Cloud storage provider Backblaze pulled in $31.3 million revenues during calendar Q2, up 27 percent YoY, and it reported a $10.3 million loss versus the $14.3 million net loss a year earlier. It expects $32.6 million, +/- $2 million revenues next quarter.
B2 Cloud Storage revenue was $15.4 million, an increase of 43 percentYoY, while Computer Backup revenue was $15.9 million, an increase of 15 percent YoY.
William Blair analyst Jason Ader writes to subscribers, telling them: “The revenue mix continues to shift toward B2 Cloud, with B2 Cloud revenue growing 43% year-over-year in the quarter, representing 49% of total revenue. With strong growth expected to continue throughout 2024, we expect B2 Cloud will surpass 50% of revenue in the second half. Backblaze continues to position B2 as a low-cost cloud storage provider and noted that it has seen no impact from broader macro challenges. Meanwhile, Computer Backup continues to surprise to the upside, with last year’s price increase resulting in lower churn than expected in the first half of this year.”
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Backblaze has hired Marc Suidan as its CFO, replacing the retiring Frank Patchel. Co-founder, chairman and CEO Gleb Budman said: “I would like to thank Frank for all of his contributions to Backblaze. He’s been an integral part of our company’s success, especially leading us through our successful IPO and for years after. We greatly appreciate his years of service and wish him well in retirement.” Suidan’s background includes leading a publicly held company as CFO, and advising and leading companies of all sizes in the technology and media industries, including numerous storage and software as a service (SaaS) cloud companies. CRO Jason Wakeam was hired in the quarter as well.
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Backup and data security supplier Commvault has expanded its cyber and data security ecosystem through strategic integrations with an array of security partners: Acante (data access governance), (Data Security Posture Management), Google Cloud (threat Intelligence), Splunk (threat detection and response), and Wiz (cloud security). These new integrations are available immediately through Commvault and its partners. For detailed product specifications, configuration guides, and additional resources, visit Commvault’s Partner page.
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Datalake service supplier Cribl announced an agreement with managed security services provider Vijilan Security. Zac Kilpatrick, VP of Global Go-to-Market Partners at Cribl, said: “By combining Cribl’s vendor agnostic data management solutions with Vijilan’s managed extended detection and response, joint customers are equipped to take complete control over their enterprise data to ensure the most secure digital environments.”
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FalconStor has reported calendar Q2, 2024, revenues of just $2.4 million, flat YoY, with a $30,963 net loss, better than the year-ago net loss of $456,785. CEO Todd Brooks said in a statement: “In Q2, we continued to effectively manage operating expenses and bolster our cash position, while we once again grew hybrid cloud ARR run-rate by over 100% compared to Q2 2023. Our growth is fueled by the expansion of FalconStor’s data protection and migration technology across the IBM global ecosystem, spanning on-premises, cloud, and MSP segments of the IBM Power customer base.” FalconStor obtained certification of its StorSafe and StorGuard integration with IBM Storage Ceph, IBM’s on-premises AI data lake solution.
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FMS 2024 Best of Show awards:
- SSD category – Most Innovative Technology – KIOXIA’s RAID Offload data protection technology to offload RAID parity compute
- Most Innovative Business Application – Graid Technology SupremeRAID, Solidigm SSDs, CheetahRAID Raptor edge servers, and Tuxera Fusion File Share
- Most Innovative Memory Technology – Industry Standards Category – SNIA for the EDSFF Specification
- LLM Inference Acceleration Category – Pliops XDP LightningAI
- Most Innovative Hyperscaler Implementation – Hammerspace for its support of Meta’s AI Research SuperCluster
- Most Innovative Hyperscaler Implementation – All-Flash and Hybrid Storage Array Category Winner – Infinidat’s InfiniBox G4 Family
- Most Innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Application – Unique Products – Neo Semiconductor 3D X-AI memory chip technology
- Most Innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Application – Phison’s aiDAPTIV+ technology
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Data management supplier Komprise has published “The Komprise 2024 State of Unstructured Data Management” report which examines the challenges and opportunities with unstructured data in the enterprise. This report summarizes responses of 300 global enterprise IT leaders (director and above) at US firms with more than 1,000 employees. The survey was conducted by a third party in June 2024. Most (70 percent) organizations are still experimenting with new AI technologies as “preparing for AI” remains a top data storage and data management priority. Yet cost optimization is an even higher priority this year and they are trying to fit AI into existing IT budgets. Only 30 percent say they will increase their IT budgets to support AI projects. Get a copy of the report here (registration required.).
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LAM Research has a document discussing its cryogenic etching approach to 1,000 layer 3D NAND. Download it here.
