Reldata becomes subject to Murphy's law

Comment Murphy is back, and sleepy storage supplier Reldata had better get used to a new management regime.

Steven FX Murphy was the CEO of archival optical storage vendor Plasmon when it crashed and burned. It was assumed by several folks that Murphy was burned by the experience himself, and would go off and play golf for a good long time. Not so: he has instead been appointed CEO of Reldata, a unified storage supplier.

The Reldata bio paragraph on Murphy has one sentence which makes a great read:

"Prior to joining RELDATA, Steven was a Director and CEO at Plasmon, a publicly traded archive appliance and media company, leading the company’s turnaround, subsequent growth and subsidiary acquisitions by ITU and Alliance Storage Technologies."

Certainly "Steven was a Director and CEO at Plasmon... leading the company’s turnaround, subsequent growth and subsidiary acquisitions by ITU and Alliance Storage Technologies." It just leaves out the fact that Plasmon crashed, that Murphy struggled for months with others to keep the company afloat somehow, but ultimately failed. Plasmon was wound up, the assets were sold off by liquidators, and suppliers and investors lost the odd dollar or million.

The occasion of Murphy's rebirth as a CEO is the release of Reldata's latest hardware and software, and a new financing round. Two representatives from Grazia Equity are now on Reldata's board. The amount of the new money isn't revealed. Along with Murphy's appointment, Peter Cmaylo, previously at iSTOR Networks, becomes SVP, world-wide sales.

Kirill Malkin, the co-founder of Reldata Inc. is also on the board and serves as Reldata's chief technology officer. No other Reldata executive staff are publicised on the company's website. Previous CEO Dr Boris Anderer - who was running the company last year - has quietly gone away, fate unknown.

The new product? It is the RELDATA 9240i with a new release of RELvos 2.4, its "64-bit storage virtualisation operating system." The product is aimed at mid-market customers who need, Reldata says: "to cost-effectively simplify management and improve utilisation of their storage infrastructures in virtualised private cloud computing environments."

Reldata has been plugging away at unified storage with both SAN (block) and NAS (file) access to the same virtualised pool of disk blocks for some time. We can expect it to be newly fired up now, with fresh finance and and a fresh - indeed seasoned, to say the least - CEO and sales boss. Reldata is going to be subject to Murphy's law and hopefully, not head anywhere near Plasmon's direction. No sirree, we don't want to go there ever again.

Welcome back to storage, Steve. It's been a little duller while you've been gone. ®