Many SMBs and remote-based enterprises are facing soaring infrastructure costs.
On this episode of DevOps Dialogues, host Mitch Ashley is joined by StorMagic’s Chief Product Officer Bruce Kornfeld, to look at the evolving landscape of virtualization and HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure).
Their discussion covers:
- The current state of virtualization technology and its market implications
- Challenges businesses face with traditional virtualization solutions
- Advantages of alternative HCI and virtualization technologies compared to VMware
- StorMagic’s role in providing innovative virtualization and cost-effective solutions with its SvHCI platform
- Future trends in HCI and virtualization technology
Learn more at StorMagic and download the Futurum report: Equipping Modern IT Infrastructure Strategies with StorMagic SvHCI for Enterprise Edge and SMBs.
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Transcript:
Mitch Ashley: Hey, everybody. Welcome to DevOps Dialogues. We’re glad that you’ve joined us today. We talk a lot about different topics around software, whether it’s in the core or at the edge, and combination of hardware and infrastructure, and we’re having that conversation today. I’m joined by Bruce Kornfeld, who is Chief Product Officer with StorMagic. Good to be talking with you, Bruce.
Bruce Kornfeld: Thanks, Mitch. Appreciate you having me on.
Mitch Ashley: You bet. Give us a little window into what StorMagic does. I can imagine what your role is as Chief Product Officer.
Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, so at StorMagic, we’re all about helping our customers run applications and store data at their small sites. That’s usually enterprise edge, the edge of the enterprise, IoT. It’s small business, medium business, but anywhere outside of the cloud, outside of a data center where they just need to run applications and store data reliably. And that’s pretty much what we do.
Mitch Ashley: Very nice. Very much a growing part of the edge, if you will. So much more moving to it.
Bruce Kornfeld: For sure. There just seems to be a lot of activity and chatter and movement in that space, and I’m sure we’ll dive into that at some point here today.
Mitch Ashley: Well, yeah, let’s go right with it. So I’d love to talk with you a little bit about some of the marketing or market changing conditions. One of the things that’s certainly gotten a lot of attention is what’s happened around Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, pricing and restructuring of products. That’s raised some costs for some companies, some users, causing them to look at other alternatives. Another factor might be just, as we were talking about, the technology has really come a long way and the networking and really being able to deliver capabilities at the edge. What’s your perspective on that?
Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, I think I’d say there’s two big market things going on right now. One of them is what you mentioned, Broadcom, and the other one I would say is I’m not sure the exact way to put it, but it has to do with cloud. There’s been a massive focus on running applications and storing data in cloud over the last 10, 20 years, and we’re seeing a lot of activity around rethinking that strategy. But to go back to your first point about Broadcom, yeah, it’s been quite the last 12 months. It’s been about a year since Broadcom announced the details of what they did with the VMware product line. And I’ll just say it’s thrown the whole industry in an uproar. I sometimes use the word chaos because it has been quite chaotic. And I’m sure that Broadcom had some very smart financial people making these decisions, and financially, they’re probably right. They probably did a really good job. They have some happy customers that are the big ones. Their stock price is up over the last year significantly.
From a financial perspective, they made some good decisions. With that, there’s a section of the market that are large companies that have lots of small sites, ROBO, remote office/branch office edge, whatever term you want to use, and there’s small and medium enterprises that are not part of that happiness because their prices have gone up significantly and they’ve been forced to buy bundles of products and features that they don’t need. And there’s a lot of frustration out there. So yeah, that’s a big one right now for us. We have a lot of end users that are asking us, “How can you help us migrate from a VMware environment to something else?” And that’s been a big piece of what’s been going on and driving our roadmap.
Mitch Ashley: I see a lot of product introductions centered around that happening, whether it’s at modernization or moving to the edge. Lots of interesting things. Well, talk about some of the edge use cases for SMB enterprise organizations. You mentioned ROBO, that’s a clear one. I can think back to my banking days with branch banking and pushing that out to the edge as well, but that’s just one scenario.
Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, so I’d say there’s lots of them. I mean, there’s lots of them. And I would say the least common denominator across all of these, and I’m going to talk about on these use cases, is that they require uptime, they require performance. They don’t have a lot of IT resource, but they’ve made a decision that a set of applications cannot be run in the cloud. And we can have that conversation as well, but they’ve made an architectural decision that says, “I need onsite. It’s a small site. I don’t have IT staff. I need to run applications here.” And typically, what we see is they’re running everything on a couple of servers as low cost as they can get it. So they’re running all of their local applications. Of course, there’s cloud connection. They’re sending data to the cloud. Everyone does it slightly differently. They’re either sending data to a cloud or a data center. But running of applications, storing data, decision making is happening locally for lots of reasons.
