CDN supplier Akamai has confirmed six new core compute regions across Europe, Asia, North America and Latin America. The new locations in Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Miami, Milan, Jakarta, Osaka, Japan, and São Paulo expand Akamai’s cloud computing network todata-intensive connection points that will ultimately allow enterprise customers to provide improved connectivity and experience to end users across the globe. This is the third installment of Akamai’s rollout of new cloud computing regions since the launch of Akamai Connected Cloud in February and its acquisition of Linode last year. Akamai ia focusing on a future where scale becomes more about the size of the network vs. the size of its datacenters, more effectively powering modern applications.
…
Data intelligence supplier Alation has become the leader in the latest Forrester Wave: Data Governance Solutions report. It scored highly in a number of sections and was recognised for its intelligent federated governance approach. The report notes that Alation blends technical skills in the field of machine learning (ML) and intelligent asset classification capabilities with a focus on collaboration tools and data valuation models. Alation received the highest scores possible in 12 criteria, including data governance management, as well as the highest possible ranking among all vendors in the strategy category.
…
Backblaze has reported that the lifetime annualized failure rate for all its SSDs was 0.6 percent, based on 2,072 drives operating for 1,897,473 drive days with 31 drive failures. This is based on SSD products with more than 100 units in use, more than 10,000 drive days in operation, and a statistical confidence interval of 1.0 percent or less between the low and the high values. It previously found that the lifetime annualized failure rate for all its disk drives in Q2 2023 was 1.45 percent, compared to 1.40 percent in Q1. That’s based on a population of 241,297 disk drives. Taking the average of the two, the HDD AFR is 1.425 percent while the SSD AFR is 0.6 percent. There is vastly more data for the disk drives, which means Backblaze can have more confidence in the accuracy of its HDD AFR than its SSD failure rate data.
…
Open-source columnar database developer ClickHouse announced GA of ClickPipes, which connects external data sources directly into ClickHouse Cloud. ClickPipes allows users to set up continuous data pipelines in just a few clicks and launches with integrations for Confluent Cloud, Amazon MSK and Apache Kafka, with plans to add more. ClickHouse Cloud, capable of processing billions of events per second, launched as a fully-managed cloud service in December 2022, building on open source real-time analytics technology used in production at companies such as eBay, Uber, and Disney. Now, by launching ClickPipes, it unveils a way for companies – like the 80 percent of the Fortune 100 that use Apache Kafka – to plug streaming data sources into its database for real-time apps and analytics.
…
Decodable, which has developed an enterprise-ready stream processing platform built on Apache Flink and Debezium, has announced the GA of Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), allowing users to run a private instance of the Decodable data plane – the part that handles connectivity and stream processing – in their own AWS account. In addition, Decodable has opened up a technical preview to support custom jobs written in Java using the standard Apache Flink DataStream and Table APIs.
…
CRN has reported that Dell has moved/promoted Jeff Boudreau, president and GM of its Infrastructure Solutions Group to Chief AI Officer, with Arthur Lewis taking on the ISG presidency. Both report to COO and vice-chairman Jeff Clarke. Clarke said Dell needs “dedicated leadership to drive our AI strategy across the company.” The AI Officer’s team will “partner across the company to understand domain-specific use cases, build, define and standardize architectures for the future, and integrate AI across our product portfolio. The team will also build relevant AI partnerships.”
…
Nearly 4 in 5 companies have developed plans for achieving carbon neutrality (78 percent), making sustainability a top priority, according to The State of Data Infrastructure Sustainability report. To help companies achieve this, Hitachi Vantara is launching its new Sustainability Services and Solutions to aid customers in achieving critical environmental and decarbonization goals. Hitachi Vantara’s new offerings enable organizations to adopt sustainable business practices that pave the way to a greener future, and focus on four decarbonisation areas: Green IT, Manufacturing, Facilities and Data and analytics.
…
Kioxia Europe is sampling new, higher performing JEDEC e-MMC Ver 5.1 compliant embedded flash memory products for consumer applications. They integrate the latest version of the company’s BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory (BiCS 8 at 218-layers) and a controller in a single package, reducing processor workload and improving ease of use. Both 64 and 128 gigabytes (GB) products will be available. As the market continues to shift to UFS, there are cases where e-MMC may still be used. This includes consumer products with mid-range storage requirements such as tablets, personal computers, point-of-sale devices and other portable handheld devices, as well as smart TVs and smart NICs.
