Tag: scale-out storage

Qumulo Comes Out Of Stealth With Analytics For Scale Out Storage

Qumulo came out of stealth on Monday with details of a scale-out storage solution featuring data-driven analytics that facilitate the intelligent management of its storage solution. Based on the premise that storage owners have made the leap to petabyte-scale storage infrastructures but have yet to cross the bridge leading to the effective management of billions of objects and files, the company’s Qumulo Core platform embeds real-time analytics directly into its storage platform. Qumulo Core runs as a software application on the Linux Operating system on commodity hardware, virtual machines or Qumulo-appliances using a flash-first hybrid design. The Qumulo Core platform gives storage owners granular insight into the number and types of storage objects populating a specific storage infrastructure as illustrated below:

Storage administrators can leverage dashboards such as graphic above to understand the allocation of billions of files across approximately 300,000 directories. In addition, Qumulo Core’s dashboard gives customers insight into the evolution of their storage infrastructure in relation to incoming data as exemplified by the data points regarding the emergence of the 5th node in a software-defined storage infrastructure and hours required to rebuild a specific hard drive. Given that the platform enables even more granular analytics about which storage objects are located across directories including trends related to the ingestion and storage of incoming data feeds, Qumulo Core empowers storage administrators to effectively manage massive volumes of data, particularly as it relates to streams of unstructured data that predispose themselves to data driven storage management.

Qumulo’s exit from stealth comes roughly six weeks after its finalization of $40M in Series B funding in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and existing investors. To date, Qumulo has raised $67M and has developed its product over three years by means of consultative interviews and questionnaires aimed at understanding the needs of enterprise storage customers. All told, the Qumulo Core platform represents a disruptive innovation in storage management by bringing the richness of real-time analytics to tackle storage problems related to Big Data and its attendant reality of billions of files. One potential future direction for the product would be to augment its data driven analytics with enhancements that deliver a machine learning-based storage infrastructure that optimizes the allocations of files within storage platforms. That said, for now, a data aware storage platform for Big Data that gives storage administrators enhanced visibility regarding the intersection of data and storage has arrived.

Advertisement

PernixData Closes $35M In Series C Funding For Its Disruptive Server Side Storage Technology

On Wednesday, PernixData announced the finalization of $35M in Series C funding in a round led by Menlo Ventures. The Series C funding raise also included the participation of individual investors in the form of Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, Jim Davidson, Managing Director at Silver Lake and Steve Luczo, CEO of Seagate Technology. PernixData’s revolutionary server-side flash storage technology allows customers to scale their storage infrastructure without adding hardware-based storage capacity. PernixData FVP delivers software-based scale-out storage capability based on the aggregation of RAM or flash for any virtualized application. PernixData’s disruptive scale-out technology enables IT administrators to decouple storage capacity from its underlying hardware infrastructure toward the end of scaling storage capacity without intrusive additions to storage hardware.

The announcement of PernixData’s Series C funding comes hot on the heels of the company’s July 31 news of quarter over quarter revenue growth of 42% in its first full fiscal year. To date, PernixData claims over 200 paying customers for its FVP product in more than 20 countries. With an extra $35M in the bank, PernixData lies poised to consolidate its impressive early traction in the use of serve side flash to improve storage scalability and performance. Expect PernixData to continue leading the revolution in the decoupling of storage capacity from hardware-based storage capacity as its flagship FVP product expands its market penetration and continues its maturation in collaboration with customer feedback. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, Lightspeed Ventures, Lane Bess, Mark Leslie and John Thompson also participated in today’s Series C round, which brings the total capital raised by PernixData to $62M.

PernixData Enhances Its Software Solution To Improve Storage Performance

Today, PernixData announces enhancements to PernixData FVP, its software-based storage solution for enabling dramatic improvements in the scale-out storage capability of IT infrastructures without the addition of hardware-based storage resources. In its initial rollout, PernixData FVP used hypervisor software to aggregate server side flash to create a “scale-out data tier for the acceleration of primary storage.” The aggregation of server side flash creates a clustered acceleration tier that enables improvements in application latency and storage performance. The clustered acceleration tier empowers application administrators to optimize application performance without changing the workflows or raw storage capacity of the infrastructure in which the application is deployed. Installed into the hypervisor kernel within minutes, PernixData FVP enables the scale-out of the storage capacity of a specific IT infrastructure without the hassle and expense of adding additional storage capacity to ameliorate storage performance issues.

As a result of today’s announcement, PernixData FVP can accelerate any virtualized application by aggregating both RAM and/or flash. The hypervisor’s ability to create an acceleration tier based on RAM and flash expands the number of use cases in which the PernixData solution can be deployed by extending the solution to a more diverse range of IT environments and budgets. Moreover, the solution can now be deployed with file, block or direct attached storage, thereby ensuring its ability to integrate into a wide range of storage environments and infrastructures. Satyam Vaghani, CTO and co-founder of PernixData, remarked on the significance of the product’s enhancements as follows:

Storage is at an amazing inflection point where performance is being extricated from capacity to optimize application behavior and cost effectively scale IOPS, without disrupting years of investment in shared storage infrastructure. By making FVP easy to deploy in any environment, and robust enough to accelerate any virtualized application using flash or RAM, PernixData is making decoupled storage architectures the de facto standard in virtual data centers.

Vaghani comments on the PernixData FVP’s ease of deployment in almost any environment and ability to decouple storage capacity from hardware-based storage capacity. As such, the solution represents a non-disruptive approach to scale-out storage via a disruptive technology that stands to transform the economics and operationalization of storage and application lifecycle management. Today’s announcement also extends the solution’s ability to support existing replication and disaster recovery processes by allowing administrators to define which host machines take part in replication groups. Customers can designate sets of host machines for replication, thereby enabling fault tolerance amongst the machines within the replication group. Overall, today’s announcement points to a significant advancement in FVP’s ability to integrate with more diverse set of storage environments and position the technology strongly for greater adoption in the industry. PernixData has signed over 100 customers since its general availability announcement in August 2013 and appears poised to rapidly expand further given FVP’s newly released ability to support almost any server and storage configuration.

PernixData Releases PernixData FVP For SMBs; Selected As Finalist In “Best Technology” VMware 2013 Awards

PernixData continues to build on its momentum in the server side flash virtualization space. On Tuesday, the company announced a brand of its PernixData FVP software catered for small to medium-sized businesses. The SMB PernixData FVP creates a clustered acceleration tier for the virtualization of server side flash on up to four hosts, allowing for scale-out storage independent of hardware storage capacity. SMBs can now take advantage of PernixData’s disruptive technology that seamlessly installs into an organization’s existing IT infrastructure. The SMB edition of the PernixData FVP means that the company is now aggressively pursuing the enterprise, SMB and startup market in a strategy that appears intent on determining which vertical will deliver most sustained traction subsequent to its general availability announcement in early August.

Meanwhile, at VMware 2013, PernixData FVP was named one of the finalists in the “New Technology” category of the Best of VMware 2013 Awards. PernixData’s VP of Marketing, Jeff Aaron, commented on the VMware award by explaining the platform’s innovation as follows: “While other vendors offer point products that deliver modest storage performance gains for a limited number of use cases, PernixData FVP provides a true clustered solution that seamlessly benefits all virtualized applications. This makes PernixData’s software a key infrastructure element of any virtualized data center.” PernixData FVP installs into the hypervisor kernel within 20 minutes, without the necessity of VM or server changes or reboots.