Okay, so it is official, Storage Alchemy LLC is off the ground and running. Right now I am helping some folks in the 'next generation' data protection space with messaging and go to market as well as marketing, social and sales enablement. As most of you know, data protection is my forte and am excited to be, once again, working on 'next generation' data protection.
The other project I am working on and am very excited about is a company based in Boston, MA called VMTurbo. I am excited for a few reasons. First, a little bit out of the storage space. While customers have a lot of the same challenges from servers to storage, and the growth of virtual servers is driving chaos across the environment, at the end of the day, IT needs to be able to deliver application service levels to the consumer. This is not unlike storage adding services such as teiring (from HDD to SSD) to help with that - so very similar results required, two different approaches and I believe VMTurbo offers customers a better, less expensive way to help deliver SLAs. Second, and perhaps the most important, the people. The energy in the office at VMTurbo is second to none. It is an exciting place to be. VMTurbo uses the "velocity marketing" model. Sales teams have "buses". There are six sellers to a bus, a manager and a technical person. The folks are on the phone constantly talking to customers who have virtual environments that are over provisioned, and applications not meeting their services levels. The music is playing and everyone is genuinely excited to be working for a company that adds value to its customers and is a solid product. It reminds me of my days at Parametric Technology or PTC in the early 90's.
VMTurbo is a solution that delivers Intelligent Workload Management for virtual environments. The solution supports multiple hypervisors including: VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen, and KVM. Now you can read all of that on their web site - but let me boil it down. There are 3 value props that I see:
- Delivers SLAs to your applications - allows you to make sure your applications are delivering the performance they need to the consumers of the application
- Ensures you are not over provisioning servers and storage in order to meet your SLAs - so it saves you capital expense
- Can fully automates the management of your virtual infrastructure - can actually take action and move VMs around the environment, in an intelligent manner, based on analytics, removing the operational expense
The way the technology works is pretty ingenious. The software treats the underlying hardware resources as a marketing place and based on your policies, determines if the VM can "afford" to move and leverage a new set of resources. It is a pretty amazing way to think about workload balancing.
As customers look to add more applications to their virtual infrastructure, one of the big inhibitors is understanding if the application run with the required performance it needs to meet the business objectives. VMTurbo allows you to do planning to see if you can add applications to the environment and what kind of an effect it will have. Also, if you are thinking about adding a physical resource, VMTurbo can tell you what kind of an effect this will have and what additional applications you could add to the environment if you had added resources.
At the end of the day, the software adds huge value, is priced to add significant value, and is a really cool company. To give you an idea on how cool - the marketing team is tweeting out #vHaiku's and encouraging tweeters in IT to put together their best IT Haiku - doesn't have to be VMTurbo related - just IT related - check out the latest one...
Stay tuned, I am helping the company to build OEMs and Partners who would like to be able to deliver the value props I stated above to their clients. I'll keep you posted. You may even see a #vHaiku from me...