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Thanks to standards, storage gets innovative.

Article Excerpt
At risk of severe understatement, the world was a very different place 10 years ago than it is today: In 1995, the Dow Jones Industrial Average surged past 4,000 for the first time; Microsoft Corp. released an operating system upgrade called Windows 95; and a company called Netscape prepared for an initial public offering of securities.

But in the world of computing storage technology, things remained largely unchanged in 1995 from the way they'd worked for years. Mid-sized companies and large enterprises paid dearly for complicated and proprietary systems that coupled data storage so tightly alongside computing functions you couldn't wedge the two apart with a crowbar.

Who could blame them? Large computer companies had a natural interest in building and servicing tightly integrated computing systems that ran on custom silicon, employed proprietary operating systems and embraced a longstanding model in which storage and servers were seen as inseparable siblings living under a common architectural framework. They were expensive, monolithic systems, but they worked. Brilliant inventors and engineers coaxed the things to life, and maintenance agreements, although expensive, gave customers confidence their hardware would protect and serve for years to come.

Still, what seemed like the right solution...