Here we are in March already with another raft of storage news announcements for the start of the Spring season.
Datrium jumps aboard the subscription train
Sort of hyperconverged system supplier Datrium is adopting a subscription business model, called Datrium Forward.
Customers get:
- Portable licenses that can be used and moved across heterogeneous hardware versions and cloud infrastructures
- Term-based software licensing on cloud in 1+ year options, and in three- or five-year options on prem
- Host software, with support included, is priced per node/year
- Persistent storage software, with support included, is priced per TB/year.
Renewals for Datrium Forward are consistent into the future for 10 years or longer, so there’s no forklift-related sticker shock in later years.
The company say,Datrium’s data node, with commodity no-haggle pricing, is much cheaper when compared to land-locked appliance solutions that bundle hardware and software. it claims it is up to 95 per cent less than the list price of popular storage arrays – and its software delivers more than just storage.
Tim Page, CEO at Datrium, says: “SANs and array-based systems are no longer a viable option for the enterprise given increasingly demanding workloads and the push to the cloud across industries. Organizations are expected to move critical workloads to the cloud and between clouds and are failing to do so with antiquated storage and HCI systems.”
Antiquated HCI systems? They were mostly developed less than 10 years ago.
As for enterprise viability, IDC’s latest storage tracker shows no hint of hyperconverged kit or SAN sales declining.
Never mind that. Page declares: “Datrium Forward makes it possible for customers to pay for value and achieve total data centre portability, instead of lining vendors’ pockets. This is the future of acquiring data center infrastructure and keeping it current.”
Retrospect looks forward
Thirty year-old and now private equity-owned backup vendor Retrospect has launched v16 of its software for Windows and Mac users.
EMC bought Retrospect in 2004 but sold it on to private equity in 2011. It’s a small and medium business backup vendor for customers with mixed Windows and Mac environments.
V16 introduces a premium version of the Management Console which adds the setup and sending of backup scripts to any Retrospect ‘engine’ so you don’t have to manually add scripts to each Retrospect instance.
It also adds concurrent Retrospect instance writes to a single backup set destination enabling an up to 16x increase in overall backup performance. This is called Storage Groups and, for users, means mean reducing the backup window, and utilisation of network resource and bandwidth. There should be a good increase in the potential RPO (Recovery Point Objective) , or the backup scope and number of devices being backed up within a backup window.
New deployment tools can automatically deploy client agents, initially in conjunction with Desktop Central for Windows and Munki for Mac systems. More integrations are planned in the future.
SUSE’s irritating survey
Open-source Linux supplier SUSE surveyed 2,000 UK adults and found:
- Almost a third (31 per cent) of consumers believe the amount of data stored on their mobile devices has ‘increased significantly’ in the last five years
- Two fifths (40 per cent of consumers store at least ten more applications on their mobile devices now compared to 2015, rising to more than 25 new applications for almost one fifth (18 per cent) of respondents
- If caught short on storage space, only one in ten (11 per cent) consumers would keep all of their data but pay for more storage
- In fact, over half of respondents (51 per cent) would delete data if they needed more space on their mobile device.
So what? Matt Eckersall, Regional Director, EMEA West at SUSE, says: “There is no doubt that consumer views, habits and expectations around data storage filter through to the enterprise.”
That’s a bit of a stretch in Blocks & Files’ view.
Eckersall adds: “The blurring of lines between work and personal life means consumer behaviour is often mirrored in the workplace. Data growth impacts both individuals and businesses, where concerns around how best to store data are now at an all-time high.”
Ah, we’re getting there; it’s about enterprise data growth, and…
SUSE says businesses need to factor consumer habits around data storage into enterprise storage infrastructure plans.
And the point is? SUSE is working with the Ceph and openATTIC open source project communities to deliver enterprise storage technology that is intelligent, scalable and cost effective.
Heaven forfend but this is one of the more useless supplier-runs-a-survey-to-tell-us-we-need-its-product exercises we’ve come across.
Veeam’s N2SW gets Amazonian
Veeam’s N2SW has introduced N2WS Backup & Recovery 2.5 with the Resource Control console. This enables you to shut off single or groups EC2 compute instances and RDS (Relational Database Services) resources when idle.
Uri Wolloch, CTO at N2WS, said: “Being able to simply power on or off groups of Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS resources with a simple mouse click is just like shutting the lights off when you leave the room or keeping your refrigerator door closed; it reduces waste and saves a huge amount of money if put into regular practice.”
RDS and EC2 instances can be shut off on demand or according to pre-set schedules.
V2.5 also optimizes the process for cycling Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) snapshots into the N2WS S3 (Simple Storage Service) repository. It claims this can lead to north of 60 per cent for backups stored greater than 2 years with compression and deduplication enhancements.
