Storage news ticker – December 2

AWS-palooza

AWS Lake Formation is a service to set up a secure data lake and has three new capabilities:

  • Lake Formation Governed Tables on Amazon S3 simplify building resilient data pipelines with multi-table transaction support. As data is added or changed, Lake Formation automatically manages conflicts and errors to ensure that all users see a consistent view of the data. 
  • Governed Tables monitor and automatically optimize how data is stored so query times are consistent and fast. 
  • Row and cell-level permissions make it more easy to restrict access to sensitive information by granting users access to only the portions of the data they are allowed to see. 

Governed Tables, row and cell-level permissions are supported through Amazon Athena, Redshift Spectrum, AWS Glue, and Amazon QuickSight.

There is a new Amazon DynamoDB Standard-IA table class to reduce DynamoDB costs by up to 60 per cent for tables storing infrequently accessed data. This is compared to Standard DynamoDB table cost. Standard DynamoDB tables offer up to 20 per cent lower throughput costs than the Standard-IA. Customers can switch between the two classes without performance impact and no application code changes.

AWS is offering three new Outposts systems — not racks but 1U and 2U servers — which run its public cloud software on-premises, and pretty skinny affairs they are too. The 1U server is the STBKRBE. It has a Graviton2 Arm-based CPU with up to 64 vCPUs in various configurations. There is 128GiB of DRAM and 2x 1.9TB NVMe SSDs. The LMAXAD41 is a 2U system powered by an “Ice Lake” Xeon with up to 64 vCPUs and 2x 1.9TB NVMe SSDs and 128GiB DRAM. The more capable KOSKFSF has 128 vCPUs, 256 GiB of DRAM and 4x 1.9TB NVMe SSDs. The systems will be deliverable in the first 2022 quarter, with AWS support looking after them. Amazon’s marketeers need to up their server naming game, by the way.

NetApp has been named the 2021 AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Design Partner of the Year in the US for its work on the jointly engineered Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP software introduced earlier this year.

The Rest

Druva is running a competitive win webinar highlighting how its customer Vertrax changed from Veeam to the Druva Cloud platform after ransomware corrupted its OneDrive and on-premises backup files. “We couldn’t recover most of the files,” said Rob Ljunggren, director of IT at Vertrax. But, when another ransomware attack happened, they were prepared. Register for the webinar here.

Taiwan-based Infortrend has introduced the EonStor DS 4000U — an all-flash SAN system to boost IOPS and reduce latency for applications like database and virtualisation. It supports U.2 format NVMe SSDs to deliver 1,000,000 IOPS and 11GB/sec throughput. This is a 90 per cent performance increase compared to the previous model. 

The system has high-performance and high-capacity tiers and an auto-tiering function to move data to these tiers. The system is backed by supercapacitors, has multiple levels of RAID protection available along with snapshots and remote replication. There is also SSD optimisation technology to extend service life, improve data protection, and simplify management. EonStor DS is certified as VMware Ready.

NetApp announced Spot Ocean Continuous Delivery (CD) is available for private preview with AWS customers in mid-December. Spot Ocean CD extends Spot by NetApp’s core technologies enabling delivery of cloud-native applications on Kubernetes. Spot Security is available in private preview, starting with AWS customers. Spot Security enables customers to detect, prioritise and help mitigate the most serious security threats and risks within cloud infrastructure.

….

Jonathan Martin, WekaIO’s president, just posted this on LinkedIn: “Weka just closed out a record-breaking quarter! … [and] tripled our revenue in Q4 year over year with more deals in Q4 than all of 2020 [and] It was also a record-breaking year.”

VMware has to cover the Nutanix CEO’s costs in its abandoned lawsuit. An extract from the lawsuit closure court order makes this clear: “NOW, THEREFORE, it is hereby ORDERED, that: 1. Plaintiff’s [Rajiv] Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings is GRANTED and Defendant’s [VMware] Cross-Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings is DENIED. 2. The Company [VMware] shall advance to Plaintiff [Rajiv] the reasonable attorneys’ fees and expenses he has incurred and will incur in connection with defending against 3 the California Action and shall indemnify Plaintiff’s reasonable Fees-on-Fees as set forth below.” Ho ho ho. That’s gotta sting.