Cloud-native data protector Alcion has joined Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab Venture Network as an inaugural startup partner. Several members of its leadership team – including co-founders Niraj Tolia and Vaibhav Kamra – are alumni of CMU.
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Aston University researchers in the UK are part of a team that has sent data at a record rate of 402 terabits per second using commercially available optical fiber. This beats their previous record, announced in March 2024, of 301 terabits or 301,000,000 megabits per second using a single, standard optical fiber. The international research team included Professor Wladek Forysiak and Dr Ian Phillips who are members of the University’s Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies (AIPT). Led by the Photonic Network Laboratory of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) based in Tokyo, Japan, also Nokia Bell Labs of the US.
The speed was achieved by using a wider spectrum, six wavelength bands (O, E, S, C, L, and U) rather than the previous four, which increased capacity for data sharing. Aston University contributed specifically by building a set of U-band Raman amplifiers – the longest part of the combined wavelength spectrum – where conventional doped fiber amplifiers are not presently available from commercial sources.
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French DNA storage startup Biomemory has hired Dr Dominique Loque as its chief scientific officer. He comes from being head of R&D at Neoplants – a synthetic biological tool maker for plant metabolic engineering. Loque worked at Bayer Crop Science before that. Biomemory has also added Chrystelle Roger, Steffen Hellmold, Olivier Lauvray, Thibault Vieille, and Raphaël Maunier to its Advisory Board.
Erfane Arwani, CEO of Biomemory, said: “In ten years, we anticipate the addressable market for DNA data storage to be around $10 billion. It will be essential to collaborate with the largest players in the data storage sector to meet the growing demand for high-density storage in datacenters while preserving our planet from excessive energy consumption.”
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Cirata, the rebranded active data replicator WANdisco, says that General Motors is proceeding to phase 2 under an existing master license agreement. Phase 2 will be transacted on the Azure Marketplace, which includes a 4PB data allowance and accompanying maintenance and support services, with a contract value of $490,733.
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Cirata has released Data Migrator 2.5, which includes native integration with the Databricks Unity Catalog. It can be used to automate large-scale transfer of data and metadata from existing data lakes to cloud storage and database targets, even while changes are being made by the application at the source. Data Migrator 2.5 also supports IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS) – the cluster file system used as storage for IBM Spectrum Scale data lakes. This initiates data transfer from a source GPFS file system as changes occur, without disruption to the storage environment. It can be used for one-off cloud migrations, disaster recovery processes, and continuous data migration use cases. Migration targets supported include the Hadoop Distributed File System, Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service, Amazon S3, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2, Google Cloud Storage, IBM Cloud Object Storage, and Oracle Object Store.
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Data lakehouse supplier Cloudera has appointed Francisco Mateo-Sidron as SVP of sales for the EMEA region. He was previously SVP and GM for EMEA at Qlik for almost three years, with 25 years at SAP before that.
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Data Protector Druva has made a February 2024 Gartner Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions voice of the customer document available for download. Naturally it features strongly in the report, being one of four chosen customer choices amongst the 11 suppliers mentioned. Download it here (registration required).
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Data pipeline supplier Fivetran has been hired by customer service platform Intercom. It says Intercom can now centralize data from all its third-party sources, instantly placing reliable and secure data into the hands of analysts and other key business decision makers, while freeing up the company’s data engineers so they have more time to focus on business-critical initiatives.
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The FMS 2024 conference announced keynote sessions will be provided by FADU, Kixoia, KOVE, Micron, NEO Semiconductor, Phison, Samsung, Silicon Motion, SK hynix, and Western Digital. Jay Kramer, FMS keynote master of ceremonies, said: “Attendees will hear about the latest memory and storage technology advances empowering emerging applications driven by AI, big data analytics, quantum computing, and 5G infrastructure.”
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Streaming data lake supplier Hydrolix has launched its Powered by Hydrolix Partner Program, saying partners can offer customers hot access to four times more data at a quarter of the cost. It was inspired, designed, and launched in the wake of a successful partnership with Akamai. Hydrolix joined the Akamai Qualified Cloud Compute Partner program in November 2023 and together the companies built the TrafficPeak managed observability service that is used by more than 100 companies worldwide.
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Huawei Central reports that Huawei and China’s Wuhan Xinxin (XMC) have a collaboration to build high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, which are used to provide GPUs with fast access to more data than can be held in x86 server-socket DRAM. Currently, SK hynix and Samsung have a near 50:50 share of the HBM market, with Nvidia the dominant GPU supplier. Micron has entered the market as well and wants to grow its 3–4 percent share. GenAI training is sending GPU demand, and thus HBM demand, through the roof.
