There has been an influx of emerging technologies across the storage landscape. Many vendors are using the exact same hardware but are figuring out ways to do a lot of smarter things with the software. In this post, I’ll cover a handful of vendors who are doing a great job innovating at the software layer to improve storage technology and performance.

Nimble

Nimble was founded by the same people who did Data Domain and does data compression. Their success led to EMC buying them in June 2009. The company is known for its massively popular backup targets. They’re the one of the first ones to compress and duplicate the data as it was being stored to greatly reduce the amount of data that needed to be stored.

Essentially, Nimble takes commodity solid state drives and slow 7,200 RPM spinning disks and turns it into an extremely fast, well-performing hybrid SAN, while delivering excellent compression ratios and the best support team in the business. Very simply, they’re doing smarter things with the same technology everyone else is using. It’s highly scalable and well designed. For example, you can change your controllers on the array during business hours with no interruptions, as opposed to having to wait until off hours as companies have been forced to do traditionally.

DataGravity

What’s interesting about DataGravity is that they have taken an entirely different approach to traditional storage. They make arrays that perform on par with just about everyone else’s, yet their secret sauce is taking unstructured, uncategorized data and categorising it at the time it’s being written. Why is this important? A lot of companies have to keep track of Social Security Numbers, Credit Card Numbers, and so on.

Traditionally, you have to buy expensive software to do this. DataGravity does it at the time the Data is written. You don’t need to invest in any additional software. That sounds too good to be true, right? Every modern SAN has two storage controllers. Most are active passive or they are both on. DataGravity has one controller looking at these traditional things while the other storage controller looks at data, categorizes it and looks at data management functions. This eliminates the need for expensive compliance related software and data protection management.

Who should take advantage?

Any company that has to deal with regulatory compliance (healthcare, finance).

Simplivity

Simplivity offers hyper-converged infrastructure similar to Nuatanix, EVO Rails, and Dell Vertex. The piece that makes them unique is their dedication to reduce IO. They take all data and compress/duplicate at ingestion once and forever. This means that if I write a data block and the data is already on the storage system, there is zero IO; I don’t have to rewrite it.

Furthermore, I can migrate virtual machines from one data center to another. It’s easy to migrate a 5 gig virtual machine and write less than a 100 mgs across the WAN. Also, when I clone a machine, there is no IO. IO is something companies can’t address during work hours because it takes up way too many resources and would bring them to their knees. You can’t do it without impacting the business. When you have Simplivity, there is no need for a third party backup vendor. Redundant data spreads through notes and only writes redundant blocks. It’s easy to have petabytes of backups living on terabytes of storage.

Who should take advantage?

We have a client who is currently in Massachusetts that is looking to move to a Colocation Facility in Florida. For this use case, Simplivity is a quick and easy way to migrate that data geographically without huge impacts on bandwidth, WAN costs, etc.

Pure Storage

If you’re looking for ridiculously fast storage, Pure Storage could be the solution for you. They use the same flash technology as everyone else, but they read and write to it differently so it’s much more efficient, optimized, and it matches the flash technology. Typically, vendors have been writing to flash drivers in the same way that they were treating spinning disk.

Who should take advantage?

If your organization has applications that require tremendously fast storage, this could be a good fit for you. One example would be if you have extremely demanding Oracle SAP or SQL applications.

VMware

VMware brings a lot of great benefits to the table with EVO: Rail. EVO: Rail is basically VMware SAN with prebuilt hardware that can very quickly and easily be deployed. It’s a scalable, software-defined data center building block that provides compute, networking, storage and management. Furthermore, it’s highly resilient.

Who should take advantage?

This is a good fit for organizations that have branch offices where there is a need for smaller VMware environments at multiple locations. It’s a quick, inexpensive way to manage them centrally from a virtual center.

Be sure to keep your eyes out for HP who is making innovations in flash storage. More on that soon.

Have you used any of these solutions? How have your experiences been? If you would like to talk more about this, send us an email at socialmedia@greenpages.com

Think of your new and existing products and services. Are there other ways you can package and price your offerings? Whether your goal is to grow your customer base, revenue, market share, or share of wallet, recurring revenue models can provide a multitude of options for creating new revenue streams from new or existing products.

