Interview with Yoram Novick, CEO of Maxta

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MAXTA INC. LOGOMaxta, interview continued with CEO Yoram Novick
Date: 18 November 2013
Maxta CrunchBase profile

CEO Series

As a part of a larger series, I am interviewing CEOs that lead companies in the field of Storage, Virtualization and Networking. What developments in the market did they see that inspired them to build their company? How will the market develop from here? These questions are on most of our minds, and I am keen on asking leaders in the industry for their views.

In this article, I interview Yoram Novick, the CEO of Maxta Storage.

Maxta

A short introduction to Maxta based on my introductory article of last week.

Maxta offers a software storage solution, that creates a storage layer across server side flash + magnetic storage. The solution works by installing their software on each of the servers you want to include and Maxta creates a storage pool across them.

Read my interview with the CTO of Atlantis Computing, another player in the Software Defined Storage space

Magnetic disks are leveraged for capacity and flash is used as a caching layer, with the capability of accelerating both reads and writes. For speed and redundancy, the software replicates writes between the server flash of different hosts, and de-stages to magnetic disks later.

I interviewed Yoram Novick to learn more about Maxta and his views on the storage market
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Introduction to Maxta Storage

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MAXTA INC. LOGOMaxta, introduction by Yoram Novick
Date: 12 November 2013
Maxta CrunchBase profile

This article is followed up by an interview with the CEO of Maxta, Yoram Novick. Read the article here.

Maxta is a new player in the software defined storage space that caught my attention. Their solution creates a storage layer across server side flash + magnetic storage. The product is downloadable, 100% software only.

I received a whitepaper from them yesterday on which most of this article is based. Consider this a primer, later this week I will interview the CEO of Maxta, Yoram Novick.
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Jeda Networks – Software Defined Storage Networking

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jedanetworksJeda Networks, interview with Stuart Berman
Date: 10 Oktober 2013
Jeda Networks CrunchBase profile

Jeda Networks: Software Defined Storage Networking

Following the first part of the interview with Stuart Berman, this article goes further into the inner workings of Jeda Networks. As a prelude to this article, I decided to first go into the significance of SDSN to the IT Infrastructure space. What does it represent and how is it significant?

The importance of Software Defined Storage Networking

Software Defined Storage Networking (SDSN) is a technology that allows customers a far easier and faster way to manage their data Storage in their datacenters. It allows large enterprise customers to very quickly scale up their storage environments and to very easily manage them.

SDSN is a type of Software Defined Networking (SDN), where the networking intelligence no longer resides in the physical network switches, but in a higher software layer. Configuration is done centrally, and new network hardware is quickly configured once added to the network. This allows IT administrators to manage far larger networks with many switches, and allows for great scalability and business agility.
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Interview with CEO of Jeda Networks | Stuart Berman

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jedanetworksJeda Networks, interview with Stuart Berman
Date: 5 Oktober 2013
Jeda Networks CrunchBase profile

As a part of a larger series, I am interviewing CEOs that lead companies in the field of Storage, Virtualization and Networking. What developments in the market did they see that inspired them to build their company? How will the market develop from here? These questions are on most of our minds, and I am keen on asking leaders in the industry for their views. This article is followed up by part 2 with background on Software Defined Storage Networking (SDSN)

Jeda Networks created a Software Defined Storage Network solution that reduces complexity in the connectivity between the compute layer and storage layer. They abstract al the complexity into software and then use regular Ethernet fabrics to build these virtualized storage area networks.

They are in a specific niche in which very few (if any) have dared venture. The inspiration for contacting Jeda Networks goes back to an article by Duncan Epping that I read a while back.

CEO of Jeda Networks Stuart Berman and I had a call last week in which he provided insight into the start of the company and his vision on the Networking and Storage market. Jeda Networks is Stuart’s fourth startup that started 4 years ago. The company was self-funded for 2 years and received external capital 2 years ago.
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Interview with Greenbytes CEO Steve O’Donnell part 2

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GreenBytesGreenBytes, interview with CEO Steve O’Donnell
Date: 26 August 2013
GreenBytes Crunchbase profile

Steve O’Donnell of Greenbytes

On the 21st of August, I interviewed Steve O’Donnell – CEO of Greenbytes. In the first part of the interview I covered the reasoning behind Greenbytes’ move toward 100% software only. In the second part, I asked Steve about his views on the storage market and asked some questions about his personal drive & background.

Some of my questions were inspired by an interesting interview on Techcrunch with Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Bipul Sinha where he explains (jump to 02:00) that in his view, the best startups offer a disruptive solution that fits into an existing structure that the customer is already using. He convincingly explains how flash virtualization startup Pernix Data fits those parameters, but left some question marks in explaining how Nutanix (also in his portfolio) meets those requirements.

I have been interested to hear the views on converged technologies and how disruptive technologies can be made to fit customers’ existing infrastructure. Steve has interesting views on these points that shine through in this second part of the interview.

How do you view the converged technologies like Nutanix, Simplivity and upcoming ConvergentIO?

Steve O'DonnellI think they’re great and the obvious way forward. The market is going toward services, toward fully integrated solutions. At Greenbytes we are seeing that customers are buying fully integrated virtual appliances for VDI that work. Working with our partners we deliver that kind of integrated solutions. Nutanix, Simplitivity are great. Except, they’re still the ancklebiters, the little guys – who’s going to win is the big guys.
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Most interesting niche within Software Defined Datacenter space?

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This question I posted on “Ask a VC Series” where Bipul Sinha was invited. Bipul Sinha is partner at Lightspeed Ventures where he currently invests in Nutanix, Pernix Data, Bromium and Peel.

Considering his portfolio and feel for the Software Defined Datacenter space I was curious to know what he considered to be the most interesting niche within SDD. Bipul regards management of the software defined datacenter stack to be very important and motivates that in the below video.
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