Cloud storage provider Backblaze has appointed its first CRO, Jason Wakeam, whose past experience includes serving as the VP of global sales and OEM at SnapLogic. He’s also worked at Cloudera, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard. Wakeam will spearhead the company’s overall sales strategy, with a focus on expanding market share and driving new revenue opportunities. He succeeds co-founder Nilay Patel, who previously served as VP of sales, and has transitioned to oversee the company’s recently established New Markets team with a special focus on AI. Backblaze says it has a commitment to attracting, retaining, and growing with larger mid-market customers.
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WANrockIT and PORTrockIT WAN acceleration supplier Bridgeworks has signed its first global distributor – Nuvola Distribution, a technology and services distributor based in the UK and Republic of Ireland. Bridgeworks’ WAN Acceleration technologies use artificial intelligence, machine learning and data parallelisation to increase the speed and volume of data flows over wide area networks (WANs). They are data agnostic and mitigate latency and packet loss to permit encrypted data to be sent and received over thousands of miles, while significantly increasing bandwidth utilization by up to 98 percent, the company claims. CEO and CTO David Trossell says the initial goal is to enable half a dozen strategic reseller partners in the UK, and to expand into each of the major European markets in year one. “We would also like to establish the Bridgeworks name and portfolio across EMEA,” he says.
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Ceramic nanoscale etching archival storage startup Cerabyte, which recently opened US offices, has joined the Active Archive Alliance. Rich Gadomski, co-chairperson of the Active Archive Alliance and head of tape evangelism at FUJIFILM North America Corp., Data Storage Solutions, said: “In this era of explosive data growth and the impact of AI/ML, the demand for active archive solutions is more critical than ever. Cerabyte’s cutting-edge, ceramic-based data storage technology aligns perfectly with our mission of providing sustainable, cost-effective strategies to address data growth challenges now and in the future.”
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Cohesity announced v7.2 of its unified cloud data management platform, Cohesity Data Cloud, with enhancements around speed, security, scale, and simplicity. It says it has has better security thanks to OAuth 2.0 support, stronger control and recovery of Kubernetes workloads, and more flexibility and efficiency when deploying in the three major cloud platforms AWS, Azure, and Google. With this latest release, customers can achieve a lower TCO and better performance offering multiple configurations, up to 200 TByte per node, that simplify operations and reduce overall storage costs. Compared to prior versions of the cloud edition, the new version can help organisations realise over 100% ingest throughput, require up to 50 percent fewer nodes per cluster, and reduce costs by up to 66 percent per terabyte. Check out the release notes here.
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Data protector Commvault has hired Pranay Ahlawat as its first CTO and AI Officer (CTAIO). He brings a background in AI, cloud and infrastructure software, business strategy, product development, and operations, including experience at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), advising software and SaaS companies on cloud and infrastructure, brings to Commvault. He’ll report to Chief Product Officer Rajiv Kottomtharayil.
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DataStax will use NVIDIA’s NeMo Retriever as its default vector embedding service in its cloud service Astra DB. Langflow and Astra DB now integrate NVIDIA NeMo Retriever NIM embedding microservice; the Hyper-Converged Database for GenAI apps now includes NeMo Retriever NIM embedding microservice as default. More info here.
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Analyst research firm DCIG has published a report naming its top 5 alternatives to VMware. They are HiveIO Hive Fabric, Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Scale Computing Platform (SC//Platform) and VergeIO VergeOS.
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SW-defined storage survivor Falconstor announced certification of its StorSafe and StorGuard products with IBM Storage Ceph. IBM Storage Ceph provides an efficient way to build a data lakehouse for IBM watsonx.data and next-generation AI workloads. StorSafe is the only IBM-certified, sold, and supported solution for backup optimization with IBM Power Virtual Server and now Ceph, available via the IBM Cloud Catalog. StorGuard offers storage virtualization, business continuity, high availability, system failover, and data migration.
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HPE CMO Jim Jackson is retiring after 7 years in post. He will be succeeded by Jennifer Temple who is being promoted after 7 years of being Chief Communications Officer to Chief Marketing & Communications Officer (CMCO). She will oversee all aspects of HPE’s global brand, marketing, and communications strategy and said: “HPE is a brand executive’s dream because purpose comes together with bold innovation and passionate team members. To fully become the AI solution partner for any enterprise so we can keep solving the world’s biggest challenges, we are going to need to show up and connect in powerful new ways. This is going to be fun.”
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SaaS data protection vendor Keepit released a survey and report, “The great balancing act: Cybersecurity leaders tackle rising pressures”, saying there are critical gaps in disaster recovery strategies and a pressing need for enhanced data security measures. Survey highlights
- Financial systems: 70% are covered by data protection strategies.
- E-commerce and HR Management Systems: 50 percent are covered.
- CRM and ERP systems: 48 percent and 42 percent respectively.
- Critical transaction-based systems, custom applications, and collaboration and productivity tools: Are lagging behind with only between a third and a quarter of systems covered.
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Kioxia, the inventor of NAND flash memory when it was part of Toshiba, is the recipient of the FMS: the Future of Memory and Storage Lifetime Achievement Award for 2024. The Kioxia engineering team, consisting of Hideaki Aochi, Ryota Katsumata, Masaru Kito, Masaru Kido, and Hiroyasu Tanaka, will accept this award for its pioneering work in developing and commercialising 3D flash memory.
