In-Depth
Video: Tape Backup for Distributed Systems (Interview)
ReiJane Huai, chairman, CEO, and co-founder of FalconStor Software, discusses his pioneering work in tape backup software for distributed systems.
ReiJane Huai, chairman, CEO, and co-founder of FalconStor Software in Melville, NY, doesn’t mince words in this interview, recorded for the C-4 Summit Cyberspace Edition. He discusses his pioneering work in tape backup software for distributed systems and notes how his earliest ideas carried forward into FalconStor’s current storage virtualization and virtual tape library product designs.
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He argues that earlier approaches to delivering value-add software services by embedding them on storage controllers, while it might have made sense two decades ago, is no longer about providing customers with benefits but giving vendors control over customer environments. The strategy, he contents, “is against the public’s interests.”
Huai decries the emergence of single vendor-branded software and hardware stacks, promoted as a means to achieve management and integration “simplicity,” as short sighted and harmful to consumers. His philosophy as a vendor is simple: “If you have the guts to characterize yourself as a platform provider, you need to have the stomach to open the environment, to encourage innovation, to bring out the [third-party] developers to enrich the environment instead of holding everything as your own.”
Huai argues that no vendor “can own the entire compute stack…the complexities are too great.” This fact, he believes, should drive a “real open attitude ... not just as a marketing word, but really open.”
Watch the other segments of this fascinating interview with Huai, and with chief technology officer Wai Lam, at the C-4 Project Web site, host of the C-4 Summit Cyberspace Edition, at www.c4project.org).
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this link to play the video.