Storage news ticker – 2 June 2023

Storage news
Storage news

CloudCasa says it’s one of the available Kubernetes applications in the new Microsoft Transactable Container (aka Kubernetes Apps) in the Azure Marketplace. CloudCasa already provides native integration with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Customers can now pay for CloudCasa through the Azure marketplace. They also get enhanced security via Microsoft’s automated malware and vulnerability scanning, we’re told. 

Cloudian’s HyperStore software is available on the HPE GreenLake Marketplace, giving customers the option to get HyperStore delivered as an on-premises service. Cloudian and HPE GreenLake together say they deliver data sovereignty and control via a pay-as-you-go financial model. With Cloudian HyperStore, customers can transform any compute platform – including servers, virtual machines, or containers – into a pool of S3 API-compatible object storage.

Cobalt Iron announced Compass NAS Protector, a new set of features in its Compass enterprise SaaS backup platform. Compass NAS Protector speeds up backups, simplifies management of NAS data, and improves and consolidates backup operations, we’re told. It has technology for identifying new, changed, and deleted NAS files compared with the Compass inventory. Proprietary scanning and identification processes optimize parallelism in NAS share/export scanning. Enhanced data-movement processing enables high-speed, parallel backup and archiving. Cobalt Iroh says it ensures NAS device independence to consistently protect physical, virtual, and cloud NAS share/export resources. Compass NAS Protector is automatically available to existing and new Compass users at no additional cost.

Ranga Rajagopalan.

SVP of Products Ranga Rajagopalan is leaving Commvault and heading to Druva.

Cloud database supplier Couchbase has enhanced its in-memory perfoirmance Capella Database-as-a-Service app. It will be accessible by popular developer platform Netlify and features a new Visual Studio Code extension, with the aim of making it easier for developers and development teams to build modern applications on Capella, streamline their workflows and increase productivity. Couchbase is also extending its enterprise deployability – adding over 10 new supported regions across three major CSPs – and introducing new features, like support for Time Series data, allowing customers to move more applications to Capella with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). 

Crucial, a Micron brand, is sampling the world’s fastest retail SSD; the T700 M.2 format drive. It uses Micron 232-layer TLC NAND, has 1, 2 and 4TB capacities, a PCIe 5.0 interface, a Phison PS5026-E26 controller, and has a 12,400 MBps sequential read and 11,800 MBps sequential write bandwidth. It can deliver up to 1.5 million/2 million random read/write IOPS.  The T700 is available with and without a passive heatsink and supports Microsoft DirectStorage API, with a direct SDD-to-GPU data path, bypassing the host CPU. More here.

Cassandra NoSQL database supplier DataStax has a partnership with AI startup ThirdAI to will try to make large language models (LLMs) and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies accessible to any organisation, regardless of where their data resides — on-premises or in the cloud — running on massively scalable databases such as DataStax’s Astra DB. This partnership marks the launch of the DataStax AI Partner Program, which has been designed to connect enterprises with AI startups and speed the development and deployment of AI applications for customers.

Search company Elastic announced a 3-year global agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and achievement of the AWS Security Competency designation. The SCA includes:

  • Accelerating integrated go-to-market activities across sales and marketing, including marketing campaigns, guides and workshops, events and sponsorships, advertising placements
  • Technology integrations and commercial incentives to streamline the migration of on-premises workloads to Elastic Cloud on AWS
  • Global expansion of best practices from the Americas to accelerate worldwide growth

Tom Coughlan writes in Forbes that David Flynn, founder and CEO of Hammerspace, spoke at the 2023 IEEE MSST conference about building an NFS file system into PCIe-based SSDs. He said that with flash performance on parity with Ethernet and with special purpose processors becoming more commonplace, the time is right for making smarter SSDs.

Hitachi Vantara has introduced Hitachi Data Reliability Engineering (DRE), a suite of consulting services assisting organizations in improving the quality and consistency of business-critical data, available through Hitachi Application Reliability Centers. With a secure, self-service approach, DRE allows organizations to embed quality data into applications, we’re told.

Huawei says its OceanStor Pacific Scale-Out Storage is suited to the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) application at petabyte scale. NWP prediction flow involves collecting meteorological observation data, pre-processing data, performing model computing, and post-processing data. Huawei says OceanStor Pacific SOS provides improved Weather Research Forcasting model storage access performance: data private clients (DPC) combining with MPI-I/O can distribute workloads to every I/O node and improve forecast accuracy performance by almost 10 times within an area of 1 km.

