Storage Power Plays: Check Out These 26 New Products

Storage At The Heart Of VMworld

VMworld has seen its share of transitions, particularly from its early focus on the virtualization technology of VMware through its current focus on the cloud. But one thing has remained steady: VMworld's importance as a place where the latest storage technologies can be found.

Storage plays a key role in both the cloud and virtualization as customers and channel partners increasingly look for new ways to store, protect, restore, archive, and manage growing data stores. Increasingly, that data is not found on-premises, or in the cloud, but straddling both on-premises and cloud environments. It may be in traditional file or block formats, inside virtual machines, inside containers, or in ways not yet obvious, but it is increasingly being managed across multiple on-premises and multi-cloud environments.

For storage lovers, VMworld is the premier venue to see what all the major vendors are doing. Software, hardware, cloud? For storage, it's at VMworld.

VMworld 2018 just ended, but the work of managing data never does, and never will.

Asigra TrueNAS Backup Appliance

The Asigra TrueNAS Backup Appliance, introduced at VMworld by Toronto-based Asigra is a purpose-built open-source appliance that supports MSPs with fast and efficient deployment of malware-free managed backup services for protecting data in VMware, Amazon Web Services and other environments. It is a physical hardware offering configured with Asigra Cloud Backup Software version 14. The software converges data protection and cybersecurity to counter growing malware attacks on backup data. The appliance lets administrators safeguard business data with software that runs on iXsystems’ TrueNAS hybrid storage systems, offering high availability, superior scalability, flexibility, and data integrity. Models range in capacities from 60 TB to over 10 PB.

Cisco HyperFlex 3.5

Cisco highlighted the all-NVMe flash storage architecture of its Cisco HyperFlex 3.5 hyper-converged infrastructure offering, which was introduced in June. Cisco HyperFlex 3.5 uses Intel Optane in its HX220c M5 all-NVMe node, which the San Jose, Calif.-based company called the industry’s first fully engineered all-NVMe hyper-converged appliance. The nodes combine an Intel Optane NVMe caching drive as well as Intel 3-D NAND NVMe drives for capacity storage, with full RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) and hot- plug functionality.

Cloud Daddy Secure Backup

Cloud Daddy Secure Backup (CDSB) from Princeton, N.J.-based Cloud Daddy provides channel partners with an enterprise backup and disaster recovery solution for Amazon Web Services that includes backup, restore, and infrastructure management capabilities along with advanced security countermeasures to provide enterprises with holistic data protection for today’s cloud world. Introduced in June, it provides backup, restore and replication across multiple AWS regions and accounts. Users can manage and schedule backups, set retention policies, and restore individual files. CDSB was designed for multi-tenancy serving channel partners and enterprise clients of any size, ranging from SMBs to large distributed enterprises, public sector organizations and MSPs.

Cohesity Helios

Cohesity Helios, a SaaS-based data management solution, lets customers see, manage and take action on their secondary data and applications globally from a single dashboard. Introduced just before VMworld by San Jose, Calif.-based Cohesity, Helios lets organizations consolidate secondary data and applications including backup, test/dev and analytics, and expand them to provide customers with access, visibility, and control across all their Cohesity DataPlatform sites whether on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. Customers can use analytics or machine learning to get advanced notice about additional capacity requirements, compare infrastructure utilization against peers, uncover best practices, test the impact of changes across all clusters before rolling those changes out, and accelerate compliance.

Datrium CloudShift

Datrium CloudShift, introduced in August by Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Datrium, is a SaaS-based disaster recovery orchestration service for VMware that combines simple operation, low recovery point objectives (RPO), low AWS cloud cost, and end-to-end readiness assurance. The combination of Datrium’s single data stack design for both primary and backup data, together with its SaaS platform for hybrid clouds, helps enterprises successfully handle challenges plaguing most real or tested disaster recovery events.

Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes For PowerEdge MX

Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes designed for the Round Rock, Texas-based company's PowerEdge MX modular infrastructure lets channel partners lower the deployment risk and quickly scale preconfigured and validated hyper-converged infrastructure building blocks.

The Nodes, jointly tested and certified by Dell EMC and VMware, can increase storage efficiency with increased storage utilization. They offer a flexible hyper-converged infrastructure platform with up to eight vSAN Ready Nodes that can be used to create VMware Cloud Foundation clusters. Flash storage devices can be added to existing hosts for increased performance, while hard drives offer increased capacity.

