Storage news ticker – September 6

Storage news
Storage news

AMD announced that the AMD Pensando Distributed Services Card, powered by the Pensando data processing unit (DPU) chip will be one of the first DPU products to support VMware vSphere 8 available from server vendors including Dell Technologies, HPE and Lenovo. VMware vSphere 8 aims to reimagine IT infrastructure as a composable architecture with a goal of offloading infrastructure workloads such as networking, storage, and security from the CPU by leveraging the Distributed Services Engine, freeing up CPU cycles for applications. VMware vSphere 8 systems from Dell Technologies and HPE, with the AMD Pensando Distributed Services Card, will be available in the coming months. AMD EPYC processor support for VMware vSphere 8 will be available upon launch.

DataCore Software has appointed enterprise Alex Grossman as VP of product management and product marketing. He comes from being CPO, CMO, and previously founder and CEO at high-performance digital storage, cloud storage, tape archive, and workflow enhancement software supplier Symply. Before that he was VP Big Data & VP Media and Entertainment at Quantum, with time racked up at Apple and Micronet before that.

Germany-based and HPC-focused VAR and integrator Starline Computer has partnered with GRAID to offer its GPU-accelerated SupremeRAID as part of  an 80TB, 1U, NVMe-based server. SupremeRAID does the RAID computation so server compute is dedicated to applications. Starline product manager Timo Fietz said: “SupremeRAID is an optimal addition to our portfolio in order to utilize the full performance of NVMe SSDs in a RAID array; a feat that traditional RAID controllers cannot achieve.”

Intel has said that Tencent’s database hosting service, TencentDB for MySQL, achieves up to an 85 percent performance boost using Intel oneAPI Tools. TencentDB for MySQL provides developers with a service for distributed data storage that supports easy setup, operation, and expansion of relational databases in the cloud. The Intel oneAPI DPC++/C++ compiler, part of the Intel oneAPI Base Toolkit, is helping Tencent drive link time optimization (LTO) and profile-guided optimization (PGO) methods to deliver the improvement.

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The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association and CXL Consortium have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to form a joint work group that facilitates communication and sharing of information with the intent to align future efforts between the two organizations. The joint work group will collaborate on useful solutions for form factors, management, security, DRAM and other memory technologies.

LaCie mobile storage
LaCie Mobile Drive and LaCie Mobile Drive Secure products

Seagate’s LaCie mobile storage unit announced Neil Poulton-designed LaCie Mobile Drive and LaCie Mobile Drive Secure products. The aluminum-encased drives provide up to 5TB of portable capacity and universal out-of-box compatibility with PC, Mac, and iPad USB-C. They have one-click automatic backup and USB-C 130MB/sec file transfer. The Mobile Drive Secure has additional hardware encryption including a lock/unlock feature in the LaCie Toolkit software. They are available this month – the LaCie Mobile Drive comes in 2TB, 4TB, and 5TB capacities, and LaCie Mobile Drive Secure versions offer 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 5TB.

 

LaCie mobile storage hooked up to a notebook
LaCie mobile drive hooked up to a notebook

Lightbits 3.0.1 TCP/IP storage has been released and is available on the AWS Marketplace. Lightbits on AWS offers cost-efficiency, with up to 90% cost savings, high performance, low latency, and enterprise data services. You can migrate on-premises I/O intensive applications to AWS, run Oracle or NoSQL databases and big data analytics. The SW will automatically detect and recover from silent SSD data corruption. Lightbits 3.0.1 adds the ability to shrink a volume’s size. All volumes are thinly provisioned, so there’s no harm in allocating large volumes, but it’s still useful on occasion to shrink a volume down to limit its total occupancy. Lightbits 3.0.1 adds the ability to backup volumes to, and restore them from, S3, using snapshots and clones capabilities. This does not interfere with the volume’s normal operation. It’s currently only available for Lightbits running on AWS and will be introduced for Lightbits on private clouds in a future release.

MariaDB and Qlik are collaborating to power customer data migrations from legacy database architectures to the MariaDB database. Using Qlik’s data integration platform, customers can migrate data from any legacy database source, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, to MariaDB Enterprise Server, MariaDB Xpand distributed SQL database or MariaDB SkySQL cloud database service, delivering – according to MariaDB – business-ready data at a fraction of the cost of legacy databases. The collaboration ensures high availability, scalability, continuous integration, and replication of synced data across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud in a few simple steps, the vendor said.