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Mainframe app migrator to the public cloud startup Mechanical Orchard has raised $50m in a Series B round led by GV, formerly Google Ventures. It previously raised $24 million in an A-round in February this year. It must have demonstrated fast product development progress to get a B-round just six months later.
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MSP backup service provider N-able reported $119.4 million revenues in calendar Q2 of 2024, up 12.6 percent, with a $9.5 million profit, more than double the year-ago $4.5 million profit a year ago. CFO Tim O’Brien said: “Our second quarter performance marks our seventh consecutive quarter operating north of the Rule of 45 on a constant currency revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA basis.”
William Blair’s Ader said in a statement: “Outperformance in the quarter was driven by consistent demand for N-able’s backup and security suites (Cove and EDR/MDR were standouts) and enhanced focus on long-term contracts (drove some of the upside due to higher upfront revenue recognition). In addition, the company posted ACV bookings growth of 20% year-over-year (in our view, the best leading indicator), reflecting still strong secular trends around IT outsourcing for both SMBs and enterprises amid a maturing MSP market.”
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A comparison of Backblaze and N-able quarterly revenue growth rates show parallel curves. Both businesses are growing consistently and steadily, with N-able’s MSP channel bringing in a lot more revenue.
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NEO Semiconductor announced the development of its 3D X-AI chip technology, targeted to replace the current DRAM chips inside high bandwidth memory (HBM) to solve data bus bottlenecks by enabling AI processing in 3D DRAM. 3D X-AI can reduce the amount of data transferred between HBM and GPUs during AI workloads. NEO says this is set to revolutionize the performance, power consumption, and cost of AI Chips for AI applications like generative AI.
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Nimbus Data launched its ExaDrive EN line of Ethernet-native SSDs supporting NVMe-oF and NFS protocols. ExaDrive EN is based on an ARM SoC that provides processing power for functions including native NFS and NVMe-oF/TCP protocol support, AES-256 inline encryption, and full data checksums. ExaDrive EN adheres to the SNIA Native NVMe-oF Drive Specification v1.1 to ensure compatibility with EBOF (Ethernet Bunch of Flash) and Ethernet switch-based enclosures. ExaDrive EN will be initially available in 16 TB capacity using TLC flash with higher capacities expected in 2025.
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Nimbus Data unveiled HALO Atmosphere storage software, encompassing block, file, and object storage. Its Flexspaces feature enables all data types and protocols to share one logical pool, including block (NVMe-oF, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, SRP), file (NFS, SMB), and object (S3- compliant) storage. HALO supports any workload type (mission-critical enterprise, extreme performance, maximum efficiency, data mobility) on one platform. HALO Atmosphere is available today with Nimbus Data’s all-flash systems. HALO will be available on the public cloud in Q4 2024.
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Nimbus Data also announced its new FlashRack all-flash storage systems powered by its HALO software. Nimbus says that with Federation, hundreds of FlashRacks can be centrally managed, simplifying administration at scale. FlashRack features Nimbus Data’s patented Parallel Memory Architecture (PMA), a stateless design that writes data to enterprise-grade flash memory in a single operation. We’re told that a single FlashRack cabinet offers up to 100 PB of effective capacity, 3 TBps of throughput, and 200 million IOPS, all while drawing 18 kW of power.
Using industry-standard 16 TB, 32 TB, and 64 TB NVMe SSDs, as well as a new option – SSPs, or Solid State Packs – combine multiple SSDs into one hot-pluggable and encrypted storage module of up to 512 TB. Using Flexspaces, SSPs can be mirrored, then split and unmounted. Customers can purchase FlashRack without any capacity and then add qualified SSDs from major vendors.
A 2RU FlashRack Turbo has up to 1.5PB raw capacity with 24 x 64 TB SSDs or 3 x 512 TB SSPs and needs 900w typical power. A 2RU FlashRack Ultra has up to 768 TB raw capacity with 24 x 32 TB SSDs or 3 x 256 TB SSPs, needing 700W typical power. Find out more here.
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Nimbus Data unwrapped BatArray, a fusion of the company’s FlashRack all-flash systems with Tesla’s Cybertruck, creating the world’s first mobile flash storage data center. BatArray uses six FlashRack Turbo systems, each storing 1.5 PB, to house 9 PB of raw all-flash storage. After considering redundancy and 3:1 data reduction, 25 PB of effective capacity is possible. Cybertruck provides a 240V 40A power circuit in the truck bed. It’s possible to run the whole infrastructure from this single circuit. With its 123 kWh battery, Cybertruck can power the entire storage system for up 24 hours entirely from its EV battery.
