Yottabyte Community Edition

Yottabyte, LLC, creator of cloud OS, announced Yottabyte Community Edition, a software platform for building a vendor-neutral virtual data center converging storage, compute and network.

Underpinning Yottabyte Community Edition is a cloud OS which enables enterprises to architect their data centers in a private, public or hybrid cloud; rapidly provision new functionality; leverage commodity hardware; and scale according to usage requirements or IT budgets.

Regardless of the selected cloud architecture, Community Edition allows single-point, web-based administration – including provisioning, management and security – across the entire network. Yottabyte’s Community Edition is available as a free download.

Yottabyte is addressing the management challenges of building and maintaining enterprise data centers.

While competitive offerings allow organizations to more quickly define the components of a virtual data center, most have failed to incorporate storage. Community Edition surpasses those approaches, not only by integrating storage with network and compute requirements but also by giving customers ultimate control over deploying and provisioning data center systems in the cloud model best suited to their needs.

"The ‘game’ of IT is shifting from point solutions with incremental advances to overall orchestration with commodity underpinnings, and it’s against this background that Yottabyte has visions of defining the ‘virtual data center,’" said Mark Peters, senior analyst at ESG. "Many IT users would like compute, network and storage in a single orchestrated solution, with an ability to define, operate and manage virtual machines, applications and even hybrid clouds. That’s a tall order, historically requiring a multi-vendor offering and typically resulting in performance and/or scalability compromises. Yottabyte is coming from ‘left-field’ both literally and figuratively; perhaps Michigan is actually just the place from which to try to change the rules of the old, entrenched IT game. Yottabyte Community Edition manifests the company’s initial vision of functional integration and orchestration, and in so doing, it may be one of the first providers to broadly embrace the management challenge of data centers as a whole."

Creating the Software-Defined Data Center
Community Edition allows companies to map their data-center architecture within a software construct, separating the control plane from physical resources. For example, with it companies can build a physical SAN with commodity hardware, or provision a virtual SAN (vSAN) or virtual NAS (vNAS) on new or existing hardware, through a web-based user interface, avoiding complex proprietary hardware set-ups and speeding time to ‘go live.’

Integrating storage with network and compute resources is just as straightforward, requiring only software definitions for addressing, interconnections, assigned bandwidth and related factors.

Further extending the value of the software-defined data center, Community Edition makes integration of network functionality a routine matter of defining each network component, application or resource:

Data deduplication: Assign dedupe methodology and resources to maximize capacity utilization
Backup: Set up backups, schedule backup periods and assign bandwidth priorities
Snapshots: Schedule storage snapshots, snapshot frequency and storage location
Restore: Set up restore parameters and bandwidth priorities. Restore multiple, deduplicated instances of your data to any point in time, from any location on a private cloud or via the Internet
Data protection: Automatically store every change in data in multiple off-site locations, allowing quick restoration even if a site goes down
Security: Establish data encryption methodology for file transfer, using AES
Scalability: Scale network, compute or storage resources at will as user requirements grow
Synchronization: Synchronize data at the block level with Yottabyte ySync
Search: Simplify advanced data searches across the network with Yottabyte ySearch
Virtual machine management: Create, manage and distribute virtual machines from a web-based user interface, managing set-up, bandwidth allocations, interconnectivity, load balancing and related parameters
Provisioning of Advanced Data Center Functionality: Community Edition even enables administrators to set up and provision functionality from the unified web-based user interface:
Managed file transfer: Conduct and manage file transfers over the web or HTTP, and set security protocol
Content delivery: Establish a full-featured content delivery network (CDN) and assign all parameters – user access, bandwidth allocation, data protection and security
WAN acceleration: Accelerate data transfers and reduce latencies by provisioning block-level deduplication, sending only block-level data changes and employing similar WAN optimization techniques

"Building and deploying a data center has become orders of magnitude more complex, given the challenges of virtualization, the need for ever higher performance and the costs of functional integration," said Greg Campbell, CTO of Yottabyte. "Complicating matters, customers won’t wait for the traditional ‘integrated solution.’ They’ll instead merge technologies to create a pieced-together multi-vendor data center, at the risk of high costs and significant management challenges. Yottabyte had a better idea: give customers software to build a virtual data center with greater functionality than they could envision, and let them visualize and create their own public, private or hybrid clouds with commodity hardware. We think this is the shape of things to come in the data center."

Yottabyte Community Edition is available as a free download (registration needed). Technical support is limited to online support forums for the free version.