Druva Cloud Platform

Druva in July unveiled the integration of Druva CloudRanger with the Druva Cloud Platform (DCP) data management-as-a-service. DCP unifies Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Druva’s product offerings and provides a single point of management that lets organizations centrally protect, manage and gain visibility into their entire data footprint. The integration of Druva CloudRanger provides a complete end-to-end offering that helps bridge data management for traditional on-premises and modern cloud infrastructures. Enterprises can use it to centrally manage their entire data footprint while helping lower the complexity and costs of additional administration and infrastructure.

Hitachi Vantara UCP HC

The new Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC, or UCP HC, storage system from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Hitachi Vantara is a scalable hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. Introduced in June, the new Hitachi UCP HC system comes with Intel Optane NVMe SSD caching to provide high-performance and low-latency transaction processing for critical applications and analytics environments. They also feature Nvidia Tesla GPU support to help address workloads requiring advanced graphics capabilities such as virtual desktop infrastructure. Instant clone technology lets UCP HC provide rapid deployment of virtual desktops. Hitachi Vantara used VMworld to demonstrate UCP HC with together with VMware Horizon 7 as part of a high-performance VDI solution.

IBM FlashSystem 9100

IBM's FlashSystem 9100 all-NVMe storage system, introduced in July, supports both IBM's proprietary high-performance FlashCore flash storage modules as well as industry-standard SSDs, and offers raw capacity of up to 460.1 TB, or up to 2 PB with data reduction, in each 2U enclosure. It is IBM's first array to feature new 2.5-inch FlashCore flash storage modules. The FlashSystem 9100 includes software that migrates data between arrays from multiple vendors without the need for a server between them, and provides unified cross-platform storage management and template-driven automation via APIs for dev/ops people. IBM also introduced three optional reference architectures to make the FlashSystem 9100 part of a multi-cloud offering.

Infinidat InfiniGuard

InfiniGuard from Waltham, Mass.-based Infinidat is an application-aware business continuity offering that provides effective capacity of over 20 PB with fast restores. InfiniGuard combines the technology and features of its InfiniBox appliance with industry-hardened deduplication technology. InfiniGuard is powered by the same Neural Cache software architecture that powers InfiniBox to help boost restore performance and deliver high-performance reliability, availability, and service expected for data protection and business continuity.

Infinidat in late July updated InfiniGuard with the ability to use all capabilities in the InfiniBox R4 appliance, improved data restore performance by 20 percent, improved the graphic user interface, and enhanced the deduplication engine monitoring and reporting.

JetStream Data Protection

JetStream Data Protection from JetStream Software, introduced late last month, gives channel partners software for continuous data capture and replication for workload mobility, high availability, and business continuity, the San Jose, Calif.-based company said. Because it continuously captures data in real time as it’s written to storage, JetStream Data Protection provides a full spectrum of data protection capabilities for VMware environments including virtual machine failover to a cloud-based business continuity service, virtual machine backup to cloud-based NFS stores and/or object stores, full-copy recovery for disaster recovery or point-in-time recovery, policy-based availability for cost-efficient SLA management on a recovery group basis, and low-latency replication.

Maxta Hyperconverged (Un)Appliance

The "(Un)Appliance" from Santa Clara, Calif.-Maxta, introduced at VMworld, features a bundled pre-configured system of Red Hat virtualization and Maxta hyperconvergence software deployed on Intel Data Center Blocks for Cloud hardware. Maxta's Hyperconverged (Un)Appliances use open source Red Hat Virtualization, and allow customers to add storage capacity by adding drives to existing (Un)Appliances, replacing smaller drives in existing (Un)Appliances with larger drives, or adding new (Un)Appliances. Customers own the Maxta hyper-convergence software license for the life of the organization, and so are not required to repurchase the software license when refreshing hardware. Hyper-converged (Un)Appliances also provide support for open-source virtualization and open-source containers with Kubernetes orchestration on the same platform.

