ioFabric would be a great name for a company that makes clothes with embedded LEDs. The kind of stuff you see someone wearing around a mall, even though they don’t sell those clothes at any of the stores. The person who wears ioFabric always seems to be there when you are, so you start to wonder. Is he always here, or do we have this weird symbiotic relationship? Does this person exist outside of this mall? Am I creating this person out of sheer force of will? Is my mutant power to create people with mildly obnoxious but oddly compelling clothing?
Turns out, ioFabric makes a really interesting storage management solution called Vicinity. Actually, what makes it interesting isn’t so much the management, it’s how it leverages that storage. ioFabric offers a solution to allow you to pool all your storage into one usable mass. This can even be extended to unused RAM. It might seem anathema to put any kind of storage into volatile memory, but ioFabric has you covered.
Essentially, their system requires two data nodes and one control node to get started. The data nodes take care of data security, hosting full backups within them (as opposed to RAID). This allows you to use something extremely fast and volatile like RAM without having to worry about data loss. Additionally, the seem to have a strong auto-tiering system that will leverage faster storage like RAM and SSDs for short periods of time. This also allows you to get additional use out of older storage that either isn’t up to snuff with performance or capacity for low intensity usage, like archiving. Since this is all pooled, smaller capacity on an old SAN become less of an issue.
Obviously the current hotness in IT is disaggregation. Whether you call this hyperconverged, composable or some other buzzword. Vicinity isn’t the most radical solution I’ve ever seen, but that probably means it will be much more practical in your setup.
Matt That IT Guy comments:
Trevor Pott recently introduced me to some of the fine folks at IOFabric and suggested that I have chat with them. Going into the call, I didn’t know a heck of a lot about their flagship product, Vicinity. I did a bit of research and gathered that Vicinity allows you to use existing storage and […]
Read more at: IOFabric wants to manage all your storage
Image Credit: Pete
