Your occasional storage digest, featuring AWS, hard drive sales, Red Hat and more

Start your week with some tasty storage snacks, including Amazon offering high-performance computing in its cloud, preliminary IDC disk drive ships for the second quarter, and Red Hat support for Optane DIMMs with SAP software.

There are a dozen shorter telegram-type items and three exec hires to start your week. Nibble away.

AWS Parallel Cluster

An AWS blog describes how to build an HPC cluster in Amazon’s cloud, using the Amazon FSx for Lustre parallel file system.

With the AWS ParallelCluster management facility, you can configure the EC2 compute and storage resources to create an automatically scaling HPC system. The compute section of the cluster scales automatically, up to thousands of instances when jobs are run and the compute nodes access Amazon FSx for Lustre.

Amazon saids FSX for Lustre provides sub-millisecond access to data and reads and write data at speeds of up to hundreds of GB/sec throughput and millions of IOPS.

IDC preliminary Q2 2019 disk drive ships

Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers has crunched IDC and TrendForce numbers to work out preliminary hard drive shipments for Q22019 and vendor segment shares. The results show Seagate sold more drives than Western Digital:

Data columns 1, 2 and 3 are millions od disk drives.

The table splits the shipments into for segments. It confirms Toshiba’s traditional strength in 2.5-inch and mobile drives, with its good showing in mission-critical drives reflecting that too. It also shows Western Digital’s withdrawal from that segment. WD prefers to pump its SSDs into the market for fast-access mission-critical data drives.

Red Hat and Optane DIMMs

Red Hat last week announced RHEL support for Optane in SAP. It said Optane persistent memory can be configured in one of the following ways for use by applications:

  • Block mode (memory mode)
  • Device DAX mode (direct access mode)
  • FS-DAX mode (file system direct access mode)

These modes are described in the Blocks & Files Optane DIMM explainer.

The current status of persistent memory support and FS-DAX for the LInux ext4 and XFS filesystems is;

  • Block Mode is fully supported in RHEL 7.3 and later.
  • Device DAX is fully supported in RHEL 7.4 and later.
  • FS-DAX for ext4 and XFS is in Technology Preview from RHEL 7.3 to RHEL 7.6. Full support is targeted in a future minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Red Hat fully supports Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory (pMEM) File System DAX (FS-DAX) as part of RHEL 7.6 and RHEL 8.0 for SAP Solutions subscriptions as follows:

  • RHEL 7.6 for SAP Solutions: for production deployments of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03, revision 35 (or later).
  • RHEL 8.0 for SAP Solutions: for production deployments of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04 (or later).

FS-DAX technology remains in Technology Preview for all other RHEL 7.6 and RHEL 8.0 use cases.

Shorts

Backup supplier Acronis has signed up FC Internazional Milano (Inter Milan) football cloud as a customer.

Cloud backup service supplier Carbonite has a new service; Carbonite Endpoint 360. It offers backup for desktops, tablets and mobile devices, and protects data across the entire Microsoft Office 365 Suite, including SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange and Teams. It’s available to customers directly and to partners through the channel. 

The European Commission’s Evolve project is looking at big data processing. It uses an HPC computing platform from ATOS/BULL, with large memory, accelerated processing, fast communication, and high-performance shared storage based on DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine. The Evolve’s consortium is composed of 19 organisations from 11 European countries with expertise in several technological domains.

OpenIO SDS (Software-Defined Storage) v19.4 supports AWS S3 ands has had performance and usability improvements.

Patriot has a SATA III access 960GB Burst SSD costing less the 8 cents/GB; $75.99 on Newegg. That’s cheap.

Data protection vendor Quest Software, announced the general availability of Quest QoreStor 6.0 to provide non-invasive long term retention. It has a Performance Tier accelerating backup and providing instant recovery, with encryption technologies to keep all data in-flight and at rest secure.

Swiss-based RAIDIX says it can drive an NVMe SSD storage node at 35GB/sec and 5.5 million IOPS, through parallelisation of IO handling, patented methods of erasure coding, lockless datapaths and rapid checksums calculation.

A blog from IBM developers Lin Feng and Wu Xu describes fault-tolerance in Spectrum Scale Erasure Code Edition. The ECE software is described here

Combined block, file and object storage software startup StorONE has signed a reselling deal with Madison Cloud, a small US public cloud front end business. Madison Cloud will use StorONE S1 software in Equinix data centres that have fast, direct connections to the AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Oracle clouds. That means compute in these clouds can process data stored in S1-powered arrays.

Object storage software supplier SwiftStack has joined the NVIDIA Partner Network (NPN) program as a solution advisor for artificial intelligence and machine learning use cases.

Replication software supplier WANdisco has announced a partnership with Neudesic, an international business and technology consulting firm. WANdisco’s Live Migrator with Neudesics’ Cloud Services will help accelerate the migration of data and analytics workloads to Microsoft Azure.

WANdisco has also teamed upi with Databricks to accelerate and simplify the migration of on-premises Hadoop analytics workloads to Azure Databricks, an Apache Spark based engineering and machine learning platform offered by Microsoft.

People

HPE has promoted Heiko Meyer to chief sales officer, reporting to Phil Davis, current chief sales officer and president of Hybrid IT. Meyer takes over the CSO role on November 1.

Prodigy Universal Chip processor startup Tachyum has appointed Kiran Malwankar to the position of VP of System Engineering. He has senior positions at Cisco, Violin Memory, Nishan Systems/McDATA, and Aprius/FusionIO. Tachyum closed an A-round of funding this month and has bagged$25m in post-A funding.

Veritas has appointed Phil Brace as an EVP to head up ithe Appliances and Software-defined Storage business. He joins from Seagate where he was in charge of Storage Systems Business and solid-state drive (SSD) product divisions. Brace also spent nine years at LSI Corporation.