Storage suppliers go Kubernetes crazy in this week’s roundup

Multiple data storage vendors surfed on this week’s Kubecon conference to push out Kubernetes announcements. But first, let’s kick off with a little acquisition.

P.S. Check out my stories on The Register this week.

Acronis buys CyberLynx

Data protector Acronis has bought CyberLynx, a small Israeli IT security consultancy. This will increase training and solutions options for Acronis Security Services, in particular for serving managed service providers;(MSPs) and managed security service providers (MSSPs).

Privately-held CyberLynx offers cyber consulting, penetration testing, post-event cyber forensic services and security audits.

Storage vendors go Kubernetes crazy.

Five mainstream storage suppliers have announced containerised app news to coincide with this week’s KubeCon.

Commvault’s Metallic VM & Kubernetes Backup is available and provides SaaS data protection for containers. Protected workloads include any CNCF-Certified Kubernetes distribution with validated support for Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes, Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and VMware Tanzu. The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform has been enhanced to store, protect, and migrate containers across hybrid multi-cloud environments.

NetApp is the starting member of a Rancher Labs OEM and Embedded Alliances Program, and is working to pioneer the next evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) services. NetApp HCI will be the first to embed Rancher’s enterprise Kubernetes management platform.

Pure Storage-owned Portworx has updated PX-Backup to v1.2 which works with any Kubernetes CSI-supporting backend. It works with Portworx’s own PX-Store, Amazon EBS, Google Persistent Disk, Azure Managed Disks, VMWare Storage, Pure FlashArray,  and any other CSI-compatible storage system. PX-Backup v1.2 has a usage-based billing model priced at 20 cents/node/hour.

Veritas has added Kubernetes support to InfoScale automated high-availability software, which will support multi-vendor cloud and on-premises environments. It adds high availability for containerised applications with non-disruptive scaling of persistent volumes; three storageclasses of persistent volumes (performance, resiliency and secure; and. quality of service features to provide predictable performance.

Disaster Recovery supplier Zerto is adding data protection and disaster recovery for containerised apps with the beta program of Zerto for Kubernetes (Z4K), an extension of its core Zerto Platform. The Z4K beta program includes access to a remote access hands-on lab running the Z4K beta code. The lab has no-charge, on-demand training on how to set up, configure, and manage a Z4K environment.

A Zerto-sponsored ESG survey of North American enterprises revealed that containers adoption is in full acceleration and in position to become the preferred for production deployment in 24 months. 71 per cent of survey respondents have deployed or plan to deploy container-based applications in a hybrid-cloud strategy.

Shorts

Cloud providers in the VMware Partner Connect program can protect healthcare data from ransomware with free Cloudian software. For every healthcare organisation enrolled, VMware cloud service providers serving this industry receive a free 50 TB, year-long license for Cloudian object storage, including Cloudian’s government-certified Object Lock technology.  

Datadobi has announced support for NAS file data migration to and protection on Microsoft Azure. Data integrity is fully preserved between the two locations.

DataStax has released K8ssandra, an open-source distribution of Apache Cassandra on Kubernetes. Find out more in this Register story. DataStax releases K8ssandra, the Kubernetes peace offering to the open-source community

DDN‘s SFA18K’s storage platform has been selected for tier 2 storage for the Fugaku supercomputer. Five SFA18KE and 25 SFA18KXE devices will provide a total effective capacity of at least 150 PB, with a minimum effective throughput of 1.5 TB/sec. They will be compute nodes for OSS (object storage servers), which serve as a gateway to other data storage units. Fugaku is a joint development with RIKEN and Fujitsu, and ranks first in the Top500 list. It goes into operation 2021. 

DDN’s A³I A1400X all-NVMe flash storage system will be used by the University of Florida’s HiPerGator supercomputer to help make it the world’s fastest AI supercomputer in academia. HiPerGator will use 4PB of storage to feed 140 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems, which contain 1,120 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, with data flowing through an Nvidia Mellanox HDR 200Gbit/s InfiniBand network.

DDN A³I 

Druva has added detection of unauthorised or non-compliant admin access into the backup environment and unusual data activity alerts. Users can search for and delete malicious files across endpoint backups to prevent re-infection. The software automatically creates a recovery snapshot from the last known good snapshots at the backup and file level, and scans for malware during recovery to prevent re-infection.

Druva acquired sfApex, a Salesforce developer tools and data migration service provider. Druva says its SaaS offering, combined with sfApex, delivers comprehensive SaaS data protection and management for Salesforce with granular backup and data recovery, streamlined and automated migrations, and improved tools for developers

Central Pacific Bank, a commercial bank in Hawaii, has implemented HPE Nimble Storage dHCI to support 1,000 virtual desktops, allowing expanded remote working for employees, continuity of regulatory compliance and improved performance, efficiency and cost savings overall.

HPE and StorMagic have announced a joint hyperconverged edge system, with StorMagic SvSAN validated with HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems. SvSAN runs on any hypervisor as a guest virtual machine to enable highly-available shared storage and virtualisation with two Edgeline servers per site. Active-active synchronous mirroring creates a copy of data on both servers, eliminating downtime.  

Microsoft’s Azure HPC team has used the BeeOND (“BeeGFS On Demand”) filesystem, 300 HBv2 virtual machines and 250TB of NVMe SSD capacity to reach 1.46 TB/sec of read throughput and 456GB/sec of write bandwidth. They claim this is at least 3.6 higher read performance than that demonstrated or claimed elsewhere on the public cloud.

Pure Storage has had an episode of minor lay-offitis with people leaving, we heard, in New Zealand and elsewhere. A Pure spokesperson said: “We undertook a minor workforce rebalancing initiative in one function to align our employees with company priorities and areas that are strategic to the business. The employees affected by this initiative were encouraged to seek other open positions within the company and we also put support in place to aid them through the workforce transition if seeking a new role outside of Pure.”

Pure Storage has announced the Pure Validated Design (PVD) program to help partners deliver simplified deployments. PVDs are available, for Commvault data protection and Vertica for analytics. More PVDs will arrive in the coming months.

Storj Labs has announced Velero (data recovery and migration in K8s environments) and Docker Registry integrations with its Tardigrade Decentralised Cloud Storage Service, launched earlier this year. Tardigrade’s network capacity has grown from 22PB to 78PB and the user count from 3,600 to 11,200. Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland are new Tardigrade storage partners.

WekaIO has set up a validation and certification program to help server partners certify their hardware running the Weka File System (WekaFS) with Nvidia DGX A100. It has also published a reference architecture for using Weka with the DGX A100.