Starboard Storage goes titsup: LeftHanders to leave the building

Chris, the Starboard/RELDATA hybrid software stack (r-pool) was in fact designed from the ground up in 2010-2011, and is superior to that used by Nimble, Tegile, Tintri and NexGen. Sadly, the failure of Starboard has nothing to do with the technology.

Storage Vendors to sell SW only or Integrated Product

I remember Having Discussion with their CEO more than 2 years ago while it was still Rel Data about possible way to OEM the software and their answer was NO. and he asked me have you tried NExenta ? as i have been observing the new storage vendors designs are all built on commodity hardware ( unlike EMC and Netapp ) but still they want to re brand the Super-micro Box as theirs and sell that as complete system. which is good for some customers and bad for company's growth of customer base . as to setup and support that type of hardware lines requires multiple magnitude of investment where good amount of investors money is been spent. not every end user has expertise on the hardware but someone who is going to take his chance with tier 2-3 storage vendor, would have already explored some how grown storage with sw like nexenta on top of that. This is main reason nexenta became success and others could not find success . while decision to offer fully integrated storage systems are pushed by product manager or CTO in the company as they would like to have tighter control on their product in terms of customer mistakes on the hardware integration and ease of support . which sometimes results into company's disappearance from the market due to costs associated to establish such infrastructure and ability to sustain it compared to software only model.