Your occasional enterprise storage digest, featuring Commvault, Nutanix, HYCU, MariaDB and more

Companies in this week’s enterprise storage news roundup, cover encryption, replication, tiering, object support, snapshots, the public cloud and more. Let’s start alphabetically.

Commvault upgrades for cloud and simpler data management

Commvault this week announced a bunch of software improvements, including single sign-on. Customers can now sign in once to manage Commvault across multiple deployments through a pull-down menu that enables navigation across Commvault regional, data centre, client, or other deployments within the Commvault Command Center.

New capabilities include support for:

  • Back up, recover, and migrate AWS DynamoDB, Redshift, and DocumentDB databases.
  • Convert, back up, and migrate VMware workloads to the Alibaba Cloud ECS.
  • Migration Oracle and Microsoft SQL database applications to Azure.
  • Integrating with the ServiceNow platform to enable self-service. Commvault customers can back up, recover, and migrate file systems, VMs, Microsoft SQL Server workloads and other ServiceNow catalog assets, within the ServiceNow SaaS platform.
  • Convert Oracle Unix databases to Linux and vice versa. This makes it easier to migrate on-premises Unix Oracle databases to the cloud, or cloud Linux Oracle databases to on-premises infrastructure, all without needing an Oracle enterprise license.

Diamanti scales up Spektra

Diamanti, the developer of a bare-metal hyperconverged Kubernetes-orchestrated container system, has upped its Spektra software game and has added a new appliance.

Spektra v2.4 adds volume encryption and supports self-encrypting drives. It also introduces asynchronous replication for offsite disaster recovery

The new D20X appliance is an existing D20 node that incorporates the latest Intel Cascade Lake Xeon processors, which feature increased core counts, a larger cache and higher clock speeds. The upshot is 36 per cent more processing power on average than models using previous Xeon CPUs.

HYCU high-fives Azure

HYCU’s data protection-as-a-service offering, Protégé, offers app- and database-aware data protection, disaster recovery across clouds, recovery of applications on a different cloud, e.g. for test and dev and also migration.

The company started out by supporting the Google Cloud Platform and has now added Azure support.

HYCU for Azure runs as a native service, available via subscription directly from Azure Marketplace and included in the Azure bill. The software is built on native APIs, supports all BLOB storage classes and auto selects the right class of Azure BLOB storage for the policy chosen by the customer.

HYCU for Azure is available immediately and data migration and disaster recovery functionality is generally available in 30 days. Data protection is available free of charge for the next three months.

InfiniteIO tiers to on-prem and cloud S3 storage

InfiniteIO has launched Hybrid Cloud Tiering software, enabling customers to access and manage all primary NAS data migrated to S3-based object storage in native file format.

The company supports public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Platform. Currently supported on-premises NFS- and S3-based private cloud platforms include Cloudian, Dell EMC, HPE, NetApp, Scality and Western Digital.

InfiniteIO has also announced extended metadata management support for Hitachi HCP S3 and NFS and Pure FlashBlade environments. Users and applications can continue to access the migrated data whether it is on-premises or in the cloud.

According to the company, customers can utilise cloud native services such as analytics, machine learning and serverless computing while maintaining internal security and governance without changing the existing infrastructure or user experience.

InfiniteIO plans to offer native file format support in Q2 as part of the Hybrid Cloud Tiering v2.5 software release.

MariaDB goes into the sky

MariaDB has announced SkySQL database-as-a-service version of its eponymous software.

SkySQL has a cloud-native architecture and uses Kubernetes for orchestration; ServiceNow for inventory, configuration and workflow management; Prometheus for real-time monitoring; and Grafana for visualization. It offers transaction and analytics support, with row, columnar, and combined row and columnar storage.

Michael Howard, MariaDB CEO, proffered this bullish quote: “Existing services, long in the tooth, lock out community innovation, meaning patches, new versions and features are missing for literally years. MariaDB SkySQL is a next-generation cloud database, built by the world’s top database engineers in the industry, allowing organisations large and small to know they have an always-on partner to not only roll out new applications, but ensure a consistent and enduring quality of service.”

SkySQL is currently available on Google Cloud Platform and pricing starts at $0.45 per hour. Developers can access example applications using SkySQL on GitHub.

Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Nanodegree

Nutanix has teamed up with Udacity, an online learning supplier, to deliver the Hybrid Cloud Nanodegree. Scholarships for are available for qualifying IT professionals.

The Nanodegree covers private cloud infrastructure and the design of hybrid private and public application deployment. Target students are those managing traditional business applications, legacy infrastructure, or cloud-native applications on public cloud infrastructure.

In phase one, Udacity will select 5,000 applicants to participate in a Hybrid Cloud Fundamentals course. From those 5,000 students, 500 high-performing students will be awarded a full scholarship. The program is designed and created with Nutanix and you can read a FAQ about it.

Scale and Acronis renew OEM vows

Scale Computing is to resell Acronis Cloud Storage, building on an existing OEM partnership with Acronis. The company already resells Acronis Backup software.

Jeff Ready, Scale Computing CEO, said in an announcement quote: “Scale Computing customers can now easily and securely store their Acronis backups locally or in the cloud, with a scalable solution that is designed for agile businesses.”

Scale is to resell Acronis Cloud Storage in one- or three-year terms and in increments from 250GB to 5TB.

StorONE gets objects, snaps, replication and more

StorONE has upgraded TRU S1, the storage software stack that runs its S1 Enterprise Storage Platform. New capabilities include:

  • Added S3 support to enable object volumes to be created alongside its existing FC/iSCSI blocks and NFS/SB files.
  • Added multiple tiering support, ranging from Optane SSDs, NVMe flash SSDs, SAS SSDs (including QLC), disk drives and the public cloud (for archiving).
  • NVMe SSDs can be placed in a separate pool from SAS SSDs. S1 metadata is automatically placed on them if they are present.
  • Support for unlimited snapshots with older snapshots able to be tiered to disk drives or the public cloud.
  • Replication support for cross-cluster deployments with asynchronous, semi-synchronous and synchronous replication of data from one StorONE system to another. Source and target storage clusters can have different drive redundancy settings, snapshot data retention policies and drive pool types.

Asynchronous replication acknowledges when the writes complete locally and to the local TCP buffer. The semi-synchronous replication setting acknowledges when data is written locally to the remote TCP buffer. Synchronous replication acknowledges when data is written locally and to the remote storage system.