Commvault is offering anti-ransomware services to its customers. NetApp wants a billion dollars a year in recurring revenue from the public cloud. Lenovo wants to offer all its products on-premises with a cloud-like as-a-service model. SingleStore has raised yet more cash for its do-it-all database — yet more evidence that VCs just love the data analytics field.
Commvault anti-ransomware services
Commvault has devised new anti-ransomware services. Its Ransomware Protection and Response Services provides resources and expertise to harden customers’ Commvault solutions from an attack, review the state of their data protection over time, and help them recover data when an attack does occur.
Ram Menashe, VP of Global Services at Commvault, said: “While we cannot guarantee our customers won’t be the target of an attack, we believe that by offering strategic protection plans, we can support customers at any stage of a ransomware attack — and do our best to help prevent it altogether with Commvault Protection Review.”
A Ransomware Protection Design and Plan service assists customers in validating their preparedness for ongoing threats and attacks.
A Ransomware Response Service provides the expertise and resources to help recover from an attack. As part of the service, Commvault provides a Ransomware Recovery Incident Manager backed by the Commvault Recovery Operations team. The service works with customers to identify and recover critical data and expedite a return to normal business operations.
These services complement Commvault’s Ransomware Protect and Recover products.
NetApp’s $1B ARR goal
With AWS FSx for ONTAP announced, NetApp’a EVP and GM of its Public Cloud Services business unit, Anthony Lye, briefed financial analysts. In his webcast presentation he said NetApp had a target of achieving public cloud services annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $450 million to $500 million in fiscal 2021 and $1 billion in fiscal 2025.
It is on track to getting to that level, and expects to make acquisitions as well as relying on organic growth to help drive its ARR upwards. Each sales person has a cloud business quota. As a reminder, NetApp is currently a $5.7 billion a year revenue company.
According to Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers, Lye said that NetApp’s competition in this area came from object and block storage companies, and public cloud companies themselves.
Lenovo as-a-Service
$60 billion a year revenue PC to enterprise IT system supplier Lenovo has announced an everything-as-a-service strategy, under the TruScale brand name. This involves a scalable, cloud-like consumption model , fully managed services, and predictable payment options for hardware and service inclusions.
Lenovo is bringing all of its as-a-service offerings under one umbrella to provide a truly global solution that makes everything from the pocket to the cloud available via a single contract framework.
Research shows the as-a-service market is growing at four times the overall IT services total addressable market. In three years, as-a-service models will represent 12 per cent of enterprise x86 server spend and over 50 per cent of new enterprise storage spend, growing at 40 per cent CAGR and around 17 per cent of commercial PC spend — up from one per cent two years ago and growing at 50 per cent CAGR.
Lenovo has joined with infrastructure partners Deloitte, VMWare and Intel, and DaaS security partners Absolute Software and SentinelOne to provide organisations with various dynamic offerings such as hybrid cloud solutions for Edge to Cloud environments, best-in-class managed security solutions, and access to the most current storage infrastructure innovation, for the life of their data, with the ability to scale storage capacity on demand.
SingleStore fund raiser — again
SingleStore, selling a single database for all data-intensive applications, has raised $80 million in funding in a Series F round, taking total funding to $264 million. It raised $50 million in debt finance and $80 million in an E round in 2020. The company must be absolutely awash with cash.
Insight Partners led the round, with participation from new investor Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Existing investors Khosla Ventures, Dell Capital, Rev IV, Glynn Capital, and Google Ventures also participated.
SingleStore said that a 300 per cent-plus increase in new customer acquisition for its cloud service and 150 per cent-plus year-over-year growth in cloud revenue led to raising a new round to continue to power innovation and growth.
SingleStore CEO Raj Verma said: “The status quo of stitching together multiple databases built for previous eras isn’t delivering the needed speed, simplicity, or efficiency. SingleStore is the industry’s first database built to solve the challenges of this new era in one database.”
Shorts
Acronis True Image has been rebranded as Cyber Protect Home Office, as it combines cyber security and data protection. Cyber Protect Home Office includes anti-malware proven to detect and stop the latest cyberthreats in real time, including zero-day attacks that have never been seen before. Protection covers videoconferencing applications like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, preventing attackers from accessing data in transit.
Box, under assault by activist investor Starboard Value, has won a board director election proxy war. Reuters reports shareholders rejected Starboard Value’s three candidates, re-electing Aaron Levie, Box’s co-founder and CEO, and Peter Leav and Dana Evan to the company’s ten-member board. This is a fairly rare setback for Starboard Value.
Open-source distributed NoSQL database supplier Couchbase has just released its latest earnings for its second quarter fiscal year ’22. Total revenue for the quarter was $29.7 million, an increase of 18 per cent year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $28 million, an increase of 19 per cent. Total ARR for the quarter was $115.2 million, an increase of 20 per cent. Gross margin for the quarter was 88.1 per cent.
Cribl, an Observability Pipeline startup, has raised $200 million in Series C funding led by Greylock and Redpoint Ventures. This brings Cribl’s total funding to $254 million, coming on the heels of sizable deals with large enterprise customers including FINRA, Rivian, and Cox Automotive. Cribl’s LogStream product parses and routes any type of event data to customers’ chosen analytics tools and storage destinations without fear of vendor lock-in, complementing tools such as Splunk, Datadog, and Exabeam.
DataOps supplier Delphix has gained SAP certification for the integration of its DevOps Data Platform 6.0 with SAP NetWeaver and SAP S/4HANA. Customers for these SAP products can use Delphix to automatically mask data for privacy compliance, secure data from ransomware attacks, and deliver efficient, virtualised data to accelerate SAP releases or train artificial intelligence and machine learning models.
