COMMISSIONED: As an IT leader, you have the daunting task of managing multicloud environments in which applications run on many public clouds and on-premises environments – and even the edge.
Operating in this cloud-native space is like conducting a symphony orchestra but with a major catch: You’re managing multiple orchestras (cloud providers and on-premises systems), rather than one. Each orchestra features its own musicians (resources), unique instruments (services) and scores (configurations). With so many moving parts, maintaining harmony is no trivial pursuit.
Take for example the relationship between different parts of a DevOps team. While developers build and test containerized applications in multiple public clouds, operators are playing a different tune, focused on scaling on-premises systems. These teams accumulate different management interfaces, technologies and tools over time. The result? Layers upon layers of complexity.
This complexity is then magnified when we consider data management challenges. Shuttling data between public clouds and on-premises systems becomes harder with the increase of data gravity, and even container orchestration tools, such as Kubernetes, require deep technical skills when it comes to managing persistent storage. And the data reflects this struggle. According to a recent VMware State of Kubernetes research report published in May, 57 percent of those surveyed cited inadequate internal experience as a main challenge to managing Kubernetes.
Achieving consistent performance, security and visibility across the entire symphony – your IT infrastructure – remains a hurdle when you account for the different instruments, music sheets and playing styles.
A playbook for managing multicloud and Kubernetes storage
There is no silver bullet for managing storage and Kubernetes in multicloud environments. But here are some steps you can take for running modern, cloud-native apps across public clouds and on-premises systems alike.
– Educate. Your IT operations and DevOps teams must learn about the various container and storage services available across public cloud and on-premises systems, as well as how to manage the technologies and tools that make them hum.
– Standardize. You’re not going to have a single tool to handle all of your needs, but you can simplify and streamline. For instance, standardizing on the same storage can help you reduce complexity and improve efficiency across multiple clouds and on-premises environments, making it easier to respond nimbly to shifts in your multicloud strategy. Pro tip: Examine where applications and data are living between on-premises systems and public clouds and whether those workload placements align with your goals.
– Automate. One of IT’s greatest magic tricks is automating manual tasks. Why manage containers and storage piecemeal? Tools exist to help IT operations staff automate chores such as provisioning storage, deploying containers and monitoring performance.
– Test. Testing and deploying your applications frequently is crucial in multicloud environments with numerous interdependencies. Not only will this help you detect and fix problems, but it will also ensure that your applications are compatible with various cloud and on-premises systems.
– Manage. Pick a multicloud management platform that empowers your team to consolidate activities from discovery and deployment to monitoring and day-to-day management from a single experience spanning multiple public clouds. Streamlining processes will make IT agile when responding to business needs.
Hype versus reality
The last step is critical. Yes, the multicloud management platform provides one unified experience for managing multiple resource types. But the onus is on you to select the right partners who can deliver on their promises and make life easier for your staff, rather than moving your processes to a system that doesn’t meet your IT service requirements.
And while there is talk of a supercloud, or one platform architecture to rule all clouds, solutions are emerging to help you manage your multicloud estate today.
Dell APEX Navigator for Multicloud Storage, available later this year, is a SaaS tool designed to help IT and DevOps teams provide deployment, management, monitoring and data mobility for APEX block and file storage across multiple public clouds and move data between on-premises systems and public clouds.
Dell APEX Navigator for Kubernetes, available next year, is designed to simplify management of Kubernetes persistent storage, enabling storage administrators and DevOps teams to deploy and manage Dell’s Kubernetes data storage software at scale across both on-premises and cloud systems.
Ultimately, these tools, which are integrated into the Dell APEX Console, help customers reduce time switching between different management experiences – so they can focus more on innovation or higher-level business tasks.
As an IT leader, the conductor of your own multicloud symphony, making sure all the orchestras in your IT infrastructure play in tune and at the right tempo is paramount – with consistent governance monitoring and management. Just as a skilled conductor must master how to blend each orchestra’s unique sounds to create a unified masterpiece, managing a multicloud environment requires you to master each cloud provider’s offerings and each on-premises systems operations.
To orchestrate them effectively, you need a strategy that helps you maintain coherence and consistency as well as reliability and performance.
What steps will you take to master your multicloud symphony orchestra?
VMware has enabled external storage clusters for its vSAN hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) product, three years after buying Datrium, which focused on the same technology.
The essence of HCI is that compute, storage, and networking are all contained in one chassis with the system scaling up or down by adding or removing hardware. However, that means if you want to additional storage capacity, you have to add more compute as well, and vice versa. Several HCI suppliers partially separated storage from HCI, providing separate resources that could be scaled up and down independently from compute, calling it disaggregated HCI or dHCI.
Nutanix, for instance, provided storage-only Acropolis nodes. HPE-acquired Nimble also has a dHCI product. Datrium was another and NetApp a fourth, with its halted Solidfire-based system.
VMware’s Pete Koehler writes in a blog that vSAN MAX is “VMware’s new disaggregated storage offering that provides Petabyte-scale centralized shared storage for your vSphere clusters.” It’s based on the vSAN Express Storage Architecture introduced in vSAN v8.0. Koehler writes: “Storage resources are disaggregated from compute resources but achieved in such a way that it maintains the capabilities and benefits of HCI while providing the desired flexibility of centralized shared storage.”
The vSAN Max system provides unified block, file, and object storage. It’s scalable with a 24-host vSAN Max cluster delivering up to 8.6PB of capacity and up to 3.4 million IOPS.
VMware says vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA), introduced in vSAN v8.0 is an optional, alternative vSAN architecture to the Original Storage Architecture (OSA) that provides different ways to process and store data. ESA provides a log-structured file system, vSAN LFS, that enables vSAN to ingest new data fast, prepare it for a full stripe write, and store metadata in a more efficient and scalable way.
