Posted by Cormac Hogan
Technical Marketing Architect (Storage)
I put together a short article on some of the things that I’ll be checking out from a storage perspective at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco next week. This is by no means a definitive list, and I’m sure we’ll hear more fantastic announcements in the coming weeks. However these are products and vendors which recently caught my eye, and I definitely mean to find out more about them at this year’s conference.
Disclaimer – Once again, the vSphere storage blog has to remain storage vendor neutral to retain any credibility. VMware doesn’t favour any one storage partner over another. I’m not personally endorsing any of these vendor’s products either. What I’m posting here are just a few vendors/products that are interesting to me from a storage perspective.
EMC Isilon – Isilon have their new Mavericks OneFS release coming out and have a whole bunch of VAAI & VASA integration features. These features will provide additional performance improvements and management features for vSphere administrators. VASA integration will allow drive features surface up in vSphere as well as enable Profile Driven Storage. I definitely want to check this out.
Nimble Storage – Another vendor who has added a bunch of new vSphere integration features with VAAI, an SRA for SRM and their own Path Selection Policy. Nimble have also announced a new scalable architeture – definitely want to see some of this in action.
Nimbus Data – Nimbus Data have just announced a new all flash storage array. The new Gemini has a parallel memory architecture (PMA) which provides fault tolerance for mission critical environments. They claim to have not only to have reduced the per-GB cost, but also increased the longevity of their flash to 10 years. I want to learn more about this.
SimpliVity– Another new player in the Storage Appliance market, Simplivity just came out of stealth mode with their new OmniCube storage appliance.There are so many bells & whistles on this appliance that it is hard to know where to begin. I’m looking forward to seeing their demo and finding out more.
Violin & Symantec – Violin Memory and Symantec have teamed up. Symantec‘s data management software is now added to Violin’s flash memory arrays. My understanding is that this now gives the Violin Memory array features like thin provisioning, snapshots, clones, dedupe, & replication. I am definitely interested in seeing if/how this enables interoperability with vSphere features.
Virsto Software – This product could be considered as an I/O accelerator, but it is all done in software via an appliance and a service thats runs on the ESXi. Some of the figures that they are producing are amazing. They also tell me that they have a tech preview of their Virsto product working with EMC VFCache – this I want to see.
This is only scratching the surface. I’m sure we will see lots more announcements during the week. But it is great to see so many storage array vendors working with us and integrating with our features and products.
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