We start off today’s roundup with news about Samsung facing production problems with its 128-layer 3D NAND. We also take a look at a Sony business using a fast Pavilion array for capturing the video points in a 3D space over time.
Samsung and string-stacking
Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers has said Samsung may be be facing production yield challenges with its gen 6, 128-layer V-NAND (3D NAND) technology. This is a single stack technology whereas Samsung’s competitors are building 100+ layer 3D NAND dies by stacking smaller layer-count blocks on top of each other. This is called string-stacking.
Kioxia and Western Digital’s BiCS 5 112-layer die uses a pair of 56-layer stacks.
Apparently a single stack etch through 128 layers is taking twice as long as the same etch through 96 layers. The etch creates a conductive vertical channel through the layers. If the yield from the wafers is too low, then Samsung’s costs go up.
Rakers suggested Samsung could change to string stacking with its Gen 7, 160-layer 3D NAND die. String-stacking could cost up to 30 per cent more than single-stacking, so Samsung will be motivated to get its single stack etching working.
Sammobile reports Samsung has set up a task force to work through the yield problems.
Pavilion and Sony
Sony Innovation Studios has picked Pavilion Data’s Hyperparallel Flash Array (HFA) for storing data from real-time volumetric virtual production with its Atom View software. Volumetric capture is a performance and latency hungry application needed for the rendering of 3-D virtual and mixed environments.
Volumetric capture captures the visual image points in a 3D space (volume) over time and in minute detail. The AtomView software is point-cloud rendering, editing, and colouring software that enables content creators to visualise, edit, colour correct and manage volumetric data. It can combine multiple volumetric data sets captured from different angles producing a single output for use in virtual film productions, video games, and interactive experiences with true photoreal cinematic quality.
The deployment was in partnership with Alliance Integrated Technologies and Pixit Media’s PixStor product.
Ben Leaver, CEO of Pixit Media, said: “Volumetric capture brings a new paradigm of size and information capable of being stored and requiring the highest performance in render speeds. With an approach that mimics a director class core switch architecture, Pavilion’s approach to multi-line card, multi-controller design means PCIe speeds to each drive, and massive bandwidth to the network over a low latency RDMA protocol.”
Billy Russell, CTO at Alliance IT, said: “It was clear that a 100G ethernet infrastructure was needed to deliver the data. We also wanted the ability to scale in the future to 200 and 400G Ethernet and support migration to tier 2 or cloud as data ages off.”
The Cloud migration uses an Ngenea product. Pavilion said it has “multiple” deployments in the Media and Entertainment vertical.
Shorts
Data protector Acronis has made Acronis Cyber Protect, its cloud offering through service providers, available as a beta version, to deploy on-premises.
Acronis has also struck yet another sports sponsorship deal. This time it’s with AFC Ajax, the Dutch professional football club. The club has yet to schedule its first post-COVID match.
IBM’s Cloud Pak for Data 3.0 is a data and AI platform that containerises multiple offerings for delivery as microservices and runs on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. It includes Actifio’s Virtual Data Pipeline to provision and refresh virtual test environments in minutes, enabling an up to 95 per cent storage capacity saving over non-use of Actifio’s VDP.
Enterprise data cataloguer Alation is working with Databricks to provides data teams with a platform to identify and govern cloud data lakes; discover and leverage the best data for data science and analytics; and collaborate on data to deliver high quality predictive models and business insights.
NoSQL database supplier DataStax today announced the private beta of Vector, an AIOps service for Apache Cassandra. Vector continually assesses the behaviour of a Cassandra cluster to provide developers and operators with automated diagnostics and advice.
Recursion, a digital biology company industrialising drug discovery through the combination of automation, AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities, is using DDN EXAScaler ES400NV and ES7990X parallel filesystem appliances that were later scaled to 2PBs of capacity for staging ML models. An all-flash layer is employed as a front-end to the file system supported by spinning disk. The first 64K of each file is stubbed to this layer, which then accelerates access to the first part of the data before streaming the rest to spinning disk.
Data protector Druva has received an NPS score of 88. NPS (Net Promotor Scores) range from -100 to 100, meaning 88 is a high positive score.
Google has announced the beta launch of Filestore High Scale, a GCP file storage product, which includes Elastifile’s scale-out file storage capability. Google completed its acquisition of Elastifile in August 2019. The Filestore High Scale tier adds the ability to deploy shared file systems that can scale-out to hundreds of thousands of IOPS, 10s of GB/s of throughput, and 100s of TBs.
Komprise has claimed it saw 400 per cent revenue growth Y/Y in 2020’s first quarter. It also added DataCentrix and Vox Telecom as resellers in South Africa.
Composable systems technology developer Liqid has signed up Climb Channel Solutions to distribute Liqid products.
