Special Section: SNW, Fall 2004 - Highlights From The SNW Floor:

TACIT NETWORKS' PRESIDENT: INDUSTRY LIMITED ONLY BY IMAGINATION
By Derrick Harris, Editor

Storage Networking World has wrapped up, and the industry is left trying to make sense of the deluge of products and announcements that resulted. One company that produced its fair share of news is Tacit Networks, who has entered an OEM agreement with BlueArc, joined the EMC NAS Partner Program, and demonstrated its cutting-edge Ishared wide area file services solution at the show.

DSstar editor Derrick Harris was able to speak with Tacit Networks' president, Chuck Foley, about these announcements, as well about the talk he gave at SNW about the emergence of Grid computing -- especially in regard to Grid-based storage.

DSstar: First of all, I would like to ask how SNW is going thus far. Is the event, as a whole, what you expected?

CHUCK FOLEY: Actually, the show is going quite well. Some shows, such as Storage Decisions and Storage World Conference, are primarily "user shows," where you have a large quantity of qualified user leads. Shows such as SNW and N+I are known more as "industry shows," where vendors outnumber customers 2:1. This year, however, we have seen a larger than normal number of customers, which I believe ads credibility to the latest Gartner studies reporting that enterprises are actually spending on competitive IT again.

For Tacit Networks, it's been an excellent show. The interest in the wide-area file services (WAFS) technology at the show (i.e. the ability to extend NAS storage over the WAN easily) has vastly exceeded our expectations. We've actually had to bring in extra people to staff our booth and present our product demonstration. Again, this is not a problem that tech companies have had in the last couple of years.

DSstar: On to Tacit's announcements at SNW. Talk to me about the partnership with BlueArc -- how will this affect the company, and how will it affect the storage industry (from both the vendor and end-user standpoints)?

CHUCK FOLEY: I think what's important here is the fact that a major storage player has integrated WAFS technology into their standard offering. It is a key milestone for any new technology when a larger, more widely-recognized company begins to incorporate that technology into their product line. Our partnership with BlueArc signals that people are really starting to understand that a single enterprise storage pool can service not only the users in the corporate location, but the remote/branch offices as well -- all without sacrificing performance, availability or cost.

Think about it this way -- if you had a 50-story building with 1,000 users, would you put a fileserver on the first floor, another on the second, another on the third, and on and on for all 50 floors? Would you want to be required to do 50 backups a day? Or would you put one large, fast, well-managed fileserver in a central location for everyone to use where it would be safe, secure and backed up? According to storage and server customers, this is a no-brainer. So, if you have 50 remote offices, why wouldn't the same logic hold? This would be nirvana for distributed enterprises, but the latency/bandwidth/availability issues presented by the WAN have made that non-feasible ... until now. BlueArc is the first major storage player to test, evaluate, and productize the WAFS technology that will let this paradigm happen, and we're finding that it's exactly what customers want.

For users it means that they can have safe, fast and secure access to massive amounts of data located any distance from them in central datacenter, while the companies they work for can consolidate a tremendous number of fileservers, and backup systems and software all to a central location. Most importantly, these companies no longer have to worry about remotely managing fileservers around the world because all of that data resides safely, securely, backed-up and compliant in the datacenter.

DSstar: What about the announcement that Tacit Networks has joined the EMC NAS Partner Program? What kind of effects does partnering with an industry giant like EMC have on a company?

CHUCK FOLEY: EMC is, of course, a global leader for storage. They have the "imprimatur" that many customers look for and require. This partnership assures those customers that our solutions (which are utilized by thousands of users across four continents) are real, solid, tested, and supported through our Cooperative Support Agreement with EMC. It also means that those customers can use enterprise-class EMC Celerra NAS systems to service not only local, but remote users as well, with the remote users enjoying the same seamless access and high performance as local users. The effect for Tacit Networks will be easier access and greater mindshare with EMC customers.

DSstar: How does your Ishared wide area file services (WAFS) appliance add for current EMC customers?