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Reuters reports that NAND and SSD supplier Kioxia is to file a preliminary IPO application for its shares to be listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Kioxia declined to comment. A consortium led by Bain has majority ownership of Kioxia, which has a NAND fabrication joint venture with Western Digital. Kioxia previously attempted an IPO in 2020 and a merger with Western Digital in 2023, which foundered due to opposition from Bain consortium member SK hynix. Now generative AI is helping to lead NAND market revenues out of a cyclical trough and an IPO looks possible again. Kioxia’s latest IPO plans emerged initially in April.
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Data management supplier Reltio has appointed Mihir Shah to its advisory board. Shah was CEO at Storcentric, leaving in April. Storcentric was a mini-conglomerate operation, acquiring Vexata, Nexsan, and Drobo, and was itself bought by Serene Investment Management in February 2023. He became the founder and managing partner at Altos Equity and a board member at OtherWorld Computing.
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Reltio announced the latest release of its Connected Data Platform with enhancements for its AI-powered offerings: Customer 360 Data Product, Multidomain MDM, and Entity Resolution. There are new velocity packs, additional audience-segmentation capabilities for Customer 360 Data Product, premium business continuity service featuring cross-regional disaster recovery and enhanced data resiliency, and expanded GenAI and ML capabilities.
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Data protector and cyber resiliency business Rubrik has been named the Healthcare and Life Sciences 2024 Microsoft Partner of the Year.
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Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson says Seagate appears to be continuing to reduce forward velocity of HAMR component requirements (seemingly pushing out a meaningful production ramp), while continuing to lift procurement of parts for 18–22TB conventional drives.
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Reuters reports that the SK Group will invest ₩103 trillion ($74.6 billion) through 2028 to strengthen its AI memory chips business, which includes building HBM chips. Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson suggests 80 percent of this investment “is slated to be allocated towards HBM.”
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NAND supplier and SK hynix subsidiary Solidigm, working with the Storage Review media outlet, announced a new world record for the calculation of 𝛑, surpassing both records they previously set in March 2024 and March 2023. They calculated 𝛑 to 202 trillion digits – nearly doubling their most recent record of 105 trillion digits set earlier this year in March. Their system used nearly 1.5PB of storage across 28 Solidigm D5-P5336 61.44TB NVMe SSDs, in a Dell PowerEdge server powered by Intel Xeon CPUs. The calculation spanned an uninterrupted calculation period of 85 days – about three months.
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Swissbit’s new N2000 (Gen3 PCIe) and N3000 (Gen4 PCIe) DRAM-less SSD product families each have four lanes and are available in M.2 2230/2242/2280 form factors. The N2000 series offers storage capacities from 60 to 480GB with TLC technology. The spectrum of the N2600 with pSLC ranges from 20 to 160GB and offers an increased service life. The features are complemented by standard integrated security functions such as AES256 encryption, Crypto Erase, and TCG Opal 2.0. The N2000 family is ideal for green IoT applications such as charging stations, industrial applications, embedded systems, data logging, and boot OS scenarios.
The N3000 series is available in M.2 2242/2280 form factors with TLC technology and capacities ranging from 240 to 1,920GB. The same applies to the N3002 PLP series, which is available in the M.2 2280 form factor. The N3602 PLP series with pSLC technology, which is available in the M.2 2280 form factor with storage capacities ranging from 80 to 320GB, is suitable for particularly high endurance requirements. They have security functions such as AES256, Crypto Erase, and TCG Opal 2.0, and are suited for industrial applications, networking systems such as routers or switches, as well as edge servers.
Swissbit offers a solderable alternative to the N2000 in the form of the E2000 PCIe BGA family. The E2000 and E2600 series offer full PCIe SSD performance in a multi-chip design measuring just 3.2 square centimeters. The ultra-compact BGAs also support the ambient temperature range from -40 to 85°C and are available with storage capacities ranging from 60 to 480GB (E2000, TLC) and 20 to160 GB (E2600, pSLC).
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Data warehouser Teradata will offer its VantageCloud Lake on Google Cloud, featuring updates that are designed to leverage the strengths of both Teradata and Google Cloud. It says key components of VantageCloud Lake are its ClearScape Analytics and a connected ecosystem that, for the Google Cloud edition, include seamless integrations with Google Cloud’s AI technologies, Vertex AI platform, and Gemini models. For example, the Teradata Customer Complaint Analyzer uses Gemini models to provide a richer and more comprehensive view of customer complaints. This joint solution can automatically categorize, analyze, and identify insights from text and audio-based customer complaints more efficiently than traditional methods, which only analyze text.
Teradata VantageCloud Lake on Google Cloud is now generally available. ClearScape Analytics integration with Vertex AI platform is now generally available, and the solution’s enhancements with Gemini models will be available for private preview in the first half of 2025.