DriveScale clearly had the right idea for their Tech Field Day presentation. They led off listing the pedigree of the founding and senior staff, including a deep history with Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and green technology. It certainly made an impact on John White. From there the company laid out their ambitions: give enterprises the configuration flexibility to scale out horizontally in the datacenter. They do this with a 10GbE network adapter to pool a JBOD of storage to traditional pizza box servers with CPU and RAM. This allows storage to be a totally separate concern for scale. John also liked their strategy of initially targeting Hadoop as a primary use case. It’s not a huge market, but definitely one they could become well known within, given the strength of their solution.
