Freedom of Choice

The blog from our CEO on “The Dirty Little Secret of Hyper-convergence” discusses choice and flexibility being the main benefits of hyper-convergence. In this blog I would like to elaborate on them. Maxta’s approach of providing “Choice,” leveraging your existing servers is a key component for deploying a hyper-converged solution. With this approach, you will be able continue to use the same management and monitoring tools, dramatically minimizing the learning curve. Additionally, you can utilize the same support model that … Read More

Don’t Fall Into the Vendor Lock-in Trap

It seems Nutanix specializes in all kinds of “lock-in” and we at Maxta think that is just not right for the customer.  When you buy Nutanix, it appears you will need to have a crystal ball to know what your future requirements will be down to the specific increments you will add each time you expand. This is a great system for Nutanix, forcing the customer into buying identical units at every expansion, whether you need that exact capacity or … Read More

Cloud Service Providers: software or appliance-based hyper-convergence?

Cloud service providers face an ongoing race to gain a competitive edge by adopting new technologies and lowering infrastructure and operational costs. Hyper-convergence has introduced innovative ways to manage storage and compute for virtualized environments by eliminating the complexity of the traditional infrastructure.   Hyper-converged products are delivered in two ways: as an appliance from a vendor, or as software-that can be installed and configured on industry-standard servers. Cloud service providers deploying hyper-converged appliances must consider the impact on their … Read More

The Dirty Little Secret of Hyper-convergence

Don’t Fall into the Vendor Lock-In Trap of Hyper-convergence About two years ago, I wrote a Blog (Storage Vendor Lock-in – Is the End Near?) that discusses how two emerging technologies, convergence and VM-aware storage, and more importantly the synergy among them, may provide the relief from vendor lock-in. Two years later, these two technologies have matured quite a bit and the synergy among them, widely referred to as hyper-convergence, is a pretty hot trend in IT. For many customers, flexibility and avoiding vendor … Read More

Taking Hyper-Convergence Mainstream with Metrocluster Support for Continuous Availability Across Data Centers

In a world where everyone tries to spin being first, I wanted to elaborate on innovation that Maxta announced on September 9 2014. In addition to being the first and so far only, hyper-converged solution to run on the newest Intel Xeon E5 2600 v3 family, we announced Maxta as the first hyper-convergence vendor to support metrocluster for data availability and continuous availability across metro distances. Hyper-convergence is a new IT paradigm and therefore, initially, customers deployed it in non-mission … Read More

Is Hyper-Convergence Ready for Prime Time?

Today, we are making a very significant announcement regarding enhancements to MxSP, our leading software-defined storage, while at the same time expanding MaxDeploy family of hyper-converged reference architectures. Specifically, we announced the immediate support of MaxDeploy for the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 v3 family, Intel Solid-State Drive Data Center Family for PCIe, and Intel Ethernet Controller XL710 that were all announced today by Intel.  Our ability to announce general availability of MxSP and MaxDeploy for Intel’s newest platform on the same … Read More

It’s VMworld 2014 Public Voting Time

Hard to believe that a year has passed and it’s prep time again for VMworld 2014. This year VMware will have a focus on the Software-Defined Infrastructure. Maxta has submitted 5 separate sessions this year specifically geared to this topic.  With your vote, we can get them included in the session agenda for VMworld 2014.  Attendees will get to hear about these exciting topics from industry experts as well as Maxta customers.   Maxta Sessions: 2586 Optimizing Software Defined Storage … Read More

Maxta and Intel Join Forces to Simplify and Streamline the Virtual Data Center

Today we are very excited to unveil a very important milestone in the evolution of software-defined storage and hyper-convergence. Maxta and Intel have agreed upon a long-term engagement plan to work together to accelerate the adoption of Maxta Storage Platform as well as to continue to develop, enhance, and optimize storage software for the virtual data center (see press release here). As a result, our customers will benefit from a significant improvement in the capabilities of their data centers while … Read More

Software-Defined Storage – The Devil is in the Details

The software-defined storage universe expanded today with the unveiling of VSAN by VMware and all of us at Maxta are excited by the news from our longstanding development partner, VMware. While it might seem a little strange to be excited for the arrival of a competitive product to Maxta’s MxSP, we have multiple reasons to be happy. The fact that VMware, a company highly regarded by everyone in the industry, has decided to dedicate the time, energy and resources to … Read More

The Real Skinny About Snapshots and Clones

Snapshots (read-only point in time copies) and clones (writable point in time copies) are table stakes features for enterprise storage for many years. Many of the storage solutions out in the market implement snapshots and clones, but not all snapshot and clone technologies are created equal. Especially in virtualized environments, snapshots and clones must be scalable and manageable to enable customers to leverage their full potential. Snapshots and clones support multiple use cases in the virtual data center. In this … Read More