Your occasional storage digest including Arcserve, Excelero and WekaIO

There’s a lot of teamwork going on in data storage land as suppliers piggyback on each other’s strengths. We see it with Arcserve and Sophos, WekaIO and Valohai, and Zadara and Cyxtra. You’ll also notice an AI flavour in today’s news roundup. Let’s start with Arcserve and Sophos.

Arcserve arm-in-arm with Sophos for over-long product names

Data protector Arcserve has teamed up with cybersecurity software vendor Sophos to protect backups from cyberattacks and data loss,.

The idea is to combine anti-ransomware and other threat prevention technologies with immutable backup and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities for protection from cyberattacks, major disasters, human error, or other unplanned outages.

Arcserve is introducing cyber and data protection for infrastructures with on-premises, cloud, and SaaS-based workloads. Its new cloud and SaaS offerings include Arcserve Cloud Backup for Office 365 Secured by Sophos and Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) Cloud Hybrid Secured by Sophos. These are possibly the longest product names that Blocks & Files has encountered. Even the acronyms are a mouthful – ACBO365SS and AUDPCHSS.

ACBO365SS provides cloud-to-cloud backup for Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online. It includes cyber protection, policy-based management, restoration to Office 365, and granular recovery with egress included.

AUDPCHSS is offered as a fully managed service extension to Arcserve UDP software and appliances, it provides cyber protection, policy-based management, RPO and SLA validation, application-level recovery, and failover and failback to public and private clouds with egress included

The Sophos technology is said to be AI-powered with deep learning capabilities that detects both known and unknown malware without relying on signatures, exploit prevention, and anti-ransomware capabilities.

Excelero gets involved with AI

PNY Technologies has launched the 3S-2400 AI storage server, which uses Excelero NVMesh NVMe-over Fabrics software to feed data to an Nvidia DGX-1 GPU server.

AI storage systems architect Mark Klarzynski said in a quote issued by PNY: “AI does not need snapshot or deduplication or many of the features standard office-focused storage require. It needs ultra-low latency and tremendous bandwidth at a price that does not impact the investment into GPU’s.”

PNY 3S-2400 AI storage server.

The 2U 3S-2400 has gen 2 Xeon SP (Cascade Lake SP) CPUs. It is hooked up to a DGX-1 and its 8 GPUs across a dual 100Gbit Ethernet or InfiniBand link. These access the 3S-2400’s NVMe SSDs directly, using RDMA facilitated by Excelero’s NVMesh software. The 3S-2400 has 32TB to 360TB of NVMe flash capacity filling its 24 drive slots. GPU access latency is about 90µs.

Each 3S-2400 supports 23GB/sec bandwidth and more can be added to scale-out a system.

Excelero CEO Lior Gal says the system “delivers the highest performance per rack unit in the market”.

WekaIO gets involved in Weka AI

WekaIO, the high performance storage company, is partnering with Valohai and its deep learning pipeline management system. This is part of WekaIO’s Weka AI ecosystem with reference architectures and software development kits to aid the use of WekaIO’s software in AI applications.

The aim is to run the entire data pipeline’s workflow, from ingesting data, to batch feature extraction, hyperparameter optimisation, inferencing and versioning, on the same production-ready storage platform, either on-premises or in the public cloud. A reference architecture exists for Nvidia’s DGX- 1GPU server.

Shailesh Manjrekar, head of AI and strategic alliances at Weka, issued a quote: “Our partnership with Valohai and our integration with its Deep Learning Pipeline Management tools expand Weka AI’s capabilities to offer Explainable AI (XAI). This is a critical factor for use cases with a social impact, including autonomous driving, healthcare, and genomics.”

Valohai DLMS integrates with WekaFS, which leverages i3.n Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) flash for the performance tier and extends the file namespace over Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets for the capacity tier.

Eero Laaksonen, Valohai’s CEO, said the WekaIO partnership “helps businesses to build models 10x faster, regain 35 per cent of lost cloud costs, and free their DataOps teams with automated ML orchestration, data management, and data mobility. It is a win-win.”

The tools from Valohai are supported in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), and available in AWS Marketplace. Weka IO is an Advanced Technology Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network.

Shorts

Software-defined storage (SDS) supplier DataCore has published a sponsored report that shows about half of the enterprise storage market is looking towards SDS or hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to meet primary and secondary storage needs. The report authors says enterprise IT increasingly recognises that HCI is primarily a subset of SDS – in other words, it is a way of implementing SDS.

