"The initial reaction is, 'Oh, another storage company,' " Hayden admits. "But that goes away in about five seconds. Managing storage is an arcane process that requires specialized people. We offer storage management that is completely unattended." He claims EqualLogic's storage array is so easy to set up that one of the company's pilot sites went "from cardboard boxes to operational SAN" in 18 minutes flat. [Ed. note: Wow! They built a SAN out of cardboard boxes?!]
EqualLogic, however, still isn't ready to divulge critical pieces of its strategy, such as pricing. "We'll be very competitively priced, but we're not just disk drives wrapped in sheet metal," Hayden says.
And it's still mute on many other particulars of its system. Here's what we were able to wheedle out of Hayden: The system's hardware is fully redundant, and it's capable of running at full Gigabit Ethernet line speed by employing some embedded TCP acceleration. The only software it requires on the host is an iSCSI initiator, and EqualLogic is participating in the beta test of Microsoft's Windows driver. Finally, users manage a PeerStorage group of arrays -- not individual arrays -- via a standard Web browser.
"The software is homegrown; the hardware is off-the-shelf components," Hayden says.
EqualLogic claims to have lined up several resellers, the names of which it can't disclose yet. And besides the reseller channel, the startup is in discussions with several potential OEMs, Hayden says.
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