Storage news ticker – August 30

Storage news
Storage news

Data manager Komprise’s 2022 Unstructured Data Management Report shows growing adoption of cloud NAS and demand for end-user and departmental self-service in the cloud. It says there has been a shift from driving storage efficiencies to delivering data services in the cloud including the ability to leverage file and object data in cloud analytics tools. Enterprises are storing more data than before: more than 50 percent are managing 5PB or more of data, compared with less than 40% in the 2021 survey, and most are spending more than 30 percent of the IT budget on storage and backups. The survey shows that cloud file storage, followed closely by cloud object storage, are top areas of investment. Finally, the report found emerging use cases for unstructured data management as requirements grow beyond cost savings and into data lifecycle management, compliance, and generating business value from data.

Global research commissioned by Cohesity reveals that nearly half of respondents say their company depends on outdated, legacy backup and recovery infrastructure to manage and protect their data. In some cases, this technology is more than 20 years old, and was designed long before today’s multicloud era and onslaught of sophisticated cyberattacks plaguing enterprises globally. The answer? Buy Cohesity offerings, of course!

HYCU CEO and co-founder Simon Taylor told William Blair analyst Jason Ader: “We have strong retention with a dollar-based NRR of 135 percent (dollar churn is 4 percent per annum). Last year, we grew sales by 150 percent, and we expect growth like that again this year. We are running fast towards $100 million in ARR and are looking to IPO after that. In Gartner’s 2022 Enterprise Backup & Recovery Magic Quadrant, we were named a Visionary (our first time in the MQ.)”

Micron is pondering an $80 billion investment in central Texas (Lockhart, south of Austin) with details published in the Texas state comptroller’s website. This says: “Micron Technology Inc. is developing ‘Project Evergreen,’ a phased semiconductor manufacturing facility.” Construction of the fab project could start in January 2023 to take advantage of a Chapter 313 tax program. (Thanks to Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers for this.)

Micron storage fab
Graphic from Micron’s Texas fab site application

India-based Neridio has a zero trust cloud-RAID concept for cloud storage with the idea of a distributed virtual cloud. A downloadable white paper states: “We have connected five cloud storage services with the system implementing cloud-RAID; denoted as cloud1, cloud2, cloud3, cloud4 and cloud5 and ‘cloud-RAID system’ respectively. The three primary data systems shown as Data source A, Data source B and Data source C are indicative data sources which can be co-located or can come from different edge locations connected to the system running the implementation of multi-cloud storage virtualization technology in the cloud-RAID system. This is a case of 3 data devices and 2 coding devices with a total of 5 devices with any two devices can be erased or unavailable without data loss.” It’s an interesting way of providing highly secure data storage but data access speed might be slow. 

Nerido RAID storage concept
Neridio graphic

The success story continues. Cloud data warehouser Snowflake has announced its Q2 2023 results (ended July 31) with $497.2 million in revenues, up 83 percent year-on-year. There was a loss of $222.8 million. It has 6,808 customers with a net revenue retention rate of 171 percent, and 246 customers with trailing 12-month product revenue greater than $1 million. Frank Slootman, chairman and CEO, said: “Snowflake’s next frontier of innovation is aimed at transforming how cloud applications are built, deployed, sold, and transacted. We look forward to executing against this growth opportunity.”

Teradata has announced VantageCloud Lake, built on cloud-native architecture. Teradata Vantage, which focuses mainly on IT-managed enterprise workloads, is now called VantageCloud Enterprise. VantageCloud Lake is a self-service offering designed to bring Vantage capabilities to broader and more diverse use cases. It’s designed to be automatically elastic and leverage low-cost object store at its core. VantageCloud Lake is designed to rapidly accelerate business outcomes for virtually any use case, including smaller ad hoc, exploratory, and departmental workloads.

Research house TrendForce thinks that NAND wafer prices will decline up to 30-35 percent this quarter because of weak demand. It previously thought they would decline 15-20 percent. It’s guiding NAND wafer prices to decline by 20-25 percent in 4Q22 compared to a previous 15-20 percent estimate. (Thanks again to Wells Fargo’s Rakers.)

VAST Data has hired Tomer Hagay as head of product. He comes from being CTO and head of product at DDN’s Tintri business unit.