In this iteration of Gestalt Storage News:
– ioFABRIC Vicinity 3.0 moves into the world of storage myth making
– WekaIO gets into the high-performance distributed storage game
– And we talk about the new world of NVMe on the On-Premise IT Roundtable
Plus discussions about the death of the dedicated storage admin!
WekaIO = Distributed Storage + Cloud
WekaIO Matrix is an impressive new entrant in the world of high-performance distributed storage, and the cloud connector is a nice complement. The company brings all the latest trends together (distributed storage, NVMe, flash, cloud) in a useful solution. And by targeting HPC, WekaIO has selected a ripe target.
Elastifile: How Bizur
If file systems are cool, then distributed file systems are Miles Davis. They’re also incredibly hard. A lot of “distributed” file systems only fit the term in the broadest sense. Many rely on a centralized model, which can potentially be fine, but really limits how you can scale. Others offer true distribution but run into performance trouble. Elastifile’s solution is the Elastifile Cloud File System. This isn’t just simple distribution, they are offering a application-level distributed file system, with the goal of offering the flexibility of the public cloud, with all the enterprise data services expected in a hybrid cloud.
World of StorageCraft- Company Acquires Exablox
In a move that could shake up the backup market down the road, StorageCraft announced the acquisition of the storage appliance company Exablox. Exablox is no stranger to Gestalt IT or Tech Field Day, and has been around for more than a little while. The combination of the two could make a compelling combined solution. The companies aren’t exactly strangers, they’ve had an OEM agreement in place since last October.
ClearSky Data Represents Your Data
After looking at some of the announcements from AWS re:Invent, the most interesting was the AWS Snowmobile, an insane 100PB SAN on wheels. This seems like the ultimate in sneakernet, giving you a ton of throughput, but really slow latency. What if instead of offering a big pile of storage with bad latency, you could simply use your own storage, but distribute it with extremely low latency? ClearSky Data claims they can deliver this. I sat in on a product briefing to figure out how.
Gestalt Storage News 16.1
What’s happening in Storage
StorPool’s storage distribution solutions
Dell EMC Isilon’s presentation at Tech Field Day
Matt That IT Guy tells us about ioFabric
J Metz answers the question: When should a administrator use a storage area network technology and when should he use a network area storage technology?
StorPool: Truly Distributed Storage
A lot of vendors claim to have distributed storage. Certainly many of them will sell a solution marketed as distributed. The issue is that a lot of what is marketed as distributed relies on legacy implementation. These were made with the standard storage needs in mind. Capacity, reliability, and speed aren’t hard to find these days. You know what is really hard to do? True distributed storage. That’s where StorPool comes in.
Docker Acquires Storage Startup Infinit
Of course, just after my Docker post, we get some interesting Docker news! It looks like Docker has acquired storage startup Infinit. If you’re never heard of Infinit, don’t worry, the name was new to me too. Looking at the announcement blog post, it’s clear the acquisition is aimed at clearing up one of Docker’s glaring deficiencies: storage.