Storage news ticker – June 26

Storage news
Storage news

Google has announced GA of BigLake support for Apache Iceberg, which has been in preview since October 2022. BigLake is a storage facility that unifies data warehouses and lakes and allows BigQuery and open source frameworks like Spark to access data with fine-grained access control. It provides accelerated query performance across multi-cloud storage and open formats such as Apache Iceberg.  BigLake Metastore provides shared metadata for Iceberg tables across BigQuery and open source engines, eliminating the need to maintain multiple table definitions. You can provide BigQuery datasets and table properties when creating new Iceberg tables in Spark, and those tables become automatically available for the BigQuery user to query. More information here.


Decentralized storage provider Filebase tells us that it now has over 35,000-plus users on the platform. The uploaded file count has surpassed 1.2 billion files (live in-production for four-plus years). It has launched GA support for its Dedicated IPFS Gateway product and also recently launched its Filebase for Startups program, which now has about 50 entries, to provide Enterprise Managed IPFS Resources. Here is a NFT Metadata Storage Provider Comparison in which Filebase shines.

iStorage has announced its USB 3.2 datAshur PRO+C, with the Type-C interface, the world’s first and only flash drive pending the new FIPS 140-3 Level 3 validation scheme. It employs PIN protection and hardware encryption to safeguard data to military standards. Capacities range from 32GB to 512GB. Built into the drive is a rechargeable battery, allowing the user to enter an 8 to 15-digit PIN via the onboard keypad before connecting the device to a USB port. The datAshur PRO+C cannot be accessed without the user’s unique PIN.

If the user PIN is entered incorrectly 10 consecutive times, the user PIN will be deleted. All data will remain on the device but can only be accessed by entering the admin PIN. If the admin PIN is entered incorrectly 10 times, the PIN, encryption key and data will be lost forever, and the device will revert to factory default settings.

The Piql-based digital storage vault in Svalbard is being used by the National Library and Archives (NLA) of the UAE, and Piql’s partner Melara Middle East. The vendor says the National Library and Archives of the UAE will be the first archival center in the Arab world and the Middle East to contract with Piql, obtaining its secure, immutable and permanent data storage technology. The vault will include original data conversion and preservation services securely for long periods of time – up to a claimed 2,000 years, says the vendor – including digital preservation services for the UAE, the GCC countries, the Middle East and North Africa.

System-on-chip builder SMART Modular’s DC4800 NVMe PCIe gen 4 SSD product in U.2 and EDSFF E.1S formats have been accepted by the Open Compute Project as an OCP Inspired product and will be featured on the OCP website in the Marketplace section. They have capacities of up to 7.68TB.

Stravito is a Swedish SaaS startup (2017) which provides a central place to store and analyze market research data. Its customers include McDonald’s, Comcast, Burberry and Danone. It has announced proprietary generative AI capabilities to improve the search experience and provide users with quicker insights. Users can ask full questions using everyday short natural language and get answers synthesized from various proprietary sources. They can also dive deeper with recommended questions – all with the security of a closed system that generates accurate answers exclusively from a client’s owned research materials, and not beyond. Users can now ask Stravito any question, of any complexity, and quickly receive complete answers that aggregate insights from various sources.

Taiwan-based TeamGroup has launched a set of industrial wide temperature (a temperature range of -40-85°C) storage products called ULTRA. There is DIMM memory from 8GB to 32GB, available in two types: DDR4/DDR5 U-DIMM and SO-DIMM. They comply with JEDEC frequency standards and can reach transmission rates as high as 5,600MT/s. An ULTRA SSD comes in the PCIe Gen 3×4 2280 form factor with a capacity range of 128GB to 1TB. The maximum read and write speed is 2,100MB/s and 1,700MB/s, respectively. The products are available for sampling. PCIe interfaces are replacing SATA III in the automotive embedded and other harsh temperature environments.

TeamGroup storage

China’s TerraMaster is announcing its Centralized Backup and Duple Backup. Centralized Backup uses a TerraMaster NAS as the store for backups of virtual machines, servers, PCs and Macs. It supports multiple types of device backup and recovery, allowing backups to be made of the data from dozens or even hundreds of PCs, servers, or virtual machines with only one TNAS. Duple Backup is a disaster recovery tool for TNAS devices. Important folders or iSCSI LUNs in TNAS can be backed up to multiple destinations, including a remote TNAS device, file server, or cloud disk, using an intuitive user menu. It also supports multiple backup strategies such as incremental backup and multi-version backup. 

TerrMaster storage diagram

TrendForce reports that explosive growth in generative AI applications like chatbots has spurred significant expansion in AI server development in 2023. This will drive up demand for HBM during 2023-2024. Presently, Nvidia’s A100 and H100 chips each boast up to 80 GB of HBM2e and HBM3. In its latest integrated CPU and GPU, the Grace Hopper Superchip, Nvidia expanded a single chip’s HBM capacity by 20 percent, hitting a mark of 96GB. AMD’s MI300 also uses HBM3, with the MI300A capacity remaining at 128GB like its predecessor, while the more advanced MI300X has ramped up to 192 GB, marking a 50 percent increase. TrendForce predicts that AI accelerator chips that primarily utilize HBM will have a total HBM capacity of 290 million GB in 2023 – a nearly 60 percent growth rate. This momentum is projected to sustain at a rate of 30 percent or more into 2024.

There’s some good news for WANdisco, which has been recapitalizing and struggling to regain its stock market listing after a senior sales rep devastated the company’s reported 2022 earnings with possibly fraudulent sales reports. It announced a new two-year agreement valued at $113,125 with Accenture to use WANdisco Data Migrator to support the data modernization program for a leading Australian bank. The company expects to recognize revenue from Q2 2023.

Western Digital, following critical security vulnerability CVE-2022-36327, has blocked access to its cloud services by My Cloud devices unless users update their firmware to My Cloud OS version 5.26.202. It fixes this bug as well as three other medium-severity issues. This affects Western Digital’s My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, SanDisk ibi, and My Cloud OS 5 devices. My Cloud OS 5 users can still access their data on these devices locally, but My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, and SanDisk ibi devices will not be able to access their data until they update to the latest firmware release.