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Your Occasional Storage Digest, featuring Cohesity, IBM, Maxta, Nutanix, Proscia, Rubrik, SwiftStack, Zadara

By
Chris Mellor
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Here’s a digest of recent storage news to help you keep up with what’s going on.

Cohesity

Cohesity is parting with some of the money raised in its recent funding  round to expand its reseller program to include service providers. There are differentiated benefits for cloud and managed services providers, with co-design workshops, cloud-ready testing, training programs, premier technical support, and more.

The secondary data converger has updated its training program with free partner training featuring three levels of accreditation for sales, engineering, and post-sales roles. Partners working with large accounts get additional financial incentives.

Cohesity has expanded its field sales coverage to support resellers in North America, Europe, and Asia, and  is boosting its partnerships with technology vendors including Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Microsoft, and VMware.

More Cohesity money is being spent across geographies on joint marketing planning, field activities, and demand generation campaigns for pipeline development. Not-for-resale (NFR) demo equipment is available for partners that need Cohesity technology for labs and demo centres. Also, Cohesity appliances and licenses are available for prospect and customer trials.

Last month Cohesity pocketed $93m in E-round funding.

IBM

In the HPC world IBM has notched up

In the entertainment and media HPC arena IBM tells us it has notched up Rhode & Schwarz (R&S) as an OEM of its Spectrum Scale scale-out, parallel file system. The software is included in the R&S SpycerNode array.

The SpycerNode system is a scalable entertainment and media file storage system for complex movie and video workloads which have intricate workflows and may feature detailed special effects components.

It uses GNR (GPFS Native Raid) which uses erasure coding to speed the rebuilding of failed disks. R&S claim this makes the rebuild time in the case of a system failure up to four times shorter than with conventional RAID systems. There can be up to 12GB/sec throughput from a single node and several millions of IOPS, depending upon the configuration.

IBM now has three GNR products on the market – the Lenovo GSS system, its own Elastic Storage Server (ESS) product, and this SpycerNode system from R&S.

R&S SpycerNode Spectrum Scale array

Maxta

This hyper-converged software supplier has been awarded a U.S. Patent (No. 10,061,781) for shared data storage leveraging dispersed storage devices.

The IP optimises both the placement of data across the dispersed devices and describes a method for accessing storage data.

The idea is to facilitate high levels of scalability and performance while minimising resource consumption.  Maxta’s HCI software uses the IP that’s just been patented.

Nutanix

Nutanix’s ability to sell into the USA government sector is improving because its cloud-based Windows desktop and application delivery service, Frame, has achieved a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Ready designation for its Government platform.

The company acquired Frame in August, with its Frame for Government DaaS platform. This is a government community cloud that provides government customers with an isolated, sovereign US-based region for its sensitive US government workloads.

Nutanix says the FedRAMP Ready designation moves the company closer to achieving a FedRAMP Moderate Authorization, which will provide public sector customers with a secure, compliant, high-performance service for running applications in the AWS and Azure public clouds that have been fully certified by the federal government. 

Proscia

Proscia, a startup working in digital pathology,  has secured  $8.3m in A-round funding from a group of East and West Coast venture capital firms.

It stores cancer patients’ biopsy data in the cloud, and makes it available to clinicians for annotation and collaboration. It was given a million dollars in seed funding in June 2016, and has worked with Samsung on mathematical oncology and deep-learning to determine the likelihood of lymph node metastasis in breast cancer.

It will use the new cash to expand the deployment of the company’s digital pathology software and accelerate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) applications to increase accuracy and efficiency in cancer diagnosis. It says the cash will fuel the development and commercialisation of clinical AI-enabled workflows targeting high-volume, high-impact cancers, the first of which will be available later this year.

Proscia will also use the funds to ramp up sales and marketing of its existing cloud-based digital pathology platform, which will serve as the foundation for Proscia’s AI-based applications.

It declares that pathologists, and their ability to diagnose cancer, are largely dependent on the microscope, a device that has been in place for 150 years. The limitations of the microscope and the subjectivity involved in assessing tumours contribute to diagnostic error, resulting in negative patient outcomes and economic burden to the healthcare system. 

For Proscia, digital pathology and AI represent a joint and long overdue way forward for cancer biopsy diagnoses that are stuck in the microscope’s eye-piece.

