* What Silver Peak, Neverfail and Abrevity are doing with grids
Gatherings such as Storage World Conference, which took place last week in Boston, are great aggregation points for vendors. This meeting is new to Boston and the east coast, although it has been running each spring in Southern California for several years now. Based on the turnout in Boston, I expect SWC to become permanently bicoastal.
My session on “super grid” followed up on several articles that have appeared in this space on the topic of the grid infrastructure being used by MIT Media Lab’s Human Speechome project, which studies language acquisition by human infants (see “MIT’s storage-based speech project uses SoIP”; “Building a small SAN grid is easy”; and “Vendors tie up with academia for storage research”). I occasionally report on this effort as its buildout continues towards a grid of 1.4TB of what is essentially commodity-based storage. The audience – all IT managers – was clearly receptive to the idea of grid, particularly now that it no longer is only available to high performance computing centers prepared to invest in big-ticket items. Thanks to Philip deCamp (MIT) and Jeff Greenberg (Zetera) for excellent presentations.
I met with several smaller companies at SWC. Here’s a quick overview of what some are doing:
* Silver Peak Systems is a new entry in the WAN accelerator segment. It focuses on doing data reduction prior to sending the data out over the WAN (only the changes are transmitted), thus limiting WAN traffic between their appliances, which sit at both ends of the exchange.
Silver Peak encrypts data both at rest and when it moves out between sites, promises to reduce net traffic for some apps by as much as 95%, and adds a throughput boost of over 100x for some applications.
* Neverfail provides an active-passive clustering solution for high availability, business continuity and continuous data protection (CDP).
A particularly interesting part of its offering is SCOPE, which collects and analyzes data about application components, services and performance attributes, and which monitors the performance, workload, bandwidth usage and other critical factors of server environments. Neverfail offers SCOPE Lite as a free download. Check it out.
* Abrevity provides solutions aimed at compliance and information lifecycle management (ILM). Its products classify data based on business value for SMBs (the FileData Classifier product) and the enterprise (FileData Manager).
FileData Manager offers special classification software for labs involved in biological research, which among other things extracts metadata from inside laboratory instrument files and creates FDA-compliant spreadsheet reports. Abrevity also offers an advanced module for extracting contextual data from Oracle, SQL and DB2.
More on some other interesting companies next time.
