Storage news ticker – August 23

Storage news
Storage news

High-end storage array supplier Infinidat has announced NVMe/TCP certification with vSphere ESXi, and vVols replication with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) integration. These new capabilities complement Infinidat’s VMware integrations, including vSphere, vRealize, and VMware Tanzu. VMware’s general support of NVMe/TCP was a milestone reached less than a year ago with vSphere 7.0U3. InfiniBox vVols replication with SRM adds VMware-native disaster recovery to Infinidat’s vVols implementation. SRM users can coordinate InfiniBox asynchronous replication for vVols via VMware Storage Policy-Based Management without needing a separate Storage Replication Adapter (SRA). Infinidat customers not using vVols can continue using the existing InfiniBox SRA to manage InfiniBox replication at no charge.

Enterprise data observability supplier Acceldata has released its Data Observability Platform (DOP), which looks at data in cloud-native, multi-cloud, hybrid or on-premises environments. The DOP is said to ensure reliability of data pipelines, provide visibility into the data stack – including infrastructure, applications, and users – to help identify, investigate, prevent, and remediate data issues. Acceldata customers include Oracle, PubMatic, PhonePe (Walmart), Pratt & Whitney, DBS, and others.

UK and Ireland-based INET Computer Solutions helps its clients safeguard their systems and data with Arcserve offerings, including the new SaaS Backup to protect Microsoft 365 data. INET has worked with Arcserve for over 10 years to provide its clients with backup and recovery services. It uses Arcserve ShadowProtect to protect data for a large number of clients. Featuring HeadStart Restore, this enables INET to recover systems and data for its clients in the event of an incident in the time it takes to reboot a server. INET also uses it to safeguard its own systems and data.

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Data protector Commvault says that Gartner has given it the highest Product Score across all three use cases in the 2022 Critical Capabilities report Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions: Data Center Environments (4.23/5), cloud environments (4.18/5), and edge environments (4.22/5). Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery scored highest in all three use cases evaluated in this research. 

NVMe/TCP storage supplier Lightbits has announced its latest patent (US 11,385,798) ) for a “method and system for application aware, management of write operations on non-volatile storage.” The technology reduces write-amplification in SSDs. Muli Ben-Yehuda, Lighbits co-founder and Chief Scientist, said: “Lightbits Intelligent Flash Management uses the ideas in this patent as well as other issued and pending patents for maximizing SSD performance and endurance. The exact write amplification depends on the application data streams and the classification process. In the worst case, Lightbits IFM can provide overall write amplification of less than 2.3x for random 4K write workloads with the system at 80 percent capacity utilization. This is the write amplification for the system as a whole, including both the SSDs internal write amplification and any additional software-induced write amplification.”

The patented technology takes account of some application-specific aspects of data being sent to the SSD: “We (1) classify different data streams based on their metadata properties as having certain characteristics (e.g., how long the block is likely to remain alive before being overwritten, i.e., Time Before Rewrite (TBR)); (2) write the data to a certain region of the SSD which is associated with this classification; (3) when needed, use the systems’ GC process to correctly place mis-classified data. This is a natural fit for zoned SSDs but can also be done on commodity SSDs and does not require zoned-SSD support.” 

Rockport Networks recently posted a video interview with Dr Alastair Basden from Durham University discussing the use of the Rockport scalable fabric at his tier 1 national supercomputing facility. Additionally, Rockport and Intersect360 Research published a whitepaper on the top considerations and trends when architecting today’s HPC clusters based on 2022 feedback from HPC users – you can download it here. On August 24 at 1pm ET, Rockport has a webinar, “Security at the Speed of Research”, with CANARIE, the University of Toronto and University of Carleton’s Cyber Lab, to discuss the current threat landscape, explain how research environments are unique, and discuss a Canadian-based innovation that can mitigate network risks without sacrificing performance. Full details and registration info can be found here

Object storage system supplier Scality has a customer win case study. Canada’s Edmonton Police Service overhauled its storage infrastructure environment to improve data availability, scalability, and accessibility while saving public funds. The deployed system includes the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, HPE scalable object storage with Scality RING, HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8000 storage, and the HPE Apollo 4510 Gen10 and HPE Apollo 4500 systems, with Veeam for backup. This system saves $2 million CAD over five years, reduces backup times by 76.9 percent, provides infinite scalability and reliable performance, and achieves multisite resiliency with datacenter rapid recovery.

But why a 3PAR 8000 when Primera and Alletra arrays have been announced to replace them? A Scality spokesperson said: ”The contract with Edmonton was signed about two years ago, just around the time Primera was announced (and before Alletra). They chose the 8000 because it was a well-established product and met the customer’s needs. Also, because Greenlake is essentially a cloud service, the physical infrastructure is not as relevant; the service level it provides is what matters.”

Talend has been named a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools. This is the seventh consecutive time that Talend has been positioned in the Leaders Quadrant based on the company’s ability to execute and completeness of vision. For a complimentary copy of Gartner’s complete report, click here.

TidalScale, whose software “glues” AWS EC2 bare-metal instances (and on-premises physical servers, together so that they function as a single larger system, is now available in the AWS Marketplace. TidalScale requires no changes to applications or operating systems and is deployable within minutes. Anyone with an AWS account can now purchase TidalScale’s software-defined server technology through their AWS account in just a few clicks.