Data catalog and intelligence tech supplier Alation has announced Alation Marketplaces, a new product for third-party data sets to augment existing data in Alation Data Catalog for richer analysis. Additionally, the company expanded Alation Anywhere to Microsoft Teams and Alation Connected Sheets to Microsoft Excel to help users access contextual information from the catalog directly within their tool of choice.
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SaaS data protector Druva has been awarded a patent, US11221919B2, for its smart folder scan technology. It assumes users have multiple snapshots – AWS EBS volumes, for example – and need to restore files from these snapshots. Instead of going over each point-in-time copy (snapshot) and checking for a file, a more efficient approach is to create a filename-based index of the files post-snapshot creation. A lookup of the index should help identify which snapshot contains the file (or associated versions). Index creation could further be optimized for resource consumption by performing a smart scan instead of a full scan to identify the changed files in incremental snapshots, we’re told.
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An ESG survey has found that data loss from the public cloud is common due to a multitude of causes. The biggest culprit was SaaS applications: 42 percent of respondents experienced sensitive data loss from their SaaS platforms. The most common contributors to cloud-resident sensitive data loss were misconfigurations of services, policy violations, and access controls/credentials issues. Download the report here.
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ExaGrid CEO Bill Andrews has released a free-to-stream easy-listening acoustic rock album, Warriors in the Woods, with him singing and playing guitar. Who would have thought it!
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High-end enterprise array supplier Infinidat has promoted Steve Sullivan, EVP and GM Americas, to chief revenue officer. CEO Phil Bullinger said: “Steve brings to the CRO role a track record of building and leading high-performing teams that have set a very high standard for customer success and delivering technical and business value in enterprise storage. His leadership in the expanded CRO role will accelerate our growth as we scale our global account and partner relationships through collaborative and cohesive go-to-market strategies and programs.”
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TrueNAS company iXsystems has announced its Mini R array, offering 12 lockable and hot-swappable 3.5” drive bays providing more than 200TB of capacity when fully populated and the option of 2.5” SATA SSDs for more than 90TB of flash storage. This larger Mini R joins the Mini X, X+, and XL+ systems in the entry-level TrueNAS Mini series. It is geared for small and home offices and can also serve in parts of enterprise deployments for remote sites, backup, and non-critical departmental applications. It is priced at just under $2,000. The latest BlueFin version 22.12.1 of its TrueNAS Scale Linux OS is now generally available for free download at here and comes pre-installed on TrueNAS Enterprise appliances with support.
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Privately owned Komprise says subscription revenues in 2022 more than doubled for a third consecutive year. There was 50 percent growth in the Komprise Global File Index, which consists of hundreds of billions of files, providing customers a Google-like search across their entire data estate to find, tag and mobilize unstructured data. Some 30 percent of revenues came from expansions, indicating strong customer satisfaction and loyalty, and Komprise has a 120 percent net dollar retention rate. There was 200 percent growth in the number of organizations using Komprise for data migrations to a new NAS or for cloud data migrations. More than 100 Microsoft customers migrated data to Azure using Komprise during the first 12 months of the Azure File Migration program, we’re told, which funds customer use of Komprise.
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Data protection supplier N-able revenues for 2022’s fourth quarter showed a 7 percent year-on-year rise to $95.8 million, with a $7 million net profit versus $2.06 million. Full year revenues were $371.8 million, up 7 percent on 2021’s $346.5 million, with a net profit of $16.7 million, up from $113,000. William Blair analyst Jason Ader commented: “Management noted broad-based demand across its portfolio as MSPs and SMBs continue to prioritize investments in data protection, security, and device monitoring, even in a tougher macro environment.”
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NetApp has effectively stopped further development of its SolidFire all-flash arrays. CEO George Kurian said in its latest results that the company had decided to reduce investment in products with smaller revenue potential like Astra Data Store and SolidFire. He added: ”We had a small business in SolidFire that we continue to sustain, but we don’t plan to grow going forward.” NetApp bought startup Solidfire for $870 million in cash in 2015. Its technology was eclipsed by NetApp’s internally developed ONTAP all-flash arrays, which currently have a $2.8 billion annual run rate.
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HPC scale-out and parallel file system supplier Panasas has run a survey by Vanson Bourne of hundreds of IT decision makers working at enterprises with more than 1,000 employees across the US, UK, and Germany. It looked at the problems enterprises face in building and managing storage infrastructure for high-performance applications. Over half of respondents (52 percent) cited specialty knowledge as the top challenge. Other problems were high acquisition costs (45 percent) and maintenance costs (43 percent).
The answer? Buy Panasas software. Jeff Whitaker, VP of Product Strategy and Marketing, said: “Our PanFS software suite demonstrates our commitment to delivering simple, reliable solutions that support multiple HPC and AI/ML applications from a single storage platform.”
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We asked Katie McCullough, CISO at Panzura, how its Customer Security Advisory Council’s Chris Hetner’s security thinking will be made available to Panzura customers? She said: “He will have quarterly sessions with 2-3 of our customers’ CISOs from different industries. Our sales team is working with our customers to announce the launch of the Customer Security Advisory Council in March. We will be sharing opportunities to join the council on a quarterly basis.”
“During the quarterly session, Chris will offer an assessment of the financial, operational, and legal ramifications/costs associated with a ransomware incident. Additionally, there will be a Q&A portion of the session where customers can share their pain points and seek Chris’ company-specific strategies advice. Panzura will also be seeking customers feedback on solutions we are working on to address the data resilience challenges customer face. Chris will also be sharing his insights in coordination with Panzura security, product and services leadership through regular blogs, and webinars.
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Cloud data warehouser Snowflake has announced a Telecom Data Cloud which offers a single, fully managed, secure platform for multi-cloud data consolidation with unified governance and elastic performance. Snowflake and Snowpark enable machine-generated data in near real time using ML models to predict faults, schedule maintenance ahead of time, and to reduce operational downtime. Initial users include AT&T, OneWeb and Singapore’s M1. Read more about Snowflake for Telecom here.
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Web3 storage supplier Storj has released its Storj Next update providing an up to 280 percent increase in file upload and download speeds. It says it delivers enterprise-grade storage for 10 percent of the price of providers like AWS, Microsoft and Google. Storj has a network of more than 20,000 nodes; an increase over the year from 13,000. CEO Ben Golub said: “Storj gets faster as we add more nodes due to parallelism for downloads. We eliminate dependency on a single data hub, instead using a distributed network of under utilized storage capacity on existing hardware, which allows for less latency and reduced data transfer times.”
A Storj spokesperson told us: “We’ve rolled out many optimizations in our metadata layer that keeps track of the split file locations [and] eliminated bottlenecks in our parallelization, [made] optimizations in our client, uplink. Eliminated unnecessary round-trips in our protocol: leveraging Noise protocol to reduce round trips, which is used by wireguard (https://noiseprotocol.org/) and optimized our gateway scalability and throughput.”
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Data protector Veeam has a new CFO, Dustin Driggs. He succeeds Chuck Garner who led the Veeam’s finance, strategy and operations functions for more than four years and is leaving for parts unknown. Driggs joins Veeam from Barracuda Networks where he worked for over 16 years, most recently as CFO and senior vice president leading the finance and accounting function.
