CFD8 Preview - Igneous Systems
Cloud Field Day 8 has lots of familiar names and a few not-so-familiar ones At least, not as familiar to me. While I know a bit about NetApp, Fortinet and HashiCorp, there’s a company on the list that I’m looking forward to because I don’t know a lot about them - Igneous Systems.
I started my research by digging through the Tech Field Day vault. Igneous presented to Tech Field Day once before back in 2016. They were just out of stealth and ready to take on the traditional storage vendors. The blog posts from the delegates coming out of that presentation were positive. The message seemed to be “true cloud for local data.” It was and remains a compelling idea - what if I bought and treated my local storage like I did cloud storage.
But that was 2016. Today there are legitimate questions about local datacenter spend. Enterprises build new workloads in the cloud. Local datacenter tech refresh budgets aren’t what they used to be. Moreover, C-Level executives, Systems Architects, and Systems Engineers have become more comfortable with cloud. Cloud Security has also matured to the point where it may be easier to deploy an app in a cloud security boundary than on-prem. Cloud is the primary location for many organizations today. I’m curious to see how Igneous has evolved to meet the current trends.
The Igneous.io website talks about managing unstructured data-as-a-service. The platform supports managing and protecting data anywhere, in any cloud. Seeing a company make a pivot is exciting. Seeing them execute a pivot well is breathtaking. They now talk about being able to get metadata from files everywhere in the environment vs the old talk about deploying physical boxes. It’s very much a cloud message and seems fitting that they be a part of Cloud Field Day in 2020. So I’m excited to see what they present and to better understand how they see themselves helping enterprises today and tomorrow.