TwinStrata is a technologically impressive cloud gateway for enterprise, and as of now it’s part of EMC. This was the biggest news so far from today’s “Redefine Possible” event in London, which I’m attending.
TwinStrata was founded in 2007 and has been shipping product since 2010. Their “cloud integrated storage” product is mainly known for adding iSCSI access in the enterprise to public or private cloud. It included enterprise features like snapshots, data reduction, and encryption, along with caching of data to reduce latency. On the back end, TwinStrata could access public cloud like Amazon S3, private cloud platforms, and even existing internal storage.
EMC announced the acquisition on July 8 at their “Redefine Possible” event in London. It was presented as part of the VMAX announcements, with TwinStrata finding a new home alongside that high-end system and its smaller brother, VNX. TwinStrata is a Massachusetts-based storage company so they will integrate nicely with the Hopkinton-based development team.
Stephen’s Stance
Where will EMC go with this technology? Short-term, I expect the existing TwinStrata product to find massive uptake thanks to EMC’s large and successful sales team. These sales will likely come at the expense of rival Panzura which today enjoys much enterprise success. Longer term, I expect EMC to maintain compatibility with third-party cloud solutions but increasingly to integrate TwinStrata into ViPR and add additional support for EMC storage and management products. And how about running TwinStrata inside the new Hypermax OS “storage hypervisor” in the VMAX3?
Disclaimer: EMC paid my way to London for this event and my “EMC Elect” status gets me access to news like this.