Spent the day on the show floor at Vmworld 2016 in sunny Las Vegas. Saw some interesting things.

  • Panzuraa now offers byte-range locking on their global collaboration platform. They’ve been having great success in the Autodesk Revit market. M&E seems like a natural as well. This is hard to do and few have done it well.
  • Promise Technology gave me a brief overview on their Apollo Cloud, a consumer-level private cloud focused on ease-of-use. The Apple Store sells them. A number of companies have tried, but it looks like Promise may have nailed it. I’ve asked for a review unit and will tell you what I find when I get to try it.
  • Another company says they’ve come up with a much more compuationally efficient advanced erasure coding scheme. This is the kind of stepwise enhancement to object storage that will pressure file storage over the nest decade, although the company isn’t focused on objects today. More if the details support the pitch. And yes, I forgot their name.
  • Stormagic can build you a 2-node high availability cluster with their software. Popular with branch offices.
  • A new group is forming to create useful storage performance testing tools. The idea is to ask users for traces that can be used to measure workloads on a half dozen metrics, including I/O randomness and compressibility – just to name a couple – so prospects can estimate their I/O workloads and then see how similar workloads performed on a number of storage systems. More on this as the details gel.
  • WD was showing a dense box of SAS blade SSDs (JBOS). Mounted in a rack of servers, you get shared DAS that can be sliced and diced as needed by their software. It isn’t an array, and avoids the costs of array controllers.
  • 3D XPoint is on the minds of vendors. VMware is working with its top software partners to get them ready.

The StorageMojo take
VMworld is a good storage show. A lot of creativity to make storage work better within virtualized environments.

Yet VMworld is only a part of a much larger and complex storage market. With all the choices we have now – and all the ones coming down the pike – the forecast is full employment for storage and system architects.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. WD is an advertiser on StorageMojo.