…
A new open source project called LangStream is designed to help developers with getting data stored in multiple different sources – vectorized data in a database, non-vector data held in databases, and event stream data alike – into generative AI applications. It supports multiple databases including MySQL and PostgreSQL as well as Cassandra. Read a Datastax blog – https://www.datastax.com/blog/how-langstream-can-integrate-diverse-data-for-generative-ai – about LangStream here.
…
Storage supplier Nexsan is positioning its products as cloud storage repatriation targets. CEO Dan Shimmerman said; “Cloud repatriation is gaining massive traction from organizations that need the ability to minimize costs while maintaining greater control of their data and applications. One of the biggest challenges surrounding cloud repatriation is ensuring your organization has the right infrastructure to support moving your data from the cloud to on-premises solutions.”
Nexsan’s diverse product line includes Unity, a unified system with the capacity and performance needed for the most demanding mix of workloads, E-Series for high-density and high-capacity storage that can shrink the data storage footprint and massively reduce costs by saving on power, plus BEAST Elite is a cost-optimized storage solution, purpose-built to offer optimal reliability, availability and density – with 960TB in a standard 4U rack – to seamlessly manage high-volume applications like backups, archives, and video surveillance.
…
Analysts at a Nutanix investor day were told it has completed its subscription transformation from perpetual license sales and a scaling phase lies ahead. Its ARR has a >20 percent CAGR in fy23 to fy27, with $1.4-$1.5 billion by fy25 and $3.1-$3.3 billion by fy27. Nutanix is guiding revenue to grow at a ~15 percent fy23-fy27 CAGR; $2.4-$2.6 billion by fy25 and $3.2-$3.4 billion by fy27. The company will look at opportunistic tuck-in acquisitions looking ahead. GPT-in-a-box is a significant opportunity for Nutanix. Ditto Cisco adopting Nutanix HCI to replace its unpopular HyperFlex HCI offering. The Broadcom-VMware acquisition will encourage the largest customers to move to a dual vendor strategy, benefitting Nutanix.
…
The latest version of ObjectiveFS, v7.1, includes native support for ARM64, AVX2, AVX-512 and more hardware architectures This version uses the fastest vector instructions available on the platform to achieve the best performance. The release includes:
- Linux x86-64 smart binary automatically selects the fastest binary for the platform
- Linux x86-64 includes support for AVX-512, AVX2, AVX, SSE4_2, SSE3, etc
- Linux ARM64 binary for ARMv8.0 and newer
- Linux ARM64 supports NEON instruction set
- MacOS universal binary for x86-64 and ARM64
- Client-side encryption now uses the fastest vector instructions available on the platform
- SHA-1 ARM64 and x86-64 native instructions support (signature v2 object stores)
- SHA-256 ARM64 and x86-64 native instructions support (signature v4 object stores)
- Vector instruction performance gain, e.g. 3.9X faster data integrity checks with AVX-512
For the full list of updates in the 7.1 release, see the release notes.
…
SmartX was named an Asia/Pacific Customer’s Choice in the recently released “Voice of the Customer for Full-Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software” by Gartner for the third consecutive year. The report included 11 worldwide vendors. The recognition and analysis are based on eligible published views during the specified 18-month submission period. Overall, SmartX was rated 4.9 out of 5 stars, with 100 percent of reviewers saying they would recommend SmartX products. In the SmartX Vendor Summary section, SmartX received a 4.8/5 in product capabilities, sales experience, deployment experience, and a 5/5 in support experience.
…
Cohasset’s VAST DataStore Compliance Assessment validates that when configured properly, the VAST DataStore meets the requirements for immutability and audibility in SEC rules 17a-4(f), 18a-6(e), FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) Rule 4511(c) and CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) rule 1.31(c)-(d). We understand that records management consultancy Cohasset Associates is the gold standard of third-party validation. VASt says that, with it storage, a customer’s compliance archive in its all-flash system with support for GPU direct storage and NVIDIA SuperPods, is available for analysis while being locked against deletion and modification as required by SEC Rule 17a-4 and similar regulations.
…
Software RAID developer Xinnor will present a talk titled “Optimizing Lustre Throughput in a Software RAID Environment: Configuration tips and Performance Insights” at the upcoming Lustre Administrators & Developers Workshop, scheduled to be held in Bordeaux on October 5-6, 2023. The Lustre Administrators & Developers Workshop serves as a premier platform for Lustre administrators and developers from across the globe to convene, share experiences, discuss developments, tools, best practices, and much more. It’s a must-attend event for those deeply involved in the Lustre ecosystem.
