Cloudflare has announced D1, the first cloud storage database for the Workers serverless platform, pitched as enabling developers to build fast, database-backed applications with just a few clicks. It said almost every business uses databases to store application data in the cloud – from the apps in your phone to SaaS applications for the enterprise to frameworks like Ruby on Rails. D1 stores data close to where their users are, which the company said provides performance without any of the complexities of installing or managing a traditional database. There are no data transfer fees, allowing them to easily move data between services as needed, it added. Following the launch of R2 Storage, which was announced last year in response to AWS data egress fees, D1 is the latest effort from Cloudflare to become a preeminent player in the cloud storage market.
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Data manager Arcitecta has opened its new EMEA headquarters in Munich, Germany, to support the company’s business across Europe. It also announced the appointment of Frank Radefeldt as SVP of customer success worldwide and managing director for Europe.
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Search company Elastic has announced an expansion of its trading relationship with Microsoft to accelerate the adoption of Elastic Cloud on Azure. The companies said they intend to continue building deeper native integrations between Elastic and Azure. In addition, they are going to expand go-to-market and co-selling activities, which include customer events, demand generation, sales enablement, and an enhanced web presence on the Azure Marketplace.
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Data management company FalconStor has announced a new reselling relationship with IBM to provide jointly validated solutions for IBM Power Systems. CEO Todd Brooks said: “These solutions are especially important to the tens of thousands of companies around the globe that leverage IBM i environments, as they now have the ability to securely backup and restore to the cloud as well as migrate their IBM i workloads to IBM Power VS Cloud with secure backup and recovery on an ongoing basis.”…
FalconStor also announced dire calendar Q1 2022 results with revenues of just $2.049 million, down from $3.8 million a year ago. A $1.1 million loss contrasts badly with the $408,295 profit reported in Q1 2021. The company has downgraded its full-year revenue expectation to between $13 million and $14 million. The IBM Power Systems will be a welcome filip. Brooks said: “Our strategic shift to recurring revenue-based hybrid cloud data protection solutions took a material step forward in the quarter as we worked aggressively to secure an important reseller relationship with IBM.”
He added: “Despite the importance of this step forward in our efforts to reinvent FalconStor, our aggressive focus on advancing critical hybrid cloud relationships and our efforts to realign our sales team accordingly negatively impacted our legacy on-premises expansions and legacy on-premises new customer acquisition revenue during the quarter. We don’t view our poor legacy results in Q1 as being a signal of accelerated legacy decline in the future.”
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Kubernetes troubleshooting startup Komodor has raised $42 million in a B-round led by Tiger Global with participation from Accel, Felicis Ventures, NFX Capital, OldSlip Group, Pitango First, and Vine Ventures, bringing the company’s total funding to $67 million. Itiel Shwartz, CTO and co-founder, said: “Troubleshooting Kubernetes and resolving incidents at scale can be overwhelmingly complex. Komodor’s platform bakes in all of the necessary intelligence and expertise required to make any engineer a seasoned Kubernetes operator.”
The company recently launched Playbooks & Monitors that it said will alert on emerging issues, uncover their root cause, and provide the operators with simple-to-follow remediation instructions. At least that is what the company is saying.
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Data labeling startup Lightly has closed a $3m seed round led by Wingman Ventures to solve data challenges in machine learning. It claims the data curation tool enables teams to save time and money on data selection and labeling while improving the performance of machine learning models. Lightly plans to open a Silicon Valley office this year.
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Composable systems supplier Liqid ran a second remote memory CXL demo (after its Dell Technologies World one last week) with Intel and Intelliprop. The Liqid Matrix software used CXL to compose DDR5 DRAM to Intel Sapphire Rapids hosts via software in tandem with other datacenter elements such as GPU, FPGA, and NVMe storage. The IntelliProp Deep Learning Memory Mesh was created using CXL fabric adapters and fabric attached memory which allows sharing of machine learning training data across multiple CPU nodes, reducing cost and power while improving the scale and overall performance of deep learning applications.
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MariaDB has said that if its Xpand distributed SQL database does not demonstrate better throughput and lower latency than another distributed SQL solution, the company will donate $25,000 to either a nonprofit or offset the infrastructure costs associated with running the test. The challenge applies to either Xpand deployed on a customer’s hardware, cloud infrastructure, or MariaDB SkySQL.
