Storage news ticker – January 24

Acronis has improved its CyberFit partner program with more emphasis on supporting partner development, particularly for cloud-based services, increasing its marketing and social media visibility with pre-packaged automated content, and offering competitive professional and financial assistance to partners willing to migrate to Acronis.

  • A focus on service providers and cloud distribution partners, with no revenue threshold for service providers, straightforward program requirements, and a dedicated partner account manager;
  • Joint business planning, with business plans available on the Partner Portal, financial benefits for Gold and Platinum partners, and joint sales and marketing efforts;
  • Competitive migration program, with financial and professional services assistance available to partners ready to migrate to Acronis;
  • Unique #TeamUp programme, offering partnerships with sports teams and unique sports benefits;
  • Sales and marketing automation tools and pre-packaged content, with e-mail drip campaigns and social media campaigns available to automate via Partner Program;
  • On-demand demo lab for partners, an upcoming cloud-based virtual lab environment with Acronis Cyber Cloud components pre-installed and available for training and demo purposes;
  • NFR programme, providing Acronis Software licenses to partners’ internal usage;

Codenotary, which supplies end-to-end cryptographically verifiable tracking and provenance for all software artefacts, actions, and dependencies and can instantly identify untrusted components in software, has raised $12.5 million in series B funding by new and existing investors Bluwat, Elaia and others. It is the primary contributor to Immudb, the open source enterprise-class database with data immutability that can scale to billions of transactions per day. Codenotary uses immudb to underpin its notarization and verification product. There have been more than 12 million downloads of immudb so far.

Meredyth Jensen.

HPC and enterprise storage array provider DDN has appointed Meredyth Jensen as its CMO. She comes from being SVP marketing at RGP, a human capital firm – a non-storage tech background. DDN has an SVP for marketing: Kurt Kuckein.

A DDN spokesperson said: “DDN continues to experience impressive YOY growth and has brought on a new CMO who will be focused on building DDN’s brand eminence, awareness and expanding our footprint in key verticals/markets as well as generating demand for our portfolio to support enterprise customers, government and higher ed in their digital transformation journeys. This is especially relevant now with commercial customer requirements driven by the growing complexity of AI data management. These customers are looking for solution providers with domain expertise in both advanced computing and Enterprise workloads. 

“Yes, Kurt is reporting to Meredyth and will bring his deep subject matter expertise to our product marketing engine to accelerate growth.”

Research outfit TrendForce expects NAND flash prices for 1Q22 to decline by 8–13 per cent quarter on quarter, compared to TrendForce’s previous forecast of 10–15 per cent, primarily due to PC OEMs’ increased orders for PCIe 3.0 products and the impact of the lockdown in Xi’an on PC OEMs’ price negotiation approaches. The daily number of new COVID-19 cases in Xi’an has recently undergone a noticeable drop, and the local government has also announced that the emergency level has been downgraded. As such, Samsung’s and Micron’s local production facilities are returning to normal with respect to workforce and operational capacity. Samsung’s local production base manufactures NAND flash products, whereas Micron’s local production base is responsible for the testing and packaging of DRAM chips as well as the assembly of DRAM modules. The impacts of the lockdown mainly relate to delays in the deliveries of memory products to customers.

Veritas has confirmed that Gartner analyst Santhosh Rao is joining Veritas in the role of senior director, product and strategy.  He will be reporting to Doug Matthews, Veritas VP of product management.

William Blair financial analyst Jason Ader told subscribers his December quarter survey of 118 VARs capped off a strong IT spending year, with VARs seeing customers put ample budgets to work and address urgent application and infrastructure needs. That said, he observed a sequential downtick in overall sentiment, which was attributed to project pushouts, severity of supply constraints, macro concerns on Omicron and inflation, and the likelihood of more moderate spending growth in 2022 (due to tougher comps).

Weebit Nano, together with its development partner CEA-Leti, has demonstrated its first operational ReRAM crossbar arrays. It says this is a key milestone on the company’s path to creating discrete (stand-alone) non-volatile memory (NVM) chips. Weebit says its crossbar arrays were developed using a 1S1R (one selector one resistor) architecture that enables the high density needed for discrete chips. Such an architecture also allows Weebit’s arrays to be stacked in 3D layers so they can deliver even higher densities. CEO Coby Hanoch said Weebit Nano continues to make significant technical and commercial progress within the embedded sector – recently “successfully scaling our ReRAM technology down to 28nm. Now, with the creation of our first kilobit crossbar arrays, we’re continuing our progress toward discrete memory solutions.”