Our IPO sensing organ is twitching strongly following a couple of Backblaze announcements. NAND and SSD fabber Kioxia has made a loss in its latest quarter. Index Engines has announced APIs so third-party storage and backup supplies can add automated ransomware attack detection into their software.
Backblaze gussying up for IPO?
Cloud storage supplier Backblaze has recruited three independent non-exec board directors to serve on compensation, audit, and nominating and governance committees, and a specialist financial PR firm, the San Francisco-based Blueshirt Group.
This month it announced the hiring of Frank Patchel as CFO and Tom MacMitchell as General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer. Interestingly, to me at least, they were actually hired in Spring 2020. MacMitchell came on board in April 2020 according to his LinkedIn profile and Patchel left his previous job in February last year.
This all looks like BackBlaze is laying the groundwork for an IPO.
Kioxia attributes Q3 loss to weak enterprise demand and smartphones fallback
Kioxia’s third fiscal 2020 sales ended Dec. 31 were ¥287.2bn ($2.72bn) with a loss of ¥13.2bn ($130m). This compares to the year-ago sales of ¥254.4bn ($2.41bn) and ¥25.3bn ($240m) loss. The numbers are going in the right direction, with a 13 per cent sales rise Y/Y.
Kioxia said smartphone-related shipments decreased from previous high levels and enterprise demand was weak, But it reported solid growth in gaming devices, PCs and data centres, which enable modest positive bit growth in the quarter.
However average selling prices declined driven by a supply/demand imbalance. In other words, A NAND glut has been driving down prices. Kioxia said this was primarily caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and China-US trade friction. The general consensus is that the NAND market will stabilise towards the second half of CY2021 as demand for data center SSDs, client SSDs and smartphones is expected to remain strong, and demand for enterprise SSDs is expected to recover steadily.
Index Engines opens APIs to protect backup vendors from ransomware attacks
Index Engines has released an API-based developer kit to enable third-party backup and storage vendors to integration of CyberSense analytics and reporting software into their products.
The company says its CyberSense software provides advanced integrity analysis of data to detect signs of corruption due to a ransomware attack on backup and storage data. The new APIs enable third parties to hook into full-content indexing of data, alerts if suspect corruption is detected, post-attack forensic reporting that allows rapid diagnosis and recovery from an attack.
APIs are available to initiate indexing jobs for data in both primary and backup storage environments via NFS/CIFS or NDMP protocols. CyberSense can directly index files in backup images, including Dell EMC NetWorker/Avamar, Veritas NetBackup, IBM Spectrum Protect, and Commvault without the need to rehydrate the data.
Shorts
Ctera‘s global file system is now supported on HPE Nimble Storage dHCI systems. Nimble Storage dHCI users can visit www.ctera.com/hpe-hci to get their free download for the CTERA virtual filer with public and private cloud service extension options.The software is already available on HPE SimpliVity HCI systems.
Search company Elastic has announced the general availability of searchable snapshots and a new cold data tier to enable customers to retain and search more data on low-cost object stores without compromising performance. Customers discover new data and new workflows by creating a schema on the fly with the beta launch of schema on read with runtime fields. There is also a web crawler for Elastic App Search to make content from publicly accessible websites easily searchable.
One fifth of the UK public does not know how to permanently erase data from a device, according to a Kaspersky survey. The research, which included a data retrieval experiment on second-hand devices, found that 90 per cent contained traces of private and business data, including company emails.
UK-based digital archiving specialist Arkivum, in partnership with Google Cloud, have been selected for the second prototyping phase of the €4.8m multinational ARCHIVER project led by CERN. The team were awarded a role in the pilot phase, announced in June 2020. This phase will run for eight months.
Quantum‘s ActiveScale S3-compatible object storage system has achieved Veeam Ready qualification for Object and Object with Immutability, meaning it now has ransomware protection. Quantum said it is ensuring that all its products have a built-in option for ransomware protection.
Redis Labs has announced RediSearch 2.0 which allows users to create secondary indexes to support their queries instead of writing manual indexes. It scales to query and index billions of documents, and use sRedis Enterprise’s Active-Active technology to deliver five-nines (99.999 per cent) availability across geo-distributed read replicas.
Data lake query tech supplier Varada has a new feature that enables a 10x-100x queries speed increase when running on Trino clusters (formerly known as PrestoSQL) directly on the data lake. Varada can now be deployed alongside existing Trino clusters and apply its dynamic and adaptive indexing-based acceleration technology. It is available on AWS and is compatible with all Trino and previous PrestoSQL versions.
Appointment setting
Commvault has appointed Jamie Farrelly, formerly at Veritas, as EMEA VP for Channel and Alliances.
Druva has appointed Scott Morris as VP Sales or Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) based in Singapore. Most recently, he served as vice president and GM for Asia-Pacific at HPE.
Edge computing company Fastly has recruiteed Brett Shirk as Chief Revenue Officer. Shirk was previously Rubrik’s Chief Revenue Officer and left abruptly earlier this month.
Database supplier SingleStore has hired Paul Forte as chief revenue officer (CRO). Forte comes to SingleStore from data management company Actifio (recently acquired by Google) where he served as the president of global field operations, including sales, marketing, customer service and post-sales.
