Israeli firm Stratoscale has announced Symphony, a software product designed to manage a collection of x86 servers together as a single cloud infrastructure. This brings yet another player to the growing hyperconvergence market.
This is Stratoscale’s first product since the company formed in late 2014. It bills Symphony as a hyperconverged software layer. Typical converged products are deployed just like traditional infrastructure and managed together; the storage, compute and network devices are separate, and simply managed from within a shared console.
Hyperconverged infrastructure is the next step in infrastructure deployment and management; the hardware components are both managed and consumed together, according to the company’s executives. The key difference is whether storage comes from an attached device (as in converged) or comes from the local disk within the servers (as in hyperconverged).
This idea isn’t new. VMware Inc. has long advocated the idea of the software-defined datacentre with its EVO:RAIL system. SimpliVity offers its OmniStack software, while Nutanix sells its HCI software. Both of these can be packaged on partners’ servers.
Stratoscale maintains that while it may be occasionally compared to the larger hyperconverged players, on paper its use cases are focused on test/dev and private cloud. Consequently, it finds itself compared to pure Openstack and public cloud services in practical use, the firm said.
While the tool is proprietary, it uses Openstack tools including Neutron (for networking), and supports many of OpenStack’s APIs. The firm expects to integrate with public services like Amazon Web Services next year, extending its API functionality.
The Symphony software supports a range of virtual machines, running on Linux and Windows, and will also handle kernel virtual machine (KVM) hypervisors, which use a virtualization system baked into the Linux kernel back in 2007.
Symphony provides a unified pool of storage, said the company, adding that CIOs can begin simply and add capacity as they go. The software works on a subscription basis, charging customers by the core.
The firm has focused on seeding the US market during last year, but plans to tackle the Canadian market in 2016.
