StorCentric targets the midrange segment

StorCentric, the humbrella storage company, has recently acquired Violin Systems, known for years as Violin Memory. As many of you know the story of Violin is pretty famous being one of pioneers of full flash array segment addressing the top of the storage pyramid. At that time, Kaminario and TMS were the 2 other companions. Today StorCentric owns 5 brands: Nexsan, Drobo, Vexata, Violin and Retrospect.

But things have changed and Violin evolved from a high-end positioning to a mid-range one before that move. StorCentric continues this and adds Violin to the Nexsan category. The shift was big as today Violin relies on standard x86 servers with storage software, so very similar to other approaches at a macro level. That delivers a real rich portfolio against usual competition. The challenge for StorCentric would be to consolidate software and use common elements across the product line. There is some directions to add some file access methods to Violin to become an unified product like Unity but this time as a full flash one.

On the software side, beyond data management, the company insists on security and especially ransomware to prevent business impact leveraging Retrospect intelligence.

Being always ready for a bargain, Mihir Shah and his team, plans more acquisitions to continue to build a serious comprehensive storage portfolio. Historically very block storage oriented except with Drobo and Nexsan Unity, the team has a clear software strategy both in terms of Software-Defined Storage and also in more general data management aspect of it. To support this, the firm has released a few weeks ago Data Mobility Suite aka DMS for all kinds of data movements especially in heterogeneous storage environments. But we see also some directions with the wish to acquired some technology in data analytics for data and storage management and an object storage engine.

Back to DMS, the idea is to provide a generic copy and replication engine among StorCentric products but also between with other products. Four use cases are covered here: data migration with the need to reduce cost or refresh systems, data replication to enhance disaster recovery and potentially business continuity, data synchronization across various storage entities and finally multi-site collaboration. A story to illustrate how to leverage an universal copy engine with different use cases. We'll monitor the adoption of DMS as supported cloud providers are interesting even if some of are completely obsolete.

The recent session during The IT Press Tour confirmed some developments around NVMe over Fabric and the preferred transport layer is TCP and the wish to add an S3 access method as well.