The company is also announcing a new version of its FVP Freedom software, the free version of their FVP software which they say gives away for free the same thing that hybrid vendors sell on top of their arrays.
Jeff Aaron, PernixData’s VP of Marketing
San Jose-based storage software vendor PernixData has made two announcements. The first is the General Availability of FVP version 3.0, their flagship storage and VM acceleration platform. The second, which may be even more intriguing, is Architect, a new software platform that provides real-time analytics for all virtualized applications and storage devices, irrespective of underlying hardware.
“Our original product, FVP, has been shipping for two years,” said Jeff Aaron, PernixData’s VP of Marketing. “It fits inside servers and creates low latency flash acceleration tools, and takes read and write into the server tier out of storage. It is leagues ahead of what anyone else does in this space.”
FVP is a decoupled storage architecture, which allows PernixData to play nice with all hardware.
“You can keep your storage array and don’t have to replace it, so we are much easier to deploy and use us for all your applications,” Aaron said. “Resellers like it because it helps them sell more servers.”
FVP version 3.0 features a new interface.
“We have redone the user interface onto HTML 5, which is more flexible,” Aaron said. More tools have also been added to it.
“We have also added PernixPlus, which is a call home function to proactively reach out to our customers if we see issues that might arise,” he added. This proactive wellness capability is based on the collection of pertinent customer deployment data
Support for vSphere 6.0 has been added as well.
PernixData has also introduced a new version of its FVP Freedom software, a free version of the software designed to expose their server-side storage acceleration to new customers. It makes several of the baseline elements of FVP – such as read acceleration and Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory – available to anyone looking for storage acceleration.
“We think this new edition of FVP Freedom will be very disruptive,” Aaron said. “It’s read-only and RAM only, so not write and not flash. But we are giving away what other vendors give in their core product, because it is so commoditized. It’s also a great way to advocate that our fuller solution should be the standard.” It covers up to 128 GB of RAM, which is what other storage arrays tend to offer in their read cache. It is community supported only.
“This will be very disruptive for the hybrid array vendors, who sell their caching software for $15,000 and it is what we give away for free.”
Both FVP version 3.0 and FVP Freedom are generally available now.
PernixData says that Architect, the new software platform, is the first to provide hardware-agnostic real-time analytics for all virtualized applications and storage devices.
“The biggest competition is VMware, with VRealize, but it is focused on server issues, not the storage side,” Aaron said. “Others like VMTurbo do parts of this, but no one ties it together like this.”
Architect combines VM and storage intelligence with real-time analytics to manage the entire IT lifecycle, from design and deployment to operations and ongoing optimization. Because it is located inside the hypervisor, it can collect dynamic application and infrastructure data to ensure decisions are constantly made using the most accurate and pertinent information.
The real-time analytics provides real-time descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics for optimal storage and VM design. For example, you can easily identify which VMs are performing poorly and why. You can best configure block sizes and read/write patterns to support an upcoming application rollout or upgrade.
Still, Aaron said that Architect won’t displace traditional storage management tools.
“If you have an EMC array, you will still use EMC storage management for it, and this won’t replace that,” he said. “It’s an add-on for additional information.”
For PernixData’s channel partners, who are their entire route to market, Architect opens up new revenue opportunities.
“This creates a whole set of services for the channel,” Aaron said. “They can sell a service with it to help determine the size of array. It also lets them understand what’s going on in the data centre, and they can sell this as a service as well.”
Architect can be deployed with or without PernixData FVP software. It just went into beta, with General Availability scheduled for Q4. Pricing has not been set, but Aaron indicated it will likely be around 100 dollars per VM.
PernixData deals direct with their VAR partners in North America, and have a global reseller agreement with Dell. They have approximately 500 customers, which range from small SMBs to the likes of Bell Canada and Costco.
