What Happens to Twelve Companies Visited by 23th IT Press Tour in California

The recent 23^rd edition of The IT Press Tour is now over and was an opportunity to meet new leaders and innovators in software-defined infrastructure. In addition to CxO, there was meetings with David Hitz, founder of NetApp, and Steve Wozniak, chief scientist at Primary Data.

• Aptare: The only IT analytics platform to monitor, manage and control various IT functions with one console. The product is agentless and was historically dedicated to on-premise environments but has extended to the cloud more recently to provide similar capabilities in both IT models. This is one of the most comprehensive existing solutions for IT storage monitoring.
• Avere Systems: In NAS virtualization and file storage acceleration, the firm continues to innovate in the on-prem and cloud file storage unification landscape. The company provides an unique behavior related to the Consistency Availability and Partition Tolerance aka CAP theorem that provides high consistency on a high availability storage service.
• Big Switch Networks: Pioneer in SDDC, the firm continues its IT transformation journey thanks to SDN and NFV, with two products: Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric. In addition the company announced the arrival of two new VPs: James Wong as GM, South Asia, and Claudio Perugini as VP WW channels.
• Coraid: The company is back in business with Brantley Coile, historic founder and CTO, as new leader. The message was clear about changing the past management behavior and the idea to stay independent for a long time without any external financing. Coraid has more than 10,000 units deployed and promotes a price of $0.0013$/GB/month over 5 years. The team continues developments and prepares some new products iterations around NVMe and other directions.
• Datrium: It continues its journey towards hybrid cloud with recent new iteration of DVX with the RackScale iteration. This development adds compute nodes in addition to data nodes and data management capabilities. This model offers flexibility for scaling capacity and performance independently and provides predictability in the IT management approach. The company promotes a full data encryption following compression and deduplication in the host meaning that data leaves the host in its final format and stored fully secured. In addition to ‘local’ replication, Datrium plans to offer Elastic Replication to AWS on early 2018. Even if the company supports NVMe drives for 18 months in compute nodes, Datrium starts to study some directions towards NVMf. Last point, the company received recently the Citrix Ready Certification for Citrix XenDesktop. 
• E8 Storage: Met one year ago when the product was not yet available, the company has since released its E8-D24 NVMf storage array and won several awards. The company plays in the very demanding market segment that requires really high performance both in IO/s, bandwidth and latency promoting 10-40x versus classic all flash arrays solutions. E8 Storage plans to address other market segments in 2018 with ISPs and IaaS. To boost that new direction, the firm announced a channel program a few days ago with Proact, Groupware Technology and WWT as first partners.
• Komprise: Pretty recent provider who plays in the multi-tier data management space, it extends the traditional tiering approach with analytics and seamless integration between on-premise storage devices and cloud. The technology doesn’t rely on stub techniques, agents or dedicated hardware. The company just announced European channel partnerships with SymStor in UK, Itiso in Germany and BCloud in Italy.
• NetApp: The company celebrates its 25 years, one of the longest life for a storage player in the industry. It has made thet launch of FlexPod SF, a new iteration of FlexPod product designed and built with Cisco. This time the product integrates the all-flash array coming from SolidFire acquisition. George Kurian, CEO, has illustrated the progress the company has made for a few quarters and David Hitz, co-founder, has insisted on the obvious necessity to bridge on-premises and cloud data environments with efficient hybrid solutions. Refer to this article for FlexPod SF.
• Primary Data: Steve Wozniak, chief scientist of the company took time to summarize technology directions. Primary Data continues its strategy towards a comprehensive and rich Data Driven Management with deep analytics and strong metadata intelligence. The company is able to move data and maintain data access for applications without interruption with the DataSphere platform. The firm is also the first NFS contributor since 2013, year when David Flynn decided to acquire Tonian Systems. DataSphere 2.0 will be released soon with several new key features and enhancements.
• ProphetStor: Launched in 2012 by former FalconStor leaders, it is an SDS player that targets data fabric with comprehensive data orchestration and services for data centers. As of today, the company articulates four products: Federator: smart storage and data services as an orchestration platform; StellarFlash: block and file all flash or hybrid storage appliances, DRProphet: BC/DR solution; and DiskProphet: storage devices media analysis and predicton. The company just raised a new round of $25 million at a $150 million post-money valuation. It entered into EMEA with operations launched by Guillaume Imberti.
• Rubrik: Recently announced, Alta is the 4.0 release that introduces the support of Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix Acropolis, Oracle RMAN, Cloud instantiation, archive to tape with QStar Technologies and SQL Server live mounts. A release that marks a milestone in the rapid story of Rubrik.
• StrongBox Data Solutions: Pretty confidential player with interesting solution named StrongLink that organizes and orchestrates data thanks to a rich metadata engine. The product discovers all data within an environment and applies some policies across multiple storage tiers to align value of data with the right storage device even tape. StrongLink appears to be a new Data Virtualization services horizontal to the enterprise storage environment managed centrally and remotely potentially if needed. In addition to StrongLink, the firm continues to promote StrongBox LTFS NAS as a dedicated archiving appliance based on tape, LTFS and exposed as a simple file server.