In-memory database supplier MemSQL has announced v7.1 of its software. This delivers SingleStore, an an extension of MemSQL’s columnstore technology that includes support for indexes, unique keys, upserts, seeks, and fast, highly selective, nested-loop-style joins. It also provides fast disaster recovery failback, MySQL language support and the ability to back up data incrementally to more environments: Amazon S3, Azure Blob Store, and Google Cloud Platform.
Netlist announced that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Federal Circuit) has affirmed the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) decision upholding the validity of Netlist’s U.S. 7,619,912 (‘912) patent. This was a win over Google, which has used Netlist technology described in the patent. The way is clear for some kind of money flow from Google to Netlist, potentially in the multi-million dollar area.
Nutanix has added capabilities to its Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution Xi Frame. These include enhanced onboarding for on-premises desktop workloads on Nutanix AHV, expanded support for user profile management, the ability to convert Windows Apps into Progressive Web Apps (PWA), and increased regional data centre support to 69 regions across Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Entertainment and media workflow object storage supplier Object Matrix says its products now support the recently launched Adobe Productions workflow for Adobe PremierePro.
Telecoms operator BSO announced the launch of an Object Storage product in public cloud mode, called BSO.st. The tech is based on the software-defined storage developed by the French company OpenIO.
PlanetScale announced the beta release of PlanetScaleDB for Kubernetes, which allows organisations to host their data in their own network perimeter and deploy databases with just a few clicks using the PlanetScale control plane and operator. PlanetScaleDB for Kubernetes is a fully managed MySQL compatible database-as-a-service for companies looking to deploy distributed containerised applications.
HCI supplier Scale Computing has added Mustek as a distribution partner in South Africa and Titan Data Solutions as a distributor in the UK.
Object (and file) storage supplier and orchestrator Scality announced an investment in Fondation Inria, a French national research institute for digital sciences. Scality is bringing both financial backing and collaboration to help support multi-disciplinary research and innovation initiatives in mind-body health, precision agriculture, neurodegenerative diagnostics, and privacy protection.
Cloud data warehouser Snowflake has announced the launch of its Snowflake Partner Network (SPN), an ecosystem of Technology and Services partners for customers.
Samsung-backed all flash key:value store startup Stellus Technologies laid off its entire sales and marketing department in April, according to a senior ex-employee. Stellus launched its first product at the beginning of February. So sales must presumably have been catastrophically bad for the entire sales and marketing team to be laid off.
ReRAM developer Weebit Nano is going to place circa $6.6 million worth of new shares via a two-tranche placement. It will also conduct a non-underwritten Share Purchase Plan to raise a further $500,000. The $71m cash will be used to complete its memory module development for the embedded memory market, transfer the tech to a production facility, continue selector development at Leti for the standalone memory market. Some of it will also go to sales and marketing and general working capital.
Veeam says Veeam Backup for AWS v2 is generally available and Veeam has achieved AWS Storage Competency status. It supports changed block tracking (CBT) API to shrink backup windows. The product makes application consistent snapshots and backups of running Amazon EC2 instances without shutting down or disconnecting attached Amazon EBS volumes.
Veeam Backup for AWS can be implemented as a standalone AWS backup and disaster recovery system for AWS-to-AWS backup, or integrated with the Veeam Platform.
Veeam has announced new Veeam Availability Orchestrator v3 with full recovery orchestration support for NetApp ONTAP snapshots, a new Disaster Recovery Pack at a lower price, and the capability of automatically testing, dynamically documenting and executing disaster recovery plans.
Data warehouser Yellowbrick Data is offering multiple petabyte (PB) capacity on its new hybrid data warehouse 3-chassis configuration. It claims this provides offers unparalleled, single-warehouse capacity with support for 3.6PB of user data in a 14U rack form factor. This 3-chassis instance has a maximum node count of 45 in that 14U and also supports 45 concurrent, single-worker queries on one system.
The actual chassis product is the 2300 series. Each node delivers 36 vCPUs per node (that’s 2 vCPUs per physical core) and has 8 NVMe SSD slots. There are HDR, VHDR and EHDR models; High Density, Very High Density and Extremely High Density. The HW differences are essentially the NVMe densities shipping on each node.
People
Dremio, which produces data lake SW, has appointed Ohad Almog as VP of Customer Success, Colleen Blake as Vice President of People and Thirumalesh Reddy as VP of Engineering. The company recently raised $70m in a Series C round of funding.
Igneous co-founder and board member Kiran Bhageshpur has relinquished his CEO slot to board member Dean Darwin. VP Products Christian Smith has left Igneous and is now a storage business development person at AWS. B&F has put out feelers to find out what’s going on.
File lifecycle management supplier Komprise has appointed Clare Loveridge as VP EMEA Sales. She comes from ExaGrid and before that Cloudcheckr, Nimble Storage and Data Domain.
