What a first day!

Of Storage Field Day 6, that is.

Today, we heard presentations from three companies, Avere Systems of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; StorMagic, coming in all the way from Old Blighty, and Tegile, located right here in Silly Valley.

I shall briefly recap the day.

Avere Systems
Starting out as a NAS optimization system, Avere Systems now bills itself as a ‘cloud enablement and NAS optimization platform’.

Let’s join them in finding out just what that is.

According to Avere, their flagship product

Avere FXT Series Edge filers were the first technology to deliver the benefits of performance tiering and scale-out clustering to any NAS environment. The FXT Series provides NAS optimization by enabling customers to achieve unlimited performance scaling for their applications, global access to their data independent of where the storage is located, and dramatic cost savings in both capital and operating expenses.

In plain English, Avere delivers a product which is a NAS caching and abstraction layer that creates a single namespace both for local NAS and cloud, including existing, and cloud storage providers. This enables organizations to use the legacy storage constructs in their current environment while leveraging emerging storage options.

It incorporates technology dubbed FlashMove, which makes it possible to seamlessly move data from local NAS to cloud and back again.

Next, Avere Systems announced a software only version of FXT Edge filer, the Virtual FXT appliance, which promises full FXT functionality on EC2 compute cloud.

During this presentation, Avere made a very good point on why Amazon AWS storage is cheap: it is the nut that gets you to spend on their compute and services when you're hooked up to their storage.

I clearly didn’t bring up the fact that their hometown team had shellacked mine just a couple of days earlier. No sense in either bringing up past defeats or re-living them, right?

StorMagic
From Bristol, in the UK, came StorMagic.

StorMagic produces a software-only solution delivering high-availability at the edge for enterprises.

In their words,

StorMagic’s SvSAN is a software solution which enables enterprises to eliminate downtime of business critical applications at the enterprise edge. This is achieved by leveraging the existing server storage and presenting it as a virtual SAN.

StorMagic’s typical customer has anywhere between 10 – 10,000 edge sites, where local IT resource is not available, but uptime of applications is a must.

What I glean from that, StorMagic’s flagship product, SvSAN, is at once both software defined storage and a hyper convergence solution for the edge of the enterprise.

These are typically remote sites, with no local IT, and critical LOB apps.

StorMagic fits best for sites such as this:

Pleasingly, StorMagic is available on Microsoft’s Hyper-v.

By the numbers, StorMagic has 1,226 customers, with over 57 petabytes managed, at ~2,200 customer sites.

Much thanks to Ray Lucchesi (@RayLucchesi) who reminded me of the potential utility of this software appliance to SMBs, and invariably to our remote users in emerging countries.

Resultantly, I shall be keeping a close eye, and probably getting in touch with StorMagic, in the near future.

Tegile Systems
Our final presentation today took place at the Newark offices of Tegile Systems.

It started out with a tour of their engineering datacenter, where my first tweet was a shout out to Jason Covitiz at Schneider/APC.

Hey @Schneider_jcov, it looks like @Tegile loves y'all, as all racks there say APC pic.twitter.com/kgjk1wktLa

— John Obeto II (@johnobeto) November 6, 2014

All racks at Tegile were APC, that’s why!

Next up, we walked to the presentation conference room.

Stepping into the conference room, I saw this: multi-colored chips and guacamole!

Just what does Tegile do?

Tegile develops and delivers a storage array which could be made up of all flash storage, or a hybrid of flash and spinning disks in a hardware appliance.

According to my friend and fellow delegate Enrico Signoretti @esignoretti, Tegile is a small company that’s doing quite well in a very crowded space.

According to them, Tegile is a

manufacturer of intelligent flash and hybrid storage solutions whose flash storage arrays support a wide range of technologies, including iSCSI, NFS, SMB 3.0/CIFS and Fibre Channel. Tegile all-flash and hybrid storage systems leverage the performance of flash technology while using hard disk drives to lower cost per GB.

Not bad, not bad.

Next, we are presented with this, which fellow delegate Scott Lowe @theotherscottlowe – describes as a perfect representation of the “realities of application storage realities in a way that makes sense:.

I kinda think he liked it.

Below, is a slide that shows what Tegile believes is their value proposition.

As I see it, Tegile accelerates performance with a hybrid flash/non-flash devices. It has inline deduplication, compression, zero elimination, thin provisioning, and automatic blockbuster reclamation. (Thanks, Arjan Timmerman @arjantim.)

From what I see, there is a relatively large, and quite impressive bundled software features in with Tegile appliances.

Tegile also has IntelliCare, which is a cloud-based analytics and trouble-shooting, technical support platform for Tegile devices.

Tegile systems can address up to 16 TB of flash cache, without any loss of performance

That’s a quick summary.

More on these vendors subsequent to the event, after I have had more time to delve into their offerings.

© 2002 – 2014, John Obeto for Blackground Media Unlimited

Follow @johnobeto