Storage news ticker – March 24

Storage news
Storage news

Arcserve’s StorageCraft DRaaS service degradation (outage) continues. A March 23 status message read: “Our engineers continue to actively work on the resolution for this issue.” The issue has been ongoing since March 9 or 10 and currently affects DRaaS availability in Australia, Canada, GCP-Canada, Ireland, US-UT, and US West.

ChaosSearch has been included as a Representative Vendor in the 2022 Gartner Market Guide for Analytics Query Accelerators. The report offers guidance on vendors that provide structured query language (SQL) or SQL-like query support on a broad range of data sources to deliver business intelligence (BI) dashboards, interactive query capabilities, and support for data modeling. ChaosSearch enable users to perform both log analytics and SQL queries concurrently and in situ from their cloud object storage, without the data pipelining, transformation, or movement that most other data lakes, data warehouses, and data lakehouses require today.

Germany-based RNT Rausch, an IT supplier, has announced two Yowie-brand storage appliances running Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage software with S3 object lock immutability: the Yowie 1100 (2TB start level) and 1200 (8TB start level). They are single-node appliances with six hot-swap disk drives and provide enterprise-grade ransomware protection to organizations with data capacities of 2–100TB. The appliances prevent encryption or deletion of objects for the duration of a user-defined retention period. Immutable S3 objects are protected by configuring WORM and retention attributes at the object or bucket level.

DataOps prepper Delphix has appointed Robert Stevenson as VP of its Japan operations, reporting to Steven Chung, President, Worldwide Field Operations at Delphix. Stevenson has served various leadership positions within the Japanese market at BEA, EMC-Dell, Lenovo, and Avaya, and spearheaded the growth of startups such as Documentum, Tanium, and Sumo Logic. Delphix says it’s only scratching the surface in Japan and has a lot of potential there.

GoodData has announced new dashboard plugins to further customize the data visualization experience. They enable widespread data accessibility by providing more tools to integrate data/UI widgets into the low-code GoodData.UI and help produce a fully composable UI. The plugins allow customers to decide on project-specific features to add to each dashboard and search the GoodData library to select the correct plugin to customize with added text, images, charts, videos, or anything else they can think of.

MariaDB has released Xpand 6 – its fully distributed SQL database with a shared-nothing architecture and fast operational analytics. Xpand uses columnar indexes for real-time operational analytics directly on transactional data without losing consistency or missing the latest transactions. A new columnar feature with a cost-based optimizer enables companies to run ad hoc queries in Xpand with speeds up to 50x faster. Xpand 6 also has parallel replication for asynchronous replication of data across locations.

Object storage software supplier MinIO has announced two new advisors: Sanjay Poonen, former VMware COO and SAP president, and Tony Werner, former president of Comcast. Both will provide counsel on growth and go-to-market strategy. MinIO has promoted Kris Inapurapu from VP of corporate and business development to chief business officer. This role encompasses all things commercial from customer engagement to renewal and growth, as well as strategic partnerships.

Nvidia has unveiled Spectrum-4 – the next generation of its Ethernet platform and the first 400Gbit/sec end-to-end networking platform, providing 4x higher switching throughput than previous generations at 51.2Tbit/sec. It consists of the Spectrum-4 switch family, ConnectX-7 SmartNIC, BlueField-3 DPU, and the DOCA datacenter infrastructure software to help run cloud-native applications at scale.

Quantum has announced a Unified Surveillance Platform (USP) for recording and storing video surveillance data, and introduced a line of Smart Network Video Recording Servers (NVRs) which combine the Quantum Unified Surveillance Platform software with a purpose-built NVR server to create an integrated appliance. USP software runs on any standard server, simplifies video recording infrastructure, and lowers total cost of ownership by consolidating the server’s compute, storage, and networking resources into a single scalable system that hosts video management system (VMS) and other common security applications.

The Smart NVR can run multiple physical security applications on a single server, Quantum says, unlike other NVRs, to reduce costs and complexity for security integrators and their customers. The USP is based on software technology that Quantum acquired last year from EnCloudEn.

RedHat‘s OpenShift Kubernetes automation software is being ported to Nvidia’s BlueField DPUs. Nvidia says OpenShift and BlueField provide a consistent, cloud-native application platform to manage hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and edge deployments with enhanced orchestration, automation, and security. The DPU offloads container management and networking, delivering more CPU power to run tenant workloads. Sign up here to learn more.

To build a machine learning application, you need to transform raw data into features. Tecton’s software does this. It has announced a partnership with public cloud data warehouser Snowflake to help put ML applications into operations. The two have collaborated to integrate Tecton and open source Feast with Snowflake’s Data Cloud. The combo provide a simple and fast path to building production-grade features to support a broad range of operational ML use cases including fraud detection, product recommendations, and real-time pricing, the companies say.

Swissbit has launched the M.2 SATA SSD X-78m2 with endurance ratings of up to 80 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day). It uses the latest generation 3D TLC NAND, configured in pSLC mode, and with a SATA 6Gbit/sec connector. This SSD achieves data rates of up to 560MB/sec for sequential reads and 490MB/sec for sequential writes, and exceeds 73,000 and 86,000 IOPS for reads and writes respectively. 

The drive is meant for especially write-intensive applications in industrial PCs, point-of-sale systems, embedded and surveillance systems, and applications in the transportation, medical, networking, and communications sectors. It uses the M.2 2242 form factor and is immediately available with storage capacities ranging from 40 to 320GB. The X-78m2 is designed and specified for industrial use at operating temperatures ranging from -40 to 85°C, including stability against the “cross temperature effect.” The product line will also be available for a commercial temperature range of 0 to 70°C. 

An Amazon Kendra connector for FSx for Windows File Server enables secure and intelligent search of information scattered in unstructured content. The data is securely stored on file systems on FSx Windows File Server with ACLs and shared with users based on their Microsoft AD domain credentials. Users can now use the Amazon Kendra connector to index documents (HTML, PDF, MS Word, MS PowerPoint, and plain text) stored in their Windows file system on FSx for Windows File Server and search for information across this content using intelligent search in Amazon Kendra. Read more in this blog.

The Argus journal reports that Western Digital is partnering Kioxia in the latter’s Fab2 3D NAND wafer building fab construction project, thus extending the pair’s joint venture. The new fab will cost ¥1 trillion ($8.3B). Apparently Kioxia is contemplating an IPO again after major shareholder Toshiba requested one.