Storage news ticker – September 26

Storage news
Storage news

Cloudflare’s R2 Storage, a distributed object storage product, is now available to all developers, providing scalable storage with no egress fees. It provides automated migration of data from S3-compatible services to its object store, which it says is highly performant and costs at least 10 percent less  than AWS’s S3 Standard. It provides integration with Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare’s scalable serverless computing platform. R2 integrates with other Cloudflare products like Access or Cache. It was launched as an open beta eight weeks ago and more than 11,000 developers have an active account. Cloudflare says it has a global network, spanning 275 cities in more than 100 countries, and R2 Storage provides low latency, high throughput storage for the most demanding applications.

Diamanti has upgraded its Ultima accelerator to v3.4. Ultima is a network and storage data plane for provisioning storage and network resources for apps in VMware Tanzu, Red Hat OpenShift, Amazon EKS, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Google Kubernetes Engine. v3.4 has a software control plane to deploy independent of datacenter locations and improve robustness and high availability. Ultima Accelerator OpenShift Edition customers can now upgrade OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) for the latest security enhancements. Ultima Accelerator OpenShift has a simplified container package installation of Accelerator firmware. Platform engineers can enable Diamanti OCP Scheduler Pod in HA to mitigate disruption of pod scheduling in case of node failure.  

Regina Dugan, HPE
Regina Dugan

HPE has a new board member, Regina Dugan, president and CEO of Wellcome Leap, a US non-profit focused on human health. She will serve on the Board’s Technology Committee. She is a former director of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the first female to do so. Dugan brings extensive experience in developing innovative technology, and has worked at Facebook (VP Engineering), Google (VP of Engineering, Advanced Technology and Products), and Motorola (SVP of Advanced Technology and Projects). She said: “Edge-to-cloud architectures are essential to competitiveness for so many companies, and HPE’s products and services are laser-focused on this future. It’s an exciting time to join the Board.”

Kyndryl, the spun-off IBM services business, is partnering with Elastic to enable customers to search, analyze, and act on machine data (IT data and business data) stored across hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and edge computing environments. The two will focus on delivering large-scale IT operations and AIOps capabilities to joint customers using Kyndryl’s data framework and toolkits and Elastic’s Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security software. Elastic users will be able to let Kyndryl manage their entire stack infrastructure and analytics workloads for IT operations.

Loadbalancer.org has a downloadable white paper, “Load balancing: the lifeblood in resilient Object storage”, explaining how load balancers ensure scalability, high availability, and zero downtime in object storage systems.

MLOPs platform supplier Domino Labs has integrations with Nvidia DGX GPUs and NetApp enabling customers to run AI/ML workloads in either datacenters or the AWS cloud without changing them. Domino’s Nexus Enterprise MLOPs offering has been validated by NetApp for use with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP as part of an AWS Managed Service. Nexus already supports on-premises ONTAP. NetApp’s Cloud Manager acts as a control plane to build, secure, protect, and govern data with data services – including replication of data across environments with SnapMirror on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP and transfer of network-attached storage (NAS) data between on-premises and cloud object stores with Cloud Sync. Domino and Nvidia have created an integrated MLOps and on-premises GPU reference architecture, validated by both technology providers.

Sony has demonstrated a Nextorage brand PCIe gen 5 x 4 lane SSD, but not for its PlayStation gaming console – the finned heat sink is too large. It uses 3D NAND, and has an M.2 2280 (gumstick) format with read bandwidth of up to 9.5GB/sec, write speed of up to 8.5GB/sec, and 1, 2, and 4TB capacities. This is not that fast. Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen 5 10000 M.2 2280 drive does 12.5GBps reading and 10.1GBps writing.

VAST Data has a new customer. SeqOIA (Sequencing Omics Information Analysis Cooperative Health Group), a French medical biology laboratory specializing in genomic medicine, is using VAST’s all-flash Universal Storage to help accelerate and optimize the analysis of genetics data for medical diagnostics. SeqOIA searches for different types of genetic events (point mutations, insertion/deletions, fusions, copy number variations, etc.) in patients to better characterize pathologies and thus offer genetic counseling to families or a new line of treatment. We’re told that SeqOIA has accelerated genome analysis time by 4x with VAST storage. Also the SeqOIA lab eliminated unresolved data read and write attempts, reducing errors to avoid missing or delayed results for patients.

Veritas has appointed a new cloud-specialist team focused on Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East and Pacific, which will be led by Mark Shephard, International Cloud Sales Leader, and Paul Hollebon, International Cloud Pre-sales Leader. Both newcomers have over 20 years’ experience in IT supporting global operations. 

The UK’s Financial Times has reported that Chinese NAND fabber YMTC has provided flash chips to Huawei for its foldable mobile phone. Democratic Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, says YMTC should be added to the entity list which bans US companies from selling technology to suppliers on the list. Huawei is already on the list. This form of low key economic war against China is increasing its scope.