Storage News Ticker – November 10

Public cloud SaaS data protector Clumio announced availability of Clumio Protect for Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cluster (EC2). Its air-gapped SQL backups provide ransomware protection for applications, low RPO and RTO with rapid database point-in-time recovery, and an agent-less backup as a service with zero impact to database performance. Clumio Protect for Microsoft SQL Server on EC2 is available now.  Clumio Protect also support SQL Server protection on Amazon RDS and VMware Cloud.

Inspur is at the Open Compute Project (OCP) summit in San Jose. It has launched, jointly with Samsung, the Poseidon V2 E3.x reference system which adopted composable architecture to maximise the benefits of the EDSFF E3.x form factor. Poseidon V2 system can accommodate PCIe 5 SSDs and various devices like AI/ML accelerators or CXL Memory Expanders. Datacentre users can configure the system according to their application’s needs. 

Nvidia announced its Quantum-2 400Gbit/sec switches, ConnectX-7 NICs, and BlueField-3 Data Processing Units (DPUs). The switch can support up to 2,048 400Gbit/sec ports, or 4,096 200Gbit/sec ports — five times more than the prior Quantum-1 switches. Quantum-2 switches use a 54 billion transistor chip made with 7nm technology. BlueField-3 DPUs have a 22 billion transistor chip, again built with 7nm technology, with 16x 64-bit Arm CPUs for offloading and isolation (disaggregation) of datacentre infrastructure stacks. Quantum-2 switches are available from Dell, HP Enterprise, Lenovo, Supermicro, QCT, and others. ConnectX-7 NICs will start sampling in January 2022 and BlueField-3 DPU sample shipping will start in May 2022.

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) together with its partners the DMTF, SNIA, and the Gen-Z Consortium, are developing a new open source fabric management “framework” to provide a unified set of tools to control and monitor multiple network fabric types. A Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at SuperComputing ’21 — November 16 at 12:15pm CST (18:15 UTC) — will seek input from the HPC network, storage, and security communities to provide useful tools to meet their needs, as well as open participation in the development of the OpenFabrics Management Framework.

OWC announced the world’s fastest and highest capacity PCIe SSD. Its Accelsior 8M2 PCIe flash storage device is for 2019 Mac Pros, Windows or Linux computers, and PCIe expansion systems. Speeds are up to 26GB/sec. The 8M2 has 8x NVMe M.2 SSD slots with four lanes of PCIe 4 lanes and up to 64TB of capacity. It has a softwareRAID capability supporting multiple RAID levels and RAID sets. There is a cooling fan in the aluminium heat shield. The Accelsior 8M2 SSD is available now in capacities ranging from 0TB (add your own drives) starting at $799 and 2TB, 4TB, 8TB, 16TB, 32TB and 64TB models starting at $1,299.

OWC Accelsior 8M2

ScaleOut Software announced extensions to its ScaleOut Digital Twin Streaming Service that integrate its Azure-based in-memory computing platform with Microsoft’s Azure Digital Twins cloud service. This integration adds new capabilities for real-time analytics to Azure Digital Twins and unlocks new use cases in a variety of applications, such as predictive maintenance, logistics, telematics, disaster recovery, cyber and physical security, health-device tracking, IoT, smart cities, financial services, and ecommerce. Users can gain real-time, scalable message processing with no-code machine learning, actionable insights and real-time visualisation for Azure Digital Twins.

Database company SingleStore announced that Henock Gessesse has joined the company as general counsel. He will contribute his significant business and legal expertise to SingleStore, which added the general counsel position to provide more fuel to its growing operation. 

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today announced it is being joined by five standards organisations in a dedicated Open Standards Pavilion at SuperComputing ’21. The SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative (SMI) and Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative (CMSI) will be represented along with the CXL Consortium, Ethernet Alliance, Fibre Channel Industry Association, Gen-Z Consortium, and OpenFabrics Alliance.  Representatives will be on hand to discuss computational storage, CXL, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Gen-Z, open fabrics, persistent memory, SNIA Swordfish, SSD and SFF standards.