So use cases we see, clearly retail’s a big one that we see a lot of. There’s a lot of retailers out there that have hundreds and thousands of sites. Retail is a big vertical for us where they run all of their applications, they’re running point of sale, inventory management, customer experience, their kitchen management systems for ticketing, everything runs locally because they just can’t depend on the cloud to run all of that. So retail is a big one that we see a lot of this activity. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s medium enterprises and small enterprises, maybe they have one location. It’s a small business. These small businesses don’t do this on their own. Typically, they have a VAR. They have an integrator that helps them, but they need to run applications locally in one fell swoop.
And to your point about technology, the performance and availability of hardware has significantly improved in the last five, 10 years. So now for a small amount of money, let’s just call it $10,000, a company can buy some hardware and some software and they can run their applications locally. It’s not a hundred, $200,000 anymore. The technology is so powerful that they can run everything locally for a little bit of money and not require a lot of IT people on site to manage it. So we run the gamut between large enterprise that have lots of sites, small businesses. Healthcare is another one. We see a lot of opportunity, a lot of customers in that space that are running their providers, their hospitals, their clinics that can’t depend on the cloud for performance, usually latency, and for data security sometimes. So a lot of healthcare providers are also deploying what we call an edge computing solution.
Mitch Ashley: There’s been a real gap in between the I can put a window server out at the edge and live with that and whatever limitations and spending a lot of money on a lot of infrastructure. And it seems that that gap’s been filled by this what we term hyper-converged infrastructure, which is really taking a lot of those capabilities that we think in larger data centers, but packaging that into smaller offerings that can live at the edge.
Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, exactly. The days of needing like an IT architect to figure out, “Okay, I need a couple servers, I need an external SAN, what am I doing for networking,” and they’re building this three-tiered architecture, awesome for the data center, awesome for the cloud when you have massive scalability needs. But if you’re at a small edge site, you really want as little kit as possible, and that’s where this hyper-converged notion comes in. In one physical server, you can virtualize servers with a hypervisor. You can virtualize storage. You can virtualize networking. And it’s all in one box. And that’s the innovation that’s happened over the last whatever it is, five, 10 years. And it’s a big driver of what can be done at the edge.
Mitch Ashley: Really a combination of hardware, virtualization, as you were talking about, and of course, the technical services that you need to support applications at the edge. You all have come out with the StorMagic SvHCI product here recently, I guess in mid 2024. Talk about your approach to solving this problem.
Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, so this really came about… StorMagic’s been around for over 15 years. We have thousands of customers around the globe that absolutely love our tech. And what it’s been over the last 15 years, it’s been at the storage layer for virtualization. So we’ve been selling a product called SvSAN for like 15 years. It works with other people’s hypervisors, primarily VMware. They’ve been the market leader, but also with Microsoft Hyper-V. So customers all these years have been like, “I’ve made a hypervisor decision. I’m a VMware shop, but VMware vSAN is really expensive. How can StorMagic help?” So we come in, we say, “Forget vSAN. Use our product instead.” And our customers are very, very happy because they can build a two-node physical two-node servers. We have this concept of a remote witness that does the three-node quorum.
So we do have a third node. It just happens to be a lightweight piece of software that runs in the cloud or in a data center. So we save customers a lot of money on hardware. They only need two servers, whereas vSAN typically needed three. We’ve been doing this for a long time. Broadcom last November, it was around late November, early December last year, all of these changes became obvious to everybody. Then all of a sudden, we saw the opportunity to get in the game of having a full-stack hyper-converged solution with our own hypervisor. And that’s where we focused our dev team on it. We’ve had skunkwork projects in the past, building our own hypervisor. We never brought it to market because of the gorillas that were out there. We figured it’d be hard to compete, but Broadcom pretty much handed us this gift and said, “Well, the market’s up for grabs.”
So here we are. SvHCI is a full-stack solution with a hypervisor. And these days you don’t have to invent a hypervisor anymore. They’re out there in the open source world. So we are using a KVM product that is used in millions and millions of installations. We’ve taken KVM. We’ve built a hypervisor using our 15 years of virtual storage knowledge and tech. We’ve built this full-stack solution. So now our customers that are asking for us to help them on their journey away from VMware because of the significant price increases, we now have a solution. And that’s what SvHCI was designed to do. And like you said, we launched it about six months ago over the summer, and just recently we’ve brought out version two of that product as well.
Mitch Ashley: Folks that may be moving off of VMware, it may not be a 100% move. You aren’t always in a position to be able to do that right. Some things are easier to migrate off of a platform than others might be. Is it possible to coexist in a VMware plus SvHCI world? How does a scenario like that work?
Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, that’s a good question. So I would say for the smaller enterprises, for the smaller organizations that have a single site or two sites, in those situations, it would be a switch. It would be, “All right, I’m done with VMware. I need a new solution.” What we’ve done is we’ve made our user interface. And the way that we manage, we’ve made it a similar feel to what they’re used to with VMware. Think about it, there’s engineers have come out of school over the last 20 years, they’re trained to know how to use VMware. So we’re not stupid. We’re smart and said, you know what? If they’re used to the workflow of VMware, let’s make our UI familiar. So when our solution gets installed, it gets installed as one stack, and all of it gets installed in about an hour.
