Your occasional storage digest with AWS HealthLake, Delphix, Infrascale, XenData and much more

This week we have AWS doing a neat health sector vertical market data lake offering with partners, Delphix bragging about its growth and diversity hiring credentials, and Infrascale offering MSPs and VARs new backup appliances. Plus XenData has added an S3 interface to its LTO tape products, providing distributed access to on-premises tape stores.

AWS HealthLake 

AWS has launched HeathLake for healthcare and life sciences organisations to ingest, store, query, and analyse their data at scale. 

It uses machine learning to understand and extract meaningful medical information from unstructured data, then organises, indexes, and stores that information in chronological order to provide a holistic view of patient health. AWS says it features specially tuned machine learning models that understand medical terminology to identify and tag each piece of clinical information. HealthLake enriches the data with standardised labels (medications, conditions, diagnoses, etc.) so the data can be more easily searched and analysed.

HealthLake is part of AWS for Health, an initiative that provides healthcare, biopharma, and genomics customers with a set of cloud-based services and AWS partner offerings. For example, Komprise and its cloud-tiering supports S3 to get data into HealthLake.

AWS HealthLake uses the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry standard format to enable interoperability by facilitating the exchange of information across healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, patients, and more.

Customers can move their FHIR-formatted health data from on-premises systems to AWS’s data lake in the cloud. They can then apply analytics using Amazon QuickSight to understand patient and population-level trends, and build machine learning models with Amazon SageMaker to help make predictions about the progression of disease, the efficacy of clinical trials, the eligibility of insurance claims, and more.

This is neat vertical sector product design and marketing for the cloud data lake and warehouse market, and could become quite effective competition against Snowflake in the healthcare market.

Infrascale backup appliances for MSPs

Infrascale announced the availability of five new Infrascale Backup and Disaster Recovery (IBDR) appliance models for MSPs and VARs servicing SMB and mid-market companies.

They include:

  • Two new on-premises appliances — IBDR 970/4TB desktop and IBDR 1270/4TB 1U rack-mount — provide increased storage (roughly 1TB) and accommodate longer retention spans on the local appliance.
  • A new IBDR 1880 appliance in three versions — 30, 45, and 60 TB SSD — capable of higher IOPS and more than double the boot capacity of the 1780 with double the compute and RAM onboard.

IBDR is a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) hybrid cloud offering for MSPs and VARs.

Delphix trumpets its diversity credentials

Database virtualiser and data ops supplier Delphix says it’s getting better at diversity.

It says that, though women make up half of the population, they are still vastly underrepresented in technology. Women held 57 per cent of professional occupations in the US in 2020, but just 25 per cent of professional computing roles, according to the National Centre for Women & Information Technology.

Delphix announced an increase in its overall employee diversity rates from 29.5 per cent in Q4FY21 to 31.7 per cent in Q1FY22, a growth of over two per cent over the last quarter. Its headcount is 500, so that two per cent means ten people who were not caucasian males were hired.

It also saw an increase in its female workforce from 22.8 per cent in Q4FY21 to 24.7 per cent in Q1FY22, a growth of nearly two per cent over the last quarter — again meaning ten females were hired. (See note about Tammi Warfield in People section below.)

Founder and CEO Jedidiah Yueh said: “Diversity is a core part of our values at Delphix. We strive hard to attract and retain a diverse employee base and use specialised sourcing tools to help us reach a more diverse pool of candidates. We’ve made progress, but there’s a lot more work to be done.”

Delphix also announced its annual growth rate grew by over 85 per cent for the fiscal year ending January 2021, pushing it into non-GAAP profitability. It also achieved a world-class Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 89 for FY2021. 

XenData adds S3 interface to LTO tape stores

XenData announced the availability of an object storage S3 interface for its LTO tape on-premise active archives. This turns them into private cloud repositories that XenData claims will compete with public cloud storage services such as AWS Glacier and the Archive Tier of Azure object storage. The S3 interface is enabled by a software upgrade. An S3-enabled XenData LTO archive provides restore times of around two minutes, which is suitable for most infrequently accessed data repositories, and has no egress charges.

The company also announced Global Sync — a synchronisation service linking multiple S3 enabled LTO archives, creating a single global file system accessible anywhere worldwide. As soon as a file is archived to LTO at one location, it becomes available as a stub file within the global file system. When a user makes a change by writing, overwriting or deleting a file, that change is propagated to all locations. This provides a consistent up-to-date set of files across the entire distributed organisation. 

