Lights Out At Candera

Candera, 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.

A Candera spokesperson confirmed the closing, but offered no other 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 they didn’t get much sales traction, and 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 was 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.”

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com