Early January storage roundup news shows speed has paid off for deduplicating backupper ExaGrid and WANdisco and WekaIO. One W-vendor sends lots of data across networks at high speed. The other provides fast access to files using parallel IO streams.
Exagrid carries on growing
When boring is good. ExaGrid has grown its business yet again, adding 100 new customers in 2018’s fourth quarter, and making more money from its deduplicating backup-to-disk arrays.
ExaGrid reported 12.2 per cent growth in 2016, 14.5 our cent in 2017, and 20 per cent last year. The target for 2019 is 25 per cent and 30 per cent in 2020.
CEO Bill Andrews attributes the growth to more efficient dedupe. Exagrid’s product “beats every solution on the market when it comes to backup performance, restore performance, cost up front, and cost over time.,” he said
For example, the company claims ingest is three times faster and restores/VM boots are up to 20 times faster than its closest competitor, understood to be Data Domain.
Andrews claims the EX63000E product scales to a 2PB full backup in a single system with an ingest rate of over 400TB per hour. It supports a replicated second site with storage of up to 4PB for disaster recovery and long-term retention, making it the largest and fastest system on the market.
Exagrid maintain sales functions in 30 countries and wants to increase this to 50 in 2020.
WANdisco almost gets first multi-cloud customer
Data replicator WANdisco has won a $565,000, three-year deal with an unnamed giant mobile network operator for its Fusion for Multi-Cloud offering. WANdisco replication enables the transmission of active on-premises data to remote sites and/or public clouds. The customer uses the software to replicate data continually across multiple Amazon cloud environments and locations.
WANdisco won the contract while working with AWS and says this is its first contract where a client is using multi-tenancy and multi-cloud (region) aspects of its product. It says a multi-cloud strategy prevents vendor lock-in and cuts total cost of ownership by reducing switching costs across cloud vendors.
David Richards, WANdisco chairman and CEO, said: “It is becoming increasingly unlikely that businesses of this scale will chose to depend on a single cloud vendor for their data requirements. We are seeing businesses with complex data requirements choose multiple suppliers for a range of specialised data use cases.”
In this case a single cloud vendor, AWS, is being used, albeit with multiple regions. So it is sort-of multi-cloud.
WekaIO gets AWS blessing
AWS has granted Storage Competency Status for Primary Storage to scale out file system software startup WekaIO.
Weka provides Matrix high-performance parallel access filer software and AWS says it’s good enough for AWS high performance computing users and using WekaIO in AWS provides HPC file access as fast as an on-premises HPC site.
Matrix has S3-compatibility, and customers such as TRE ALTAMIRA and Untold Studios use it in their AWS HPC operations. It is available in the AWS Marketplace.
People peregrinations
Fast network interconnect supplier Mellanox has appointed Doug Ahrens as its new CFO. He comes from being CFO at GlobalLogic. The interim CFO was Eric Johnson and he reverts to his role of VP and corporate controller. Mellanox has been rumoured to sell itself with both Xilinx and Microsoft fingered as potential acquirers. Ahrens’ appointment may signal Mellanox is not for sale.
Software-defined storage outfit Virtuozzo has appointed Alex Fine as CEO. This is his first CEO gig, and his resume includes stints at CloudBlue, Ingram Micro, Odin and Parallels. Previous CEO George Karidis, who left in September last year, is now a COO at PacketHost. Virtuozzo is entering the hyperconverged infrastructure market with a Virtuozzo Infrastructure Platform product.
WekaIO has opened a Midwest US region office in Detroit to increase its presence with car makers. Richard Dyke, WekaIO’s Sales VP, said: “Detroit is the heart of the US automotive industry and therefore a critical territory for us.”
