34 New Offerings Proving VMworld Is The Key Storage Conference (Part 1)

VMworld: The New Storage Show

VMworld 2015, while ostensibly focused on virtualized and cloud environments, has gradually taken on a new persona as a conference focused on storage for virtualized and cloud environments.

Nearly every major and second-tier storage vendor came to VMworld 2015 to demonstrate its latest hardware and software technologies. In fact, so many storage vendors were out in force that Jamie Shepard, senior vice president for health care and strategy at Lumenate, a Dallas-based solution provider, told CRN that "VMworld is now the largest storage conference in the world."

CRN was also busy during VMworld, and found at least 34 new storage hardware and software solutions that were either showed for the first time during the event or were introduced no earlier than July. Because there were so many solutions, this slideshow was broken into two parts. (Don't forget to check out Part 2 of this slideshow.)

Here's the first part of CRN's look at the many storage products in the spotlight at VMworld 2015.

Arcserve: Data Protection Cloud Plus On-Site Appliance

Arcserve, the Minneapolis-based data protection software vendor formed last year when it was spun out of CA, used VMworld to show off its new Arcserve Cloud solution for offsite backup, archiving, and disaster recovery. The Arcserve Cloud is integrated with the Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) Appliance to help MSPs extend their data protection solution portfolio.

The Arcserve Cloud offers such data recovery capabilities as disaster recovery as a service to protect data and allow virtual machines to spin up in the cloud, long-term off-site data retention, easy disaster recovery testing, and such services as global dedupe, encryption, compression and WAN-optimized replication, the company said.

Atlantis Computing Expands SDS, Hyper-Scale platforms

Mountain View, Calif.-based Atlantis used VMworld to launch Atlantis USX 3.0, the third generation of its software-defined storage (SDS) platform, and to unveil factory integration of its Atlantis HyperScale appliance solution on Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Supermicro server platforms.

The new Atlantis solutions are certified for VMware VVOLs integration, and offer data mobility across the data center with all-flash performance for all users and applications. Both solutions take advantage of ever-faster and ever-cheaper processing power, memory, and flash storage to provide storage systems that have targeted availability levels that adapt resilience based on the importance of the data or system.

Barracuda Networks: Virtual Backup Appliance

The new Barracuda Backup Vx from Campbell, Calif.-based Barracuda Networks, introduced at VMworld, is a virtual appliance that runs on either VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V to provide complete cloud-integrated data protection for physical, virtual and Software-as-a-Service environments. Data can be replicated to another appliance or to Barracuda Cloud Storage for protection. The new virtual appliances offer source-based and target-based in-line deduplication, while central management capabilities let customers manage multiple sites from a single interface while defining roles to allow access to data in each location.

Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform

The new Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform from San Jose, Calif.-based Brocade is a dedicated, purpose-built Fibre Channel SAN appliance for measuring application-level and device-level I/O performance and traffic behaviors. The appliance installs quickly without disrupting operations, and operates without impacting customers' compute, storage, network or security resources, the company said.

A single appliance can analyze 20,000 data flows and millions of IOPS, letting it calculate and analyze a large amount of networking metrics to help identify potential causes of infrastructure issues. It also tracks historical performance trends to help customers proactively monitor and resolve issues, often before they occur.

Catalogic Software Update Copy Data Management Solution

Catalogic Software, Woodcliff Lake, N.J., showcased the next release of its ECX 2.2 copy data management solution. ECX 2.2, scheduled for release this month, was enhanced with a number of features for improving workflow automation and orchestration for copy data creation and use, including enhanced, policy-based, copy data management workflow automation, improved role-based access control, expanded scalability and performance, and improved fault-tolerance.

ECX 2.2 also now offers deliver ’in-place’ copy data management support for such IBM storage solutions as Storwize, SVC, v9000 and IBM Flash Copy Manager.

Cirba Pairs Analytics With NetApp Storage

Cirba, Richmond Hill, Ontario, showed how the latest version of its intelligent policy-based analytics platform supports for NetApp storage solutions to improve organizations' visibility into storage utilization vs. actual virtual machine requirements. The company said this optimizes virtual machine placements in order to balance demand across storage resources.

ClearSky Data Exits Stealth, Touts Fast Cloud Pipe To Primary Storage

Boston-based ClearSky Data, which just last month came out of stealth mode, made its first public appearance at VMworld. The ClearSky Data Global Storage Network combines primary, backup and recovery of data across the entire data life cycle, with an emphasis on providing high performance and low latency with cloud scalability.

The Global Storage Network leverages points-of-presence, or PoPs, to link the company's storage appliances and flash-based cache to the cloud with no more than 2 milliseconds of latency.

The ClearSky service combines primary storage, backup and disaster recovery. It automatically tiers data by moving cold data to the cloud, keeping warm data in metro-based PoPs within 120 miles of customers across the global network, and keeping a small portion of hot data on-premise.

Curvature Partners With DataCore On Software-Defined Storage

Curvature, a San Francisco-based IT infrastructure and services provider, unveiled a partnership with DataCore, a Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based developer of software-defined storage solutions. The partnership brings together DataCore's software-defined storage software, which can run on any commodity hardware, with Curvature’s hardware reseller business and its professional services arm.