Container storage startup Diamanti is expanding operations in Latin America and EMEA, and id forming partnerships with channel partnerships in Asia Pacific. It has opened an office in Amsterdam, Netherlands and has hired a team of experts with experience in Kubernetes in the UK, Benelux/Nordics, and Turkey/Middle East regions. Diamanti has also opened a Mexico City office.

Kaseya has launched a unified backup portal for Unitrends and Spanning. The Unitrends Unified Backup Portal enables customers to manage all backups from a single portal and initiate appliance, direct to cloud, and Microsoft O365 application backups.

Spanning Dark Web Monitoring is a first-to-market monitoring facility for MS Office 365 and, next month, GSuite. The software combines backup and restore functionality for Office 365 and GSuite with Dark Web intelligence and search capabilities to identify, analyse and proactively monitor for an organisation’s compromised or stolen employee data.

HPE has introduced storage-class support with NimbleOS v5.2. An all-flash AF60 or AF80 array can have 1.5TB Optane SSDs added with the OS caching technology, ensuring 95 per cent or more reads are from the Optane cache.

Cloud file gateway and sharer Nasuni is offering free migration for Panzura customers, following Panzura’s purchase by private equity.

Netlist has introduced its NS1554 NVMe M.2 format SSD. It uses 96-layer TLC NAND and delivers up to 3.0GB/sec sequential read throughput and 440,000 random read IOPS. The drive’s over-provisioning can be customised to support more than 3 drive writes a day for the 5-year warranty period. It also has flexible power throttling and power-loss protection. Capacity levels range from 800GB to 3.84TB. 

BIOS IT will sell Panasas HPC storage throughout the US, EMEA and APAC as an appointed value-added reseller (VAR), providing customised HPC product and services to its customers. BIOS IT general manager Ian Mellett comments, “We are excited to partner with Panasas to offer our customers in the HPC arena the extreme performance, reliability, and simplified manageability that the ActiveStor Ultra product delivers.”

NVMe-oF storage supplier Pavilion has launched HPCinnovation.com, a website designed to bring awareness to a “third wave” of storage for High Performance Computing (HPC) environments. It says this third wave is facilitated by NVMe which freed SSDs from legacy disk interfaces. Pavilion’s Hyperparallel Flash Arrays eliminate the bottlenecks imposed by the legacy all-flash array dual-controller architecture with a switch-like design, This enables multiple controllers to access storage simultaneously and  deliver “unprecedented performance”. 

In-memory database supplier Redis has announced RedisAI. It reduces the time spent outside the AI inference engine to collect and prepare the necessary reference data. Redis says it can and can deliver up to ten-times more inferences than other AI serving platforms and at a much lower latency. RedisAI has built-in support for major AI backend systems (TensorFlow, PyTorch, and ONNX Runtime), and enables inferencing to run across platforms. For instance, a model that was trained by PyTorch can be inferenced by TensorFlow.

Seagate has signed an Open COVID Pledge and granted free access to all of its patented technologies to help enable the diagnosing, preventing, containing, and treating of COVID-19.

The SNIA has a live webcast coming on June 23 at 10am PT, entitled “A Multi-tenant Multi-cluster Kubernetes Datapocalypse is Coming.” Sounds dramatic. It asks what are the implications of multiple Kubernetes clusters in a broad deployment? What happens if a cluster goes down? What’s the impact on business resiliency? Managing and securing multiple clusters is becoming a key topic and area of debate. Multi-cluster Kubernetes that provides robustness & resilience is rapidly moving from “best practice” to a “must have”.

StorJ Labs has released Storage Node for QNAP Systems, allowing users to generate revenue from their unused NAS QNAP hard drive capacity and bandwidth. Users can install the app and set up a Storage Node on the Storj Network in minutes. The company has also announced early access for the Tardigrade S3 Gateway for QNAP, which allows NAS owners to backup the data on their devices to the Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage Service through QNAP’s Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS 3) tool.

Western Digital has joined the the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium (AECC), a cross-industry group working to drive best practices for the coming vehicle, computing and storage convergence.

Hybrid cloud data warehouse supplier Yellowbrick Data is partnering analytics supplier SAS to develop a product roadmap and build integrated system for data analytics. Allen Holmes, VP business development at Yellowbrick, said. “Our partnership means that users will enjoy the best of both worlds—the reliability and features of SAS along with the high performance and implementation flexibility that Yellowbrick delivers. This is a win-win collaboration for enterprises.”

Zadara, which supplies on-premises arrays under a managed service scheme, has partnered with colocation operator Cyxtera. The 62 Cyxtera co-lo centres around the globe can have multi-tier Zadara arrays installed in them, available via the Cyxtera Marketplace.