Hitachi Vantara Australia & New Zealand today announced that it has successfully achieved a Data Centre Virtualisation VMware Master Services Competency. VMware Master Services Competencies are designed to help partners demonstrate customer-centric solutions and technical proficiency, with proven success and expertise in a specialised area of business.
IBM Spectrum Scale container native v5.1.1.3 is available now and features:
- Automated deployment of CSI operator and driver
- Support for storage cluster encryption
- Support for rolling upgrade of IBM Spectrum Scale image versions
- Support for a limited set of IBM Spectrum Scale configuration settings
- Support for up to four storage clusters
- Support for up to 16 remote filesystems
- Automated IBM Spectrum Scale performance monitoring bridge for Grafana
Spectrum Scale CSI driver v2.3.0 is also available now:
- Support for Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 and 1.21
- Support for Kubernetes subpath
- Migration of CRD to v1 from v1beta
- Liveliness probe for CSI driver pods
- Minimum Fileset based volume size is changed to 1Gi
- Changes in inode calculation for preallocation
- Images are now in IBM Cloud registry for CNSA based deployment
- Automated CSI deployment with CNSA
Kingston Digital Europe is shipping a super-fast USB drive — the XS2000 — using USB 3.2 gen 2×2 speeds up to 2000MB/sec and capacities of 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. The 20000MB/sec speed needs a USB 3.2 gen 2×2 connector; it’s up to 1000MB/sec with a USB 3.2 gen 2 connector. This pocket-size drive connects to a PC, notebook or other portable device host via a USB Type-C connector. The XS2000 includes a removable ruggedised sleeve and IP55-rating to withstand water and dust. Expect prices around $99, $160 and $285 for the 500GB, 1TB and 2TB models.
LogDNA, which supplies a log management observability platform, unveiled early access for its coming LogDNA Streaming product. LogDNA’s Data Ingestion Pipeline can ingest, parse, and normalize massive, fluctuating amounts of structured and unstructured log data. LogDNA Streaming now automatically sends that data to any application or analysis tool, while maintaining tight control over storage costs and compliance measures.
A Nasuni blog by Tech Marketing VP Tom Rose dismisses AWS’s FSx for NetApp ONTAP, saying: “The difference between Nasuni and NetApp is the difference between a platform that was born in the cloud and one that has been ported to the cloud.” And he says: “The NetApp approach is to lift and shift the primary storage you’ve relied on in the past to the cloud, then add on costs for snapshots, cloud tiering, backup, DR, and edge caching.” Read the blog for more kick-the-competitor stuff.
Nebulon, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service vendor with a DPU-like server add-in card (Service Processing Units), has set up a Nebulon smartPartner programme with two new incentives, Nebulon smartStart and Nebulon smartRewards, designed to help reseller partners significantly accelerate and grow both their revenue and margins. Tim Pitcher, VP Sales at Nebulon, said: “It’s no secret that the channel industry has experienced limited margins and growth as a direct result of overly-distributed hyperconverged platforms.” So sell Nebulon kit instead.
PNY is offering branded HP USB 3.2 Flash Drives to its sales network: the HP x5600b & x5600c. These USB flash drives are designed to store, transfer and share digital files quickly and easily from a wide range of devices: smartphones, PCs, tablets, etc. They are available in capacities ranging from 32GB to 256GB. The HP x5600b USB flash drive has dual connectivity consisting of a standard USB type A connector and a micro-USB connector. The HP x5600c USB flash drive features dual connectivity consisting of a standard USB Type A connector and a fast USB Type C connector.
A Qumulo blog by Head of Competitive Intelligence David Chapa dismisses AWS’s FSx for NetApp ONTAP, saying: “AWS FSx is a managed service offered by AWS, and this makes the third such offering by AWS. Sounds like a big win, but it’s the same legacy complexity of on-prem but now on AWS.” Read the blog for more kick-the-competitor stuff.
Rumour central — it might just be rumour but we hear a certain SaaS backup mover and groover could execute an IPO manoeuvre in early 2022.
Backup and archive tape and disk storage vendor Spectra Logic announced LTO-9 tape availability in its tape library range, including the Spectra TFinity ExaScale, T950, T950v, T680, T380, T200, T120, T50e and Spectra Stack. Using LTO-9 cartridges the TFinity library can hold 1EB of uncompressed data — the first library in the world to do so.
SvSAN storage software supplier StorMagic was included in the latest edition of the Gartner Voice of the Customer Report for Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software Vendors. Get a copy of the Gartner report here.
Archiving system supplier StrongBox Data Solutions uprated its channel program. The enhanced Ambassador Partner Program includes 100 per cent guaranteed deal registration and protection, easy-access partner portal, competitive margins and recurring revenue opportunities, marketing investment funds, sales support and qualified lead access.
Tuxera, a storage software and networking technology company, has agreed to acquire HCC Embedded, a developer of embedded file systems, flash management, and network data transfer software. The two say their combined experience and understanding of data storage and transfer technology covers any operating system or real-time operating system, any flash memory type, any hardware environment, and any storage interface, and a wide range of network protocols.
Flash chip, SSD and HDD supplier Western Digital announced that the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), has approved its greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals. SBTi has two different ambition levels: the Standard Commitment to limit global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and a more demanding 1.5°C trajectory commitment. WD has committed to the 1.5°C path. It commits to reduce its Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 42 per cent by 2030, from a 2020 base year. The company is also adopting a Scope 3 target to reduce the emissions intensity of its products by 50 per cent by 2030.
Open-source distributed SQL database supplier Yugabyte has announced a new EMEA customer win: global digital money transfer service business WorldRemit.
