Last week I was briefed by Springpath and they launched their company officially yesterday, although they have been around for a long time. Springpath was founded by Mallik Mahalingam and Krishna Yadappanavar. For those who don’t know them, Mallik was responsible for VXLAN (See the IETF draft) and Krishna was one of the folks who was responsible for VMFS. (Together with Satyam who started Pernix Data) I believe it was early 2013 or end of 2012 when Mallik reached out to me and he wanted to validate some of his thinking around the software defined storage space, I agreed to meet up and we discussed the state at that time and where some of the gaps were. Since May 2012 they operated in stealth (under the name Storvisor) and landed a total of 34 million dollars from investors like Sequoia, NEA and Redpoint. Well established VC names indeed, but what did they develop?
Springpath is what most folks would refer to as a Server SAN solution, some may also refer to it as “hyper-converged”. I don’t label them as hyper-converged as Springpath doesn’t sell a hardware solution, they sell software and have a strict hardware compatibility list. The list of server vendors on the HCL seemed to cover the majority of big players out there though, I was told Dell, HP, Cisco and SuperMicro are on the list and that others are being worked on as we speak. This approach offers a bit more flexibility according to Springpath for customers as they can chose their own preferred vendor and leverage the server vendor relationship they already have for discounts but also maintain similar operational processes.
Springpath’s primary focus in the first release is vSphere, which knowing the background of these guys makes a lot of sense, and comes in the shape of a virtual appliance. This virtual appliance is installed on top of the hypervisor and grabs local spindles and flash. With a minimum of three nodes you then can create a shared datastore which is served back to vSphere as an NFS mount. There are of course also plans to support Hyper-V and when they do the appliance will provide SMB capabilities and for KVM it will use NFS. But that is on the roadmap right now, but not too far out according to Mallik. (Note that support for Hyper-V, KVM etc will all be released in a different version. KVM and Docker is in Beta as we speak, if you are interested go to their website and drop them an email!) There is even talk about supporting the Springpath solution to run as a Docker container and providing shared storage for Docker itself. All these different platforms should be able to leverage the same shared data platform according to Springpath, the diagram below shows this architecture.
They demonstrated the configuration / installation of their stack and I must say I was impressed with how simple it was. They showed a simple UI which allowed them to configure the IP details etc, but they also showed how they could simply drop a JSON file in there with all the config details which would then be used to deploy the storage environment. When fully configured the whole environment can be managed from the Web Client, no need for a separate UI or anything like that. All integrated within the Web Client, and for Hyper-V and other platforms they had similar plans… no separate client but all manageable through the familiar interfaces those platforms already offer. [Read more…] about Startup introduction: Springpath