Reader’s storage digest: Backup, HPC storage, data lakes and more

In this week’s roundup of storage news, we look at Dremio’s Data Lake Engine on AWS, Rubrik extending its public cloud workload coverage, HPE enlarging GreenLake to cover Cohesity and Qumulo, and more.

Dremio takes data warehousing data lake to AWS

Dremio’s Data Lake Engine, which enables data warehouse queries to run on data lakes, has pushed out a Dremio AWS edition. The new product is Dremio software running in AWS and has elastic engines and parallel instances.

Elastic engines enable data teams to configure any number of compute engines, each sized and tailored to the workload it supports and running inside customers’ own AWS accounts.

Amazon S3 data lakes need data extracting and loaded into data warehouses for fast analysis.  Dremio’s chief product officer, Tomer Shiran, told us: “With Dremio AWS Edition, data teams can query the data in place in S3 with lightning-fast interactive performance while reducing their cloud infrastructure costs by over 90% compared to traditional SQL engines.” 

The Dremio AWS SW supports multi-tenant instances via parallel projects with lifecycle automation. Each instance contains all associated configuration, metadata, and data reflection details. These Parallel projects provide end-to-end lifecycle automation across deployment, configuration with best practices, and upgrades, all running in customers’ own AWS accounts.

Dremio AWS Edition is available in the AWS Marketplace.

Rubrik extends Polaris

Data manager and protector Rubrik has extended its public cloud coverage to more workloads on AWS, Azure and Google.

It will now protect Google Compute Virtual Machines (VMs) as a service, as it does for AWS and Azure. Policies are set to backup and recover Google VMs for hundreds of GCP projects and regions. 

Rubrik’s AWS backup facilities now include Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS). It looks after all instance types and transaction logs across availability zones. There’s a 2-click setup and Rubrik says point-in-time recoveries can be done in minutes.

Microsoft 365 OneDrive can now be protected by Polaris and both file-level and folder-level recoveries are supported.Rubrik says the backup data remains with a customer’s accounts enabling them to “comply with enterprise data control requirements.” This is different from the separate backup account approach taken by Clumio.

HPE Greenlake floods over Cohesity, Qumulo and CyrusOne

GreenLake Central is now generally available with over 250 early adopter customers. Central is HPE’s online operations console for a customer’s Greenlake hybrid cloud IT estate, meaning its HPE software and hardware kit across its data centres, all managed as a service by HPE and used in a self-serve, pay-per-use, scale up-and-down way. Basically customers get a public cloud-like experience on-premises and in the public cloud by sourcing kit from HPE. More than 800 Greenlake customers have done precisely that.

Cohesity data protection and management, and Qumulo’s scale-out file storage are now available through Greenlake.

HPE has also announced an extended co-location deal with Cyrus One with a single contract, invoice, and point of contact. Customers have the option of co-location for any GreenLake-sourced system, hosted in any CyrusOne datacenter globally.

Acronis Cyber Protect bundles backup and cyber security

Backup supplier Acronis, which has a strong security focus, has integrated backup, disaster recovery, next-gen anti-malware, cybersecurity, and endpoint management tools into one Acronis Cyber Protect service for MSPs. 

Acronis is positioning the bundle as a single product for MSPs to roll out services to their clients, such as vulnerability assessments, URL filtering, and patch management.

It says AV-Test.org, a German security institute, ran a pre-release version of Acronis Cyber Protect in March 2020 on a computer running Windows 10 Professional.

AV-Test tested both the status and dynamic detection rates of Acronis Cyber Protect, scanning a set of 6,932 malicious Windows executable (PE) files. Acronis had a 100 per cent detection rate and also delivered zero false positives in a separate test. You can check out the test results.

The Acronis Cyber Protect roadmap has an on-premises edition scheduled for release in the second half of 2020. A personal version is also planned for release in Q3 2020.

Cost second and third most important thing about HPC storage

HPC storage supplier Panasas has commissioned an analysis by Hyperion Research that shows TCO and purchase price both outstrip scalability, resilience and even network connectivity and floorspace in a survey of verndors buying HPC storage. The commissioned survey drew on data centre planners and managers, storage system managers, purchasing decision-makers and key influencers, as well as users of HPC storage systems. Hyperion surveyed organizations with annual revenues from under $5m to more than $10bn.

Interested parties can download the Hyperion report.

Shorts

The UK’s Crown Commercial Services office has selected Bridgeworks to offer the NHS and qualifying medical research organisations data management services over the next 12 months, at no cost. Bridgeworks is making available its PORTrockIT IP network acceleration products free of charge for one year, to any Health Organisation or Medical Research Establishment engaged in COVID-19 vaccine research work.

NetApp FlexPods, converged infrastructure validated designs integrating Cisco servers and switches with NetApp storage, are available on a subscription basis in EMEA: FlexPod as a Service (FPaaS) – storage, compute, network and hypervisor – delivered as a managed, cloud-based service.  This will be made similarly available in the USA.

Tributary Systems, which sells its Storage Director enterprise backup product, has signed a deal with Hitachi Vantara to have its VSP G Series arrays and HCP object storage be backup target storage for Storage Director. Storage Director said it offers an ultra-high performance data path to HCP cloud object storage enabling HCP to be deployed as both a near-line active backup/restore as well as an archive solution.

Hybrid cloud data warehouser Yellowbrick has made a deal with Next Pathway Inc. to have its SHIFT Migration Suite convert legacy and other supplier’s data warehouse code to run on Yellowbrick. This includes the capability to automate the conversion of database objects such as SQL and complex types including Stored Procedures, orchestration logic, ETL pipelines, Dynamic SQL, and others from legacy technologies such as Teradata and Netezza.