Storage news ticker  – May 24

Edge-to-cloud file services supplier CTERA has announced a partnership with cloud storage supplier Wasabi Technologies to provide integrated file and object data service for mid-sized companies. The new offering combines CTERA’s global file system technology with Wasabi’s object storage in service bundles designed for rapid delivery and support by channel partners. CTERA technology includes integrated file and object cloud service, caching edge filers for fast local SMB/NFS access, ransomware protection and disaster recovery, automated data discovery, and migration from legacy NAS. Customers and partners can register for a free 30-day trial here.

Data validation and documentation services supplier Anomalo has announced an integration with data lakehouse platform Databricks. Enterprises can monitor the quality of the data stored in the Databricks lakehouse in real-time, it said.

The GigaIO FabreX for composable infrastructure is now natively supported in Nvidia’s Bright Cluster Manager v9.2. The pair said customers can build easy-to-manage, platform-independent compute clusters that scale to handle AI and HPC workloads. GigaIO’s universal dynamic memory fabric, FabreX, enables an entire server rack to be treated as a single compute resource. PCIe-connected resources normally located inside of a server, including accelerators, storage, and memory, can be pooled in accelerator or storage enclosures, and be made available to all of the servers in a rack. 

GRAID has formed a partnership with Japan’s HPC Tech so that its all-flash SupremeRAID storage server can be used in high-performance computing systems supplied by the Nvidia Elite Partner.

Kingston has announced a external touchscreen SSD needing a password input for data access. The IronKey Vault Privacy 80 external SSD (VP80ES) is FIPS 197 certified with XTS-AES 256-bit encryption. VP80ES offers additional features for data protection, like Multi-Password (Admin/User) Option with PIN/Passphrase modes and Configurable Password Rules. VP80ES’s Brute Force attack protection crypto-erases the drive if the Admin and User passwords are entered incorrectly 15 times in a row by default. The drive is bundled with a neoprene travel case and two USB 3.2 Gen 1 adapter cables to connect to USB Type-C2 or Type-A supporting computers and other devices. It is available in 480GB, 960GB, and 1,920GB capacities, and is backed by a limited three-year warranty and free technical support.  

Kingston VP80ES touch-screen SSD.

Biotech researcher SeekGene is running MemVerge Big Memory Cloud Edition software with Optane PMem DIMMs in the Alibaba cloud. This involves no change to SeekGene’s on-premises application code. It allows SeekGene to double its sample size and enables up to five times more concurrent processes to run, it said. SeekGene reckons it is able to improve data loading and exporting performance by two orders of magnitude through eliminating the I/O bottleneck that is caused by disk reads and writes.

N2WS Software has announced the immediate availability of N2WS Backup and Recovery version 4.1, with major enhancements and integrations to further protect workloads running on AWS including SAP HANA and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Immutable backups are stored in Amazon S3 using Object Lock. N2WS now protects Amazon RDS databases running the MySQL or PostgreSQL engines, it said. With N2WS, you can archive Amazon RDS databases to Amazon S3, S3 Glacier, or S3 Glacier Deep Archive, and rehydrate archived databases back to a production state in a timely fashion, it added. Customers can protect Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) entities, including Transit Gateway, Customer Gateway, VPN Gateway, and site-to-site VPN connections. View the release notes here.

Nutanix, a supplier of hybrid multicloud computing, was named Customers’ Choice in the 2022 Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer” for Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software (HCI) for the fourth consecutive year and for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage for the second consecutive year. 

OpenDrives said it has scaled from providing NAS systems for media and entertainment to powering an Open Ecosystem built for enterprise-scale IT. A full-suite offering includes underlying Atlas Core software that powers multi-vendor, multi-cloud systems, managed service Atlas Cloud Plus for hybrid cloud setups, and the Ultra Hardware Platform – scale-up, scale-out storage with a 2U form factor. Atlas Core supports S3 shares, templates for SMB and NFS shares, mount management, SED management, expanded containerization, new HD/HDX modules and cluster management. New integrations with partners include Creative Mobile Solutions (CMSI), EVS, Western Digital, and Signiant.

Phison Electronics has linked arms with AMD and Micron to build a cooperative PCIe 5 ecosystem of compatible products for gamers and content creators. The ecosystem consists of AMD’s AM5 platform, Phison’s PS5026-E26 controller, Micron’s DDR5 DRAM, and Replacement Gate 3D NAND. The PS5026-E26 features nearly a 2x performance increase over the previous-generation controller while adhering to the same power limitations of the M.2 form factor.

Hyperconverged infrastructure appliance vendor Scale Computing has announced a Fleet Manager for edge computing and MSPs, intending to simplify management and monitoring of distributed IT infrastructure. SC//Fleet Manager consolidates real-time conditions for a fleet of clusters, including storage and compute resources, giving admins a single cloud-based pane of glass at fleet.scalecomputing.com, scaling from 1 to over 50,000 clusters. Connectivity and cluster health can be checked with a glance. Any problems across the fleet are highlighted automatically, and admins can drill down into a specific cluster to diagnose and fix problems. For IT managers with multiple clusters, Scale Computing’s maintenance time will be further reduced by 50 percent or more.

Scale Computing has announced SC//Platform software updates with promised improvements in SC//HyperCore software. It  bundles a variety of adapted open-source and proprietary software to create an operating system for Scale Computing clusters. Custom-built utilizing the KVM architecture to integrate with the Scale Computing Reliable Independent Block Engine (SCRIBE) storage layer directly, SC//HyperCore is designed to make virtualization and software automation easier. It identifies, reduces, and corrects problems in real time. The update includes REST APIs created to enhance the speed and ease with which users can deploy virtual machines (VMs) and containers at scale using cloud-init. This is open-source technology that allows customers to take common VM templates and provide them with configuration information at first boot via scripting, allowing for mass provisioning of customized VMs.

VAST Data’s Universal Storage v4.2 and 4.3 updates add HTTPS support for S3, Object Locks, object versioning, multi-part uploads, and IAM integrations to unify S3 user identities with file access identities over SMB and NFS. It has expanded capabilities within the VMS UI and API, integrating them into its NFS and SMB view creation flow. It’s now possible to present file-based data directories as buckets (or vice versa) and choose how that data’s access is controlled from the same interface.

The latest software supports indestructible snapshots, multi-protocol ACLs, and multi-protocol IAM user policies. VAST’s centralized Uplink Cloud Management system include integration with Zendesk. There is support for NFS4 over RDMA, delivering a performance boost for NFS4. VAST said it is the only vendor to accelerate NFS4 with RDMA, making it possible to power high-scale HPC, AI, media, and analytics workloads with a simple and secure client interface. It has compliance with Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2, using validated cryptographic libraries for encryption at rest.