45Drives has announced the Stornado F16, its most powerful storage server to date. It has a 2RU chassis with:
- AMD EPYC or Intel Xeon CPUs, expandable to 4TB of memory, and ready for 100GbE networking
- Sequential read speeds of 56.5 GB/s, write speeds of 55 GB/s, and up to 10.2 million IOPS.
- 16 U.3 NVMe drive bays supporting up to 243.2 TB of raw storage.
- Tri-mode backplane for seamless compatibility with U.3 NVMe, SATA, and SAS drives.
It claims this is a ‘”leap forward from the acclaimed Stornado F2, doubling the number of PCIe Gen5 lanes per drive for unmatched data throughput.”
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Commvault has announced Clumio Backtrack to enable enterprises to use automation to rapidly revert billions of objects stored in Amazon S3 to a specific version at a specific point and time. Organisations can currently use Amazon S3 Versioning to recover specific objects; so, if a piece of data in Amazon S3 is lost, deleted, or altered, users can go back in time and revert to a good copy of that data. Commvault’s technology takes that premise to new heights. Backtrack can revert billions of objects to earlier versions, radically changing how quickly and easily large-scale datasets can be rolled back – even seconds after an issue comes to light.
Via its serverless architecture, Backtrack will uniquely empower organisations to recover datasets of practically any size, from individual objects to whole Amazon S3 buckets where billions of objects may be stored. Commvault will offer early access to Clumio Backtrack in December, with global general availability planned for early 2025.
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According to The Information, Databricks has told investors it aims to raise $7 – 9 billion at a ~$61B valuation, to cash out employees that hold restricted stock units.
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Rami Douenias has joined DDN as VP of Global Sales Engineering. He was Quantum’s AVP – Head of Presales / Solution Engineering – America’s for a year, and at Cohesity before that, for just 8 months, coming from an 8 year stint at Pure Storage.
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DDN is enhancing the speed of its Infinia object storage. At AI STAC in London, UK, December 4, 2024, it will “share groundbreaking advancements that make object storage a Tier 1 data platform for latency-sensitive applications.” It will be “reducing object storage latency to sub-millisecond levels” and thereby “accelerating real-time decision-making, backtesting, and model training” and “optimizing Spark-based analytics for large-scale AI workloads.” We think DDN will be supporting NVIDIAs GPUDirect-like S3 over RDMA scheme.
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Data manager Denodo launched Denodo Platform 9.1, adding new AI capabilities and tools to Platform 9. It has an AI-powered Denodo Assistant, which uses the semantic layer of the Denodo Platform to automate data engineering tasks and deliver contextualised insights and recommendations to data analysts and other business users. It features;
- Query Wizard Recommendations: Builds on Denodo Platform 9’s support for natural language queries to provide step-by-step guidance through query creation.
- Intelligent Query Autocompletion: Offers context-aware suggestions while users write queries.
- Data Preparation Wizard: Enables data products to be tailored to different use cases,.
- Suggestions for View and Column Descriptions: Automatically generates business-meaningful descriptions for views and columns.
- Enrichment of Text-based Unstructured Data: Automatically summarises and classifies text, identifies and extracts data entities, analyzes sentiment, identifies and redacts sensitive data, and translates text using LLMs, all available as a single function call.
Platform 9.1 also includes the new Denodo AI SDK, an open-source toolkit that accelerates the development of AI-powered applications and agents, especially when implementing RAG (retrieval augmented generation). The Denodo AI SDK simplifies the integration of both structured and unstructured data into GenAI models, for higher accuracy and better performance.
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This sounds interesting: Cloud backup supplier Eon has raised a $70 million Series C funding round led by BOND, growing its valuation to $1.4 billion. Returning investors included Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Founded in January 2024 by CEO Ofir Ehrlich and Gonen Stein, of the CloudEndure founding team (acquired by Amazon Web Services in 2019), and Ron Kimchi, former general manager of AWS migration and disaster recovery services, Eon launched in October with $130 million in funding. It has already filed dozens of patents for cloud storage and data management technologies and raised $200 million in funding overall in under a year. Eon’s platform eliminates manual backup tasks by autonomously scanning, mapping, and classifying cloud resources.
Eon says its mission is to provide instant access to all backed-up cloud data, through a next-generation platform with the first backup autopilot. Visit https://www.eon.io/ for more information.
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Cloud data manager Informatica announced new capabilities for Microsoft Azure, to help customers build, deploy, and activate AI and analytics-driven innovations with trusted data:
- Gen AI Blueprint for Azure OpenAI Service – Accelerates development and deployment of enterprise-grade GenAI and copilot experiences with reference architectures and templates using Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform and Azure OpenAI Service.
- Enhanced SQL ELT for Microsoft Azure – Enables no-code data pipeline definition and execution with in-database SQL-based processing for increased performance and scale.
- Open Table Iceberg Support for ADLS Gen2 – Supports data migration and integration to Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 in Iceberg format, unlocking price-to-performance benefits of Iceberg in storing and accessing large-scale data sets for AI.
