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 additional customers will benefit from reduced complexity and cost of their IT infrastructure and eliminate entirely the need for storage arrays.

The ever-increasing improvements in hardware coupled with the pervasiveness of Intel architecture resulted in very powerful and cost effective servers. Server virtualization enabled the creation of a very efficient compute platform that is easy to manage and scale. As most of you know very well, due to the benefits of server virtualization, the main bottleneck of the virtual data center these days is predominantly storage. Storage didn’t keep up with the improvements that took place at the compute end.

Maxta was founded to eliminate the storage bottleneck and match storage to compute in terms of simplicity, availability, agility, and cost. Maxta has broken the code to finally integrate storage into a converged virtual data center with a software-only solution. It’s a complete storage stack with the true characteristics of virtualized computing:  an efficient, flexible and scalable platform that aggregates and pools resources so they can be allocated at the appropriate granularity on demand. Our numerous deployments significantly simplify IT and provide all the enterprise-class features and reliability that customers expect from enterprise storage.

Over the last decade, Intel introduced various features in their architecture to accelerate the rate of adaption of virtualization. Intel x86 architecture is the backbone of all major server virtualizations platforms and is therefore the basic building block of all virtual data centers. The main goal of the Maxta/Intel working together is to continue accelerating the rate of adoption of virtualization by eliminating the storage bottleneck. We are creating reference architectures for converged compute/storage platforms that will serve as the foundation for the modern data center. Moreover, we are going to introduce new capabilities as well as tightly integrate and optimize Maxta software to Intel architecture and storage devices to leverage the full potential of hyper-convergence.

By optimizing its hardware for virtualization, Intel enabled server virtualization to move to the forefront of the data center. Today’s announcement will inevitably enable software-defined storage and hyper-convergence to become mainstream as well. The future data center will be based entirely on software-defined storage rather than storage arrays.

We at Maxta are thrilled to work with Intel and continue to lead the industry in storage innovation for the modern data center.