Rubrik

Rubrik says it’s won data protection business from a Scottish government agency handing out public money in subsidy form. The agency is the Agriculture and Rural Economy (ARE) Directorate which pays out £750m in subsidies a year, based on EU regulations.

SwiftStack

Object storage supplier SwiftStack has announced support for the new Splunk Enterprise 7.2 with SmartStore, an optimised data management model which separates storage resources from compute nodes. SwiftStack can be a SmartStore storage target. Warm Splunk data is accessed via the S3 API.

It says users can keep all Splunk data online, in one or more data centres and/or clouds, search across months or years instead of days or weeks, and meet data governance objectives for long-term retention and protection. SwiftStack has the storage of machine-generated data in mind, for business intelligence and analytics work.

Zadara

Zadara has added deduplication and compression to the all-flash arrays which it places in customer’s IT centres and operates on their behalf. These are called Virtual Private Arrays. Zadara says the added technology will lower customers’ TCO as its usage-based pricing model means that they only pay for the storage they consume.

Three cloud storage gateway startups are running neck and neck

By
Chris Mellor
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Three cloud storage gateway startups are running neck and neck with near-equivalent funding and no sign of a breakaway by either CTERA,  Nasuni or Panzura.

Interestingly, all three were started up in 2008.

CTERA is an Israeli startup led by co-founder Liran Eshel. Nasuni’s CEO is Andres Rodriguez, also a co-founder, while Panzura’s CEO Patrick Harr took on the role in May 2016. That was after the co-founding CEO Randy Chou left in February that year.

Yesterday CTERA gained $30 million fresh funding to build out its infrastructure, taking total funding to $100 million.  Nasuni’s total is $120 million and Panzura stands at $90 million.

The pattern of funding events for the trio is similar too,  remarkably so given the vagaries of venture capital.

How do they differ?  Broadly speaking, CTERA focuses on security, Nasuni on helping customers find the best cloud for their files and Panzura on large file set distribution, synchronisation and sharing, such as electronic design automation files. It has also added its Vizion.ai SaaS data manager which indexes and manages a customer’s global file estate.

There is an overlap between cloud storage gateways and file sync and share suppliers such as Box and Egnyte. The storage industry is wrestling with customer desire to store frontline file data in the cloud and access it at the  speed of local storage. The solutions, so far, revolve around edge appliances used for on-premises caches and technologies to reduce network bandwidth needs and speed network transit time.

Overall, the problem area is hybrid on- and off-premises file storage and access. Cloud storage gateway is a means to that end, not an end in itself and newer file system suppliers such as Elastifile are working in the same area.

The question arises: are cloud storage gateways features or products?

The future of feature

Elastifile’s technology has an elastic file system that merges on-premises and public cloud worlds.  Cloud storage gateway functionality is required to move data between the two but this is part of Elastifile’s offering and not the core product feature.

If cloud storage gateways are features then cloud storage gateway suppliers have to move up stack and into hybrid file data management services. How well CTERA, Nasuni and Panzura respond to that challenge will determine if they can make a successful break away.

Druva heads Churchward for boardroom advice

By
Chris Mellor
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Guy Churchward, the former CEO of Data Torrent, has joined back-up vendor Druva as a board-level advisor.

Real time data ingestor Data Torrent withdrew from the fray in May this year, and Churchward started advising Druva in August, according to LinkedIn.

Churchward was Core Technologies President at Dell EMC before resigning to run Data Torrent. His CV includes stints as President and CEO of LogLogic, VP and GM of the Data Protection Group at NetApp,  VP and GM of BEA’s WebLogic Products Group, and senior management positions at Sun Microsystems (formerly Tarantella Inc.), The Santa Cruz Operation (formerly IXI), Accenture (formerly Binder Hamlyn) and Olivetti. The guy has been around the block a few times.

He currently sits on the board at Datera, a startup which supplies Elastic Data Fabric scale-out, block access, server-based storage software running in x86 servers.

Why did Druva avail itself of Churchward’s advice?  In an email interview CEO Jaspreet Singh told us:  “Guy is a very accomplished guy – and we know each other since EMC invested in Druva.”

Druva CEO Jaspreet Singh

“Guy has built a strong foundation in data management, protection, and storage [and] will be playing a critical role in helping us on product roadmap and direction. And I am closely working with him on a few strategic product opportunities which we can’t speak about yet.”