DataCore Ups Hyper-Converged Performance With Parallel I/O

DataCore Software showed off its adaptive parallel I/O software, which the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based company said harnesses multi-core processing systems to eliminate the performance bottleneck caused by I/O operations. DataCore said its parallel I/O software, when combined with ever-denser multi-core processors and efficient CPU and memory designs, is a big part in creating storage servers and hyper-converged systems that gain "an order of magnitude" increased in storage performance, particularly in mission-critical lines of business applications based on Microsoft SQL Server, SAP and Oracle databases.

DataGravity Enhances Data-Aware Storage Appliances

Nashua, N.H.-based DataGravity showed its new DataGravity Discovery Series V2 data-aware data management and protection appliances, which include flash storage acceleration optimization and provide both information discovery by conducting searches natively at the point at which data is stored and snapshot-based block, file and virtual machine data protection.

The appliances last month were enhanced with content and tag alerting, along with predefined and custom tagging, to provide automated email alerts of when and where sensitive data is stored and used to help find access anomalies and policy violations. Also new is intelligent profiles to allow compliance policy checks to be defined, assigned and scheduled for regulatory and internal governance policies.

Hitachi Data Systems Unveils EVO:RAIL, VVOLs Support

Hitachi Data Systems, Santa Clara, Calif., used VMworld to unveil its Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) 1000 for VMware EVO:RAIL, a new hyper-converged appliance based on the EVO:RAIL software stack. The new UCP 1000 is aimed at rapid, low-cost deployment of remote office, test and development, virtual desktop and similar virtualized solutions.

The company also unveiled VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) support for its industry-leading Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G1000, as well as Hitachi Virtual Infrastructure Integrator 3.0, a data protection and management solution specific to VMware vSphere.

Huawei Enterprise Gets VMware Certifications

Shenzhen, China-based Huawei said at VMworld that its Huawei OceanStor converged storage portfolio has been certified for VMware’s vSphere 6.0 virtual platform, Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) and IPv6.

With the vSphere 6.0 certification, Huawei’s OceanStor solutions now offer VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) for Block, VAAI for Network Attached Storage (VAAI NAS), Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA), and Site Recovery Manager (SRM) capabilities. The company claims its support for IPv6 and VVOLs on the vSphere 6.0 platform is an industry-first for storage vendors.

IBM Enhances Spectrum Protect Cloud-Based Data Protection

IBM, Armonk, N.Y., unveiled new features to two Spectrum Protect software offerings as part of the company’s software-defined storage. IBM Spectrum Protect can now help businesses back data up to on-premise object storage or the cloud without a cloud-gateway appliance. It supports IBM SoftLayer cloud infrastructure today, and the company plans to expand support to other public clouds in the future.

IBM Spectrum Accelerate on Cloud, which helps companies deploy block storage on SoftLayer without having to buy new storage hardware or manage multiple appliances, will be available as a service to IBM Cloud customers via SoftLayer infrastructure.

Kaminario Brings All-Flash Storage To Under $1 Per Usable GB

The new K2 v5.5 all-flash storage array from Kaminario, released to the channel late last month, brings the lowest price point in flash storage to under $1 per useable GB, or 50 percent of the price of its competitors, the Newton, Mass.-based vendor says.

The K2 v5.5 takes advantage of low-cost 3-D TLC flash technology with support for 3-D TLC drives, giving enterprise customers the ability to boost effective capacity to more than 360 TBs per K-block module and scale a single K2 array to multi-petabytes. The array also includes native array-based asynchronous replication for ease in deploying disaster recovery solutions. Its Perpetual Array feature also lets customers seamlessly update hardware without downtime or forklift upgrades.

Maxta Eases Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Deployments For Multiple Vendors

The newly expanded and enhanced MaxDeploy program from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Maxta provides flexibility in delivering hyper-converged infrastructure solutions on customers’ choice of server vendors, including Cisco, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Quanta and Supermicro. MaxDeploy does this by providing predefined and preconfigured appliances that are preloaded with software, and ordered and deployed as a complete system. These appliances are delivered to customers by Maxta channel partners, who can take advantage of the MaxDeploy program for configuring, quoting and ordering.

Micron Shows Off Its New SSD, Flash Technology

Boise, Idaho-based SSD and flash storage manufacturer Micron Technology used VMworld to show off several recently unveiled flash storage solutions.

This includes Micron's own entry-level model M510DC SSD, as well as the new S600DC series of SAS (serial-attached SCSI) SSDs designed jointly with Seagate. The company also showed off the new category of nonvolatile memory it jointly developed with Intel called 3D XPoint technology. Micron claims 3D XPoint is 1,000 times faster and offers 1,000 times greater endurance than NAND flash, but offers 10 times the density of conventional DRAM memory.

NetApp Intros SnapCenter Data Management Solution

New from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based NetApp at VMworld was SnapCenter, an application that performs centralized application-consistent backups, verification, cloning and recovery across various environments from a single console.

NetApp said SnapCenter offers simplified backup, restore and clone management with integrated workflows as well as improved performance and availability. It also provides centralized management for application administrators, as well as high availability with load and performance balancing.

SnapCenter consists of the SnapCenter Server and SnapCenter Plug-Ins for a variety of applications, databases and hypervisors. It allows the centralized deployment of plug-ins to remote hosts, as well as centralized scheduling and monitoring of backup, verification, clone and restore operations.