Following on from last year when I attended Storage Field Day #2 I’m glad to say I’ve been invited back to San Jose this year for SFD #4, happening Nov 13th-15th. I enjoyed the experience last year and learnt a lot so while it’s another four days out of the office (and two long haul flights) I believe it’s time well spent. Of course I’m not the main attraction – below I provide a quick summary of the sponsors as it gave me a good excuse to go look up the ones I was less familiar with (the official event page also lists them). These are my thoughts based on a quick look at vendor websites so I’m happy to be corrected! Nimble Storage, Proximal Data, and Virident are attending VMworld Barcelona so I’ll have a chance to get some information in advance;

Avere Systems – a NAS hybrid storage array with a difference as it’s designed to work as accelerated networked storage in front of ‘legacy’ storage arrays and includes unusual features (for a storage array) such as WAN acceleration and storage migration functions. It also offers storage virtualisation and a global namespace. A less common use case maybe?

Cleversafe – an object storage solution designed for large scale storage requirements (first mention of Big Data during my investigations) – if you don’t have 10PB these guys aren’t what you need. You know RAID and replication techniques? That won’t help you here. Cleversafe uses ‘dispersed’ storage and erasure codes (which I need to learn more about) and sells via hardware appliances.

CloudByte – Their flagship product, ElastiStor, is a ZFS based software only product which offers storage virtualisation, linear scalability, and storage QoS. Potentially comparable to Nexenta (although they don’t offer QoS to my knowledge)? Software only, scalable, ability to use commodity hardware – what’s not to like? There’s also a free trial which works up to 4TB – lab time here we come…

CohoData (previously Convergent.io) – As a startup company who have yet to launch its hard to know exactly what they do. The founders were behind the creation of the Xen hypervisor back in the late 90s – these guys have serious pedigree.
From their website “an integrated storage and networking model that abstracts configuration and functionality from the underlying hardware while making use of innovative storage networking integration and high-performance, commodity hardware to help http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/lipitor/ customers realize the vision of a software-defined datacenter“. Buzzword bingo? Another Nutanix or Simplivity? Time will tell.

GridStore – They’ve recently changed direction from scale out NAS to focus on performance enhancement by resolving the I/O blender problem created by virtualisation. In this respect it seems to do for Hyper-V (and Windows in general) what Virsto offers for VMware although it also offers storage QoS per VM. Like others it’s a ‘software defined storage’ product that’s bundled as an appliance (apparently for support purposes).

Nimble Storage – offer a hybrid storage array using a CASL architecture. These guys presented at SFD2 and seem to have seen good growth. It’ll be interesting to see what’s new – I’m guessing they’ll cover some of their SmartStack reference architectures with maybe a mention of InfoSight and NimbleConnect.

Overland Storage – Many of the SFD sponsors are startups but Overland were founded in 1980 and as a global company it’s hard to know which product from their portfolio they’ll be covering. I’d guess at SnapScale X4, a unified (NAS & iSCSI), scalable storage cluster which was released recently.

Oxygen Cloud – Dropbox on steroids with end to end encryption, AD/LDAP authentication, and easy sharing. Rather than being just ‘cloud’ storage Oxygen Cloud offers a storage service which abstracts away the underlying storage implementation, allowing you to use multiple vendors and locations (including your own) transparently. Interesting but there’s a big challenge overcoming Dropbox’s brand awareness.

Proximal Data – Their product is Autocache which offers intelligent server side caching embedded in the (VMware only) hypervisor. There is tough competition in this area notably from VMware’s recently released vFRC and Pernix Data’s FVP product which hit the scene with a splash a few months ago (Pernix presented at SFD3). I like the fact the company name is relevant so I can easily remember what they do!

Virident (now Western Digital) – makers of PCI-E server flash storage solutions, very much in competition with the market leading Fusion-IO. Recently acquired by Western Digital (Sept 2013). Unlike Proximal the server side flash is used as an adjunct to main memory (containing the working set of the application) rather than as an I/O cache.

As always you can watch the sessions live over the Internet (via the TechFieldDay website) and interact via social media (Twitter hashtag #SFD4).

Further Reading

Luca Dell’Oca has a similar post with some extra details