VeloBit - (acquired by WD)
Founded in September 2010, VeloBit, Inc. develops software that delivers an
order-of-magnitude improvement in storage price-performance.
VeloBit
is pioneering a new approach that can be used with any Solid State Disk (SSD) to
deliver industry-leading performance at a lower cost. The solution allows
customers to deploy SSD without changing their applications or primary storage,
thus preserving their existing investments in data protection and storage
management. The company is headquartered in Boxborough, MA and backed by
Longworth Venture Partners and Fairhaven Capital. To learn more, visit
www.velobit.com.
see also:- Velobit's
SSD Blog ,
VeloBit
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com
Where are we now
with SSD software? - (And how did we get into this mess?)
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in June 2011 -
VeloBit
announced
it had received Series A funding..
In August 2011 -
VeloBit published a
report
(pdf) which talked about the company's unlaunched (at that time) technology.
It said - that VeloBit's approach to SSD caching is designed to work with legacy
interfaces and
SATA and
SAS SSDs - instead of
relying on PCIe SSDs.
In
May 2012 - VeloBit
released
1.1 of its SSD caching software for Linux called HyperCache. (VMware and
Windows versions are in Beta.
In July 2013 -
WD announced it had
acquired VeloBit |
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| WD catches VeloBit |
Editor:- July 10, 2013 - For the past 15 years
from what I've seen - the ultimate business aim of most storage software
companies has been - to get
acquired.
That's
been even more true in the SSD
software market - wherein frankly - most companies don't even pretend to
invest in sustainable business models.
In the past 2 years - an SSD
software company has been
acquired every 2
months (on average) and the latest company sustaining that trend is VeloBit which has been
acquired by WD
for deployment by its subsidiary HGST - it was announced
today.
In case you've forgotten why this trend started - software
makes it easier to sell more SSDs and the ROI from a vendor's point of view is
better than doubling the sales force. That's why valuations (not disclosed in
this case yet) have been so disconnected from the financial outlook of the ISV's
themselves. See also:-
SSD ASAPs | | |
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| 60 seconds to make your
SSDs accelerate even faster |
Editor:- May 8, 2012 - VeloBit today
released
1.1 of its SSD caching software for Linux called HyperCache. (VMware and
Windows versions are in Beta.
Editor's comments:- I spoke to
VeloBit's CEO, Duncan McCallum
about the company and the new product.
Like many other SSD ASAP
software packages HyperCache ducks the problem of how to manage
high availability
environments by effectively only caching host reads and bypassing the caching
SSD when doing host writes.
Duncan said the software is efficient in
its use of host resources. It takes up less than 3% of host server CPU cycles
and about 2% of RAM (compared to the capacity of the attached SSD cache).
How
is VeloBit's caching software different?
In use - the company says its
content locality caching
uses the signatures of the data patterns which already are used
frequently and have lots of references in order to predict and prioritize the
caching of similar looking data. In that respect - the cache manager is
learning something which is unique to that apps environment rather than simply
caching blocks based on where they are address-wise relative to the current hot
data.
In its business model - Duncan said he wanted to make VeloBit's
software easy to adopt and install via web marketing. A design goal was to make
HyperCache capable of being installed in under 10 minutes. He said the new
launch version typically installs in under 60 seconds!
VeloBit has
tested their software with SSDs in various form factors from leading companies
including OCZ,
Fusion-io and
Virident.
Duncan
commented that when it came to
PCIe SSDs - they found
their software produced the best results with Virident - which he said
produced the fastest SSD caching results of any SSD they had yet tested.
Other
aspects of VeloBit's offering (to me) look similar to many other previous SSD
software products:- internal compression, write attenuation, real-time dedupe
and pricing on a per CPU basis.
With so many companies vying for the
same customer share of mind the thing which stands out for me is the 60 seconds
install time. |
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Even allowing for a degree of future software
bloat - the slowest part about acquiring new SSD ASAP software could soon
become typing in your credit card details. | | | |
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