19 Hot Storage Products That Bring Power And Performance To The Cloud

VMworld is not only one of the top conferences for finding the latest on cloud and virtualization platforms, but also for showcasing the latest in storage products as this sample of 19 new hardware, software and cloud offerings shows.

VMworld 2019: Making Storage The Center Of The Cloud

Managing, protecting and migrating data are key to the success of cloud and virtualized environments, making storage hardware, software and services an important part of those environments. And nowhere was this more evident than at the VMworld 2019 conference, the place where many of the storage industry's latest innovations were found.

Nearly all storage vendors looking for their piece of the cloud business were at VMworld 2019 to demonstrate and, in many cases, show for the first time their latest offerings— from traditional storage arrays to the latest in flash storage to software-defined storage platforms to software. Whether data needs to sit on-premises, in virtual machines, in the cloud, in containers or in any combination, the technology to make it happen was likely at VMworld 2019.

Here’s a look at 19 key storage offerings showcased at VMworld 2019.

Atto Technology XstreamCore 7550 and 7600 Achieve VMware Ready Status
Atto Technology, Amherst, N.Y., used VMworld 2019 to showcase its new Atto XstreamCore FC 7550 and 7600 accelerated protocol bridges, which in mid-August achieved VMware Ready status. The FC 7550 and 7600 accelerated protocol bridges transform existing direct-attached SAS storage into a pool of scalable Fibre Channel storage by connecting direct-attached SAS storage to up to 64 physical hosts.

Cloudian Object Storage For vCloud Director

San Mateo, Calif.-based cloud object storage technology developer Cloudian used VMworld 2019 to highlight its partnership with VMware to deliver object storage to help its 4,000-plus cloud providers compete with hyper-scalers.

Managed directly from VMware vCloud Director, the new Cloudian Object Storage for vCloud Director provides what the company terms an affordable, massively scalable, S3-compatible storage fully compatible with cloud-native applications. The jointly engineered offering lets VMware’s cloud partners provide new value-add, higher-margin services to customers. It meets capacity-intensive data protection, management and analytics objectives by leveraging S3-compatible applications for such use as Storage as a Service, Backup as a Service, Archive as a Service, Disaster Recovery as a Service and Big Data as a Service.

Clumio Backup as a Service

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Clumio, in its first public outing since it recently exited stealth mode, took to VMworld 2019 to showcase its secure Backup as a Service aimed at helping enterprises replace traditional software and hardware management with a modern SaaS approach. The offering protects VMware workloads in data centers, remote locations, or on VMware Cloud on AWS via a subscription to a secure service and without managing any hardware or software on-premises or in the cloud. Clumio leverages the scale and elasticity of the public cloud to manage data protection, make backup costs predictable, scale on-demand, and provide a global view of backup compliance with always-on security.

Cohesity Runbook

The Cohesity Runbook application from San Jose, Calif.-based Cohesity provides organizations with new capabilities for moving workloads systematically between on-premises data centers and the public cloud as needed by companies that increasingly rely on the cloud for everything from test/dev to disaster recovery. It features a graphical design canvas to drag, drop and design automation workflows to help ensure that the right sequences happen in the right order. Cohesity Runbook supports disaster recovery and cloud workload migrations for virtual machines to the Amazon Web Services cloud.

DataCore Software-Defined Storage PSP9 Update

Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based DataCore's software-defined storage provides a high-performance flexible storage infrastructure. The PSP9 update features DataCore Insight Services (DIS), a cloud-based predictive analytics engine that delivers actionable insight across multiple vendors and data centers, including primary, secondary and hyper-converged storage. It provides problem detection, best-practice recommendations and capacity planning. Machine learning and artificial intelligence help detect current and foreseeable anomalies in the storage infrastructure, and its recommendation engine provides corrective actions.

PSP9 also features an extensive user interface redesign, new automation capabilities, a complete REST API library, encryption-at-rest across multiple storage systems, improved VVOLs management, increased resiliency for metro-cluster environments, and subscription-based licensing options.