Maybe 2019 will reveal the strategic product opportunities Singh mentioned. ®

Regarding Violin Systems and its race for All-Flash Array glory

By
Chris Mellor
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Violin Systems has launched its latest VXS 8 all-flash array into what it calls the extreme performance all-flash array market.

Its a hot box with latency down to 50μs when using NVMe over Fibre Chanel, and dedupe and compression are switched off. The VXS 8 has cloud-delivered predictive analytics, with an augmented reality smart phone app as an end-point for this, and it has a coming move away from its costly proprietary flash drives, the Violin Inline Memory Modules (VIMMS), towards using TLC (3bits/cell) 3D NAND SSDs connected to the VIMM carrying-board.

The marketing pitch is extreme and consistent low latency, high-IOPS performance equivalent to the NVMe-oF startups (E8, Excelero, Vexata), that’s claimed to be 5x to 7x faster than traditional AFA vendors (Dell EMC, HPE, IBM, NetApp, Pure) while offering the same levels of enterprise data services as these mainstream trad AFA players, and which the NVMe-oF startups lack.

This is Violin’s self-declared market niche. Can it succeed, having failed before?

Violin says it has more than 100 Fortune 500-size customers running mission-critical applications. This is the base on which it must build. It says the three most important AFA attributes to them are low latency, consistent performance  and enterprise data services. Their applications are, Violin says, tier zero ones, which includes OLPT, DBMS and VDI, and they offer real-time insights to help the customer’s operations.

Upcoming applications are in the AI, IoT, trading and supply chain areas.

It says its customers can make greater profits from decreased transaction times, an accelerated supply chain and faster insights into such things as financial trading calculations. All this depends upon the aforesaid consistent low latency and high-performance.

If it can demonstrate that, and show that its customers need less IT infrastructure to run their their tier 0 apps; meaning fewer servers and therefore systems and application SW licenses, fewer network links, less cooling and so forth, then it has a chance.

Violin says using its gear means that customers have a lower IT total cost of ownership with savings so great that the Violin storage can almost come for free. 

It claims that mainstream AFA vendors; Dell EMC, HPE, IBM, NetApp, Pure along with DDN Tintri and Nutanix, are only suitable for tier 1 applications and mixed workload storage, not tier 0 apps. 

Violin’s view of its market landscape

This is Violin’s claimed market niche; tier 0 application performance for F500 enterprises that must have enterprise data services.

But the mainstream AFA suppliers all have NVMe-oF technology speed ups coming and the hot box startups will get the data services Violin says they need.

How long does Violin have before its window of opportunity closes?

It has to stay at the top of the performance (IOPS, low latency) ranking. It has a roadmap to migrate away from proprietary VIMMs towards using 3D NAND TLC (3bits/cell) SSDs, with microcode additions giving it direct control over the flash chips inside the SSDs. That should help counter the inherent slowness of TLC NAND compared to MLC NAND, and aid in reducing its costs and so helping fund product and business infrastructure development.

In our view the next two years are crucial. Violin has made the necessary first product refresh steps. It now has to demonstrate it’s a stayer, with the installed base taking up the new kit and its channel finding new customers for it.

Performance-wise it has to stay at the top of the tree, and if things like Optane caching in accessing servers are needed to do so then it must be done.

Its crucial, in our view, that Violin can believably claim a performance crown and retain it.  Fail at that and its whole marketing edifice crumbles.

The Soros Fund, Violin’s owner, faces a dilemma if the company falls behind in the performance stakes. It would have to raise it stakes to develop faster product or quit. We should see which way the wind is blowing by the end of 2020. 

Two-horse HCI race with graphical clarity

By
Chris Mellor
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Dell Technologies and Nutanix, the leaders of the hyperconverged infrastructure  (HCI) appliance market, are  increasing their dominance, while their competitors in  the following pack look to be fighting for market scraps.

A chart of quarterly suppler revenues since 2014’s first quarter by Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers shows the bifurcation in the market between the leaders and the followers;

The top two curves are all VSAN Ready Nodes and all Nutanix sales (including its OEMs.) Next is Nutanix itself followed by Dell EMC’s VxRack and VxRail.

Then we have, in declining order, HPE SimpliVity, Cisco and late-entrant NetApp. 