There is a log-structured object manager and data structure, built around a high-performance block engine and key value store that can deliver large write payloads with less metadata overhead. This log-structured design is, VMware says, “highly parallel and helps us drive near device-level performance capabilities in the ESA.”
VMware vSAN Max diagram
A vSAN Max cluster can be set up in a single site or stretched across two. It is managed through vCenter Server exactly like traditional vSAN. Koehler suggests a few use cases including a tier one database storage resource, centralized storage for a set of vSphere clusters, and scalable storage for cloud-native apps.
The new vSAN Max offering is expected to be available in the second half of fiscal 2024, and will be licensed separately from existing vSAN editions, offered as a subscription and licensed on a per-tebibyte basis. The license includes everything needed to run a vSAN Max cluster – no licenses of vSphere etc. are needed. Find out more in a vSAN FAQ in VMware’s website.
Interview Here is the second part of our interview with Mainline Information Systems storage architect Rob Young, following part 1. We talked about proprietary vs standard SSD formats, high-speed cloud block storage, CXL, file vs block and single tier vs multi-tier arrays and more.
Blocks & Files: What advantages does proprietary flash hold versus commercial off the shelf?
Rob Young
Rob Young: Pure [Storage] demonstrates the advantages in its DirectFlash management of their custom modules, eliminating garbage collection and write amplification with zero over-provisioning. With zero over-provisioning you get what you paid for. VAST Data, with its similar scheme, works with cheap (in their words) COTS QLC drives. Their stellar algorithms with wear-level tracking cell history is such a light touch that their terms of service will replace a worn out QLC drive for 10 years. Likewise, we read that VAST are positioned to go from working with 1000 erase cycles of QLC cell to the 500 erase cycles of PLC when PLC becomes a thing.
What is an advantage of custom design? The ability like Pure to create very large modules (75 TB currently) to stack a lot of data in 5 units of rack space. The drives are denser and more energy-efficient. IBM custom FCM’s are very fast (low latency is a significant FCM custom advantage), and have onboard and transparent zero overhead compression. This provides less advantage these days with custom compression at the module level. Intel incorporated QAT tech and compression is happening at the CPU now. In development time QAT is a recent 2021 introduction. At one point, Intel had separate compression cards for storage OEMs. I don’t want to talk about that.
Let’s briefly consider what some are doing with QLC. Pure advertises 2 to 4 ms IO (read) response time with their QLC solution. In 2023 is that a transactional solution? No, not a great fit. This is a tier2 solution – backup targets, AI/ML, Windows shares, massive IO and bandwidth – a great fit for their target audience.
Solidigm D5-P5336
So, when we discuss some of these solutions keep in mind, you still need something for transactional workloads and there are limited one-size fits all solutions. Now having said that, look at the recent Solidigm announcement of the D5-P5336. They are showing a 110 us small random read described as TLC performance in QLC form-factor. That’s 5x faster than the QLC VAST is currently using. Surely a game changer for folks focused on COTS solutions.
Blocks & Files: Do very high-speed block array storage instances in the cloud using ephemeral storage, in a similar way to Silk and Volumez represent a threat to on-premises block arrays?
Rob Young: Volumez is a very interesting newcomer. We see that Intersystems is an early showcase customer adopting Volumez for their cloud-based Iris analytics. What is interesting about Volumez is the control plane that lives in the cloud.
On-prem storage growth is stagnant while clouds are climbing. These solutions are no more of a threat to on-prem than the shift that is organically occurring.
Secondly, Volumez is a Kubernetes play. Yes, next-gen dev is focused on K8s but many Enterprises are like aircraft carriers and slow to pivot. There are a lot of applications that will be traditional 3-tier VM stack for a long time. What wouldn’t surprise me, with cloud costs typically higher versus on-prem, is we would see Volumez customers at some point do common sense things like test/dev footprint resides on-prem and production in a cloud provider. Production resides in the cloud in some cases just to feed nearby analytics plus it is smaller footprint than test/dev. Cloud mostly owns analytics from here on, the great scale of the shared Cloud almost seals that deal.
Blocks & Files: How might these ephemeral storage-based public cloud storage instances be reproduced on-premises?
Rob Young: Carmody tells us an on-prem version of Volumez will happen. Like Volumez, AWS’s VSA uses ephemeral storage also. How will it happen? JBOF on high-speed networks and it might take a while to become common but suppliers are about today.
Cloud has a huge advantage in network space. Enterprise on-prem lag cloud in that regard with differing delivery mechanisms (traditional 3-tier VMs and separate storage/network .) What Volumez/AWS VSA have in common is there is no traditional storage controller as we know it.
VAST Data D-nodes are pass-thru storage controllers, they do not cache data locally. VAST Data gets away with that because all writes are captured in SCM (among other reasons.) Glenn Lockwood in Feb 2019 wrote a very good piece describing VAST Data’s architecture. What is interesting is the discussion in the comments where the speculation is the pass-thru D-Node is an ideal candidate to transition to straight fabric-attached JBOF.
Just prior to those comments, Renen Hallak (VAST co-founder) at Storage Field Day spoke about a potential re-appearance of Ethernet Drives. The pass-thru storage controller is no longer at that point. It’s just getting started with limited Enterprise choices but folks like VAST Data, Volumez and others should drive fabric-based JBOF adoption. Server-less infrastructure headed to controller-less. Went off the rails pie-in-the-sky a bit here but what we can anticipate is several storage solutions become controller free with control planes in the cloud and easily pivot back and forth cloud to on-prem. For all the kids in the software pool, “hardware is something to tolerate” is the attitude we are seeing from a new storage generation.
