The AI Summit showed that architectural / resource disaggregation is an increasing focus in the AI industry – both at the chip and system level, says Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers. Exponential growth of AI models (>100x increase in compute load over the last 5 years) combined with the slowdown in Moore’s Law is creating a natural push towards disaggregation, he says. Technologies like CXL’s memory sharing and memory photonics will likely be key to effective disaggregation. He expects the industry conversation to move to the tradeoff between additional CXL-enabled memory and latency. A presenter at the event noted CXL’s memory-sharing ability is key when multiple processors are being utilized (common in AI workloads). Another said AI normally needs two separate fabrics (one for storage, one for memory) whereas HPC can use a single fabric.
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Real-time data platform supplier Aerospike announced the appointment of Martin James as VP of EMEA, responsible for driving regional growth and meeting customer demand for Aerospike. He joins the company from Percona, where he is said to have trebled the business in EMEA and APAC. Prior to Percona, he was regional Vice President for Northern Europe at DataStax, managing enterprise sales.
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Arcserve announced findings from its annual independent global research study of UK IT decision makers that showed the loss of critical data continues to disrupt businesses and remain an issue for organisations. 83% of respondents reported a severe loss of critical data in their organisation. Of those, 36% had permanent data loss. There is more about disaster recovery plans and testing and business continuity disruption. As usual with such reports the unstated conclusion is that customers should buy Arcserve products and services to help fix the issues identified.
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Commvault has appointed Alan Atkinson as its Chief Partner Officer, a new exec role, taking over from John Tavares, who was VP for Global Channels and Alliances. Commvault said: “Partners remain a critical part of our go-to-market strategy. With John Tavares choosing to pursue opportunities outside Commvault, we have an opportunity to centralise and refocus on our relationships with partners to accelerate growth and expand our global partner ecosystem. Alan’s extensive industry experience and guidance will enable us to do just that.” Atkinson was SVP Commercial Sales CTO at Dell until 2020.
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Datadobi has updated its StorageMAP product to v 6.2, adding identification of data sets with high amounts of orphaned data and enabling its removal. Orphaned data is owned by employees of a company that are inactive but still enabled on an organization’s network or systems. Eliminating orphaned data enables IT leaders to reduce cost, lower carbon footprint, and lower risk while maximizing value out of relevant unstructured data used by active users. More information here.
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Dell Technologies is expanding its strategic relationship with Red Hat to simplify deploying and managing on-premises, containerized infrastructure in multi-cloud environments. Dell APEX Containers for Red Hat OpenShift offers an on-premises cloud experience for developers with a Dell-managed Container-as-a-Service offering. Dell Validated Platform for Red Hat OpenShift offers documented guidance for DevOps teams to help speed deployment of on-premises IT for container orchestration using Dell PowerFlex, Dell’s ‘other’ HCI system separate to VxRail. Dell and Red Hat are co-engineering a hybrid cloud system using Dell software to integrate Red Hat OpenShift with Dell infrastructure, and IBM and Dell plan to add optional IBM intelligent automation software for application performance monitoring.
Dell APEX Containers for Red Hat OpenShift has planned availability in the US in early 2023 with broader availability to follow. Dell Validated Platform for Red Hat OpenShift is available globally on September 30, 2022. The Dell hybrid cloud solution with Red Hat OpenShift has planned availability in 2023.
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SaaS data protector HYCU announced its State of Ransomware Preparedness report in partnership with ActualTech Media. Ransomware attacks occur on average every 11 seconds and have risen to more than 236.1 million in the first half of 2022. About 52 percent of ransomware victims suffered data loss on some level. Almost 63 percent of victims suffered an operational disruption. Just 41% airgap their backups ansd only 47 percent routinely test their backups, the report found.
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The IBM ESS3500 is the latest member of the Elastic Storage Server line, a scaleout set of storage products for AI and Big Data analytics. This product line is based on IBM Power processors and uses Spectrum Scale parallel access file system software. It uses NVMe/flash to deliver high-performance storage for AI, data analytics and HPC use cases. The ESS 3500 System includes 2 x x86-64 integrated I/O servers, NVMe storage + optionally Serial attached SCSI storage enclosures (ESS v6.1.4). Read up the system in an IBM presentation here.
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IBM is withdrawing its Linear Tape-Open (LTO) 6 Data Cartridge models and IBM 3599 Tape Media Cartridges in the Asia Pacific area. Full note here.
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Kioxia America has introduced new Industrial Grade flash memory devices. This new lineup utilizes the latest generation BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory (BiCS 5 with 112 layers we think) with TLC (3-bit-per-cell) technology, and is available in a 132-BGA package. Densities range from 512 gigabits (64 gigabytes) to 4 terabits (512 gigabytes). These new KIOXIA devices feature SLC (1-bit-per-cell) mode for applications that require faster read/write times and high cell endurance. Sampling of the new KIOXIA Industrial Grade flash memory devices commenced earlier this year, with mass production expected late in the fourth quarter of 2022.
