Storage news ticker – May 19

Data protector Acronis announced general availability of Acronis Advanced Security + Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, with new capabilities such as AI-based attack analysis. EDR is designed for MSPs.

Open source data integration platform supplier Airbyte has launched a no-code connector builder that makes it possible to create new connectors for data integrations. The builder enables non-engineers such as data analysts to create an extract, load, transform (ELT) connector within five minutes – a process that traditionally could take more than a week.

Microsoft is publicly previewing Azure Container Storage. It provides a consistent experience across different types of storage offerings, including Managed options (backed by Azure Elastic SAN), Azure Disks, and ephemeral disk on container services. You can create and manage block storage volumes for production-scale stateful container applications and run them on Kubernetes. It’s optimized to enhance the performance of stateful workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters by accelerating the deployment of stateful containers with persistent volumes and improving quality with reduced pod failover time through fast attach/detach. Details in a blog.

CData announced that CData Sync is available on SAP Store and allows CData to deliver data integration to the data sources and SAP databases that organizations use. 

Storage buff Brantley Coile
Brantley Coile

Brantley Coile, the founder and CEO of Etherdrive SAN company Coraid, has shaved off his beard. He says he’s reinventing Coraid, now The Brantley Coile Company, as well.

External data integrator Crux has announced its Crux External Data Platform (“EDP”) SaaS offering to automate the onboarding of any external dataset directly from vendors into a customer’s store. The self-service cloud platform allows data teams to onboard and transform external data for analytics use up to 10 times faster than traditional manual methods. External data from governments, non-profits, and commercial data vendors is a critical business resource in many sectors such as finance, supply chain, retail, healthcare, and insurance. Crux has partnerships with over 265 leading data providers including MSCI, Moody’s, S&P, SIX, FactSet, and Morningstar.

File migrator and manager Datadobi has a blog about not forgetting stale data in WORM storage. It will need deleting eventually. Read the blog here.

data.world has announced the introduction of the data.world Data Catalog Platform with generative AI-powered capabilities for improving data discovery. data.world is the industry’s most popular data catalog with more than two million users, including enterprise customers with tens of thousands of active users.

Flipside has said its Flipside Shares offering is available on Snowflake Marketplace and provides joint customers with access to modeled and curated blockchain data sets, without the hassle of managing nodes, complex data pipelines, or costly data storage. Flipside provides access to the greatest number of blockchains and protocols in Web3, including Ethereum, Solana, Flow, Near, Axelar, and more than a dozen others.

IBM has acquired Israeli company Polar Security whose agentless product allows customers to discover, continuously monitor and secure cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) application data, and addresses a shadow data problem. Polar Security is a pioneer of data security posture management (DSPM) – an emerging cybersecurity segment that reveals where sensitive data is stored, who has access to it, how it’s used, and identifies vulnerabilities with the underlying security posture, including with policies, configurations, or data usage.

GPU-powered RAID card startup GRAID has signed up Trenton Systems as a partner. US-based Trenton Systems is a designer and manufacturer of ruggedized, cybersecure, made-in-USA computer systems for defense, aerospace, test and measurement, industrial automation, and other major industries. 

Data manager and lifecycle organizer Komprise has new governance and self-service capabilities that simplify departmental use of its Deep Analytics – a query-based way to find and tag file and object data across hybrid cloud storage silos. It’s providing share-based access for groups, a new directory explorer, and exclusion query filters in file index search. Komprise says its latest release makes it dramatically easier for teams to find and manage their own data, while simplifying governance for IT.

Micron plans to install a 1gamma DRAM manufacturing line at its fab in Hiroshima, Japan, according to a Nikkei Asia report. This is part of an up to $3.6 billion (500 billion yen) investment program in Japan and will involve extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which will also be used in its Taiwan DRAM fab.

N-able CEO John Pagliuca has signed the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion Pledge, reinforcing company support and commitment towards its Diversity, Equality, and Belonging philosophy. CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion was founded in 2017 and is the largest CEO-driven business commitment to advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace with more than 2,400 CEOs having pledged to create more inclusive cultures.

Pure Storage says Virgin Media O2, one of the UK’s largest entertainment and telecommunications operators, is a customer, using its portfolio – including FlashArray//X and Evergreen//Forever – to support its 47 million connections.

