Logowatch Cisco and the vendor formerly known as Pure Storage have let their designers and marketers loose on the internet to explain some recent decisions.
We shouldn’t have referred to Pure Storage using that name, because the company yesterday re-branded as “Everpure,” a name it shares with an Australian purified water company.
The storage company’s schtick has long been storage that scales without requiring forklift upgrades, with consumption-based pricing.
But the company has decided that’s old hat, and that the new name is “a commitment to transform storage that is static and rigid into a system that’s living, resilient, and built to grow.”
Or as CEO Charlie Giancarlo wrote: “Our new identity represents our evolution from redefining storage to rethinking data management, as we help customers unleash the power of data.”
The CEO thinks the new brand also “captures who we have become and where we are headed,” and “matches the scope of our impact and the future we are creating in data management. Like our Evergreen technology, we are non-disruptively upgrading our brand for the future.” *
Well, not entirely non-disruptive, because the company will change email domain and re-brand all its boxes.
The logo for Everpure, formerly known as Pure Storage - Click to enlarge
Everpure's logo hardly diverges from Pure Storage's old visual identity, and the company has spared us the kind of deep dive into fonts and colours that sometimes feature in LogoWatch columns.
Cisco, meanwhile, believes it has reinvented the box.
The networking giant makes lots of boxes to house its appliances, most of which don’t need to be pretty because they end up in datacenters.
But Cisco feels a product called the Room Kit Pro G2 – a device that connects cameras, microphones and speakers in meeting rooms – needs to be easy on the eye.
The company’s designers therefore “drew inspiration from titanium camping spoons and car bodies” because both are made of sheet metal with shapes stamped into them that increase their stiffness.
“By introducing subtle, dune-like ridges into the top surface of the chassis, we were able to halve the wall thickness of the main enclosure – passing every strength and safety test with room to spare. The result is a lighter, ultra-sturdy all-metal box, free of plastic faceplates and built from just two main pieces instead of four,” wrote Cisco’s VP for design Gavin Ivester (who designed the first Apple PowerBook and was once Gibson Guitar’s chief creative officer).
Cisco's new box for the Room Kit Pro G2 - Click to enlarge
Ivester has also devised a measurement perhaps worthy of consideration by The Register’s Standards Soviet for inclusion in our standards converter by pointing out that the new design saves one kilogram of metal per unit and means Cisco has “eliminated the mass equivalent of 16 vintage Volkswagen Beetles from our supply chain.” ®
*That might just be the second data storage joke The Register has ever encountered. The first is: “Why was the band called 1023MB? Because it couldn’t get a gig!”
Source: The register