Vendor exhibitor: Midfin

IT infrastructure often moves to the cloud for increased flexibility and decreased provisioning time. Midfin wants to provide the same thing to internal resources. By provisioning networking, storage, and compute together, machines can go from zero-to-ready for configuration in a matter of seconds. Midfin recently exited stealth and LISA is their first conference appearance. Co-founder Ajith Jayamohan told me they chose LISA because they "believe in being open. LISA is the perfect venue. There are a lot of like-minded people here."

Midfin's eFabric product focuses on learning, optimizing, defending, and healing the environment. During the demo, I watched a hardware node be pulled out. Within a few seconds, the system had moved the running instances onto different hardware. Hardware distribution of instances can be close together for latency-sensitive applications or across multiple racks or data centers for fault tolerance.

In addition to hardware feature, eFabric's management console is interesting. It allows administrators to define zones (vertical partitions, often racks or datacenters) and projects (horizontal partitions). Users can be granted access to certain projects in order to start their own instances or clusters. Blueprints, which template instances, and the AppHub, which serve as an application store, make self-service easy. In addition, the dashboard is entirely backed by a RESTful API, so custom interfaces can be written as needed.

For admins who need flexible internal infrastructure, Midfin's offering looks very interesting.