PernixData Launches With Goal To Become The VMware Of Flash

PernixData today launched its Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP) for clustering flash to get higher levels of performance. It’s similar to how VMware aggregates CPU and memory to give customers more for its server infrastructure. PernixData says <the advantage comes with getting more out of a flash-based server and reducing the need for storage, one of the greatest costs for today's enterprise customers.

Customers install the PernixData FVP in their server clusters without needing to change the infrastructure. It does not matter what the hardware is or who the flash supplier may be. Pernix will initially address the data center customers who use VMware, the market leader in virtualization.  Pernix can also run on Xen and KVM.

Pernix delays the need for customers to invest in more storage, said Poojan Kumar, CEO and Co-Founder of PernixData. A storage infrastructure that is 2 or 3 years old can keep existing infrastructure by optimizing the Flash with Pernix. It’s that storage market that the company sees as its biggest opportunity. That means there are plenty of competitive threats. VMware’s parent company is EMC, one of the largest storage vendors in the world. The company is making its own push for the server market.

Storage is still a huge problem, Kumar said. The I/O is the bottleneck. The problem is only getting worse as companies process more data. Storage becomes a necessity. Historically the costs come not just in the storage boxes themselves but also in the people needed to manage them. Virtualization creates its own set of storage issues. The more virtual machines, the more storage that is needed to manage them.

But is it worth it for the storage vendors to pursue this market that Pernix is pursuing?

Rakesh Malhotra, vice president of products for Apprenda, said on Twitter that with the shift to flash, storage innovation is all in software. That is true. He called out PureStorage and its capability to virtualize the underlying solid state discs (SSD) into a unified pool.

Sandhya Gorman, a market development manager at Intel tweeted that there is so much innovation ahead in storage that there is not the need right now for vendors to move into the server arena.

What do you think?