Blocks & Files: How might block arrays use CXL, memory pooling and sharing?
Rob Young: Because it is storage, a CXL-based memory pool would be a great fit. The 250 nanosecond access time for server-based CXL memory? Many discussions on forums about that. From my perspective it might be a tough sell in the server space if the local memory is 3-4x faster than fabric-based. However, and as mentioned above, 250 ns second added overhead on IO traffic is not a concern. You could see where 4, 6, 8, 16 PowerMAX nodes sharing common CXL memory would be a huge win in cost savings and allow for many benefits of cache sharing across Dell’s PowerMAX and other high-end designs.
Blocks & Files: Should all block arrays provide file storage as well, like Dell’s PowerStore and NetApp’s ONTAP do? What are the arguments for and against here?
Rob Young: I touched on a bunch of that above. The argument against is the demarcation of functions, limiting the blast radius. It isn’t a bad thing to be block only. If you are using a backup solution that has standlone embedded storage, that is one thing. But if you as a customer are expected to present NFS shares as backup targets either locally at the client or to the backup servers themselves you must have separation. As mentioned, Pure has now moved file into their block, unified block and file.
Traditionally, legacy high-end arrays have been block only (or bolt-on NFS with dubious capability.) Infinidat claims 15 percent of their customers use their Infinibox as file only, 40 percent block and file. The argument for is there is a market for it if we look at Infinidat. Likewise, Pure now becomes like the original block/file Netapp. There is a compelling business case to combine if you can or the same vendor block usage on one set of arrays, file on other. Smaller shops and limited budgets combine also.
The argument against it is to split the data into different targets (high-end for prod, etc.) and a customer’s architectural preferences prevail. There is a lot of art here, no “one way” to do things. Let me point out a hidden advantage and a caution regarding other vendors. Infinidat uses virtual MAC addressing (as does Pure – I believe) for IP addressing in NAS. On controller reboot via outage or upgrade, the hand-off of that IP to another controller is nearly instant and transparent to the switch. It avoids gratuitous arps. One of the solutions mentioned here (and there are more than one) typically takes 60 seconds for IP failover due to arp on hand-off. This renders NFS shares for ESXi DataStores problematic for the vendor I am alluding to and they aren’t alone. Regarding the 15 percent of Infinidat’s customers that are NFS/SMB only; a number of those customers are using NFS for ESXi. How do we know that? Read Gartner’s Peer Insights, it is a gold mine.
Blocks & Files: How might scale-out file storage, such as VAST Data, Qumulo and PowerScale be preferred to block storage?
Rob Young: Simple incremental growth. Multi-function. At the risk of contradiction, Windows Shares, S3 and NFS access in one platform (but not backup!)
Great SMB advantages of same API/interface, one array as file, other as block. More modern features including built-in analytics at no additional charge in VAST and in Qumulo. In some cases, iSCSI/NFS transactional IO targets (with caveats mentioned.) Multiple drive choices in Qumulo and PowerScale. NLSAS is quite a bit cheaper – still – take a dive on the fainting couch! For some of these applications you want cheap and deep. Video capture is one of them. Very unfriendly to deduplication and compression.
In VAST Data’s case, you will be well poised for the coming deluge. Jeff Denworth at VAST wrote a piece The Legacy NAS Kill Shot basically pointing out high bandwidth is coming with serious consequences. That article bugged me ever since I read it, I perseverated on it far too long. He’s prescient, but like Twain quipped: “it is difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future.” What we can say is AI/ML shows you with a truly disaggregated solution that shares everything with no traffic cop is advantageous.
But the high bandwidth that is coming when the entire stack gets fatter pipelines, not just for AI but in general as PCIe5 becomes common, 64 Gbit FC, 100 Gbit ethernet and higher performing servers will make traditional dual-controller arrays strain under bandwidth bursts. Backup and databases are pathological IO applications, they will be naughty and bursting much higher reads/writes. Noisy neighbor (and worse behavior) headed our way at some point.
Blocks & Files: How do you view the relative merits of single-tiered all-flash storage versus multi-tiered storage?
Rob Young: Phil Soran, founder of Compellent, in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, came up with auto-tiering; what a cool invention – but it now has a limited use case.
No more tiers. I get it and it is a successful strategy. I’ve had issues with multi-tier in banking applications at month-end. Those blocks that have long since cooled off to two tiers lower are suddenly called to perform again. Those blocks don’t instantly migrate to more performant layers. That was a tricky problem. It took an Infinidat to mostly solve the tiering challenge. Cache is for IO, data is for backing store. To get the data into a cache layer quickly (or it is already there) is key and they can get ahead of calls for IO.
Everyone likes to set it and forget it with stable/consistent performant all flash arrays. IBM in their FS/V7K series provides tiering and it has its advantages. Depending on budget and model, you can purchase a layer of SCM drives and hot-up your data to that tier0 SCM layer from tier1 NVMe SSD/FCM – portions of the hottest data. The advantage here is the “slower” performing tier1 is very good performance on tier0 misses. There is a clear use case for tiering as SCM/SLC is still quite expensive. Also, there is your lurker, let’s put an IBM FS9000 IO less than 300 us but more than Infinidat SSA. Additionally, tiering is still a good fit for data consumers that can tolerate slower retrieval time like video playback (I’m referring to cheap and slow NLSAS in the stack.)
The NetApp fully managed Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud is now known as Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, with Google assuming the role of the primary provider and manager of the service.
It is based on NetApp’s ONTAP operating system and its file-based data functions running on the Google Cloud Platform as a native GCP service. It provides multi-access protocol support for NFS V3 and v4.1, as well as SMB, and has features such as snapshots, clones, replication, and cross-region backup. It is the only Google storage service supporting both NFS and SMB.
