Storage news roundup – July 21

Managed infrastructure systems provider 11:11 Systems has joined the AWS Partner Network (APN) and will offer customers 11:11 Cloud Backup for Veeam Cloud Connect, 11:11 Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365, and 11:11 Cloud Object Storage.

Vitali Edrenkine.

Data protector Arcserve has appointed Vitali Edrenkine as its chief marketing officer (CMO). Edrenkine was most recently SVP Growth Marketing at Vendr, and prior to that, he worked as SVP of Demand Generation and Digital Platforms at DataRobot. Prior to that he was at Rackspace. 

Catalogic’s CloudCasa for Velero is now available in the Microsoft Azure marketplace. CloudCasa is a cloud-native, data protection service that also fully supports Velero and detects and alerts on vulnerabilities in Kubernetes clusters.

Dell is recommending customers use Cirrus Data block migration with its Dell APEX-as-a-Service to move block data to the APEX block service, which is based on PowerFlex. Cirrus claims Dell APEX customers with Cirrus Data can perform block data migrations 4 to 6x faster than traditional approaches, meaning public cloud migration tools (see Azure and AWS) and specific vendor storage tools. The transfer uses thin reduction; data is compressed, and all zeros are eliminated. One Cirrus Data claimed a customer moving 9PB of data from AWS’ EBS to Dell PowerFlex realized savings of $3.2 million annually; 60% less than what they were paying for raw native storage.

DataCore’s Swarm object storage has been certified as a backup target for v12 Veeam Backup & Replication and v7 Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365.

Dell says it has enhanced PowerProtect Data Manager and PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery and PowerProtect DD Operating System. The vendor lists the features below:

  • Customers can directly back up PowerStore data to PowerProtect DD. PowerProtect Data Manager provides volume and volume group snapshot backups directly to PowerProtect appliances from PowerStore arrays using the Data Manager UI. 
  • PowerProtect Data Manager adds Recovery Orchestration for VMware VMs. 
  • Customers can vault data from the Data Manager Appliance to a PowerProtect DD-based cyber vault on-premises or in cloud, facilitating orchestrated recovery checks and the restoration of backup and appliance configuration data. 
  • Dell has added retention lock compliance on the Data Manager Appliance.
  • Customers can replicate data to/from the cloud using PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition on-premises or APEX Protection Storage for Public Cloud for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.
  • PowerProtect DDOS includes Smart Scale workload management with automatic identification and inclusion of affinity groups when performing migrations between appliances.
  • PowerProtect DDOS updates have support for KVM VirtIO disks with PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition and enhanced cloud security of APEX Protection Storage for Public Cloud with support for retention lock compliance on AWS.
Storage Scale eBook.

IBM has claimed a performance breakthrough with up to 125GBps per node throughput (from 91GBps) via the Storage Scale System 3500 that scales to 1000s of parallel access nodes. It has improved caching performance and added automated page pools to enhance the system’s ability to provide more balanced and improved performance for AI applications. Read a Storage Scale eBook to find out more.

Marvell QLE2800 HBA.

Marvell says it’s the provider of the quad-port FC target host bus adapters (HBAs) in the HPE Alletra Storage MP hardware. The QLogic QLE2800 HBA has port isolated architecture and is capable of delivering up to 64GFC bandwidth and support concurrent FC-SCSI and FC-NVMe communications. It includes support for virtual machine identification (VM-ID), automatic congestion management using Fabric Performance Impact Notifications (FPIN) and enhanced security with encrypted data in flight (EDiF) that HPE can potentially use in the future. 

Cloud file services supplier Nasuni is integrating Microsoft’s Sentinel security information and event management (SIEM) platform, with its offering. It allows customers to automatically spot threat activity and immediately initiate the appropriate responses. Microsoft Log Analytics Workspace gathers and shares Nasuni event and audit logs at any Nasuni distributed Edge device for constant monitoring with the Sentinel platform.  Nasuni also has new targeted restore capabilities for its  Ransomware Protection service.

HPC and AI storage supplier Panasas has listed some academic customers for its ActiveStor products: the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI), the UC San Diego Centre for Microbiome Innovation (CMI), LES MINES ParisTech, and TU Bergakademie Freiberg state technical university in Germany and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK. According to Hyperion Research, total HPC spending in 2022 reached $37 billion and is projected to exceed $52 billion in 2026.

SSD controller developer Phison says it has found a way of having its controlled SSDs hold AI application data that would otherwise be in DRAM, compensating for DRAM being expensive and consequently not fully specified for AI-processing servers. Based on the application timeline, Phison’s aiDAPTIV+ structurally divides large-scale AI models and collaboratively runs the model parameters with SSD offload support. This approach maximizes the executable AI models within the limited GPU and DRAM resources, which Phison claims reduces the hardware infrastructure cost required to provide AI services.

Swiss-based Proton has launched Proton Drive for Windows, a secure, end-to-end encrypted cloud storage app that offers users a way to sync and store their files to Proton Drive cloud storage right from their Windows device. Like Dropbox it ensures that files and folders are always up-to-date across all connected devices. Any changes made to files on a Windows PC will be automatically reflected on a user’s other devices that have Proton Drive installed. 

