Today’s digest features a lot of storage suppliers adding public cloud presence and support to their offerings, such as Actian, DataStax, Qumulo, Rubrik, ScaleOut Software, StorONE, and WekaIO. Read on.
StorONE jumps aboard Azure train
Storage array software supplier StorONE has ported its S1 software to Azure and announced its S1:Azure product. This runs natively on Azure and is said to function as a cost-effective cloud DR site and archive for on-premises workloads.
Karl Rautenstrauch, Principal Program Manager for Azure Storage at Microsoft, said: “[StorONE] provides organisations the ability to seamlessly move existing applications to Azure cloud and continue to benefit from the enterprise feature set they deploy on-premises, like snapshots, auto-tiering, and replication.”
S1:Azure supports all Azure managed disks and automatically moves inactive data to lower-cost tiers. Cloud operators can apply unlimited, frequent, and space-efficient snapshots for backup, ransomware protection, and versioning of mission-critical data. StorONE’s cascading replication continuously updates DR copies in other Azure regions or on-premises.
Block (iSCSI) and file applications (NFS/SMB) can burst to the cloud with only changed data returned on-premises when the burst is over. Alternatively that data can be migrated permanently to run in Azure.
StorONE claims S1:Azure minimises Azure TCO by delivering high performance from compute instances that are significantly less expensive and require less memory than competing solutions.
S1:Azure is available in the Azure Marketplace now.
Qumulo and Weka support Amazon’s Nimble Studio
Amazon has announced its Nimble Studio – nothing to do with HPE’s Nimble storage array – which renders video special effects in the AWS cloud.
AWS says customers can set up a content production studio in hours instead of weeks, with elasticity that gives them near limitless scale and the ability to render on demand. Video artists will have access to accelerated virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering across AWS’s global infrastructure so they can create content faster.
The workstations are powered by Amazon EC2 G4 instances.
Amazon suggests a typical animated feature film generates 730TB of data and up to half a billion files, requiring more than 150 million core compute hours and coordination from hundreds of artists and engineers. Running that lot in AWS is cheaper than setting up an on-premises operation, or so Amazon says.
WekaIO announced its support for Amazon Nimble Studio so that studio users have access to the WekaFS file system. It can be deployed using AWS CloudFormation templates.
Qumulo also announced native support for the Amazon Nimble Studio. On-premises video special effects customers using WekaIO and Qumulo can burst workloads and workflows to Amazon Nimble Studio with little or no change.
Amazon Nimble Studio is available now in six AWS Regions and AWS Local Zones: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and US Local Zone (Los Angeles), with additional region support coming soon.
Egnyte provides single governance risk number
Egnyte has updated its file-based cloud content and governance software, adding more security and compliance features.
A Governance Risk Dashboard evaluation tool summarises organisations’ risk into a single number. It also prioritises the next steps and tracks progress and improvements. The software helps customers understand where sensitive content resides and what safeguards need to be put in place to reduce risk across the organisation on an on-going basis.
Content safeguards prevent data leakage by restricting public links to sensitive files. Content safeguard policies can be automatically created to restrict links to a minimum security level, based on sensitive content matching, risk score, and location, which are then enforced.
Egnyte is also expanding its professional services offerings with Strategic Health Checks; periodic evaluations that provide an organisational content governance assessment and maturity improvement plan to help improve control, security, and productivity.
Shorts
Actian announced the availability of its Avalanche hybrid cloud data warehouse on the Google Cloud Marketplace. The Avalanche data warehouse is delivered as a turnkey, fully managed service that utilises Google Kubernetes to deploy in minutes, is easy to scale up and down, and can run 8x faster than alternatives.
Catalogic ECX 2.12 adds new copy data management and data mobility features and support for HPE Nimble, IBM storage, NetApp, and Pure FlashArray ActiveCluster Pods and vVol data stores.
UK MSP and Commvault partner Oriium has integrated Commvault’s HyperScale Appliance with its Azure and AWS environments, as well as its own cloud infrastructure for backup purposes. Oriium also deployed Commvault’s Activate because of its file storage optimisation and data governance features.
DataStax has announced its Astra serverless database is available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Astra builds on the Apache Cassandra open source database and represents the industry’s first and only open, serverless, multi-cloud, database-as-a-service (DBaaS).
Datto announced its collaboration on the Ransomware Task Force’s (RTF) “Combating Ransomware: A Comprehensive Framework for Action” report. RTF is a coalition of more than 60 experts in industry, government, law enforcement, and international organisations coming together in the fight against ransomware. Datto CISO Ryan Weeks is an RTF member.
Wisconsin-based MSP OFFSITE has bought Infinidat’s disk-based storage at petabyte scale to displace existing all-flash arrays. It says the Infinidat storage was one third the cost of all-flash arrays for the same amount of usable storage, with no need for dedupe or compression. It also gets immutable snapshots.
Object Matrix has been recognised as a Challenger and Fast Mover poised to achieve a Leadership position in the GigaOm Radar for Enterprise Object Storage which analysed numerous object storage vendors
Rackspace has made a strategic investment in Platform9 and will launch a Rackspace Managed Platform for Kubernetes (MPK), powered by Platform9’s Managed Kubernetes (PMK) product.
ScaleOut Software released new visualisation capabilities for its Azure hosted ScaleOut Digital Twin Streaming Service and companion on-premises streaming analytics platform. It has gained the addition of geospatial mapping for real-time continuous queries.
Flash and DRAM supplier SK hynix announced financial results for its first quarter of 2021. The consolidated revenue of the three months to March 31 was up 18% year-on-year to 8.494 trillion won ($7.6bn) while the operating profit amounted to 1.324 trillion won ($1.2bn), up 66%, and net income was up 53% to 993 billion won ($892m).
Data protector and manager Rubrik has announced its Rubrik Go subscription, including Cloud Data Management and M365, is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. It says its software consolidates disparate hardware and software components into a single management plane to govern applications across data centres, Azure, and SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365.
HCI supplier Scale Computing has integrated Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) on Scale’s HC3 systems. This makes VDI easier as admins can provision and manage virtual machines (VM) along with RDSH sessions and applications centrally from the Parallels RAS Console.
Spectra Logic announced its family of tape libraries and Spectra BlackPearl NAS product have attained Veeam Ready qualification with Veeam Backup & Replication v11.
WekaIO has been added to the JMP Securities 2021 Elite 80 List of privately-held cybersecurity and IT infrastructure companies because of its WekaFS file system.
Zerto has sponsored an IDC whitepaper, “The State of Data Protection and Disaster Recovery Readiness: 2021”, which says 95.1% of organizations have suffered a ransomware or malware attack in the past 12 months with more than 80% indicating at least one attack resulting in data corruption. They should have bought Zerto’s anti-ransomeware products, presumably…
People
John Shackleton, former OpenText CEO, has been appointed interim CEO of FutureVault, provider of secure, cloud-based document management and storage. Shackleton will work with the board of directors during a search process for a permanent CEO to lead FutureVault.
HPC storage supplier Panasas hired Todd Ruff as VP Marketing in March 2021, and Brian Reed as VP Products and Alliances in February 2021. Richio Aikawa has also joined Panasas as Director of Vertical Solutions, a key role as the company looks to expand its focus for financial services, trading, and manufacturing customers. All three report to COO Brian Peterson.
Veritas has hired Barry Cashman as its Regional Vice President for the UK and Ireland. He comes from Micro Focus where he spent the last four years as VP and General Manager, UK&I, with previous stints at VCE and EMC.
