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Primary Data
is developing data virtualization solutions that transform datacenter
architectures by matching data demands with storage supply across a single
global dataspace. With Primary Data, applications, servers, and clients gain the
ability to transparently access data while it is intelligently migrated between
direct-attached, network-attached, private and public cloud storage to deliver
unprecedented manageability, performance, and efficiency. The Primary Data
platform features an intelligent policy engine that automatically places data on
the right resources across file, block, and object storage to meet evolving
application requirements in real time. Visit us at www.primarydata.com.
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Primary Data and the
Top SSD Companies list
where are we
heading with memory intensive systems?
what were
the big SSD memory architecture ideas in 2016? |
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who's who in SSD? - Primary Data
by
Zsolt Kerekes.
editor - StorageSearch.com
- November 2014
Primary
Data, founded in 2013 and with operations in Salt Lake City, Silicon Valley
and Israel - is the most ambitious storage software startup I have ever
encountered.
The company - which has $63 million in funding at the
time of writing this - emerged from stealth mode this month.
What
Primary Data's platform offers - is an architecture for transforming 20 to 30
years of inherited data market archeology into the scalable and flexible modern
world.
It's a bigger step than
simply replacing
hard drives with SSDs. But it's part of the same story. |
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| New SSD based
software will demolish many limits you thought were set in stone - such as the
size of server memory and the restrictions of how you can redeploy and migrate
data which is siloed in different legacy systems. |
| the Top SSD Companies -
2014 Q3 | | |
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| another $13 million for
Primary Data |
Editor:- February 17, 2014 - A
report
in SiliconAngle.com - shared from the linkedin page of Primary Data's CMO
- Rick White -
says that Primary Data (which is still in stealth mode) has secured another
$13 million funding - bringing its total funding up to $63 million.
Editor's
comments:- there's a lot of speculation about what this new company is
doing.
Primary Data's founders changed the enterprise server market
with their previous startup
Fusion-io (founded in
2006).
Before Fusion-io - server makers didn't want to talk about
SSDs.
After Fusion-io - no server maker could launch a new
enterprise server product line without including SSD acceleration as a standard
option. (Because Fusion-io signed up most of the key server oems as "PCIe SSD inside"
which made all server makers
hostage to the
fortunes of SSD).
When Primary Data launches its products later
this year - what will its products look like?
From the hints dropped
so far - it seems that
Primary Data will
aim to shake up the enterprise architecture world with a new platform which
leverages SSD enhanced servers as the worker ants in a new software scheme
which spans everything from the local cluster to the
cloud.
See
also:- VCs and SSDs,
enterprise SSD silos,
SSD software | | |
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Rick and
Dave's new stealth mode enterprise SSD company
Primary Data gets $50
million initial funding |
Editor:- November 11, 2013 - you may be asking
yourself - how does a company founded less than 6 months ago - and which
doesn't say anything much on its web site - manage to attract $50 million in
its first external funding round?
The answer is given by one of these
investors, Ping Li
at Accel Partners - who - in the recent
funding press release - said Primary Data's
biggest asset is its team of recognized pioneers in the storage industry. Their
technical strength and remarkable experience in successfully bringing disruptive
technologies to market will help to solve a number of data virtualization and
mobility problems.
- who's Primary Data?
- Primary Data, founded in 2013 and
with operations in Salt Lake City, Silicon Valley and Israel - is developing
next generation data virtualization and mobility technologies to manage how
information is stored and shared globally.
- what are they up to? - (best guess)
SSD software which
will change the economics of
cloud servers and
storage by disruptively improving the utilization
efficiency and
performance of virtualized apps servers.
Editor's comments:-
now if you've been researching this - you'll see that I haven't actually told
you any new details about Primary Data which you couldn't already have learned
from seeing the public statements which the company has dispersed in various
places on the web.