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MKW Ventures analyst Mark Webb will present a paper, “Memory Technologies : How Chiplets Change Everything”, on emerging memories at FMS 2024 [FMS OMEM-203-1 Heterogeneous Solutions for Performance Session – Wed Aug 7, 3:00pm – 4:05pm Ballroom C]. He reckons emerging memories – MRAM, RRAM, PCM, Crosspoint, FeRAM, UltraRAM – will not emerge to any material impact on the DRAM or NAND Market. The emerging memory market will not be $30 billion or even $3 billion in the next 5-10 years. It is well below $300 million today. In summary he says there is no universal memory coming. We have SRAM, DRAM, NAND, NOR, MRAM, RRAM, PCM available today. Let’s focus on integrating those as embedded or in chiplets.
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MaxLinear, which supplies radio frequency (RF), analog, digital and mixed-signal integrated circuits and storage accelerators, saw its Q2 2024 revenues fall 50 percent y/y to $92 million with a loss of $39.3 million, compared to the year-ago $4.4 million loss. It said the broadband market recovery is slower an anticipated and it’s taking further actions to align with market conditions. It hopes to see revenues between $70 million and $90 million in Q3. This weak guidance prompted a share sell-off.
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Momento, a real-time data platform startup founded by the engineering team that built DynamoDB, has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Momento delivers cloud primitives like cache, storage, and pub/sub so developers don’t have to write this stuff themselves. Daniela Miao, co-founder and CTO of Momento, said: “The AI revolution requires enterprises to move faster than ever, which leaves them with even less time to build, harden, and operate their infrastructure. Shipping better products faster than everyone else is now table stakes for survival. Your engineers need a rocketship that’s ready to fly, now.”
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Percona tells Kubernetes v1.31 is due out in August and has some storage changes:
- All cloud service provider-specific in-tree volume plugins are removed and now live within the Container Storage Interface world.
- Persistent Volume last phase transition time feature moved to GA in v1.31. This feature adds a PersistentVolumeStatus field which holds a timestamp of when a PersistentVolume last transitioned to a different phase. This allows you to measure time e.g. between a PV Pending and Bound. This can be also useful for providing metrics and SLOs.
- Always Honor PersistentVolume Reclaim Policy moved to Beta in v1.31. This feature prevents volumes from being leaked by honoring the PV Reclaim policy after the Bound PVC is also deleted.
- Kubernetes VolumeAttributesClass ModifyVolume moved to Beta in v1.31. This feature extends the Kubernetes Persistent Volume API to allow users to dynamically modify volume options (such as IOPs and throughput), after a volume is provisioned.
- Project quotas for ephemeral storage moved to Beta in v1.31. Using project quotas to monitor resource consumption for ephemeral volumes provides much better performance for huge volumes and lots of Pods utilizing those. Valid use case for ephemeral databases using local NVMe storage at scale.
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AI Vector database startup Pinecone says Pinecone Connect is now GA. This offers a widget within your platform for developers to sign up or log in, choose or create an organization and project in Pinecone, and generate an API key instantly. It allows developers to manage Pinecone resources directly from another platform via a simple authentication flow. Partners including Twilio and Matillion are already using Pinecone Connect to streamline AI workflows for their users. Those who are new to vector databases can easily import their data into Pinecone and begin their Gen AI journey for free.
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Cloud data warehouser Snowflake will host the Llama 3.1 collection of multilingual open source large language models (LLMs) in Snowflake Cortex AI for enterprises to arness and build powerful AI applications at scale. This offering includes Meta’s largest and most powerful open source LLM, Llama 3.1 405B, with Snowflake developing and open sourcing the inference system stack to enable real-time, high-throughput inference and further democratize powerful natural language processing and generation applications. Snowflake’s AI Research Team has optimized Llama 3.1 405B for both inference and fine-tuning, supporting a 128K context window from day one, while enabling real-time inference with up to 3x lower end-to-end latency and 1.4x higher throughput than existing open source offerings. It allows for fine-tuning on the massive model using just a single GPU node — eliminating costs and complexity for developers and users — all within Cortex AI.
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Google and Veritas Technologies have announced the availability of Veritas’ Alta Data Protection offering on the Google Cloud Marketplace. They claim Veritas Alta Data Protection reduces cloud computing costs by as much as 40 percent, and cloud snapshot storage costs by as much as 90 percent. It is self-managed and designed to efficiently secure and protect mission-critical data in the cloud, at scale. Features enable enterprises to:
- Write data from backup to on-prem to Google
- Seamlessly copy applications to and from Google
- Run applications (including PaaS workload, Cloud SQL, MySQL, PostreSQL ad Google Cloud Storage) on the Google Cloud Engine
- Leverage Veritas technologies to back up customer data to any Google Cloud Storage type
- Purchase solutions through Cloud Marketplace
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Western Digital has added an 8TB variant to its M.2 SN850X gaming SSD, which uses a PCIe gen 4 link. It previously maxed out at 4TB. More info can be found in an AnandTech report. The 8TB SSD costs $899.99 (MSRP) with a heat spreader.
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