Your occasional storage digest with Storj and Tesla, Komprise, OVH Cloud and more

A cloudy theme this week, with Tesla camera footage stored in a cloud and cloud service provider OVH offering a Kubernetes service. We also have Komprise enabling its management dashboard facility to look at multiple sites.

It’s a peculiar week — there’s almost no backup news. None.

Storj and Tesla

Storj has a way for Tesla owners to store and share their car camera footage.

The company produces decentralised cloud object storage (DCS) software, previously known as Tardigrade, which uses MinIO and is S3-compatible.

Tesla vehicles come with built-in sensors and cameras that can record Dashcam or Sentry Mode video. Dashcam footage is captured when a Tesla driver is operating their vehicle. Sentry Mode video is captured when the vehicle is parked, and someone approaches or movement is detected. Both modes must be manually enabled to record video, which is primarily stored on a USB drive inside the vehicle. The data must then be manually transferred to another device if the driver wishes to view, share, or store the video long-term.

Tesla auto.

Storj has integrated its DCS software with Rclone open source software to enable Tesla car owners to store the car-generated footage in DCS. Storj DCS has a free tier so that Tesla owners can upload up to 150GB of footage to the service at no cost.

When video is uploaded to Storj DCS, it is encrypted, encoded for redundancy, and stored across a diverse set of Nodes worldwide. Once the footage is uploaded, Tesla drivers can share the video with friends, family, or other interested parties with just a click of a button through Storj’s object browser using Storj Share functionality. From there, video can be streamed or downloaded to other devices.

JT Olio, Storj CTO, said “This integration not only enables Tesla owners to privately and securely manage their footage, but it also showcases how easy it is to integrate Storj DCS with open source software and how well the product can upload and stream data to locations all around the globe.”

A Storj blog by Infrastructure Engineering Manager Krista Spriggs provides more details.

Komprise extends Intelligent Data Manager

File lifecycle manager Komprise has added multi-site control to its Intelligent Data Manager with a v4.0 release.

Customers and CSPs can get a consolidated view across sites with this data management as a service offering.

Kumar Goswami, co-founder and CEO of Komprise, said “Aside from the cloud, many organisations are geographically dispersed or have security protocols and organisational boundaries that require them to localise where data movement occurs. Komprise brings granular flexibility and control with new multi-site data management capabilities.”

The 4.0 release introduces:

  • Centralised management across multiple sites — Set up multiple sites, each with their own storage and separate data management policies and activities. All sites are managed from a single, on-premises or cloud-based Komprise Director. This enables centralised management for cost and performance optimisation through a single dashboard, providing a consolidated view across all sites in the entire deployment.
  • Localised policy management and execution — Each site has its own Komprise Observer virtual machines to connect to all the storage and clouds for that site and perform the associated data-management tasks. Policies and execution are controlled locally within each site, according to distinct departmental needs and security requirements.
  • Global search and deep analytics across sites and clouds — With a centralised dashboard, enterprises now have a single searchable virtual data lake of all unstructured data that can be shared across the enterprise. Customers can develop custom queries to identify specific data sets such as ex-employee data, or data belonging to a project that might be strewn across data centres and clouds.

Krishna Subramanian, Komprise President and COO, told us: “[We] are now providing a global multi-site Director and dashboard across multiple Komprise Directors along with a Global Data Index so you can search and find across all files and objects across  all sites.  This is significant engineering because the scale can be hundreds of billions of files and we have a fast, efficient, elastic index to do this.”

“Just last weekend, we had a customer who ran into a compliance issue and had to quickly purge ex-employee data globally and was able to use this capability to do so.” 

Komprise customers will appreciate the opportunity to manage all their Komprise instances through a centralised single dashboard.

OVH Cloud gets into managing Kubernetes

OVH Cloud, one of whose data centres was struck by fire earlier this year, has made a managed Kubernetes Service available.

It manages both the underlying hardware and the Kubernetes software stack, keeping it up to date with critical updates associated with bugs and security patches, and providing load-balancer and pod auto-scaling capabilities. Developers can start small with entry-level instances and then upgrade to more powerful instances when moving to larger-scale production.

OVH Strasbourg data centre showing fire damage.

OVH expects the overwhelming majority of production applications to be-cloud native within the next 18–24 months.

