Cool Stuff @ Datacenter Ventures

Dateline: Silicon Valley
I went to the Datacenter Ventures conference last week to see what the cool kids are cooking up. There were over 60 presenting companies, ranging from tiny startups looking to raise their first VC dime to companies that have already raised tens of millions, have customers, and aren't looking for money.

Themes I liked: Google-style scalability; commodity hardware; datacenter automation; faster search; enterprise open source. Read on for specifics.

Rumors Lots of speculation about Cisco's Nuova subsidiary. Conventional Wisdom is that Nuova moves beyond the network into the hyper-scale cluster market. Since they own the network market they need to find another growth engine and it has to be something big.

Random observations I liked A couple of people commented that network security is evolving from attempting to lock everything down inside the data center to using the WAN gateway as the security choke point. Doesn't solve the 4 GB flash drive problem, but it will certainly slow data leaks.

Michael Workman of Pillar noted that the rapidly growing markets in China and India can't afford big-iron storage. Another spur to innovation.

Greg McAdoo of Sequoia predicted that the next 5-10 years of storage will be driven by consumers rather than enterprises. I couldn't agree more.

Someone suggested that VMware-style server virtualization is a dead-end, because the bigger data center problem is not slicing one server into many but making many servers look like one. That feels right to me. And just what some of the companies at DV are doing.

Expect to see more startups going the open source route. Venture financing is tight, marketing is expensive, and open source done right gets a startup free attention in the tech community while removing a lot of the concerns customers have about investing in a small company. A couple of good examples below.

Cool Stuff: Honorable Mentions Cleversafe is sounding cooler. It's open source, secure and scalable. They cut through a lot of enterprise worry points: vendor lock in, encryption problems, cost. Check them out.

Qlayer is focused on what they call "commercial data centers". Hosting companies, portals, large e-businesses. They mention "Google-like" but are more modest than Google in one respect: they virtualize a rack of commodity pizzabox servers instead of a whole datacenter. Sounds like a great way to get one's feet wet without betting the farm or one's job.

Njini is a company I've mentioned at StorageMojo.com. Njini's engine puts a wrapper around files, effectively extending their metadata, to automate unstructured data management. These may be the guys that make ILM feasible.

Cassatt and BEA founder Bill Coleman presented their product, Collage. Bill described Collage an infrastructure for service level automation. For example, the last day of the quarter you want incoming orders given the highest priority. You give that policy to Collage and it ensures that all the relevant systems have the resources they need to get the job done. Sounds great, yet there are some details I'm curious about, such as how does Collage know what systems order processing relies on?

PointofData presented their Active Information Platform that indexes both databases and files. They claim AIP produces small indices (~10% the size of common index algorithms) and very fast searches that are more complete than searching the various data silos individually. They used the example of Enron email where they found 30% more hits than the software the lawyers used in discovery.

Appistry's software enables "Application Solution Fabrics" that allow you to take legacy apps and put them on a cluster of low cost hardware. For one customer they took a legacy uniprocessor app and in one day got it running on a cluster of 200 machines. Is that cool?

Coolest Hardware & Software @ Datacenter Ventures So with all the cool stuff mentioned above, what impressed me the most?

Coolest Hardware: Woven Systems Woven Systems is developing a low latency, high port count and low cost 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch. Combining a latency almost as good as Infiniband with Ethernet's universal support and high volume components, Woven is working to ship the universal backplane for hyper-scale cluster apps. Create a mesh with these switches and you've got a powerful and fast fabric for building utility-class infrastructures. Combine with Coraid's AoE architecture and you've got a screaming fast, low cost hyper-scale storage fabric.

Coolest Software: Zmanda Zmanda provides a supported version of Amanda, the 15 year old open source project devoted to data protection. Backup is the most widely used storage software. So why are people voluntarily locking up their data in proprietary, overpriced, cash-cow software that forces them to buy back their data every few years with maintenance fees and minimal "upgrades"? Very cool feature: you don't even need the application to read a Zmanda backup tape or disk. Now that is investment protection that protects your data, not just the vendor's revenue stream.

The wrap-up The VCs seemed pretty downbeat, probably due to the tough IPO market. Yet I saw a lot to like at DV this year. The key takeaway: a bunch of people working on making computing more scalable and cheaper than ever using the lessons from internet data centers. That is a very good thing for all of us. If you'd like to read more about DV, check out my website StorageMojo.com.