DataFabrics.com Data Fabrics Inc. - Background Information
Data Fabrics Inc. is a technology startup formed in 2008 and registered in the state of Minnesota, USA. When conducting electronic commerce and other Internet related activities, Data Fabrics operates under the trade name – Tangible Storage.
The Information Technology industry is a fairly mature market with a rich history, traditions, well defined practices, long-established corporations, enormous conglomerates and numerous professional trade associations. On the flip side, the IT industry is also home to smaller technology startups, new and promising unexplored products and concepts, unconventional and untested ideas, loose gatherings of small firms and user groups of individuals who happen to share common interests.
The big firms and established corporate giants manufacture and sell large quantities of business and consumer products every year. With revenues exceeding millions or even billions of US dollars, these titans of industry generally apply and reuse, safe, time tested ideas when developing new products and services. Really bold, uniquely imaginative plans are not usually conceived here as the normal incentive is to ensure that consumers are comfortable with upgrade strategies from year to year. From the design perspective, small, incremental upgrades, and slight improvements or changes are encouraged to keep people buying new product. But the changes are not too extensive to avoid situations where loyal customers may feel alienated about the new layout or system.
The startups on the other hand, deal with risk everyday. The primary sources of new innovation and new ways of doing things comes from the tiny, more dynamic firms. Some of the proposed concepts from these innovators are subversive and can undermine and sometimes overthrow entrenched, well adopted legacy machinery or even recent state of the art systems. After a while, the larger companies notice the forward momentum and growth of these newer, previously unknown technologies and make investments to control portions of this emerging market. Other products may never really see the light of day, fizzle out and vanish because they were too ahead of their time, never received sufficient visibility or they addressed needs that never existed in the first place.
Unfortunately, the average consumer is caught in the balance or crossfire between polar opposites - “traditional but safe” and “inventive but risky”. Even for consumers with well funded IT departments, decisions are often difficult to make. Often, IT decisions cannot be made purely on the merits of the technology alone for the trend nowadays demonstrates a tendency for traditional solutions to be more expensive while the inventive stuff tends to be more affordable at least during the short term. There are other market forces at work though as the traditional solutions enjoy a larger percentage of supporters. So it's easy to find and hire employees with the required skill to manage these traditional systems.
No two companies are alike and IT consumers have to make the tough decisions about the future direction that they should take suitable for the needs of their own organizations although the quality and quantity of good, available information may be lacking. Giving the choice of either ideal or practical solutions, most people would probably opt for something between the two. Realistically though, this is rarely the case as the large manufacturers, trade publications and marketing press would generally oversimplify the IT ecosystem to fit their own rules and pigeon holes everyone into separate and distinct categories or classes. So instead of being given the choice of buying a blended system consisting of solutions A, B and C, the manufacturers distort and simplify things by only offering solutions – either A or B or C with few or no combinations at all. The truth however, is that software is quite malleable and many programs are portable, being capable of being used on numerous hardware platforms. Hardware today is fairly inexpensive and the power within modern microprocessors routinely breaks records with their unprecedented abilities to process large amounts of work within short durations of time. There are really no technical reasons why “enterprise-grade” software cannot run on today's budget laptop computers. The reason why enterprise-grade software is usually so expensive has everything to do with the way manufacturers carve up the market. Sure, it costs much more to develop scalable enterprise software and it also costs quite a bit to train people to support it but in most instances, high-end software is expensive primarily due to artificial marketing restrictions and price fixing. Code can run anywhere but some people prevent that from happening for reasons of profit. There is nothing wrong with the profit motive but while a large IT manufacturer is earning huge revenues, many smaller companies who buy and use the solution have to justify this cost over the span of several years especially in the case of multi-year service contracts. The cost of doing business may be high because consumers are unaware that choices exist that could prove to be more cost efficient. They simply purchase the most visible or most popular solution and often end up paying a lot for it in financial terms. But more significantly, a bad buying decision for a product which does not fit a firm's needs or culture can end up costing a firm future customers due to scope creep, overwork, bad engineering, mismanagement of information or data loss. In the end though, expensive high-end technologies are living on borrowed time. Once the word gets around that some new subversive tech offers many of the same features at a much lower acquisition cost then that resets the order of things in favor of the consumer.
