"So it was a fixed and rigid packaging based on interoperability and certification we achieved with Microsoft," De Luca said.

Two-and-a-half years later, what HDS found was many of these first generation solutions lacked the availability, reliability and integration that the customers were really expecting.

"We had the availability and reliability done right, but our integration was quite loose," De Luca said.

He said HDS spent the last two years looking at what IBM, HP, NetApp and EMC were doing with their announcements, only to find they typically "lacked scalability."

"A lot of them were built on commodity components and targeted at the SMB market," De Luca said.