XenData Global Sync graphic.

When files are restored from another location, they are transferred directly using peer-to-peer multi-threaded HTTPS, which delivers secure fast file transfers. The Global Sync service uses a cloud database, but the files themselves are never stored in public cloud object storage, avoiding cloud storage and egress fees. Furthermore, because the new service only synchronises file system metadata, it requires minimal bandwidth.

Shorts

Cloud analytics vendor Actian announced general availability of its Zen V15 embedded database for mobile and IoT use cases, connecting mobile and IoT devices to gateways, the cloud, and traditional on-premise databases. The Zen V15 database is claimed to have breakthrough levels of performance and is certified to work with the Intel OpenNESS and Smart Edge MEC platforms.

Commvault’s Metallic has gained FedRAMP Ready High status, the only SaaS backup solution to do so. The Metallic Government Cloud meets the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) compliance readiness attestation and is hosted exclusively on Microsoft’s Azure Government Cloud 

Commvault has announced a partnership with SoftwareONE — a provider of end-to-end software and cloud technology solutions — as its first MSP global design partner for delivering Metallic data management as a service. SoftwareONE is launching its cloud-based managed BackupSimple service powered by Metallic, and offering it to MSPs.

Migration provider Datadobi has launched its DatadobiDriven Training Portal to provide strategic partners and end customers with tailored technical certification, support, and on-going communication. 

Data as a Service (“DaaS”) analytics infrastructure supplier GoodData announced a strategic partnership with analytics platform provider Vertica. GoodData’s Cloud Native (GoodData.CN) analytics platform will connect directly to Vertica’s data warehouse to accelerate the adoption of Data as a Service in the enterprise support and real-time analytics. 

Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud will be available on Microsoft Azure Germany to give customers more choice when it comes to data location. It also announced a new unified data governance and catalog as-a-service in the cloud to help businesses update and re-image their data governance programmes.

NVMe/TCP supplier Lightbits Labs has been assigned a patent for a system and a method of managing over-provisioning on non-volatile memory computer storage media with an optimal over-provisioning ratio.

Automated cloud migration supplier Next Pathway said it’s doing well because companies are migrating legacy apps to the cloud. It has formed strategic partnerships with Global System Integrators (GSIs) to deliver a migration offering and has licensed SHIFT, its automated migration tool, to technology companies such as Informatica. It says it has already translated tens of million lines of code and tens of thousands of ETL (extract, transform, load) pipelines in the first half of 2021.

Palo Alto Networks has developed a virtual firewall system using Nvidia’s BlueField Data Processing Unit (DPU). The DPU accelerates packet filtering and forwarding by offloading traffic from the host processor to its on-board hardware that is separate from the server CPU.

Pure Storage announced it has reached a milestone for its subscription-based Evergreen Storage program, with over 7000 non-disruptive controller upgrades by more than 2700 customers since 2015. The average number of upgrades has grown 38 per cent year-over-year for the last five years.

Balaji Venkateshwaran, Senior Director, Product Management at Pure, has written a blog indicating Pure is early into QLC (4 bits per cell) flash with its FlashArray//C product line and it is doing very well. It’s corporate trumpet blowing, but interesting anyway.

SaaS data manager Redstor launched support for Salesforce, and says it is the only channel-centric vendor to protect Salesforce alongside Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Xero and other modern and legacy infrastructure from a single application. Redstor recovers data independently of the CRM platform, and users don’t require a degree of Salesforce expertise.

SK hynix has started mass production of 8 Gigabit (Gb) LPDDR4 mobile DRAM based on the 1αnm; the fourth generation of its 10nm process technology, built using EUV (Extreme Ultra Violet) lithography equipment. This 1α technology follows the first three generations of per cent increase in the number of DRAM chips produced from the same size of a wafer, compared with the previous 1znm node. SK hynix plans to provide the latest mobile DRAM products to smartphone manufacturers from the second half of 2021 and will apply 1α technology to DDR5 DRAM early next year.

SK hynix 1αnm LPDDR4 mobile DRAM.

Storage Made Easy’s File Fabric Teams App extends Microsoft Teams collaboration to data outside of Microsoft 365, including object storage solutions such as Azure Blob Storage, Amazon S3, and also on-premises and cloud-based file storage such as Azure Files, Amazon FSx, and many other storage solutions that support SMB file shares.

