ioFABRIC Inc. today announced general availability of ioFABRIC Vicinity, a ground-breaking software-defined storage platform that transforms the storage infrastructure, unifying existing systems with new media to reach new levels of service. Vicinity's QoS-driven storage automation increases business agility and frees IT time to focus on true business innovation, providing the storage transformation necessary to handle the next decade's storage demands.

Vicinity's industry-unique solution breaks down storage silos by unifying existing storage systems, including traditional SAN and NAS systems, along with newer flash and hyperconverged appliances. Vicinity provides a platform that truly manages and optimizes for diverse workloads concurrently, creating a unified storage environment that enables cross-vendor data mobility both on-premise and cloud. Vicinity reveals more capabilities in the existing infrastructure and provides an intelligent storage platform for long-term growth.

Since Vicinity's debut, compelling applications and solutions have emerged, such as:

• SAN Extender - More life from existing storage by seamlessly extending it with newer technologies while staying within budget.
• Migration Solution - Seamlessly migrates data between both old and new storage targets while apps are up and running, eliminating risk and ensuring continuity.
• Hyperconverged - Innovates with a software-driven intelligent, resilient, cost-effective application platform that deploys in minutes.
• Docker - A micro-converged system providing storage that was designed with Docker in mind: light, agile, scalable and persistent.
• Server SAN - Transforms commodity hardware into a distributed, enterprise-class storage platform, while maintaining unique application service objectives.

With these many powerful options, IT experts see the benefits of software-defined storage as a way to achieve true business agility. One customer deployed the SAN Extender, freeing the hours he was spending optimizing his environment on a daily basis.

"I was spending a great deal of time, almost on a daily basis, trying to get the most possible performance out of our NAS units," said Donald Lopez, IT Manager at InReach. "ioFABRIC Vicinity is extremely simple to deploy and use. The biggest advantage for me was the time I gained in my day by having Vicinity monitor and automatically shift things around in order to get the performance I needed."

Industry experts across the board are beginning to research and communicate the business benefits of SDS and EMA chose ioFABRIC for an "EMA Vendors to Watch" award. "ioFABRIC Vicinity excels at making storage management efficient, automatically delivering the needed storage resources to meet service-level requirements," said Jim Miller, Senior Analyst at EMA. "Costly overprovisioning can be eliminated, and overall storage utilization can be increased to its full potential, which means capacity purchases can be delayed while administration chores are reduced."

"The future is about intelligent automated solutions that can do the complex and time-consuming activities that usually require expensive experts and expensive systems," said Steven Lamb, co-founder and CEO at ioFABRIC. "Vicinity adds intelligence to any storage, allowing admins to gain agility and data mobility in a cost-optimized manner.

With features like intelligent monitoring and automation, ioFABRIC Vicinity drastically reduces storage OPEX and CAPEX. Vicinity transforms storage to transform business, driving agility and cost-efficiency in any environment. Customers experience cost-effective growth, risk-free migration, easy hyperconvergence integration, and flexible storage for development environments, including Docker.

ioFABRIC Vicinity is licensed by capacity under management as an annual software subscription, with site and perpetual licenses available. Vicinity is available through ioFABRIC's reseller and distribution channel, in addition to pre-built appliances with bundled hardware and software.