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Sources like Reuters and Bloomberg are saying a Kioxia IPO will take place around Dec 18 with pricing initially set at ¥1390/share suggesting a market cap of close to $5B. Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson tells subscribers “we see this result at somewhat disappointing for WDC vs. prior suggested valuations for Kioxia or our prior assertions that a valuation of ~$10B should be considered a bottom for WDC’s flash segment.” Regarding the to-be-separated off Western Digital SanDisk flash+SSD business, Bryson sees “the expected split of the company as creating substantial value for shareholders at a valuation commensurate with Kioxia’s IPO.”
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Netlist has won a $118 million damages award against Samsung Electronics, Samsung Electronics America, and Samsung Semiconductor (together “Samsung“) in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The award resulted from a jury trial which involved three Netlist patents: U.S. Patent Nos. 7,619,912, 11,093,417 and 10,268,608. The infringing products were all Samsung DDR4 RDIMMs and DDR4 LRDIMMs. Netlist filed the complaint against Samsung in August 2022. The federal jury’s unanimous verdict confirmed that all three Netlist patents had been infringed by Samsung, that none of the patents were invalid, that Samsung willfully infringed those patents, and that money damages were owed to Netlist for the infringement of all three patents.
In April 2023, Netlist won a $303 million damages award against Samsung, and in May 2024, Netlist won a $445 million damages award against Micron Technology, Inc., Micron Semiconductor Products, Inc. and Micron Technology Texas LLC. C.K. Hong, Netlist’ CEO, said, “In the past 19 months three separate juries have awarded Netlist $866 million in damages for the willful infringement of our patents. These verdicts are among the largest in the semiconductor industry during this period.”
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Storage supplier Nexsan has signed up CASA Software to distribute its products in the sub-Saharan Africa region. CASA Software says it’s a “ digital transformation organisation comprised of a highly skilled team of technology professionals. The company has over three decades experience in the South African and sub-Saharan ICT industry.”
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Quantum’s shares have soared 620.8% to $21.77 since Nov 20 and a $3.01 price. Some one is buying lots of its stock to make such a difference. Is a bid underway?
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The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced Western Digital CEO David Goeckeler has been elected Chair of the SIA Board of Directors. SIA represents 99% of the U.S. semiconductor industry by revenue and nearly two-thirds of non-U.S. chip firms.
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Distributed cloud object storage supplier Storj launched its Channel First program and portal with:
- Simplified deal registration and partner precedence support.
- Easy collaboration with clear, predictable pricing and reserved capacity options.
- Comprehensive marketing and sales playbooks, including co-branded materials and training.
- Integrations with leading technologies, supported by thorough testing and documentation.
- Commitment to partner success with no additional costs or minimum thresholds.
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StorONE announced Zion Gabai has joined as VP and GM of International Sales. He has expertise across networking, storage, cloud, big data, analytics, IoT, AI, and security, having worked for Dell EMC and NetApp among other companies. With 25 years experience, Gabai most recently was Senior Director for Western and Central Eastern Europe for Dell EMC and also served as Senior Manager for the strategic solutions group for NetApp.
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Bulgaria-based Tiger Technology is looking to raise A-round funding to accelerate its growth. The company provides a hybrid multi-cloud file namespace for Windows Servers and enables space-saving file tiering from on-prem servers to cheaper file and object stores with ancillary backup, archive, file sync, business continuity, and disaster recovery benefits. It has several products: Tiger Store on-premises file sharing; Tiger Pool combines multiple volumes into a single pool; Tiger Spaces file sharing among work group members; and the Tiger Bridge cloud storage gateway, syncing and tiering product.
With 65 percent Y/Y revenue growth, 300 percent pipeline increase, and most of the revenue coming from US-based customers, the company says it addresses the cloud storage services at a turning point when it’s expected to reach $137 billion by 2025. Iraván Hira replaced founding CEO Alexander Lefterov in April this year, with Lefterov now the CTO.
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TrendForce said the global DRAM industry revenue reached US$26.02 billion in 3Q24, marking a 13.6 percent QoQ increase. The rise was driven by growing demand for DDR5 and HBM in data centers, despite a decline in LPDDR4 and DDR4 shipments due to inventory reduction by Chinese smartphone brands and capacity expansion by Chinese DRAM suppliers.
SK hynix reported $8.95 billion in revenue—a 13.1 percent QoQ increase—maintaining its second-place position. Although its HBM3e shipments ramped up, a 1 percent – 3 percent QoQ decline in bit shipments from weaker LPDDR4 and DDR4 sales offset these gains. Micron saw its revenue surge by 28.3 percent QoQ to $5.78 billion, driven by strong growth in server DRAM and HBM3e shipments, which led to a 13 percent QoQ increase in bit shipments.
Nanya Technology faced a more than 20 percent QoQ drop in bit shipments due to weaker consumer DRAM demand and intensified competition in the DDR4 market from Chinese suppliers. Winbond experienced an 8.6 percent QoQ decline in revenue, falling to $154 million, as consumer DRAM demand softened and bit shipments decreased. PSMC reported a 27.6 percent QoQ decline in revenue from its in-house consumer DRAM production.
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More information has come out from Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson about the separation of Western Digital (WD) from its SanDisk subsidiary which will likely take place in Q1 2025. He predicts some 80 percent of current WD shares will go to the new WD HDD-only business with c20 percent going to the spun-off SanDisk flash+SSD business.