Sameet Agarwal, VP and GM for Google Cloud Storage, said: “Today’s announcement extends our ability to deliver first-party storage and enterprise data management services so organizations can rapidly deploy, run, protect, and scale enterprise workloads with the familiar tools and interface of Google Cloud.”
Ronen Schwartz, SVP and GM for Cloud Storage at NetApp, added: “We see our mission as creating cloud storage and data services that are as forward-thinking and easy to use as possible, and this partnership allows us to continue making this vision a reality.”
NetApp made its ONTAP services available on GCP back in 2018 and has the most comprehensive cross-cloud and on-premises file storage system offering available covering AWS, Azure, and Google. Customers with NetApp systems in their datacenters can use AWS, Azure, and GCP datacenters as extensions of their own for tiering, bursting, business continuity, disaster recovery, migration, etc.
Customers can run either Windows or Linux applications as virtual machines in a few clicks and without any refactoring. Storage volumes can scale from 100GiB to 100TiB. There is support for instant capacity additions or changes between performance tiers without downtime. Built-in block-level incremental backups provide protection without needing downtime or slowing app performance.
NetApp tells us that being a Google Cloud first-party service means that its customers now have a smoother and more integrated operational experience including:
Full integration with Google Cloud Console, APIs, and gcloud CLI management
Full integration with Google Cloud billing – no marketplace hoops to jump through, full-fledged burndown of the Google Cloud Committed Use Discounts (CUD) since this is a first-party offering
Improved integration in IAM, Cloud Monitoring, and Cloud Logging for better resiliency
Simplified UI, structured around user workflows in the Google Cloud ‘look and feel’
Simplified and improved documentation, along with the Feedback button to send recommendations directly to Google Cloud
Administrative volume and service actions
SOC2 Trust Service Criteria – Type 1 compliant service operations and controls, inherited from Google Cloud
Service Level Agreement of 99.95 percent for data plane without CRR (Cross-Region Replication) and 99.99 percent with CRR
NetApp will be working with Google Cloud on the feature roadmap and deeper integration with the array of Google Cloud services such as GCVE, GKE, etc. Read a Google blog and online NetApp documentation to find out more.
Data protector Acronis has renewed its relationship with the UK’s Southampton Football Club. Channel partner TMT will provide the club with the full suite of Acronis cyber protection offerings.
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Cloud and backup storage provider Backblaze has announced price increases. B2 Cloud Storage’s monthly pay-as-you-go rate increases from $5/TB to $6/TB with free egress for customers for up to three times the amount of data stored. Prices for its Computer Backup business, effective October 3, will increase from $7/month to $9/month.
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Postgres contributor EnterpriseDB (EDB) is partnering more with Google Cloud to make two of EDB’s offerings available on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): EDB Community 360 PostgreSQL on GKE Autopilot and fully-managed database-as-a-service EDB BigAnimal on Google Cloud.
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Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute (VCCRI) is using Filecoin decentralized storage to store 125+ TiBs (137.439 TB) of cardiac research data, including raw datasets from published papers consisting of thousands of images of cells and encrypted backups of their SyncroPatch machine, a laboratory technique for studying currents in living cells.
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FileShadow is a SaaS service that collects a user’s content from cloud storage, email, hard drives, etc.and puts it into a FileShadow Library which can be shared with others. It now enables small businesses and individuals to publish content from their FileShadow Libraries to Facebook Pages.
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TrueNAS supplier iXsystems has been awarded a Top Workplaces 2023 honor by Knoxville Top Workplaces and the Knoxville Sentinel News.
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Lenovo is a significant all-flash array supplier 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)
In Q1 CY23, according to IDC, All Flash Arrays accounted for 45 percent of the entire storage array market. For Lenovo, it is actually 61 percent.
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Cloud filesystem and services supplier Nasuni has appointed Jim Liddle as its Chief Innovation Officer. Liddle, formerly Nasuni’s VP of Product, was founder and CEO of acquired Storage Made Easy. He will lead the development and implementation of Nasuni’s data intelligence and AI strategies
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Cornelis Networks, Penguin Solutions and Panasas have partnered to define and test a reference design of Penguin Computing’s Altus servers running Scyld ClusterWare and Panasas ActiveStor storage appliances connected with the Cornelis Networks Omni-Path Express fabric. This should save new and existing customers time and money. the Cornelis Omni-Path Gateway is an efficient and cost-effective alternative to direct connected Panasas storage in data centers with existing file system storage using Ethernet in the back-end. Read a solution brief here.
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Peer Software announced PeerIQ, a self-hosted analytics engine that enhances storage analytics, observability and monitoring, with a single pane of visibility into heterogeneous hybrid and multi-cloud storage environments – going beyond the limitations of singular vendor storage systems. PeerIQ is a virtual appliance that contains a dashboard and analytics environment that offers tools for monitoring the health and performance of PeerGFS, Peer’s Global File Service, and an organization’s replication environment.
PeerIQ provides organizations with insights into their storage infrastructure, as the engine ingests storage metadata. The platform then performs analysis and delivers trending information through intuitive visualisation and reporting. Its dashboards are viewable via a web browser and provide a visual and interactive interface that displays telemetry data that is updated automatically.
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Rubrik has announced generative AI product integrations with VMware to help customers recover better from malware attacks:
Get step-by-step guidance to recover unaffected files from the most recent snapshot and affected files from the snapshot prior to suspicious threat detection — layered on top of a clean virtual machine built from a gold master template.
Identify vSphere templates to reconstruct clean and safe virtual machines and avoid introducing undetected vulnerabilities within the operating system.