Rakers has also charted HCI software-only revenues by vendor which makes the VMware/Nutanix dominance clearer;

VMware with VSAN is the clear leader, followed by Nutanix. Then we have Cisco, HPE and Dell-EMC in a tight grouping a long way behind. Cisco’s revenue trend is positive while HPE has had two quarters of declining growth as has Dell EMC. 

HPE/SimpliVity  has also had six quarters of revenues lower than its highpoint in the fourth 2016 quarter and has now been overtaken by Cisco. SimpliVity was bought by HPE in January 2017 and sales have trended downwards since then. Can it recover, or will it suffer the indignity of being overtaken by NetApp as well?

Dell EMC’s trailing position in this SW-only chart doesn’t matter as owner Dell Technologies owns most of VMware whose  VSAN SW powers Dell EMC’s VxRail kit.

There are a group go smaller players than the ones in these two charts; DataCore, Datrium, Huawei, Pivot3 and Scale Computing, not to mention Axellio. There’s still scope for HCI HW development with Optane persistent memory, NVMe SSDs and NVMe-oF storage access yet to appear in most products.

In another year we might find Raker’s charts look rather different, although it would be surprising if VMware and Nutanix relinquished their dominance. Those two horses are so far in front they are out of sight. B&F

Inspur joins SPC-1 benchmark league table

By
Chris Mellor
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Chinese server and storage vendor Inspur has leapt into the SPC-1 benchmark rankings, beating a top-end IBM array with a much lower price/performance rating.

The SPC-1 benchmark tests a storage systems responsiveness in terms of IOPs and provides measures of overall response time and price/performance in terms of $/K-IOPS. The host systems are  8 x NF5280M5 Inspur servers, each linked to the storage with 2 x 16Gbit/s FC links.

Inspur’s AS5300G2 is nothing fancy – a scale-out all-flash system with four nodes of dual controller 2U enclosures, each holding 24 x 800GB SSDs and featuring  4 x 16Gbit/s FC ports.

Inspur’s system scored 1,500,346 SPC-1 IOPS at a cost of $307.62/K-IOPS. Its system cost was $461,526.84 and the response time was 0.895ms. There are much faster systems and also much cheaper competitors. Blocks and Files notes that Inspur produced the SPC1 result with a 16Gbits Fibre Channel fabric, and MLC (2bits/cell) SSDs. We dare say a version using NVMe SSDs might go faster still.

SPC-1 v3.n benchmark summery numbers.

The big beasts

Huawei dominates the rankings, taking the top three slots followed by US NetApp’s A800 in fourth place.  The Chinese vendor appears again in fifth.  The top five systems all rate at more than 2.3m IOPS.  Inspur has the fastest system and the best price/performance in the 1m to 2.3m IOPS grouping. IBM’s DS8888 was benchmarked in November 2016 so it is long in the tooth.

We’ve charted the SPC-1 numbers in the table above, only labelling the suppliers with stand-out values:

As you can see Inspur is ahead of the pack to its left, the swathe of Huawei systems and also the IBM and NetApp scores.

The  SPC-1 result of Inspur is likely to cut no ice in the USA, where Chinese computers are out of favour – even before the Trump trade war. But it could well prove beneficial to Inspur as it markets its AS5300G2 arrays in its home territory and in Southeast Asia generally.

A quick run through Axellio’s iWARP all-flash Hyper-V HCI box

By
Chris Mellor
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Axellio has jumped onto the hyperconverged  train with the FabrixXpress edge-computing appliance, a software-defined “datacenter in a box” for enterprises and service providers to build on-premises and hybrid integration with Azure. 

But does the world need another HCI appliance? HyperGrid is moving away from its Hyper-V HCI system, leaving a market hole for Axellio to fill. Think Hyper-V, all-flash and iWARP  – there is an unfilled niche here.

The appliance’s full name is FX-WSSD, standing for FabrixXpress Windows Server Software-Defined.

Axello FX-WSSD

It’s an all-flash X86 box in a 2U chassis, using Windows Server 2016 and 2019, and by using NVMe over PCIe goes faster than the flash would lead us to expect. Axellio, a business unit of X-IO,  says this make the most of virtual workload CPU performance improvements in Windows Server 2019.

FX-WSSD component diagram.

The FX-WSSD uses Storage Spaces Direct, with claimed consistent and  extremely low latency because it has a hypervisor embedded architecture, built-in read/write cache, and NVMe drives mounted on the PCIe bus.

