Cachengo, Inc. was founded by Mike Young after much irritation with how the industry was going. Mike, a pioneer in storage, has had a long history in bringing about drastic economic changes to the market place.
NetAttach
In 1998 he was the first to leverage open source and the Linux operating system to develop an enterprise class Network Attached Storage (NAS) product. At the time, numerous companies were looking to challenge the incumbents (Auspex Systems and Network Appliance), but they sought to do so with proprietary runtime operating systems (RTOS) from companies such as Wind River. However, these early products relied upon expensive developer seats combined with embedded hardware. The end result was the production of products that were under powered and highly unreliable due to their proprietary design. Mike had a different idea in mind.
Rather than develop proprietary hardware, he found a storage system that represented the quality to place his NetAttach company name upon. He started with a 12-drive, 4U disk array from Xyratex. But rather than utilize one of their RAID controllers, he re-designed their RAID canister by placing a PICMG passive backplane into it. A special power cable was designed to route power signals from the midplane of the disk array onto the PICMG backplane. And then an industrial motherboard, PCI-to-FC RAID controller and Gigabit Ethernet controller were plugged into the backplane. All I/O signals were directed out the back of the canister and the FC connections were directed from the RAID controller into the FC port bypass module in the disk array.
The whole design was fairly simple, but represented a significant improvement over the other NAS appliances. Rather than consisting of a head unit and disk shelf, this design was the first high-end, all-in-one appliance. And it was the first to offer native file sharing support for Mac users along with 64-bit Gigabit Ethernet and RAID.
Snap Appliance
In 2003, Mike was hired by Snap Appliance to take the company upstream and into the enterprise. This marketing position didn’t last very long before he took over as the company’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief Evangelist.
In his short-lived marketing position, Mike recognized the gap that existed between Marketing and Engineering. Taking marketing requirements and figuring out how to implement them as features is a tough exercise for any technology company. But Mike’s expertise in Linux and open source, coupled with his understanding of storage, allowed him to quickly chart paths. This experience led to two significant enhancements to the Snap operating system including a significant performance boost by offloading file system journaling to another device, as well as the convergence of block and file support, which has since re-shaped the file server market.
NetHelix
Developing storage appliances can be considered a little bit art and a little bit science. Some companies have done very well at it, while others have done very poor jobs. Regardless of the size of the company, the actual operating system integration work can be quite tedious. Mike recognized this and derived an abstraction layer that would allow other storage companies to focus their attention on their core applications and avoid the time consuming integration work. This capability was acquired by Xyratex in April 2005 and formed the basis for the company’s storage appliance business.
Since then, companies who have benefited from Mike’s vision include Lefthand Networks, Intel and numerous others. As of this update, this business unit represents the second largest business within Xyratex’s storage division.
Before all this
Prior to these companies, Mike helped drive the early days of RAID and Storage Management for companies such as Mylex and Adaptec.