One of the peculiarities about stealth mode
companies is they do need to talk to people to get things done - but they also
need to control the flow of information about what they reveal for various
reasons - not least of which are:-
- they don't want to alert competitors
- they might change the details and direction of what they do
Last
week I was talking to the founder of yet another stealth mode SSD company -
whose web site says a little bit more than that of Primary Data - but I can't
say who he is yet either.
I can tell you what he told me, however,
which is this...
He had to launch his minimalist web site some time
before he would have ideally liked to - because some of his early customers
have policies which mean they can't make payments to a company which doesn't
have a web site.
Going back to Primary Data - I think I can safely
say this.
I confidently predict that when Primary Data does formally
exit stealth mode and launch its new products - it will join an elite band
of SSD companies (Fusion-io,
SandForce,
DensBits and
Skyera) in entering
the Top SSD Companies
List within a single quarter. (If not before). | | |
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| the impact
of file metadata on applications performance |
Editor:- October 5, 2016 - The interdependency
of storage software,
physical storage and applications performance is one of the constantly recurring
themes in the SSD era.
When you change one variable - such as the
assumption that storage has a single type of characteristic - the old west 6
shooter rotational model which underpinned all data IO requests in legacy
systems software - to a faster machine gun model - with futuristic
options verging towards the light saber and photonic data shots - thanks to
solid state storage - then data systems architects have more degrees of freedom
around which they can optimise system effectiveness.
A recent blog
from Primary Data
-
Accelerate
Applications by Offloading File Metadata Operations - gives a top level view
of why it can be useful to offload file metadata operations from storage
arrays. Among other things the blog reminds us that...
"Storage
array CPUs can spend significant processing cycles keeping up with all the
metadata operations such as managing file permissions and tracking open and
close events that might otherwise be used for processing data I/O. In some
cases, this can bring both storage and client application performance to a
crawl." ...read
the blog | | |
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| Primary Data emerges
from stealth |
Editor:- November 19, 2014 - Primary Data -
the most ambitious storage software startup I have ever encountered - today
emerged from stealth mode - with 2 announcements.
- 1st announcement
The
news
that Steve Wozniak
has joined the company as Chief Scientist.
Wozniak who cofounded
Apple in
1976 - elevated the general
visibility of fledgling Fusion-io
when he joined that company in the Chief Scientist role
February 2009.
The impact of this was assessed and captured in a
2011 blog by Woody Hutsell
- who at that time was working at erstwhile enterprise SSD competitor -
TMS. Woody wrote at
that time (2011)...
"I used Google trends data to see if there was
an inflection point for Fusion-IO and I found it. The inflection point was their
hiring of Steve Wozniak. What a brilliant publicity move... I spent a lot of
time trying to figure out how to create a similar event at TMS. I thought if we
could hire "Elvis" we would have a chance."
Today (in
November 2014) Primary Data's cofounder - Rick White said...
"With Woz on the team along with Lance and
David,
we now have the band back together, and I'm amped to be reunited at Primary
Data."
- 2nd announcement
The
unveiling
of Primary Data's first product - a
storage virtualization
platform that will be able to virtualize, migrate, manage, coalesce and
reprioritize vari-natured and variously siloed enterprise data - which has
been trapped in legacy containers - into a single usable global dataspace.
The
company's press release says - "Just as server virtualization decoupled
compute from the underlying server infrastructure, the Primary Data
virtualization platform decouples application data from the underlying storage
infrastructure to bring dynamic data mobility to the enterprise for the first
time. Data virtualization gives applications, servers, and clients the ability
to transparently access data while it is intelligently migrated between
direct-attached, network-attached, private and public cloud storage across a
single global dataspace to deliver unprecedented manageability, performance, and
efficiency." Editor's comments:- Primary Data - which was
founded in May 2013
by the same people who created Fusion-io - and which has already received $63
million in funding -
is in my view set on a course which could lead to it becoming one of the top
10 enterprise software companies in the next 5 years - and one of the top 5
storage software companies much sooner than that.
