AWS has announced general availability of new storage-optimized Amazon EC2 I4g instances featuring AWS-designed Graviton processors and AWS Nitro SSDs. With up to 64 vCPUs, 512 GiB of memory, and 15 TB of NVMe storage, they deliver up to 15% better compute performance than other AWS storage-optimized instances, we’re told. There are 6 sizes:
Storage volumes built from the Nitro NVMe SSDs deliver:
- Up to 800K random write IOPS
- Up to 1 million random read IOPS
- Up to 5600 MB/second of sequential writes
- Up to 8000 MB/second of sequential reads
(All measured using 4 KiB blocks.)
Torn Write Protection is supported for 4 KiB, 8 KiB, and 16 KiB blocks. Target storage-intensive workloads include relational and non-relational databases, search engines, file systems, in-memory analytics, batch processing, streaming, and so forth. These workloads are generally very sensitive to I/O latency, and require plenty of random read/write IOPS along with high CPU performance.
EC2 I4g instances are available today in the US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) AWS Regions in On-Demand, Spot, Reserved Instance, and Savings Plan form.
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Microsoft Azure Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VM series instances are the first Azure VM series to support NVMe storage protocol. NVMe support enables these series to achieve the highest Disk Storage IOPS and throughput of any Azure VMs to date, we’re told. More info here.
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Backblaze has announced Q1 cy2023 results for its cloud-based backup and general storage services. Revenues of $23.4 million were up 20% with a loss of $17.1 million vs the year-ago $12.1 million loss. Computer backup revenues rose 8% to $13.4 million but B2 cloud storage rose 42% to $10 million. B2 revenues could eclipse backup revenues next quarter. CEO Gleb Budman said: “We were pleased to deliver 42% year-on-year revenue growth for B2 Cloud Storage in Q1— well above that of our competitors like Amazon Web Services (AWS). Additionally, our Q1 results support our goal to approach Adjusted EBITDA breakeven in Q4 of 2023.”
Backblaze expects Q2 revenues to be between $24.1 million to $24.5 million.
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Block data migrator Cirrus has announced the availability of Cirrus Migrate Cloud with Cloud Recommendation Wizard in the Azure Marketplace. The pitch is that Cirrus Migrate Cloud (CMC) enables organizations to migrate block-level storage data from any source to Azure and between Microsoft Azure Disk Storage with near-zero downtime.
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DataStax has launched a new open source support service around machine learning and AI. Luna ML will be aimed at companies that want to get into using their data for ML projects based on the newly open sourced Kaskada real-time event processing engine. This will help make it easier to get started around these kinds of projects, as well as combining Kaskada with other open source projects for larger ML initiatives, like Cassandra for running a feature store or Pulsar for data streaming. Kaskada is a real-time event processing service that supports real-time AI
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Grafana Labs has announced updates to its fully managed Grafana Cloud observability platform; specifically a new Adaptive Metrics feature, which enables users to aggregate unused and partially used time series data to lower costs. It’s now available for broader public access. Read a blog about it.
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Michael Hay has rejoined Hitachi Vantara as VP Technology and Research, coming from Teradata. He was previously VP and Chief Engineer at Hitachi V from 2013 to 2018.
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Data security provide Immuta announced a strategic investment from Databricks Ventures, the investment arm of Databricks, the data lakehouse supplier. It comes after a year of growth for Immuta in which the company reported a 200% increase in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) for its Data Security Platform SaaS offering as it expanded into EMEA and APAC. The investment will go towards product innovation to strengthen the integration between both platforms and new go-to-market initiatives to increase enterprise adoption.
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At OpenWorks 2023, MariaDB has unveiled its vision to bring the power of distributed SQL through its Xpand database to both the MariaDB/MySQL and PostgreSQL communities. CEO Michael Howard said the intent is: “to take databases to new heights of scale and resilience, in any cloud at a fraction of the cost of competitors.”
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Large (>20GB) file transfer provider MASV has revealed lower prices, new enterprise plans and compliance with SOC2 Type II. MASV previously announced ISO27001 and TPN, with HIPAA coming soon. Its new MASV Professional membership cuts its customers’ costs by 20 percent. Egress data over 200GB each month is billed on a flexible usage-based discounted plan of $0.20/GB. All MASV Professional plans include unlimited users at no additional cost. User plans are available from massive.io or on AWS Marketplace.
