In this week’s data storage roundup, Infinidat has put things in place to support vSphere disaster recovery failover across metro distances while Retrospect make it simple and easy to add systems throughout an enterprise IT estate to its backup regime. Meanwhile, Toshiba has published a little update about the disk drives that store large hadron collision data at CERN.
We also have a bunch of shorts on Datrium, Formulus Black, Kingston, Pivot3 and others.
Infinidat delivers vSphere Metro Cluster support
Infinidat, the high-end storage array vendor, has announced reference architecture support for VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) with its InfiniBox Active-Active Replication.
vMSC enables a single cluster of physical host resources to operate across geographically separate data centres. InfiniBox Active-Active replication implements vMSC and achieves zero RPO and zero RTO. In other words, business services can keep operating through a complete site failure.
Pete Chargin, senior director for the vSphere platform at VMware, said in a quote: “Our customers… utilize vMSC to reduce downtime while enabling high performance. Infinidat’s vMSC reference architecture is one of the solutions that fills that need effectively for multi-petabyte enterprise environments, optimising the value of vMSC for the higher end of the enterprise market.”
Infinidat claims it is faster from a latency perspective than other vendors that offer active-active synchronous replication capability.
Retrospect builds automatic onboarding
Retrospect has announced Retrospect Backup 17 and Retrospect Virtual 2020 and updates for the Retrospect Management Console. The backup supplier said its product suite now provides hosted management service for automatic onboarding of physical and virtual backup instances.
With automatic onboarding, administrators can share a single URL with their entire company, and each employee can download the client for their platform, pre-packaged with a public key for authentication. There are no user passwords, and Retrospect Backup 17 automatically adds the new clients and starts protecting them.
Retrospect Virtual 2020 is a management facility that enables customers to monitor physical and virtual backup infrastructure via the Retrospect Management Console.
Mihir Shah, CEO of StorCentric, parent company of Retrospect, had an announcement quote: “Retrospect enables any business to backup their entire infrastructure and restore a file or a system to a single point in time–days, months, or years in the past. The ubiquity of ransomware means businesses need a data protection strategy, with on-site backups for fast restore and an off-site location. Retrospect makes it a click away.”
Retrospect Backup 17 is certified for Nexsan E-Series and Nexsan Unity storage devices – Nexsan is another StorCentric sub.
Toshiba loves Large Hadron collisions
Toshiba said the CERN Large Hadron Collider has used three generations of its disk drives since 2014 to store experimental data.
The current storage setup at CERN consists of HDD buffers with 3,200 JBODs carrying 100,000 hard disk drives, providing a total of 350PB.
Toshiba’s upcoming launches for CMR (conventional magnetic recording) and SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drives will give CERN access to 16TB and 18TB drives. This will add 432 TB of new capacity per JBOD.
Toshiba is also developing a next-generation microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology to extend capacities beyond 20TB per HDD and beyond in coming years.
Shorts
Datrium has been awarded five new US patents for data resiliency and durability; enhanced storage performance; advancements in server-powered deduplication, encryption and compression; and data path monitoring for improved network resilience.
Formulus Black has released a Tech Brief entitled: In-Memory Storage and Formulus Black’s FORSA. This “details the unique characteristics of NAND, DRAM, and SCM, as well as discusses what makes SCM so exciting. Find out how we have changed the storage game by incorporating SCM and DRAM technologies to create a high-performance and ultra low latency in-memory storage system.” You can download a copy.
Kingston Technology has a released the DC1000M, a U.2 data centre NVMe PCIe SSD. It delivers up to 540K IOPS of random read performance and moe than 3GB/sec throughput. The drive is hot pluggable, has end-to-end data path protection, power-loss protection and telemetry monitoring. It is available in 960GB, 1.92TB, 3.84TB and 7.68TB capacities, and has a limited five-year warranty.
MEMXPRO has introduced extra long life TLC SSDs for Edge AI and 5G use. They are the PT31 series with SATA 3 interface and 10,000 P/E cycles, and the PC32 NVMe SSD series with 40,000 P/E cycles. MEMXPRO said the 10K endurance Micron B17A TLC is 3x longer, and 40K endurance Micron B17A TLC in SLC (1 bit/cell) mode is 13x longer than MLC (2bits/cell) or other industrial TLC NANDs.
Hyperconverged infrastructure supplier Pivot3 has a partnership with UK-based AIMES, a cloud and data centre service provider. AIMES’ Health Cloud will use Pivot3 kit for university and hospital researchers to collect and analyse massive amounts of sensitive data.
Houston-based OvationData stores and processes datasets from oil and gas companies in 50 countries worldwide. Oil and gas companies “chunk” their largest files and send them to OvationData and projects with 25+TB files were becoming frequent. It is using Qumulo’s file system as a single workspace to concatenate such large file chunks from customers into single files for processing or transport.
Rambus has developed an HBME 2 interface offering; a co-verified PHY and memory controller operating at a top speed of 3.2 Gbit/s over a 1024-bit wide interface. It delivers an aggregate bandwidth of 410 GB/sec from a single HBM2E DRAM stack. Find our more from a downloadable HBM2E and GDDR6: Memory Solutions for AI white paper.
StorMagic has joined the HPE Complete program as a replacement for the StoreVirtual offering that was discontinued through HPE at the end of 2019. StorMagic’s virtual SAN SvSAN software will be available worldwide immediately through HPE’s global reseller and distribution network.
New CPU developer Tachyum has become a member of two JEDEC committees developing standards for solid state memories and DRAM modules
FPGA supplier Xilinx has announced Alveo-U25 brand Smart NICs with network, storage and compute acceleration functions for cloud service providers, telcos, and private cloud data centre operators. Suggested workloads are SDN, virtual switching, NFV, NVMe-oF, electronic trading, AI inference, video transcoding, and data analytics. Xilinx says it provides higher throughput and a more adaptable engine than SoC-based NICs.
People
With CFO Ron Pasek retiring, NetApp has appointed Mike Berry as EVP and CFO. He joins from McAfee where he was also EVP and CFO.
Nutanix has promoted Sylvain Siou to VP Systems Engineering, for Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA). Siou will have a role supporting Nutanix’s expansion in EMEA, while maintaining overall responsibility for the company’s team of systems engineers in the region.
Pliops, the developer of a dedicated storage processor, has announced that Carnegie Mellon University assistant professor David Nagle has joined its advisory board. According to Pliops, Nagle is a key influencer in the creation of exabyte-scale databases and storage offerings for the hyperscale world. Nagle has had senior positions with Facebook, Google and Panasas.