Security-focused data protector Rubrik has added user intelligence capabilities that utilize time series data recorded over consistent intervals in Rubrik Security Cloud to proactively mitigate cyber risks before they can be exploited. Customers will have visibility of the types of sensitive data they have, which users have access to the data, how that access has changed over time, and whether that access may pose any risk to their business.

Samsung storage

Samsung has announced development of the industry’s first 128-gigabyte DRAM to support Compute Express Link (CXL) 2.0. It worked with Intel and its Xeon CPU to do so. The new CXL DRAM supports PCle 5.0 interface (x8 lanes) and provides bandwidth of up to 35GBps. CXL 2.0 supports memory pooling – a memory management technique that binds multiple CXL memory blocks on a server platform to form a pool, and enables hosts to dynamically allocate memory from the pool as needed. It will mass produce the product later this year.

SingleStore has launched SingleStore Kai for MongoDB, an API that turbocharges (100-1,000x) real-time analytics on JSON and vector-based similarity searches for MongoDB-based AI applications, without the need for any query changes or data transformations. The new API is MongoDB wire protocol compatible, and enables developers to power interactive applications with analytics with SingleStoreDB using the same MongoDB commands. It is available at no extra cost and is open for public preview as part of the SingleStoreDB Cloud offering. SingleStore is also introducing replication (in private preview) that can replicate MongoDB collections into SingleStoreDB.

The Storage Management Initiative’s SNIA Swordfish v1.2.5 is out for public review. This new bundle provides a unified approach to manage storage and servers in hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments, making it easier for IT administrators to integrate scalable solutions into their datacenters. This new version provides:

  • Expanded support for profile and mapping in the Swordfish NVMe Model Overview and Mapping Guide
  • New use cases and section to the Swordfish Scalable Storage Management API User’s Guide
  • Functionality enhancements supporting both traditional and NVMe and NVMe-oF storage

The Information reports that Snowflake wants to acquire search engine startup Neeva to help its customers search documents stored in Snowflake’s data warehouse. Neeva has added a large language model front end and has a vector database. Neeva seems to have shopped itself to Databricks as well.

StorMagic says German manufacturers Witholz GmbH and WST Präzisionstechnik have deployed StorMagic SvSAN to simplify their IT environments and reduce hardware requirements, resulting in maximum operational efficiency, high availability of data and 100 percent uptime at a lower cost.

Veritas has updated its Veritas Partner Force program for FY 2024. It is incentivized with improved rewards for cloud-based deals, a simplified transaction process, and new training and accreditation programs. It will also support Veritas in delivering growth on the Veritas Alta secure cloud data management platform, continuing to modernize routes to market by improving available resources to two-tier channel and managed service providers.

Veza says its Veza Authorization Platform is available on the Snowflake Data Cloud. Joint customers can manage access permissions and secure their sensitive data at scale. Veza’s Authorization Platform provides companies with visibility into access permissions across all enterprise systems, enabling customers to achieve least privilege for all identities, human and non-human, including service accounts.

Scale-out, parallel filesystem supplier WEKA has unveiled v4.2 of its Data Platform with advanced data reduction and a container storage interface (CSI) plug-in for stateful containerized workloads that can lower storage and operational costs. It also offers significant performance improvements in the cloud (6x over alternatives in Azure), providing the scale and application data protection needed to support thousands of containers for cloud-native artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The advanced block-variable differential compression combined with cluster-wide data deduplication delivers data reduction at scale for an estimated cost saving of up to 6x for AI/ML training models, 3-8x for exploratory data analysis, and up to 2x for bioinformatic or large-scale media and entertainment workloads like visual effects. 

HPE’s Zerto business unit has announced real-time encryption detection mechanism and air-gapped recovery vault features as part of Zerto 10, which includes monitoring for encryption-based anomalies. This capability monitors and reports on encryption as data streams in and can detect anomalous activity within minutes to alert users of suspicious activity. It can provide early warning of a potential ransomware attack – unlike backups, which can be up to a day old – and help pinpoint when an attack was initiated, so data can be recovered to a point seconds before it began. The Cyber Resilience Vault provides the ultimate layer of protection allowing for clean copy recovery from an air-gapped setup if a replication target is also breached.

Zerto also announced the launch of Zerto 10 for Azure, delivering disaster recovery and mobility. It delivers a new replication architecture for scale-out efficiency and native protection of Azure Virtual Machines with support for multi-disk consistency for VMs in Azure. It’s available in the Azure Marketplace.