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.
Duncan,
What is your thought on Pure Storage?
Chappy 🙂
I think Pure Storage is an awesome company, they are listed in the article… just not as one of the “lesser known” 🙂
Thanks for the shout-out, Duncan. And you’re right… we’re very much a Copy Data Management platform, supporting both business agility and business resiliency use cases.
Happy to share more, if you’d like to chat please do stop by. And thanks again for the mention.
Mike Troiano, Actifio CMO
I have seen the Maxta solution. If it’s helpful at all here is some info on them. They basically take the local storage of the hosts and present it as centralized storage to vCenter. They use ssd’s for caching and perform an effective raid 1 on the data across the hosts. When I was shown the solution they maxed out at two hosts but had plans to expand it before they launched the product. The key with them is that they are designed to use cheap storage. The ssd can be a sata disk and the rest can be standard sata hard drives. They said they have found that a single 240 GB sata ssd will provide enough caching for up to 50 TB of data. They also said that there was no discernible performance increase using more expensive pcie ssds. The best part of the solution is that it is controlled entirely within vCenter. The solution was fast but needed some more features before it would be ready for prime time. That being said they had not yet launched it.
Cheers,
Jon