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MSP-focussed Data protector N-able has expanded the Continuity features in Cove Data Protection with Standby Image recovery in Microsoft Azure. This delivers smarter disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), helping MSPs and IT professionals provide a full range of recovery services to end users, now including recovery in Azure.
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The latest release of NetApp’s ONTAP has increased performance of NFS over RDMA and GDS , and customers can get more than 171GiBps from an ONTAP storage cluster to a single NVIDIA DGX A100 compute node. If your existing ONTAP systems have the appropriate network adapters, you can add this level of performance with a free upgrade by updating to ONTAP 9.12.1 or later versions. Read test onfig etails and more in a blog.
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Nutanix announced 3 dataservices-oriented offerings at its .NEXT conference.
- Nutanix Central provides a single cloud-delivered console for visibility, monitoring and management across public cloud, on-premises, hosted or Edge infrastructure.
- Unified data services across hybrid multicloud environments, enabling integrated data management of containerized and virtualized applications on-premises, on public cloud and at the Edge, with comprehensive data services for Kubernetes applications as well as cross-cloud data mobility. Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) enables snapshots directly to cloud native object stores, starting with the AWS S3 object storage service.
- Project Beacon is a multi-year effort to deliver a portfolio of data-centric Platform as a Service (PaaS) services available natively on Nutanix or public clouds. This is an upgrade from the NDS managed Database-as-a-Service offering. The vision is of decoupling apps and data from the underlying infrastructure so developers can build applications once and run them anywhere.
Nutanix also rediscovered converged infrastructure by deciding to offer separate compute and storage nodes. This matches what Dell is doing with Dynamic AppsON, the linking of PowerStore storage arrays with VxRail HCI dynamic (compute-ony) nodes to sepatately scale compute and storage in an HCI environment. HPE has had this for some time with its Nimble dHCI offering (now Alletra).
Nutanix Objects Storage now integrates with Snowflake so customers can use the Snowflake Data Cloud to analyze data directly on Nutanix Objects Storage ensuring data stays local.
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HC storage supplier Panasas announced 50 percent Y/Y growth in total partners since the launch of a new channel strategy a year ago. In addition, more than half of Panasas’ total revenue in the past year was partner-driven, with nearly a fifth of that revenue being net new logos.
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Cloud file services supplier Panzura has been named to Inc. magazine’s annual Best Workplaces list in the May/June 2023 issue. This is its second such ranking in 2023. Pure has achieved three-year revenue growth of 485%, and in the past year has joined Inc.’s 5000 list of Fastest Growing Companies in the US.
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Pure Storage announced the results of a new end user survey, “IT Leader Insights: The State of IT Modernization Priorities and Challenges Amid Economic Headwinds.” Ninety percent of IT buyers state that the pressure of their digital transformation agenda led them to buy technology their infrastructure could not support. Access the report here.
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Real-time database supplier Redis announced the appointment of Spencer Tuttle as its Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). He joins from business intelligence analytics company ThoughtSpot, with over 15 years of experience in the tech industry and experience in growing revenues and expanding operations.
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Seagate announced the launch of its cloud import service in the UK, as part of Lyve data transfer solutions. With this new service, customers can upload large data sets to any major public cloud destination, including Amazon S3, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, IBM Cloud Object Storage, OVHcloud, Wasabi, and Lyve Cloud.
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Snowflake is opening a new UK office and Customer Experience Centre (CEC) in London, providing a “workplace experience” for employees and an area for collaboration with prospective clients. Snowflake’s fy2023 product revenue in EMEA grew 72 percent YoY. It also expanded its team in EMEA by 68 percent, reaching 1,289 in total as of January 31, 2023. In fy 2023 it continued to shift the EMEA sales team to a vertical-focused model.
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Research house TrendForce’s latest research indicates that, as production cuts to DRAM and NAND Flash have not kept pace with weakening demand, the ASP of some products is expected to decline further in 2Q23. DRAM prices are projected to fall 13~18 percent; NAND Flash is expected to fall between 8~13 percent.
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Cloud storage provider Wasabi strengthened its EMEA presence with the appointment of Jon Howes as VP and GM for EMEA. He will build on Wasabi’s growth in the region, highlighted by a flagship deal with Liverpool Football Club, 1,800 new partners, and a nearly 90 percent ARR growth rate. A full region go-to-market team has been established to support the growth of cloud storage, with Eric Peters as Country Manager of Benelux & Southern Europe based in France; Daniel Arabié, Country Manager of Central Europe/DACH based in Germany, and Kevin Dunn, Country Manager for the UK/I & Nordics based in the UK.