Get clear recommendations on which snapshot or files to select for a clean and successful recovery through Rubrik’s data threat analytics integrated with Azure OpenAI.
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Data analytics accelerator SQream announced its no-code ELT and analytics platform Panoply is launching an AI Flex Connector helper which leverages generative AI to streamline the path to business intelligence. This tool will make it easier for users to collect all of their business data – from CRMs, user applications, and other tools – into one single source, and minimize the technical requirements to generate quick data insights.
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Cloud datawarehouser Snowflake’s revenue growth continued with a 36 percent Y/Y rise to $674 million in its second fy2024 quarter. Its customer count rose to 8,537 from last quarter’s 8,167, up 370. The expected loss was $226.9 million, not much different from the year-ago $222.8 million loss on revenues of $497.2 million.
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The DRAM recession is ending. TrendForce reports that rising demand for AI servers has driven growth in HBM shipments. Combined with the wave of inventory buildup for DDR5 on the client side, the second quarter saw all three major DRAM suppliers experience shipment growth. Q2 revenue for the DRAM industry reached approximately $11.43 billion, marking a 20.4 percent QOQ increase and halting a decline that persisted for three consecutive quarters. Among suppliers, SK hynix saw a significant quarterly growth of over 35 percent in shipments.
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Trendforce reports NVIDIA’s latest financial report for FY2Q24 reveals that its data center business reached US$10.32 billion—a QoQ growth of 141 percent and YoY increase of 171 percent. The company remains optimistic about its future growth. TrendForce believes that the primary driver behind NVIDIA’s robust revenue growth stems from its data center’s AI server-related solutions. It expects NVIDIA’s to extend its reach into the edge enterprise AI server market, underpinning steady growth in its data center business for the next two years. Which storage suppliers will benefit?
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SkiBig3 works on vacation planning for ski resorts in Banff National Park – Banff Sunshine, Lake Louise Ski Resort and Mt. Norquay. It has selected the VergeOS UCI platform over VMware, Hypeer-V and public cloud options for its better data protection and scalability.
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According to a global study conducted by S&P Global Market Intelligence and commissioned by WEKA, the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) by enterprises and research organizations seeking to create new value propositions is accelerating, but data infrastructure and AI sustainability challenges present barriers to implementing it successfully at scale. Visit www.weka.io/trends-in-AI to read the full report
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Zadara has partnered with managed services provider Node4 to deliver multi-tenanted immutable and secure storage for its Veeam backup and recovery platform via its zStorage Object Storage offering.
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Switzerland-based Zstor is introducing DapuStor Haishen5 Series PCIe 5.0 SSDs in Europe. They have sequential read and write speeds reaching up to 14000/8000 MBps, and 4K steady-state random read and write speeds of up to 2800/600,000. Form factors include U.2, E1.S and E3.S and they use Marvell Bravera SC5 SSD controllers.
Frore Systems showed off a 64TB U.2 SSD cooled by its AirJet Mini at Flash Memory Summit 2023 that removes 40W of heat without using bulky heat sinks, fans or liquid cooling.
AirJet is a self-contained, solid-state, active heat sink module that’s silent, thin, and light. It measures 2.8mm x 27.5mm x 41.5mm and weighs 11g. It removes 5.2W of heat at a 21dBA noise level, while consuming a maximum 1W of power. AirJet Mini generates 1,750 Pascals of back pressure, claimed to be 10x higher than a fan, enabling thin and dust-proof devices that can run faster because excess heat is taken away.
Think of the AirJet Mini as a thin wafer or slab that sits on top of a processor or SSD and cools it by drawing in air, passes it over a heat spreader physically touching the device, then ejects it from another outlet. Alternatively, AirJet Mini can be connected to its target via a copper heat exchanger.
Inside the AirJet Mini are tiny membranes that vibrate ultrasonically and generate the necessary airflow without needing fans. Air enters though top surface vents and is moved as pulsating jets through the device and out through a side-mounted spout.
Cross-sectional AirJet Mini diagram
AirJet is scalable, with additional heat removed by adding more wafers or chips. Each chip removes 5W of heat, two chips can remove 10W, three chips 15W, and so on. A more powerful AirJet Pro removes more heat – 10.5W of heat at 24dBA, while consuming a maximum 1.75W of power.
AirJet can be used to cool thin and light notebook processors or SSDs, and enable them to run faster without damage. Running faster produces more heat, which the AirJet Mini removes.
OWC Mercury Pro in its 3.5-inch carrier, with 8 x M.2 SSDS inside, 4 on top, 4 below, each fitted with an Air Jet Mini
OWC built a demonstration a portable SSD-based storage device in a 3.5-inch carrier, which it exhibited at FMS 2023. Inside the Mercury Pro casing are 8 x 8TB M.2 2280 format SSDs, each with an attached AirJet Mini. Its bandwidth is between 2.2GBps and 2.6GBps for sequential writes. We don’t know how it would perform without the Frore cooling slabs, though.
Speed increases may not be the only benefit, however, as a similar-sized Mercury Pro U.2 Dual has an audible fan. Frore’s cooling does away with the noise and needs less electricity.
We could see notebook, gaming system and portable SSD device builders using Frore membrane cooling technology so their devices can be more powerful without needing noisy fans, bulky heatsinks or liquid cooling.
OWC has not committed to making this a product. Get a Frore AirJet Mini datasheet here.
NetApp’s financial performance for a third consecutive quarter reflected the challenging economic climate as the company reported revenues were lower than expected, despite surpassing estimates.
