Storage news ticker – September 28

Cloud storage provider Backblaze has launched a company Shareholder Perks Program on the Stockperks app. Stockperks provides shareholder rewards, with more than 20 public companies using the platform to connect with their retail investors. Current Backblaze shareholders can use the Stockperks app to obtain discounts on computer backup or Backblaze B2 subscriptions and Backblaze-branded gifts.

Data manager Cohesity has hired Mark Molyneux as its CTO Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). He will be advising customers, prospects, and partners on how next-gen data management with its SaaS focus can help them manage, protect, secure, and derive value from their data. He was previously UK Business Development CTO at Dell Technologies following more than 12 years at Barclays Bank, where he held the position of Director of Group Storage, Virtualization, and Public Cloud.

Data integrator Fivetran has upgraded its partner referral program along with the launch of new reseller certification programs. The expanded program, with four new tiers, enables hundreds of existing resellers to grow their business even more, and support Fivetran’s growth across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific regions. 

SaaS data protector HYCU has a new logo and strap line – Data Anywhere, Protected Everywhere. A video explains more.

Kioxia has developed a prototype 2TB capacity microSDXC UHS-1 memory card for smartphones, digital cameras, and portable games consoles. The SD Association’s SDXC specification has supported memory cards up to 2TB for more than a decade, but 2TB cards have not been successfully manufactured until now. We can thank Kioxia’s BiCS 3D NAND for the high capacity, formed from 16 x 1 Tbit dies, and an in-house controller. Consumer-usable capacity will be less than 2TB due to factors such as overhead data areas, formatting, bad blocks and other constraints, and may also vary based on the host device and application. Mass production is scheduled to begin in 2023. We believe it is gen 5 BiCS TLC (3bits/cel) NAND with 112 layers.

NCMe/TCP storage supplier Lightbits is demonstrating its software-defined, NVMe/TCP storage cluster providing high-performance block storage to compute servers equipped with Intel IPU E2000 smartNICs, thereby freeing up CPU cores. This is taking place at the Intel Innovation event, September 27-28, in San Jose. In the demo the number of cores needed for storage was reduced by more than 4x, demonstrating significant CPU utilization savings.

NetApp has joined the STAC Benchmark Council. STAC is a carefully controlled and defined set of benchmarks for the financial services industry. Expect to see NetApp AFF ONTAP storage systems appearing in benchmarks soon.

Sports betting and gaming specialist FSB Technology is using Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) to host core workloads on AWS and other public cloud platforms. It is also planning to use Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Microsoft Azure and is looking forward to NC2 becoming available on Google Cloud Platform as it believes this will further enhance the company’s ability to meet the needs of new customers and markets around the globe. FSB Technology was already a Nutanix Cloud Platform user and this is a classic example of Nutanix’s land and expand strategy in action.

Hyperconverged infrastructure appliance vendor Scale Computing has announced the availability of its SC/HyperCore on Intel NUC Enterprise Edge Compute (EEC) platform. This is an all-flash, NVMe storage-based, compute appliance powered by 11th Gen Intel Core processors. This system is a good fit for remote high-speed edge compute applications and includes high availability clustering, rolling upgrades, and integrated data protection. It can be managed centrally through the Scale Computing Fleet Manager user interface, which can scale from 1 to 50,000+ clusters. It can be deployed without a rack infrastructure or server closet. A three-node cluster of Intel NUC Enterprise Edge Compute units built with Scale Computing starts at less than $5,000 MSRP.

DR and high-availability supplier SIOS has announced the availability of SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux version 9.6.2. This clustering software provides support for recent operating system upgrades (RHEL 8.6, Oracle Linux 8.6, Rocky 8.6, Miracle Linux 8.4) and Azure Shared Disk. It supports Azure, AWS EC2, and Google Cloud Platform. Customers can create a SAN-less cluster that uses only local storage, delivering cluster protection in cloud environments where shared storage solutions are impractical or impossible.

US-based HBC has chosen Veeam’s Availability Suite to centralize data protection on-premises and across the AWS and Azure clouds. Veeam says HBC saved more than $1 million in a one-time capital expenditure and saves $600,000 in recurring operational expenses annually. Veeam helps HBC ensure business continuity, meet internal governance compliance requirements, and protect against ransomware. Veeam backs up 80TB of data across more than 2,000 instances in AWS and Azure to Amazon S3 and Azure Blob Storage. Veeam also backs up 40TB of data across 14 physical machines on-premises to Dell EMC Data Domain.

HBC has been in business for more than 350 years and is North America’s longest continually operating company. It began in 1670 with a royal charter from England to seek a northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean, occupy the lands adjacent to Hudson Bay, and set up commerce. Today, HBC is the majority owner of e-commerce companies such as Saks, a leading online destination for luxury fashion, and The Bay, a Canadian e-commerce marketplace.

Lisa Krueger, Yellowbrick
Lisa Krueger

Data warehouser Yellowbrick has hired Lisa Krueger as its new veep of customer success. Krueger brings over 25 years to Yellowbrick and has previously served in senior customer success roles at companies including Couchbase, DataStax, Talend Corporation, and Oracle.