IT manufacturers that offer technologies that are both “inventive and safe” are a rare breed. It goes against the way the industry functions and chips away at the IT dynasties where protectionism may be a standard business practice. Data Fabrics seeks out the safe qualities within products by analyzing high-end technologies and concepts for their suitability and potential to be re-purposed for use within small and medium sized organizations with modest budgets and limited in-house IT staff. We then attempt to match safety with innovation/inventiveness by screening and selecting the rising new stars that exhibit traits such as reliability, durability, subversiveness and their potential impact to reinvent the market. The selection criteria is wide and complex but this is necessary to derive a smooth continuum of options and to offer customers the widest possible range of choice and customization within reasonable, practical limits and budgetary constraints. Tangible Storage is the first step toward realizing these goals by delivering approachable, uncomplicated Storage Area Networking equipment to many more people who were previously not satisfied with traditional outfits. In effect, we deliver high-end technology repackaged to fit the operations of small business offices.
What is the history behind the company's name and logo?
Some people ask about the company name – Data Fabrics. They automatically assume that we are in the business of selling textiles or lengths of cloth but this is not the case. Within IT circles some technicians visualize all data and information as massive sets of interconnected nodes that are logically grouped to form fabrics, meshes, arrays or matrices of related elements. This is a particularly important skill when designing databases or large, complex data structures.
On another note, the field of high-performance computing makes extensive use of fabric computing and switched fabrics. This was taken into consideration early in the cycle of vetting possible company names.
On a broader scale within the physical universe, cosmologists refer to the theory of space-time which was largely popularized into everyday common speech by Albert Einstein. Space-time is currently best illustrated as a fabric or mesh which curves around objects of significant mass and their resulting gravitational effect. It is this fabric that connects everything in the universe to everything else. It's easy to see parallels between the term - “Data Fabrics” and this space-time fabric.
Cosmologist Stephen Hawking suggested in 1981 that quantum information was destroyed/lost when matter entered the event horizon of a black hole. The implications of this deeply troubled other physicists like Leonard Susskind because there is a fundamental law in physics which states that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another. If black holes can destroy quantum information then this theory could unravel everything known about modern day physics. The holographic principle has been championed to solve the black hole information paradox. The principle puts forth the notion that any 3-D matter that falls into a black hole is converted into a 2-D matrix where all quantum data is stored within the event horizon. While it would be very difficult to retrieve this data, it's still possible due to the fact that no data is lost and in theory all matter can be recovered since the state of the bits were recorded on the 2-D matrix. Taken to the next level, this could suggest that the nature of the universe is holographic. All data is recorded and preserved in 2-D within the extreme outer edges of the universe and is projected inward to form the 3-D universe that we experience today. If true then this hypothesis may yet reveal that the universe is indeed a type of quantum computer which makes use of holographic storage. The fabric of reality may be altered by changing the states of quantum bits. We may realize that we are not just passive passengers laying back enjoying the journey, we might actually be co-pilots and have an active say on how the ship is piloted.
All of this goes way beyond the confines of even the most advanced forms of IT today. Some might be content thinking that any truly advanced nexus between cosmology and IT would remain as a plot device in sci-fi novels for the foreseeable future. It's undeniable though, that every new generation born into our world makes additional headway to further rationalize and quantify the known universe with deeper and deeper understanding. When we start peeling back the layers, things become less and less material and more and more abstract. If something can be quantified then it can be computed. If it can be computed then it's all just data. And all data is ultimately expressed as relationships and fabrics. Data Fabrics is not just a name, it's also a mission statement and stated quest to discover the greater meaning and truths in things not readily seen or understood for the benefit of our customers and the community at large.