ioFabric releases Vicinity software-defined storage platform for general availability

Toronto Storage-as-a-Service company ioFabric has announced the release of its Vicinity software, which debuted in August 2015, for general availability effective immediately.

ioFabric’s Vicinity software-defined storage (SDS) platform optimizes diverse workloads and unifies existing storage systems with newer infrastructure, including traditional SAN and NAS systems, along with flash and hyperconverged appliances.

Founded in 2013, ioFabric has been funded by private investors and Real Ventures, and the company consists of a group of serial entrepreneurs, including co-founder and chief technology officer Rayan Zachariassen, vice president of marketing Andrew Flint, business development director Nigel Miller, and co-founder and CEO Steven Lamb, all of whom have worked together for the past 20 years, successfully piloting four previous companies to exits.

“The future is about intelligent automated solutions that can do the complex and time-consuming activities that usually require expensive experts and expensive systems,” said ioFABRIC co-founder and CEO Steven Lamb. “Vicinity adds intelligence to any storage, allowing admins to gain agility and data mobility in a cost-optimized manner.”

Breaking down these storage silos to create a unified storage environment frees up more time for IT departments to focus on concurrently managing and optimizing diverse workloads while enabling cross-vendor data mobility, both on-premise and in the cloud.

“I was spending a great deal of time, almost on a daily basis, trying to get the most possible performance out of our NAS units,” said Donald Lopez, IT Manager at InReach. “ioFABRIC Vicinity is extremely simple to deploy and use. The biggest advantage for me was the time I gained in my day by having Vicinity monitor and automatically shift things around in order to get the performance I needed.”

Vicinity is an example of SDS 2.0. Whereas SDS 1.0 was about virtualizing storage, SDS 2.0 is about offering IT professionals a degree of automation and control over how their storage works via a user interface that automatically places active data on high-performance media enabling fast access while pushing lower priority data onto higher capacity, less expensive media.

Applications and products that have emerged since Vicinity’s debut include:

SAN Extender – More life from existing storage by seamlessly extending it with newer technologies while staying within budget.
Migration Solution – Seamlessly migrates data between both old and new storage targets while apps are up and running, eliminating risk and ensuring continuity.
Hyperconverged – Innovates with a software-driven intelligent, resilient, cost-effective application platform that deploys in minutes.
Docker – A micro-converged system providing storage that was designed with Docker in mind: light, agile, scalable and persistent.
Server SAN – Transforms commodity hardware into a distributed, enterprise-class storage platform, while maintaining unique application service objectives.

Last August, ioFabric’s Vicinity won the Most Innovative Enterprise Business Application award at the annual Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, and Enterprise Management Associates also chose ioFABRIC for an “EMA Vendors to Watch” award.

“ioFABRIC Vicinity excels at making storage management efficient, automatically delivering the needed storage resources to meet service-level requirements,” said Jim Miller, Senior Analyst at EMA. “Costly overprovisioning can be eliminated, and overall storage utilization can be increased to its full potential, which means capacity purchases can be delayed while administration chores are reduced.”
For customers, Vicinity’s QoS-driven storage automation drastically reduces storage-related operating expenses (OPEX) and capital expenses (CAPEX).

Vicinity is sold through ioFABRIC’s reseller and distribution channel, supported by its LEaD program, with partners selling Vicinity as licensed software with support or by white-labeling it with additional hardware and/or software.

Vicinity is licensed by capacity under management as an annual software subscription, with site and perpetual licenses available. Vicinity is available through ioFABRIC’s reseller and distribution channel, in addition to pre-built appliances with bundled hardware and software.