34 New Offerings Proving VMworld Is The Key Storage Conference (Part 2)

More Proof: VMworld Is The New Storage Show

While the traditional infrastructure virtualization and cloud building solutions seen at VMworld in the past were pretty cool, with 2015's conference, VMworld looks more and more like the IT industry's premier storage event.

A Who's Who of storage vendors -- including partners and rivals of VMware and its parent company, EMC -- came to VMworld 2015 to demonstrate their latest hardware and software technologies. In fact, so many storage vendors were out in force that Jamie Shepard, senior vice president for health care and strategy at Dallas-based solution provider Lumenate, told CRN that "VMworld is now the largest storage conference in the world."

CRN was also busy during VMworld, and found at least 34 new storage hardware and software solutions that were either showed for the first time during the event or were introduced no earlier than July. The first 17 of those products were shown in a separate slideshow.

Ready to see the next 17 new products? Turn the page, and review storage at VMworld 2015 with CRN.

NexGen Storage Updates Hybrid Flash Storage Operating System

Louisville, Colo.-based NexGen Storage used VMworld to introduce version 3.5 of its storage operating system for hybrid flash storage arrays. The new version offers Quality of Service (QoS) Manager for vCenter Server 6, including tight support for VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs), as well as support for virtual machine-level QoS. It also supports PCIe flash as well as NVMe flash, making it compatible with next-generation flash devices from such companies as Intel, Micron, SanDisk and Samsung.

NexGen also said it is working with VMware to tightly integrate Storage QoS and VVOLs in order to provide such services as QoS, snapshots, thin provisioning, cloning, automated VVOLs provisioning, and software-defined storage performance on a per virtual machine basis.

OCZ Intros New High-Performance SSDs

OCZ, the San Jose, Calif.-based SSD company owned by Toshiba, demonstrated its new Intrepid 3700 series of SSDs. The Intrepid 3700 series are available in four usable capacity points: 240 GBs, 480 GBs, 960 GBs and 2 TBs.

The new SSDs offer performance of up to 540 MBs per second for sequential 128-KB block reads, 470 MBs per second for sequential 128-KB block writes, 91,000 IOPs for random 4-KB block reads and 13,000 IOPs for random 4-KB block writes. The company is targeting them at read-intensive applications including online archiving, media streaming, video on demand, virtual desktop infrastructure and Web browsing.

PernixData Updates High-Performance Storage Software

PernixData, San Jose, Calif., used VMworld 2015 to show an updated version of its PernixData FVP software, which the company said puts storage intelligence into high-speed server media. PernixData adds hypervisor clustering, topology-aware fault tolerance, read-and-write acceleration, and seamless support for any shared block-and-file storage systems.

PernixData FVP version 3.0 now includes support for vSphere 6.0, a new HTML5 based User Interface for increased Web browser performance, new performance optimizations, and automated "Call Home" support to help identify and resolve customer support requests.

Platform9 Integrates With SolidFire For High-Performance Private Clouds

Platform9, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based developer of a cloud-based management tool for converting an organization's existing servers into a smoothly running private cloud, used VMworld 2015 to showcase its new Platform9 Managed OpenStack for VMware vSphere environments.

Platform9 Managed OpenStack is a Software-as-a-Service solution that transforms an organization's existing servers into an Amazon Web Services-like self-service private cloud within minutes. The company is partnering with Boulder, Colo.-based all-flash storage array vendor SolidFire to integrate SolidFire's all-flash scale-out storage systems with Platform9's OpenStack-as-a-Service solution. This allows the use of existing and new virtualized servers to power private clouds in minutes with SolidFire's all-flash storage providing the needed performance.

Primary Data

Primary Data -- a Los Altos, Calif.-based startup that virtualizes data to make it more easily accessible by various types of storage -- used VMworld 2015 to unveil its storage-agnostic DataSphere data virtualization platform for dynamic data mobility across different storage tiers, including server flash, SAN, NAS and cloud storage.

