Maxta Updates Hyper-Converged Platform

Looking to make it simpler to manage hyper-converged systems Maxta today unveiled MxInsight, a set of tools that provides access to historical reporting, enhanced policy management, and quality of service (QoS) management for storage devices embedded inside the platform.

In addition, Maxta also announced support for Kilo, the latest update to the OpenStack cloud management framework. Maxta says it has developed both Nova and Cinder drivers for OpenStack with full integration with all Kilo features.

Finally, Maxta unfurled MxCloudConnect, a remote call home capability that can be used to proactively deliver maintenance and support notifications.

Based on Intel processors, Maxta CEO Yoram Novick says the Maxta platform is unique in that it can run any hypervisor in a way that allows IT organizations to scale compute and storage up or out independently of one another.

“What’s been missing is the storage side of the equation,” says Novick. “Maxta is the missing link for the software defined data center in a box.”

MxInsight extends those capabilities by providing insights into both real-time performance and capacity utilization via a unified user interface, while at the same time making it possible for IT administrators to set policies such as replication factors, data rebuild priority, and compute/storage affinity at the virtual machine level.

Locked in battle with system vendors that are several times its size, Maxta is making a case for maintaining server and storage independence in a hyper-converged world. Instead of having to pre-configure systems and hope for the best, Novick says the Maxta platform can be more easily adjusted to support the compute and storage requirements of application workloads that tend to change over time.

Market research firms such as Technology Business Research (TBR) are forecasting that a major shift in underway towards these types of platforms. By 2018, TBR estimates that converged infrastructure will worth $19 billion.

Whether those predictions will pan out, of course remains to be seen. Maxta, which counts Intel among its investors, is clearly betting that not only it will, but that the shift to hyper-converged systems inside the data center will lead to traditional server vendors being upended by relative upstarts such as Maxta.

Naturally, it may take a few years yet for the shift to hyper-converged systems to become a new everyday reality inside the data center, especially when you consider how entrenched systems and storage administrators currently are in their respective domains. But as is often the case a better economic model for deploying integrated sets of servers and storage resources may yet wind up changing roles inside the data center whether administrators like it or not.