Note: Sorry for the vague details on the tech part, you’ll get all of that tomorrow – this is what I was allowed to post today

In the world of data it’s always been about speed. SSD’s have become very common on consumer machines and not unusual in corporate datacenters. Fast, reliable, and prices failing – what isn’t to like? Two years ago I looked at this and realized – no big realization really – that disk speeds were growing a lot, but tape backups weren’t keeping up. Combine that with “big data” and it seemed like an opportunity – was there a chance to be the first mover?  Could something replace tape at a lower cost and faster speed? Fast forward two years and we figured out a way to change the form factor of SSD’s so that we could package them in a circular layout, assigning writes to one of them and then moving to the next while the first one was finishing the IO – a huge reduction in latency that met our requirements for speed. To get the cost savings we needed packaging that was easy to manufacture (think of the equivalent of a tape case) and that we could easily (cheaply) license. After a lot of research the answer was to look back in time a little – cassette tapes. We found a partner that manufactures them and another partner here in Florida to do the final assembly at costs too good to believe. We licensed the whole idea and process to a major vendor and you’ll see that announcement in the press tomorrow (Apr 1 not being a great day for a product launch), but we did some arm twisting and have a tiny gap in the NDA (you know the rules and so do I) that allows you to get a first look now at the video we  showed to convince the investors to fund our idea and get things ricky rolling.