Maxta also announced MxCloudConnect, a cloud based call-home capability, as well as support for OpenStack Kilo out of the gate.
Hyperconverged solutions vendor Maxta has upgraded its software with MxInsight, which adds a next-generation UI, historical reporting, enhanced policy management, and comprehensive storage quality of service management for all Maxta MxSP software and MaxDeploy appliance solutions. They also announced MxCloudConnect, a remote call home capability, which delivers proactive maintenance and support notifications. Finally, Maxta reaffimed its support for OpenStack with the announcement of immediate support for the new OpenStack Kilo release.
Maxta is a software vendor, which has been selling its MxSP VM-centric software storage platform, which converts standard servers into a converged compute and storage solution, since late 2013. It has since supplemented that with MaxDeploy reference architectures for all Tier One server vendors, and for Intel and SuperMicro white label servers. These allow partners, who are Maxta’s entire route to market, to sell appliances to customers who prefer to buy that form factor.
“We believe software-centric is the best approach to hyperconverged,” said Yoram Novick, Maxta’s founder and CEO. “Selling the software-only solution is successful with a certain set of customers, but there are others who didn’t want to buy the software and install it themselves, who asked if we could work with our partners to create an appliance solution. We did this, but there is no appliance with a Maxta logo, no branded MaxDeploy appliance. It is our software in someone else’s hardware.”
Accordingly, the new Maxta software upgrades both the MxSP software and MaxDeploy appliances. Its new interface provides common management of VMware, KVM and OpenStack. The upgraded reporting responds to customer demands for more insight.
“After using the product, customers wanted historical perspective on what was going on,” Novick said. “They told us, it is great to know we are 80 per cent full but without more data, we can’t predict what would be needed in a month. So we added the ability to get more informationon, to get more historical perspective, and have other ways to look at the data. It’s a better way to do planning.”
VMCentric data management policies have also been made more granular, to allow priority to be given to specific applications.
“The customer has a better understanding of applications for VMs, and may want to prioritize specific applucations which are most important,” Novick said. “It will allow replication for say, their top two applications. They want to control replication, the reboot of these specific important ones, to make these decisions at the VM level. Now we are allowing them to do this, whereas before, all the VMs were treated the same. It’s really a QoS thing, although we don’t like to call it that.”
MxCloudConnect, a new cloud based call-home capability, adds a new proactive maintenance capability.
Yoram Novick, Maxta’s founder and CEO
“This is more on the analytics side,” Novick said. “Customers have been asking for a way to do proactive monitoring, to let them know if something will go wrong. We can use data from overall monitoring trends, collecting the metadata from customers to provide more data to each customer, getting more analytics into our support.”
Finally, in conjunction with the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver B.C., where Maxta will be exhibiting, the company is reaffirming its support for OpenStack and announcing Day Zero support of the new OpenStack Kilo release.
“We have been working on OpenStack for quite some time, and this is part of our continuous effort to provide the latest and greatest support,” Novick said. Maxta enables hyper-convergence for Kilo, and has developed both Nova and Cinder drivers for OpenStack with full integration and leverage of new Kilo features.
