Copan's bid for greatness

Mark Ward

As a CEO Mark Ward is in the Softek/Plasmon Stephen Murphy mould, almost literally since he too is from America's east coast and an Irish Catholic by upbringing. He has that combination of a solid layer of charm and confidence overlaid onto a clear thinking core of intelligence, strength of mind and vision, with a potential for a huge amount of disciplined work, the ability to motivate staff though belief in them and them wanting to avoid failing him, and an apparent facility to be ruthless and very forceful if needed.

He believes that there has been no serious storage innovation for ten years or more, counting EMC's Symmetrix and NetApp's filers as examples of the level of innovation he means. His pitch is that the enterprise storage world is broadly split between active transaction-type data and the rest; the rest being infrequently accessed data that has no business being on transaction-focussed storage arrays.

What about Centera? He reckons this is interesting software layered onto a 10-year old transaction-type array with SATA drives replacing the original Fibre Channel ones. It's not been designed for the purpose it serves from the ground up; it's not truly innovative. Copan's Revolution MAID arrays have been designed from the ground up and pass his innovation test.

He is utterly serious here: for Ward, Copan's MAID technology represents innovation of the same order as NetApp's filers were ten years ago. The clear implication is that he sees a NetApp-size growth opportunity in front of Copan - and there is no serious competition.

Other suppliers' partial spin-down refreshes of their arrays simply doesn't cut it; think HDS, EMC and others. They don't reduce the power draw down to Copan levels and it doesn't do anything for disk packing density at all. He cites Sony in London, England's West End, which faced a capped power supply to its data center. It needed storage for its PlayStation gaming operation and an EMC bid would have meant 16 new storage frames (racks) and more power than was available. Copan did the same job in two frames and a tenth of the power draw.

A partial spindown EMC bid would still need 16 racks and would have needed much more power than Copan's product.

Nexsan is the only true MAID-based competition but it eschews deduplication and targets SME customers through the channel. Copan has a laser-like focus on Global 500-type enterprises, the top of the business pyramid, and has a direct salesforce doing consultative selling with fulfillment and service through skilled channel partners. Sun is a reseller in the UK, selling to BT for the NHS spine in its new IT structure. IBM is the break/fix service partner in the USA.

Copan has single-mindedly built out a foundation infrastructure skeleton for a large and global company. Ward will now drive it to flesh out that skeleton and deliver the sales results with enterprise customers finding that the only real escape from the persistent data flood that is overwhelming their power suppliers' capacities and the space bounds of their data centers is through a revolution in data storage; moving idle data off front line, transaction-type arrays onto Copan's Revolution product and getting instant relief from data obesity.

This is no technology-development company with a five-year venture capitalist horizon to acquisition, funds crystallization and moving on. Ward thinks big and wants to build big. He reckons big business is caught in a data obesity vise and Copan's product is the only way to unlike the jaws of that vise. A data storage revolution is what is needed and Copan's Revolution product is it.

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