5 new vendors to watch at VMworld 2013

VMworld 2013 is fast approaching, and I’m excited to make this virtualization (and cloud) journey for the 10th year in a row.

For those of you who’ve been to VMworld in the past, you know there’s a lot going on during this event. But one of my favorite parts of the show is the Solutions Exchange. This is where you can get quality one-on-one face time with the vendors. This year, VMworld is expecting around 250 companies to participate.

[ Also on InfoWorld: SwiftStack announces software-defined storage for OpenStack | Virtual network startup launches platform for cloud data centers | Track the latest trends in virtualization in InfoWorld’s Virtualization Report newsletter. ]

VMworld may be owned and operated by VMware, but outside of the occasional hiccup, this show does a fairly good job of representing virtualization and cloud products that span VMware’s ecosystem and beyond. The Solutions Exchange showcases many of the small and large established companies that you may already be familiar with, but it’s also a great place to learn about new stealth companies and new products that haven’t had a chance to make a name for themselves yet.

While I’m preparing myself to visit with as many of those 250 vendors as humanly possible during normal exhibit hours, I also wanted to bubble up to the top of that list a few companies that I haven’t yet met with in person but would like to.

Here are five relatively new companies and products that I believe will be interesting new arrivals to the VMworld 2013 scene.

CloudByte A newcomer to VMworld 2013 is CloudByte. This will be my first time meeting CloudByte at the show, but the company has been around since 2011. CloudByte was started by technology executives from companies such as HP, IBM, NetApp, Novell, and SanDisk. It jumped into the software-defined storage market, gaining notoriety as a startup that guarantees QoS to every application from a shared storage platform.

The company’s basic idea is to permit larger companies and cloud service providers with the ability to host performance-sensitive applications in the cloud and to do so economically.

At the show, CloudByte will be showcasing its ElastiStor solution, which it advertises as the software building block for new age data centers used to run clouds and virtual machines. The ElastiStor controller can be installed on any server, and these controllers can be linearly clustered for high availability and scale-out storage. According to the company, organizations can scale to thousands of applications and still meet their performance demands.

Part of the company’s planned demonstration will be to show how ElastiStor can seamlessly fit within an organization’s cloud and virtualization environment. While visiting the company’s booth, I plan to find out how it can provision storage QoS-aware VMs from vCenter, configure IOPS-based storage tiers, and create VMware ESXi high-availability clusters.

CloudByte will be located in the New Innovators pavilion.

FSLogix FSLogix emerged from stealth mode at the end of July. The company was co-founded by Kevin Goodman, formerly of VMware, and Randy Cook, from Symantec.

The company’s first product is simply called Apps. What’s interesting about this product is its simplified approach to application management. Apps provides dynamic application visibility, which enables policy-based control of when any application is visible to individual users or groups from a single golden image.

The solution allows IT administrators to realize the benefits of application virtualization for all Windows applications across physical, VDI and Citrix/RDS platforms. That means it works with virtualization, but it isn’t a requirement, thus increasing the playing field for FSLogix.

The company claims it can reveal or remove any version of any application on any image for any user in the organization. Does that grab your attention? It did mine.

FSLogix has already generated buzz from a group of beta customers using the product. I had the opportunity to get a brief introduction to the company over the phone; however, I’m really looking forward to learning more and seeing it in action at the FSLogix booth at VMworld. You can find the company in the New Innovators pavilion.

Infinio Infinio’s coming out party will take place at VMworld 2013. After getting a prebrief by company executives back in June, I believe the company is poised to become one of those disruptive software technologies in the storage industry.

The company’s first product is called Infinio Accelerator, described as “downloadable storage performance for NAS-backed virtual infrastructures.” When the need for more storage performance arises, the first answer may not be to throw more hardware at the problem or to purchase a more expensive solid-state-drive (SSD) storage solution. Instead, Infinio’s claim to fame is that its software-only solution can extend the performance of the NAS device you already have in place. It’s a virtual appliance that sits between the virtual machine storage traffic and the NFS datastore. To enhance storage performance, it uses server-side caching to minimize the I/O traffic load on the centralized storage.

Unlike other newcomers locating themselves in the New Innovators pavilion section at VMworld, Infinio is blasting ahead with a bronze-level sponsorship, making itself much more visible to attendees walking the exhibit show floor.

PernixData Perhaps following the “go big or go home” mantra, PernixData is going all out as a Silver sponsor of this year’s VMworld event.

PernixData is a startup founded by VMware veterans that recently raised $20 million in new financing. The company says its software can turn server-based flash storage into a resource shared across a standard VMware cluster of as many as 32 systems.

The software, called PernixData FVP, virtualizes server-side flash so that companies can quickly and inexpensively improve storage performance. What’s interesting is that the technology can stitch together flash memory across servers in a virtualized cluster into a shared cache, which can in turn serve as a tier of storage above a SAN for the most-used data to create a performance data tier.

This is a software-only product that uses on-server flash that customers already have deployed, and it works with any products currently supported by VMware’s software. That’s a win for PernixData because it means companies won’t have to change out their existing infrastructure.

For now, it only works with VMware’s hypervisor. However, the company has stated that it plans to migrate this solution over to Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM in the future.

PLUMgrid In my opinion, network virtualization is bringing the sexy back to networking, and it’s becoming the next big disruption in the modern data center. Companies like PLUMgrid are trying to capitalize on this emerging market.

PLUMgrid came out of stealth mode after securing $10.7 million in Series A funding a year ago. To pull it all together, it has assembled a team of industry veterans across companies such as Cisco Systems, Marvell, Nicira, Sun, Vyatta, and VMware.

A little more than a month ago, the company released PLUMgrid Platform, a solution designed to automate data center operations and increase IT efficiency and productivity while reducing associated costs. The software solution is targeted at enterprises and cloud service providers building public and private cloud data centers. According to the company, it enables users to quickly and easily create, copy, and deploy secure multitenant virtual networks.

PLUMgrid is another first-time VMworld sponsor, and you can find the company in the New Innovator pavilion.

What other companies are on your list of “must see” vendors at this year’s VMworld event? What other newcomers should be top of mind for people searching out new and innovative technologies?

I hope to see many of you at the show. If we cross paths, please say hello and introduce yourself. VMworld is a great networking event, and I’ve made many friends at this show over the years. You can trace my VMworld footsteps on Twitter by following me at @vmblogcom.

This article, “5 new vendors to watch at VMworld 2013,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com.