StorMagic: Know thy Customer…

by | Dec 6, 2014 | Storage Field Day 6 |

Stormagic was one of the companies I didn’t know what to expect of during Storage Field Day 6. As one of many in the VSA market I just didn’t see the real value of another player on the VSA battlefield, BUT… As the title already reveals, Stormagic is one those awesome companies creating technology for a special market. They are not targeting becoming the next EMC or Nutanix, they want to help the companies in need of specialised technology.Let’s dive into the technology they offer and the companies needing this.

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You can watch this presentation by Hans O’Sullivan (CEO) during SFD6 for more information on StorMagic SvSAN:

Technology first

 

aaaastoramagic1 Based on linux, Stormagic SvSAN is a pupose build VSA to serve at the egde. Because of the SvSAN architecture  it can run in on a hypervisor as well as on bare metal. As you can see, the  product is based on iSCSI. That being said,  because of the way SvSAN is build, there should be no problem to offer other protocols as well,  whenever there is customer need. Stormagic accomplishes this  by running SvSAN as a (sort of) stack in the user space and leveraging the Linux Asynchronous IO interface (including zero copy and direct access to storage devices) making it just as effecient as a kernel based product (I’ll have to try that for myself someday soon).

 

More information on this can be seen in this presentation by Chris Farey (CTO) during Storage Field Day 6:

 

 

Living at the Edge

So with a such well though technology, where does this fit into the customers environment? You might think this is a useable technology for the complete datacenter, and although it might very well be, it’s not where Stormagic SvSAN is build for. The technology is developed to serve at the edge of a datacenter. Using SvSAN there where  it makes sense to have a high available but centrally managed solution for the business critical applications. With support for VMware as well as Hyper-V and a true hardware independent solution is what gives true strength to the SvSAN offering. This is what makes SvSAN a great solution for many use cases…

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StorMagic SvSAN infrastructure

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Central management through vCenter  or  StorMagic web GUI

You can watch this video for more information on the SvSAN product by Chris Farley:

SvSAN use cases

So what are the use cases for StorMagic SvSAN? First of all it is a scalable and high available product that can be build with only 2 servers which makes it a great solution for smaller environments and Remote Offices at the edge of an environment where business critical applications run. Looking at the pricing of the product and the possibilties the product offers (High Availability/Central Management/VMware VAAI support/Caching/Storage Pooling and VSA restore technologies) reveals a great and mature solution that can be used for many environments. Using the Stomagic website here are the major fields Stormagic SvSAN is used:

  • Retail – stock control, customer and staff management, point-of-sale
  • Government – diplomatic communication platforms
  • Defense – battlefield control systems
  • Manufacturing – process control
  • Financial Services – customer transactions
  • Restaurant and Hospitality – booking and kitchen ordering systems
  • Transportation – vehicle positioning and monitoring
  • Energy – remote power generation plant control
  • Medical – PACS

More on the SvSAN use cases can be viewed in this presentation by Hans O’Sullivan during SFD6:

Changing my view

As said before I asked myself what to think of Stormagic SvSAN. After the presentation at SFD6 I really see where the true strength of SvSAN is. Does that mean there is nothing to improve? Absolutely not, there is always room for improvement, but as you can see in the presentation those questions were asked and I know the StorMagic people are more then happy to listen to your need for improvement and work on a solution as soon as there is a need. This is company knowing they can do well in a certain field and they keep improving to make sure they can offer a product to their customers that makes sense from their perspective and not because it’s another cool feature on the list….

Other Delegates on StorMagic:

A couple of delegates already blogged about StorMagic that you should read also, so here they are:

Disclaimer: I was invited to this event by the GestaltIT and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than me (Arjan Timmerman).