V3.0 of Maginatics Cloud Storage Platform

Maginatics Inc. announced its Cloud Storage Platform (MCSP) version 3.0.

It brings functionality and features to enhance the capabilities and performance offered to enterprise and service provider customers. It includes enhancements to the Maginatics Virtual Filer or MVF (formerly known as Maginatics File System or MagFS) and the introduction of two features – content delivery cache and site cache.

The 3.0 release delivers:

• Enhanced multi-layer adaptive caching for performance optimization over greater distances. The site cache feature allows data to be cached at a local branch office, reducing overall WAN traffic and speeding access for LAN-connected users who share constrained WAN pipes. Augmenting site cache, the content delivery cache capability gives customers the ability to utilize a CDN without sacrificing data consistency, to provide a read cache experience for users who are away from their data.

• Simplified management and operations. Storage IT admins enjoy enhancements in their day-to-day operations with the support of Rest APIs that facilitate direct integration within their own orchestration environment. It provide flexibility while enabling the manipulation of shares and MVFs from the IT admin’s tool of choice. VMs can be added to a Maginatics cluster via DHCP, enabling customers to expand their clusters with a single click instead of having to use command lines. It also introduces enhanced security and audit control capabilities with support for multi-user named admin accounts, ensuring that all actions performed on the virtual filer are attributed to the user invoking the action.

• Improved range of recovery and healing. v3.0 introduces improved DR and VM healing functions aimed at reducing the number of steps required by an admin during a DR/failover scenario. This ensures BC at all times despite disasters. Employees can continue to maintain productivity with persistent access to their applications and data regardless of location and device used.

• Expanded partner ecosystem with EMC ViPR object storage support. Customers deploying the Maginatics virtual filer with an EMC ViPR object storage system will benefit from the power of the combined solution. Some advantages include:

  • Migration of legacy applications to a software-defined environment.

  • Accelerated development of highly distributed and scalable applications.

  • Consistent data for both local and distributed environments.

“Maginatics’ software-defined storage technology lets Entec securely store our data in the public cloud while centralizing both control and application logic behind the firewall of our own data center. We researched all the alternatives, and only Maginatics could give our geographically-distributed teams the great performance and collaboration platform they need no matter where they are located,” said Stefanos Douroudakis, COO, Entec Group of companies. “With Maginatics,our teams are now able deliver fast and efficient services to our customers, even at distant construction sites, without the overhead and complexity of managing data siloes. Our company benefits from tremendous cost savings and improved business agility as well. It’s a tremendously innovative solution that delivers deep tangible benefits.“

Legacy and other emerging storage systems such as traditional filers, cloud storage gateways and WAN optimization appliances are sub-optimal when applications and users are not co-located with the system. Distributed data access patterns suffer over protocols such as CIFS and NFS. Traditional systems introduce a bottleneck by requiring all interactions with the backing data store to flow through them.

This platform is a storage solution that provides scale-out, end-to-end encryption, edge intelligence and mobile optimization, all in a software form factor. The split-plane architecture of the platform provides advantages including security, scalability and control throughout the entire system – in the cloud, on every endpoint and application, and everywhere in between.

“Since our v1.0 launch, we have continued to focus on the critical and rapidly-expanding needs of our enterprise IT customers, many of whom are seeking more agile IT solutions,” said Jay Kistler, CTO and co-founder, Maginatics. “This new release delivers a rich set of capabilities to further help our customers mitigate or eliminate many of the key storage issues that arise in the distributed enterprise. With the addition of support for EMC ViPR object storage in particular, customers deploying an EMC/Maginatics solution will be able to seamlessly migrate their legacy applications to a software-defined cloud environment. The combined platform delivers the vastly enhanced agility enterprises demand. Moreover, it enables IT organizations to consolidate and centrally manage huge volumes of data while boosting workforce productivity and their companies’ ‘top line’ by delivering anywhere, any-device data access with end-to-end security and native performance acceleration.“

Availability

• It will be available in late Q2 2014.

• Current term- and perpetual-license customers will be able to upgrade to MCSP v3.0 at no additional cost.