A decade ago, flash began changing the storage market in profound ways. We’re now seeing similar disruptions with NVMe. But the speeds of the new interface bring to light new bottlenecks for performance, especially at scale. Intel designed their Storage Performance Development Kit to specifically focus on driving down latency to allow for scaling that borders on linear.
Veeam as a company has largely eschewed agents for their VM backup solutions. But when it comes to physical servers, the company is offer not one, but two agents to help with your backup and recovery needs.
If you haven’t followed SolarWinds’ portfolio since 2014, they’ve made some key acquisitions to get up to speed on cloud monitoring, using them to form the backbone of a comprehensive solution. The best part is, though SolarWinds views this as a full stack solution, it’s not inherently bundled so you can use the components as needed. Their oldest acquisition in this span was the Swedish company Pingdom. Let’s take a look at how SolarWinds is using that IP.
Robin Systems does not mess around when it comes to the scope of their mission. Some companies set out to be iterative. They want to create something a little faster, a little more efficient, or a little easier to use. Robin Systems aims to reinvent infrastructure for modern distributed applications. It’s a company mission that certainly doesn’t lack for ambition.
In some ways, StorMagic has an old school approach to software-defined storage. Instead of a hyperconverged infrastructure approach that utilizes some of the same principals, but ultimately locks you into very specific hardware, StorMagic is strictly software only. Their goal is to provide software abstracted storage functions that allow organizations to run on their hardware of choice. They see their market at the edge of the enterprise. These would be remote locations for large organization where installing and deploying specialized hardware isn’t cost effective or physically feasible.
VMware NSX is a powerful multifaceted solution with a lot of dimensions. So much so that it’s actually a little hard to get a single understanding of it. That’s not to say that it is a bloated or convoluted offering, merely ambitious in scope. If you’re going to make a platform for network virtualization and security, it’s kind of go big or go home.
But when talking about NSX, it’s easier to do it in pieces. Once you do, you realize that many of the aspects of the platform are based around some basic guiding principals. In this piece, I’m going to focus particularly on the security aspects. VMware designed NSX security around micro-segmentation. Aside from being a useful buzzword, it’s also a very smart way to keep your VMs and applications secure.
I’ve heard for a while that DNA storage could be a potential replacement for magnetic tape, at least for archiving. It’s dense and has a long shelf life, which lends itself to the application. But I didn’t have a way to visualize that density. So, against my better judgement, I started doing some math.
Open source is not entirely new to NetApp, they’ve had an OpenStack team in the company since 2011, mainly contributing to the Cinder project. This provided on-demand block storage in OpenStack. In the past 18 months, this has been consciously expanded into an open ecosystem team, organized around thePub.
Late last year, I wrote an overview about ClearSky Data. The company has a unique product. They offer an alternative to the usual state of cloud storage, with lots of latency and multiple data copies that you’re paying for individually. What continues to strike me about their offering is its completeness. Make no mistake, this is a fully managed storage solution.
The company has recently announced some exciting developments coming down the pipeline.
When a category becomes settled, a bit of tedium begins to set in. Room for innovation rapidly shrinks, and becomes more about efficiency and refinement than redefinition. That’s kind of how I felt the hyperconverged infrastructure market was settling into. There are still marked differences in price, features, and capability between the players. But the literal configuration of hardware seemed to be homogenized.
Datrium is trying to change the expectations of hyperconvergence. Instead, they are billing their concept as Open Convergence. This is their response to the traditional issue with HCI. Their basic format is to separate bulk storage from compute, flash, and networking.
