His machine of choice was the Apple Macintosh and his goal was to start a computer animation company after graduation. But he didn't start a computer animation company. Isakovich didn't stop there. He saw that the real mass-storage opportunity lay in a new technology called storage area networks. SANs, as they are called, are network-attached arrays of large disk drives that provide the largest, fastest disk service available today.
SANs are big, really big.
We're no longer talking about gigabytes or even terabytes of data. SANs can store petabytes, which is a word I'd never even heard until I met Isakovich but which means 1,000 terabytes. Isakovich's modest goal is to do to EMC what Dell Computer once did to IBM , and he just might succeed. So Synapsys Digital became TrueSAN Networks, and Tom Isakovich became the madman of fibre channel SANs. He had to be, because until 1999, Isakovich, late of Stanford's Theta Delta Chi fraternity, was TrueSAN's only employee.