The world of enterprise infrastructure has been undergoing a fairly dramatic renaissance over the past several years. Where hardware once dictated datacenter capabilities, intelligent software is now the key component in defining and building the new datacenter. For example, you may have previously bought a server by specifying its hardware characteristics, but you can now define a server through software by way of virtualization. As the datacenter continues its transformation — from a static, hardware-based environment to one that is defined by software — the result will be an agile, cost-effective, enterprise-class infrastructure for next-gen computing.
To date, the major innovations in enterprise infrastructure have occurred in the compute and networking layers of the datacenter. VMware transformed the x86 hardware landscape through server virtualization, and more recently, Nicira (acquired by VMware) redefined networking by creating a software framework for networking. Storage is the last big piece of the datacenter that is ripe for disruption. While there have been recent innovations in new storage technologies like flash, storage architectures remain hardware-defined and have not changed fundamentally over the past 20 years.
Through Convergent.io, the potential of the software-defined datacenter will be fully realized — at last — with software-defined storage networking.
The team at Convergent.io is uniquely qualified to usher in a new world of software for storage. The founders have deep technical backgrounds and have been part of previous transformative trends in storage and virtualization. The three co-founders are infrastructure rock stars. Ramana Jonnala started his career at VERITAS where he helped to define the pre-eminent storage architecture of the past 20 years. Ramana was also instrumental at XenSource, which was acquired by Citrix, where he led a variety of virtualization initiatives. Keir Fraser and Andy Warfield have deep virtualization and storage backgrounds. Keir was one of the inventors of Xen and Andy has produced a mountain of storage code for virtualized environments. The team could not be better suited to take on the new storage networking opportunity.
As someone who has worked with this team for many years, I am thrilled to work with Convergent.io and the superb founding team.
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