Five years ago, a small group of us recognized that the storage industry was in turmoil. The trend of exponential user capacity growth that had dominated the industry for the past several decades was showing no sign of slowing down. To complicate matters even more, the value of the user data was also increasing rapidly. In other words, companies were becoming more and more dependent on storage that they could not properly manage. We decided there was a need for a new type of storage solution.