Storage news ticker – November 16

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Backblaze raised $100 million from its November 11 IPO in which it aimed to sell 6.2 million shares in a range set at $15 to $17. They were sold at $16, netting the company $99,200,000. Shares are now trading at $25.50, 59.4 per cent higher than the offer price. Investors like this cloud backup and storage providing company’s prospects.

Data migrator-cum-data manager Datadobi has added API programmability to its data mover SW DobiMigrate. With v5.13 customers and partners can now extend existing automated storage provisioning workflows with data migration steps. This enables automation of file and object migrations, reorganisation and/or clean up projects. Organizations can first use the storage system APIs to provision a new group of on-premises or cloud storage and then use the DobiMigrate API to set up the NAS or object migration. Following the cutover to the new storage, the administrator can then again use storage systems APIs to deprovision the original storage. The process is fully auditable.

HPE has updated its Azure Stack HCI on Apollo 4200 validated solution, adding the Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus server with an updated processor (Intel Ice Lake), faster and larger capacity of 3200MT/sec DRAM support, Optane Persistent memory 200 series, and select GPU/FPGA support. This 2U server can accommodate high-performance NVMe, and SAS/SATA SSDs, capacity-oriented 3.5-inch disk drives (HDD) or 2.5-inch ones as well. It runs Azure Stack HCI software v21H2. This includes support for Azure workloads, Azure Virtual Desktop (in preview) and new Azure management capabilities like Azure Arc-enabled VM provisioning and management. HPE is working to get Apollo 4200 Gen10 plus into the Azure Stack HCI catalog as soon as General Availability of Azure Stack HCI version 21H2 takes place.

An IBM source tells us adding and removing memory is already a reality and supported by SAP HANA running on IBM Power9 servers. There is an IBM “Dynamic LPAR” (DLPAR) operation to add memory to or remove memory from a running LPAR on Power9 Server. LPARs must use HANA 2.0 SPS05 revision 52 (or newer) and SLES 15 SP2 or RHEL 8.3. Use a DLPAR operation to adjust memory if you immediately need more memory to fulfill a critical business task, and shutting down the SAP HANA system is not possible. When using a DLPAR operation on an SAP HANA system, it is recommended to verify the NUMA layout of the system afterwards due to a possible performance impact. For details see the SAP tech note.

Chinese supplier Memblaze launched its PBlaze6 6530 series PCIe 4.0 x 4 lane enterprise SSD using 176-layer 3D NAND and supporting NVMe v1.4. Max random read IOPS are 1.1 million, max random write IOPS are 450,000 with sequential read/write bandwidth reaching 6.8GB/sec and 4.8GB/sec, respectively. Overall write latency is 10μs. It features a 11W typical write power consumption and offers dynamic power adjustments from 6W to 14W by per 1W. Capacity levels are 1.92TB, 3.84TB and 7.68TB. and its write endurance can be up to 1.5 DWPD (5 years). It comes in PCIe Add-in-Card and 2.5-inch form factors. A PBlaze6 6536 variant offers three capacity sizes, including 1.6TB, 3.2TB and 6.4TB, and its endurance can be up to 3.3 DWPD (five years).

Panasas announced the appointment of Bret Costelow as EVP of global sales to oversee sales and business development worldwide. His CV includes being VP global sales and alliances at DDN and director global sales, software and services sales, HPC, at Intel with the open-source Lustre parallel file system.

Paragon Software announced the availability of its Paragon File System SDK for embedded developers. It says Paragon FS is a new, AUTOSAR-compliant file system designed with flash memory in mind. It focuses on flash memory longevity and performance under the heaviest use cases and fits a wide range of hardware — from tiny, low-resource IoT devices to heavy automotive virtual cockpits. Paragon FS consists of independent modules, like VFS and various levels of cache to fine-tune performance, so that unneeded modules do not increase the footprint or affect performance.

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Quantum announced its ActiveScale object storage product has achieved AWS Outposts Ready designation, part of the AWS Service Ready Program. ActiveScale object storage systems can now be used alongside an AWS Outposts deployment to provide Amazon S3-compliant object storage for Amazon Web Services running on an AWS Outposts rack. 

Cloud datawarehouser Snowflake announced that data scientists, data engineers, and application developers can now use Python — the fastest-growing programming language — natively within Snowflake as part of its Snowpack developer framework. Snowpark for Python is currently in private preview.

VAST Data announced that Jump Trading Group selected VAST’s Universal Storage as the foundation for its high-performance computing (HPC) cloud infrastructure. As a global research-based trading firm, Jump employees include quants, technologists and researchers needing good technology to innovate and push scientific breakthroughs in the field of algorithmic trading. A VAST-Jump video will tell you more.

Play video here.