In its first fiscal quarter of 2024, ended July 28, revenues were down 10 percent year-over-year to $1.43 billion. This was, however, above their forecast midpoint. NetApp reported profit of $149 million, representing a 30 percent fall from the previous year. The hybrid cloud segment generated revenues of $1.28 billion, a 12.3 percent decrease, while public cloud revenues stood at $154 million, marking a 16.7 percent increase. The public cloud annual run rate (ARR) saw a modest 6 percent rise to $619 million, but the direction of travel has some way to go to offset hybrid cloud revenue declines – $180 million this quarter.
CEO George Kurian said: “We delivered a solid start to fiscal year 2024 in what continues to be a challenging macroeconomic environment. We are managing the elements within our control, driving better performance in our storage business, and building a more focused approach to cloud.”
The market was affected by the challenging economic situation with muted demand and lengthened sales cycles. Billings dropped 17 percent annually to $1.3 billion. All-flash array sales were presented in ARR terms as being $2.8 billion, a 7 percent drop on a year ago. Positive momentum surrounds NetApp’s recently introduced the AFF C-Series array, which uses more affordable QLC flash. The product is pacing to be the quickest-growing all-flash system in the company’s history and NetApp expects AFA sales to rise. NetApp launched its SAN-specific ASA A-Series ONTAP systems in May and Kurian hopes they will “drive share gains in the $18 billion SAN market.”
Financial summary
Operating cash flow: $453 million up 61 percent year-over-year
EPS: $0.69 vs $0.96 a year ago
Share repurchases and dividends: $506 million
Cash, cash equivalents, and investments: $2.98 billion
A concerning note is that NetApp’s product sales have been on a downward trend for the past five quarters. At present, they stand at $590 million, marking a 25 percent year-on-year decline. Service revenues witnessed a 5 percent rise to $842 million but fell short of offsetting the decline in product sales.
Addressing the performance of NetApp’s all-flash and public cloud revenues, Kurian mentioned “focusing our enterprise sellers on the flash opportunity and building a dedicated model for cloud … The changes have been well received, are already showing up in pipeline expansion, and should help drive top line growth in the second half.”
Kurian said flash revenues were particularly good last year because NetApp benefited “from elevated levels of backlog that we shipped in the comparable quarter last year. If you remove that backlog, flash actually grew year-on-year this quarter.” NetApp is second in the AFA market behind Dell, according to IDC. The CEO expects NetApp’s “overall flash portfolio to grow as a percentage of our business through the course of the year,” with AFA sales growing faster than hybrid flash/disk array sales.
Public cloud is a particular problem, with Kurian saying: “I want to acknowledge our cloud results have not been where we want them to be and assure you we are taking definitive action to hone our approach and get back on track … First party storage services, branded and sold by our cloud partners, position us uniquely and represent our biggest opportunity.” That means AWS, Azure, and Google, with news coming about the NetApp-Google offerings.
He added in the earnings call that “subscription is where we saw a challenge, both a small part of cloud storage subscription as well as CloudOps and we are conducting a review” to find out more clearly where things went wrong.
NetApp acknowledged the surge in interest in generative AI and said it was well represented in customers’ projects.
NetApp and Pure Storage
NetApp has been announcing its all-flash array storage ARR numbers for the past seven quarters. That gives us a means of comparing them to Pure Storage’s quarterly revenues, either by dividing NetApp’s AFA numbers by four to get a quarterly number, or multiplying Pure’s quarterly revenues by four to get an ARR. We chose the former, normalized it for Pure’s financial quarters, and charted the result:
By our reckoning Pure’s revenues, based on all-flash sales, passed NetApp’s last quarter, but NetApp has regained the lead with its latest quarter’s revenues.
NetApp was asked in the earnings call about Pure’s assertion “that there won’t be any new spinning disk drives manufactured in five years.” Kurian disputed this, saying: “When you cannot support a type of technology, like our competitors cannot, then you have to throw grenades and say that that technology doesn’t exist because you frankly can’t support it.”
Next quarter’s revenues are expected to be $1.53 billion, with a possible deviation of $75 million. This represents an estimated 8 percent annual decline. Kurian said NetApp expects to see “top line growth in the back half of FY’24,” meaning the second and third quarters should see a revenue uptick. That should be mostly due to increased AFA sales with some contribution from the public cloud business.
Analyst GigaOm has released two Sonar reports looking at the state of ransomware protection in block and file-based primary storage, with Infinidat first in block and fifth in file, the highest-placed vendor overall.
Sonar reports provide overviews of suppliers in an emerging product technology class, and places them in a semi-circular space divided into feature play and platform play quarter circles and two concentric half rings overlapping them. The outer ring is for challengers and the inner one for leaders. The closer suppliers are placed to the central point of the semicircle, the more innovative they are. Suppliers are divided into fast movers (black arrow) in terms of their product and market development or forward movers. It all becomes clear when you look at a Sonar diagram so here is the one for primary block storage suppliers:
There are 10 block storage suppliers, the top three being Infinidat, Dell, and Pure Storage with platform plays. IBM, Hitachi Vantara together with challengers Nutanix and StorONE form a more dispersed group of platform players, with HPE and NetApp plus DDN forming a feature play threesome.
File-based ransomware is the most pervasive and uses a combination of techniques to remain unnoticed and spread silently. Block-based ransomware is less common, but encrypts entire data volumes, making recovery much harder than file-based attacks. The suppliers are ranked in terms of their timely identification, alerting, and mitigation of attacks.
The report authors, Max Mortillaro and Arjan Timmerman, say:
Infinidat offers a complete and balanced ransomware protection solution with InfiniSafe technology included, which has been enhanced this year with InfiniSafe Cyber Detection, an ML-based, petabyte-class, proactive ransomware detection solution.
