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.