Back around the year 2000, I was working in operations for a startup called MongoMusic. Mongo was creating a technology/service that helped people discover music that sounds like other music. Mongo was a modern day Pandora and we needed to store a lot of music. This involved ripping, metadata, storage and retrieval. It was terabytes of data, which at the time was difficult to manage.
We started with some Sun machines and attached disk arrays as our initial storage plan. Then we moved to Network Appliance Filers. From there we developed our own cluster of commodity storage devices and then we switched to an early stage storage provider called Scale8. Scale8 provided a caching server that had access to it’s data center storage. The caching device could be mounted like a local drive and essentially provided a limitless file system. It was early days for them and there were bugs, but I loved the solution. Once Mongo was bought by Microsoft, we championed the service internally and I think one other MSN team used them briefly, but Scale8 ultimately went out of business. They were probably a year or two too early, didn’t hunker down quite far enough during the dotcom bust and probably had other things holding them back that wasn’t apparent from the outside. But. They were very early in the cloud storage space. They had a good and improving product. They just didn’t have the timing.
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