A quiet week for data storage news, what with Thanksgiving and all. Which means that for the first time in many moons there is no Kubernetes or container product news to speak of. So let’s see what else is cooking.
Well, Backblaze is using more inclusive terms for its repository software. And Filecoin says it has an exibibyte of competitively price cloud storage capacity available for users – but you have to pay with bitcoin. Also Acronis’s hyperactive PR department continues its heroic efforts to get the company onto our storage digest every week. Last but not least Kioxia is upping the ante with its PCIe 4.0 roll out.
Backblaze embraces 21st Century
Cloud backup provider Backblaze is replacing loaded terms in its repository software. The company is changing ‘master’, ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitelist’ to “main”, “denylist” and “allowlist”. (It doesn’t use the term “slave”).
Backblaze blogger Lora Maslenitsyna says: “The full team at Backblaze understands that these changes might be small in the grand scheme of things, but we’re hopeful our intentional approach to those issues we can address will encourage other business and individuals to look into what’s possible for them.”
Shorts
Acronis has updated True Image 2021 with a professional-grade vulnerability assessment tool. Users can now scan their operating systems and applications for exploitable vulnerabilities and get recommendations on closing security gaps.
SMB cloud storage provider Datto has released its third quarter results, with $130.7m in revenues, up 11 per cent Y/Y, and profits of $19.5m, up, 617 per cent. According to William Blair analyst Jason Ader, Datto is a key enabler of SMB digital transformation and the pandemic will ultimately accelerate the outsourcing shift, creating secular demand tailwinds for the company
IP storage turned archiver survivor FalconStor has delivered near-startling results for its third 2020 quarter ended Sep 30. Revenues of $$.4m grew 10 per cent Y/Y to $4.4m and there was a profit of $1.1m, neatly reversing the year-ago $1m loss.
Peer-to-peer based cloud storage provider Filecoin says its mainnet blockchain-based public storage cloud has reached 1.2EB (1 exbibyte) of capacity and claims to offer a hyper-competitive alternative to AWS, Azure and Google. The service is priced in bitcoin and the capacity is available across thousands of servers and PCs worldwide who assign spare capacity to Filecoin.
IBM’s Spectrum Scale parallel access file system has templates (called terraform templates) to provision public cloud infrastructure (i.e. AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM Cloud) where Spectrum Scale can be deployed for users. They get highly available access to a shared namespace across multiple instances.
Kaseya has launched Unitrends Recovery Series Gen 9 which includes Automated Regulatory Compliance, 88 per cent more SSD and up to 2x faster computer and network power than Gen 8, AI-based ransomware detection, Helix SaaS self-healing backup software integrations, and a better management console. Gen 9 also has a new transparent subscription option.
Kioxia has added PCIe 4.0 support to the KumoScale flash array via v3.16 of the KumoScale software. This enable the array to serve more users per storage node.
Quantum has released StorNext 7, with a feature to automate data placement on NVMe, SSD and HDD storage for high-throughput, low-latency workloads. The app has a new GUI and expanded web services APIs that provide new ways to query metadata, automate data movement, configure and manage the file system. There is also a simplified, capacity-based licensing model. GA is slated for mid-December.
Server memory expander ScaleMP has announced GA for vSMP Foundation Version 10.0. ScaleMP MemoryONE tech pools DRAM, NVDIMMs and NVMe SSD capacity into a single coherent memory space for x86 systems. V10 adds support for support for VMware ESXi, Linux KVM and AWS Cloud virtual-instance users. Support for Azure Cloud and Oracle Cloud is expected by year end. SAP HANA, Redis, Apache/Spark, MongoDB, MySQL and Lotus (Filecoin) are claimed to have proven performance gains with v10.
France’s Dassault Systèmes’ cloud subsidiary, 3DS Outscale has launched the Outscale Object Storage (OOS) service based on Scality RING technology. By 2024, companies’ unstructured data, stored as files or objects, will triple compared to 2019, according to Scality, which cites Gartner forecasts.
Ceph storage array supplier SoftIron has gained a “Veeam Ready – Object and Object with Immutability” qualification for its HyperDrive storage system. This means a HyperDrive array can be a target store for Veeam backup data and replication.
