Some days ago (June 3, 2014), Infinio has announced a change in executive board with an important new entry: Scott Davis, former VMware CTO (storage and end-user computing divisions), joins Infinio as CTO. Infinio founder Vishal Misra (previous CTO), moves to the newly created role of Chief Scientist. Misra is also a professor in the Computer Science department at Columbia University.
Infinio has a really interesting storage acceleration product (see this post for the 1.0 version, but actually we are at 1.2 version) with a really innovative approach. Let’s see how this changes will accelerate Infinio company.
“I am pleased to be joining such an innovative team and company. Infinio’s distributed, content-based architecture is a real game-changer,” Davis said. “This unique approach enables a transparent, non-disruptive platform to solve many problems for the IT administrator. Today, Infinio is focused on a radically efficient server-side storage cache that is optimized for RAM, but there are many other potential applications. I’m excited to be part of defining the vision and moving it forward.”
“Today, Infinio is focused on storage acceleration for VMware, and virtual desktop deployments are a key growth market,” said Infinio Co-founder and CEO Arun Agarwal. “As such, there simply isn’t a more ideal CTO than Scott to complement our already seasoned executive team. He will leverage deep domain knowledge and unique technical acumen to take our initial market success, fueled by Vishal’s work dating all the way back to Columbia, into a highly scalable, market-leading platform.”
I have also had a short but interesting Q&A session with Scott Davis. So, huge congrats for this new role, and best whishes in your new journey.
Q: “With the new CTO from VMware how (of if) will change the strategy at Infinio?”
A: One of the things that attracted me to Infinio isn’t technology at all; it is their business model. What I’ve learned from VMware and other companies is you need to make it really easy to consume your products. Infinio is a pioneer in what I call software-defined storage services, which is all about delivering software that is not disruptive. So I don’t want to change the strategy, but rather, build on it.
The company has great potential to do more than what you see in the first product. Server-side caching is interesting and has value for customers, but I’m interested in helping the company take this non-disruptive business model and this underlying content-based cache technology forward to do even more.
What I see going forward here is the ability to seamlessly, as a service, apply the content based cache as a scalable virtual directory enabling a new level of transparent storage virtualization and associated value added capabilities. You’ll see us adapt this engine and apply it to broader storage platforms and broader workloads, and to other things than just storage acceleration. Things like de-dupe, data encryption and various cloud technologies. For cloud to advance, particularly hybrid clouds in data centers, there needs to be efficient mechanisms to access data associated with the allocations.
Q: “Considering also the past experience before VMware (I have used Virtual Iron before the Oracle acquisition :) ), do you have some future plans also to build solutions for other hypervisors?”
A: The core Infinio engine runs today as a virtual appliance and hence could fairly straightforwardly be adapted to other hypervisor platforms. Like any early stage company, we’re focused first on where we can have the greatest impact and reach the most prospective customers with our solution. Right now, that’s VMware vSphere, so that is the first hypervisor we support. We also work quite well with XenDesktop running on ESXi, however, and that is a great use case for Infinio Accelerator. As market adoption of other hypervisors grows, and customers ask for it, we’re open to supporting other hypervisors in the future.
Q: “Or just work tightly with VMware to build more solutions for this platform (like something for iSCSI protocol)”
A: Support for block storage protocols, including iSCSI, is something our customers are asking for today, so it is naturally in our nearer term roadmap. Adding block support will immediately make our solution useful across a larger segment of the VMware customer base, and will help us better support multi-protocol environments. Stay tuned for more news there.
Andrea Mauro
Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.
