Your occasional storage digest with TrendForce NAND figures and more than 25 other announcements

At opposite ends of the storage speed spectrum, IBM is withdrawing LT06 tape products and Phison has a fast PCIe Gen 4 SSD controller. Meanwhile, NAND revenues are growing steadily, according to TrendForce analysts. Cohesity has hired an EMEA boss, and Lightbits Labs has a new VP for marketing.

NAND revenue growth

Research house TrendForce reported NAND revenues in 2021’s first quarter rose 5.1 per cent quarter-on-quarter. Bit shipments rose by 11 per cent while the overall ASP dropped by five per cent – the bit ship rise offset the ASP fall. More bits were needed for consumer devices and smartphones. Data center demand was flat. 

Among the suppliers:

  • Samsung NAND flash revenue for 1Q21 rose by 7.0 per cent QoQ to $4.97bn.
  • Kioxia’s revenue rose slightly by 1.0 per cent to $2.78bn.
  • WD’s NAND revenue reached $2.18 bn, up 6.9 per cent.
  • SK Hynix’s NAND revenue jumped 11.5 per cent to $1.83bn.
  • Micron’s NAND revenue rose by 4.8 per cent to $1.65bn.
  • Intel’s NAND revenue came to $1.11 bn, down 8.4 per cent from the previous quarter.

Removing 3D XPoint, which TrendForce included in the Intel NAND number, Intel’s ‘pure’ NAND revenues would have risen 9.7 per cent from the prior quarter Combined Kioxia/WD revenues were $4.96bn, a tad under Samsung’s $4.7bn.

Shorts

Actian announced its Ingres NeXT initiative with a new version of Actian’s OpenROAD 4GL application development environment and support for Ingres relational database management software as a fully managed service in the cloud.

ATTO has released ATTO 360 Tuning, Monitoring and Analytics Software version 3. This can improve the performance of ATTO FastFrame Ethernet SmartNICs by up to 30 per cent. V3 adds support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), plus three new profiles for NVMe-over-Fabrics, iSER, and NFS over RDMA, plus a new Dell OneFS profile for NFS over RDMA.

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere, which enables customers to run and manage container-based applications on-premises using the same APIs, cluster management, workload scheduling, monitoring, and deployment pipelines they use with Amazon ECS in AWS.

AWS also announced the general availability of Amazon Redshift ML, making it possible for data analysts, database developers, business analysts, and data scientists to create, train, and deploy machine-learning models with familiar SQL commands instead of having to use a separate interface and a different programming language.

Backblaze announced a spring release of its B2 Cloud Storage platform with S3-compatible object lock for immutability, object-lock legal hold, server-side encryption, and cross-origin resource sharing. Later this year, the B2 Cloud Storage platform is set to add a Partner API, giving software partners the ability to provision and manage Backblaze B2’s scalable storage natively.

Enteprise file collaborator Egnyte announced new integrations with Google Workspace and Dropbox to help companies secure and govern their sensitive cloud content.

BigID, which supplies a data intelligence and management platform, announced a partnership with Databricks, a data and AI company, to integrate their products. BigID enables customers to find and identify their sensitive and critical data in Delta Lake on Databricks and take action on it for security, privacy, and governance. 

Research house DCIG has announced the availability of its 2021-22 DCIG TOP 5 Enterprise Multi-site File Collaboration Solutions report. This report provides guidance organisations should consider for SDS-based file storage solutions that enable effective file collaboration.

Druva, which supplies cloud data-protection-and-management-as-a-service, has appointed Redington as the its first national distributor in India.

Singapore-based Flexxon has launched an SSD that’s said to have AI-powered cybersecurity features built in. There’s a video here.

In-memory computing supplier GridGain has released a software-as-a-service version of the GridGain Control Center. This is a cloud-native, subscription-based solution for operations teams to manage their production environments, and enables customers to manage compute clusters that are deployed across single or multi-cloud services, on-premises, and hybrid environments.

HPE has announced its forthcoming a Kubernetes CSI driver will support its newly launched Alletra 6000 and 8000 arrays.

Effective August 30, 2021, IBM will withdraw from marketing its LT06 tape drive and TS2900 Tape Library with LTO6 HH SAS drive and rack mount kit products.

Kingston Technology has announced high-performance, enthusiast, and gaming DDR3 and DDR4 memory modules under the Fury brand.

NAND and DRAM supplier Micron has now expects its fiscal Q3 2021 revenue to be at or above the high end of the guided range, which was $6.9-$7.3bn. The upside is largely driven by an improved pricing environment across both the NAND and DRAM markets.

GPU supplier Nvidia has announced a string of server OEMs for its BlueField-2 DPUs, aka SmartNICs: ASUS, Dell Technologies, GIGABYTE, QCT, and Supermicro.

UK-based object-storage supplier Object Matrix has delivered an additional 600TB node for BT TV’s existing MatrixStore On-Prem object-storage solution. This has enabled BT TV to migrate content from 6 MatrixStore nodes being decommissioned. This changeover increases the capacity of the existing system, and saves power and rack space by replacing six legacy nodes with a single new one.

Panzura announced that DCIG has added Panzura CloudFS global file system to its list of top 5 enterprise multi-site file collaboration solutions. Get the DCIG report here.

Amer Sports, an international sporting goods company, is using Percona to provide support for MySQL databases at the heart of its applications and services for customers. Percona’s open-source database team will implement best practices and support services across Amer Sports’ MySQL database deployments, with the goal being to reduce operational costs, improve performance, and enhance security.

Flash controller supplier Phison Electronics Corp is shipping its PS5018-E18 PCIe Gen 4 controllers to manufacturer partners with 176-layer replacement gate NAND. It delivers up to 7,400 MB/sec sequential reads and 7,000 MB/sec sequential writes.

Phison’s E18 graphic

HCI supplier Scale Computing announced sales wins at several US educational institutions: Auburn University,  Hood College, Virginia Tech, and Community High School District 218 in Illinois.

Virtual SAN provider StorMagic announced its SvSAN and Zerto (DR and cloud data management and protection) have been validated with HPE Proliant servers. The three products can be delivered through the HPE Complete Program so customers can protect edge-to-edge, edge-to-core, or edge-to-cloud workloads.

TerraMaster’s four-bay NAS

Chinese supplier TerraMaster has announced its two-bay F2-210 NAS system with up to 36TB capacity for under $150, and its four-bay F4-210 with up to 72TB capacity for under $300. Both are available on Amazon. 

Varada, the data lake query acceleration startup, announced a new capability designed to support text analytics workloads and work faster on exabytes of string-based data. Varada’s technology is integrated with Apache Lucene and works on a customer’s data lake, serving  SQL data consumers out-of-the-box.

WekaIO, the fast filesystem startup, and Arch Platform Technologies, have announced the integration of Weka cloud deployments with Arch’s studio-in-the-cloud platform. The two say artists and studios can on-ramp to cloud-based creative production with their integrated pair of products and and get to market quicker.

Richard Gadd now at Cohesity

People

Data manager and protector Cohesity has named Richard Gadd as VP and GM of EMEA sales with immediate effect. He comes from a similar position at Hitachi Vantara.

NVMe-over-TCP/IP-based software-defined storage supplier Lightbits Labs has appointed  Carol Platz as its VP of Global Marketing. She comes from WekaIO.