ioFABRIC is the hall of mirrors of the data storage world. While there is at least one original version present (that would be you, looking in the mirrors), there are numerous copies of yourself evident in virtuality.
That’s the way the Toronto-based company handles enterprise data: It keeps originals safe and then makes plenty of copies available on a virtual basis so that a business doesn’t falter if something were to happen to the power supply, data center or backup data center.
ioFABRIC on Aug. 22 launched a new version of its main product, Vicinity. Version 3.0 is a multi-site, multi-cloud data fabric designed to ensure complete data protection and availability with new cost-optimization features.
Customers running Vicinity generally make the transition from traditional multi-silo storage to a continuously available, protected and evergreen data fabric. Vicinity doesn’t require buying any new hardware; it incorporates existing and new storage hardware and uses artificial intelligence built into the platform to ensure that applications reach their required protection, availability, capacity, performance and cost requirements.
Like Having a 24/7 Storage Admin
So Vicinity is like having a storage admin residing in the system, 24/7.
“The cost of disaster recovery is a thing of the past,” Product Manager Nicholas Baron told eWEEK. “Your data always has to be available; it always has to be on. You need a storage environment where you have real-time access data, no matter if you have issues in your data center, or in your disaster recovery data center, or if you have storage in the cloud. Your compute needs to follow that data, no matter if a host or rack is down—your business can’t stop running.
“So we believe that by having a virtual storage environment, where you have multiple copies of that data—that we call live instances—you can connect any of them and you’re getting the same data real time at any of those live instances.”
ioFABRIC Vicinity is vendor-neutral and supports applications running on legacy servers, commodity hardware, VMs, containers and clouds. By pooling storage, Vicinity creates an automated data fabric that delivers protection, capacity and performance requirements across all storage, sites, and clouds. ioFABRIC’s data fabric allows any hardware or cloud to be added or removed from service.
ioFABRIC’s evergreen secret-sauce tech aims to eliminate migrations, storage silos and forklift upgrades–all extreme pains in the rear for storage admins. With no vendor lock-in and seamless live instances between sites and clouds, enterprises gain the business value of storage-as-a-service from their traditional infrastructure, Baron said.
Uses Swarm AI to Optimize Cost Saving
A key new feature in Vicinity 3.0 is a set of service-level objectives that promote cost-optimization across the entire data fabric. ioFABRIC uses an open-source branch of artificial intelligence called Swarm that automatically uses the lowest-cost storage while ensuring that each application’s requirements are met and maintained. Policy management features allow data to be placed and moved based on usage, data activity, and cost, Baron said.
Baron said that the ioFABRIC Data Fabric identifies and self-heals itself around disk and network failures, using resilient live instances of data placed across nodes, sites, or clouds. With the high levels of protection that Vicinity provides, business continuity is ensured from disaster or failure, he said.
Vicinity also provides a high level of data durability and availability against ransomware attacks with its incremental, immutable snapshot and snapcopy technologies, Baron said.
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