Hedvig’s latest release of its software-defined storage platform includes new all-flash capabilities, native encryption, and integrations with Veritas, VMware, and Red Hat.

As with earlier releases of the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform, version 3.0 runs on-premises, in the public cloud, or both. Also like earlier versions, the software is decoupled from hardware.

“It runs on industry standard commodity hardware or you can create an instance in a public cloud,” said Rob Whiteley, VP of marketing at Hedvig. “Our system needs CPU memory and disk or flash. We don’t care where that comes from.”

And while it can run on any public cloud, “we’ve gone the extra step of validating the big three: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google,” he added.

Enterprises moving away from traditional legacy storage and embracing software-defined storage (SDS) drove the platform’s new features, Whiteley said. “Over the last six months we noticed a different buyer in the market. We noticed more traditional, mainstream enterprises are beginning to adopt software-defined storage.”

As flash storage technology becomes more readily available and economical, these same companies are also investing in all-flash data centers.

“Typically we were trying to provide dynamic tiering between some amount of flash and some amount of spinning disk,” Whiteley said. “What we’ve noticed, as companies go down this all-flash path, they are having different tier of flash in the same server, maybe high-end NVMe in one end and some other more pedestrian enterprise flash below that.”

To this end, version 3.0 improves the platform’s all-flash caching, including more advanced auto-tiering and read cache capabilities. Customers building all-flash data centers or adding all-flash resources in public clouds can use NVMe, 3D Xpoint, and other new super-fast flash technologies without having to add proprietary hardware.

The updated software also includes new security technology, called Encrypt360. Hedvig wrote the code for this based on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption and leveraging Intel libraries. It encrypts data that’s in-use, in-flight, and at-rest.

“Because we have this disaggregated architecture, we can start the encryption right where the data is being generated,” said Eric Carter, senior director of marketing at Hedvig. “It comes across the network fully encrypted and it’s stored fully encrypted. That’s why we call it 360 because we’re doing it at multiple points.”

Encrypt360 supports a variety of key management systems, including AWS and Barbican, which is the OpenStack key manager service. It also enables customers to select a 256-bit AES encryption policy on a per-volume basis.

Additionally, Encrypt360 can be combined with advanced auditing and multi-tenancy access control mechanisms to ensure customers can meet IT compliance and regulations while adopting hybrid and multicloud environments.

Hedvig 3.0 added to its existing Docker and OpenStack CloudScale plugins with new integrations with Veritas and Red Hat as well as an improved plugin for VMware. The new Veritas OpenStorage Technology (OST) plugin allows existing Veritas customers to connect NetBackup to Hedvig as a deduplicating backup target.

The existing Hedvig VMware vSphere Web Client plugin has achieved VMware-ready storage certification and adds new security, backup, and data protection capabilities.

Additionally a Hedvig Storage Proxy container is now Red Hat certified for customer production use and published in the Red Hat Container Catalog. This certified container supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and OpenShift featuring Docker and Kubernetes.

The 5-year-old SDS startup closed a $21.5 million Series C funding round in February with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) as a new investor. This brought Hedvig’s total financing to $52 million, and resulted in a partnership with HPE. Hedvig’s SDS is now integrated with HPE Apollo 4200 servers.

This expanded the startup’s market reach, Whiteley said.

HPE began selling the bundled appliances in June, and three months later the product represents about 50 percent of Hedvig’s business opportunities.

“These are companies that probably weren’t going to do business with a startup but knowing that HPE is vouching for us and supporting us completely changes the tone,” Whiteley said. “That helps us to into healthcare, government, other financial services outside of banks. We’re ready to plant the flag and say 2017 is the year of SD storage.”