Maginatics Debuts Storage Platform At VMworld

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Maginatics on Monday at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco rolled out MagFS, a software-based storage platform that combines on-premises storage with cloud storage and supports a variety of endpoint devices such as PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

The company, which is funded by Atlantic Bridge and EMC, provides file sharing among users of distributed systems. MagFS is a software platform, installed on industry standard servers, that supports Amazon S3. Customers deploying MagFS on-premises have support for EMC Atmos, OpenStack Swift, and other platforms. Public cloud support is provided by AT&T Synaptic, HP Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, among others.

Maginatics claims that accessing unstructured data is a chore for many users of mobile devices, so MagFS comes out of the box with support for IOS, iPod Touch, and iPad. Android support is coming soon. The MagFS is expected to be available in September. Clients are available at no charge from the Apple App Store.

The system, which includes a cloud gateway for cloud-based file sharing, supports Microsoft Active Directory, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, Kerberos, and AES-256 encryption in flight and at rest.

The MagFS is expected to be available in September. Clients are available at no charge from the Apple App Store, Amazon, or the Android Market.

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Maginatics was founded in 2010 by CEO Amarjit Gill, formerly of Agnilux and CTO Jay Kistler, formerly with Yahoo.

Scale Computing is also introducing a new mid-range storage system which converges servers, virtualization, networking, and storage. HC3 consists of purpose-built servers and storage nodes, as well as virtualization software and virtual 1-Gbps and 10-Gbps Ethernet network adapters for connectivity. They support Windows Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The HC3 system ships as a four-node starter system, which includes four quad-core CPUs, each with 128 GB of RAM, eight 1-Gbps or four 10-Gbps Ethernet network adapters and 8 TB to 32 TB of raw storage consisting of SATA or SAS drives.

HC3 systems are able to scale up to as many as eight nodes per cluster. Nodes can be added non-disruptively. Previously, Scale Computing had the M Node storage arrays, which could be clustered with software. Those arrays are still available and can be added into a cluster.

Scale Computing's HC3 is expected to be available in the 3rd quarter of this year.

Scale Computing was founded in 2007 by CEO Jeff Ready, formerly of Corvigo and Tumbleweed. The company is funded for $31 million by Scale Venture Partners, Northgate Capital and Benchmark Capital.

Editor's note: Updated 9/4/12 to clarify availability of Android support.

Deni Connor is founding analyst for Storage Strategies NOW, an industry analyst firm that focuses on storage, virtualization, and servers.