Your occasional storage digest featuring Druva, WekaIO with STACs of benchmarks, and more

PHAEDO manga comic cover

This week, Druva helps notebook and desktop users defeat ransomware, and WekaIO feasts on more STAC benchmarks.

Druva gets fiery-eyed

Druva, the backup service vendor, has cut a deal with security outfit FireEye to provide ransomware protection for desktop and notebook users. 

FireEye Helix, a cloud-hosted security operations platform, integrates via APIs with Druva InSync to inspect endpoint restoration from backup files.

Sean Morton, customer experience VP at FireEye, said: “Traditional backup solutions can be a ‘black box’, but Druva’s unique capabilities offer greater visibility into ongoing activities.”

Druva said the combined system identifies abnormal data restoration, ensuring data being restored is within the enterprises’ network. It verifies compliance to geography-based data access and restoration policy and makes visible who is accessing the system, tracking Unauthorised Admin Login attempts, password changes and Admin attempts to download or recover data.

The joint software generates alerts, according to pre-built rules. These trigger pre-configured playbooks to help security analysts assess an event and mitigate or fix it.

WekaIO wins STACs of benchmarks

WekaIO, the fast parallel file system software startup, has topped another set of STAC benchmarks

As we wrote 12 months ago: “The STAC-M3 Antuco and Kanaga benchmark suites are regarded as an industry standard for evaluating the performance of systems performing high-speed analytics on time series data. STAC benchmarks are widely used by banks and other financial services organisations.”

The STAC M3 tests involved a hefty setup with 32 HPE servers. The Kx kdb+ 3.6 database system was distributed across 14 HPE Proliant XL170r Gen10 servers, with data stored in a cluster of 18 HPE Proliant XL170r Gen10 servers with a total of 251TiB of SSD capacity, all accessed via WekaIO WekaFS 3.6.2 software.

WekaIO outperformed all publicly disclosed results in 11 of 24 Kanaga mean-response time (MRT) benchmarks and outperformed all publicly disclosed results in all Kanaga throughput benchmarks (STAC-M3.β1.1T.*.BPS).

When compared to a kdb+ solution involving an all-flash NAS and 4 database nodes (SUT ID KDB190430), it was faster in all 24 Kanaga MRT benchmarks and in 15 of 17 MRT Antuco benchmarks.

There’s more information in STAC benchmark test documentation (registration required).

Shorts

Fujitsu has announced PRIMEFLEX for VMware vSAN to streamline the deployment, operation, scalability and maintenance of VMware-based hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). The system is intended for general purpose virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructures, big data and analytics, remote and branch office, edge computing and mission-critical workloads such as SAP HANA.

Kioxia has published a Manga comic designed by AI, called PHAEDO. This is the story of a homeless philosopher and Apollo, his robot bird, who try to solve crimes in Tokyo in 2030. Basically, AI software developed the character images using Nvidia GPUs and Kioxia SSDs. Kioxia says PHAEDO is the world’s first international manga created through human collaboration, high-speed and large-capacity memory and advanced AI technologies.

HPE has created vSAN ReadyNodes with VMware using ProLiant servers to add to its hyperconverged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) portfolio. The ProLiants are installed with vSphere, vSAN, and use firmware that complies with VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). Customers receive HPE-based support for all Level 1 and Level 2 requests, with a handoff to VMware support for Level 3 software support requests.

IBM has joined the Active Archive Alliance. Chris Dittmer, IBM VP for high end storage, said: “Our archive storage solutions combine Exabytes of storage with geo-dispersed technology and built-in encryption for data integrity and confidentiality. We are excited to join the Active Archive Alliance and to help promote solutions that deliver rapid data search, retrieval, and analytics.” He’s talking mainly about disk-based IBM COS.

Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers tells subscribers Micron pre- announced a solid (surprising) upside for their F3Q20 this week – revenue at $5.2-$5.4B and non-GAAP EPS of $0.75-$.80 vs. the company’s initial $4.6-$5.2B / $0.40-$0.70 guide. Rakers reckons demand for Micron’s server DRAM has shot up. 

WANdisco, which supplies replication technology, has won a global reseller agreement with an un-named systems integrator. This integrator, with 240,000 people in 46 countries – think a CAP Gemini-class business – is going to build its own data migration practice for moving data at scale into the public cloud. 

Veeam has published the Veeam 2020 Data Protection Trends Report, which reports that almost half of global organisations are hindered in their digital transformation (DX)journeys due to unreliable, legacy technologies. Forty-four per cent cite lack of IT skills or expertise, as one in 10 servers having unexpected outages each year — problems that last for hours and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Veeam’s conclusion?  This points to an urgent need to modernise data protection and focus on business continuity to enable DX. Buy Veeam products in other words. No surprise here.

People

Commvault has hired Jonathan Bowl as general manager of Commvault UK, Ireland & Nordics.

Beth Phalen, President of Dell EMC’s Data Protection Division, has resigned.

SoftIron has appointed Andrew Moloney as its VP of strategy to lead the company’s go-to-market planning and execution as it expands its product portfolio and global presence. SoftIron recently completed a $34m Series B funding round.