Founded by Former FalconStor Executives, ProphetStor Out of Stealth

ProphetStor Data Services, Inc., in software-defined storage, emerged from stealth mode and announced Federator, which brings operational flexibility and cost savings to OpenStack cloud computing, big data analytics, HPC, and day-to-day storage demanding applications.

Data growth and longer retention times have increased the burden on data centers, sending IT departments scrambling to accommodate increasingly diversified storage demands from virtualization and big data analytics to regulation compliance (for example, data protection and archiving). Unplanned storage array acquisitions entail expensive migrations, and it only gets worse as budgets shrink.

“Storage has to change to meet these challenges with higher efficiency and better agility,” says Eric Chen, CEO of ProphetStor and from 2010 to 2012 VP and GM, AsiaPac ops, FalconStor.

Other executives include Peter Liu, VP professional services, formerly with the same position at FalconStor, and Steve Tan, VP engineering, previously co-founder and CTO of Cloudena, VP engineering at Ciphermax (formerly Maxxan), and previously at Maxtor, Nihan Systems and Micropolis.

ProphetStor Federator frees storage users from complex, expensive external SAN storage and fabric with its storage federation technology, which provides automatic discovery, pooling, classification, abstraction, and provisioning. Along with its support of QoS through IO/s provisioning, standard SMI-S, CDMI, and vendor- specific APIs protocols, the solution makes scalability and enterprise-grade resilience efficient while reducing storage costs.

“ProphetStor Federator unifies data operations across block storage arrays, and supports iSCSI and FC protocols,” explained Chen. “ProphetStor Federator is the only answer on the market today to build a scale-out storage tier mixing legacy storage arrays with x86 commodity servers. Storage will become as inconspicuous as networks or servers. Our goal is to drive the total storage cost down and helps CIO’s meet corporate storage demand by bringing equality and freedom to their choices of storage solutions.”

With OpenStack adoption on the rise, ProphetStor joins the players to provide a robust storage solution to the OpenStack community. Federator allows a cloud administrator to add, move, or remove storage servers and capacity on demand. It responds to any infrastructure change automatically and puts the control back to OpenStack users, while maintaining performance.

Without waiting for budget cycles for buying new storage arrays, Federator adopts and repurposes legacy storage arrays, and/or commodity servers, to kick start OpenStack deployments. Its performance scales linearly with the number of storage servers and disks.

Federator can be managed from either OpenStack Horizon or REST API over http. Initially available on Ubuntu, supports will extend to all the Linux distributions in the future; and it works agnostically with storage systems, regardless of type, model, or speed, giving organizations freedom of choices in storage.

Federator targets to deploy in a variety of environments, including VDIs, high-performance databases, and public or private clouds.

Federator demo is available with official release in Q1, 2014.

ProphetStor was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Milpitas, CA with branch offices in Taiwan.