Jeffrey Gregor, General Manager, OVHcloud US, said “The ability to deploy, manage, and scale consistent and secure-by-default Kubernetes instances on demand defines what it means to be cloud-native. The power of our managed Kubernetes in our Public Cloud environment allows teams to iterate faster, automate more aggressively, and exploit modern application-lifecycle paradigms.” 

The OVH service includes:

  • CNCF-certified managed Kubernetes offer;
  • Persistent volumes — Add persistent volumes to worker nodes, ensuring durability for application data;
  • Simple, easy-to-use interface — Configure, add and delete nodes via the OVHcloud Control Panel;
  • Role-based access control — Deploy services with specific levels of access;
  • Multiple versions and upgrades — Choose from any of the latest three stable versions of Kubernetes when creating a cluster;
  • Integration with OVHcloud’s vRack — Flexibility to expose cluster(s) services publicly, or through the OVHcloud private network.

Details such as prices are available online.

Shorts

Data migrator Datadobi says its product suite can be sold on US government GSA IT 70 contracts, as it has been approved to be on Climb Channel Solutions’, a subsidiary of Wayside Technology Group, Inc. That gives Datadobi access to US federal, state, and local government business.

HPE has added Qumulo’s File Data Platform to its list of GreenLake Cloud Services (metered subscription) offerings. Qumulo is expanding its operations to include the Asia-Pacific region in partnership with HPE. Qumulo’s scalable file system software runs on HPE Apollo and ProLiant servers.

HPE is certified for the SplunkOperator for Kubernetes, which allows users to deploy and manage Splunk Enterprise in a Kubernetes infrastructure. The HPE Ezmeral Container Platform works with Splunk to create a single datastore that leverages open-source Kubernetes and S3, and is available as a fully managed as-a-service solution from HPE GreenLake.

AI pipeline supplier Iguazio is partnering Boston Limited, which supplies high-performance, mission-critical server and storage kit, to sell into the data science market. Boston Limited will offer data centre hardware and technical services, while Iguazio provides its data science platform, said to save time and cost on getting AI to production.

Micro Focus’s Vertica Eon Accelerator is available under an early access program, and Micro Focus has bought Full360 — its strategic partner which supplies Vertica as a service. Vertica is a massively scalable analytics platform using database machine learning. The Eon Accelerator provides analytics-as-a-service.

Smart infrastructure SaaS supplier Nebulon has added support for ProLiant servers using gen-3 AMD EPYC processors to its smartCore and smartEdge products.

Next Pathway, an automated cloud migration company, announced it has extended Snowpark, Snowflake’s developer tool, to automatically migrate and run ETLs (Extract, Transform and Load) and ETL pipelines (data workflows) natively in Snowflake. Snowpark, using Next Pathway’s language, enables ETL data pipelines to be executed in Snowflake’s single, governed core data platform, shortening migration time, minimising the technical footprint and reducing cost due to fewer systems in a customer’s architecture.

Redstor has added AI and analytics to its smart data management service and offers support for OneNote, Kubernetes and Salesforce. It has enhanced its RedApp, a purpose-built application for partners, enabling them to deliver scalable protection and management of customer data, more easily, from a single application.

Testing house SANBlaze has doubled the tests in its Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) test suite for NVMe devices from 105 to over 200, and added more than 200 negative test cases. It claims it is the only ZNS testing vendor to provide all-inclusive comprehensive ZNS testing. ZNS technology allows for dividing physical storage media into logical zones governed by the NVMe ZNS specification and is part of the recently ratified NVMe V2.0 spec.

SMART Modular has added T5EN PCIe/NVMe M.2 2280 and U.2 flash drives for aerospace, defence and industrial applications that require durable, rugged, and secure memory storage. The drives offers capacities up to 8TB (M.2 up to 4TB) of TLC NAND, and PCIe Gen 3×4 performance using 3D TLC flash with pseudo single-level cell (pSLC) support. 

People movers

HPC parallel file system supplier Panasas has hired Fred Vasofsky as Managing Director of its Vertical Solutions business. The upstanding Fred comes from being the GM for WekaIO’s federal business, and was at WD, SanDisk, EMC and StorageTek before that.

Storage stack rewriting software supplier StorONE has appointed Bill Cordero to be VP Worldwide Channels. He’ll launch the new PartnerONE channel program and expand StorONE’s global reach. Cordero was VP Worldwide Channel Sales at Yellowbrick Data for eight months and ran channel sales at Diamanti, Blue Medora and Upguard before that.