Airbyte, which supplies an open source data integration platform, today announced its first premium support offering for Airbyte Open Source. Until now, Airbyte provided support to its users through its community Slack and Discourse platforms. The premium support plan offers one business day response time for Severity 0 and 1 issues, two business days response time for Severity 2 and 3, one week response time for pull request reviews, and an ability to request a Zoom call.
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Data intelligence supplier Alation has hired former Peloton CFO Jill Woodworth as its CFO, and David Chao, formerly VP and Head of Product Marketing at DataDog, joins as Chief Marketing Officer. Alation has opened new offices in London, UK, and Chennai, India. The new Chennai office will host more than 160 employees from across engineering, product, finance, and HR teams.
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Alluxio has published a Presto Optimization Handbook, downloadable here; Presto being a distributed query engine for data analytics. For customers using Trino (formerly PrestoSQL), check out The Trino Optimization Handbook here.
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CTERA has expanded its relationship with Hitachi Vantara. This concerns Hitachi’s announcement of Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) reaching end-of-life. CTERA provides a migration path by introducing CTERA Migrate for HDI, a turnkey solution that replaces HDI and preserves the existing storage repository investment. It’s part of the CTERA Enterprise Files Services platform. There’s more info in this blog.
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Data lakehouse supplier Databricks is buying Okera, an AI-centric data governance platform. It says Okera says it addresses data privacy and governance challenges across the spectrum of data and AI. It says it simplifies data visibility and transparency, helping organizations understand their data, necessary in the age of LLMs, and to address concerns about their biases. Okera offers an AI-powered interface and self-service portal to automatically discover, classify, and tag sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII). Okera has been developing a new isolation technology that can support arbitrary workloads while enforcing governance control without sacrificing performance.
Nong Li, Okera co-founder and CEO, is known for creating Apache Parquet, the open source standard storage format that Databricks and the rest of the industry builds on.
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DDN says it’s sold more AI storage appliances, like the A1400X2, in the first four months of 2023 than it had for all of 2022, partly due to the broad enthusiasm for generative AI. Dr James Coomer, SVP of Products, said: “The trillions of data objects and parameters required by generative AI cannot be fulfilled without an extremely scalable and high-performance data storage system. DDN has been the solution of choice for thousands of deployments for organizations such as NASA, University of Florida, and Naver.”
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Helmholtz Munich, part of Germany’s largest research organization, the Helmholtz Association, is a DDN customer. It has has four fully populated SFAES7990X systems that span a global namespace, and an SFA NVMe ES400NVX system with GPU integration for faster data throughput with direct datapaths between storage and GPU for its intensive AI applications. Case study here.
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Professor Tom de Greef of the Eindhoven University of Technology expects the first DNA datacenter to be up and running within five to 10 years. New files will be encoded via DNA synthesis. Another part will contain large fields of capsules, each capsule packed with a file. A robotic arm will remove a capsule, read its contents and place it back. De Greef’s research group developed a microcapsule of proteins and a polymer and then anchored one file per capsule. The capsules seal themselves above 50 degrees Celsius, allowing the PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) read process to take place separately in each capsule. In the lab, it has so far managed to read 25 files simultaneously without significant error.
Each file is given a fluorescent label and each capsule its own color. A device can then recognize the colors and separate them from one another. A robotic arm can then select the desired file from the pool of capsules in the future.
A research paper appeared in the journal Nature Nanotechnology under the title ‘DNA storage in thermoresponsive microcapsules for repeated random multiplexed data access’. DOI: 10.1038/s41565-023-01377-4.
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IBM Storage Fusion HCI System caching accelerates watsonx.data queries, watsonx being the upcoming enterprise-ready AI and data platform designed to apply AI across a business. IBM watsonx.data is delivered on-prem with an appliance-like experience. Watch a video about it here.
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Web3 storage supplier Impossible Cloud has certified its first German datacenter, located in Frankfurt, with plans to handle client data beginning June 1.
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Informatica has announced the launch of its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) on Google Cloud in Europe to address data sovereignty and localization concerns. There are new capabilities for IDMC including security features to control access to security assets and master data management enhancements for financial services and ESG compliance. Informatica has more product integration on Amazon Redshift with Informatica’s no code/no setup software as a service (SaaS) AI-powered cloud data integration-free directly from the Amazon Redshift console and industry certifications for financial services, healthcare and life sciences.
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MSP-focused data protector N-able announced revenues of $99.8 million for Q1 this year, up 9 percent year over year, with a $3.5 million profit, lower than last year’s $5.1 million. Its subscription revenues were $97.4 million, another 9 percent rise. This is becoming a fairly predictable business revenue-wise.
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Serene Investment Management-owned Nexsan has surpassed its aggressive Q1 earnings target for its SAN and file storage product line. This includes E-Series, Unity, and the Assureon Data Vault. We don’t know what the target was. Serene bought Storcentric and thus Nexsan in February this year for $5 million in a DIP loan, retaining key employees and leaders as it restructured the business. Prior Nexsan owner StorCentric filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July 2022 and looked for a buyer.
Update. Storcentric’s Drobo operation closed down at the end of January, as its website indicates;
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Scale-out filesystem supplier Qumulo has announced integration with the Varonis Data Security Platform and introduced its new Snapshot-Locking capability to protect customers against ransomware. The Varonis Data Security Platform provides real-time visibility and control over cloud and on-premises data and automatically remediates risk. Its behavior-based threat models detect abnormal activity proactively and can stop threats to data before they become breaches. Qumulo’s Snapshot-Locking feature uses cryptographic protection, where only the customer has access to the cryptographic key-pair required to unlock the snapshot.
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Rakuten Symphony is partnering with Google Cloud to provide its Symcloud SDS K8s data management and persistent storage for Google Anthos Distributed Cloud offerings. Symcloud SDS releases will be aligned with GDC’s Anthos releases. Symcloud SDS is available through the Google Marketplace.
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Pre-registration has opened for the SmartNICs Summit for its second annual event. It will occur on June 13-15 at the San Jose Doubletree Hotel. “We are now seeing the full impact of SmartNICs. They offload overhead from CPUs and make solutions more scalable,” said Chuck Sobey, Summit General Chair. “Distributed compute power is essential to handle the demands of incredibly fast emerging applications such as ChatGPT. SmartNICs Summit will help designers select the right architectures.”
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Storage analyst firm DCIG has named StorMagic SvSAN a global top five HCI solution. The “2023-24 DCIG TOP 5 Rising Vendors HCI Software Solutions” report evaluates offerings from 11 rising vendor HCI software solutions to provide IT decision makers with succinct analysis of the market’s HCI solutions.
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Synology tells us the BC500 is available for sale in the US as of May 10. The TC500 is still slated for June 14, and MSRP is $219.99 for both models. The BC500 should be available from retailers soon, and also just launched on its web store.
