Start-Up ioFABRIC Delivers Vicinity

ioFABRIC Inc. introduced Vicinity, a flash-optimized, software-defined storage solution that delivers agility and ongoing cost savings across a multivendor data center.

It features advanced storage automation that unifies existing storage resources, centralizes storage management, simplifies the deployment of flash, and improves storage utilization – delivering application-specific QoS levels.

Vicinity is a new way of looking at storage. Administrators define what storage needs to deliver to applications – in terms of performance, capacity, and data protection requirements – and Vicinity automates across diverse storage resources to make it happen. It hides the complexity of the underlying storage resources, automatically monitoring and adapting to infrastructure and application workload changes. Storage is delivered on-demand, transforming the data center into a storage service model, with cloud-like economics and ease-of-use.

“The growth of storage capacity and performance needs will continue to outstrip storage budgets for the foreseeable future, putting IT administrators behind the 8-ball with regard to effectively and efficiently housing their business-critical data, while simultaneously making it readily available for their end users,” said Mark Peters, practice director and senior analyst, ESG. “Automated solutions such as ioFABRIC’s Vicinity are an excellent way for organizations to optimally leverage their existing storage investments by ensuring that only the most-important data is utilizing the most-expensive storage media while using commodity hardware for plain capacity purposes – all achieved without the traditional management headaches and costs of doing it manually.”

“The industry’s move towards software-defined storage solutions is a crucial first step towards driving more value out of storage systems for less cost, but it is just that – a first step,” said Steven Lamb, co-founder and CEO, ioFABRIC. “Rather than manually provisioning storage on multiple point-solutions, Vicinity is a fully-automated storage fabric that allows users to define what they need from storage and let the software do the rest, gaining data center agility and ongoing cost savings.”

Vicinity automatically migrates data across diverse storage resources, intelligently placing active data on high-performance media for fast access, and stale data onto inexpensive, higher-capacity media. It discovers storage media in the infrastructure and continually monitors for application workload suitability. It increases utilization and optimization of existing assets, extending their life while uncovering additional capacity and performance that is already owned but underutilized.

Additional features and benefits of Vicinity:

• Deploys as a physical or virtual appliance that is accessible over standard storage protocols and/or as software agents on Linux application servers in a converged storage model
• Nearly eliminates storage provisioning time, one of the most time-consuming chores of a storage admin
• Achieves near-zero downtime through automation, reduced complexity, and data protection features, including dynamic replicas, self healing, and snapshots
• Eliminates manual data migration efforts by identifying and profiling and utilizing new storage resources
• Efficiently uses flash by automatically moving performance-starved application data to flash and stale application data to capacity storage
• Unifies DRAM, flash, and HDDs across direct-attached, SAN, NAS, and cloud storage

Vicinity is licensed by capacity under management as an annual software subscription, with site and perpetual licenses available.

It will be available through ioFABRIC’s reseller and distribution channel, in addition to pre-built appliances with bundled hardware and software.

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2015.07.08 | Press Release