Candera Closes Doors

UPDATED: A once promising storage equipment vendor has closed its doors due to weak
sales and lack of support from major original equipment manufacturers . Its
assets will be sold, but it is unknown to whom at this time.


A Candera spokesperson confirmed the closing Thursday, but would offer no
other specific details.

Illuminata analyst
David Freund noted that weak sales
and the lack of proper channels through which to sell its ATA appliances
and clusters put Candera in a bind.


Candera, which had accrued $59 million in funding, made a serial ATA
storage switch for managing storage devices from various
vendors on a storage area network (SAN) . Serial ATA has soared
as a low-cost alternative to more expensive data exchange protocols, such as
Fibre Channel .


While Candera had a program and multi-million-dollar lab in place to knit
multi-vendor products together, it failed to develop momentum for its
storage virtualization products in the market.


While trying to ease customer pains by developing one control point for
storage, switches and servers from disparate vendors, the company may have
cost itself time to market. Still, Candera’s products were strong and
promising, according to Freund.


“It is a shame. They actually had a really interesting technology,” Freund
told internetnews.com. “It was a switch-based platform and they were
doing phenomenal work on interoperability. The problem is a) they didn’t get
much sales traction; and b) they didn’t get any major OEM deals. It was
really the lack of OEM deals that killed them.”


In an April 2003
interview
with internetnews.com, Candera President
and CEO S. Sundi Sundaresh said the Milpitas, Calif., concern’s core value
is nailing down interoperability to give storage managers the ability to
choose between any switch, server or storage provisions.


This is a departure from the philosophy of other vendors that focus on
making API swaps. To make this happen, Candera
forged pacts with vendors of Fibre Channel switches, storage arrays,
host bus adapters (HBAs) and software.


Certification partners included EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, Brocade,
McData, Emulex, Veritas and Microsoft. Sundaresh thought that Candera might
compete with switch giants Brocade, McData and Cisco over time.


But ultimately, without an OEM to lean on, Candera failed to develop strong
legs for market traction.


“Sure, there are companies that will play with the bleeding edge and maybe
kick the tires with it if they could afford to face some glitches or
losses,” Freund said. “But put your faith in anything that’s near the heart
and soul of your company? I don’t think so.”

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