It’s that time of year when it seems like everybody is doing “Top Ten ${WHATEVER} in 2015” or “Predictions for ${INDUSTRY} in 2016” posts. I was feeling left out, hence my jumping on the bandwagon.
Rather than restrict myself to one particular technology or industry, I’m going to make my predictions across the different parts of the IT industry that I see from my particular vantage point. I have predictions about:
Yesterday, Nutanix announced that it had filed Form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Form S-1 is what companies use to proposed creating an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of publicly-traded shares of stock.
Nutanix intends to list its Class A Common Stock under the ticker symbol “NTNX”. The number of shares to be offered or their initial price point hasn’t been determined yet, but Nutanix says that they aim to sell a maximum of $200 Million in shares of stock. The deal is being underwritten by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse.
Nutanix makes a hyperconverged infrastructure appliance. They have OEM partnership deals with both Dell and Lenovo.
Nutanix is most often seen as a competitor to SimpliVity, but they try to paint themselves in a different light. In the filing, Nutanix positions itself as competing with traditional storage vendors and specifically lists EMC, NetApp, and Hitachi Data Systems. Nutanix also calls out VMware as a competitor. You can read the full text of the SEC filing here.
During their most recent fiscal year, Nutanix registered $241 Million in revenue with a net $126 Million loss.
It will be interesting to see if the market is ready to get behind hyperconvergence.
Yesterday, NetApp announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire SolidFire for $870 Million in an all-cash bid.
SolidFire is a privately-held storage company who makes an All-Flash array based on a scale-out architecture. I’m a big fan of both SolidFire and their Element X operating system (available as a software-only option) — I’ve written about them before.
Below I’ll walk through some aspects of the deal and offer my opinions and speculations. I promise they’ll be worth at least as much as you’re paying for them. You can read SolidFire’s official take on it here. My take is completely unofficial. Continue reading
[NOTE: This post has been updated with answers to some of the questions I had at the time of the announcement. The updates are inline, below.]
Today, EMC made some announcements about some new Isilon products that they hope to make Generally Available (GA) in “early 2016”. If you’ve been following Isilon closely like I do, nothing in the announcements will be a big surprise as everything talked about is something the Isilon folks have been talking about in roadmap presentations for a while now.
After presenting more marketing about the Data Lake message (I’ll summarize: Put all your data in one big place. That place is Isilon. That Isilon Data Lake can now (OK, in “early 2016”) be expanded from the Core to the Edge and even to the Cloud”), the announcement covers plans to announce:
I’ll go through each of these, plus more, in some detail below. Continue reading
Today, Dell, Inc. announced that they — along with private-equity firms Silver Lake, MSD Partners, and Temasek — have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire EMC Corporation for $33.15 a share. This price comes out to approximately $67Billion in cash and stock, making it the single largest pure-tech takeover ever.
Yesterday, IBM announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cleversafe. Cleversafe is a manufacturer of object-based storage appliances. Cleversafe positions themselves as a software-based storage solution, but I’ve only ever seen their software available on the hardware appliances they sell.
I’ve been impressed with the ease-of-use and robustness of the Cleversafe platform. I have a few customers using it and they’re very happy with it.
IBM intends to move Cleversafe into their Cloud business unit to assist with on-premises and hybrid cloud solutions. As of this date, no information has been made public on the price of the acquisition.
You can get more details by reading the IBM press release, which is a good read despite their use of “on-premise” instead of the correct “on-premises”…
Yesterday, PernixData announced the General Availability of version 3.0 of FVP. FVP is a software solution that enables the use of host-installed Flash and RAM to accelerate storage performance in a VMware environment. The performance increases that FVP can provide are often quite significant. If you’re not familiar with FVP I wrote an overview of the product back in March when PernixData announced version 2.5.
Since I’ve written an FVP overview before, I’ll skip ahead to talking about what’s new in this version. Continue reading
This week, VMTurbo released version 5.3 of their Operations Manager monitoring / management / automation / Quality of Service (QoS) tool.
Yes, I’ll admit that previous sentence is a little confusing, but Operations Manager has so many features and capabilities packed into it that it defies easy classification.
For those who aren’t familiar with VMTurbo or their Operations Manager, I’ll do an overview of it, then I’ll walk through what’s new in version 5.3. If you’re already familiar with VMTurbo and just want to leap right in, you can download a free trial here. Continue reading
Today, SimpliVity announced three new improvements to their hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution offering. The improvements can categorized as software, hardware, and programatic:
I’ll walk through each of these below. Continue reading
Last week, VMware released version 6.2 of their software-defined networking (SDN) product, NSX. One of the things that’s interesting to me is that VMware no longer refers to NSX as an SDN solution. Instead, they’re playing a bigger game with it and call it “the network virtualization platform for the Software-Defined Data Center” (SDDC). This is in line with VMware’s overall message lately, positioning themselves as an SDDC solution, not just as one for server virtualization.
I’ll walk through what’s in the new release below. Continue reading
