Cormac just released his article about storage vendors to check out at VMworld, right when I was typing up this article. Make sure to read that one as well as it contains some great suggestions… I was looking at the list of vendors who have a booth at VMworld, there are a whole bunch I am going to try to check out this round. Of course some of the obvious ones are my friends over at Tintri, Nutanix and Pure Storage but lets try to list a few lesser known vendors. These are not all storage vendors by the way, but a mix of various types of startups from the VMware ecosystem. I have added my own oneliner to it, so you know what to expect.
- Actifio – Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery solution that seems to be gaining traction, maybe I should say “Copy Data Management” solution instead, as that is ultimately what it is they do.
- CloudPhysics – Monitoring / Analytics, the power of many! Or as I stated a while back: Where most monitoring solutions stop CloudPhysics continues.
- Cumulus Networks – Linux Network Operating System is how they describe themselves, decoupling software from hardware is another way of looking at it… interesting company!
- Infinio – Downloadable NFS performance enhancer! AKA memory caching solutions for NFS based infrastructures, check the intro article I wrote a while back…
- Maxta – Software Defined Storage solution, virtual appliance based and hypervisor agnostic… Not spoken with them, or seen their solution yet
- Panzura – A name that keeps popping up more and more often, a global distributed cloud storage solution. Haven’t dug in to it yet, but when I get the chance at VMworld I will…
- PernixData – Came out of stealth this year, and as you all know is working on a write back flash caching solution… One of the few offering a clustered write back solution within the hypervisor
- Plexxi – Networking done in a different way, SDN I would say.
- SolidFire – SolidFire is definitely one cool scale-out storage solution to watch out for, one of the few which actually has a good answer to the question: do you offer Quality of Service? More details about what it is they do here… Not on the show floor, but outside of the expo.
Just a couple of companies which I feel are interesting and worth talking with.