Pogo Linux Leaps Into Storage
There are, however, two catches. First, the system is powered by Linux. And second, the server isn't manufactured by EMC, Hewlett-Packard or any other leading storage vendor. The S316, after all, was created by an up-and-coming systems builder.
Pogo Linux took a rather unusual route to storage. The company was created in 1999 after its founders, who came from such companies as Apple, Compaq and Western Digital, developed a low-cost, Linux-based PC, which they sold for just $299.
"The problem was we quickly realized there were no margins selling PCs at that price," says Tim Lee, co-founder and president of Pogo Linux. "So we moved up the chain and started building workstations, then servers and then finally onto storage."
Thus, the systems builder ditched the PC business and moved from the Silicon Valley area to Redmond, Wash.--of all places--to embark on servers and storage. Looking back, Lee and his fellow founders must be glad they hopped into the storage market, which has been Pogo Linux's most successful business of late. The company's line of StorageWare servers, including Serial ATA systems and IDE RAID compact boxes, has garnered attention from customers and critics alike. But for a systems builder that only a few years ago was building ultra-cheap PCs, storage can be a challenging market.
"In the past three years, we've been doing a lot of storage, and it's a difficult market to be in," Lee says. "Storage is one of those areas that is enormously complex. Customers demand perfection and don't want any downtime."
Neither the complexity nor larger brand-name competitors such as EMC, HP and IBM has slowed Lee down. For one, Pogo Linux has stayed true to its low-cost roots. The StorageWare S316, for example, is priced much lower than comparable enterprise SCSI drives from top storage vendors. For its part, the StorageWare 1400 compact storage unit provides 750 GB of storage for less than $3,000.
But Lee says Pogo Linux's pricing isn't the biggest draw. Instead, the company relies on its customized and cutting-edge storage systems to do battle in the market.
"Our Serial ATA systems are one-of-a-kind and really help distinguish us," Lee says. "Serial ATA has a lot of capacity, and it's more reliable than other drives. Plus, it also offers dramatic cost savings compared to SCSI technology."
Pogo Linux, which typically sells to higher education, financial-services and government clients, says its Serial ATA systems are between 20 to 30 percent less costly than traditional SCSI and Fibre Channel drives. The S316 model also offers a variety of choices for customers, including Serial ATA drives from such leaders as Seagate and Western Digital, dual Intel Xeon processors between 2.4 GHz and 3.06 GHz, an external tape drive from HP, and RAM starting at 512 MB and ranging up to more than 16,000 MB (at additional costs).
Lee also says the Linux OS is ideal for storage. Indeed, the company proudly declares that "Linux isn't an OS; it's a lifestyle." Pogo Linux uses Red Hat to power StorageWare boxes, and the systems builder installs MySQL, the increasingly popular open-source database application, in some of its boxes.
"The whole idea with storage systems is that you want to be able to configure the storage environment the way you want and make it flexible with other parts [of the infrastructure]," Lee says. "So Linux is the perfect solution for storage."
Overall, Lee says his company has carved a comfortable niche for itself by building affordable storage systems around open source. It plans to continue reducing the price of a terabyte for enterprises and small and midsize customers.
"I think you'll start to see more companies building their own storage systems, which is great," Lee says. "We want storage costs to come down from the millions of dollars to the thousands."