Dell Technologies’ PowerMax solution offers solid ransomware protection capabilities, while PowerStore and PowerFlex are gradually being improved by inheriting some of PowerMax’s features. These are augmented by Dell CloudIQ’s AIOps platform’s proactive detection capabilities, propelling the company forward in the Sonar.
Pure Storage provides ransomware protection through its SafeMode snapshots (now enabled by default) and strong multifactor authentication (MFA), while it has added security posture features to its solution. It also delivers a ransomware recovery SLA, an add-on service that helps customers recover faster in case of an attack.
The file report focuses on NAS offerings and it looks at 16 suppliers:
There are four closely placed fast-moving leaders, Racktop, Cohesity, NetApp and infinidat, with a platform-focused approach, and then CTERA with a more feature-focused product. It’s in front of slower-moving Nasuni, also a leader, and challenger Panzura, which is crossing into the leader’s area. Nutanix is the trailing platform play leader.
Dell, Pure, and StorOne are platform-oriented challengers while Hitachi Vantara and WEKA trail them with less of a platform focus. We see DDN, IBM, and Hammerspace as feature play-oriented challengers.
The report authors note:
RackTop’s system intertwines file storage and data security within its BrickStor SP software-defined solution, embedding a comprehensive set of ransomware protection capabilities delivered through a zero-trust approach.
Infinidat offers a complete and balanced ransomware protection solution with InfiniGuard CyberRecovery, which has been enhanced this year with InfiniSafe Cyber Detection, an ML-based, petabyte-class proactive ransomware detection solution.
Cohesity continues to deliver on the cyber resiliency promise with proactive ML-based detection, on-premises and cloud-based immutability capabilities, and strong zero-trust and anti-tampering features, augmented with data protection and data management features inherent in the platform.
NetApp delivers a strong set of ransomware protection capabilities at multiple layers, while also working on rationalizing and better integrating its portfolio of cyber resiliency features.
Nutanix Data Lens offers a commendable SaaS-based data security solution for ransomware resilience and global data visibility with features such as proactive threat containment and alerting capabilities.
CTERA recently released Ransom Protect, a homegrown AI-based proactive ransomware detection solution that completes the company’s cyber resiliency feature set.
Nasuni’s ransomware protection includes fast recovery, mitigation with plans for automated recovery orchestration, and a proactive ransomware detection solution that is being actively improved.
There is much more detail on each supplier and its offerings in the two GigaOm reports than we have highlighted here. You can download the two reports from Infinidat’s website – block Sonar here and file Sonar here – to pore through the details at your leisure.
Project Monterey, the joint venture between Dell, VMware, and Nvidia to put vSphere on a DPU (data processing unit) to offload storage and networking tasks from a host x86 CPU, appears to be in the R&D waiting room, with wannabe VMware acquirer Broadcom not publicly confirming support for it and VMware itself not offering even half-hearted backing.
Started in 2020 by VMware and Nvidia, the Monterey initiative was introduced as a new security model that offloads hypervisor, networking, security, and storage tasks from the CPU to the DPU.
Yet since Broadcom confirmed its intent to buy VMware, the fate of Project Monterey has been called into question. The EU Commission previously looked into the competitive implications of the acquisition and, among its concerns, said in December: “In 2020, VMware launched Project Monterey with three SmartNICs sellers (NVIDIA, Intel and AMD Pensando). Broadcom may decrease VMware’s involvement in Project Monterey to protect its own NICs revenues. This could hamper innovation to the detriment of customers.”
Fast-forward to July and the EC conditionally approved the takeover of VMware, saying: ”Broadcom would have no economic incentive to hinder the development of SmartNICs by other providers by decreasing VMware’s involvement in Project Monterey, an ongoing cooperation with three other SmartNICs sellers (NVIDIA, Intel and AMD Pensando), as such foreclosure would not be profitable.”
However, B&F asked Broadcom for its view on Project Monterey this month and a company spokesperson said: “I’m afraid Broadcom can’t answer this one,” which isn’t exactly a glowing confirmation of its involvement.
Others were more definitive. Dell told us: “We plan to continue our VMware collaboration to support vSphere Distributed Services Engine (previously known as Project Monterey) with our latest generation VxRail systems, which provides the most flexible configurations of any generation to date. We have enabled configurations for a variety of use cases including GPUs, DPUs and increased storage density with rear drives.”
VMware has a microsite for the vSphere Distributed Services Engine (vDSE) with text, a video, and a downloadable ebook. The intent is to provide supercharged workload performance with the DPU’s host server infrastructure offload functions. The structure behind this is to have a vSphere ESXi hypervisor on the DPU run VMware infrastructure app services: vSphere Distributed switch, NSX Networking, and NSX Distributed Firewall, storage services and infrastructure management, for example.
A diagram shows how these are related:
The text says that vDSE’s NSX Distributed Firewall is available as a tech preview; NSX Distributed Firewall being available as a beta feature in NVX v4. The ebook also notes that having bare metal Windows and Linux OSes on the DPU, plus Storage Services, and Infrastructure Management are not available in vSphere 8. Presumably we’ll need a future vSphere release to bring these functionalities to the DPU.
The ebook discusses a vendor ecosystem comprising Dell, Intel, HPE, Lenovo, Nvidia, Pensando, and VMware.
Substantial involvement. But recent comments from VMware at VMworld Explore in Las Vegas cast a shadow over this: the port of ESXi to Arm for the BlueField system was experimental. VMware CTO Kit Colbert said: “As we look forward we are continuing to evaluate supporting the mainboard processor.”
All CEO Raghu Raghuram would say is that VMware is considering taking its virtual storage and networking tech to Arm. In other words, there is no current commitment to keep supporting the vDSE software stack on BlueField DPUs or other Arm-powered DPUs and SmartNICs.
