Lots of member berries being eaten in this thread.
Everything that has a beginning has an end Neo.
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Back in the day, all storage which wasn't from EMC, came from Wichita. Storage-Tek, Sun, HP, IBM, NCR, SGI... they all rebranded the product from Wichita.
When LSI bought Symbios from Hyundai, they had no clue what to do with storage - LSI was chips only. As long as LSI left Wichita alone, they did well. When Talwalker took over as CEO, he began to operate Wichita like a chip company, with disastrous results. Even then, the revenue from storage made up for the losses in chips.
Unfortunately, the product was over-engineered - to the degree that it took ridiculous amounts of work to implement any particular new feature, and storage lagged behind the features which were beginning to show up elsewhere in the industry. A number of startups yanked the rug out from under the price-band 1to3 products, and an ill-fated attempt to buy features from Israel and staple them onto the front of the product sealed Wichita's fate. It was around this time that the layoffs began in earnest, and just coincidentally (TM) seemed to hit the engineers who were the most vocal about the folly of the Israel plan. After scores of millions of dollars, the product limped to an ending - delivered to one customer for tax purposes, and left to rot on the vine. Three years and a fortune wasted, and Wichita was even further behind on features.
The product is (was?) still dang rock-solid. You can practically drive a truck over it while running 1000 volts through the frames... and your data will still be recoverable. They are fast too... to a point. They are not (still?) scalable, and I believe to this day, the product is still ridiculously over-engineered.
So... the product line which began in the early 90's, which became the reason for the existence of the facility, is petering out now. A fascinating story, I think, viewed objectively, with the fatal blow coming with the change in the C-suite at LSI logic.
It's a black hole in south central Kansas. Consists of an organization fraught with politics and nepotism where they decide peoples careers in the parking lots of churches. It's run by a strong autocrat who doesn't believe in new ideas or approaches. Fall in line or find a new job, they actually congregate around his desk ~ 4:30 to tell him what a great job he's doing.
Weird...really weird, I've witnessed it for too long.
Bonus percentage for employees
Wichita