Hedvig leads the SDS pack

Always a pleasure to visit Hedvig and meet Avinash Lakshman and his team, we had a new opportunity during the last IT Press Tour in December. Obvious leader in the SDS space, the team has presented a new iteration of the product fully hardware and cloud agnostic.

The product, Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform aka DSP today in 3.0, was illustrated with a multi-cloud and cloud orchestration approach, validating again that software makes the difference. Thanks to the HPE investment, support and active participation of Milan Shetti, CTO datacenter infrastructure at HPE, as technical advisor, the company has made significant progress and market penetration. HPE has finally selected the right player after several tentatives that never took off.

Hedvig means independence and intelligence as finally the solution is not linked or limited to any interface - file, block and object - supporting any workload, any application, open to virtualization and containers, any hardware and working today the top 3 cloud service providers AWS, GCP and Azure. Clearly the message is around universal usage, providing a converging platform between primary and secondary storage across multiple applications.

Again like others players, the company provides a multi-cloud model surfing on an market hype. Two effects, "me two" so the company can be selected for that support and at the same time no differentiator against direct competition. But again you have to be multi-cloud, hybrid and cloud agnostic nowadays.

Hedvig defines itself as a HyperScale SDS, I should say as well, multi-protocol SDS.

In France BNP Paribas has chosen the product and designed a geo distributed data center across Paris and London.

To refresh readers on the product, we need to say the the philosophy has scalability, agility and resiliency in mind. Three components define the platform:

• Storage Service as a software installed in Linux x86 systems, glued together. They formed the scale-out back-end.
• Storage Proxy is the front-end exposing virtual disks to the applications tier with block or file protocol.
• And APIs to integrate service close to the application, this is the object interface place.

Virtual disk is a core concept here delivering what many other SDS solutions don't and can't provide especially encryption, deduplication and compression.

DSP 3.0 introduced last summer provides three new features:

1. FlashFabric with the ability to scale flash across private and public clouds and deliver optimized caching supporting PCIe, NVMe and 3D XPoint into s single platform,
2. Encrypt360 for end-to-end encryption, deduplication done first, based on 256 bits AES per disk and accelerated via Intel processors,
3. and new and improved CloudScale plugins for partners software like Veritas OST, VMware or Red Hat for container imaging.

We anticipate some great news from Hedvig in 2018 being present on the hot list of many players and of course customers.