Storage news ticker – July 1

HPC and enterprise storage supplier DDN has received its third consecutive “AI Hardware Innovation Award” in the annual AI Breakthrough Awards program conducted by AI Breakthrough, a market intelligence organization that recognizes technological and product leadership in global AI and AI-driven digital transformation markets. DDN was recognized for its A3I (Accelerated, Any-Scale AI) AI400X2 system, which has been instrumental in bringing operational excellence for enterprise digital transformation initiatives in AI, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, autonomous driving, research, and other enterprise IT infrastructures.

Tellius, an AI-driven decision intelligence platform, has announced a partnership with Databricks that enables customers to run Tellius natural language search queries and automated insights directly on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, without the need to move any data. Via a Delta Lake connector and with Tellius, organizations can search and analyze their data to identify what is happening with natural language queries, understand why metrics are changing via AI-powered Insights, and determine next best actions with deep insights and AutoML.

Data protector Arcserve has expanded its N Series range with N1100-4 and N1200-4 systems. These hyperconverged data protection appliances combine orchestrated recovery using Arcserve UDP, the flexible scale-out design of Nutanix, and ransomware protection of the backup system with Sophos Intercept X Advanced cybersecurity. Arcserve N Series enables customers to protect any type and number of workloads across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

Cloudera, the big data analytics supplier, has announced the general availability of Apache Iceberg in its Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) product. Iceberg is a table format for data lakes, targeted for petabyte-scale analytic datasets. A prior Cloudera blog said that by optimizing the various CDP Data Services including CDW, CDE, and Cloudera Machine Learning (CML) with Iceberg, Cloudera customers can define and manipulate datasets with SQL commands, build complex data pipelines using  features like Time Travel operations, and deploy machine learning models built from Iceberg tables.  Dremio, Google Cloud, and Snowflake are also supporting Iceberg.

Decodable, a real-time data engineering company, unveiled a faster, simpler, and less expensive means to ingest streaming data into Databricks with the addition of a new Delta Lake connector for users of the Decodable SaaS offering. It enables ingestion of data into Databricks at the Bronze and Silver stages of the Databricks medallion data layer architecture. Interested application developers can get started building their first Decodable pipeline with a free Decodable Developer account, which includes the Databricks Delta Lake connector.

… 

Enterprise file-based data collaborator Egnyte, which has more than 16,000 customer companies, has introduced Snapshot recovery to mitigate ransomware attacks. It has ensured that if its customers are at risk of losing their data, they have a very simple-to-use, fast, and strong system for recovering data. Read about it in a detailed blog.

DPU startup Fungible has been awarded US patent 11,340,985 which refers to offloading data durability coding from a host’s (server, router, etc) X86 processor to a DPU. The DPU splits data into fragments and stores them in different fault domains so that the data can be reconstructed from a remaining subset if some of the data is lost due to hardware or software errors. Techniques could enable inline data recovery of data with low or very low latency, while requiring significantly less storage than a simple data replication scheme. By offloading the performance of such operations to data processing units, one or more of the hosts or server devices may be available to perform other tasks and/or operate more efficiently.

HPE in partnership with Nvidia has launched “Get Ahead”, an original comedy series exploring the everyday struggle to get ahead of AI in financial services. The “fintech sitcom” follows an AI customer insights manager, a data scientist, and an IT manager as they work against the clock to launch their new AI-driven customer experience. IT tackles Ol’ Spaghetti, the legacy technology mountain. The Data Scientist pitches her case for appropriate AI tooling and more compute and the AI Insights Manager embarks on the data science hiring roller coaster. HPE says the series drives a visceral, emotive connection to the challenges of AI development across the spectrum of differing roles and challenges. Watch episode 1 here.

Get Ahead
Get Ahead

SaaS data protector HYCU has announced a new service through which customers will be able to take advantage of HYCU Protégé for AWS to gain lifetime protection of 1TB of AWS data for free and also gain access to HYCU’s 24x7x365 support. HYCU Protégé for AWS is a comprehensive, fully managed data protection service that provides 24×7 support, and includes monitoring of backup success with proactive alerting and enhanced ransomware protection in the event of an attack. To take advantage of the offer, customers can sign up directly with HYCU.

Ondat, a Kubernetes-native data platform provider, has released v2.8 of its Ondat platform for stateful workloads in Kubernetes. It opens up the option of running a robust ETCD setup within production clusters, removing the need for external service setup. This change reduces operational overhead and cost for production users. v2.8 has snapshots that can be used with other backup and disaster recovery services to create backups of data outside of the cluster (i.e. AWS S3 backups) for audit, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance. Prometheus endpoints are now supported.

Ondat has created an Amazon EKS Blueprint add-on to enable users to quickly get started in creating, managing, and scaling stateful environments via GitOps.

Object storage supplier Scality channel execs have bolstered the company’s partner program with new training enablement, incentives, additional support, and renewed focus. These additions will position partners for accelerated growth as market trends indicate increased demand for multi-cloud and hybrid data flow strategies. To reward partners for identifying and closing new deals in this segmentation, Scality has launched a new ARTESCA challenge program that offers incentives and includes the potential to win a trip to Mauritius.

Synology has announced the availability of the FS3410, the latest in the FlashStation family of all-flash network attached storage servers. A mid-range 3000-series unit, the FS3410 is a cost-effective system with out-of-the-box networking capabilities and high throughput making it ideal for use cases that demand high-performance storage, including VM storage and protection, file syncing, and business application hosting. Powered by Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system, the 2U 24-bay FS3410 is a dual-purpose NAS and SAN systemdriven by an Intel Xeon octa-core processor with optional support for Fiber Channel and faster 40/56GbitE networking. Volume-level deduplication ensures up to 3.15:1 storage space reduction.

All-flash, single tier file storage startup VAST Data has signed up Ingenuity Studios as an animation and VFX customer. Ingenuity wants to allow artists and animators to collaborate on projects with ultra-fast performance and low latency, and enable render farms to deliver at up to 10x faster performance than HDD-based scale-out storage. VAST’s Universal Storage architecture will be used for all of Ingenuity Studios’ projects going forward, and is already supporting such productions as American procedural action drama television show S.W.A.T.

Ingenuity Studios

Grant Miller, partner and VFX supervisor at Ingenuity Studios, said: “We generate massive data sets for every project we work on. For our 3D and simulation teams, a single frame can require several gigabytes – and we need thousands of frames just for one sequence. Having the infrastructure to control that sprawl and serve more than 300 remote workers who all need low-latency access to that data is critical to our operations.”

Data replicator WANdisco has directly secured two contracts, valued at $2.5 million in aggregate, with leading information and communications technology providers in China. Approximately 50 percent of the value will be recognized as revenue immediately and the contracts, structured as limited perpetual licenses with annual maintenance for five years, represent a renewal and significant expansion of two existing license agreements with key clients. China is a largely untapped market for WANdisco, which says a major reorganization of its direct sales function and go-to-market strategy is now clearly bearing fruit.