StorMagic, which has a Go-to-Market partnership with HPE for their HCI software, has extended that from the initial ProLiant focus earlier this year to the edge-focused HPE Edgeline servers
Brian Grainger, StorMagic’s CRO
Edge-focused hyperconverged infrastructure [HCI] vendor StorMagic has further expanded their strategic partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise [HPE]. In March, they entered the HPE Complete program for third party vendors going to market with HPE as a replacement for the end-of-lifed HPE StoreVirtual family. Now they are building out that relationship further, with the announcement that their StorMagic software had been validated with the HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems.
“We have worked in several large deals on the HPE ProLiant, and we did have some rather large customer rollouts,” said Brian Grainger, StorMagic’s CRO. “But our focus is on empowering the edge. 80% of our sales are there. This Edgeline validation was a checkbox for HPE. They just wanted deeper validation on Edgeline. It’s a stepping stone to deeper validation on HPE servers in their hardware group.”
The Edgeline – no surprise given the name – is HPE’s purpose-built solution for distributed deployments at the far edge.
“HPE is currently are using SimpliVity and StoreVirtual on the edge, and we’ve taken the place of the StoreVirtual with this,” Grainger said. “We are also more appropriate for the edge than SimpliVity. SimpliVity is a great product – rock solid – but it’s designed for the data centre.
“The whole intent of the joint solution with SVSan and Edgeline is to get a very cost-effective lightweight solution,” said Jason Grant, Director, Storage & Data Solutions at Atlanta-based VAR Veristor Systems. “It is idea for chain restaurant or retail locations where you cant support data centre-type equipment. We are working with a restaurant chain that has 800-plus locations around the country on a Proof of Concept.”
Grant said that this is also an effective solution for edge industrial deployments.
“There are Edgelines designed to go into industrial environments as well,” he indicated. “It’s a very cost-effective solution. It’s an absolute silver bullet for those environments, which drives as much cost out of the solution as possible.”
Grant noted that the solution is typically a small 1U HPE Edgeline server with KVM running on a Linux kernel, and StorMagic running on that. StorMagic also supports different OS and different hypervisors.
Grant said that the StorMagic solution is more effective for these kinds of deployments than HCI solutions offered by competitors because it is more flexible in smaller use cases because it is software.
Jason Grant, Director, Storage & Data Solutions, Veristor Systems
“Most of their competitors have to go to their smallest footprint, and even then still can’t get as small as the StorMagic software delivers,” he indicated. “We evaluated others, and the difference in footprint is significant. The hardware ones have overhead in environments which only have very small application workloads. So you have more than your applications require. Since StorMagic is software, there’s a lot more flexibility on the hardware side from a compute and memory perspective.”
“We have a very unique way that we manage our Witness,” StorMagic’s SvSAN 2-node configuration for vSphere environments, Grainger said. “It’s our heartbeat into those two server environments, where the Witness is embedded into the customer’s server, rather than just being a third piece of hardware. The natural progression of this type of partnership is deeper and more embedded solutions.”
Grainger said to look for more from the HPE-StorMagic partnership.
“We have got a rather robust road map with HPE on both SvSAN and our SvKMS encryption key management security through the HPE Complete program,” he said.
HPE Edgeline systems validated with SvSAN are available now.
