14 Firms Visited During #25 IT Press Tour

During the 25^th edition of The IT Press Tour, 14 companies were visited with their respective executives. They play in various IT infrastructure segments.

Here is a summary of each company visited:

• Datos IO: Founded to address data protection challenges associated with distributed applications with data layers based on NoSQL databases such MongoDB or Cassandra or Hadoop – modern applications -, the company has developed an approach guarantying almost zero RPO. Recent product iterations cover HDFS, incremental restore, query-able recovery, parallel data streaming and support of any secondary storage.
• DriveScale: The company is among a small list of players delivering a software composable infrastructure approach to build an on-demand, real-time, scalable and disaggregated computing architecture to sustain today’s and future’s workloads. The software controls and manipulates physical hardware through the Ethernet switch at the heart of the solution. Founded by several former Sun Microsystems leaders, the firm delivers the promise of Sun “The Network is the Computer”.
• FogCoin: New entity and service created by AetherWorks, the company who build AetherStore, the P2P storage service, FogCoin is a new blockchain-based cryptocurrency leveraging the Internet, storage (AetherStore) and Compute (ActiveAether). The idea of FogCoin is to enable a global market for computing power – ActiveAether – especially with all the edge computing power deployed and connected everyday.
• Hedvig: The multi-protocol SDS firm continues to extend its coverage and has built an efficient multi-cloud strategy illustrating its advance against competition. As a pure software approach, the distributed storage platform supports any workload, any infrastructure and any cloud. The firm is one of the few players who can deliver a single solution orchestrating primary or secondary data needs.
• Igneous: The object storage company has made a shift in its strategy compared to one year ago. Now the team focused on a few use cases and especially wishing to be a good backup and archive target. The session didn’t cover nano servers and we heard that the firm has licensed its IP to a French open source object storage company.
• iXsystems: Officially launched in 2002, the open source company is a recognized player thanks to FreeNAS with an adoption of more than 4,000 customers. It builds systems, storage and racks in its own manufacturing line in San Jose and has a growth in storage with a 42% average Y/Y since 2012. The firm has shipped so far around 1EB of storage and has integrated OpenZFS. Beyond SOHO and small/medium businesses covered by FreeNAS, the firm has invested in the enterprise flavor of it named TrueNAS which offers HA, FC, enterprise components and 24/7 support options.
• Minio: The company continues to penetrate the market with a more and more comprehensive solution. Its approach makes the product copied by various vendors and several commercial object storage vendors use its tools. Minio could be deployed on public clouds on Azure, AWS, GCP and Alibaba and on premises with on NAS, JBOF, VMware vSAN, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesosphere DC/OS and Cloud Foundry. Minio confirms that S3 eats everything and will continue to do it, other with their own approach having lost the game.
• Panasas: The historical leader in File Storage HPC has spent several years to re-design and re-architect the product to address to HPC like business needs. The vendor is one of the few pioneers of the parallel file system approach delivering high performance and scalable approach. Recent developments include a new operating environment based on FreeBSD, a new disaggregated approach with dedicated separated metadata server, a software agent DirectFlow available for Mac so for M&E, a file-based N+2 erasure coding and SMB based on Samba.
• Quantum: In secondary storage and in M&E for years with StorNext, Quantum just unveiled Xcellis Scale-Out NAS powered by StorNext. The solution has now the capability to scale horizontally both in capacity and access and provide many data services that make the product attractive. The company prepares to announce its new scalable storage offering Castle in few months.
• Qumulo: Reference in the Scale-out NAS category with classic but fast industry file sharing protocols such NFS and SMB, this company has introduced QF2 few months ago leveraging their pure SDS approach to run on commodity servers such HPE Apollo, on AWS EC2 or on their own appliances. Qumulo belongs to the small file storage companies that demonstrate scalability and data durability with a new generation of file system with the need to rely on object storage architecture.
• Rubrik: New recent round at $1.3 billion valuation, it continue to shake the data protection market landscape at a rapid pace with a comprehensive multi-cloud approach. Started as a new backup solution for virtualization, the firm has expanded quickly beyond this hot segment with classic data protection needs providing as well DR, archiving, CDM, search and of course analytics. Rubrik is a real SDS model supporting appliance, commodity and in-cloud models. The other innovation from the company is Cerebro coupling a blog engine and distributed task framework to a data control plane.
• Spanning Cloud Apps: Backed private within the Insight Venture Partners portfolio, the company is now ready to address new data protection challenges for cloud native applications. Originally into Salesforce data protection, Spanning protects now GSuite and Office365 with plan to support other applications such ServiceNow, Slack or others. The company is about to announce a GDPR compliant extensions to be aligned with May deadline in Europe.
• Sysdig: Long time believer of container-based infrastructure model, it offers Sysdig Monitor for a few years now adopted by more than 250 paying enterprise customers. The company ambition is to provide a container intelligence platform to run containers and microservices in production. To sustain such agnostic container strategy, the firm has added Secure to improve container security, Falco to offer an open source CLI for individual hosts and Inspect, the tool for capture analysis available on Linux and Mac.
• Vexata: Recent player in the hot all flash storage array market segment, it promotes one single storage platform for both analytics and transaction workloads what it’s called today HTAP for Hybrid Transaction and Analytics Processing. Validated and illustrated by several partner sin the ecosystem, the company continues to preach an universal data fabric for various data applications behaviors. Its design offers a low end-to-end latency and the company is expected to unveil an horizontal scaling mode this year.