IBM Plans to Buy Secrete Start-Up XIV Information Systems
According to a reliable source from Israel, IBM will pay $300 million to $350 million to get XIV. Behind this start-up in stealth mode, there is the legendary Moshe Yanai. But which mysterious technology?
By Jean Jacques Maleval | December 31, 2007 at 11:47 amThis Israeli start-up, XIV Information Systems, has never revealed anything on its activity. Here is what we got from different sources.
One of its founders is the well-known Moshe Yanai, also known as “Mr. Symmetrix,” behind the legendary success of EMC and then Diligent Technologies, which has one of the most remarkable de-duplication solutions. Another founder of XIV, who happens to be the CEO, Ofir Zohar, however, is unknown to us, although he has filed multiple patents relating to storage virtualization. One of his inventions, for example, provides a computer-implemented method for operating a data storage system, which has multiple memory caches linked to physical storage units, and in which requests for access to the physical storage units are queued. The technical team of XIV includes members of the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence, including another co-founder Shemer Schwartz. They also boast a former employee of SANgate Systems (which later became Sepaton), Efri Zeidner.
On the start-up’s web site, we could find only one sentence describing the product being developed, to be known as Nextra: “XIV’s Nextra Grid Storage Product is a fully scalable, high-performance, distributed data storage system.” According to a source at Diligent, it involves a virtualization controller appliance, with advanced caching, “à la HDS,” which could support any heterogeneous assortment of disk bays. The idea would be to undertake, with high-end storage, what server grids achieve for processing, although at a much lower price per gigabyte than EMC DMX-4, with applications like replication and others. What’s more, each file should be broken down into smaller elements that would be distributed on several disk drives rather than be protected by conventional RAID controllers, something several grid storage start-ups have already proposed.
“I have not spoken with anyone there yet. All I know is that Jim Sullivan is the CEO (old EMC guy, Giant Loop guy, and then CenterPath guy) and they are supposedly building a Symmetrix killing device. Why anyone would want to kill the box that made them filthy rich I don’t know, but that’s the rumor,” wrote us few months ago in an email Steve Duplessie, senior analyst at The Enterprise Strategy Group.
The XIV name seems to evoke the last letter of Symmetrix, followed by an I for information and V for virtualization.
According to Israel Business Arena, since inception in 2002, only $3 million dollars have been invested in the start-up, without VC involvement and it employs 35 people. Compared to the price of its acquisition, the return on investment for the investors is enormous. Yanai, who left EMC with a huge financial package, can now rest until the end of his life without any financial problems.
He was ousted as vice
president of engineering after a clash with new EMC CEO Joseph Tucci over
strategy in 2001. It’s funny to see him now helping IBM with a new architecture to compete against EMC.
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