Old Arcserve and young StorageCraft – both second or third tier data protection companies – are merging. Are they huddling together for warmth or is it a growth play? Two newer Kubernetes-focused startups are getting funding; StorageOS and Platform9.
Arcserve and StorageCraft merge
Veteran data protector Arcserve and relative newbie StorageCraft are merging. Terms were undisclosed. The two companies are both backed by private equity owners and say they will form a single entity providing workload protection throughout the data centre, in the cloud, cloud, for SaaS applications, and at the edge.
Arcserve CEO Tom Signorello will run the combined company, with StorageCraft branded ‘StorageCraft, an Arcserve Company’. Matt Medeiros, Storagecraft’s CEO will depart. Doug Brockett, its president, will stay in that role and report to Signorello.
Signorello said: “This merger will place us at the forefront of filling a massive market gap by supporting all workloads in every environment with one ecosystem. No longer will organisations require ad-hoc solutions that only add to the complexity they are trying to solve.”
Arcserve has UDP appliances that integrate backup, disaster recovery and backend cloud storage and partners Sophos for security. It also has cloud and SaaS offerings. The smaller StorageCraft covers a larger geographic area with data protection, including backup for Office365, G Suite and other SAaS options, and OneXafe, a converged, scale-out storage product.
The two will continue to support and invest in their existing products while looking to combine their IP and develop new functionality and services. They say this will enable a seamless evolution from current to next-generation infrastructures and data workloads, including hyper-converged, multi-cloud, containers, edge infrastructures, and next-generation cloud data centres.
N.B. Arcserve has announced UDP (Unified Data Protection) 8.0 It is designed to protect organisations’ entire infrastructure, including hyperconverged, from data loss, cybercriminals, and persistent threats like ransomware (using Sophos technology) and AWS S3 immutable storage. It protects Nutanix Files and can use Nutanix Objects as a target. UDP 8.0 also protects Oracle database backups using RMAN.
StorageOS gets $10m B-round
StorageOS, a UK startup that provides virtual SANS for Kubernetes-orchestrated containers, has raised $10m in a B- series round. Total funding now stands $20m. The investment will fund go-to-market activities and build out sales and other customer-facing teams.
The funding round was led by Downing Ventures, with current investors Bain Capital Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, MMC Ventures and new investor Chestnut Street Ventures all chipping in.
Alex Chircop, StorageOS Founder and CEO, said: “Securing a further significant round of funding is an important step in the development of the business and a huge vote of confidence in our team, technology and achievements to date.”
Salil Deshpande, General Partner at the Bain-backed Uncorrelated Ventures, said: “Storage subsystems need to be containerized – it’s the future – but not if it compromises performance. That was the real test: could the StorageOS container-based storage engine run and support very high performance workloads such as transactional databases?”
“Once I saw it in action, delivering stunning results, and consistently blowing away all the competition in independent benchmarks, I knew it was a winner.”
Platform9 gets funding for Kubernetes offering
Managed Kubernetes provider startup Platform9 has raised $12.5m in D-round funding, taking the total raised to $37.5m.
Sirish Raghuram, Platform9 co-founder and CEO, said in a statement: “Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for building out hybrid and edge applications. However, the journey to cloud native is fraught with complexity: developers need to understand micro-services, platform engineers need to operationalise Kubernetes, and ongoing upkeep of cloud native applications is extremely difficult.”
Platform9 thinks it can fix that and reported 145 per cent growth in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) in its fiscal 2020, and a 340 per cent increase in its customer base. Current Platform9 clients include Kingfisher Retail, Redfin, Cloudera, Yext, and Juniper Networks.
Shorts
DDN has announced record $400m in annual revenues for 2020, along with its highest ever profitability. The company said it delivered 52 per cent in revenue growth from 2018 to 2020 under its DDN and Tintri brands. 2020 was the fifth consecutive year of customer expansion, revenue and profitability growth for DDN. It said it has an installed base of more than 11,000 customers.
