Today we will continue on our Tech Field Day 12preparation of trying to get a grasp on some of the companies presenting at the event. Next up, Igneous Systems – again, another company I’ve not had any interaction with or have really even heard of. With that, let’s take a quick look at the company and the services, solutions, and products they provide.
Who is Igneous?
Founded in just 2013, Igneous Systems is based out of Seattle and entered the market looking to solve the issue around unstructured large data and public cloud. There founders have a fairly decent and strong storage background – Kiran Bhageshpur (CEO/cofounder) and Jeff Hughes (CTO/cofounder) both come from an engineering background, both from the Isilon division at EMC – and Byron Rakitzis (Architect/cofounder) was the first employee hired at NetApp, being responsible for a good chunk of code there and holding over 30 patents to his name. I’m always interested in seeing the paths that startup founders have taken – this appears to be the first go around for these three guys so let’s hope they are successful!!!
[symple_box color=”yellow” fade_in=”false” float=”center” text_align=”left” width=””]Disclaimer: As a Tech Field Day 12 delegate all of my flight, travel, accommodations, eats, and drinks are paid for. However I did not receive any compensation nor am I required to write anything in regards to the event or the presenting companies. All that said, this is done at my own discretion.[/symple_box]
Igneous – True Cloud for Local Data
These three guys have set out to bring the benefits and agility of public cloud down into the four walls of your datacenter. If we think about different types of data flowing around within the enterprise today we can identify quite a few that just aren’t a good fit to ship up to services like Amazon S3. Think IoT, with sensors that can generate a vast amount of data that you may want to have access to often. It may not be cost efficient to ship this data up to the cloud for storage. Other types of data such as security or syslog fall into that same type of category. Aside from just being a vast amount of data, enterprises struggle with what to do with large datasets such as media content. But the real driving factor behind shipping most data to services such as S3 comes in the terms of security and compliance – we may just not want our sensitive data sitting outside of our buildings!
The problem with this though is enterprises want the agility of public cloud. They want to be able to budget in terms of storing this data – and after you buy a big honking box of storage to sit in your datacenter it’s pretty hard to scale down and somehow reclaim those dollars initially spent! This is where Igneous comes into play.
Igneous is a hardware appliance – it’s still that big honking box of storage that sits inside our firewall – the difference being we don’t actually buy it, we rent it. And the terms of this rental contract are based around capacity – a “pay as you go” type service. Now you may be thinking, yeah great, we still have storage that we have to manage, we just don’t have to pay for it upfront – we still have to manage it! That’s not the case. When Igneous is engaged they deliver the appliance to your datacenter, they install it, and they manage it throughout its lifetime, meaning hardware and software upgrades are all performed by Igneous during the lifetime of the contract.
But the real advantage of Igneous, like most other products comes in the terms of software. Having local storage is great but if it can’t be accessed and utilized the same way as we do those services such as S3 and Google Cloud then we haven’t really deployed the cloud into our datacenter. The APIs provided by the Igneous box are accessed using the same familiar API calls that you are used to using with services like Azure, S3, and Google – So we still have the agility and efficiency of a cloud service, but the difference being, that your data is still your data and remains local inside your datacenter. Obviously Igneous provides visibility into your data, allowing you do capacity management and run analytics against the data consumed.
Igneous has an interesting solution and one that I feel can be incredible useful. How it integrates with other products is interesting to me. Essentially, if they support the S3 API then technically we should be able to find some way to use Igneous with other 3rd party products that can send data to Amazon. I’m thinking of backup and other products here which have the ability to copy data to S3 – we could essentially place an Igneous box at our DR site and possible copy the data there, keeping within our organizations. We will most definitely find out more about Igneous and their local cloud solution come Tech Field Day 12when they present. I encourage you to follow along – I’ll have the live-stream up on my page here, and you can also find it a ton of more information over at the official Tech Field Day 12page! Thanks for reading
