When technology pioneers, George Teixeira and Ziya Aral invented a technology that would meet today's market demand, they knew they needed to move quickly. Businesses need a lot of computer storage capacity today. Internet sites now keep track of what users read, what pictures they download and which products they buy.
Retailers keep detailed records of the flow of merchandise.
But, while technology manufacturers were concentrating on producing expensive hardware to do the job, Aral and Teixeira, executives at a large hardware manufacturing company, were firm believers in another approach-the development of software to be used on regular, inexpensive PC's. People don't want to buy expensive hardware just for storage-the cost savings of conducting storage from software rather than hardware is enormous and an entire company can have access to the data on storage. Their proposed storage operating software would result in storage servers one-third the cost and three times the performance of current hardware systems. But, when their innovation fell on deaf ears at the company where they worked, they knew they would need to do it on their own. We needed to get a good, clean story to the venture capitalist.