It’s time to visit with old friends this week as Fibre Channel lives on at higher speeds, DRAM demand increases, and backup revenues rise nicely. That’s true for both data protection in the cloud and on-premises. The constant increase in data generation and movement is providing a constant positive headwind for the storage business.
For once AI, machine learning and Kubernetes take a back seat.
Broadcom’s 64gig HBA
It has only taken 8 months. Broadcom, which launched its 64Gbit/s (gen 7) Fibre Channel switch last September, has made available its matching 64Gbit/s HBA: the Emulex Gen 7 LPe36000-series Host Bus Adapters.
Broadcom claims it’s the world’s first 64G Fibre Channel HBA and enables an end-to-end 64G data path. Its speed in Tolly Group testing:
- Reduced Oracle data warehousing runtime by 87 per cent compared to 32G FC,
- PCIe 4.0 demonstrated up to a 63 per cent improvement in application performance for dual-port 64G HBAs compared to running in a PCIe 3.0 server,
- Cuts storage migration times by up to 38 per cent,
- Reduces VM boot storm times by up to a half.
Kevin Tolly, founder of The Tolly Group, said: “The combination of new PCIe 4.0 servers and all-flash arrays demonstrate such high performance margins that they are now capable of consuming all the bandwidth that current storage networks can deliver.”
That’s why, he says, “all-flash storage arrays should be paired with 64G technology such as Emulex Gen 7 HBAs and Brocade Gen 7 switching.”
DRAM shipments and prices rose in Q1
Research house TrendForce says all DRAM suppliers posted revenue growth in 1Q21, and overall DRAM revenue for the quarter reached $19.2bn, 8.7 per cent growth QoQ.
This was mostly due to higher demand for notebook memory resulting from remote working and working from home during the pandemic. The researchers also cite increased demand from Chinese smartphone manufacturers – OPPO, Vivo and Xiaomi, competing for marketshare after Huawei was included on the US Entity list.
These two things led to higher-than-expected shipments from various DRAM suppliers while DRAM prices rose as TrendForce had predicted.
It says some server manufacturers have started a new round of procurement as they expect a persistent increase in DRAM prices.
Datto drives revenues higher
Cloud backup service provider Datto saw Q1 revenues rise to $144.9m, up 16 per cent on last year’s $116m and beating estimates. There was a $15.3m profit (GAAP net income), up a massive 1,030 per cent from the year-ago $1.4m.
Subscription revenues rose 17 per cent Y/Y to $135.6m and ARR (Annual Run-rate Revenue) rose 15 per cent to $572.5m.
It increased its MSP partner count by 300 in the quarter, to 17,300. Guidance for next quarter is $147m +/- $1m in revenues.
William Blair analyst Jason Ader told subscribers: “The beat was driven by rebounding demand for the firm’s core continuity (backup/disaster recovery) solutions, which management attributed to the combination of economic reopening tailwinds (though still early and uneven) and SMB focus on ransomware protection.”
He said: “Net new ARR, which after adjusting for currency was $26m, a significant acceleration from the prior three quarters and the second-highest net new ARR in company history.”
Ader thinks Datto will achieve mid-to-high teens growth after facing increased customer churn during the pandemic.
Veeam announces yet another double-digit quarter
Data protector Veeam has announced an annual recurring revenue (ARR) increase of 25 per cent Y/Y for Q1’21.
CEO and Board Chairman William Largent talked of double-digit YoY growth across all geos and said: “To see such increases globally is a tremendous achievement in such a challenging environment.”
Veeam has now recorded 13 consecutive quarters of growth greater than 10 per cent and the customer count has gone past 400,000.
It overtook Veritas in revenue terms in the quarter and IDC says it’s the second largest software vendor worldwide after Dell EMC.
Danny Allan, CTO and SVP of Product Strategy at Veeam, said: “Our product roadmap for 2021 will further expand our offerings with the top cloud providers – AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google – and Kubernetes.”
Shorts
Aunalytics is partnering Stonebridge Consulting. The combination of Aunalytics Aunsight Golden Record as a Service and Stonebridge’s EnerHub data management product provides customers in the oil and gas market with Universal Data Access and dynamic data cleansing and governance.
ChaosSearch’s multi-model and multi-cloud Data Lake Platform product now supports SQL on the AWS and GCP clouds. It indexes data as-is within cloud environments, recognising native schemas, rendering it fully searchable and uses open APIs. That enables log and BI analytics with existing tools in use, such as Tableau, Looker, Kibana, Grafana or Elastic API.
Cisco is end-of-lifing its UCS-E VSAN ready node. The last day to order the product is November 5, 2021.
The ClearDATA Healthcare Security and Compliance Platform can automatically detect protected health information (PHI) in multi-cloud storage buckets. It ensures compliance with applicable privacy regulations that include HIPAA and GDPR.
Commvault’s Metallic SaaS data protection is out in 20 countries in the EMEA region after having been available for 6 months. Shai Nuni has been appointed as the new Vice President of Metallic in EMEA. Customer wins include Aliscargo Airlines (Italy), Evolutio Cloud Provider (Spain), Sithabile Technology Group (South Africa), and Keshet Broadcasting (Israel)
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has selected DDN‘s SFA200NVXE and SFA7990XE modular storage systems as infrastructure components for its new 19.4 TFLOPS FX1000 ARM-based supercomputer system TOKI-SORA, which went into operation in December 2020. The DDN systems will provide over 50 PBs of usable SSD and HDD storage capacity at a combined peak throughput of up to 1TB/sec.
UK-based data protector Databarracks has bought 4sl for an undisclosed sum to create a combined company with 75 staff, including 50 data protection experts.
Barnaby Mote, CEO and founder of 4sl, said: “Databarracks is now the UK’s largest Commvault Managed Service Provider.”
Delphix has announced new data compliance capabilities for Salesforce customers, protecting personally identifiable information.
Flash chip fabber and SSD maker Kioxia announced a 20 billion yen ($18m) investment to expand its Technology Development Building at its Yokohama Technology Campus and to establish its new Shin-Koyasu Advanced Research Center. The new facilities are expected to be operational by 2023.
Pavilion Data is supplying its HyperParallel Data Platform array to the Cyber Bytes Foundation (CBF), which showcases technologies in its Research and Innovation Labs located at the Quantico Cyber Hub (QCH). These labs support a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with Marine Corps System Command and Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command.
Open source database software and services supplier Percona announced a preview of its fully open source Database as a Service (DBaaS), which eliminates vendor lock-in and supports Percona open source versions of MySQL, MongoDB and PostgreSQL. By using Percona Kubernetes Operators it’s possible to configure a database once, and deploy it anywhere – on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment.
Korean flash and memory foundry business SK hynix said it is considering a plan to double its foundry capacity. Co-CEO and Vice Chairman Park Jung-ho said it will look into several options such as equipment expansion at domestic sites and M&A.
BeeGFS parallel file system company ThinkParQ has promoted channel partner Advanced Clustering Technologies from Gold to Platinum status, meaning it can provide 1st and 2nd level support.
DDN’s Tintri operation paid for an ESG study that said VDI customers got value from their Tintri VMstore storage with cost savings and easier VDI admin.
Cloud storage provider Wasabi has announced support for S3 Object Lock, meaning stored objects can be made immutable for a specific period of time and so protected against ransomware. Of course you needs backup apps that support it too, like Veeam Backup & Replication.