Datrium Disaster Recovery as a Service

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Datrium’s workload orchestrator, ControlShift, provides production support of fully automated failover to the VMware Cloud on AWS based on snapshots held in AWS S3. This SaaS offering provides comprehensive disaster recovery and cloud backup for data protection of on-premises Datrium DVX systems, and provides a single point of ordering, billing and support to help eliminate the need to manage AWS and VMware Cloud accounts directly. With Datrium DRaaS, organizations can make the cloud their disaster recovery data center at a fraction of the cost of a second data center, delivering 10X or greater cost savings.

Dell EMC PowerProtect Cloud Snapshot Manager

Dell Technologies at VMworld 2019 unveiled its move to make Dell EMC Cloud Snapshot Manager a part of its PowerProtect software family. Moving forward, Cloud Snapshot Manager will be called Dell EMC PowerProtect Cloud Snapshot Manager. At the same time, the company has added new capabilities to Cloud Snapshot Manager, which provides customers with a single tool to protect workloads across multiple clouds. New to the offering is support for protecting Blob storage containers in Azure with granular Blob object level recovery and the expansion of the REST API to facilitate improved automation.

Infinidat InfiniBox Software Release 5

InfiniBox from Waltham, Mass.-based Infinidat is a self-managing, sub-millisecond-response time, multi-petabyte scale storage array. InfiniBox Software Release 5 transforms InfiniBox into a building block of the Infinidat Elastic Data Fabric, the company's vision of a multi-petabyte, software-defined hybrid data center. InfiniBox R5 provides performance improvements, Network Lock Manager (NLMv4) for NFSv3, active-active replication for 100 percent data availability, and nondisruptive data mobility for simplified workload relocation between any two InfiniBox systems. Performance improvements include latency reductions, support for up to 1.4 million block IOPS, up to 2 million NFS IOPs, and increased throughput up to 25 GBps.

Nakivo Backup And Replication v.9

Nakivo Backup and Replication v.9 from Sparks, Nev.-based Nakivo introduces support for Microsoft Windows Server backup, allowing customers to protect physical, virtual and cloud environments. The offering provides incremental, application-consistent backups of business-critical applications and databases running on physical Windows Server machines, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, Active Directory, and Oracle. Customers can also restore physical Windows Server backups to VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines. This gives customers with physical or mixed environments the ability to protect their critical data and applications via a single pane of glass with a starting subscription of $17 per machine, per year.

NetApp Kubernetes Service On VMware

As a part of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based NetApp’s Cloud Native Anywhere story, NetApp Kubernetes Services (NKS) now supports a fully managed Kubernetes service on VMware vSphere, regardless of where the VMware infrastructure is being run. NKS helps reduce the complexity of deploying and managing on-premises Kubernetes clusters and their application workloads to provide enterprise capabilities such as in-place upgrades, role-based access control (RBAC), application life-cycle management, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud configurations, and Istio service mesh automation. NKS on VMware is one of several jointly engineered solutions for VMware applications aimed at bringing simplified, scalable, high-performance infrastructure across any cloud.

Panzura Vizion.ai Log Analytics Service

The new Vizion.ai Log Analytics Service from Campbell, Calif.-based Panzura provides a single offering for ingesting, storing, analyzing and managing expanding log data sets across the organization. It allows a business to visualize its data in under five minutes and provide customized alerts. Data is never deleted or taken offline, making it always available for search, analytics and machine learning. The application also provides flexible deployment by letting businesses choose their managed service option of private or public based on security, compliance and big data requirements.

Quest Software Foglight Evolve
Foglight Evolve is Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based Quest Software's new holistic and proactive approach to hybrid infrastructure management. This newly rebranded and repackaged software targets the simplification of complex data center management by helping maximize performance, minimize downtime, right-size resources, and predict future outcomes across hybrid cloud environments. New to the most recent version of the software is predictive cloud migration analytics, including forecasting pricing and dependencies, with the ability to immediately migrate workloads. Foglight Evolve offers simple licensing options, including Foglight Evolve Cloud, Operate and Monitor.

