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In the late 1990s, Gal Naor started a company, StorWiz (he later changed the name to StorWize), to advance a technology he developed for delivering data compression at wire speed. Not only was this a cool idea and one that struck me as much more efficient than most algorithmic data deduplication approaches in vogue at the time, it had the nifty advantage of being software-based. You could apply the technology to just about any type of storage to squeeze out the bandwidth required for data transfers and space for storing bits when they came to rest. IBM bought StorWize in 2010, making Naor and his investors rather well to do. That was the last I had heard of Naor for years. I thought he'd had his fill of storage technology and gotten out of the business just in time to miss the industry consolidation that dramatically reduced the number of vendors in recent years. As it turned out, Naor had "gone quiet" for the past seven years and not just to bask in the afterglow of his success. He was engaged in serious R&D for his next big ...