Data protector Veritas announced support for the AWS for Health initiative (see above). Veritas Enterprise Vault runs on AWS. With the most recent version of Veritas NetBackup, customers can backup data to write once read many (WORM) storage on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) with support for Amazon S3 Object Lock. In other words Veritas can move data into the AWS HealthLake for AWS services to be used to analyse it.

Migration/replication company WANdisco released the first edition of an  annual Hadoop Migration Trends Report, showing that most data migrations still rely on “old school” approaches and tools involving shipping data by truck to cloud vendors (56 per cent) and/or using tools not designed for on-premises to cloud migration such as DistCp (48 per cent). As a result, more than 54 per cent of migration projects have not gone according to plan. According to the report, 24 per cent are not completed on time, 11 per cent are not within budget, and 20 per cent miss the mark on both. The report should soon be available on WANdisco’s web site.

ReRAM developer Weebit Nano completed the design and verification stages of its embedded ReRAM module and announced tape-out — the release to manufacturing of a test-chip that integrates this module. This will allow Weebit to demonstrate to customers a fully functional ReRAM product that can be integrated into System-on-Chip products. It expects to have its first silicon of the embedded ReRAM module towards the end of this year.

Weebit recently announced the industry’s first commercial integration of its oxide-based ReRAM (OxRAM) cell with an ovonic threshold switching (OTS) selector, saying it’s a critical step in the company’s commercialisation path for the discrete (stand-alone) memory market.

Customers

The UK’s Macmillan Cancer Support charity has moved its on-premises Windows File Server storage into the cloud using Nasuni. Lightweight Nasuni Edge Appliances cache frequently accessed files locally, maintaining fast access for Macmillan’s 1500 employees, with unstructured data up in the cloud.

HPC storage supplier Panasas has announced a five-year strategic alliance with the University of Wollongong (UOW) in Australia to support medical and scientific research initiatives that deploy cryogenic electron microscopy (Cryo-EM). The University will buy Panasas storage and engineering expertise to optimise workflows and design reference architectures for this work.

University of Wollongong.

Cloud-native Kubernetes storage provider StorageOS has provided managed service provider Civo with persistent cloud-native storage volumes to support its managed Kubernetes services, winning against competition from OpenEBS, Portworx, and Rook.

UK Cosmetics retailer Lush is using Veeam channel partner iland’s Secure Cloud Backup for Veeam Cloud Connect to protect its data. 

WekaIO says Visual Effects creative studio Preymaker is using the Weka File System on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to share data across different applications and operating systems. It has a distributed team and employs artists all over the world — from Los Angeles to New York, London, France, Sweden, and South Africa. The AWS cloud means artist workstations can be spun up and down depending on capabilities and project demands.

People

Tammi Warfield.

Orlando de Bruce joined Delphix as VP for Corporate Marketing and Brand in March.  Delphix has hired Tammi Warfield as its SVP for Customer Success. She joins from Microsoft, where she was the Vice President for the Customer Success Business Applications Solution Area. It also hired Steve Barrett as SVP International Operations in June.

Stan Hansen.

File-based collaboration vendor Egnyte has hired Stan Hansen as its new CRO to round out the executive team. We’re told He’s got a long pedigree in sales and had a hand in taking Pluralsight public in 2018. He’s based in the Silicon Slopes of Utah. Get that, the silicon slopes? Ski slopes, presumably, as he’s based in Salt Lake City.

Anneka Gupta has joined data protector and manager Rubrik as its Chief Product Officer. She was previously President and Head of Products and Platforms at data connectivity supplier LiveRamp. Rubrik now calls itself the the Zero Trust Data Management company, and has trademarked the term “Zero Trust Data Management”.

Anneka Gupta.

A Gupta quote said: “Rubrik is uniquely placed to solve the three big challenges of data today: rapid recovery from ransomware, automation of data operations, and transition of data to the cloud.” Competition alert! Automation of data operations sounds very much like Delphix’s idea of Data Ops.

VAST Federal, a unit of VAST Data announced that former CIA Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt has joined as its newest board member. He will advise the company on its federal business expansion. 

Data protector Veritas has promoted Geoff Greenlaw as the new VP of Channel and Alliances for Europe, Middle East, Africa and India (EMEAI). The company has a renewed channel strategy, with a heavy focus on ransomware protection. Greenlaw’s first priority will be to roll out this revamped and simplified 2022 Veritas Partner Force Program.

Former Veritas Technologies EVP Phil Brace has joined Sierra Wireless as its President and CEO.