According to Axellio this is designed to “scale in”  – whatever that means – by converging storage and compute. It says storage, compute (XEON E5-26xx V4 family) and network bandwidth can be upgraded independently.  The appliance supports multi-tenancy (of course) and is validated for the Microsoft WSSD reference architecture. A range of iWARP network adapters from Chelsio Communications is supported – iWARP is a protocol for delivering RDMA over TCP/IP.

A canned quote from ESG Senior Analyst Mike Leone points out the system “enables organizations to freely move workloads between Azure and the Axellio FabricXpress platform. Networking, mobility and scalability within the platforms are the types of differentiators that will speed further adoption on both the SMB and enterprise level.”

Although the base component is a 2U chassis, the FabricXpress WSSD’s multiple configurations start in a 4U, 4 node footprint, and they are available now. The 4U system has storage that scales from 12.8TB to 920TB and memory from 512GB to 4TB.

WANdisco cloud subs drive sees it take H1’18 revenue hit

By
Chris Mellor
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Confirming earlier indications WANdisco revenues in the first half of 2018 were $6.6m,  down 32 percent on the same period a year ago.

It blames the decline on its transition from selling product licenses to a subscription model, which will  give it annual recurring revenue from cloud deals. It’s still confident of making its revenue target for the year.

The company supplies replication software for sending active data to the cloud, and has an OEM deal with IBM. The royalty rate in this deal is increasing from 30 to 50 per cent and it has a joint development with IBM to support IBM BigSQL and other products, expanding the total addressable market. 

WANDisco CEO Dave Richards.

Other encouraging news to set against the revenue fall includes an initial $200k contract win with an unnamed automotive customer. The contract is structured under the recurring revenue model and expected to grow to a multi-million dollar annualised value over the coming years.

WANdisco has announced an OEM sales partnership with Alibaba Cloud and the first product is now integrated with Alibaba’s offering. 

Dr. Sakthi Subramanian has joined WANdisco as its VP of Engineering and the company has filed a blockchain patent. This could, it says,  potentially open a significant new market for WANdisco’s core replication technology.

IBM is keen on blockchain technology as a means of validating data sent between different parties, and there seems a natural fit with replication; replicated data could carry blockchain verification.  B&F

Sphere 3D preps reverse stock split

By
Chris Mellor
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Sphere 3D, the perennially loss-making business that owns Overland Storage and Tandberg Data, is preparing a stock consolidation with a range from 1:2 to 1:10.

The stock is currently trading on Nasdaq at $0.37 – under the required minimum $1 floor price since March 28, 2018.  The company received a warning letter from NASDAQ on May 18, which gave it 180 days  – until November 26 – to regain compliance.

The proposed stock split was revealed in an SEC filing on September 27,  and shareholder approval is sought at an October 26 meeting. If approved  the plan can put in place within one year of the meeting.

Sphere 3D is currently aiming to sell its Overland and Tandberg business to a corporate vehicle set up by its chairman CEO Eric Kelly.

We note that Overland Storage performed the NASDAQ  stock split dance once before, in April 2014.  B&F

SNIA open-sources CDMI cloud storage standard

By
Chris Mellor
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The  Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) this week open-sourced the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) v2.0 standard, with the aim of encouraging the wider storage community to join in and help speed development.

In practical terms, the  move  means that the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) can now accept pull (change) requests on the CDMI specification from non-SNIA members. 

Blocks and Files thinks CDMI is a worthwhile initiative that should help unify object data management.  The standard defines the functional interface that applications will use to create, retrieve, update and delete data elements from the public cloud.

SNIA CDMI diagram

It has the ability to work alongside OpenStack Swift and Amazon S3 Models. CDMI clients can manage containers and the data placed in them.

The SNIA says CDMI provides end users with “hassle-free data access, data protection and data migration form one cloud service to another.”  By “data” it effectively means object storage data.

David Slik, co-chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage TWG, said; “There are currently more than 20 products that meet the CDMI specification.  By opening the specification repository, we hope to speed the development of this and other standards.”

That list contains 24 products – however…  it includes a contribution  from Coho Data, a defunct vendor, four products powered by Scality which are essentially the same, and two NetApp storageGRID products, which are also essentially the same. So let’s settle on 19 products and note  that the list does not include Caringo, Cloudian, IBM COS, Hitachi’s Content Platform, Dell EMC, OpenIO and many others. Filer suppliers are also absent.

