V7 Hive Fabric bees swarm out from AI-ready re-invented Atlantis apicultural HCI offering

HiveIO, which bought failed Atlantis Computing’s HCI and VDI tech, has released v7 of its SW saying it eliminates trad HCI vendor complexity.


Hive Fabric is a software HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure) offering based on KVM. V7.0 delivers a Cluster Resource Scheduler (CRS) and virtual servers which enables running multiple mixed-application workloads on a single infrastructure.

Hive Fabric diagram.

CRS monitors resource use across the Hive cluster and can move guest VMs between servers to ensure operational efficiency.

Dan Newton, CEO of HiveIO, claims: “With Hive Fabric, users can consolidate disparate meta-data into a single stream enabling your IT team to gain valuable insight into their business that leads to innovation and increases ROI.”

HiveIO says the fabric’s Message Bus, which holds the cluster’s metadata, is AI-read; a hint that AI techniques like machine learning are coming to boost manageability.

CTO and co-founder Kevin Mcnamara said: “IT professionals [will be able to] leverage an AI engine to provide proactive support.”

HiveIO history

  • Founded in 2015 by CTO Kevin Mcnamara and Chief Development Officer OIfer Bezalel with a $1.8m A-round of funding and Joe Makoid as CEO and President,
  • November 2015 – launched software-defined Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering for SMBs, including VDI, virtualized servers, infrastructure, storage, and security,
  • B-round of funding in 2017 from Citrix Systems and three other investors,
  • July, 2017 – Acquires Atlantis Computing HCI and VDI technology assets in 2017 for undisclosed sum,
  • November, 2017 – Joe Makoid leaves to become CEO and President at MakTRAX,
  • April, 2018 – Dan Newton, ex-GM and SVP at Rackspace, hired as CEO,
  • August 2018 – releases Hive Fabric v7.0.

Trad HCI complexity

On the trad HCI vendor complexity point HiveIO claims “Hive Fabric 7.0 satisfies the performance, scale, and security that enterprises demand while eliminating confusing licensing and multi-vendor integration and management that come with traditional hyper-converged infrastructure.”

Er, Blocks & Files has been told by HCI vendors, such as Cisco (HyperFlex), Dell EMC (VxRAIL), HPE (Simplivity), Nutanix, Scale and others that the whole point of HCI is to buy scale-out boxes that integrate all the HW and SW and licenses needed in one product with one SKU, eliminating complexity – but, hey, marketing!

We’ve asked HiveIO to respond to this point, and Newton said this regarding HCI vs. HCF: “Hive Fabric version 7.0 has all of the functionality of traditional HCI products but is offered under one license and by one vendor, which eliminates a variety of unnecessary costs. Hive Fabric also comes with its own native broker and gateway. Fees and vendor lock-ins from other solution providers can be detrimental to the functionality of the data center. So to make things even more simple, Hive Fabric can run on any x86 hardware without additional overlay, so the solution can be integrated into existing data centers, unlike many products on the market today.”

But B&F thinks you still have to buy the HCI hardware, which you don’t with an all-in-1 HCI system. We think this HiveIO point is a dubious one.

Get a Hive Fabric overview here. V7.0 Hive Fabric is available now. B&F