MaxLinear is to acquire Silicon Motion Technology under a deal announced at the latter’s EGM on August 31. Silicon Motion supplies more SSD controllers than any other company in the world for servers, PCs and other client devices and is the leading merchant supplier of eMMC and UFS embedded storage controllers used in smartphones, IoT devices, and other applications.

Micron storage facility
Micron’s planned Boise memory fab

Micron plans to invest $15 billion in building a new memory fab in Boise, Idaho, co-located with Micron’s R&D center at the company’s headquarters. It will be the first new memory manufacturing fab built in the US in 20 years. This is the first of Micron’s multiple planned US investments following the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act. The new fab will create over 17,000 American jobs, including approximately 2,000 direct Micron jobs, by the end of the decade.

Open source object storage software supplier MiniO has entered a joint business relationship with PwC Canada to build, co-sell, and co-market cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions to Canadian enterprises across various industries.

The Oracle Cloud now has autotuning for OCI block storage. “Our customers have been managing the performance of all their volumes on-demand easily across the entire performance range, starting from the Lower Cost option up to Ultra High Performance (UHP), with 120 VPUs per GB and industry-leading 300,000 IOPS per volume. They can seamlessly adjust the performance of any of their volumes, even ones created years ago, while the volumes are online without any downtime, using the command line interface (CLI), application programming interface (API), software developer kit (SDK), Terraform, and the Oracle Cloud Console,” said Oracle. Read this blog to find out more.

HPC storage supplier Panasas announced the general availability of three Panasas systems announced in May a scale-out hybrid ActiveStor Ultra 100 array with an all-flash version and an expanded capacity hybrid flash/disk Ultra XL system. That’s 4 months after the products were announced making the May announcement kind of preliminary. The latest release talks about PanFS, v9.2, saying it is more portable to address the rapidly growing enterprise HPC and AI sector.

Combined analytic and transactional database supplier SingleStore has revealed Captain Metrics, DataDock Solutions, Dell Technologies, Digital Asset Research, Foodics, impact.com, and Thentia as customers. Recent additions to the executive team include Shireesh Thota as senior vice president of engineering, Yatharth Gupta as vice president of product management, Brad Kinnish as chief financial officer, and Meaghan Nelson as general counsel.

The USB Promotor Group has announced a second version of the USB 4 standard. It will provide up to 80Gbit/s operation, based on a new physical layer architecture, using existing 40Gbps USB-C passive cables and newly defined 80Gbit/s USB-C active cables. USB data architecture updates now enable USB 3.2 data tunneling to exceed 20Gbit/s and the new standard aligns with the latest versions of the DisplayPort and PCIe specifications. It is backward compatibility with USB4 Version 1.0, USB 3.2, USB 2.0 and Thunderbolt 3.

 All-flash file storage supplier VAST Data says Sweden’s Kanal 75 has chosen VAST’s Universal Storage architecture as the backend to real-time video for its live productions. One of the largest multimedia companies in the Nordic region, Kanal 75 produces TV, internet, and news content focused on horse racing and the betting culture surrounding it. The company makes more than 100 hours of TV each week and delivers more than 1,000 live productions each year for viewers in Europe, Australia, South Africa, and the USA .

Data protector and manager Veritas has warned that businesses are facing a cost crisis for collaborative working tools as post-COVID working practices begin to catch up with them. The use of cloud collaboration services, such as Microsoft SharePoint (the storage and sharing platform used by Office 365 and Microsoft Teams), rapidly accelerated at the start of the pandemic. But with very few providers of collaboration tools offering options to archive files, businesses are finding that their data volumes and cost overruns are now ballooning out of control, said Veritas. If left unaddressed, those businesses will find themselves paying the high price of “storage overages” for data that they’re no longer using and should have archived. 

Cloud data warehouser Yellowbrick Data has appointed Robert Potts as VP of North American Sales. He has deep experience in tech, SaaS, and databases both on-prem and cloud from a 20-year career at companies such as Net App, Dell, EMC, and Snowflake. Potts held sales leadership roles in all those organizations and most recently led the West Coast teams at H2O.ai. Potts will report to Marc Fields, SVP of Global Sales.