McCanne says NBT is solving a complex problem that can be tackled in many different ways. "We've come up with a set of innovations that solve the general case of access to data, which includes very challenging problems in areas like remote backup over wide-area networks and moving very large files over long distances," he says.
It's the same set of problems that at least four other startups -- including Actona Technologies Inc., DiskSites Inc., Storigen Systems Inc., and Tacit Networks -- are aiming to tackle. The supposed breakthrough from these companies is the ability to write as well as read to remote file servers, with as little delay as performing the same function on the LAN. In other words, there's no more storage in remote offices: It's all centralized, and files are shared over the WAN and potentially cached, depending on how often they are used.
Alan Saldich, NBT's director of product marketing, claims the company's target application is broader than just file caching, and it's not just a distributed file system either. "It's a simple architecture, broadly applicable to any client-server interaction," he says. [Ed. note: A Swiss Army knife approach, then. Perhaps it's a VCR and a microwave and a storage appliance all in one!] NBT says it has filed for three patents on its technology so far.
"There is huge expense spent on storage around the world because WAN performance is so poor, you have to replicate everything to get the performance," says Saldich. That may be true, but WAN-distributed storage is such a new market, none of the industry analyst firms has any projections for it yet. And although these other startups might be shipping products, not one of them has announced a customer yet.
Still, the others have a healthy head start over NBT, if the market materializes. "The opportunity to develop channels for this technology is now, as the tech market comes back," says Tim Williams, founder and CEO of Tacit (see Tacit Makes Funding Explicit
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