I had gained a good
idea of what Primary Data might be doing from various conversations I had
with the cofounders (Rick White and David David Flynn) during the past year -
when I approached them to ask for feedback and a sanity check about some
forward looking SSD articles I had written.
This is the kind of
thing I do - with SSD market visionaries - when I know I'm thinking about a
topic which is placed so far ahead in time that maybe only a handful of other
people on the planet are thinking about it - and when I want to be sure
that I haven't fallen off the edge (of possible realities). This is so as not
to lead you - my readers - too far astray when you read these articles. Although
I can't
always guarantee that.
So when I spoke recently to David Flynn,
cofounder and CTO - Primary Data) and Lance Smith
CEO - Primary Data - about the company's exit from stealth and its product -
I had already got there by fast forwarding from what I knew before.
Here's
what you need to know now.
- Primary Data isn't in the
SSD market.
Although
having said that - its core technology is predicated on the general market
availability of low cost flash acceleration in servers.
So why write
about them here?
Well - in the same way that
all enterprise
data intersects SSDs - so too do some software products intersect more
frequently with SSDs than others. Common examples being Oracle and VMware and
various operating systems.
If my guess is right - Primary Data - will
join that elite set of software infrastructure products which are commonly
encountered in the enterprise.
- What's the availability of the product?
Primary Data is testing an
early version of the product in selected customer sites.
These are
organizations which have a huge amount of data which they would like to be able
to leverage more conveniently. Example industries mentioned to me being :-
semiconductor design, and oil exploration.
When I asked - when will
people be able to generally buy the product - I was told - the back end of of
the 2nd half of 2015.
- What problems does the product solve?
Typically enterprise data is
"trapped" in silos - which relate to the applications or the brands
of storage system the data was born in. Although it's theoretically possible to
extricate this data for other purposes or to migrate it to storage which has
different characteristics - the processes for doing this are risky and time
consuming - due to interpendencies between applications and the metadata. As a
result - data is less flexible and business opportunities for data reuse are
restricted by the migration costs.
Primary Data's platform will
enable user organizations to manage their data more flexibly - by decoupling
the data from its original physical origins (DAS, NAS, SAN, cloud etc) and
placing it in a globally managed virtualized storage space - which eliminates
the barriers of interdependence between data, and particular storage products
and applications.
- Impressions of the architecture.
I knew from my earliest
conversations with the founders that Primary Data's product is very ambitious in
scope
It has to be able to reach into and understand every type of
popular enterprise storage system - and be capable of extracting the data and
creating new customer value by understanding the relationships between data,
applications and user policies.
At the center of the product is a data
hypervisor - which provides abtractions for every control characteristic you
might want to attach to data.
David Flynn told me that when you ingest
data from one type of legacy storage and migrate it to another - the code which
does the left hand side of the work doesn't need to know what the ultimate right
hand side is going to be. These translation processes into and out from the
hypervisor to supported real storage products are designed to be decoupled. I
realized that will make it easier for Primary Data to add support for many
additional storage classes and applications - while eliminating the risk that
some migration sets might inherit different capabilities than others.
Patents?
Early in the life of the company - when I asked about likely timescales for
getting any product to market - I learned that - as for many startups - an
important milestone was getting patent applications filed. That's why one of the
company's earliest hires was a full time patent person.
- The big idea.
Data in the enterprise today looks and behaves the
way it does because all products (systems and applications) have inherited
architecture and ways of managing data from decades of market evolution.
If
you were starting to design to design a data processing architecture today -
which encompasses the big ideas about SSDs, the cloud, virtualizing servers and
virtualizing storage - you would do things a different way. It would be more
flexible and enable you to have more freedom about how to repurpose and
prioritize data.
Clearly it's unfeasible to throw away old
applications and old infrastructure.
What Primary Data's platform
offers - is an architecture for transforming 20 to 30 years of inherited data
market archeology into the scalable and flexible modern world.
It's a
bigger step than simply replacing hard drives with SSDs. But it's part of the
same story. | | |
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