HPE has acquired CloudPhysics, the developer of SaaS technology that monitors and analyse IT infrastructures, estimates costs and viability of cloud migrations and models customers’ IT infrastructure as a virtual environment. Potential infrastructure purchases can be checked for positive or negative ROI.
Kaseya has acquired RocketCyber and its cloud-agent security operations centre.
DataStax has announced Astra serverless, an open source, multi-cloud serverless database-as-a-service (DBaaS). It claims Astra delivers total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of up to 3-5 times over non-serverless database workloads
Infinidat has expanded its alliance with VMware with new support for vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols). InfiniBox is the first petabyte-scale storage platform available in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab.
TrueNAS SCALE 21.02 is now available from ixSystems. The software starts from the TrueNAS 12.0 base which includes OpenZFS 2.0, all the file, block, and object storage services, the middleware to coordinate these, and the web UI.
Robin.io and IBM said Robin Cloud-Native Storage (Robin CNS) platform for Kubernetes is now part of IBM Cloud Satellite. Cloud Satellite lets users run IBM Cloud services on IBM Cloud, on-premises, or at the edge, with everything delivered as a service.
Intel has released the 670p QLC 3D NAND SSD for client devices. It runs faster and lasts longer than its immediate predecessor and is available in capacities of up to 2TB. Apparently, this makes it the ‘ideal storage solution for thin-and-light laptops and also desktop PCs”.
The 670P has 522GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities and the PCIe 3.0 4-lane interface. It delivers up to 310,000/340,000 random read/write IOPS, and 3.5GB/sec sequential read and 2.7GB/sec sequential write throughput, using a dynamic SLC cache in all cases. Endurance is a nominal 0.2 drives writes per day and 740TB written at the 2TB capacity level.
Samsung has begun mass production of its PM9A3 E1.S format SSD, the ‘ruler’ replacement for M.2 gumstick-style SSDs. It has a PCIe gen 4 interface to its 128-layer TLC flash and delivers up 750,000/160,000 random read/write IOPS and up to 3GB/sec sequential write bandwidth. Samsung isn’t revealing available capacity levels.
Microsoft has announced Surface Removable SSDs (rSSDs), enabling users and technicians to replace the SSDS on a Surface Pro 7+ laptop. SSD kits consist of a single certified refurbished SSD – plus SSD screw. All volume sizes are available: 128GB, 256GB ,512GB or 1TB. At this time, the kits cover Surface Pro 7+ only and will not work for Surface Pro X or Surface Laptop Go. For now, the product is available in the US only, but Microsoft plans to ‘gradually roll out the kits to all Surface regions’.
Kioxia says its lineup of CM6 and CD6 Series PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise and data centre SSDs have gained compatibility approval with Supermicro rackmount systems such as Ultra, WIO, BigTwin, FatTwin, SuperBlade, 1U/2U NVMe all flash arrays, GPU accelerated systems, and Super Workstations.
BT has added Acronis‘s small business and small office/home office protection to its security services portfolio.
People
HPC storage supplier Panasas has hired Tod Ruff as VP Marketing, Brian Reed as VP Product and Alliances, and Richio Aikawa as Director of Vertical Solutions. They report to COO Brian Peterson. Tom Shea was promoted to Panasas CEO in September last year, and he hired Brian Peterson in November. The Panasas exec ranks are changing.
Sorin Faibish, a senior distinguished engineer – Midrange storage division at Dell EMC (meaning PowerStore) has been recruited by Cirrus Data Solutions as Director of Product Solutions.
Data warehouser Databricks has recruited Vinod Marur as SVP of Engineering to lead the global engineering team. Marur was SVP Engineering at Rubrik and an engineering VP at Google before that.
VAST Data has hired Sven Breuner as its Field CTO International. He was the field CTO for Excelero from Feb 2019 to Jan 2021. Breuner has been founder, CTO, CEO and board member at ThinkParQ since Oct 2013 to the present (board member only now.)
