Nexsan has started up the RoCE road giving faster access to its Assureon archive arrays. IBM-owned Red Hat has added multi-cloud support to its container storage and Scality thinks flash object storage will proliferate at the edge. There are a bunch of other news items below these headline ones.
Nexsan archive kit gets RoCE and Blockchain
Nexsan has added Private Blockchain and end-to-end RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to its Assureon arrays with a v8.3 update.
Private Blockchain stores data in an immutable data structure, using cryptography to secure transactions and with an automated integrity audit at the redundant sites to ensure data integrity and transparency. It provides secure archiving of digital assets for long-term data protection, retention and compliance adherence.
Surya Varanasi, CTO of StorCentric, Nexsan’s parent company, said: “With the release of Assureon 8.3, we have implemented RoCE to provide over a 2x performance improvement… Users are now able to quickly and efficiently retrieve data with a 40Gbit/s RDMA Converged Ethernet connection between the Assureon server and Assureon Edge servers, and thereby accelerate access to archived data storage securely.”
IBM (Red Hat) OpenShift container storage
Red Hat has announced OpenShift Container Storage 4. This is based on Ceph storage which supports file, block and object storage. It has a multi-cloud object gateway from Red Hat’s December 2018 acquisition of NooBaa.
Red Hat says customers operate from a unified Kubernetes-based control plane for applications and storage and can now choose data services across multiple public clouds. No public cloud lockin in other words.
Customers get Rook storage orchestration facilities.
Red Hat has also announced Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.3, with new security capabilities including FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) compliant encryption (FIPS 140-2 Level 1) and encryption of the etcd datastore.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4 is generally available today for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.
Flash insight for Scality at the edge
Scality CEO Jérôme Lecat thinks object storage used for edge computing will be all-flash.
Specifically, object storage will move into the edge for applications that capture large data streams from a wide variety of mobile, IoT and other connected devices. This will include event streams and logs, sensor and device data, vehicle drive data, image and video media data and more.
There will be high data rates and high concurrency from thousands or more simultaneous data streams. The edge applications will be developed for cloud-native deployment, being containerised. They will naturally embrace RESTful object style storage protocols, making object storage on flash media an optimal choice on the edge to support this emerging class of data-centric applications.
RESTful APIs use standard HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE. Get and Put are object storage type commands.
Lecat also thinks that, as enterprises adopt cloud-native applications, Kubernetes will become the default platform for infrastructure deployment in the data centre. This chimes with Portworx’s thoughts on Kubernetes.
Shorts
Data backup and security provider Acronis has signed a multi-year deal to provide cyber-protection products to the San Diego Padres professional baseball team.
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has awarded Dell Technologies a Technology & Engineering Emmy for the Dell EMC Isilon scale-out NAS storage, recognizsng its early development of hierarchical storage management systems. Dell EMC media and entertainment customers have used over 1.5 EB of Isilon storage in the past three years.
Hammerspace’s Hybrid Cloud File Service has officially been verified as Citrix Ready. Among many other things, it enablesCitrix Virtual Apps and Desktop users to access data across multiple locations and / or within the public cloud. Citrix said Hammerspace helps reduce delays and improve response times when running virtual desktops from the hybrid cloud.
IT infrastructure management business Kaseya said annual bookings passed $300m in 2019. Its organic growth rate was about 30 percent and it added more than 5,000 new customers. Kaseya claims more than $2bn valuation. The company owns the Unitrends and Spanning backup businesses and is backed by private equity firm Insight Partners.
Kingston Digital Europe has announced the availability of a new data centre SSD, the DC1000B M.2 NVMe boot drive. It has capacities of 240 and 480GB and has a PCIe gen 3 x4 interface. The performance is up to 3,200/565 MB/sec sequential read/write and 205,000/20,000 IOPS.
MariaDB has released MariaDB Platform X4, claiming it gives developers instant access to smart transactions previously only achievable with expensive proprietary systems. Gregory Dorman, VP distributed systems and analytics at MariaDB Corporation, said: “We implemented a dual storage layout for data: row based for transactions and columnar for true analytics.”
MariaDB Platform X4 uses block storage, such as AWS EBS, for fast transactions along with object storage, such as AWS S3, for fast, scalable analytics. The company claims it’s it the only product on the market to offer this level of cloud-native storage.
Object storage supplier Object Matrix has paired up with Ortana Media in a technical collaboration to provide integrated content management and archive workflows. Cubix from Ortana Media Group is an asset management and orchestration platform and MatrixStore is a media-focused and object-storage based system. Cubix can move stuff to and from MatrixStore.
People
Cloud-enabled data manager Aparavi has hired Gary Lyng to be its CMO. He comes from Violin Systems. Before then he was at SanDisk (acquired by Western Digital), EMC, NetApp, Hewlett Packard, and Veritas Software.
Erwan Menard is currently leading Google Cloud’s Infrastructure and Applications Modernization portfolio of solutions. Previously, he was the CEO of Elastifile, a start-up providing scalable enterprise file storage solutions for the Cloud, acquired by Google in 2018.