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Storage semiconductor analyst Mark Webb of MKW Ventures has produced a storage and data protection technology hype cycle:
CXL is at the top of this hype cycle and persistent memory DIMMs are at the bottom.
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The Arctic World Archive held its bi-annual deposit ceremony at Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Arctic World Archive is an initiative by Piql to store data and digitized cultural heritage on the island of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean. It is located in a vault 300 meters inside a decommissioned mine, stores data and digitized cultural heritage lasting up to 1,000 years. Representatives from 8 different nations made 13 deposits. The depositors were The Archaeological Survey of India, GitHub, The Norwegian Health Archives, The National Museum of Norway, Repsol,the Norwegian bank SpareBank 1, Museum of the Person in Brazil, and others.
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RAID Inc has the released the ARI-600 Series, replacing the ARI-200 and ARI-400 Series. It has new processors, interconnects, ASICS, advanced declustered RAID technology and self-healing storage technology (Self Sufficient Drive Restoration, or SSDR), which offer greater performance, higher capacities, faster than ever rebuild times and five nines availability (99.999%). The products boast 12GB/sec on sequential reads and 10GB/sec on sequential writes, and up to 740,000 random read IOPS in all-flash configurations. They can be configured for several different file systems and applications. There are 3 form factor sizes, including a 2U 12-bay 3.5” (ARI-600), a 2U 24-bay 2.5” (ARI-603) and a 5U 84-bay (ARI-609). The ARI-609 product allows for hybrid configurations of SSD, 10K, and 7.2K HDD media with a maximum capacity of 6.7PB. The ARI-609 product is qualified to ship with 20TB HDDs while the ARI-603 supports SSD capacities of up to 15.36TB per slot. The series support 12Gbit/s SAS as well as 32Gbit/s FC and 25Gbit iSCSI.
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China’s SmartX has released SMTX Backup & Recovery to provide backup and recovery for data center workloads running on SmartX IT infrastructure (including SmartX HCI). SMTX Backup & Recovery 1.0 focuses on backing up virtual machines running on the SmartX native ELF virtualization platform, to external NAS servers. Customers using SmartX Native Hypervisor ELF can select Active-Active Clustering, Asynchronous Replication, and Backup to suit their data protection strategies for different applications. SMTX Backup & Recovery is SmartX native and agentless, with one-platform centralized management from CloudTower, and offers flexible backup options, the vendor said.
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Swissbit was the unidentified premier European storage manufacturer mentioned in SSD controller firmware supplier Burleywood’s FlashOS news release in August. Germany-based Swissbit makes industrial SSDs and other memory products. It is expanding into the data center market. It and Burlywood will develop performance-optimized SSDs adapted to the requirements and application profiles of Big Data, Video Streaming and Machine Learning. The products will keep performance at a consistently high level over the entire lifecycle of the SSD, the pair said. Matthias Poppel, CSMO at Swissbit AG, said: “The strategic partnership with Burlywood is the best starting point for our step into the data center market.”
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Datacenter virtualizer Verge.io and Dallas Digital Services announced an agreement to offer Verge.io’s virtual cloud software stack to build, deploy and manage virtual datacenters. With Verge-OS software, Dallas Digital enables virtualized data centers for its clients with savings and efficiencies. Verge-OS abstracts compute, network, and storage from commodity servers and creates pools of raw resources that are simple to run and manage, creating infrastructures for environments and workloads like clustered HPC, ultra-converged and hyperconverged datacenters, DevOps and Test/Dev, compliant medical and healthcare, remote and edge compute including VDI, and multi-tenant private clouds.
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Veritas Technologies has launched a UK-hosted version of its archiving and eDiscovery software-as-a-Service solutions, backed by UK Microsoft data centers. Via Veritas tools like Merge1 and Advanced Supervision, the new offering will afford customers, such as public sector bodies, assurance that they are retaining data sovereignty to ensure compliance.
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WANdisco, the data activation (replication) company, announced its joined The Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE) to build an open, standardized cloud-native architecture for automotive innovation and design. SOAFEE includes enterprise companies from across the automotive, semiconductor, and cloud industries, and is governed by AWS, Bosch, and ARM, among others. WANdisco will work with fellow SOAFEE members to develop an open, cloud-native architecture that standardizes automotive hardware and software requirements to meet the real-time and safety demands of software-defined vehicles (SDVs). Earlier this year, WANdisco launched WANdisco Edge to Cloud, making it possible for exabytes of edge data to be transferred for use in any cloud environment. Edge to Cloud is already supporting one leading automotive component manufacturer in moving exabytes of sensor data from the edge to the cloud to fuel AI and ML and develop new business models
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Cloud storage supplier Wasabi Technologies announced an integration with Hanwha Techwin to provide a fully scalable, cost-effective cloud storage solution for the Wisenet WAVE VMS to reinforce the surveillance industry’s next generation architecture needs. By using a combination of on-premises and cloud technology, users of Wasabi hot cloud storage and Wisenet WAVE VMS can support high camera counts, high-definition resolutions, high frame rates, and long retention periods with reliability, affordability, and availability.