CHUCK FOLEY: Enterprise customers, that have chosen EMC storage systems, obviously value a high-performance, highly managed environment. With the Tacit Networks' Ishared solution, that highly-managed, enterprise-class storage pool can now be extended to support not only the local user community, but the entire enterprise. According to Nemertes Research, 87 percent of corporate users work remotely from headquarters. Other analysts show that 75 percent of corporate data resides outside of the datacenter, while only 30 percent of remote backups complete successfully. Tacit Networks' solution extends the advantages of enterprise-class EMC storage to all users in the enterprise while ensuring that their data is securely stored, managed and backed up in the datacenter according to best practices.

DSstar: Speaking of WAFS, what has the reaction been to the demonstrations Tacit Networks has been putting on at SNW?

CHUCK FOLEY: The immediate response to such a graphic display of this technology exceeded our expectations. Our demonstration connected our "remote location" in Orlando to datacenters in both New Jersey and the U.K., and once SNW attendees saw that they have the ability to open, use and save files from anywhere in the world (as if they were in the same location as the fileserver), they truly understood the power of the technology. The value proposition just "clicked," as it does with our customers.

Since the show is just wrapping up this week, it's too early to tell what the final outcome of our show investment will be, but initial indications are extremely positive. We have already arranged for a number of real customer evaluations to be installed over the next few weeks. All these came about simply from the power of our demonstrations at the show.

DSstar: All this talk of distributed enterprises makes me think of Grid computing, a subject on which you will be giving a talk during SNW. What is your definition of Grid computing?

CHUCK FOLEY: Everyone has a different definition of Grid computing. Mine is simple: a ubiquitous pool of computing resources that can be accessed when needed, where needed and by any authorized user regardless of the users physical location or the physical location of the supporting systems.

DSstar: What kind of timeframe do you see for Grid being widely adopted within the enterprise sector?

CHUCK FOLEY: The initial phases of adoption have begun. A good harbinger of things to come is the High Performance Computing (HPC) segment that has learned to put together a pool of resources that can be used to solve one or many problems. Early leaders, such as Oracle, have developed application computing environments such as Oracle 10g RAC that will speed the adoption into the enterprise beginning in 2005. By 2008, Grid computing will be a reality for the Fortune 2000.

DSstar: As a company with interests in distributed storage, you must be quite interested in Grid-based storage. Does Tacit Networks have any Grid-based solutions in the works?

CHUCK FOLEY: Rather than having our own Grid-based solution, I would say that we are a "Grid enabler." Our technology allows users a single view of, and a single access point to, information that might be spread across different systems, in different locations, all around the world. This means that users in London or San Francisco or Caracas literally share a global view of data, which might be located in 12 different sites worldwide.

Yes, we're very interested in the adoption of Grids, as this is one macro-trend that will drive further adoption of WAFS technologies.

DSstar: How big do you foresee Grid storage becoming? Do you think the storage capabilities of Grid computing can rival the compute abilities as Grid's main selling point?

CHUCK FOLEY: Currently, we spend almost $1.5 trillion a year on technology. One of the fastest growing segments of this technology spend is network-attached storage, which enjoys a yearly growth rate of almost 30 percent. One of the things that we have proven as a society is that there are no limits to what we can ask for, or demand, out of technology and information. And the more we ask, the more storage will continue to be required. As the benefits of Grids become more real (via technology that is finally catching up with the demands and the hype), Grid storage will become a requirement for the paradigm to continue. This becomes a massive opportunity for companies such as Tacit Networks that allow this to happen.

DSstar: Finally, I would like to ask what the future holds for Tacit Networks, and for Charles Foley, in particular.

CHUCK FOLEY: Excitement and growth. This is a fast-paced industry, limited only by our collective imaginations and energies (which are virtually unlimited). At Tacit Networks we have assembled a killer team of industry aces -- some of the best that I have ever seen. Customers are rewarding us with the best kind of accolades -- orders for our products. In return, we're asking them for their ideas of where we should go to continue to extend our value proposition, and they're not shy about telling us what they think. While today we are the leader in providing file services for the remote office (and in turn increasing performance while slashing cost), you can expect to see us add other "services" to the branch office. Tacit Networks' goal is to enable a truly "support free" remote office environment where those users have all of the performance, reliability, and service benefits of someone in the same building as the multi-million dollar datacenter.