The first release of the CDMI 2.0 specification is expected in the second half of 2019. If you have ideas get contributing. B&F

Sysdig be Nimble, Sysdig be quick…raids HPE for staff hires

By
Chris Mellor
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Sixteen employee have left the HPE Nimble organisation in just four months, we can reveal.

Thirteen have jumped ship to Sysdig, a well-funded container intelligence startup whose recently-hired CEO is Suresh Vasudevan, the CEO of Nimble at the time of its  acquisition by HPE in  April 2017. A search on LinkedIn for people with Sysdig and Nimble stints in their CVs will reveal them.

Suresh Vasudevan

We found:

  • Naveen Bali, Lead Engineer, joined from HPE Nimble in August 2018,
  • Stuart Bridger, Senior Escalations and Support Engineer at Sysdig, joined from HPE Nimble in July 2018,
  • Drew Calderone, Senior Support and Escalations Engineer, joined from HPE Nimble in June 2018,
  • Mark Fulton, Senior Technical Account Manager, joined from HPE Nimble in August 2018,
  • Kevin Kauffman, Software Engineer, joined from HPE Nimble in September 2018,
  • Alexander Lawrence, Senior System Engineer, joined from HPE Nimble in September 2018,
  • Alan Laws, Software Engineer, joined from HPE Nimble in September 2018, Eric Linnell, VP Support, Customer Success and Professional Service, joined from HPE Nimble in August 2018,
  • Michael Moody, Enterprise Account Executive, joined from HPE Nimble in August 2018,
  • Donald Patterson, Senior Escalations Engineer, joined from HPE Nimble in June 2018,
  • Andrew Paul, Enterprise Account Exec at Sysdig, joined from HPE Nimble in August 2018,
  • Josh Rechsteiner, Director of Support and Customer Success Operations, joined from Sysdig September 2018,
  • Keegan Riley, SVP w-w Sales at Sysdig, joined from HPE Nimble in May 2018.

The three most recent leavers are:

  • David Nellinger Adamson, InfoSight’s architect and data scientist, 
  • Matt Armstrong, director of engineering at InfoSight,
  • Anupama Kirpekar, VP engineering of InfoSight.

HPE declined to comment on their departures, the timing of which could be linked to the ending of post-merger retention bonus payments. 

We have no reason to suspect that anything is awry in HPE Nimble land – people move all the time and there is a huge cultural difference between startups like Nimble and massive mainstream vendors.  

Other moves

Ulrike Riess has resigned from her Senior PR Manager role at data protection supplier Acronis, and re-joined TechTarget, this time in a Senior Editor role.

Enrico Signoretti, who was a Technology Evangelist and Product Strategist at object storage startup  OpenIO has started a new career life as a research analyst at Gigaom. He was head of Product Strategy at OpenIO from Jan 2017 to April 2018. B&F

Integrate all the things! Virtual Instruments goes TAP dancing

By
Chris Mellor
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Virtual Instruments is setting up a Technical Alliance Program to better sell its products in conjunction with integrated upper stack performance monitoring offerings.

The Virtual Instruments Technology Alliance Programme (VITAP) will ensure the testing and validation of product integrations with Virtual Instruments’ performance management products.

VITAP members can resell integrated systems more effectively through jointly-facilitated strategic sales engagements. 

Existing members include Apposite Technologies (cloud migration), cPacket Networks (network monitoring), Garland Technology (networking),  and Gigamon (network visibility).

We can divide the infrastructure performance management area into four sub-sections:

  • IT infrastructure monitoring (storage, storage networking and servers)
  • Network Performance Monitoring
  • Application Performance Monitoring
  • Digital Experience Monitoring

Where they intersect we can place algorithmic IT operations, as in our diagram above.

VI’s heritage lies in IT infrastructure monitoring and it has built vendor alliances and integrations to bring in data from Network Performance Monitoring and Application Performance Monitoring.

The company needs to round out its offerings – to embrace the public cloud, for example. And to do this it must add more integrations and alliances. In other words, it  wants to build an eco-system.

VI asserts that enterprises want an open ecosystem of vendor-independent testing and monitoring tools, creating the opportunity for companies to build mutually beneficial relationships. Its VP of Product Ecosystem Jaymin Patel claims VITAP is the “only vendor-agnostic alliance program in the hybrid infrastructure performance management industry.” B&F

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