With its patented Parallel Memory Architecture, BatArray delivers up to 360 GBps of ingress performance, or approximately 3 terabits per second. Nimbus Data claims this data rate is three times faster than the massive AWS Snowmobile, Amazon’s original data transfer vehicle based on a 45-foot long semi-trailer truck. All data is automatically encrypted in hardware using AES-256 with KMIP support. Egress speed is even faster, reaching up to 600 GBps, or nearly 5 terabits per second.
At maximum performance, a user can fill BatArray to capacity in about 7 hours, still leaving more than 200 miles over range in the Cybertruck battery. With 400 Gigabit Ethernet FR4 fiber cabling and transceivers, this transmission rate is possible over 2 km, allowing for some distance between BatArray and the source or destination connection points. BatArray supports industry standard NFS, SMB, S3, and NVMe-oF protocols.
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NVM Express, Inc. today released three new specifications and eight updated specifications. The three new specifications are the NVMe Boot specification, the Subsystem Local Memory command set and the Computational Programs command set. The updated specifications are the NVMe 2.1 Base specification, Command Set specifications (NVM Command Set, ZNS Command Set, Key Value Command Set), Transport specifications (PCIe Transport, Fibre Channel Transport, RDMA Transport and TCP Transport) and the NVMe Management Interface specification. The NVM Express specifications and the new feature specifications are available for download on the NVM Express website.
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Semiconductor designer Rambus says it has advanced data center server performance with the industry-first Gen 4 DDR5 Register Clock Driver (RCD). This technology boosts the data rate to 7200 MT/s, setting a new benchmark for performance. It enables a 50 percent increase in memory bandwidth over today’s 4800 MT/s DDR5 module solutions. You can read more about it here.
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Data protector Rubrik has a tech integration and partnership deal with Mandiant, part of the Google Cloud, aiming to expedite customers’ threat detection and path to cyber recovery. Mandiant Threat Intelligence is now integrated directly in the Rubrik Security Cloud. Breaking intrusions, active campaigns, and evolving threats detected by Mandiant Threat Intelligence are now integrated into Rubrik’s Threat Monitoring capability providing threat intelligence to Rubrik Enterprise Edition customers. Rubrik’s Threat Hunting and Threat Monitoring capabilities are used to identify a safe recovery point by automatically applying Mandiant Threat Intelligence’s thousands of knowledge points against every Rubrik backup. Rubrik Clean Room Recovery allows customers to recover and store data in a clean Google Cloud environment or multi-cloud environments. Rubrik and Mandiant can bring together their respective Ransomware Response and Incident Response teams to provide victims with additional investigative and recovery support. Read more about all this in a Rubrik blog.
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Silicon Motion announced its SM2508 – the best power efficiency PCIe Gen5 NVMe 2.0 client SSD controller for AI PCs and gaming consoles. It’s the world’s first PCIe Gen5 client SSD controller using TSMC’s 6nm EUV process, offering a 50 percent reduction in power consumption compared to competitive offerings in the 12nm process. With less than 7W power consumption for the entire SSD, we’re told it delivers 1.7x better power efficiency than PCIe Gen4 SSDs and up to 70 percent better than current competitive PCIe Gen5 offerings on the market.
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South Korean memory, NAND and SSD manufacturer SK hynix will receive up to $450 million in funding and access to $50 million in loans as part of the US CHIPS and Science Act for its investment to build a production base for semiconductor packaging in Indiana. lt plans to seek from the U.S. Department of the Treasury a tax benefit equivalent of up to 25% of the qualified capital expenditures through the Investment Tax Credit program. This follows SK hynix’s announcement in April that it intends to invest $3.87 billion to build a production base for advanced packaging in Indiana, creating an expected 1,000 jobs.
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Western Digital launched two new automotive flash products – the Western Digital AT EN610 NVMe SSD and iNAND AT EU75 – for next-generation, high-performance, centralized computing (HPCC), advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), and other autonomous driving systems, at FMS 2024. It also launched the RapidFlex Interposer, which converts PCIe SSD signals to Ethernet so PCIe eSSDs can be deployed in either an Ethernet-switched or a PCIe-switched EBOF NVMe-oF architecture. It unveiled the world’s first 8TB SD card, the SanDisk SDUC UHS-1, and a 16TB external SSD at FMS 2024 as well as a new 64TB eSSD for storage-intensive applications. WD previewed two PCIe 5.0 x 4 lane M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs; one performance focussed and the other a DRAM-less mainstream drive. Both used BiCS8 218-layer NAND.
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Winbond Electronics unveiled the W25N01KW, a 1Gb 1.8V QspiNAND flash device. It’s designed to meet the increasing demands of wearable and battery-operated IoT devices with low standby power, small-form-factor package, and continuous read for fast boot and instant-on support, achieving up to 52 MBps in both Continuous Read and Sequential Read modes. It’s available in compact WSON8 (8mm x 6mm) and WSON8 (6mm x 5mm) packages.
