Igneous Comes Out Of Stealth With Its First Product

Igneous Systems came out of stealth today and announced their first product, the Igneous Data Service. The idea behind the Igneous Data Service is to deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) on customer premises. This gives customers what Igneous refers to as a “true” cloud for local data.

Igneous Systems came out of stealth today and announced their first product, the Igneous Data Service. The idea behind the Igneous Data Service is to deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) on customer premises. This gives customers what Igneous refers to as a “true” cloud for local data.

Based in Seattle, Washington, Igneous Systems is comprised of talent from Isilon Systems, EMC, and NetApp along with cloud talent from Amazon and Microsoft. Igneous Systems is venture-backed by groups such as NEA, Madrona Venture Group, and Redpoint ventures. Igneous main point they are trying to achieve, in their words, is, to fundamentally reset expectations about how to build, maintain, and scale on-premises compute and storage infrastructures in the cloud era. Igneous has been granted 11 patents so far on their technology.

Supporting S3 API, the Igneous Data Service offers Zero-Touch Infrastructure. What this means is that customers need not buy or maintain equipment. Igneous states that they will handle all monitoring, maintenance, software updates and troubleshooting of on-premises equipment. To which, customers will only need to pay an annual subscription based on installed capacity. Igneous owns and operates the equipment at customer sites behind a firewall, meaning customers can access the cloud at LAN speeds, much faster than typical public clouds. Having the data onsite is also a plus to customers attempting to meet specific compliance policies.

Igneous Systems four key attributes include:

• 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 a 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.

Availability and pricing

Igneous Data Service is available now to North American customers. Purchases can be made in annual subscriptions in increments of 212TB starting at $40,000 or 1.5 cents per GB.

Igneous Systems main site

Discuss this story

Sign up for the StorageReview newsletter