The common factors in this week’s storage news round-up are the two mainstays: Kubernetes and the public cloud. Kubernetes storage and protection products are getting enhanced and the rush to add public cloud support continues unabated.
SoftIron stands out by adding an AMD X86-powered edge NVMe SSD box to its previously all-ARM Ceph arrays. There also seems to be a larger than usual torrent of other storage news.
SoftIron adds X86 NVMe Ceph HyperDrive
SoftIron, a supplier of ARM-powered Ceph storage devices, has bitten the Intel bullet, and added a Performance+ X86-based HyperDrive product which uses NVMe SSDs.
It says it is targeting edge compute environments.
This is a hot and fast 1U box. It uses the AMD Epyc 3000 processor in the first two Performance+ products: the HD61026 and HD61052. They consume less than 250W of power each and provide line-rate throughput with dual 25GbitE network connectivity.
The HD61026 uses a 4 x 6.4TB NVMe SSDs (25.6TB) and the HD61052 has 4 x 12.8TB drives (51.2TB).
SoftIron says its Performance+ products can be used in data centres as a caching tier sitting in front of (slower) disk-based HyperDrive appliances. You can check out a Performance+ brochure for more information [PDF].
StorageOS gets encryption and faster app recovery
StorageOS has upgraded its eponymous software product for cloud-native storage to v.2.4. This adds encryption at rest with a native Kubernetes construct for key management, faster application recovery and thin provisioning.
When using encryption with StorageOS, encryption and decryption keys are fully under the control and management of the consumer as Kubernetes Secrets. This means native Kubernetes integration with key management system providers such as HashiCorp Vault.
V2.4 StorageOS also features Rapid Application Recovery via enhanced fencing awareness, together with “up to” 500 per cent improvement for failover and recovery. When deploying a stateful application within the recommended Kubernetes StatefulSet controller, a failed pod has a default eviction timeout of five minutes, allowing up to five minutes of downtime to pass before recovery is actioned.
Rapid Application Recovery allows StorageOS to use its background node awareness to intervene and where applicable, allow pods to be scheduled on different nodes with full access to their required persistent storage. This feature significantly improves recovery time and allows a StatefulSet time to recover within 30-60 seconds.
The upgrade adds thin provisioning support. The StorageOS Dataplane can detect Trim/Unmap events and can transparently recover storage pool capacity at the point of deletion, therefore freeing storage from a thinly provisioned pool without manual intervention.
NAKIVO updates backup product
V10.3 NAKIVO Backup & Replication backs up M365 Exchange Online contacts and calendars. They can be recovered to the original or a different mailbox.
It has added backup and recovery functionality for VMware Cloud Director Backup so that vApps, individual VMs and vApp metadata are protected and recoverable.
Customers with VM disks on HPE 3PAR storage arrays can can back up their systems from 3PAR storage snapshots and so put less stress on the production environment.
Managed Service Providers can use a Direct Connect feature in Backup & Replication to connect to their clients’ environments via a secure single port without establishing a VPN connection.
Shorts
The Active Archie Alliance released a report, Saved By The Data, saying companies can quickly adapt to massive market changes with active archiving for centralised data access, analytics, automation, dynamic scaling, and cost-savings.
Catalog DNA storage and computation will be featured at IBM’s Think conference. Catalog CTO David Turek said: “Our work with IBM … optimised the ligation process in a way that significantly reduces data encoding costs.”
Managed Kubernetes provider Civo has launched a production-ready service built on K3S.
Cloud Storage Security has launched Antivirus for Amazon S3, a cloud native scanner that directly scans all objects in Amazon S3 for malware, including ransomware. It says malware scanning for S3 objects in AWS is not addressed by AWS native services, nor by most of the security solutions available for Amazon S3, which do not directly scan files and objects in S3 buckets
DataStax says its open source K8ssandra (Cassandra on Kubernetes) is available on any Kubernetes environment, including Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine and the Azure Kubernetes Service.
Recovering IP storage business FalconStor, now focusing on archiving, has announced encouraging Q1 fy21 results; revenues of $3.8m, up 18.8 per cent Y/Y, and a profit of $425K, far better than the year-ago $720K loss.