Scale-out filer supplier Qumulo announced GA of Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service (ANQ) in 11 new regions: France Central, Germany West Central, North Europe, Norway East, Sweden Central, Switzerland North, UK South, UK West, West Europe, Canada Central, and Canada East.

RightData announced DataMarket, a user-friendly way to act on all data within an organization, including understanding definitions, viewing metadata, control access, and direct access to APIs, connectors, and natural language-based data analysis. Data consumers can use natural language search to find out about data products, see quality ratings and reviews. Users can then request access and use the data through its provided API, JDBC connectors, downloads, or the rendering of data visualizations directly within the DataMarket.

Serve The Home reports Sabrent has a Rocket X5 PCIe gen 5 M.2 2280 form factor SSD in development. It has 1TB and 2TB capacity points and is packaged with a fan-driven heatsink. The 2TB model so far delivers >14GBps sequential reads and 12GBps sequential writes. These numbers would put the X5 on a par with Kioxia’s read-intensive CM7-R

Samsung has an automotive UFS 3.1 NAND with 128, 256 and 512-GB variants product for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems and satisfying the negative 40°C to 105°C temperature requirements of AEC-Q100 Grade2 semiconductor quality standard for vehicles. The 256GB model provides a sequential write speed of 700MBps and a sequential read speed of 2,000MBps. Samsung claims the product offers the industry’s lowest energy consumption. 

SMART Modular’s DC4800 data center SSD, in E1.S and U.2 formats, has been accepted as an OCP Inspired product and will be featured on the OCP Marketplace. It’s is a PCIe gen 4 connected drive available in capacities up to 7.68TB.

The SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative (SMI) announced that SNIA Swordfish has achieved a milestone with the publication of Swordfish v1.2.4a by ISO/IEC as ISO/IEC 5965:2023. The new ISO/IEC-published version replaces ISO/IEC 5695:2021, with the addition of functionality to manage NVMe and NVMe-oF. 

SuperWomen in Flash today shared figures from a recent study by the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), a non-profit community founded in 2004 which is funded by the National Science Foundation:

  • In the last five years, approximately 10% of U.S. IT patents included women as inventors.
  • In the US, IT patenting overall increased almost 17-fold between 1980-84 and 2016-2020.
  • Patents with woman inventors increased 56-fold from 1980-84 to 2017-2020, even as the percentage of women employed in IT either remained flat or decreased slightly.
  • In 2022, 27% of professional computing occupations in the U.S. workforce were held by women.
  • In 2022, 23% of total tech C-suite positions in Fortune 500 companies were held by women.

UC3400 (top) and SAA3400D (bottom). Looks pretty much like the same hardware with different labels.

Synology has launched two enterprise storage units, the UC3400 and SA3400D, both 12-bay dual-controller devices focused on business continuity. The SA3400D is focused on file and application hosting and provides minute-level failover in case of component failure. It provides more than 3,500/2,900 MBps seq. read/write throughput and 500 TB maximum storage capacity. The UC3400 is an active-active SAN, with in excess of 180,000 4K random write IOPS, and up to 576 TB of storage, for iSCSI & Fibre storage, such as VM storage.

Scale-out parallel filesystem vendor WekaIO announced what it terms as two guarantees: the WEKA Half Price Guarantee for cloud deployments; and the WEKA 2X Performance Guarantee for on-premises deployments. The Half Price Guarantee promises the WEKA Data Platform can help cloud customers achieve up to 50 percent cost savings over their current equivalent cloud storage solution with zero performance impact. Its 2x Performance Guarantee says on-prem customers will achieve a 2x performance increase over their all-flash arrays for the same cost. Eligible customers using a hybrid cloud deployment configuration can participate in both schemes. Learn more here.

Data protector Veeam has published an AWS Data Backup for Dummies eBook. Get it here.

Veritas and Kyndryl have partnered to launch two new services: Data Protection Risk Assessment with Veritas; and Incident Recovery with Veritas. These services will help enterprises protect and recover data across on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Data Protection Risk Assessment with Veritas will rely on Kyndryl’s cyber resilience framework and Veritas’ data management solutions to offer unified insights across on-premises, hybrid and cloud environments. Incident Recovery with Veritas will use AI-based autonomous data management capabilities to give customers a fully managed service encompassing backup, disaster recovery and cyber recovery. 

Phil Venables, CISO at Google Cloud has joined the Board of Directors at identity security company Veza.

Tom’s Hardware reports China’s YMTC is manufacturing 128-layer 3D NAND with Xtacking 3.0 technology, which is based on placing the 3D NAND flash wafer underneath a separately fabbed CMOS peripheral circuit logic chip, bonded to it with millions of small connectors. It has previously built its 128-layer NAND with Xtacking 2.0 tech. Xtacking 3.0 was developed for YMTC’s 232-layer chip but US tech export restrictions have halted that product’s development, so back to last generation tech rejuvenated with new peripheral logic. Research house Yole analysts have determined that YMTC’s 232L NAND has two separate components or decks; one with 128 layers and the other 125.