Much of the industry is still talking about the success of basic subscriptions (Amazon Prime, Netflix, Box, etc.), but many forward-thinking companies know the real value is in the broader range of monetization options. Nearly any product in your catalog can be repackaged into a recurring revenue service with a vast array of pricing options. Whatever your goals may be you have options… and lots of them.

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The SaaS model has truly revolutionized the way software is being used. Convenient, hosted on the now cloud, without the need for IT or hardware and so many more advantages. So what is cloud-based billing? A recent piece by Gigaom helps explain why cloud billing is beneficial and how it helps vendors move all aspects of a paper-based system to the cloud. But isn’t that old technology? Isn’t that about generating a PDF file and sending it to your customers instead of a printed invoice? Perhaps not. Perhaps this is about a billing system that works for the SaaS software, charges customers online and they can pay online. Perfect! This is turning out to be good.

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Using Cloud (aka SaaS) applications is natural for most of us — simply sign up with your email, login and then use the service within minutes. The Cloud works particularly well with consumer-oriented services. Businesses, however, have slightly different needs.

Up until now, Sematext Apps offered only App sharing. For instance, if you had an SPM App for monitoring your Elasticsearch cluster, another SPM App for monitoring Spark, and a Logsene App where you shipped all your logs, you could invite one or more of your teammates to each one of those apps separately, and give them either Admin or User role. This works fine when you have just a few teammates or just a few Apps.

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The benefits of cloud billing can be irresistible. Always-on availability, flexibility, elastic scalability, low cost, global reach. But with high-profile security breaches from the likes of Target, Sony and health insurer Anthem, it’s understandable that thinking about turning your billing system over to the cloud could give you the willies. How can you capitalize on the cloud’s tantalizing advantages while minimizing risk? Here are three things to look for in a cloud billing system you can trust.

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Basis Technologies, leaders in streamlining, accelerating and optimizing SAP systems, today announces the launch of theirDevOps toolset, focused on helping companies running SAP move from slow, linear, and manual
development to safer, more agile and responsive development and test workflows.

Building on the success of their market-leading Transport Express solution, the DevOps toolset comprises 4 flexible solutions that address specific goals of DevOps; Transport Expresso, ShiftLeft, DevMax and SnapOps.

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JMS provides a standard messaging API for interoperability of applications on the Java platform. This enables your JVM-backed applications to connect to each other to send and receive messages. RabbitMQ is a messaging broker that serves as an intermediary for messaging between multiple platforms/languages.

ruxit now supports Java messaging, including monitoring of JMS message handlers, EJB message-driven beans, and the RabbitMQ consumer-plugin interface. We’ll continue to extend messaging support over the coming weeks.

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The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has found nearly two fifths of small businesses are sceptical about the benefits of cloud technology when compared against security risks.

The survey, which was conducted in association with Verve and polled over 1200 SMB professionals, found 59% were using cloud services of some description, and of those, the biggest worry was a risk of data being lost, stolen or damaged, cited by 61% of respondents.

55% were worried about not being able to access online services as and when, while 52% were concerned about not knowing who could access their data. Intriguingly, a third (33%) of respondents worried they would become too reliant on cloud computing services.

While security continues to be the major bugbear for smaller businesses worried they’d lose data in the cloud – or have it taken away – steps have been taken by cloud service providers to change things, most notably building data centres in Europe for European customers.

The FSB said that while the move for European data centres was welcome, it won’t in their opinion impact small businesses’ mindset, as the perception that companies won’t have control of data in the cloud will still exist.

The most popular cloud service for small businesses was by far file storage according to 73% of respondents, followed by email and contacts (63%). Online document processing (38%) and accounting (36%) were also popular.

The need for cloud services among smaller businesses was relatively mixed. Almost a quarter (23%) of respondents say their business needs cloud “a great deal,”, 22% said they needed it “a fair amount”, 27% said “not very much” when 20% opted for “not at all.” For future uptake, respondents argued that terms and conditions in plain English (47%) and more transparent pricing (46%) were key.

The FSB expects usage of cloud services to increase among SMBs in the coming 12 months, but added growth will be stronger if the concerns highlighted are taken on board.

You can find the full survey data here.

A discussion with Kony, Inc. on the latest in enterprise mobility exploring advancements in applications design and deployment technologies across the full spectrum of edge devices and operating environments.
This five-part series of penetrating discussions on the latest in enterprise mobility explores advancements in applications design and deployment technologies across the full spectrum of edge devices and operating environments.

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