The company showcased how DataSphere unites EMC Isilon, NetApp ONTAP, Intel NVM, and Amazon S3 cloud storage under a single global data space, transforming existing storage tiers from isolated silos pinned to an application into globally available, infinitely scalable resources.

Reduxio Launches Enterprise Hybrid iSCSI Storage Array

VMworld 2015 saw San Bruno, Calif.-based Reduxio Systems launch a new enterprise storage system, the Reduxio enterprise hybrid iSCSI storage array. The new solution, which is now available, helps companies increase data storage performance while reducing data storage costs and improving data integrity. The Reduxio enterprise hybrid storage system provides storage management and optimization tools that help minimize redundant data storage, recover data from any moment in history down to the second, and seamlessly move data back and forth between flash and disk storage.

SanDisk Launches Flash Storage Software For vSphere 6.0

SanDisk -- a Milpitas, Calif.-based developer of flash storage drives, arrays and software -- introduced FlashSoft software for VMware vSphere 6.0, a virtual data service integrated through the vSphere APIs for IO Filtering (VAIO). This latest version of FlashSoft software provides write-back caching support for all VMware data stores, including VMFS, NFS, virtual volumes (VVOLs) and virtual SAN (vSAN). SanDisk, which is a VMware design partner for caching APIs in the VAIO framework, said it collaborated with VMware in the specification and development of this new capability.

SIOS Technology Resolves Issues In VMware Environments

SIOS Technology, San Mateo, Calif., introduced SIOS iQ, which it called the industry’s first simple, intelligent software platform for understanding IT operations and resolving issues in dynamic VMware environments. SIOS iQ applies a data analytics approach to a broad range of data sets to help IT and storage administrators recognize abnormal patterns of behavior and identify root causes of performance issues. It organizes, analyzes, and learns from large integrated data streams and identifies subtle changes in behavior patterns among related objects that indicate potential issues; it uses that information to make configuration recommendations on how much cache to add and what size the cache blocks should be.

SoftNAS Intros Multi-Tenant NAS Solution

Houston-based SoftNAS introduced SoftNAS for Service Providers, a multi-tenant NAS replacement for service providers. The solution provides inexpensive iSCSI and object storage as a base for a consumption-based, pay-as-you-go metered licensing. Pricing for SoftNAS for Service Providers begins at 6 cents per GB per month.

SoftNAS also provided a technology preview of SoftNAS UltraFast, a new core technology it said reduces latency to improve overall IT infrastructure total cost of ownership by accelerating data access and file movement.

Supermicro Intros All-NVME Storage For Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Super Micro Computer, the San Jose, Calif.-based provider of custom systems and components for servers and storage solutions, showed its latest all-NVMe SuperServer, SuperBlade, MicroBlade and SuperStorage solutions optimized for VMware hyper-converged infrastructure at VMworld 2015.

The new solutions cover a wide range of workloads, from virtual desktop infrastructure to virtualized and automated data centers. For instance, Supermicro’s 2U TwinPro-based EVO:RAIL MAX appliance brings NVMe SSD performance to hyper-converged infrastructure solutions. Other new Supermicro solutions offer high-density all-flash storage, servers optimized with virtualized GPU technology and more.

Tegile Systems Intros Hyper-Scale Flash Storage Platform

Tegile Systems, Newark, Calif., used VMworld 2015 to unveil its IntelliFlash HD flash storage platform, which it said is targeting enterprise data centers with the kind of performance and economics seen in hyper-scale data centers. The IntelliFlash HD solution, aimed at Fortune 1000 enterprises looking to consolidate data centers, offers up to 5 million IOPS and 10 PBs of effective capacity in a single rack at less than 50 cents per effective GB.

The IntelliFlash HD features a multi-controller scale-up and scale-out architecture to provide up to 512 TBs of capacity in a 3U form factor. It also provides unified storage with Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS and SMB3 access to data. Data services include snapshots, clones, thin provisioning, inline deduplication and compression.

