VMworld 2014 is in full swing, with more than 23,000 people having made the pilgrimage to San Francisco for this this year’s show. Thus far, things appear to be well-organized and running very smoothly. During my first walk through the Expo Center, I could not help but notice the sheer number of booths showcasing products that are storage-specific in nature. Flash drives appear to be the focus in quite a few of the booths. I have to wonder what the field will be like down the road as the price of flash continues to drop and the capacity of flash drives continues to grow. I believe that in the near future, most storage devices will be all flash-based, with any drives that spin becoming bottom-tier storage or owned just for fun. Could we get to a point at which physical hard drives actually become the media with which to replace backup tapes? Hmm, wouldn’t that be interesting?
Tech Field Day Extra is a VMworld event for which I’ve had the honor and privilege to serve as a delegate. On Monday, I was on the delegate panel for the presentation by DataGravity. This company brings its own special magic to the storage arena with its version of a storage service–type platform that has a unique twist. DataGravity strives to present physical storage as a commodity hybrid solution fully configured with an extensive analytical capability with regard to storage data and use.
This platform was developed to ensure that virtual machines have absolute priority in anything the platform does. This prevents it from affecting the performance of VMs or the primary storage controller by utilizing the secondary storage controller to move data to the analytic engine. The analytic engine gets the data from DiscoveryPoint index data from snapshots in order to provide data protection, governance, and search and discovery, all in an integrated appliance.
Although this is version one of DataGravity’s product, I think it took keen insight for the company to develop its vision of data-aware storage. And it seems I am not the only one who believes DataGravity is onto something special—that something is special enough that DataGravity has won Best of Show at the Best of VMworld 2014 Awards. It did an outstanding job in winning Best of Show this year. I highly recommend that you give this technology a closer look. And remember, this is just the beginning of DataGravity’s journey.