Red Hat OpenShift 4

Red Hat OpenShift 4 is the next generation of Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform, re-engineered to address the complexity of container orchestration in production systems. It was designed to deliver a cloud-like experience across hybrid clouds via automated updates across Kubernetes deployments. The platform offers simplified application deployments and life-cycle management with Kubernetes Operators. A major feature is Operator-enabled Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4, currently under development, which offers highly scalable persistent storage for cloud-native applications that require features such as encryption, replication and availability across the hybrid cloud.

StorOne S1aaS

S1aaS, or S1-as-a-service, combines the enterprise-class storage services of StorOne with Dell Technologies and Mellanox hardware. The New York-based technology developer said S1aaS provides a balance of enterprise-class performance and data protection capabilities at a new affordable price point. S1aaS includes all storage services, including high-performance, hyper-converged infrastructure, scale-out file storage, backup and archive/long-term retention, along with support for block, file and object storage protocols and for all media types—all on a single platform.

Synology UC3200

Synology, Bellevue, Wash., used VMworld 2019 to demonstrate its Unified Controller 3200. The UC3200, slated to be released in the fourth quarter, is Synology's new active-active dual-controller design that provides nondisruptive iSCSI service for enterprises seeking a highly available storage target for databases or virtual machine data. The UC3200 comes equipped with Synology's management and disaster recovery tools to help systems administrators simplify the implementation process while helping lower total acquisition costs.

Tintri By DDN NexentaStor VSA

Data protection software developer Nexenta and flash storage developer Tintri, both of which were recently acquired by Chatsworth, Calif.-based DataDirect Networks, have worked together to develop the NexentaStor VSA for Tintri offering, which lets users add iSCSI block and enterprise NAS file services to existing Tintri deployments. First shown at VMworld, NexentaStor VSA for Tintri is deployed as an OVF (Open Virtualization Format package) on VMware ESXi hosts and Tintri datastores. DDN said the NexentaStor VSA for Tintri is optimized to get maximum capacity savings from Tintri's data reduction technologies. It also provides full-featured iSCSI, NFS and SMB services, including high-availability clustering, space-optimized snapshots, snapshot schedules, high-performance replication, easy integration with NexentaCloud, and more.

Veritas Enterprise Data Services Platform

The Veritas Enterprise Data Services Platform from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Veritas Technologies is a unified set of technologies designed to abstract the complexity of data and infrastructure management for enterprise IT. The platform is comprised of NetBackup, InfoScale, Information Studio and Aptare applications. It allows VMware users to manage the availability of business-critical services at the application layer while leveraging flexible data protection with granular or at-scale recovery whether the VMware environment runs on-premises or in any of the major clouds.

Vexata Active Data Architecture With Robin Platform

The Vexata Active Data Architecture with Robin Platform combines Vexata's ultra-low- latency and high-throughput NVMe flash storage with Robin.io's platform for extended Kubernetes with built-in storage, networking and application management to deliver a production-ready offering for Oracle databases and related applications including WebLogic Server, Oracle RAC and EBS. The Robin technology automates the provisioning and management of Oracle databases to let it be delivered with an "as-a-service" experience with one-click simplicity. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based StorCentric, the parent company of Vexata, said the combined offering accelerates the full range of Oracle workloads including OLTP and DW/OLAP, random and sequential data, data ingest, and backup and recovery to allow customers to provision databases in minutes, scale on demand and reduce costs.

Western Digital Ultrastar VMware-certified Storage Solutions

Western Digital, the San Jose, Calif.-based hard drive and flash storage manufacturer, used VMworld showcase how its VMware-certified Ultrastar SSDs and Ultrastar Storage Server platforms accelerate performance for VMware ESXi, vSphere and vSAN HCI workloads. New offerings include its Ultrastar 96-layer 3-D flash NVMe SSDs available in multiple form factors for either mixed-use-case or very read-intensive applications. Western Digital also showcased its new Ultrastar Serv24-4N four-node NVMe all-flash and Serv24+6 hybrid storage server platforms. The latter Serv24+6 supports up to 336 TB of hard drive storage and up to 48 TB of NVMe flash to provide both storage density and performance for vSAN workloads in virtualized and hyper-converged infrastructure environments.