Your occasional storage digest featuring Diamanti, HYCU, TrueNAS and more

Two Kubernetes-related news stories in this week’s storage news round up. Diamanti has debuted a software-only offering and Robin.io has upgraded its core offering and introduced a full-featured but capacity-limited free-for-life software edition.

HYCU has found another great sub-niche for its data protection – SAP HANA on Google Cloud, and iXsystems has added two more products to its TrueNAS range.

Diamanti Ultima

Diamanti, the supplier of a hyperconverged system for running Kubernetes orchestration of containers, has announced a standalone software product called Ultima. This is an integrated networking and storage data plane system and extends across on-premises and cloud-based environments, supporting any Kubernetes cluster distribution.

Ultima includes multi-tenant L2 and overlay container networking capabilities and container-aware data services like snapshots, backup, synchronous mirroring, and asynchronous replication

A Diamanti spokesperson said: “This announcement continues Diamanti’s evolution to a software-focused company and puts us square in the middle of a space where there has been a lot of recent attention  and activity (i.e. Pure Storage’s acquisition of Portworx and Veeam’s acquisition of Kasten).” 

Tom Barton

Is this a move away from hardware? Diamanti CEO Tom Barton told us: “It is by no means a change in Diamanti’s technology focus. Our innovation has always been in the software layer. By untethering our data plane software from hardware, Diamanti is answering enterprise customer demands for easy ways to expand across Kubernetes services, distributions and infrastructure in a hybrid cloud. “

Barton said: “We are proud to launch the only comprehensive data plane solution for both networking and storage that delivers advanced data services and both CSI and CNI plugins while the rest of the industry addresses only one of these areas at a time.” 

HYCU DPaaS for SAP HANA on Google’s Cloud

HYCU is the first vendor to offering Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) for SAP HANA running in Google’s Cloud.

The HYCU Backup for GCP product offers:

  • Automated Discovery, Deployment and Maintenance of Google’s SAP HANA BackInt Agent,
  • User Interface provides SAP Admins access via SAP HANA Studio and Backup Admins via HYCU Management UI,
  • Quick time to DR and Clone with 1-click simplicity for SAP HANA infrastructure level DR across Google regions, and also cloning,
  • Consistent, point-in-time recovery of a complete SAP HANA Database,
  • Cloud aware, compute-free at-source dedupe and auto-tiering based on data protection policies reduce cost,
  • Support for backup targets using Cloud Storage Bucket Lock (WORM),
  • Air-gapped backup targets.

Several cloud service providers around the world have deployed HYCU’s Google SAP HANA service. A HYCU Cloud Services Provider Program is a co-branded service that can deliver data migration, data protection, and disaster recovery as a service.

TrueNAS range bulks up

iXsystems has added the R-Series Storage systems and the SCALE Open Source HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI) Platform to its TrueNAS portfolio.

TrueNAS R-Series.

There are four R-Series storage systems:

  • TrueNAS R50: a 4U, 48 x 3.5″ / 4 x 2.5″ NVMe Bay system which features up to 16 CPU cores and a maximum capacity of 890TB that starts at $9,990 MSRP. 
  • TrueNAS R40: a high-density 2U all-flash system with 48 x 2.5″ and 7mm Bays, up to 16 CPU cores and 360TB of Flash Storage with a starting price of $8,990 MSRP.
  • TrueNAS R20: a 2U system with 12 x 3.5″ and 2 x 2.5″ Bays, up to 16 CPU cores and 230TB capacity with pricing that begins at $4,990 MSRP. 
  • TrueNAS R10: a compact 1U all-flash system with 16 x 2.5″ and 7mm Bays, up to 10 CPU cores, and 120TB of capacity for a starting MSRP of $5,990.

TrueNAS SCALE is a scale-out HCI platform for converged compute and scale-out Open ZFS storage. It can scale from 1 to 100 nodes. SCALE is available as Open Source Debian-Linux based software or as an appliance-based solution using iXsystems’ X20, M40, M50, and M60, and R-Series hardware systems.. 

Robin.io adds more to Kubernetes  

Robin.io is adding enhancements to Robin Cloud Native Storage for Kubernetes and the immediate availability of Robin Express, a full-featured, free-for-life edition.

Robin Express complements the company’s enterprise-focused offering, Robin Enterprise, which offers 24×7 enterprise support, unlimited node and storage capacity, and true “per-node-hour,” consumption-based pricing. Its capacity is limited to 5 nodes and 5TB.

The enhancements to Robin Cloud Native Storage for Kubernetes include;

  • Data management for Helm Charts: Helm is the most popular package manager and deployment mechanism on Kubernetes.  With Robin, you can now easily snapshot, backup, and migrate an entire Helm release as a single entity
  • Data locality (compute-storage affinity) for performance-sensitive workloads
  • Affinity and Anti-affinity policies to support the availability needs of stateful applications that rely on distributed databases and big data platforms.
  • Consumption based pricing for Robin Enterprise: Pay only for what you use.

Shorts

Acronis has integrated iAcronis Cyber Protect with Citrix Workspace.  The VB100 certified anti-malware solution secures endpoints with real-time protection that uses AI-based static and behavioural heuristic, on-demand antiiirus, anti-ransomware, and anti-cryptojacking technologies to prevent direct attacks against the Citrix Workspace app.  

Alluxio has announced the availability of its latest open source Data Orchestration platform with an expanded metadata service and a new management console for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. Users can manage namespaces with billions of files without relying on third party systems. Use the management console to connect an analytics cluster, with engines such as Presto and Spark, with data sources across multiple clouds, single cloud or on-premises.

Grau Data has announced the general availability of Blocky for Veeam, which protects Veeam backups by denying any file access from unauthorised application processes. Blocky uses application whitelisting to identify and allow only authorised processes to access backup files. It creates a secure WORM (write-once, read-many) functionality.

HubStor has opened a private preview of HubStor backup for Azure VMs. Early access is open to a limited number of organisations running VMs on Microsoft Azure. The company will offer some preference for existing customers and partners, and space in the program is limited. 

Kingston Digital Europe has announced the DataTraveler Duo USB flash drive with dual USB Type-A and Type-C1 ports to share files between laptops, desktops and mobile devices. The drive has 32GB and 64GB capacities. 

VMware has selected MinIO as a design partner for the launch of the new Data Persistence Platform which is part of Cloud Foundations 4.1, which in turn is part of vSphere 7.0. You can launch multi-tenant object storage directly from vCenter. 

VMware-MinIO diagram.

HCI vendor Scale Computing is offering Acronis Agentless Backup for its HC3 product, allowing for full virtual machine backup and fast recovery for HC3 clusters.

Ceph storage startup SoftIron has hired Greg Bruno as its Chief Architect. His pedigree include Teradata and helping to develop the Rocks cluster toolkit at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He was VP of Engineering and co-founder of StackIQ, which was acquired by Teradata in 2017.

Western Digital has announced the SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charger Sync and SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charger 15W. The Ixpand Wireless Charger Sync, with up to 256GB of local storage, provides wireless charging, while automatically backing up photos and videos and freeing up space on a mobile device. The SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charger 15W does charging without the backup capability.

Consultancy ESG has published a tech validation report on Yellowbrick’s data warehouse which cites an up to a potential 332 per cent return on investment (ROI). IT compared Yellowbrick with legacy on-premises EDWs, cloud-only EDWs, and Apache Impala implementations for Hadoop-based data lakes. Get a copy from Yellowbrick’s website.