SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwired - Oct 11, 2016) - Igneous Systems, a venture-backed startup based in Seattle, today announced its first offering, the Igneous Data Service, designed to deliver the value of IT cloud services for data that organizations need to keep within their own data centers.
"We started Igneous three years ago seeing firsthand both the continued growth in unstructured data and the shift from building infrastructure to consuming services," said Kiran Bhageshpur, CEO and co-founder of Igneous Systems. "As data continues to grow in size and value, we look forward to helping our enterprise customers curate that data to speed decision making and support new business models."
The Igneous Data Service offers true cloud for local data. It supports the S3 API -- an emerging de facto standard for cloud-based object storage, designed for usage by enterprise application developers managing large data sets along with a rich ecosystem of third-party applications. Also, like the public cloud, the Igneous Data Service offers Zero-Touch Infrastructure™ where customers do not purchase capital equipment or manage the equipment on an ongoing basis. Igneous handles all monitoring, maintenance, software updates and troubleshooting of on-premises equipment used by the Igneous Data Service.
Igneous Systems owns and operates its purpose-built infrastructure equipment at its enterprise customers' locations behind their firewalls. Other internal applications and systems can access the Igneous Data Service at local area network (LAN) speeds, rather than Internet speeds. In addition, enterprises can keep their data inside existing IT architectures designed to conform to internal security or compliance policies.
Unlike traditional on-premises equipment and even many "private cloud" solutions, Igneous customers do not buy or manage equipment. Igneous simply charges an annual subscription based on installed capacity.
"Public cloud IaaS is rapidly gaining acceptance among IT organizations," said Deepak Mohan, research director, Public Cloud Storage Services and Infrastructure at IDC. "Public cloud services are increasingly seen as an enabler of business agility and speed, beyond just an IT cost saving. This is bringing about a shift in IT infrastructure spending, with implications for incumbent leaders in enterprise infrastructure technologies. Through architectural innovations in hardware and software, the Igneous Data Service delivers the public cloud experience within the customer's premises, addressing the growing demand for public cloud benefits with on-premises data."
INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY
From a technology perspective, Igneous Systems incorporated four key attributes into the Igneous Data Service which it considers as "first principles" to enable cost-effective deployment of an on-premises Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering.
- On-premises data with cloud management. While the data always stays on the customer's networks. Igneous continually monitors, maintains and troubleshoots its fleet of inventory using automated, software-based cloud management techniques employed in today's hyperscale cloud environments.
- RatioPerfect™ architecture. Behind the Igneous architecture is a nano-server design where each disk has its own dedicated CPU and Ethernet connection. This design enables a highly distributed architecture that provides the scalability and resiliency of the public cloud but scaled to run on customer premises.
- Extensible Data Path. Large data sets typically require inline processing of data before uploads or downloads "complete." With its extensible data path, higher level operations (such as auto-tagging for search) can be performed on a mirror of incoming and outgoing data streams without slowing down low-level system functions.
- Cloud native services. To enable new application workflows, the Igneous architecture is built utilizing a modern microservices approach and incorporates stream processing, an event-driven framework, and container services.
"Igneous offers a differentiated approach to solving the complex challenges of data-centric computing in the enterprise where management of large-scale infrastructure has grown untenable," said Scott Sinclair, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Systems Group. "Technically, it addresses the issues required for management at hyperscale, minimizing hardware and software fault domains, and laying out a future that extends the platform well beyond its initial roots in storage."
"The ITS team here at Northeastern University supports global enterprise and research programs that manage extremely large data sets that exceed petabyte scale," said Rajiv Shridhar, Director, Systems & Production Services for Northeastern University. "For years, we have been projecting that at our current data growth trajectory, curating this data with traditional on-premises storage architectures will become increasingly untenable. I had been discussing our vision for scalable storage that supports our requirements with the founding team at Igneous as the company was getting started. We are pleased that Igneous has now emerged as a vendor with whom, due to their storage architecture, we can see a path forward to not only collect and store data but also enable the development of new enterprise and research applications utilizing large, unstructured data sets to support Northeastern's vision."
PRICING AND AVAILABILITY
The Igneous Data Service is available immediately to customers in North America. Customers can purchase annual subscriptions in increments of 212 terabytes (TB) of usable capacity, starting at under $40,000 USD (equivalent to 1.5 cents per gigabyte (GB) per month). Volume discounts are available, based on installed capacity or contract duration.
ABOUT IGNEOUS SYSTEMS
Igneous Systems is a Seattle-based, venture-backed company. The early technical team draws on veteran infrastructure talent from Isilon Systems, EMC, NetApp combined with modern cloud expertise from Amazon and Microsoft. The go-to-market team combines talent from market-disrupters such as Tableau and Barracuda Networks, complemented by incumbent infrastructure vendors including Isilon Systems, EMC, and NetApp. Igneous exists to fundamentally reset expectations about how to build, maintain, and scale on-premises compute and storage infrastructures in the cloud era. To date, Igneous has been granted 11 patents in the US based on its technology breakthroughs. For more information, visit http://www.igneous.io.