IceWEB: Nailing Unified Storage

IceWEB is a unified storage player that  has been in the market for a number of years, with a big footprint in federal government. But the market is awash in new primary storage offerings, many of them focused on unified storage. NetApp obviously held the reigns for a long time, but a few representative recent contenders include Scale Computing, Nexsan’s E5000, Dell's Fluid File System offerings, companies like Nimbus, and more. This newly crowded market means that even established unified storage companies have to have concrete differentiators from their competitors, or they’ll lose out to more attractive new offerings.

IceWEB seems to have some clear differentiators including an enterprise-grade storage subsystem and a user interface that is more user-friendly than many we’ve seen. These two differentiators should help IceWEB to go further than competitors in delivering both infrastructure and operational efficiency.

• The underlying storage subsystem seems to be built for enterprise-class primary use, and is architected for better workload isolation and more granular performance tiering (including across SSD) than many products in the market.   
• A highly polished interface that looks more sophisticated than a lot of the other stuff that has been coming to the market. At first glance an interface may not seem like a real thrill. But a highly useable interface is conducive to better user adoption and comfort, which in turn makes a unified storage offering even more attractive and marketable.

It seems like IceWEB has something to show off, and I'm personally looking forward to putting their product under the magnifying glass to see if the efficiency factors really surface.  Perhaps we'll see them in the Taneja Group Lab in the near future.

IceWEB appliance screenshot