Tintri Intros New All-Flash Array, Converged Infrastructure

Mountain View, Calif.-based Tintri used VMworld to unveil its Tintri VMstore T5000 all-flash storage array. The new array provides the ability to set quality of service on a per-virtual machine basis as a way to guarantee high performance and low latency across the entire flash capacity. Customers can use it to run 5,000 virtual machines in 2U of rack space, the company said.

Also new is the Tintri VMstack converged infrastructure solution, which pairs Tintri all-flash or hybrid flash storage array with customers' choice of server. The company said select Tintri partners will offer prequalified, integrated solutions designed for specific use cases such as virtual desktop infrastructure, high performance enterprise applications and private clouds.

Unitrends Betas Data Protection Appliances, Software

Unitrends Release 9.0 Beta is a re-engineered version of the software powering Burlington, Mass.-based Unitrends’ physical and virtual backup and recovery appliances and Unitrends Cloud. Release 9.0 Beta provides complete enterprise data protection that extends recovery assurance to physical systems. It features a user interface that is the same across Unitrends' Recovery-Series, Unitrends Enterprise Backup and Unitrends Free solutions. It also provides seamless integration to ReliableDR to add recovery assurance for Windows guest-level backups in addition to VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V applications. Customers can perform 100 percent automated testing and failover to ensure their physical environments are fully recoverable within each application’s recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs).

Veeam Previews Veeam Availability Suite v9

The Veeam Availability Suite v9 from Baar, Switzerland-based Veeam was previewed during VMworld 2015. The application promises high availability of data with what Veeam calls an RPTO (recovery point time objective) of 15 minutes or less for all applications and data.

New features available in v9 include Veeam Cloud Connect Replication, which lets channel partners easily offer disaster recovery as a service; Veeam Explorer for Oracle, which provides transaction level recovery of Oracle databases to a precise point in time; and Backup from Storage Snapshots and Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots with EMC VNX and VNXe hybrid storage arrays for rapid creation of backups from snapshots.

Veritas Shows Off New Data Protection Capabilities

Veritas, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company that is in the process of splitting from corporate parent Symantec, used VMworld 2015 to demonstrate its most recent solutions.

These include the Veritas Resiliency Platform, a solution giving customers a unified, global approach for IT service continuity to help ensure that critical data and applications remain accessible across multi-vendor physical and virtual environments; Veritas InfoScale, which provides application availability and software-defined storage to help overcome operational complexity, tool proliferation, unpredictable service levels and lack of agility; and NetBackup 7.7, the latest iteration of its enterprise-grade data protection solution with new functionality and increased performance.

VMware Intros VSAN 6.1 Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Solution

VMware, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based sponsor of the VMworld 2015 conference, did not sit on the sidelines while its storage partners and competitors grabbed the spotlight. Instead, it took center stage with the introduction of its new VMware Virtual SAN 6.1, which is targeted at increasing data protection options for business-critical environments with its new Stretched Cluster feature and enhanced VMware vSphere Replication with its 5-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

VSAN 6.1 also brings customers new management and monitoring capabilities through deep integration with VMware vRealize Operations and a new Health Check Plug-In for performance monitoring, root cause analysis and capacity planning. It also introduced support for new flash hardware devices, including Intel NVMe and SanDisk ULLtraDIMM SSDs.

Zadara Storage Expands Storage-As-A-Service

Zadara Storage, an Irvine, Calif.-based provider of enterprise storage-as-a-service, used VMworld 2015 to highlight new capabilities including Backup to Amazon S3 (B2S3), an automatic, snapshot-based, continuous, incremental backup from the Zadara Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) solution to Amazon S3 object storage.

The company also unveiled its new Docker-based Zadara Container Services, which enable the VPSA to run applications within the storage itself, rather than running code in compute servers. The company claims this high performance, low latency, and reduced traffic between server and storage.