Storage startup Ionir says its software has achieved Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification. As a reminder, Ionir can move data of any size across any distance in 40 seconds or less, and also instantly recreate data as it existed at any previous point in time.
Composable systems supplier Liqid released an ESG Validation report which found that the Liqid Matrix CDI platform accelerates time to value, increases resource efficiency, and improves IT agility for on-premises data centres.
MariaDB has updated its SkySQK cloud database with the Xpand distributed SQL database component GA, claiming that it’s at least a third less expensive than other distributed SQL options in AWS or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). SkySQL has transparent high availability and now fully supports AWS.
Nutanix says its cloud platform now extends to AWS GovCloud, providing a unified cloud platform across Nutanix on-premises and bare metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud region. Nutanix Clusters on AWS GovCloud and Flow Security Central have been added to the Nutanix Government Cloud Services Federal Risk and Authorisation Management Program (FedRAMP) Authorised product offering at the moderate security impact level.
Pure Storage announced PX-Backup v2.0, its container app backup product, adding secure self-service, using role-based access control, and support for VMware Tanzu and Azure, using native CSI integration. It can can protect applications running on these platforms, even if a customer is not using PX-Store. PX-Backup can be bought from the AWS Marketplace and IBM Cloud Catalog.
Seagate announced an NVMe SSD version of its OneTouch portable external drive storage with up to 2TB capacity and sequential read/write speeds up to 1030MB/sec. It uses USB 3.2 Gen 2 USB-C technology and is compatible with USB-C and USB 3.0 Windows and Mac computers. One Touch SSD is offered for MSRPs of $94.99 (500GB), $169.99 (1TB) and $309.99 (2TB).
Data warehouser Teradata has updated its Teradata Vantage on Google Cloud offering with first-party services integration with Dataflow, a stream/batch data processing service, plus QueryGrid connectivity to BigQuery and Dataproc. It has also added consumption pricing.
Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers told subscribers that, in Q1, nearline HDD capacity shipped totalled 191.5EBs, about two-thirds of total HDD industry capacity shipped, growing 13 per cent y/y and up a strong 32 p per cent y/y. Toshiba was the relative outperformer with ~25.6EB shipped, growing ~53 per cent y/y and +47 per cent q/q. Seagate reported ~95.5EB shipped, up 25 per cent y/y and +34 per cent q/q. Rakers estimates WD shipped ~70.4EB, down 8 per cent q/q but +25 per cent q/q.
Trilio says its cloud-native data protection v2.1 TrilioVault product features visibility and insights into Velero-based backups and enhanced disaster recovery (DR) capabilities for multi-cloud infrastructure deployments. It has new Kubernetes distribution certifications from Rancher, IBM Cloud and VMware Tanzu.
Replication provider WANdisco announced $10.5m revenues for 2020, down from 2019’s $16.2m. It says that, with the Q4 2020 launch of LiveData Migrator on AWS and the LiveData Platform on Azure, 2021 marks the beginning of the growth phase for the company. There was a loss of $34.3m (2019 loss: $28.3m) with WANdisco pointing the finger at its move to subscription pricing. It has raised $42.5m via a share placement and is considering a US listing.
Customers
Belgian ISP and IT service provider Proximus Group is using Datadobi’s DobiMigrate to move legacy NAS file data onto new Isilon storage following a Dell EMC recommendation.
Qumulo’s scale-out file storage and AWS are being used by Montreal-based Raynault VFX to improve its rendering workflow. It says it can spin up more than 1,000 nodes using Qumulo Cloud Q and AWS Thinkbox Deadline within minutes for on-demand rendering.
People
Data protector HYCU has hired Rickie Goyal as VP for Global Operations, following its $87.5m A-round funding. More execs and other ranks will be added in the coming months. Goyal has a CV with time at ThoughtSpot, Confluent and Nutanix. Notably at Nutanix, its sales team grew from 60 to more than 800 during his tenure.
Komprise has recruited Martin Gibbons as channel director, EMEA. He was previously at Cohesity and spent 14 years at Commvault before that. Ben Conneely has been hired as VP of Sales, EMEA, ands his CV includes much time at HPE Nimble and EMC.
WekaIO has hired Joe Hassell as regional sales manager for its APAC region, opening up a New Zealand regional office. Hassell comes to Weka from Google-acquired Actifio, where he led the APAC team.
