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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Interview with Walter Angerer, CEO of Parsec Labs

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Parsec logo wideParsec Labs, interview with Walter Angerer
Date: 6 November 2013
Parsec Labs website

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.

Parsec Labs

Innovation in the NAS market has focused on performance acceleration through usage of SSD technology. For an SMB customer, migrating to a larger and faster NAS represents a large capital investment and migrating data from the old to the new NAS is a painful process.

Parsec Labs targets the SMB market with a Storage router that sits between your NAS systems and your clients. The storage router accelerates performance with its SSD layer and adds de-duplication and compression technology to leverage your existing NAS storage capacity.
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Interview Poojan Kumar – CEO of PernixData

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pernixdataPernixData, interview with CEO Poojan Kumar
Date: 4 November 2013
PernixData 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.

PernixData

Storage arrays have typically been designed for Data Services and not performance. By scaling up disks inside the array, performance does increase but the supporting infrastructure quickly becomes a bottleneck.

Server side flash offers a solution by being close to the application. However because it is a single device, you loose many of the crucial advantages of virtualization like mobility (HA & DRS)
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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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Diablo Technologies MCS: Tech Specs

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diablo_technologies (1)Diablo Technologies, MCS Tech specs by CEO Riccardo Badalone
Date: 10 September 2014
Diablo Technologies Crunchbase Profile

Following the first part of the interview with Riccardo Badalone, this article goes further into the background of Diablo MCS and the performance it delivers.

Diablo’s Road to MCS

Diablo Technologies has been strong in the memory subsystem. From 2003 onwards, the company has always been in the space between the processor and the memory. Essentially creating a layer of abstraction between the physical interface and the logical interface the processor thinks it is communicating with.

The first development focused on analog IP for high speed serial interconnect. In 2005 Diablo built on top of that with the first product being a bridging product in x86 for fully buffered Dimms; Low power bridges with interface of the processor on one side, interface of DRAM on the other. It was an primarily a physical layer device, no software component. In 2008 the company pivoted, focused purely on flash and non-volatile media. Diablo sought a way out of the DRAM space, while leveraging the expertise and know-how in the memory subsystems.
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Interview Riccardo Badalone – CEO Diablo Technologies

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diablo_technologies (1)Diablo Technologies, interview with Riccardo Badalone
Date: 9 September 2013
Diablo Technologies Crunchbase Profile

Riccardo Badalone of Diablo Technologies

I had a great skypecall with Riccardo Badalone of Diablo Technologies this friday. I heard about Diablo Technologies recently and found myself very interested in the background of this company. The interview is covered in two parts, part 2 goes into the technological details and performance of Diablo MCS and can be found here.

Riccardo started the company a decade ago in 2003, he cofounded it with Franco Forlini and Michael Parziale. Diablo Technologies is based in Ottowa, Canada.
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Diablo Technologies MCS – Persistent Storage/Memory in DDR3 form factor

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Diablo Technologies (1)Diablo Technologies MCS introduction
Date: 30 Augustust 2013
Diablo Technologies Crunchbase Profile

I was recently made aware of Diablo Technologies who develop one very interesting product; Memory Channel Storage (MCS).

-update- Find part 1 of my interview with Riccardo Badalone here and part 2 of that interview with background on Diablo MCS here.

Diablo MCS are 200 GB / 400 GB NAND flash modules that are designed to connect directly to the memory bus. The product looks like a regular DDR3 RAM module, while featuring persistent NAND flash. MCS modules are plugged right in the memory slots and can be configured to be recognised as Storage or Memory.
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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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