Data intelligence supplier Alation has put out a Data Culture Maturity Assessment framework to help organizations measure the value of their data culture. The assessment applies the four core tenets of the Alation Data Culture Maturity Model – Data Search & Discovery, Data Governance, Data Literacy, and Data Leadership – to measure an organization’s ability to realize business value from its data initiatives. The framework is available on the Alation website, and was developed with Alation’s global customer base, which includes 40 percent of Fortune 100 companies.
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CRN reports that Arcserve has abruptly ended sales of its Cloud Services and OneXafe Solo hardware. OneXafe Solo is an appliance that streams backup data to cloud services. Website sales ended February 12 and distribution sales will end on March 8. Product support will end on July 31. Arcserve is thinking about external cloud services suppliers to replace its in-house cloud services. It obtained the OneXafe product line when it acquired StorageCraft in March 2021.
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Data protector Catalogic is making a so-called soft launch of DPX 4.10, which brings new features and improvements for both DPX and vStore. A PDF highlights the major enhancements and includes release notes. A Catalogic newsletter has additional details.
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Data streamer Confluent announced the Confluent Migration Accelerator, saying that as enterprises look to migrate away from Apache Kafka and traditional streaming infrastructure (e.g. messaging systems), Confluent’s Migration Accelerator will lower the barrier to migration. Open source Apache Kafka has gained widespread adoption as a way to harness real-time data, with more than 100,000 global organizations and 75 percent of the Fortune 500 using it today. Despite its popularity, self-managing Kafka can create significant ongoing operational burdens and risks. It does not have elastic scalability, failover processes, cluster sizing, and more.
Launch partners for the Confluent Migration Accelerator include Amazon Web Services (AWS), EPAM, Google Cloud, iLink, Improving, Microsoft Azure, Platformatory, Psyncopate, CloudMile, Ness, and SVA System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH. Confluent will bring in more partners to grow the program.
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ExaGrid, which supplies a tiered deduping backup target with a fast restore landing zone, has appointed Rohan Cook as AVP of Sales in the APAC region. Bill Andrews, President and CEO, said: “ExaGrid is continuing to expand globally and now has over 4,100 active customer installations in more than 80 countries. The APAC region is a crucial area of growth and a major focus of the company in 2024.”
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TrueNAS supplier iXsystems and open source developer Klara have contributed a Fast Dedupe data deduplication feature to the OpenZFS and TrueNAS communities. Fast Dedup enhances sustained deduplication performance. Deduplication performance has been limited in ZFS and OpenZFS since the inception of the file system due to its metadata handling. Fast Dedup, we’re told, ameliorates this with the introduction of a re-engineered metadata structure dynamically sized to operate in RAM or on dedicated flash devices for expedited processing. These advancements collectively enable up to 20 times faster performance and five times more usable capacity for certain workloads while greatly improving reliability for systems with deduplication enabled. The technology outperforms legacy dedup by employing algorithms and strategies that scan, identify, and eliminate duplicates, while keeping metadata in RAM and SSDs.
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Kioxia has offered NAND chipmaking capacity to SK hynix to encourage the company to agree to a merger with Western Digital’s NAND+SSD business unit, according to the Jiji news agency via Reuters. Kioxia and Western Digital have a NAND foundry joint venture. WD wants to spin-off its NAND+SSD business unit into an independent company and had tried to merge with Kioxia. But SK hynix, which owns part of Kioxia, blocked the proposed deal late last year.
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Unstructured data management company Komprise doubled its new subscriptions in 2023 compared to 2022, driven by strong growth in new logos and record expansion from existing customers. The company grew average annual contract value by 60 percent with multiple seven-figure deals throughout the year, we’re told. Komprise is now managing unstructured data in the exabyte range across its customers. Kumar Goswami, co-founder and CEO, said: “In the AI era, customers want to turn data volumes into data value and Komprise Intelligent Data Management leverages AI to look inside files and provide another level of insight and value.”
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ObjectFirst announced rapid bookings growth and strong business momentum on the first anniversary of the company’s launch in February 2023. It has deployed over 80 Ootbi installations – six of which were valued over $100,000 – and achieved bookings growth of over 200 percent from the first half of the year to the second half. There has been a 400 percent increase in inbound sales inquiries in the same period. ObjectFirst increased its employee base by 64 percent in 2023.
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Cloud file services supplier Panzura has signed international distributor Climb Channel Solutions to make Panzura’s products available through its reseller network. Climb is its first distributor. Panzura aims to accelerate growth as a channel-first organization. Climb will work with and onboard 99 percent of Panzura’s current DVARs to grow their business. Panzura CEO Dan Waldschmidt said: “Partnering with Climb Channel Solutions will enable us to bring radical productivity to new organizations by delivering seamless end-to-end data management and protection to their most valuable asset: data.”
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Data manager Quantum has published an ebook, Content Owner’s Guide to AI Content Enhancement. It asks how can content producers use AI to enhance their content workflows and simplify and speed the production process to bring new content to market faster? Readers will learn about the different types of AI, best practices for deploying AI technology to speed and enhance content workflows, and how to use new content creation and enhancement tools, including Quantum CatDV and Nvidia solutions, to deliver content faster, and reduce repetition. Get the ebook here.
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According to Stocklytics.com, Samsung’s semiconductor market share dwindled by about 40 percent in the last two years. The firm’s worldwide market share in the semiconductor industry was 7.5 percent in 2023, down from 12.3 percent in 2021. Global semiconductor revenue slid to $533 billion last year, an 11.1 percent year-on-year decline. Out of the total, Samsung’s semiconductor revenue accounted for 7.5 percent of the market share, raking in roughly $39.9 billion, a sharp decline of over 37.5 percent from 2022’s $63.8 billion. Samsung hopes to regain share partly through shipping HBM chips to GPU suppliers.
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The Nikkei news outlet reports that Sony will start mass-producing laser diodes, similar to LEDs, for use in Seagate’s 30TB-plus HAMR disk drives. These drives’ read/write heads use a so-called nanophotonic laser producing 830 nm light photon pulses. Seagate said it plans to vertically integrate the nanophotonic laser into the plasmonic writer subsystem in-house. Sony Semiconductor Solutions (SSS) will start producing the diodes in May. It looks like SSS could supply the diodes to Seagate for such integration or possibly be a second source for the diodes.
Sony intends to invest around ¥5 billion ($33 million) in a production facility in Miyagi Prefecture, Honshu, and a Thailand plant for the laser diode supply. Once WD and Toshiba move to HAMR technology, SSS could have two more customers for its laser diodes.
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Hyperconverged cloud technology supplier Virtuozzo is announcing a free migration program for VMware cloud providers that are looking for a cloud platform alternative and were ejected from VMware’s Cloud Provider Program (VCPP) following the Broadcom acquisition. The Virtuozzo promotion includes free professional services for VCPP members who are no longer eligible for or no longer accept VMware under Broadcom’s terms. Virtuozzo can help them to continue operating as cloud service providers and adopt a lower-cost, more future-proof public/private/hybrid cloud solution at the same time, we’re told. The services available can include:
- Free discovery/requirements analysis
- Free managed migration from VMware to Virtuozzo’s service provider cloud platform
- Free managed deployment services
- Free training, certification, and technical account management
VMware customers can inquire here.
