Your occasional storage digest with a ZB of shipped disk capacity, petabyte flash Dell servers, and more

A zettabyte of disk capacity shipped in 2020. A 2U Dell server can have over a petabyte of Nimbus Data flash. And GigaSpaces in-memory apps can use less space and yet go faster. Read on.

A zettabyte of HDD capacity shipped in 2020

TrendForce research showed demand for storage has fuelled HDD exabytes shipped growth, and a record zettabyte of HDD capacity was shipped in 2020. A zettabyte is 2 to the 70th and equal to 1,000 exabytes, a million petabytes, and a billion terabytes.

TrendForce HDD unit and exabyte ship numbers for 2020

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. was quick off the mark and boasted that it led Seagate and Western Digital in year-on-year nearline HDD average capacity growth in 2020. It followed its 55 per cent year-on-year growth in 2019 with 35 per cent growth in 2020 according to the TrendFocus data.

TrendFocus VP John Chen was quoted in a Toshiba statement: ”Toshiba’s 9-disk helium-sealed HDD platform has enabled the company to achieve the highest five-year compound annual growth fates for nearline HDD Units, Exabytes, and average capacity shipped through 2020.”

GigaSpaces in-memory software gets smaller and faster

GigaSpaces has made in-memory applications faster and more affordable with v15.8 of its InsightEdge Portfolio. This release reduces hardware costs and provides up to 10X faster response time on queries.

It features memory space reduction as the GigaSpaces Ops Manager can automatically reduce an object’s RAM storage footprint by up to 70 per cent.

Yuval Dror, GigaSpaces’ VP for R&D, said in a statement; “The release of InsightEdge Portfolio version 15.8 delivers our best performance results to date for operational and analytical workloads, and higher elasticity to handle expected and unexpected peaks; all while reducing infrastructure and cloud costs.”

Up to 10x faster response time is achieved for SQL queries, reporting and BI by automatically replicating selected small tables of data to the nodes in the cluster to accelerate server-side JOIN performance. A new Broadcast Objects feature replicates smaller static tables that are used frequently when combining rows from two or more tables, for example daily exchange rates.

GigaSpaces Kubernetes Operator supports Kubernetes Helm for day-1 deployment in a cluster and subsequent operations of managing application workloads and auto scaling up or out to support unexpected workloads.

Dell servers get up to 1.2PB of flash in 2RU

Nimbus Data’s ExaDrive SSDs have been certified with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, enabling up to 1.2PB (petabytes) of flash storage in one 2 rack unit (2U) server.

The ExaDrive range includes the 100TB capable ExaDrive DC series and QLC flash-based ExaDrive NL series.

“The combination of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and Nimbus Data ExaDrive SSDs enables 5x greater storage capacity per server than nearline enterprise HDDs and 6x greater flash capacity than the closest competing SSDs,” stated Thomas Isakovich, CEO of Nimbus Data.

ExaDrive SSDs have been certified in the following Dell EMC servers and the following maximum capacities may be achieved.

  • Dell PowerEdge R240: Up to 400 TB of TLC flash or 256 TB of QLC flash
  • Dell PowerEdge R440: Up to 400 TB of TLC flash or 256 TB of QLC flash
  • Dell PowerEdge R540: Up to 1,200 TB of TLC flash or 768 TB of QLC flash
  • Dell PowerEdge R740: Up to 1,200 TB of TLC flash or 768 TB of QLC flash
  • Dell PowerEdge R7525: Up to 1,200 TB of TLC flash or 768 TB of QLC flash

Shorts

Cloud data repository platform provider RSTOR has teamed up with Arcserve to provide data and ransomware protection. In the near future, RSTOR and Arcserve plan to release cloud-based services to ensure business continuity of applications and data. RSTOR does not charge egress and data access fees.

Commvault has signed up with Skytap, a cloud service provider, to expand data protection and migration for IBM i workloads hosted in Skytap on Microsoft Azure.

Stargate support for DataStax Enterprise (DSE) is now available, enabling users to use REST, GraphQL, and schema-less Document APIs in addition to CQL when building applications on top of DSE.

Kubesafe, a cloud-native data protection company, has announced the general availability of its app-centric Kubernetes backup and business continuity software support for NetApp ONTAP storage systems. This is for applications using ONTAP storage running on Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, and Red Hat OpenShift platform without any changes to their existing infrastructure.

Cloud filesystem supplier Nasuni recorded a record $24.6m in annual contract value bookings in the fourth quarter of 2020 and software subscription revenue for 2020 grew 36 per cent Y/Y. Data under management increased 70 per cent across AWS, Azure and other cloud object storage. 

Pavilion Data said it working on a 250PB opportunity with Seagate.  It tells us it can be an important part of the overall Federal solution for Seagate, even more so as it GAs its Global File System which will be able to support tiering.

Rewind has acquired BackHub, and its Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) software for GitHub repositories. BackHub currently protects data for over 1000 customers.

StorCentric last week said it closed 2020 with record growth and ” greater than 35 per cent CAGR achieved over the past several years”. The company claims it has more than 7,000 enterprise customers.

Opus Interactive, a cloud, colocation and IT services company, is using Scality RING and Zenko to deliver services, including data management across multi-cloud infrastructure, backup-as-a-service and more. Most Opus customers are in highly regulated industries with strict data compliance requirements. Scality RING meets this need and gives Opus Interactive the scale and flexibility of S3 object storage and NFS and SMB file access.

Amy Madeiros

Amy Medeiros has been named SVP Corporate Marketing and Inside Sales for DDN and Tintri brands. She will be responsible for strategic and creative marketing and sales initiatives, with a focus on increasing the profitability of channel partners.

The Evaluator Group has hired Dave Raffo as Senior Analyst, HCI and Container Storage. He most recently worked for 13 years at TechTarget as Editorial Director and Executive News Editor for storage, data protection and converged infrastructure.