Multi-site, multi-cloud data fabric promises cost-effective business continuity

ioFabric has been delivering data management software through its network of resellers and distributors since 2013 and entered the New Zealand and Australia markets last year.

Founded by an executive team that has worked together for over 20 years, ioFabric's flagship product, Vicinity, is a multi-site, multi-cloud data fabric that aims to ensure storage is always available and protected.

Vicinity version 3.0 has been released, and ioFabric claims it offers complete data protection and availability as well as industry-unique cost optimisation features.

Vicinity incorporates existing and new storage assets, using artificial intelligence to ensure applications reach their required protection, availability, capacity, performance, and cost requirements.

Vicinity supports applications running on legacy servers, commodity hardware, VMs, containers, and clouds. By pooling storage together, Vicinity creates an automated data fabric that delivers protection, capacity and performance requirements across all storage, sites, and clouds.

ioFabric's vendor-neutral data fabric allows any hardware or cloud to be easily added or removed from service.

"With an ever-increasing amount of imaging data to store and manage, it's imperative that we have a solution in place that provides us with the protection we need for long-term backup storage," comments Peter Washburn, system administrator at Technicare Imaging.

"With ioFabric Vicinity, we determine what our storage requirements are based on business value and ioFabric automatically meets those objectives simply and easily, ensuring business continuity that is cost-optimised.

"We get all the data protection and availability that we need without any of the headaches typically faced in planning and managing storage.

IoFabric says version 3.0 implements a branch of artificial intelligence called swarm intelligence that automatically uses the lowest cost storage while ensuring that each application's requirements are met and maintained.

Moreover, policy management features allow data to be placed and moved based on usage, data activity, and cost.

Greg Wyman, VP Asia Pacific, ioFabric, comments "The one message that resonates with all our customers and prospects is cost optimisation: Simply set the performance (IOPS or latency) objectives for an application and by ticking a box, and the lowest cost storage will be used to deliver the requested performance objectives.

"Data will move off expensive SAN or NAS spinning disks to less expensive commodity SSD or flash, which delivers exponentially higher performance at substantially lower cost.

Wyman says, as a result, the business advantage increases as stale data is automatically moved out of SSD to less expensive high capacity, low cost spinning disk or cloud, thus freeing up that SSD or flash for other applications.

The ioFabric Data Fabric identifies and self-heals 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, ioFabric says business continuity is protected from disaster or failure.

Vicinity also aims to provide a high level of data durability and availability against ransomware attacks with its incremental, immutable snapshot and snap-copy technologies.

"Managing storage has long been a balancing act of trying to maximise protection and availability in the face of increasing costs and complexity," says ioFabric CEO and co-founder Steven Lamb.

"Why put up with the headaches that come with worrying about how you're going to maximise performance and add capacity while staying within your existing budget?

Lamb concludes, "With ioFabric Data Fabric, we've simplified the process of data management by allowing organizations to focus on their business objectives and leave the details of the underlying infrastructure to us.