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Sound too good to be true? Well it’s not, according to this Modern Multicloud webinar from Dell – Achieve Greater Cost Control and IT Agility by Leveraging Dell APEX. In it you’ll hear Chris Wenzel, senior Presales manager at Dell Technologies, talk about how organizations across the world are finding ways to address their rising IT costs using unified infrastructure solutions.
Proving that point are Neil Florence, Head of Systems and Infrastructure for UK construction and engineering company NG Bailey and Neil’s colleague Stephen Firth, NG Bailey’s Infrastructure Manager. They outline how the company has worked hard to transform its own infrastructure and get its business onto a really stable platform over the last few years, having updated all of its core processes to help simplify its operations.
NG Bailey was accelerating the rate of SaaS adoption but worried that its traditional three tier approach to datacenter infrastructure wouldn’t fit the new model or help the business grow. To that end, and having taken the decision not to move everything into the public cloud due to associated cost risks, a natural evolution towards a multicloud environment was already underway.
At that point NG Bailey sought help and advice from Dell Technologies and Constor Solutions, a Dell Technologies IT solutions provider, including a strategic session at its Innovation Centre in Limerick which helped it understand how different Dell solutions could help the organization.
You can hear Neil and Stephen explain where Dell APEX Flex on Demand fits in helping to bring cost effective unified storage and data protection controls across multiple clouds, whether Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and others – and whatever the applications and data they happen to host.
IBM has announced its latest TS1170 tape drive with 50TB cartridges, more than 2.5 times larger than LTO-9 cartridges.
IBM, which manufactures the LTO tape drives sold by itself, HPE, and Quantum, has its own proprietary tape formats used in its TS1100 series drives and Jx format media. The latest TS1170 drive supports 50TB JF media cartridges with 150TB compressed capacity through 3:1 compression. The prior TS1160, announced in 2018, supported JE media with capacities of 20TB raw and 60TB compressed.
IBM TS1170 tape drive
The TS1170 drive operates at 400MBps raw throughput and supports both 12gig SAS and 16gig FC connectivity. It is also recognized as LTFS-ready. However, JF media is not backwards-compatible with the earlier JE specification.
The new tape cartridge media, also called 3592 70F, uses Strontium Ferrite particle technology. Fujifilm has demonstrated a 580TB raw capacity tape using Strontium Ferrite particles so there is a lot of runway for future capacity increases.
LTO-9 tapes hold 18TB raw and 45TB compressed, less than IBM’s JE format tapes. The LTO tape roadmap has a coming LTO-10 specification with 36TB raw/90TB compressed capacity. Where IBM uses a 3:1 compression ratio, the LTO group uses 2.5:1. An IBM TS4500 tape library, using the JF cartridges, will be able to hold the same amount of data as an LTO-9-based library but with more than three times fewer tapes thanks to IBM’s large capacity tape and greater compression. Even when LTO-10 tape technology arrives, the TS4500 will still have a better density in terms of TB per cartridge.
The LTO (Linear Tape-Open) organization was founded to provide an open industry standard format to replace various proprietary tape formats such as Quantum’s S-DLT and DLT. But since only IBM makes LTO tape drives and these drives use media from Sony and Fujifilm, IBM has a lock on the LTO tape format.
LTO group members HPE and Quantum are dependent upon IBM and can do nothing to get LTO tape cartridge capacity up to the IBM TS1170/JF level unless they develop their own drives. If they do this, they may have to lose some backwards-compatibility. With IBM’s dominant presence in the LTO space, competitors would need significant investment to establish a foothold.
Graid, the GPU-powered RAID card startup, says it has accelerated its RAID card speed following a software update.
The company’s SupremeRAID card utilizes on-board GPUs for RAID parity calculations and interfaces with a host server through the PCIe bus. The SR1010 model employs a PCIe gen 4 connection to a host. As the PCIe bus’s link bandwidth expands – moving from gen 3’s 8Gbps to gen 4’s 16Gbps, and further to gen 5’s 32Gbps – the RAID card’s IO speed correspondingly rises. The latest v1.5 software update from Graid introduces support for PCIe 5.
Leander Yu.
Leander Yu, Graid CEO and president, said: ”Gone are the days of IO bottlenecks … Customers investing in NVMe along with PCIe gen 5 infrastructure will experience unparalleled performance when deploying SupremeRAID to protect their data, giving customers the perfect platform for AI/ML, IoT, video processing, and other performance-hungry business applications.”
The software supports RAID levels 0/1/10/5/6/JBOD while the core software license supports up to 32 native NVMe drives. v1.5 adds support for 8 drive groups, up from 4, better random IO on AMD servers, and support for Oracle Linux.
The updated software enables the card to deliver up to 28 million random read IOPS and a two-fold increase in sequential read bandwidth when attached to a host with dual 96-core AMD EPYC 9654 CPUs, 384GB of memory, and 24 x Kioxia CM7 NVMe SSDs, in RAID 5 and 6 configurations. A full performance spec table shows this and previous speed results:
B&F Table
Alternative RAID hardware cards have lower performance. Broadcom’s MegaRAID 9600 achieves up to 6.4 million random read IOPS in comparison.
At present, Graid offers support for both Linux and Windows hosts. However, current data indicates Windows performance lags behind Linux when deploying the SupremeRAID card. This disparity is expected to decrease as Graid promises enhanced functionality for Linux and improved performance for Windows server hosts in an upcoming software release.
Graid table
SupremeRAID software v1.5 supports both the SR1010 and SR1000 cards. This update will be accessible to all Graid customers as a complimentary upgrade, irrespective of their procurement channel.
