Data protector Acronis announced the integration of its Advanced Security and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions. Its users gain access to mission-critical EDR capabilities at no additional cost. It has an MSP-centric design, enhancing technician efficiency through automation and substantially reducing false positives. Acronis recommends that MSPs deploy security to every endpoint to ensure a complete cyber-protection set up. Get more information here.
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Sathya Sankaran, GM of CloudCasa by Catalogic, wants us to know that 2023 was a good year for CloudCasa. “2023 was the year we fully committed to the open source Velero community and made CloudCasa available to the tens of thousands of Velero users to manage and support their Velero deployments. We’ve seen continued adoption, accelerated by our joining the Azure Marketplace. Additionally, we’re so pleased to see CloudCasa named as a major player in the IDC Marketscape for Worldwide Container Data Management and a leader and outperformer in the GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes Data Protection. We appreciate that we continue to receive validation of our leading Kubernetes data protection offering from the analyst community, as well as our customers, users and partners.” CloudCasa’s spinout from Catalogic however did not happen in 2023.
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Commvault has released research showing that while IT and security teams are talking the talk when it comes to joint operations to combat more sophisticated cyber attacks, the reality is that less than half are walking the walk. It says that traditional silos between ITOps and security teams are beginning to break down, as organizations realize the importance of increased collaboration to combat the onslaught of more sophisticated cyber attacks.
According to the Futurum-produced, Commvault-commissioned “Overcoming Data Protection Fragmentation for Cyber-Resiliency” report, nearly all (99%) respondents indicated that the relationship between ITOps and security has grown more connected over the past 12 months. For those who described the relationship between ITOps and security as “connected,” 64 percent stated they now have shared goals for maintaining the company’s security and 70 percent stated they have joint processes and procedures in place for daily operations. However, there is still work to do. For example, only 48 percent stated they have established joint processes and procedures in place to mitigate or recover from an incident.
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Extending its coverage of archival tape library system suppliers, Hammerspace now supports QStar Archive Manager tape libraries as data sources in its Global Data Environment’s parallel file system and namespace. QStar Archive Manager provides SMB, NFS and S3 protocol options for tape library storage for data suppliers such as Cohesity, Rubrik and HYCU, and now Hammerspace. Archive Manager is gateway software running on Windows or Linux that presents one or multiple file systems or buckets for simple data management to a growing set of tape media. Learn more here.
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IBM announced fourth quarter 2023 results, with revenues up 4% Y/Y to $17.4 billion and profits of $3.3 billion, up 14%. The Infrastructure segment of its results, which includes storage, brought in $4.6 billion, up 3%. No storage sub-segment revenues were revealed. But CFO Jim Kavanaugh said: “Distributed Infrastructure revenue was up 7%, with growth across both Power and Storage. Power performance was fueled by demand for data intensive workloads on Power 10, and Storage traction was aligned to the success of the z16 cycle.” Full year revenues were $61.9 million, up 2%, with profits of $7.5 billion, up almost fourfold on the year from $1.8 billion.
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South Korea CXL technology startup Panmnesia is discussing CXL collaboration with HPE. The two have had one meeting so far but more are coming, with CXL’s relevance to HPC and AI acceleration being matters of interest to HPE.
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Data protector Rubrik has celebrated its 10th birthday. A blog by co-founder amd CEO Bipul Sinha says: “Last year, we passed $500 million in subscription annual recurring revenue and currently count more than 5,500 customers.” There are more than 3,000 Rubrik employees.Sinha says: “What’s next for Rubrik? As we have from the beginning, we’ll place no limits on what we can become. We will strive for an infinite outcome as we help organizations dealing with unprecedented volume, variability, and velocity of data build a resilient future in the face of inevitable cyberattacks. We’ll continue to define new frontiers at the intersection of artificial intelligence, business data, and cybersecurity to ensure data is secure and available to the right users on any platform at the right time for the right duration.”
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Seagate has applied its Exos 24TB technology to NAS drives with its IronWolf Pro 24 TB, upping the maximum capacity by 2 TB. This 10-platter helium-filled drive tops the existing 2 to 22 TB IronWolf capacity range and has the same 285MBps max sustained transfer rate as the 22 TB drive, 512 MB cache, 6 gig SATA interface, 7,200rpm spin speed, 2.5 million hours MTBF, 5-year warranty and 550 TB/year workload. It has Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER) and rotational vibration (RV) sensors paired with dual plane balancing to lower vibration, and is priced at $649. Get a look at the datasheet here.
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Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers calculates, based on our estimate of Toshiba’s 4Q23 HDD revenue totaling ~$665 million during 4Q23, we would estimate that total 4Q23 HDD industry revenue totaled approximately $3.37 billion, down 6.5 percent year on year and up 11 percent quarter on quarter. We now estimate that we are at a point of realizing a return of year on year growth in HDDs with our combined 1Q24 revenue estimate at ~$3.7 billion implying a 7 percent annual increase and an 11 percent jump for the quarter. This would represent the first year over year growth for the HDD industry since 1Q22.
Combined 4Q23 total HDD capacity shipped totaled approximately 215.1 exabytes, down 8 percent year on year and up 9 percent for the quarter. And total 2023 HDD exabytes shipped totalled approximately 849.3 exabytes, down 28 percent year on year and down 38 percent from the peak trailing twelve-month capacity shipped for the period ending 2Q22.
Nearline HDD capacity shipped in 4Q23 totaled ~151.4 exabytes, which was down 7 percent year on year but up 13 percent for the quarter. Seagate and Western Digital’s nearline HDD capacity shipments were up 16 percent and 23 percent respectively during 4Q23, while Toshiba’s nearline HDD capacity shipments were up only 3 percent for the quarter during this time. He estimates that Western Digital and Seagate had a ~44.5 percent and ~43.0 percent nearline HDD capacity ship share during 4Q23 – totalling 87.5 percent and leaving Toshiba with 12.5 percent.
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GPU IaaS provider Genesis Cloud is using VAST Data’s storage to help it offer AI initiatives and Large Language Model (LLM) development. The two explain that, by providing fast, real-time access to data across public and private clouds, VAST eliminates data loading bottlenecks to ensure high GPU utilization, better efficiency and ultimately lower costs to the end customer. Germany-based Genesis Cloud has datacenters In Europe and North America with the latest AI accelerators and GPUs, network and storage facilities designed for GenAI, Machine Learning, Simulations, Rendering, and other high-performance computing workloads. This customer win is similar to previous VAST Data wins at CoreWeave and Lambda Labs.
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Lola Visual Effects (VFX), which produces computer generated effects for feature films and television series, is using VAST Data storage to help streamline global collaboration on its data-intensive productions. It is adopting AI technologies and deep learning tools to enhance its special effects. VAST’s global namespace and metadata helped with collaboration across Lola VFX’s locations and paved the way for automated asset tracking and integration of production systems, and solved playback caching issues with its previous storage system. That meant it wouldn’t play back 4K footage in real time.
Edson Williams, Founder and Managing Partner at Lola VFX, explained: “Our operations demand infrastructure that not only supports but enhances real-time global collaboration. Our demands are extreme, but VAST actually exceeded our expectations. Initially, we anticipated a 24 to 36 month payback period, but with the remarkable efficiency gains we’ve experienced, we expect to see a significant return on our investment in as few as 15 to 18 months.” It bought its first VAST system I 2022. Read the case study here.
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Veeam CTO Danny Allan is leaving the company. There is a next step in his career but his LinkedIn post doesn’t say much about it all.
