SoftIron - a HyperCloud that is not Your Typical HCI

Day one of #CFD19, SoftIron presented on their hybrid cloud offering. While members of the past Evaluator Team had spent time with them, I had not. Thus this was a new introduction.? SoftIron lands in what is often called the HCI market, or ore progressively, the Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure.?? They bring an alternative to this market that appears to be particularly of interest to organizations needing a “zero-trust” and secure systems, for instance the US Airforce, one of their clients. What is it they are doing that is so different?

SoftIron builds their own units for compute, network and storage. This is not a specification given to an ODM to manufacture, but pretty much other than the chips, they manufacture the systems in the US and Australia.? From their website they state: “The software foundation in HyperCloud is based on a lineage of intellectual property developed and designed for FISMA Systems at the “High” level, including equivalent evaluations such as FedRAMP High and DoD SRG IL-5. In addition, HyperCloud relies on FIPS-140 compatible cryptographic modules.”

SoftIron claims significant scale.? Usually, HCI’s are limited to 16 nodes in a cluster for reason of blast radius (recovery) or performance, particularly IOPS.? In the Soft Iron situation, their clients have very large clusters running into the double digit PB’s and racks. ?Plus these clusters in certain situations are supporting HPC or image processing environments.? Not your typical HCI space. The question is how?

Part of their answer is based on the control plane residing in their top of rack networking nodes and how the environment scales as they add racks.? Another is in the devices being stateless. ??

They own their software stack including the data management. In the time we had with them, the architectural details were limited, thus this analyst and team will be diving into their design of data management (it is object based) and systems management interface for Day 2 operations.