Startup News Flash part 4

This is the fourth part already of the Startup News Flash, we are in the middle of VMworld and of course there were many many announcements. I tried to filter out those which are interesting, as mentioned in one of the other posts if you feel one is missing leave a comment.

Nutanix announced version 3.5 of their OS last week. The 3.5 release contains a bunch of new features, one of them being what they call the “Nutanix Elastic Deduplication Engine”. I think it is great they added this feature is ultimately it will allow you to utilize your flash and RAM tier more efficiently. The more you can cache the better right?! I am sure this will result in a performance improvement in many environment, you can imagine that especially for VDI or environments where most VMs are based on the same template this will be the case. What might be worth knowing is that Nutanix dedupe is inline for their RAM and flash tier and then for their magnetic disks is happening in the background. Nutanix also announced that besides supporting vSphere and KVM they also support Hyper-V as of now, which is great for customers as it offers you choice. On top of all that, they managed to develop a new simplified UI and a rest-based API allowing for customers to build a software defined datacenter! Also worth noting is that they’ve been working on their DR story. They’ve developed a Storage Replication Adapter which is one of the components needed to implement Site Recover Manager with array based replication. They also optimized their replication technology by extending their compression technology to that layer. (Disclaimer: the SRA is not listed on the VMware website, as such it is not supported by VMware. Please validate the SRM section of the VMware website before implementing.)

Of course an update from a flash caching vendor, this time it is Proximal Data who announced the 2.0 version of their software. AutoCache 2.0 includes role-based administration features and multi-hypervisor support to meet the specific needs of cloud service providers. Good to see that multi hypervisor and cloud is part of the proximal story soon. I like the Proximal aggressive price point. It starts at $999 per host for flash caches less than 500GB, which is unique for a solution which does both block and file caching. Not sure I agree with Proximal’s stance with regards to write-back caching and “down-playing” 1.0 solutions, especially not when you don’t offer that functionality yourself or were a 1.0 version yesterday.

I just noticed this article published by Silicon Angle which mentions the announcement of the SMB Edition of FVP, priced at a flat $9,999, supports up to 100 VMs across a maximum of four hosts with two processors and one flash drive each. More details to be found in this press release by PernixData.

Also something which might interest people is Violin Memory filing for IPO. It had been rumored numerous times, but this time it seems to be happening for real. The Register has an interesting view by the way. I hope it will be a huge success for everyone involved!

Also want to point people again to some of the cool announcements VMware did in the storage space, although far from being a startup I do feel this is worth listing here again: introduction to vSphere Flash Read Cache – introduction to Virtual SAN.

First part of the Startup News Flash was published a couple of weeks ago, and as many things have happened I figured I would publish another. At times I guess I will miss out on a news fact or a new company, if that happens don’t hesitate to leave a comment with your findings/opinion or just a link to what you feel is newsworthy! As mentioned in part 1 the primary focus of this article is Startup news / Flash related news. As you can see most flash related except for one.

Nimbus Data launched two brand new arrays: Gemini F400 / F600 arrays. These are all flash arrays, and bring something unique to the table for sure… and that is costs: price per useable gigabyte is $0.78. Yes, that is low indeed. How do they bring it down? Well of course by very efficient deduplication and compression. On top of that, by leveraging standard hardware and getting all smarts from software the price can be kept low. According to the press release these new arrays will be able to provide between 3TB and 48TB of capacity (I almost said disk space there…) and will be shipping end of this year! Although Nimbus declared Hybrid Storage officially dead, mainly because of the cost of Nimbus all flash solution (the F400 starts under US$60,000, the F600 starts under US$80,000.), I still think there is a lot of room for growth in that space and many customer will be interested in those solutions. My question yesterday on twitter was to Nimbus which configuration they did the math with to declare hybrid dead, because cost per gigabyte is one thing, the upfront investment to reach that price point is another. It will be interesting to see how they will do the upcoming 12-18 months, but it is needless to say that they will be going after their competition aggressively. Talking about competition….

Last year at VMworld I briefly stopped at the Tegile booth, besides the occasional tweet I kind of lost track until recent as Tegile just announced series C funding… Not pocket money I would say but a serious round, $35 million, led by Meritech Capital Partners and original stakeholder August Capital and strategic partners Western Digital and SanDisk. For those who don’t know, Tegile is a storage company who sells both a hybrid and an “all-flash” solution and they have done this in an interesting modular fashion (all-flash placed in front of spinning disks = modular hybrid). Of course they also offer functionality like dedupe/compression and replication. Although I haven’t heard too much from them lately it is a booth I will surely stop by at VMworld. Again, there is a lot of competition in this space and it would be interesting to see an “All-flash / Hybrid Storage bake off”. Tegile vs Nimbus, Nimble vs Tintri, Pure Storage vs Violin…

Violin Memory just announced the 6264 flash Memory Array. This new all flash storage system can provide a capacity of 64 TiB/70.3 TB with a footprint of just 3U, and that is impressive if you ask me. On top of that, it can provide up to 1 million IOps and at a ultra low latency! Who doesn’t want to have 1 million IOps to its disposal right? (More specs to be found here.) To me though what was more exciting in this press release was the announcement of a management tool called Symphony. Symphony provides a single pane of glass for all your Violin devices (read more details here.) It provides a smart management interface that allows you to create custom dashboard, comprehensive reporting, tagging and filtering and of course they provide a RESTful API for you admins out there who love to automate things. Nice announcement from Violin Memory, and those already running Violin hardware I would definitely recommend evaluating Symphony as the video looks promising.

CloudPhysics just announced the Card Store is GA as of today (13th August 2013) and a new round of funding ($ 10 million) led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Previous investors the Mayfield Fund, Mark Leslie, Peter Wagner, Carl Waldspurger, Nigel Stokes, Matt Ocko and VMware co-founders also participated in this round. I would say an exciting day for CloudPhysics. Many have asked over the last year why have I always been enthusiastic about what they do? I think John Blumenthal (CEO) explains it best:

Our servers receive a daily stream of 80+ billion samples of configuration, performance, failure and event data from our global user base with a total of 20+ trillion data points to date. This ‘collective intelligence,’ combined with CloudPhysics’ patent-pending datacenter simulation and unique resource management techniques, empowers enterprise IT to drive Google-like operations excellence using actionable analytics from a large, relevant, continually refreshed data set.

If you are interested in testing their solution, sign up for a free trial at cloudphysics.com. Pricing starts at $49/month per physical server, more details here. For those wondering what CloudPhysics has to do with flash, well they’ve got a card for that!

That was it for Part 2, hope you found it a useful round-up and I will expect to be able to publish another startup news flash within 2 weeks!

violin memory