Both the new StorSecure Encryption and Key Management capability, which removes the need for third party key management products, and the KVM support significantly lower the total cost of a StorMagic deployment, an important consideration considering most of their deployments are small ones.
Bruce Kornfeld, GM of Americas at StorMagic
Bristol U.K.-based edge-focused hyperconverged infrastructure [HCI] vendor StorMagic has made a pair of announcements. They have announced the addition of StorSecure Encryption and Key Management to their platform, as well as support specifically for pure open source KVM hypervisors.
“We are really excited about these announcements,” said Bruce Kornfeld, GM of Americas at StorMagic. “We have been working on these products for quite a while, and the stars were aligned to launch them at the same time.”
The addition of the dedicated key management technology solves what had been a key pain point for customers – the cost of key management software.
“We introduced data encryption as part of our product about a year ago, and have been shipping the encryption engine for a while,” Kornfeld said. “Our strategy was to allow the customer to use any key manager they wanted that using the standard KMIP protocol. It has been successful. But the problem has been that the cost of the key manager almost dwarfed the cost of the software. It was at least 5x – the key management software cost between $7000 and $10,000 per site. At small sites, the key management component of an encryption solution was cost-prohibitive.”
Now the key management is bundled with the storage encryption engine into the StorMagic solution at a cost of $USD 2000 per site for that component. It allows the total cost of a two-server, highly-available SvSAN solution that includes hardware, software and maintenance to be deployed for less than $USD 10,000.
“This is a very modern approach because its’s all software, it’s all virtual appliance,” Kornfeld said. “In the past, key managers have been HSMs [hardware security modules] which have been expensive and proprietary. Our key manager can also run anywhere that the customer wants. We are offering three different ways they can deploy their keys – at the edge site, in the data centre or in the cloud – and all at the same price.
“Those are now huge differentiators for us, the price point and the ability to store the keys anywhere,” Kornfeld added.
The second part of the announcement is the expansion of StorMagic’s hypervisor support for their SvSAN software. In addition to VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, it can now be deployed on open source Linux KVM hypervisors like Red Hat Enterprise Linux [RHEL] and CentOS.
“We are going after the open source market of people looking to lower their costs,” Kornfeld said, noting that his will allow customers to save 90 per cent on hypervisor licensing and support costs. “In the CentOS world there has been no HCI option at all. We are the first for that.”
This KVM support doesn’t extend to adaptations of that hypervisor, like Nutanix’s AHV.
“While some have taken KVM, and built their own proprietary versions of it, we are doing this completely open source, and are appealing to that community,” Kornfeld said.
The way that both StorSecure and the new KVM support will cut total deployment costs is a big competitive win for StorMagic’s channel partners.
“For partners, these two new solutions they can bring to their customers lets them continue lowering the cost of computing,” Kornfeld said. “Cost is king, so lowering the cost of key management and hypervisors is important.”
Both StorSecure and KVM hypervisor support are available now.
