Tag Archives: 22dot6

22dot6 Releases TASS Cloud Suite

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22dot6 sprang from stealth in May 2021. and recently announced its TASS Cloud Suite. I had the opportunity to once again catch up with Diamond Lauffin about the announcement, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

 

The Product

If you’re unfamiliar with the 22dot6 product, it’s basically a software or hardware-based storage offering that delivers:

  • File and storage management
  • Enterprise-class data services
  • Data and systems profiling and analytics
  • Performance, scalability
  • Virtual, physical, and cloud capabilities, with NFS, SMB, and S3 mixed protocol support

According to Lauffin, it’s built on a scale-out, parallel architecture, and can deliver great pricing and performance per GiB.

Components

It’s Linux-based, and can leverage any bare-metal machine or VM. Metadata services live on scale-out, redundant nodes (VSR nodes), and data services are handled via single, clustered, or redundant nodes (DSX nodes).

[image courtesy of 22dot6]

TASS

The key to this all making some kind of sense is TASS (the Transcendent Abstractive Storage System). 22dot6 describes this as a “purpose-built, objective based software integrating users, applications and data services with physical, virtual and cloud-based architectures globally”. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Valence is the software that drives everything, providing the ability to deliver NAS and object over physical and virtual storage, in on-premises, hybrid, or public cloud deployments. It’s multi-vendor capable, offering support for third-party storage systems, and does some really neat stuff with analytics to ensure your storage is performing the way you need it to.

 

The Announcement

22dot6 has announced the TASS Cloud Suite, an “expanded collection of cloud specific features to enhance its universal storage software Valence”. Aimed at solving many of the typical problems users face when using cloud storage, it addresses:

  • Private cloud, with a “point-and-click transcendent capability to easily create an elastic, scale-on-demand, any storage, anywhere, private cloud architecture”
  • Hybrid cloud, by combining local and cloud resources into one big pool of storage
  • Cloud migration and mobility, with a “zero stub, zero pointer” architecture
  • Cloud-based NAS / Block / S3 Object consolidation, with a “transparent, multi-protocol, cross-platform support for all security and permissions with a single point-and-click”

There’s also support for cloud-based data protection, WORM encoding of data, and a comprehensive suite of analytics and reporting.

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to Lauffin about 22dot6 on 2 occasions now, and I’m convinced that he’s probably one of the most enthusiastic storage company founders / CEOs I’ve ever been briefed by. He’s certainly been around for a while, and has seen a whole bunch of stuff. In writing this post I’ve had a hard time articulating everything that Lauffin tells me 22dot6 can do, while staying focused on the cloud part of the announcement. Clearly I should have done an overview post in May and then I could just point you to that. In short, go have a look at the website and you’ll see that there’s quite a bit going on with this product.

The solution seeks to address a whole raft of issues that anyone familiar with modern storage systems will have come across at one stage or another. I remain continually intrigued by how various solutions work to address storage virtualisation challenges, while still making a system that works in a seamless manner. Then try and do that at scale, and in multiple geographical locations across the world. It’s not a terribly easy problem to solve, and if Lauffin and his team can actually pull it off, they’ll be well placed to dominate the storage market in the near future.

Spend any time with Lauffin and you realise that everything about 22dot6 speaks to many of the lessons learned over years of experience in the storage industry, and it’s refreshing to see a company trying to take on such a wide range of challenges and fix everything that’s wrong with modern storage systems. What I can’t say for sure, having never had any real stick time with the solution, is whether it works. In Lauffin’s defence, he has offered to get me in contact with some folks for a demo, and I’ll be taking him up on that offer. There’s a lot to like about what 22dot6 is trying to do here, with the Valance Cloud Suite being a small part of the bigger picture. I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes for 22dot6 over the next year or two, and will report back after I’ve had a demo.

Random Short Take #56

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Welcome to Random Short Take #56. Only three players have worn 56 in the NBA. I may need to come up with a new bit of trivia. Let’s get random.

  • Are we nearing the end of blade servers? I’d hoped the answer was yes, but it’s not that simple, sadly. It’s not that I hate them, exactly. I bought blade servers from Dell when they first sold them. But they can present challenges.
  • 22dot6 emerged from stealth mode recently. I had the opportunity to talk to them and I’ll post something soon about that. In the meantime, this post from Mellor covers it pretty well.
  • It may be a Northern Hemisphere reference that I don’t quite understand, but Retrospect is running a “Dads and Grads” promotion offering 90 days of free backup subscriptions. Worth checking out if you don’t have something in place to protect your desktop.
  • Running VMware Cloud Foundation and want to stretch your vSAN cluster across two sites? Tony has you covered.
  • The site name in VMware Cloud Director can look a bit ugly. Steve O gives you the skinny on how to change it.
  • Pure//Accelerate happened recently / is still happening, and there was a bit of news from the event, including the new and improved Pure1 Digital Experience. As a former Pure1 user I can say this was a big part of the reason why I liked using Pure Storage.
  • Speaking of press releases, this one from PDI and its investment intentions caught my eye. It’s always good to see companies willing to spend a bit of cash to make progress.
  • I stumbled across Oxide on Twitter and fell for the aesthetic and design principles. Then I read some of the articles on the blog and got even more interested. Worth checking out. And I’ll be keen to see just how it goes for the company.

*Bonus Round*

I was recently on the Restore it All podcast with W. Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi. It was a lot of fun as always, despite the fact that we talked about something that’s a pretty scary subject (data (centre) loss). No, I’m not a DC manager in real life, but I do have responsibility for what goes into our DC so I sort of am. Don’t forget there’s a discount code for the book in the podcast too.