Micron 5200 [MAX/PRO/ECO] SATA SSDs

The Micron 5200 SATA SSDs from Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology are targeted at virtualized workloads including on-line transaction processing, business intelligence, virtual desktop infrastructure, block or object storage, media streaming, and vSAN hyper-converged infrastructures. Available in a 2.5-inch form factor, the Micron 5200 SATA SSDs deliver high-performance sequential reads/writes, random writes of up to 33,000 IOPS, 95,000 IOPS random reads, and capacities of up to nearly 8 TB based on 64-layer 3-D NAND technology. The low-latency Micron 5200 SSDs help reduce storage bottlenecks with fast, consistent. Micron’s newest vSAN 6.7 reference architecture, developed in collaboration with VMware, extend the 5200 to provide predictably high performance across multiple workloads in vSAN environments.

Nakivo Backup And Replication v8.0

Nakivo Backup and Replication v8.0 from Nakivo brings customers and partners the Sparks, Nev.-based company's new enterprise-grade Site Recovery functionality for disaster recovery automation and orchestration. Site Recovery, unveiled at VMworld 2018, allows customers to perform emergency failovers, planned failovers, failbacks, and data center migration in a single click. Companies can create, update and test their recovery workflows without disrupting the production environment. It is very scalable to work with companies of almost any size. The Site Recovery feature is a part of the main data protection product and doesn’t require any additional licensing.

NetApp Verified Architecture for VMware Private Cloud with NetApp HCI

NetApp used VMworld 2018 to unveil its NetApp Verified Architecture (NVA) for building a VMware Private Cloud on NetApp HCI. Using known and trusted VMware tool sets, the NVA provides a blueprint for a private cloud that delivers enterprise scale for competing mixed workloads. The intent of this validated architecture is to provide guidelines, best practices, and a detailed example deployment of a VMware private cloud, using VMware products, on a NetApp HCI cluster. NetApp said the new reference architecture further strengthens its channel partners’ ability to deliver private cloud solutions that enable customers to bring the benefits of the cloud on-premises.

Panzura Vizion.ai

Vizion.ai from Campbell, Calif.-based Panzura is an intelligent, multi-cloud data management platform. The platform, introduced at VMworld 2018, delivers centralized, unified control and insight across an organization’s data so that enterprises can to virtually consolidate all of their data within a single dashboard for comprehensive indexing, search and analysis. Vizion.ai’s machine-learning engine also provides predictive analytics to help reduce costs based on user access patterns and performance/cost analysis of storage locations. The platform also helps customers implement policy-driven, automated data control to ensure compliance and security policies are met. Vizion.ai’s intelligent features are targeted at improving productivity, operational intelligence, security, and reduced cloud costs.

Pivot3 Intelligent Edge Command and Control Solution

Pivot3’s Intelligent Edge Command and Control offering is a ruggedized hybrid cloud platform targeted at supporting the infrastructure needs of defense, intelligence, and other extreme operations at the “tactical edge.” The Austin, Texas-based company said the new fully self-contained computing infrastructure transforms vehicles, ships and planes into stand-alone data centers. Optimized for analytics, virtual desktop and IoT uses cases, it lets customers with mission-critical requirements capture, process and act on data in the field. Powered by Pivot3’s Intelligence Engine, the offering provides NVMe flash performance, security, scale, and resilience in compact form factor capable of supporting multiple mission-critical workloads. Pivot3 Intelligent Edge Command and Control is slated to ship in the fourth quarter.

Pure Storage Shows Updated FlashArray//X

Mountain View, Calif.-based all-flash array vendor Pure Storage introduced its data center architecture based on the latest update of its FlashArray//X arrays. The latest FlashArray//X, introduced in May, includes the all-NVMe //X90, which features up to 3 PF of effective capacity in 6U. It also included the latest revision of the company's Purity Operating Environment software which the company said features up to a 20 percent better data reduction over the previous version.

Quest Software Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 8.8 (FVE 8.8)

Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 8.8 from Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based Quest Software gives IT teams complete visibility to help identify performance bottlenecks, predict cloud migration costs, decommission wasted resources, and automate capacity requirements across the virtual hybrid data center before they impact business. Version 8.8, unveiled at VMworld 2018, helps simplify virtual environment management, reduce time spent on mitigating performance issues, and ensure the data center supports the most critical applications. It supports VMware and Microsoft HCI platforms, expands storage array support, simplifies SLA management, is certified for VMware Cloud on AWS, and supports Azure and AWS. A technical preview also supports Kubernetes and Docker containers.

SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM)

The latest edition of SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM), version 6.7, adds support for Huawei OceanStor and Dorado devices, and now features hardware health support for Dell EMC Isilon and NetApp, two industry-leading all-flash array vendors. With this extended support, Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds' SRM 6.7, first introduced last month, can enable resource monitoring across a wider mix of infrastructures in multi-vendor environments to help meet the needs of a broad set of customers. SRM’s data integration with other SolarWinds products, including Virtualization Manager (VMAN) and Server & Application Monitor (SAM) through the Orion Platform, provides for an end-to-end relationship mapping from application and virtualization through storage.

StorageCraft OneXafe

The new OneXafe converged scale-out storage and data protection platform for both physical and virtual environments, introduced last month by Draper, Utah-based StorageCraft, delivers comprehensive storage and data protection services in an integrated and easy-to-use offering with seamless integration to disaster recovery-as-a-service. OneXafe's patented VirtualBoot feature recovers terabyte-sized virtual machines in less than a second. It protects applications in both virtual and physical environments within a single workflow. It works in conjunction with StorageCraft's new ShadowXafe data protection software, which offers service-level-agreement-based data protection with simple, one-click orchestration. It also provides flexible recovery of data protected with ShadowProtect, and works with both physical and virtual machines. ShadowXafe is available now as a perpetual license but by year-end partners will be able to offer it as part of a monthly subscription.

Unitrends VM Backup Essentials (vBE)

Unitrends VM Backup Essentials, or Unitrends vBE, converges enterprise-grade virtual backup software, ransomware detection, and fully integrated cloud storage options into a single offering. Introduced by Burlington, Mass.-based Unitrends this spring, vBE helps administrators protect the modern, highly virtualized data center against the latest downtime threats. Administrators can quickly download, deploy and start backing up all VMware workloads. For solution providers, Unitrends vBE provides an integrated backup, replication, adaptive deduplication, and instant recovery offering in a virtual appliance that deploys in 15 minutes or less. vBE retails for $105 per socket with 24x7 U.S.-based support.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Version 2

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v2 protects data inside the Office 365 infrastructure, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Introduced in July by Baar, Switzerland-based Veeam, version 2 now includes data protection for OneDrive for Business, which can also restore and export files and folders with the new Veeam Explorer for Microsoft OneDrive. It also now offers data protection for SharePoint, and comes with a newly redesigned job wizard for ease of use. Also new is a free version, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Community Edition, which is limited to 10 users and 1 TB of protected SharePoint data.

Veritas NetBackup 8.1.2

Veritas just before VMworld introduced NetBackup 8.1.2, the latest version of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's data protection technology with a simplified user interface. NetBackup 8.1.2 enables authorized employees to protect and monitor data in bot on-premises or multi-cloud environments. The software helps simplify day-to-day operations and empowers employees to play a greater data management role. Through integration with Veritas Smart Meter, users can identify issues, view a report of capacity usage, and act to ensure their backup environments are running smoothly. NetBackup works with traditional IT workloads, big data analytics platforms, open-source databases and hyper-converged infrastructure to help ensure data in those environments is protected.

VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 1

VMware's vSAN 6.7 Update 1 aims to make it easier for customers to adopt hyper-converged infrastructure via simplified operations, efficient infrastructure and rapid support resolution, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said. Introduced during VMworld, the software update enables administrators to quickly spin up new hyper-converged infrastructure clusters faster while reducing maintenance operations time. The new HCI deployment helps deliver improved efficiency due to automated capacity reclamation, and helps administrators anticipate data needs with new predictive tools. vSAN 6.7 Update 1 also takes advantage of granular diagnostic tools and historical data to help decrease time-to-resolution when issues arrive.

Western Digital IntelliFlash N Series

San Jose, Calif.-based Western Digital’s IntelliFlash N series, introduced in June, are designed for real-time transactional applications, machine learning, artificial intelligence and deep analytics. The IntelliFlash N series combines both flash memory and NVMe storage to deliver shared storage that helps accelerate enterprise applications. With its patented multi-tier storage media technology, the N-Series lets users choose microsecond latency storage and economical dense storage in the same system. Powered by IntelliFlash OS 3.9, the N series portfolio scales from 19 Ts to 1.3 PB of solid-state storage.