Byte and Switch: Are you seeing interest in iSCSI yet?
Workman: The whole purpose of the damn thing is to simplify, consolidate, and save. I look at these systems as an adjustable wrench. The thumbscrew is iSCSI. When 10 GigE comes out, that's when I think iSCSI will take off. There will be a serious challenge between FC SANs and Ethernet SANs then.
Byte and Switch: Do you plan heterogeneous support for your systems?
Workman: Probably not. When we started development, people were working on things like StorageTank [IBM] and WideSky [EMC] for multivendor support. (See IBM Virtually in the Game, IBM Gasses Up Storage Tank, EMC Widens WideSky Program, and Users Frosty on EMC WideSky.) Heterogeneous platform management was extremely difficult to develop.
Larry and I talked about it, and he said, "If it takes five years to develop heterogeneous storage management, everything that existed at the point you started is off the books and gone." They [StorageTank and WideSky] cost [IBM and EMC, respectively] more than $200 million [to develop]. It would have cost that much squared if we tried to do a virtualization platform.
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