There is significantly improved task efficiency in large-scale cluster environments: Computing time decreases with an increase in computing nodes. Overall time decreases by 1/3 compared to before in an environment with 64 nodes and 40 cores for each node, due to I/O performance improvement. This system uses metadata search functions to speed data search and management efficiency.

Craig Bumpus.

Azure data protector Keepit has appointed Craig Bumpus as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Bumpus will be responsible for building Keepit’s go-to-market and associate strategies and helping to set direction with CEO Frederik Schouboe. Prior to joining Keepit, he served as CRO at Qumulo and at UiPath, where he played a part in growing the company from $25 million to over $400 million.

Kioxia is sampling a second generation UFS 4.0 flash drive for smartphones, digital cameras and the like. UFS 4.0 incorporates MIPI M-PHY 5.0 and UniPro 2.0, supports theoretical interface speeds of up to 23.2 gigabits per second (Gbps) per lane or 46.4 Gbps per device, and is backward compatible with UFS 3.1. Kioxia’s little UFS 4.0 card has a performance improvement over its previous generation of +18 percent sequential write, +30 percent random write and +13 percent random read.

Kioxia has a new Exceria Plus G3 Series consumer SSD in development. It comes in M.2 single-sided 2280 format with a PCIe gen 4 interface and up to 2TB capacity using TLC NAND. Provisional sequential read bandwidth is 5,000 MBps. The new drive has approximately 70 percent more power efficiency at max sequential read speed over the previous generation EXCERIA PLUS G2 Series.

Kioxia is opening two new R&D facilities — the Flagship Building at the Yokohama Technology Campus and the Shin-Koyasu Technology Front — to bolster the company’s research and development of flash memory and solid-state drives (SSDs). Going forward, other R&D functions in Kanagawa Prefecture will be relocated to these new R&D hubs to improve research efficiency.

Research house TrendForce says Micron will be fabricating its leading edge 1-gamma DRAM (~10nm) at the company’s Hiroshima, Japan fab, but that doesn’t mean it’s abandoning Taiwan. Micron will be developing the 1-gamma process in Taiwan and production will start in CY ’25 in both Taiwan and the Hiroshima facility.  

Startup Ocient announced v22 of its Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse (OHDW) product adding real-time analytics features, query performance enhancements, and support for additional business intelligence (BI) tools. It has improved performance for loading, streaming, and extract, load, transform (ELT) workloads, eliminating the need for standalone tools like Spark and Informatica, Ocient says. V22 marks GA of Hyperloglog (HLL) sketches for Ocient’s suite of real-time analytics capabilities so customers can create rollups of data using approximations on aggregated metrics and accelerate query processing without sacrificing performance. More information here.

Kevin Delane.

Enterprise SaaS app data protector OwnBackup has hired Kevin Delane as its CRO. Delane was formerly CRO at Cohesity, leaving in March this year. Cohesity and OwnBackup are partnering so that Cohesity can supply OwnBackup’s SaaS protection of Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and ServiceNow to its customers. The two are working on a joint offer to consolidate the protection of SaaS applications on a single system, streamlining IT operations, reducing attack vectors for cybercriminals to exploit, and providing business continuity to counter data disruption, we’re told.

SK hynix says it has completed the development of the industry’s most advanced 1bnm DDR5 DRAM, the fifth-generation of the 10nm process technology. The company and Intel are running a joint evaluation of 1bnm and validation via the Intel Data Center Certified memory program for DDR5 products targeted at Intel Xeon Scalable platforms. The DDR5 products provided to Intel run at the world’s fastest speed of 6.4Gbps (Gigabits per second), we’re told. This represents a 33 percent improvement in data processing speed compared with test-run products in early days of DDR5 development. The development means new DRAM products that offer both high-performance and performance per watt.

WANdisco’s crunch general meeting at which it will seek new shareholder funds needed for its survival is scheduled for June 6. Non-exec director William Grant Dollens is resigning from WANdisco’s board. He was appointed in 2016 and a company statement says: “having served a six-year term as originally envisaged at the time of his appointment, now is an appropriate time to step down as the Company embarks upon the next phase of development.”

The statement adds: “Recently Mr Dollens has been instrumental in securing the appointment of interim Chair Ken Lever, interim CEO Stephen Kelly, and interim CFO Ijoma Maluza.” Chairman Ken Lever said: “I look forward to continuing a constructive dialogue with him as the Board continues to focus on advancing the fundraising and other workstreams that are designed to lift the current suspension of WANdisco’s shares and position the Company for long term success.”