A first look at Cohesity

I mentioned in an earlier post that Cohesity were one of the vendors that I wanted to check out at VMworld 2015. These guys have only literally exited stealth. Just yesterday, I sat in on a webinar from Nick Howell, who I know extremely well from his days in technical marketing over at NetApp. Nick has now joined Cohesity as the role of an evangelist, which I think is a great move on Cohesity’s part. On Nick’s webinar, he introduced us to the vision behind Cohesity’s product, what they hope to fix in a customer’s environment and some teasers regarding…

A first look at ClearSky Data

I had a heads-up recently on a new company, ClearSky Data, who only exited stealth today. I want to make it clear that I have not yet been briefed by the folks from ClearSky, but I am definitely hoping to chat with them at VMworld 2015 (they’ll be at booth 441). Therefore a lot of what I have in this post is conjecture on my behalf. It seems to me that their goal is to help change how enterprise IT teams buy, manage and optimize their storage. Instead of consuming traditional storage arrays (alongside backup and disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure)…

A closer look at Rubrik

A couple of months back, I wrote a short article on Rubrik. They were just coming out of stealth mode and had started an early access program. Since they had not officially launched, there wasn’t a lot that I was allowed to say about the company, other than give a high level overview. As they have now officially launched their r300 series of products, along with news of a massive $41 million Series B of funding, I can now share some additional details about their products and technology. Just to recap on what Rubrik do, they are offering a converged…

A quick introduction to Rubrik

I first encountered Rubrik at this year’s Partner Exchange (PEX) 2015 in San Francisco. They had some promotional flyers made up labeled “Backup Still Sucks”. I guess a lot of people can relate to that. I had a chat with Julia Lee, who used to be a storage product marketing manager here at VMware, but recently moved to Rubrik. Rubrik’s pitch is that customers are currently stitching together backup software with backup storage in order to backup their virtual infrastructures – there is no seamless integration. Rubrik’s primary aim is backup simplicity – they want to provide a “time machine”…

A closer look at SpringPath

Another hyper-converged storage company has just emerged out of stealth. Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with the team from SpringPath (formerly StorVisor), based in Silicon Valley. The company has a bunch of ex-VMware folks on-board, such as Mallik Mahalingam and Krishna Yadappanavar. Mallik and Krishna were both involved in a number of I/O related initiatives during their time at VMware. Let’s take a closer look at their new hyper-converged storage product.

COHO Data – out of stealth today!

There is a new storage vendor on the block – COHO DATA – who just exited stealth and launched their new product with the tag ‘Storage for the Cloud Generation’. I had the opportunity recently to catch up with Andy Warfield, co-founder and CTO of COHO DATA. Andy has a long history of involvement with storage and virtualization. A graduate of Cambridge University in the UK, he was involved in XenSource where he developed much of the low-level storage integration mechanisms for external storage arrays like NetApp and DELL EqualLogic. Andy gave me an in-depth interview related to their new…

SimpliVity Announce OmniCube Storage Appliance

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with  Jesse St. Laurent, Product Director at a new storage startup called SimpliVity. SimpliVity finally exited stealth mode today, but has been around since the end of 2009, with development starting in earnest in 2010. The name of the hardware storage appliance which SimpliVity have just announced is the OmniCube. Having asked Jesse to describe the features of the appliance, he listed the following: