Nasuni working with Presidio to manage AWS costs

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September 6, 2023

Cloud file data services supplier Nasuni is extending its Presidio partnership to include AWS public cloud control through a managed service offering.

Nasuni says it’s optimizing AWS cloud use and reducing opex with Presidio’s Proactive Recapture into Savings Management (PRISM) program. It’s said to use an AI/ML engine to save customers from overpaying for cloud instances. Presidio – a US-based consulting, service, and IT systems supplier – says it will “assume all of the overpayment risk of buying, selling, operationalizing and day-to-day managing of RIs (Reserved Instances).”

David Grant, Nasuni President, said: “Combining Presidio’s global reach, comprehensive technology portfolio, and digital transformation expertise with the Nasuni File Data Platform in AWS enables customers to accelerate their cloud journey at any stage.” The journey is away from legacy file infrastructures, meaning on-premises filers.

Presidio’s PRISM surveys a customer’s AWS RI usage and presents a savings model based on its data. If the customer then signs a PRISM deal, Presidio buys AWS services upfront on the customer’s behalf, freeing up cash and capital costs. Presidio is a premier consulting partner within the Amazon Partner Network, which allows customers to make purchases through the AWS Marketplace and benefit from the AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP)

This is similar in one way to NetApp’s Blue XP CloudOps service, which, with its Spot-based service, dynamically scales cloud instances up or down as applications require to avoid customers paying for unneeded instance resources. By enlarging the scope of its Presidio partnership, Nasuni has a competitive answer to part of NetApp’s Blue XP offering.

Nasuni has signed a multi-year business agreement with Presidio to simplify how companies store, protect, and manage file data in hybrid cloud environments. It says that with Presidio’s managed services taking care of operational management of Nasuni’s file data cloud environment, the Nasuni team is saving time and able to focus on enhancing its product and developing new features.

Raphael Meyerowitz, Engineering VP, Technology Solutions and Strategic Partnerships at Presidio, said: “Through our partnership, our customers can significantly improve file management and access while reducing infrastructure and gaining an important strategic advantage by being able to better tap into data.”

Presidio will be speaking at Nasuni’s virtual annual conference, Nasuni CloudBound23, on November 1-2, 2023.

Lenovo storage man talks market share, all-flash and more

By

Chris Mellor

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September 5, 2023

A boy rides by the Lenovo offices on a bicycle.

B&F caught up with Marco Pozzoni, EMEA Storage Sales Director for Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, about Lenovo’s moves in the storage sector. He was hired from NetApp, where he was MD for Italy, in 2020.

China’s Lenovo is a Hong Kong-headquartered PC and IT systems supplier that focuses on mainstream IT markets. It is a giant business, and revenues in its fiscal 2023 year were $62 billion.

The PC and server product lines are based on its acquisitions of IBM’s PC and server business units in 2005 and 2014 respectively. Kirk Skaugen is the EVP and president for Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) which supplies its server, storage and networking products. He was a PC guy, being an ex-Intel SVP and GM of its Client Computing Group, joining Lenovo in 2016. Pozzoni was hired from NetApp, where he was MD for Italy, in 2020, and was part of the Lenovo team that subsequently set up the partnership with NetApp.

Our impression is that a core Lenovo focus has been on selling hardware-based systems, which it is now also supplying through its TruScale IaaS deal. Lenovo is not known for developing chip-level products, like Huawei, nor for developing its own software – witness the OEM deal with NetApp and the reselling deal with Weka. It is a formidable IT hardware manufacturer and system supplier and, with its channel, a determined supplier to emerging or enlarging markets, such as the current AI market.

In August the ISG unit reported $1.9 billion in revenues in Lenovo’s first fy2024 quarter. It said it experienced hyper-growth in storage, software, services, and high-performance computing (HPC), with storage achieving triple-digit year-on-year growth, making Lenovo the 4^th largest storage provider in the world.

In particular and according to IDC (Q1 CY23):

Lenovo is in #4 position WW on AFA Total Storage (Dell, NetApp, Pure and Lenovo)
Lenovo is in #2 position WW looking at AFA Price Bands 1-6 ($0-100k) (Dell, Lenovo, Pure and HPE)
Lenovo is in #1 position WW and EMEA looking at AFA entry Price Bands 1-4 ($0-25k)

Pozzoni told us: “It is worth noting that today’s market is characterized by All Flash, Hybrid and HDDs Arrays. In Q1 CY23, according to IDC, All Flash Array was accounting for 45 percent of the entire arrays [market]. Whereas for Lenovo, it is actually 61 percent. This shows the great investment Lenovo is making in innovative technologies like AFA to help customers in their digital transformation journey.”

He said: “Kirk had this vision of becoming the number one infrastructure player from a storage perspective, and worldwide level.” The company is making progress, Pozzoni claimed: “Eight years ago, we were number 11, from a total market share perspective around storage, according to IDC. We are today number four… Over a span of eight years, being able to move from number 11 to number four, is a massive achievement.”

“We’re not number three yet, we’re not yet on the podium, but we are getting close.”

What will it take for Lenovo to overtake HPE ($1.1 billion in its latest quarterly storage revenues) and become number 2 behind NetApp, with its most recent $1.43 billion quarterly storage revenues? Pure’s latest quarterly revenues totalled $688.7 million, so we can say Lenovo’s current quarterly storage revenues are more than Pure’s $688.7 million but not as much as HPE’s $1.1 billion.

Lenovo’s storage product line

This consists of:

Unified storage products
- DG series all-flash arrays (AFA) using QLC flash and NetApp’s ONTAP software
- DM series AFA, with TLC flash, and hybrid SSD/HDD arrays, using ONTAP
SAN products – DE series AFA and hybrid arrays, FC and IP SAN switches
Direct-attached storage – Various JBODs
Hyper-converged Infrastructure – ThinkAgile server-based – VX – VMware, HX – Nutanix, SX – Azure Stack
Tape – IBM TS22nn and 43nn tape drives and autoloaders

Lenovo OEM’s NetApp’s ONTAP unified file and block access storage operating system and ports it to its own hardware. Pozzoni said Lenovo has a joint-venture with NetApp in China, 51 percent owned by Lenovo and 40 percent by NetApp. Lenovo sells its products with perpetual licenses or makes them available through its TruScale pay-as-you-go, IaaS subscription service.

There are no monolithic arrays, similar to Dell’s PowerMax or IBM’s DS8000, and neither are there scale-out, parallel filers such as those like Dell’s PowerScale (Isilon) and Qumulo, in Lenovo’s storage product line. But Lenovo is partnering Weka to resell its file services software integrated with ThinkSystem servers into the high performance AI and analytics markets.

HPE is OEM’ing VAST Data’s scale-out and disaggregated file storage software and aiming at the same markets. Its quarterly storage revenues have been hovering between$1.1 billion and $1.3 billion since 2018. If Lenovo can continue racking up storage growth at a 3-digit Y/Y clip then it could overtake HPE’s storage revenues in a year’s time.

Huawei adds 5-in-1 scale-out all-flash array to portfolio

By

Chris Mellor

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September 4, 2023

Huawei has launched a new all-flash OceanStor Pacific array, the 9920, and revealed some details of its compression and ransomware recovery.

The China-based megacorp competes with the big guns of storage and has a wide storage product portfolio: OceanStor Dorado all-flash, OceanStor Hybrid, OceanStor Pacific distributed storage, FusionCube HCI, and OceanProtect backup storage.

The new 9920 has a scale-out design with a fully symmetrical distributed architecture, however, it is actually five arrays in one as it has a versatile design with CPU type and drive variations based around a 2RU chassis. This can be powered by either two Arm-based Kunpeng 920 processors or, in performance-intensive H-Series guise, two Intel Xeon SP CPUs.

The Kunpeng-powered chassis can have either 12 x 3.5-inch or 25 x 2.5-inch drive bays used for SAS or NVMe drives. The H-series can have 12 x 3.5-inch or 25 x 2.5-inch SAS slots, or 12 x 3.5-inch or 24 x 2.5-inch NVMe drive bays. It’s a complicated picture overall.

A Kunpeng node can provide up to 20GBps bandwidth and run at up to 230,000 IOPS with a consistent 1ms latency. The faster Intel H-Series runs up to 800,000 IOPS. As nodes scale out, the bandwidth and IOPS totals increase.

A 9920 Kunpeng system supports NFS, SMB, POSIX, MPI-IO, HDFS, and S3 storage access, while an Intel-based H-Series supports SCSI, iSCSI, and OpenStack Cinder.

Data access is by TCP or RoCE across 25 or 100GbitE or 100Gbps EDR InfiniBand. The 9920 provides data redundancy based on erasure coding with an N+M scheme where M can be 2, 3 or 4, indicating the drive recovery number. If data is lost, there is automatic and concurrent data rebuilding at a 2TB per hour rate with Kunpeng processors and 4TB/hour with Xeon CPUs. The H-Series also supports 3-copy mode instead of erasure coding.

Huawei says that, with its FlashLink technology and AI Fabric network acceleration, a single 9920 system can meet the application performance requirements of millions of virtual machines with workloads such as virtualization (cloud resource pools), databases, high-performance computing, AI applications, and big data analysis.

The 9920 can be be used on its own or to provide a flash storage tier for the disk-based OceanStor Pacific 9540.

OceanStor compression and ransomware protection

Huawei’s OceanStor software suite has smart application-aware compression. For example, the company has developed its own algorithms for compressing JPEG images used in digital pathology, claiming an up to 59:1 compression ratio when its software is used versus a 38:1 compression ratio without its software.

Its software can take a base 1.8:1 GZIP compression ratio in gene sequencing and increase it to a 3:1 ratio, we’re told. In this instance, the software semantically parses input data and recognizes certain application file types, such as digital pathology and gene sequences. It can then use multi-frame correlation and reference-based compression to increase the data reduction ratios by up to 50 percent. Huawei says its software also has adaptive boundary recognition to reduce partition information entropy, and this alone can increase the compression ratio by up to 20 percent more.

An OceanCyber appliance can monitor OceanStor Pacific IO patterns in real-time via data copy snapshot security scanning. It can detect ransomware attacks, with a claimed 99.9 percent identification accuracy, and then provide recovery from a so-called isolation zone across air gaps using secure snapshots in a WORM file system. Recovery can start within seconds of an attack being detected.

The extortion detection starts before any ransomware event with blocklists and trustlists. IO behavior is monitored for in-process events using user behavioral analysis. Huawei’s software also runs periodic detection scans for ransomware in files.

Huawei products are effectively unavailable in the US. Outside the US, and in regions and territories where its products are sold, Huawei products represent formidable storage system competition.

Storage news ticker – September 4

By

Chris Mellor

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September 4, 2023

MediaFlux supplier Arcitecta has announced Scale-Out ZFS with Mediaflux, which it reckons “overcomes the scalability limitations of traditional scale-up ZFS systems and empowers customers to handle exponential data growth easily and achieve up to a 10:1 reduction in storage costs.” Mediaflux provides a unified view of data across multiple ZFS servers, enabling organizations to easily scale storage capacity and performance by adding more servers to the cluster. Arcitecta says Scale-Out ZFS with Mediaflux offers intelligent data placement, easy administration, superior data protection and performance, and a global namespace across multiple ZFS storage servers to enable simplified data management. Users and administrators can view and manage data spread across multiple ZFS storage servers as if it were in a single directory structure. Read a solution brief here.

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Aerospike has released its recently announced graph database on Google Cloud and Google Marketplace. Aerospike enables developers on Google Cloud to now easily write applications with new and existing Gremlin queries. This applies to Aerospike Graph for AdTech, Customer 360, fraud detection and prevention, and other use cases that must operate at scale in real time. Aerospike Graph delivers millisecond multi-hop graph queries at extreme throughput across billions of vertices and trillions of connections. Benchmarks show a throughput of more than 100,000 queries per second with sub-5ms latency – on a fraction of the infrastructure.

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Data security supplier Comforte AG is partnering with AWS to offer joint customers its end-to-end data security offering. This privacy-preserving protection for sensitive data elements includes personally identifiable information (PII), data discovery, and classification features specifically designed to scan for sensitive data elements within AWS environments.

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No-code data integration platform Dataddo has been recognized as a Google Cloud Ready solution for automating connections between online services and BigQuery, AlloyDB, and Cloud SQL. Dataddo says its ETL, ELT, and reverse ETL capabilities, together with its portfolio of 250+ connectors, let mutual customers synchronize any business data from online sources to BigQuery, AlloyDB, and Cloud SQL, as well as from this storage to other databases and operational applications.

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EnterpriseDB (EDB) today announced GA of EDB Postgres Distributed on EDB BigAnimal fully managed Postgres-as-a-Service. It says that it can help enterprises meet the needs of a globally distributed customer base and improve business continuity across multiple datacenters while protecting against unplanned outages that cause downtime, with up to 99.995% availability.

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The Detroit Pistons team of the National Basketball Association (NBA) has selected Infinidat’s InfiniBox for its enterprise storage needs. This was a straight commercial deal with no sponsorship elements. The Detroit Pistons are consolidating the applications and workloads from three different vendors onto their InfiniBox platform. Going forward, InfiniBox will provide the storage capacity and advanced capabilities for VMware environments, SQL database environments, and various file applications and workloads, such as data stores, video, and file archives. By making this transition, the Pistons will be able to save significantly on capital expenditure and operational expenditures. Infinidat partner Mainline Information Systems was heavily involved in the deal.

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SmartX’s IOMesh shared a Make It Simple evaluation of Kubernetes storage suppliers in which it had the leading position:

It tested TPC-C MySQL and PostgreSQL performance. In terms of overall IO performance and stability, IOMesh emerged as the top performer, with Longhorn, Portworx, and OpenEBS following in that order.

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Data management and archiving vendor Spectra Logic is announcing support for the IBM TS1170 tape drive and 50TB JF media in its enterprise-class libraries. This, according to Spectra Logic, brings unprecedented new levels of storage density and capacity to Spectra Logic TFinity ExaScale, T950, and T950v libraries. The Spectra TFinity library becomes the world’s largest tape storage system as it breaks the multi-exabyte barrier for storing uncompressed data, with up to 2.15EB of uncompressed data, and up to 6.45EB with a 3:1 compression ratio. Spectra libraries support the intermixing of IBM TS series, Oracle T10000 family, and LTO tape drives.

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Web3 decentralized storage provider Storj says it has just about doubled revenue since November 2022.

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Swissbit has announced a U.3 format, D1200 PCIe gen4 TLC SSD for datacenter use, saying it delivers the highest sustained system performance over its lifetime. In addition, features including Full Data Path Protection, NVMe-MI for out-of-band management, Secure Boot telemetry, Persistent Event Log, and AES data encryption. Capacities are 7.68TB and 15.4TB.

It achieves bandwidths of up to 6,900 MBps for sequential reads and 7,000 MBps for sequential writes. The D1200 provides up to 1.6 million IOPS for reads and 900,000 IOPS for writes. Its endurance values are at least 1.5 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) when measured against a standardized workload (JEDEC Enterprise Workload) over a five-year period. The D1200 is available now.

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TrendForce’s enterprise SSD revenue ship numbers recorded a 25 percent sequential fall from the calendar Q1 to calendar Q2:

Market leader Samsung suffered most with a 34.1 percent fall, while Micron suffered the least with a 1.8 percent decline. SK hynix/Solidigm and Micron, also Western Digital, registered market share gains due to their sales falling slower than the market average. TrendForce attributed the overall enterprise SSD market decline to CSPs buying less product. It added: “Western Digital is also gearing up to introduce QLC SSDs… its next-generation PCIe 4.0 products are yet to reach mass production.”

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Serverless analytics and AI app real-time search startup Rockset has raised $44 million in a Series B extension round, bringing the company’s total capital raised to date to $105.5 million. The round, which included $7 million in debt financing, was led by Icon Ventures, with participation from new investors Glynn Capital, Four Rivers, K5 Global, and existing investors Sequoia and Greylock. Over the past two years, Rockset has tripled its revenue, doubled its customer base, and replaced Elasticsearch across verticals including fintech, gaming, e-commerce, and logistics.

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Data-in-use encryptor Vaultree has integrated its software with Google Cloud SQL and has achieved a Google Cloud Ready – Cloud SQL designation. Customers arew promised:

Complete Data Security: With Vaultree’s encryption, data stored in Google Cloud SQL remains continuously protected, preserving its confidentiality and integrity.
Enhanced Data Usability: Enterprise businesses no longer need to choose between security and functionality. With Fully Functional Data-In-Use Encryption (FFDUE), data remains encrypted but agile, fostering growth and AI-driven innovations.
Global Compliance: The combined power of Vaultree and Google Cloud SQL empowers organizations to meet cross border data protection standards, fostering greater trust among partners and clients.
Effortless Integration: Implementing Vaultree’s FFDUE with Google Cloud SQL is seamless, ensuring businesses can elevate their data security without disruption.

The integration is available now for Vaultree and Google Cloud customers.

Cerabyte roadmaps ceramic nano-memory storage

By

Chris Mellor

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September 4, 2023

German startup Cerabyte says its ceramic-based storage technology will enable 100 petabyte archives using cartridges and 1 exabyte ones using ceramic tape.

Update: Cartridge points added; 4 Sep 2023. Cartridge data carrier details added; 6 Sep 2023.

Co-founder and CEO Christian Pflaum will present some details about its ceramic nano-memory technology at the 2023 Storage Developer Conference in Fremont, California, September 18 to 21. We have seen his session abstract and it is an informative read.

He will introduce storage technology based on inorganic nano layers using ceramics that are 50-100 atoms thick to store information protected against most data storage media threats: fire, flood, electrical surges, etc.

Data can be written and read using laser or particle beams, structuring the information in data matrices, in a similar way to QR-codes (quick-response codes); two-dimensional, machine-readable, optical bar codes.

Cerebyte says volumetric data density mainly scales with the thickness of the substrate, which can be 100-300 µm thick glass sheets, or 5 µm thick tapes coated with 10 nm thick ceramic coating.

The technology roadmap is projected to scale from 100 nm to 3 nm bit sizes, corresponding to areal densities of GB/cm² to TB/cm² class. Data reading is achieved with high-resolution microscopic imaging techniques for optical read, or electron beam microscopy for structures below the optic diffraction limit.

Cerebyte told us this about the shape of the media inside the cartridge: “The data carriers are square-shaped, single accessible sheets, stacked in the cartridge, both sides are ceramic-coated, and the data is written in the form of holes/ no holes (zeros & ones) into the ceramic layer; quasi-punched cards in nano-scale.”

Laser beam matrices will enable datacenter rack storage densities scaling from initial 10 PB systems to 100 PB using CeraMemory cartridges (2025-30) and 1 EB using CeraTape (2030-2035). Particle beam matrices will enable further scaling.

GBps class read speeds will be enabled by high-speed image sensors in combination with advanced robotics access. Read times are in the seconds-class domain down to a few seconds for performance-optimized Ceramic Nano Memory systems.

Cerabyte says its Ceramic Nano Memory can also enable writing of data at GB/s class speed providing for fast data ingest for datacenter rack-based systems. It claims it can write up to 2,000,000 bits with one laser pulse.

Cerebyte graphic. Note the written QR-code-type data on the left of the light beam

Particle beam writing on tape could achieve TB/mm³ class density, it claims, exceeding the storage density of all commercially available storage solutions today by an order of magnitude.

The cost roadmap is expected to offer cost structures below projections of current commercial storage technologies.

It says the media is fully recyclable, and has low power write and read access as well as high media longevity. That means Ceramic Nano Memory has a strong sustainability value proposition.

In summary, Cerebyte says its Nano Memory is poised to address the density, performance and access paradigms as well as cost and sustainability demands of datacenters, offering a scaling path to the Yottabyte Era.

Comment

Cerabyte says it has already established partnerships with what it calls major players in relevant manufacturing areas.

Spectra Logic has just announced its Tfinity tape Libraries can scale to 2.5 EB raw data capacity using IBM TS1770 tapes with their 50TB JF tape media. That could increase threefold using compression.

The statement that volumetric data density “mainly scales with the thickness of the substrate” could mean that read and write devices will have to have sophisticated technology to write and then read data at the right depth and location in the media. It is not easy. Developing such technology put paid to holographic storage.

However, Cerebyte tells us: “Using separately accessible thin sheets overcomes the difficulties of reading through many layers into the depth.” And so it would.

Check out Cerebyte’s website for background information.

Dell Q2 revenues better than expected, sees AI everywhere

By

Chris Mellor

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September 1, 2023

Dell reported revenues in the second quarter ended August 4 of $22.9 billion, 13 percent less than a year ago, with a net income of $455 million, 10 percent down annually, as both its CSG and ISG business units recorded stronger sales than in their poor first quarter.

CFO Yvonne McGill said: “Revenue grew 10 percent sequentially to $22.9 billion, with strong cash flow from operations of $3.2 billion in Q2 and $8.1 billion over the last 12 months. We continue to deliver value to shareholders and have flexibility to increase our return of capital going forward.”

Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and COO, put a good gloss on these numbers with his quote: “With a better demand environment and strong execution, we delivered extraordinary Q2 results.” They were better than Dell’s high-end guidance of $21.2 billion by $1.7 billion. That is extraordinary, even though this quarter is seasonally stronger for Dell than its first quarter.

He said in the earnings call: “Coming into the quarter, we were cautious given our Q1 results, but the demand environment improved at a faster rate than we anticipated, particularly as we moved into June and July.”

Clarke added: ”We continue to focus on the most profitable segments of the market where we have a leading position. Demand for our proprietary software-defined storage solution has now grown eight consecutive quarters. Our client solutions group business was up 8 percent sequentially with strong attach rates. And AI is already showing it’s a long-term tailwind, with continued demand growth across our portfolio.”

Financial summary

Operating income: $1.2 billion down 8 percent Y/Y
Operating cash flow: $3.2 billion
Recurring revenue: $5.6 billion, 8 percent higher Y/Y
Cash and investments: $9.9 billion
Total debt: $27.4 billion vs $27.2 billion a year ago

The PC-focused Client Solutions Group (CSG) saw its revenues fall 16 percent Y/Y to $12.9 billion, with $10.6 billion coming from the commercial side and $2.4 billion from consumers.

The Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) earned $8.5 billion, 11 percent down annually, with $4.3 billion in servers and networking revenue, down 17.6 percent Y/Y, but with growth seen for AI-optimized servers.

Dell said its storage revenue was $4.2 billion, 2.9 percent down annually, so doing better than servers and networking. There was continued demand growth in its midrange PowerStore array and software-defined PowerFlex storage – its non-VMware hyperconverged infrastructure offering. PowerFlex has now grown eight consecutive quarters with second quarter demand more than doubling year-over-year.

Clarke said: “Our performance was primarily driven by our strength in HCI, most notably, our PowerFlex …We’re seeing great momentum there [with] its ability to independently scale compute and storage for high-performance applications. … it grew triple digits, more than doubled in the quarter.”

It’s interesting that HCI vendor Nutanix also did well with its non-VMware offering, suggesting that VMware’s continued HCI dominance is at risk.

The upper end of its storage products did not do so well, Clarke saying: “Our high-end storage is going through that down cycle where we saw the mainframe refresh, we saw a buildup through the COVID time ,or now in the digestion of that capacity that was brought online.” He’s optimistic that the AI demand surge could drove unstructured (file) and object storage sales, meaning PowerScale and ECS product sales.

But the outlook for the next quarter is for a storage revenue downturn, with Clarke saying: “It’s seasonally down Q2 to Q3. And with the weakness in our enterprise customers, they happen to be the greatest concentration of the high-end or high-priced band storage arrays that we sell.” THere could well be an upturn in the fourth quarter though.

We’d love to know the revenues for each storage product line but we don’t get to see those numbers. Dell’s storage revenue makes it the clear storage systems market leader, with higher revenues than drive suppliers Micron (DRAM and SSD), Western Digital (HDD and Seagate (HDD). Micron and Western Digital have traditionally had higher revenues than Dell. Here’s a chart of storage suppliers’ revenues over time to show how their businesses have progressed:

Once the DRAM and NAND memory glut is over then we can expect Micron and WD revenues to soar above Dell again. No other storage system vendor represents a current threat to Dell’s across the board storage leadership, neither NetApp, HPE, IBM, Pure Storage nor Nutanix.

Jeff Clarke: “We think there’s going to be AI factories everywhere.”

Looking ahead Dell expects its total addressable AI market to have a compound annual growth rate of around 19 percent over the next few years to around $90 billion. It says AI servers accounted for roughly 20 percent of its servers sold in the first half of 2023, it has about $2 billion in AI server backlog and a strong sales pipeline.

Clarke said: “We think there’s going to be AI factories everywhere, little ones and big ones and little ones on the edge and medium-sized ones in datacenters and large ones at cloud scale. That paints a picture of a pretty significant opportunity for us.”

He thinks that: “In the near term, we are seeing organizations concentrate on so-called fourth generation AI use cases: customer operations, content creation and management, software development and sales. And internally, we are doing the same to enhance how we build products, service our customers and improve productivity and efficiency.”

He also said AI-related hardware was developing rapidly: “We’re tracking at least 30 different accelerator chips that are in the pipeline in development that are coming.”

The outlook for the next quarter is for revenues between $22.5 billion and $23.5 billion, well down on the year ago third quarter’s $24.7 billion at the $23 billion guidance mid-point. Dell has raised its full fy24 revenue expectations, due to expected sequential growth in the Q4, to be between $89.5 billion and $91.5 billion, down 12 percent Y/Y at the $90.5 billion mid-point.

Nutanix scents profitability after bumper Q4

By

Chris Mellor

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September 1, 2023

Nutanix reported revenue growth in excess of guidance for the fourth fiscal 2023 quarter with its lowest annual loss for seven years, bringing profitability within reach.

Rajiv Ramaswamim Nutanix — Rajiv Ramaswami

Revenues in the quarter ended July 31 for the hyperconverged infrastructure software vendor were $494.2 million, up 28.2 percent, with a loss of $13.3 million, sharply down on the year-ago loss of $151.3 million. Full fiscal 2023 revenues were $1.86 billion, 17.8 percent more than 2022, with a loss of $254.4 million, much improved from the year-ago loss of $798 million.

President and CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said: “Our fourth quarter capped off a fiscal year that showed healthy year-over-year top line growth and sharp year-over-year improvements in profitability and free cash flow.”

Free cash flow in the quarter was $45.5 million compared to $52.7 million in the preceding quarter and $23.2 million a year ago. Gross margin was 83.7 percent against 79.3 percent a year ago. The non-GAAP operating margin for the year was positive at 9 percent, a first for Nutanix and a signal of GAAP profitability being close.

Nutanix revenue — Q4 fy23 revenue growth accelerated over Qs 1,2 and 3

Ramaswami said: “Overall, for fiscal 2023, we demonstrated consistent execution, solid top line growth, strong renewables performance, sharp improvements in profitability and free cash flow and continued progress on our longer-term strategic priorities.”

Nutanix is growing in spite of the poor macro-economic situation. Ramaswami said businesses are choosing Nutanix as they are “looking to optimize their total cost of ownership.” CFO Rukmini Sivaraman mentioned there had been a modest increase in sales cycles but “we are seeing continued new and expansion opportunities for our solutions despite the uncertain macro environment.”

Some 500 new customers came on board in the quarter. There were 430 last quarter after three quarters of declining numbers. It takes the customer count up to 24,550, and the spend per customer continued to increase. In lifetime bookings terms there are now:

142 customers with >$10million – up 29 percent Y/Y
217 customers with $5 – $10 million – up 22 percent Y/Y
326 customers with $3 – $5 million – up 20 percent Y/Y
1,498 customers with $1 – $3 million – up 17 percent Y/Y

The land-and-expand customer strategy machine is working well and Nutanix sees a rosy road ahead. Sivaraman said: “Overall, we remain confident in our view around a large and growing market for our solutions combined with a growing mix of renewals as a significant driver of both billings growth and margin expansion over a multi-year period.”

Nutanix sees a big opportunity with AI inferencing models, which start out with training in the public cloud, to operate at customer’s edge sites. Ramaswami said: ”What you’re going to see is companies need to run these AI models where their data is. And in a lot of applications, enterprise applications, sensitive data is stored on-prem or at edge locations where they’re actually gathering the data in the first place.”

See the red ink loss bars starting to shrink in recent years.

That’s the reasoning behind Nutanix’s recent GPT-in-a-box announcement, about which Ramaswami said: “It’s still early days, but I’m excited about where this is going.”

Nutanix is also pleased with its Cisco partnership deal, with Ramaswami saying: “We are excited about working with Cisco on this partnership and having themselves our leading hybrid multi-cloud software, leveraging their extensive go-to-market reach.”

The Broadcom-VMware acquisition is still being seen as an overall positive by Nutanix. Sivaraman said: “We continue to see significant engagement and opportunities related to potential concerns around that transaction,” and mentioned a seven-figure deal won because of such concerns.

Ramaswami added that customer concerns and engagements over VMware’s future were rising. “Clearly, we’ve seen some deals starting to close. And there is still a lot of variability in terms of how the pendulum is going to swing on this one from customers who might just use us to get at a lower price from VMware to customers who truly see us about bringing a second [choice], reducing their risk with an alternative provider.”

The new Cisco partnership deal is valued highly by Nutanix because its gets the firm in front of more customers. Ramaswami said: “We today have about… 25,000 customers roughly, but our addressable market in terms of customers are at least 100,000. And so Cisco’s broad market reach could help us get those initial entries… I look at this as an expansion opportunity for us with a much larger customer base.”

Next quarter’s revenue is expected to be $500 million varying by $5 million, implying 15.3 percent annual growth at the midpoint. Full 2024 revenues are being guided at $2.13 billion varying by $15 million, a 14.3 percent rise.

Comment

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a way to consume storage without having external storage systems, SANs mostly. Nutanix’s main competitor is VMware with its vSAN. But it also competes with external storage suppliers such as Dell, HPE, IBM, NetApp, and Pure Storage. Pure has the smallest revenues of these players, and has just reported a $688.7 million quarter, ahead of Nutanix.

Will Nutanix be able to outgrow Pure over the next few years? The answer partly depends on whether customers want hyperconverged infrastructure more than they want to buy compute, networking, and storage hardware as independent entities. The jury is still out on that.

Quantum improves private-public cloud data integration

By

Chris Mellor

-

August 31, 2023

Quantum is making it easier to move backup, file, and object data between its private cloud infrastructure products and the public clouds.

The data management supplier has added facilities to its DXi backup appliance, FlexSync replication, and ActiveScale object store to move unstructured data to and from public and private clouds for tiering, retention, and integrated public-private cloud workflows.

Brian Pawlowski, Quantum — Brian Pawlowski

Quantum chief development officer Brian Pawlowski said: “Our strategic vision is to deliver the best end-to-end data platform from on-premises to any cloud that empowers our customers to address their unstructured data needs across the entire data lifecycle.

“This isn’t about ‘public cloud versus private cloud’; it’s about giving customers choice and enabling them to create flexible, hybrid cloud workflows that are designed for their unique needs and goals, and these new features we are delivering make that easier for customers to achieve.”

There are three product developments: DXi CloudShare, FlexSync 3, and ActiveScale Cold Replication.

DXi Cloud Share enables the deduplicating DXi backup appliances to tier compressed and deduplicated backup data sets to both public clouds and on-premises (private cloud) ActiveScale object stores. This enables offsite protection against ransomware and long-term retention of backup data for regulatory and in-house data compliance.

FlexSync 3 replicates files to and from StorNext environments, and can now move data to public clouds and ActiveScale systems with Quantum Myriad systems being a future replication source and target. The FlexSync product can used to integrate on-premises and public cloud workflows across geographies with a shared, centralized object repository.

Quantum says FlexSync enables users to synchronize files to and from an S3 bucket on a public or a private cloud storage destination, including ActiveScale. File data is written as objects into the cloud bucket and file system metadata is also written to the bucket in a format that can be used with a remote FlexSync instance.

Quantum says “simple cloud disaster recovery (DR) protection is one of the obvious uses for FlexSync’s new object capability. Recurring replication may be scheduled at intervals as short as one minute, providing near real-time protection from site disaster.”

The cloud bucket becomes a transit point for files to move between StorNext file systems and serves as a centralized content repository for otherwise disconnected sites.

The ActiveScale architecture consolidates NVMe, hard drives, and tape resources into a single namespace that scales to billions of objects and exabytes of capacity. It supports the S3 Glacier Storage Class as its primary interface. ActiveScale Cold Replication moves data on from one ActiveSale store to other ActiveScale systems, and to AWS’s S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Glacier Deep Archive services. Quantum says it is “the industry’s first and only immutable object replication between cold data services” for massive data sets whose useful life spans from years to decades.” ActiveScale Cold Replication enables “the most durable, cost-effective multi-copy solution for long-term retention.”

Timothy Sherbak, Enterprise Products and Solutions Marketing at Quantum, writes: “We created ActiveScale Cold Storage (ASCS) so that customers and managed service providers could achieve cloud storage economics in their own facilities using a simple scale-out, multi-tiered storage architecture and service-oriented approach like that of hyperscale public cloud providers.”

For example: “A local in-house ASCS system at your data center or colocation facility acts as your primary data source. To protect against site failure and increase durability, the ASCS system employs AWS Glacier or Deep Glacier as its replication partner.”

ActiveScale Cold Replication and FlexSync 3 are available immediately. DXi Cloud Share is planned for release in this year’s fourth calendar quarter. FlexSync 3 for Myriad, Quantum’s unified and scaleout file and object storage software, is planned for release next year.

There’s more information on DXI Cloud Share here, FlexSync 3 here, and ActiveScale Cold Replication here. You can find an ActiveScale Cold Storage datasheet here.

Infinidat data protection box bumps up restore speed with Veeam

By

Chris Mellor

-

August 31, 2023

Infinidat is claiming its data protection system can restore data at 28TB a second, yes, terabytes a second, which would far outpace competing systems.

Update: ExaGrid points added. 4 Sep 2023. Infinidat points added. 5 Sep 2023.

High-end array supplier Infinidat’s CMO Eric Herzog presented at the recent VMware Explore event in Las Vegas and looked at how Infinidat and Veeam worked together to protect VMware workloads. He asserted that the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the most critical metric for cyber recovery and business continuance after cyber attack events.

Herzog claimed a 20 PB Veeam backup set was recovered in 11 minutes and 55 seconds from an Infinidat InfiniSafe system. Spreadsheet maths says this is 1.678 PB per minute and that means 27.96 TBps. At least in this single test, if the reported numbers are accurate, this is much faster than a Pure Storage FlashBlade, with stated restore times of up to 270 TB per hour (4.5 TB per minute and thus 75 GBps.

The InfiniSafe system, at 1,678 TB/min is more than 370 times faster. This is so outlandish we checked our numbers again – but they were correct – see our table below.

We tried to compare this against ExaGrid, known for high performance, which has a tiered backup storage design using a non-deduplicated disk landing zone for recent data and deduplicated disk for older backup data. Restores from the landing zone, without the deduplication rehydration overhead are fastest, with an ExaGrid document saying: “ExaGrid can provide the data for a VM boot in seconds to single-digit minutes versus hours for inline data deduplication backup storage appliances that only store deduplicated data.”

But no actual restore speed numbers are provided. Its fastest appliance, the EX84 has a maximum backup throughput of 15.25 TB per hour. An InfiniGuard array can take in up to 180 TB per hour, and this implies that InfiniGuard would outpace ExaGrid’s EX84 in restore speed terms as well as ingest speed.

This isn’t unexpected as, other things being equal, an all-flash system should go much faster than a disk-based system. But ExaGrid’s appliances scale out so you could add more of them to match Infinidat’s ingest and restore speeds. ExaGrid can actually scale out to a 488 TB/hour ingest rate with its EX2688-G configuration, so matching Infinidat’s restore speed should be possible. Whether this is worthwhile has price/performance, rack space and electricity usage aspects to the decision.

Why is InfiniSafe so fast? It is basically an InfiniGuard data protection hybrid array or InfiniBox (disk-based) or InfiniBox SSA (all-flash) storage array running InfiniSafe software which stores immutable snapshots of production InfiniBox systems. InfiniSafe also protects against ransomware with its cyber-resilience feature set, but we are not concerned with that here, just the restore speed. And that comes from the base InfiniBox system being a fast system with its memory caching. The all-flash InfiniBox SSA II is the fastest of all Infinidat’s arrays.

Production systems can be backed up using Veeam Backup and Restore software. Infinidat CMO Eric Herzog says there are more than 100 mutual Infinidat-Veeam customers. His presentation cited enterprise customers who had replaced Data Domain, ExaGrid and NetApp backup storage systems with InfiniGuard, with InfiniGuard’s speed a significant competitive advantage in each case.

Bootnote. Here is our spreadsheet table showing Infinidat and Pure Storage restore speed numbers:

ExaGrid point of view

ExaGrid CEO Bill Andrews told us: “When comparing scale-out to scale-up you need to compare apples to apples: ingest performance, restore performance and cost. They [Infinidat] may be comparing SSD to HDD which of course is faster for restore but will be very very very expensive as well. That is why they called out Pure as it is Infinidat SSD to Pure SSD.

“Scale-out front end-controllers where you add disk shelves can take in a 1PB or 2PB full backup.

“Each ExaGrid appliance (Scale-Out) takes in 84TB and the you add another appliance and so on.

“ExaGrid can have up to 32 appliances in a single scale out system for a 2.7PB full backup at 488TB/hr. for ingest.

“This is much faster than the inline deduplication approach Infinidat uses for ingest performance. (See web site link; Scalability – ExaGrid)

“For a real comparison:

ExaGrid will be a fraction the price HDD versus SSD
ExaGrid will be faster for ingest because writing to HDD will always beat inline deduplication in CPU regardless of what it writes to
Any SSD system will be faster for restore but then again your backups are slower and it cost a lot more

“ExaGrid is far cheaper than Pure, 2X the ingest performance but because Pure is SSD so the restores are faster. We do see Pure in some deals. We never see Infinidat. We see a lot of HPE, NTAP and HPE primary storage, Dell Data Domain, HPE Storeonce and Veritas FlexScale appliances.”

ExaGrid’s VP for architecture Tom Gillispie said: “26TB/Sec is the read bandwidth of 4,667 SSDs in parallel, and that’s before overhead for fault tolerance. It is 2,400 100GigE connections running in parallel. I suppose if you had 10 to 1 compression you’d have 1/10th the numbers, but something needs to rehydrate at that rate.

“My guess is the 11 min, 55 secs is the time from restore being started until the restore says complete and it is an entirely metadata operation, as in instant recovery at that scale or something similar. Either that or they can scale very large and their spreadsheet is assuming a gigantor backup deployment.”

Comment

We understand that, from several Infinidat Webinars, the 20PB recovery is from an InfiniGuard system, which has a hybrid InfiniBox embedded within the InfiniGuard and does not have an InfiniBox SSA II all-flash option. Infinidat is not comparing recovery from an all-flash InfiniBox SSA to a Pure all-flash array but from a hybrid array-based InfiniGuard compared to a Pure all-flash array, as well as to several other vendors that are mentioned in the VMware Explore presentation.

Cirata rises from the ashes of WANdisco

By

Chris Mellor

-

August 31, 2023

WANdisco shareholders approved a company name change to Cirata during its Annual General Meeting on August 30.

Earlier this year, the live data replicator faced challenges when it revealed in a filing that an unidentified senior sales representative had misrepresented financial reports. This was followed by the resignation of the chairman, CEO, and CFO, layoffs, a forensic accounting investigation, a stock market suspension, and appointments of an interim chair, CFO, and CEO. Following this, there was an emergency capital raise which facilitated the company’s re-entry to AIM, the UK junior stock market and initiated a comprehensive reassessment of its product and market strategy.

CEO Stephen Kelly said: “It’s time to focus our collective attention on the future and do everything we can to help drive the growth plan forward. Renaming and rebranding the Company is one step in that journey and we’re excited to build Cirata into a category leader.”

A Cirata statement said: “The company felt the time was right to be renamed as part of a broad and extensive rebranding program that best reflects the updated company vision, values and future growth plans. The new name is intended to provide a new and positive canvas where the company can build positive brand equity going forward.

“Cirata is a combination of ‘cirrus cloud’ and ‘data’ and the name enables the Company to continue to pursue market opportunities in the data integration space under a new name and brand identity. The Company intends to transition into the new brand identity and integrate the new name in Q4.”

On its newly launched website, Cirata highlights its belief that “the combination of powerful cloud computing and analytics techniques such as AI applied to massive data sets will provide game changing data modernization and monetization opportunities over the coming decades.”

Cirata aims to focus the Data Migrator product set on replicating active data from its generation at edge computing sites up into the public clouds and public cloud-based analytics data warehouses and lakes, such as Snowflake and Databricks. It will also work as an edge-to-datacenter replicator for on-premises-based analytics and processing.

Farewell, WANdisco. You screwed up, big time, and the rebrand marks a welcome new beginning.

Pure Storage revenues bounce back in Q2

By

Chris Mellor

-

August 31, 2023

In spite of a revenue decline in the first quarter of fiscal 2024, Pure has bounced back with positive growth in its second quarter.

Update. Dell storage decline corrected to 3 percent from 11 percent (which was ISG decline). 5 Sep 2023.

The company reported revenues of $688.7 million for the quarter ending August 6, a rise of 6.5 percent year-over-year and surpassing projected figures. The reported loss of $7.1 million down from a $10.9 million profit from the same period a year ago.

Charlie Giancarlo, Pure Storage — Charlie Giancarlo

CEO Charlie Giancarlo said: “We are pleased with our financial results this quarter. While the macro environment continued to be challenging, we outpaced our competitors and saw strong growth in our strategic investments, particularly in Flashblade//S, Flashblade//E and Evergreen//One… I have never been more confident in our long-term growth strategy or in our opportunity to lead this market.”

Indeed, when compared to its competitors, Pure exhibited strong performance. Dell’s storage results showed a 3 percent decrease to $4.2 billion, NetApp fell by 10 percent to $1.43 billion, and HPE experienced a 4.5 percent decline, settling at $1.1 billion.

Q2 also saw record sales for Pure’s scale-out FlashBlade unified file+object products, which includes a significant deal (minimum $10 million) for its FlashBlade//S product designed for generative AI work. The FlashBlade//E’s sales growth, based on QLC NAND, has been faster than any previous product launched by Pure.

Subscription services revenue saw year-over-year growth of 24 percent, reaching $288.9 million. This resulted in an ARR of $1.2 billion, a 27 percent increase. Evergreen//One’s consumption-as-a-service subscription sales witnessed a twofold rise year-over-year. The global customer base expanded by 325 this quarter, surpassing 12,000, which now includes 59 percent of the Fortune 500 – a growth from the previous quarter’s 56 percent. This means an addition of 15 Fortune 500 clients.

CFO Kevan Krysler said: “We were very pleased with record sales across our FlashBlade portfolio, and doubling sales of our Evergreen//One subscription offering this quarter. With our Purity software working directly with raw flash, we have established substantial differentiated advantages and business value for our customers, while at the same time expanding our margins.”

Pure’s competitors use off-the-shelf SSDs in contrast to Pure’s proprietary direct flash module (DFM) drives. Krysler said: “The majority of the capacity we now ship is based on QLC (4bits/cell) raw flash,” which should give Pure a pricing advantage over customers using more expensive TLC (3bits/cell) commercial SSDs.

”US revenue for Q2 was $495 million dollars and International revenue was $194 million dollars,” he added, implying that Pure has growth opportunities outside the USA.

Pure’s enterprise business and Evergreen//One both surpassed expectations, contributing to the reversal of Q1’s revenue decline. According to Krysler: “That’s a testament to our field really adjusting to our customers’ buying behavior.”

Financial summary

Gross margin: 70.7 percent vs 70.1 percent in Q1
Operating cash flow: $101.6 million
Remaining performance obligations: $1.89 billion, up 26 percent Y/Y
Free cash flow: $46.5 million
Total cash, cash equivalents & marketable securities: $1.2 billion

Regarding the Portworx Kubernetes storage business, Giancarlo said: ”Portworx had a good quarter, so we’re very pleased with the progress overall of Portworx. I would say that the the enterprise market for cloud native applications for stateful cloud-native applications has probably progressed a bit slower in the last year than we had expected early on.

“But our expectation is that 5 to 10 years from now, all applications will be designed in a cloud native with containers and Kubernetes. So we’re very confident about the future… We’re #1 in that space, and we expect that to continue.”

Disk dying

CTO Rob Lee reiterated Pure’s view on flash replacing disk drives in the earnings call: “Disk is – well, a dead technology spinning, so to speak.” He said Pure’s DFM gave it a competitive lead over SSD-using competitors such as Dell, HPE and NetApp. “We’ve got a three to five-year structural and sustained competitive advantage over, frankly, the rest of the field that I think is trapped on SSD technology.”

IBM FlashSystems use proprietary IBM flash drives and Pure may face stronger competition there.

Giancarlo added: ”The last refuge for hard disks now is in the secondary and tertiary tier. And now we’re able to reach price parity with them at a procurement cost and yet have much lower total cost of ownership and be smaller and be more reliable.

“There’s no other markets that are going to hold revenue for hard disks that flash won’t penetrate. And what that means is just lesser revenue and therefore, lesser investment in ongoing development of hard disks. That’s also going to be a problem for the vendors. So it’s unfortunate. I don’t hold any malice. But similar to markets in the past, you’re just – when these transitions take place, CDs over vinyl or DVDs over VHS, there’s just no stopping progress.”

AI

Pure has more than 100 customers using its products in the traditional AI and newer generative AI fields. Giancarlo said: “AI systems are typically greenfield. So we’re not generally replacing. What we are competing with are solely all-flash systems. Hard [disk drive] systems just can’t provide the kind of performance necessary for a sophisticated AI environment.”

Older datasets stored on disk have a growing need to be made accessible for AI processing and Pure hopes customers will move these datasets to its faster flash storage. Lee said: “That’s where we see a tremendous opportunity for us with especially in our FlashArray//C line.”

The outlook for next quarter is for revenues of $760 million, 12.4 percent higher than a year ago. Krysler said the guidance “assumes continued strong subscription revenue growth fueled by our Evergreen//One subscription services.”

Giancarlo added: “We’re expecting stabilization through the end of the year and hopefully an improvement towards the end of the year beginning of next.”

HPE storage biz holds its own against rivals

By

Chris Mellor

-

August 30, 2023

HPE showed its storage business doing proportionally better in the third quarter than its main competitors who all saw worse revenue declines.

Update: Pure results on Aug 30 showed 6 percent revenue growth, outpacing HPE.

Revenues for the quarter, ended July 31, were $7 billion, up just 0.7 percent year-over-year, with a profit of $464 million, 13.4 percent up annually. The company’s four main business units had mixed fortunes, with compute down 13 percent to $2.6 billion, storage down 4.5 percent to $1.1 billion, Intelligent Edge (Aruba) up a CEO-pleasing 50 percent to $1.4 billion, and passing storage revenues for the first time. HPC and AI revenues of $836 million rose 1 percent year-over-year as a large set of orders started their prolonged delivery and revenue recognition journey.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri focused on operating efficiency, the edge, HPC/AI, and Greenlake numbers in his earnings call comments, saying: ”In Q3, our Intelligent Edge business contributed 20 percent of our total company revenue. It is now the largest source of HPE’s operating profit at 49 percent of our total segment operating profit. Our HPE GreenLake hybrid cloud platform is accelerating our other service pivots, delivering an annualized revenue run rate, or ARR, of $1.3 billion, a 48 percent increase year-over-year. Our strategic shift towards edge, hybrid cloud and AI delivered through our HPE GreenLake cloud platform is working, and we are delivering on our financial commitments.”

HPE segment revenues — HPEs Intelligent Edge revenues (dark blue line) have just exceeded its Storage revenues (green line).

The large decrease in compute revenues, 13 percent, contrasted with the 4.5 percent storage decrease. That held up well when compared to recent storage results from Dell, down 11 percent to $3.76 billion, NetApp, down 10 percent to $1.43 billion, and Pure Storage, down 5 percent to $598 million in its prior Q1 fy24 earnings. But, in its latest, Q2, results, announced on August 30, Pure said it had 6 percent Y/Y revenue growth, much better than HPE, Dell and NetApp.

The economic environment is depressed, but AI and similar digital projects are getting priority in customer IT spending. Neri said: “While the broader IT market is still pressured, demand for our products and services grew sequentially in the third quarter across all key segments of our business, driven by high-growth areas like AI and HPE GreenLake … we exited the quarter with the largest HPC and AI order book we have ever had.”

It was all down to the Alletra storage product line apparently. Interim CFO Jeremy Cox said: “HPE Alletra revenue grew triple digits in Q3 for the fifth consecutive quarter. It is now one of our higher revenue products and thus growth rates may normalize. This product is shifting our mix within Storage to higher-margin, software-intensive revenue and is a key driver of our ARR growth. We’ll continue to invest in R&D and our owned IP products in this business unit, such as our new file-as-a-service and HPE Alletra MP offerings.”

The Alletra file-as-a-service mention refers to the OEM’d VAST Data software and that came too late in the quarter to have any material effect on sales.

HPE did not reveal its all-flash array revenue numbers.

Neri said that HPE’s storage plan was working: “The team and I drove an intentional strategy to pivot that portfolio, which was a conglomerate of different offerings that we built over 15 years or so to one consistent architecture that allows customers to consume data services, both primary and secondary in a cloud-native way and a subscription-based model.

“So, HPE Alletra is our primary storage that now covers pretty much all the price segments, price bands if you will, of the traditional storage from general purpose to business critical to mission-critical. And we address block and file. And in the future, we’re also going to address the object piece.”

No doubt HPE partners Cloudian, Scality, and VAST will all be hoping to supply their object storage software to enable HPE to address the object piece.

Neri added this point about Alletra: “This business went from zero to in excess of $1 billion very, very quickly. And it’s amazing that it’s one of the fastest-growing products in our portfolio, growing triple digits. But what I’m really pleased is that it comes with a significant subscription, which is growing double digits.“

We don’t know which parts of the Alletra portfolio, the Nimble or Primera product components, are growing fastest, but we can be sure that other parts of HPE’s storage portfolio are looking less bright, such as SimpliVity HCI and StoreOnce deduplicating backup appliances. Maybe they will get an Alletra brand makeover.

The outlook for HPE’s next quarter is revenues between $7.2 billion and $7.5 billion, $7.35 billion at the mid-point and 6.6 percent down on a year ago. It will make fiscal 2023 revenues of $29.1 billion, 2.2 percent more than fiscal 2022.

This is low overall growth, and the Q4 number suggests that HPE’s storage revenues may decline again. Perhaps AI storage demand may help growth in fiscal 2024.

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Storage news ticker – September 4

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Comment

Dell Q2 revenues better than expected, sees AI everywhere

Nutanix scents profitability after bumper Q4

Comment

Quantum improves private-public cloud data integration

Infinidat data protection box bumps up restore speed with Veeam

ExaGrid point of view

Cirata rises from the ashes of WANdisco

Pure Storage revenues bounce back in Q2

Disk dying

AI

HPE storage biz holds its own against rivals

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