Here’s a carton of storage news brought to you by the virtual drone delivery service at Blocks & Files.
Customers
PAIGE, a well-funded US start up that uses AI to tackle cancer pathology, has signed up to Igneous Unstructured Data Management as-a-Service. It uses the service to protect and manage 8PB training datasets of anonymised tissue images. Igneous also provides a long-term protection and retention tier for the training datasets and results data post-processing. The datasets are used to train algorithms on a Pure Storage FlashBlade and NVIDIA GPU compute cluster.
Fox Sports Australia has bought a Dell Isilon all-flash F800 arrays for outside broadcast vans and its data centre. They store data used in the production of live sports in 4K UHD video resolution. This will help the Foxtel channel broadcast in 4K resolution at twice the frame rate of Foxtel’s HD channels.
The UK’s Nottingham Building Society has bought Nexsan E18P storage to replace a six year-old 32TB IBM DS3524 array, which couldn’t store enough data. The E18P can scale to 648TB and takes up half the rack space of the DS3524. Thank heavens for large capacity disk drives.
Untold Studios, an independent creative studio based in the UK, is using the WekaIO Matrix file system on Amazon Web Services AWS to manage its visual effects (VFX) workflow. VFX artists can connect to Amazon EC2 G3 instances in the cloud and get the same performance as on-premises or local disk. Untold chose Matrix because it is cloud-native, built on AWS, and doesn’t require a big capex investment to spin up.
Shorts
Alluxio, a super-fast distributed storage system developer, has has completed an $8.5m B-round, taking total funding to $16m. Veritas founder and former CEO Mark Leslie joined the round and will serve as a board observer. Alluxio says its technology is in production at Alibaba, Baidu, Barclays, Comcast, Development Bank of Singapore, ESRI, JD.com, Lenovo, Oracle, Paypal, Tencent and Wells Fargo.
Commvault’s IntelliSnap snapshot technology is validated to work with Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged systems to protect application workloads, file systems and virtual machines (VMs.) This complements the existing Commvault ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS offering.
Excelero, an all-flash NVMeoF startup, claims revenues quadrupled in fy2018 and won three times as many customers than the previous year. It also claims that 2017 sales were four times higher than in 2016. It has released no figures.
Excelero says it sold thousands of licenses to hyperscale web companies in 2018. Revenues were split evenly between them and OEM-led deals by Supermicro and Lenovo, and also regional resellers and system integrators including Arcastream, CMA and Pixit Media.
MariaDB, the open source database, has released a version for data warehousing and analytics. MariaDB AX can be deployed on premises or across any public, private or hybrid cloud topology.
Rambus has bought the assets of failed Diablo Technologies. Diablo was a pioneer in developing NVDIMMs, such as Memory1, but shut down in December 2017 while it was being sued by Netlist, another NVDIMM developer, for patent infringements.
Redis Labs announced that Redis Enterprise is available for Intel Optane DC persistent memory, across multiple cloud services or as downloadable software. The software supports products from companies participating in Intel’s hardware beta. Two memory modes are available: using Memory Mode, Redis Enterprise-powered applications can achieve comparable performance to DRAM with cost benefits. Developers get greater cost savings using AppDirect mode with Redis Enterprise, while still delivering faster performance than NVMe.
SUSE Linux is supporting Intel Optane DC persistent memory with SAP HANA, running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. Users can optimise their workloads by moving and maintaining larger amounts of data closer to the processor and minimising the higher latency of fetching data from system storage. The support comes in SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 4.
Zadara says its virtual private storage arrays are available to customers of VMware Cloud on AWS.
People
Bill Wohl left his post as Chief Communications Officer at Commvault in December 2018 to join United Rentals as Head of Brand and Communications.
Joe Consul has joined Datera as its CFO, reporting to CEO Guy Churchward.
Marlena Fernandez has been hired by HCI vendor Scale Computing as its VP For Marketing. She has worked for Seagate, Symantec and Oracle.