Two new AWS Regions are supported by v2.5: AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region and the new AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. It offers offers automated cross-region disaster recovery between the AWS GovCloud (US-East or US-West) Regions.
The new release has an expanded range of APIs relating to configuring alerts and recovery targets.
Shorts
Backup supplier Acronis is sponsoring E-Prix race car concern DS TECHEETAH, which competes in the in the ABB FIA Formula E championship. Acronis is supplying backup, storage, and disaster recovery products and gets its logo on the DS E-TENSE FE19 car.
Cloud backup service provider Backblaze has an interesting blog about SSD reliability. It surveys the different types of SSDs and failure modes. The conclusion is: “selecting a good quality SSD from a reputable manufacturer should be enough to make you feel confident that your SSD will have a useful life span.”
Object storage supplier Cloudian has reported a fourth consecutive year of record revenue and 80 per customer count growth to more than 300. it shipped six times more appliances – more than 250PB – than in the whole of the previous year. Cloudian claims it is the most widely adopted independent provider of object storage solutions – meaning it is better than Caringo, Scality or OpenIO.
Dell EMC has classed composable infrastructure supplier DriveScale as a Tier Enterprise Infrastructure Global Partner. DriveScale software is compatible with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, Ethernet switches and data storage products. The twosome are targeting big data, machine learning, NoSQL and massively parallel processing solutions optimised for Kubernetes and containers on bare metal deployments in cloud and enterprise data centres.Elastifile, a pioneer of enterprise-grade, scalable file storage for the public cloud, today announced that it has become an
Cloud-native scale-out filer Elastifile has become a SAP PartnerEdge Open Ecosystem – Build partner. It saying this strengthens the bonds between Elastifile’s file storage and SAP’s cloud application suite.
In-memory computing supplier GridGain has launched GridGain Community Edition. It includes the Apache Ignite code base plus patches and additional functionality to improve performance, reliability, security and manageability. The software enables GridGain to quickly deploy patches and upgrades for the Apache Ignite community, faster than the normal Ignite release cycle.
An IBM Redbook explains how IBM Aspera sync can be used to protect and share data stored in Spectrum Scale file systems across distances of several hundred to thousands of miles. It explains the integration of Aspera sync with Spectrum Scale and differentiates it from solutions built into Spectrum Scale for protection and sharing. The Redbook also elaborates on different use cases for Aspera sync with Spectrum Scale.
TIBCO Software has acquired in-memory data platform SnappyData, which has Apache Spark-based, unified in-memory cluster technology. Tibco’s Connected Intelligence platform gets a unified analytics data fabric that enhances analytics, data science, streaming, and data management. It says the result is up to twenty times faster than native Apache Spark, while scaling to support large Apache Spark-compatible stores.
Veritas Technologies is playing the survey game as well as SUSE. It says it’s unearthed just how deep the productivity crisis goes. On average, UK employees lose two hours a day searching for data, resulting in a 16 per cent drop in workforce efficiency. How can we fix this terrible problem? Would you believe that UK organisations that invest in effective day-to-day management of their data report cost savings and better employee productivity as a result.
How do they do that? Did you know Veritas can help global organisations harness the power of their data with a centralised data management strategy?
Hot stuff. Wasabi, which offers cloud storage that is 1/5th the price and up to 6x the speed of Amazon S3, is opening its first EU data centre in Amsterdam. This complements two existing US data centres. David Friend, Wasabi CEO, says Wasabi’s “API is 100 per cent S3 compliant and there are no charges for anything other than the amount of data stored – no egress fees, no charges for PUT, LIST, DELETE or other API calls.”
Customer
GPU-accelerated data warehouse developer SQream has signed LG Uplus, a mobile carrier owned by LG Corporation. This is expected to improve LG Uplus’ network operations and efficiencies, reduce costs and downtime, and offer better quality of service to customers.
LG Uplus becomes SQream’s first customer in South Korea as the company grows its worldwide market share within the telecom industry. The LGPlus HW includes IBM’s POWER9-based AC922 server with NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs and IBM FlashSystem 9100 storage.
IBM Cognitive Systems VP of AI and HPC, Sumit Gupta, said: “This combination of technologies is planned to allow LG Uplus to integrate with Hadoop and interface with base station probes for log analysis for analysis of the company’s very large data stores.”
People
Rubrik has appointed Brett Shirk as its Chief Revenue Officer, responsible for driving Rubrik’s global go-to-market strategy and reporting to Co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha. He was VMware’s SVP and GM for the Americas. Before that he was with Symantec and Veritas, which Symantec acquired. Mark Smith resigned as Rubrik’s EVP for Global Sales and Business Development in December 2018 and his LinkedIn status is “Retired.”