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DRAM and NAND chip supplier Micron has surpassed 50,000 lifetime patents. More than 4,000 employees in 16 countries have contributed to this accomplishment over the course of Micron’s 43-year history. Almost 2,600 were granted in 2021, the most in a single year for Micron.
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Nebulon has announced four-minute (TimeJump) ransomware recovery on Lenovo ThinkSystem rack server edge deployments. Nebulon claimed it provides enterprises with a Lenovo-based two-server cluster alternative for their edge datacenters with near-instant recovery capabilities. This, it added occupies a 33 percent smaller physical footprint equating to a one-third cost reduction as compared to three-node-minimum hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) systems, which can take hours or even days to fully recover from ransomware attacks.
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NetApp has published its annual Spot by NetApp Cloud Infrastructure Report, based on a survey of public cloud businesses and IT decision makers. Here are some highlights:
- In 2022, 63 percent of respondents plan to increase their use of cloud technology and 52 percent plan to migrate additional services to the cloud.
- 50 percent of respondents are focused on optimizing cloud costs. Confidence in visibility into public cloud costs has dropped in the past year with 21 percent “very” confident in 2022, down from 31 percent in 2021.
- 96 percent of respondents said FinOps is important to cloud success, but only 10 percent have a mature FinOps practice.
- 71 percent of respondents use an MSP for their cloud operations and 100 percent of companies that work with an MSP for cloud operations said that they have benefited from that relationship.
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Kubernetes platform provider Ondat is teaming with SUSE to deliver a software stack for organizations running cloud-native workloads with persistent storage. The Ondat and SUSE Rancher solution stack is cloud-agnostic, resilient, secure, and can offer significant cost savings for a variety of use cases, such as self-managed, database-as-a-service (DBaaS), it said. A blog has more details.
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Cloud file sharing and collaborator Panzura has raised $80 million in Series B funding from Kayne Partners and CIBC Innovation Banking. This round rewards Panzura’s growth since it was, as CEO Jill Stelfox said, refounded in 2020. She led the asset purchase. Total funding is now $180 million. Her initiatives, so the company said, resulted in a rise in annualized recurring revenue of over 200 percent and helped Panzura achieve 4x the speed of growth over its competitors in 20 months. The company posted a customer retention rate of 97 percent during the same period and achieved a best-in-class NPS Score of 87. The privately owned business has not filed financial figures.
This funding, Panzura noted, allows it to scale operations to continue servicing enterprise customers. Panzura plans to add another 150-plus team members by the end of 2022 and has openings in engineering, marketing, HR, finance, and sales.
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PingCAP has announced general availability of TiDB Cloud, its fully managed distributed SQL DBaaS. It is a cloud-native database that helps to build modern applications in the cloud – both on AWS and Google Cloud. TiDB Cloud handles all behind-the-scenes infrastructure, cluster deployment, and backup. Ed Huang, CTO and co-founder, said: “Legacy databases are no match for today’s enterprises processing millions of transactions per second.” TiDB is an open-source, distributed Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) database that features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, high availability, and MySQL compatibility.
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Data integrator Talend has named Sam Pierson as CTO and Jason Penkethman as CPO, a newly created role. Pierson was SVP of engineering at Illuminate Education, a SaaS company focused on data and collaborative instructional tools.
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Data analytics startup SQream has appointed Naama Saar as chief operating officer. She will be responsible for executing the company’s strategy to become the market leader for petabyte-scale analytics. Saar was executive director at YNV group. CEO Ami Gal said: “Her creativity, energy, customer-centric approach, and proven experience managing multimillion-dollar budgets will fuel our next stage of growth.”
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HP Business unit Zerto commissioned IDC to conduct a major ransomware survey in which 79 percent of respondents said they have activated a disaster recovery (DR) response within the past 12 months. Nearly two-thirds (61 percent) of these incidents were triggered by ransomware or other malware with 60 percent of organizations reporting they had experienced unrecoverable data – substantially more than the 43 percent response rate to the same question a year ago. The IDC White Paper can be read here.
