Your occasional storage digest, featuring Druva, Microsoft, Veeam and StorONE

Take a jolly dash along the River Storage and visit Druva for a backup history lesson, Microsoft with ideas on formal data sharing, StorONE with Dell server storage as a service, and Veeam for customer growth numbers.

Druva data protection

In a July blog Druva’s W Curtis Preston sketched out five phases of major development in the history of data protection in the last 30 years:

  • Centralised network backup (Veritas, Legato, IBM, Commvault)
  • Target deduplication (Data Domain, Quantum)
  • Virtualization-centric backup (Veeam)
  • Hyperconverged data protection (Cohesity, Rubrik)
  • Cloud-delivered data protection as a service (Druva)

He is prepping a series of articles that will compare Druva with the other players mentioned above. We can’t wait.

Microsoft and data sharing

Businesses and organisations sharing data often have detailed and formal agreements as to what sharers can and cannot do with the shared data. Fr instance the agreements could concern people’s privacy, intellectual property rights or other limitations on use.

Microsoft’s Erich Andersen, chief IP counsel, has written a blog about such formal data sharing agreements between organisations.

He writes: “Often, agreements for broad data sharing scenarios are unnecessarily long and complex. We also think there is an important role for agreements that limit rights to computational use for AI.”

The company has developed three draft data use agreements:

  • Open Use of Data Agreement (O-UDA)
  • Computational Use of Data Agreement (C-UDA)
  • Data Use Agreement for Open AI Model Development (DUA-OAI)

The company invites interested people to read and review the drafts, with a view to formalising the agreements and making them available for use.

StorONE and Dell storage-as-a-service

Startup StorONE has announced its S1-as-a-Service (S1aaS) which integrates its S1 combined file, block and object storage software with Dell PowerEdge server hardware. Customers can start with a $999 per month deal for an 18TB all-flash array that delivers up to 150,000 IOPS in a 2U form factor, and has data protection included.

The hardware details:

  • PowerEdge R740xd rerver, a 2U 2-socket Xeon Skylake, all-NVMe flash drive system,
  • Active-Active configuration,
  • Raw Capacity: 6 * 3.84TB SSD SAS = 23.04TB,
  • Usable Capacity: 18.4 TB Useable,
  • Compression and Dedupe are included; StorONE counts the physical storage only,
  • Protocols: Block (iSCSI), File (NFS, SMB) and Object are included,
  • Block (FC) – one time extra cost for the HBA, no extra charge for the software,
  • Performance: 150,000 IOPS,
  • Scale: capacity – up to 60TB; performance – up to 300,000 IOPS.
Dell PowerEdge R740xd server

There is monthly billing and no cancellation fees. StorONE says its S1aaS offering is cheaper than any cloud storage service or on-premises storage solution in the market today.

Veeam customer growth rate slows

Veeam, the virtualized server backup vendor, said it surpassed 355,000 customers in the second 2019 quarter. On May 22 it said it had more than 350,000 customers and had achieved a $1bn/year revenue run rate. It also said then it was adding 4,000 customers a month. The rate appears to have slowed since then as it has added 5,000 or so customers in two months.

Most customers have taken up Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4, which has been downloaded nearly 350,000 times since its release in January.

Veeam is adding subscription pricing for all products as a business model and is also embracing the hybrid cloud. It said annual recurring revenue increased 26 per cent year-over-year in the quarter.

The partner deals announced with Nutanix and Exagrid, combining their hardware systems with Veeam software, should be followed by others in the second half of the year.

Shorts

Content management supplier Alfresco has been named a leader in a 26-criteria evaluation of 14 Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Platforms in The Forrester Wave: ECM Content Platforms, Q3 2019 report.

Israeli telecommunications provider Bezeq has replaced a Hitachi UCP and Hitachi VSP F400 all-flash array because response times were getting too liog and upgrade possibilities were limited in its 118TB data warehouse application. It’s now using Excelero NVMesh with Fujitsu servers and Mellanox 100 Gbps Ethernet switches, and getting  a 2x to 3x throughput improvement and database run times cut by up to 80 per cent

In-memory startup Formulus Black has appointed Mark Iwanowski as its new CEO, replacing Dr. Carr Bettis who stepped down as CEO and executive chairman, citing personal reasons.

In-memory supplier GridGain said subscription sales doubled during the first half of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018. Sales to new GridGain customers more than doubled during the period and total sales from new European customers grew more than 150 per cent.

Iguazio and Microsoft showcased Machine Learning Pipeline Automation on Azure Intelligent Edge for multiple industries at the Microsoft Inspire event. Demos included location-based recommendations for retail, real -time stock performance and sentiment analysis, predictive infrastructure operations and KubeFlow Pipelines at the edge.

iXsystems has expanded the FreeNAS Mini series of network storage systems with two new models and tighter integration with TrueNAS and cloud services. TrueNAS and FreeNAS Mini can be managed by True Command from a “single pane of glass”.

The NVM Express organisation has announced the release of the NVMe  1.4 Base Specification. The NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) 1.1 specification has entered into final 45-day member review. V1.4 NVMe provides improved quality of service, faster performance, improvements for high availability deployments, and scalability optimisations for data centres.

Phison Electronics will provide native support for Everspin’s 1 Gbit STT-MRAM memory in its next generation enterprise SSD controller lineup. Phison ships more than 600 million controllers annually. The MRAM support means it can protect data against power loss without the use of supercapacitors or batteries.

The RM5 has been certified for VSAN v6.7.

The SCSI Trade Association (STA) has announced the successful completion of the 18th Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) plugfest, the first for the 24G SAS storage interface standard that consists of SAS-4 and SPL-4 protocol layers. The plugfest was held June 25-27, 2019, at Austin Labs in Milpitas, California.

Amphenol Corporation, Microchip Technology, Molex LLC, Seagate Technology PLC and Teledyne LeCroy Corporation attended and provided initial specification verification support.

StorageCraft has announced its OneXafe Solo 300, a plug-and-play appliance that streams data to the StorageCraft Cloud Services for business continuity. It said it provides enterprise-class protection and recovery at an SMB price point.