You can go from bare metal to having a full-stack hypervisor, virtual networking storage up and running in about an hour. And that’s unheard of in the VMware scenario. You have to install vSphere or ESXi. You have to install virtual networking. You have to install vSAN. You’re talking about a day’s worth of work or more. We’ve got that down to about an hour. And then those customers that are small, they have, yes, a little bit of a learning curve, but they don’t have to go to a week-long training on how to use our UIs. Very simple. So in those cases, it’s a full switch. But to your point, for the larger enterprises, they may choose to stay with VMware in their data center for good reason. It’s a great product. vSphere and vSAN, VMware’s products, are great for the data center.
They’re scalable. They’re high performant. They’ve got lots of management tools available. But to roll that out at the small sites is just cost prohibitive. So the way those customers would do it is they would have the same management capability that they’ve had in the data center and their IT team would need to use the StorMagic tools to install and manage our hypervisor and our full-stack, but they can absolutely play together. And we have plenty of customers that are either doing this today or we’re in proof of concepts with them to do it in the near future. There would be two slightly different UIs. But from an enterprise management perspective, they could be managed holistically.
Mitch Ashley: Keeping the workflow very similar between the two environments, given that you…
Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, listen, I hate to say it, these days it’s almost like a VM is a VM is a VM. I mean, yes, VMware’s virtual machine is slightly different than a KVM. As I think, Mitch, we’ve also built tools to help customers take their existing virtual machines from a VMware environment, do the necessary conversion and import it into ours. It’s not a seamless migration. You can’t just say down a server and move a VMware VM into ours instantly. It takes a little bit of converting, but we make it as easy as possible for them to do that.
Mitch Ashley: Very nice. Well, it’s fascinating talking with you about it. It’s always fun to talk about a little bit of hardware and some software and some distributed computing at the edge. So if folks want to come visit the StorMagic website, I guess it’s .com, right? StorMagic.com. What kind of information or help can they get from you to learn more?
Bruce Kornfeld: So I would say clearly take a look at StorMagic.com. Everything you’ll need is there. I’ll just point out a couple of things that might be interesting. One is there is a VMware savings calculator that you’ll find on there. We spent a lot of time building it with accurate pricing information. StorMagic you’ll find is very upfront about pricing, very open about it. A single node SvHCI solution for the software stack, including hypervisor, virtual networking, and two terabytes of storage, that’s our starting price point for storage, all of that stack is about $2,000 US list price. I think it’s $2,050, something like that. So we’re very transparent on our pricing. This VMware savings calculator will allow you to go through and pick your exact scenario that you’re thinking of, how many nodes, how many servers, et cetera, and we’ll do a real comparison for our pricing versus VMware’s, as well as energy savings.
So you’ll see that. That’s one area that I’ll direct you to on our website. And the other one is just recently we launched SvHCI version two. So I encourage you to pop on our website and look around, but some of the new things that are coming that we just announced, like snapshots, integration with our centralized manager, our fleet manager. So now all of your nodes of SvHCI can be managed from a single pane of glass. And we also announced this VM import capability where we’re going to help you automate the process of bringing a VMware VM into the StorMagic SvHCI world. So I would say those are the two areas that I would encourage you to take a look at.
Mitch Ashley: Very helpful. Sounds like a lot of good resources there to check things out and do a little self-service checking out with the calculator too and seeing what might work for potential customers. Bruce, it’s been great talking with you. Appreciate you coming on to DevOps Dialogues and exploring HCI and what’s happening in that world, as well as solving issues around computing and storage and networking at the edge, and maybe helping out with a little bit of VMware transformation problem at the same time.
Bruce Kornfeld: Thanks, Mitch. I appreciate you having me and looking forward to doing it again sometime.
Mitch Ashley: Love to do it. Thanks again, and thanks to everybody for joining us today on DevOps Dialogues.
Author Information
Mitch Ashley is VP and Practice Lead of DevOps and Application Development for The Futurum Group. Mitch has over 30+ years of experience as an entrepreneur, industry analyst, product development, and IT leader, with expertise in software engineering, cybersecurity, DevOps, DevSecOps, cloud, and AI. As an entrepreneur, CTO, CIO, and head of engineering, Mitch led the creation of award-winning cybersecurity products utilized in the private and public sectors, including the U.S. Department of Defense and all military branches. Mitch also led managed PKI services for broadband, Wi-Fi, IoT, energy management and 5G industries, product certification test labs, an online SaaS (93m transactions annually), and the development of video-on-demand and Internet cable services, and a national broadband network.
Mitch shares his experiences as an analyst, keynote and conference speaker, panelist, host, moderator, and expert interviewer discussing CIO/CTO leadership, product and software development, DevOps, DevSecOps, containerization, container orchestration, AI/ML/GenAI, platform engineering, SRE, and cybersecurity. He publishes his research on FuturumGroup.com and TechstrongResearch.com/resources. He hosts multiple award-winning video and podcast series, including DevOps Unbound, CISO Talk, and Techstrong Gang.
