Most Memorable Storage Quotes of 2007

It's been a year of memorable words from the lips of buyers, suppliers, and hangers-on in the storage industry. Here are a few of our favorites, in descending order of impact:

• No. 10: "It looks like ZFS was a conscious reimplementation of our WAFL filesystem, with little regard to intellectual property rights."
  Dave Hitz, NetApp founder and EVP, on NetApp's decision to sue Sun for alleged patent violations.

  It also looks as if some lawyers are going to get rich in Lufkin, Texas.

• No. 9: "[NetApp would] like us to unfree ZFS, to retract it from the free software community. Which reflects a common misconception among proprietary companies -- that you can unfree free. You cannot... "
  — Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO, on Sun's decision to countersue NetApp to obtain a permanent injunction to remove all NetApp filers from the market and obtain "sizeable monetary damages."

  If you can't unfree free, can you free unfree?

• No. 8: "We do not believe that people will throw away their 13 million ports of SAN."
  — Michael Klayko, CEO, Brocade Communications Systems, while addressing analysts in March about the way Brocade plans to use 10-Gbit/s Ethernet to augment, not replace, its Fibre Channel switches.

  We don't believe that either, Mr. Klayko. But folk are trading some of those 13 million FC SAN ports for iSCSI, and the trend may continue.

• No. 7: "Hitachi is focusing on improving the performance of the Hard Disk Drive business, exploring every possibility. However the fact is that Hitachi has not decided to sell the Hard Disk Drive business."
  — Hitachi statement issued twice in 2007, once in September and once in December, to address speculation that Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) was up for sale.

  Translation: "We are thinking about selling HGST, we just haven't done it yet."

• No. 6: "If you encrypt it, you have key management problems."
  — Warren Axelrod, business information security officer, U.S. Trust, speaking on a user panel on enterprise data protection in June 2007.