Storage news ticker – September 7

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September 7, 2023

Airbyte has announced an integration with Datadog, the monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. It gives customers the ability to monitor and analyze data pipelines with reporting of nearly 50 metrics – at no additional cost. Users get an overview of the overall performance of Airbyte data pipelines from a centralized location, detection and instant alerts on failing syncs or connections, and notifications on long-running jobs, which could indicate latency issues. The integration is available immediately. To begin using it, existing Datadog customers can configure their Airbyte deployments to send metrics to Datadog. Users not already on Datadog can sign up and get started with a free trial. Users not already on Airbyte can sign up for free.

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Backup software supplier Bacula has revealed its product roadmap. It aims to:

Further heighten security levels via smart alerts on suspicious patterns
Detect Data Poisoning
Monitor and detect anomalies in your data
Get more insights on how your data evolves and changes
Get details about infected, corrupted or error files in your infrastructure
Improve security levels of your environment with personalized recommendations
Detect any insecure or inadvisable configuration
Plus possible OpenStack support

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CData has achieved Google Cloud Ready – Cloud SQL Designation for Cloud SQL, Google Cloud’s fully managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. We’re told that this designation enables organizations to simplify data connectivity in the cloud, eliminate data silos, and break down barriers to insights. CData says it provides enterprise data connectivity offerings that ingest live data from more than 250 applications, systems, and data sources directly into Cloud SQL to support analytics, reporting, and other business initiatives.

Ian Wood, of storage company Commvault — Ian Wood

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Data protector Commvault has hired Ian Wood to be its as Senior Sales Engineering Director for the UK & Ireland. He spent 23 years at Veritas, where most recently he was Senior Sales Engineering Director for the UK & Ireland.

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Cloud database supplier Couchbase reported revenues of $43.1 million, up 8 percent anually, for its Q2 ended July 31. Total ARR as of that date was $180.7 million, up 24 percent. Counchbase says it “is not able, at this time, to provide GAAP targets for operating loss for the third quarter or full year of fiscal 2024 because of the difficulty of estimating certain items excluded from non-GAAP operating loss that cannot be reasonably predicted, such as charges related to stock-based compensation expense. The effect of these excluded items may be significant.” Operating loss was $21.9 million versus an operating loss of $15.2 million a year earlier.

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Databricks has revealed an extensive product roadmap for its Azure version, with more than 20 bullet point items. Here’s a sample:

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GRAX, a supplier of Salesforce data management and protection, has released GRAX Lite for free Salesforce backup and recovery. It enables backups into AWS or Azure cloud storage environments and runs entirely in the customer-owned cloud. There are automated incremental backups of Salesforce data, including files and attachments, with granular control; users can restore individual records. More info here.

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SaaS backup supplier HYCU’s CEO and co-founder, Simon Taylor, has a book coming out: Averting the SaaS Data Apocalypse. It will be launched at the Empire Boston in Boston, MA, on September 12. Attendees are promised “a captivating presentation by Simon offering insights into the challenges and solutions presented in the book.”

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IBM’s public cloud has raised its prices outside the USA, effective January 1, 2024. The rises are listed here. They are presented as uplifts from US base prices and vary from 2.9 to 7.5 percent.

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InfluxData, which built the time series platform InfluxDB, has announced InfluxDB Clustered, a self-managed time series database for on-prem or private cloud deployments, deployed natively in Kubernetes. It says this completes its commercial product line developed on InfluxDB 3.0, its rebuilt database engine optimized for real-time analytics with higher performance, unlimited cardinality, and SQL support. InfluxDB Clustered has 100x faster queries on high-cardinality data, 45x faster ingest, and 90 percent storage reduction cost compared to the preceding InfluxDB Enterprise. It has encryption at rest and in transit, single sign-on, attribute-based access control, and air-gap support. InfluxData also recently announced the availability of InfluxDB Cloud Dedicated, a fully managed and scalable single-tenant InfluxDB cluster based on the InfluxDB 3.0 architecture and intended for large-scale time series workloads.

Kingston XS1000 storage — Kingston XS1000

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Kingston has a new key fob-sized, all-black external SSD, the XS1000 with USB 3.2 gen 2 performance and 1TB or 2TB capacity. It sits alongside the existing XS2000 with its up to 4TB capacity. Both weigh less than 29 grams. The XS1000 provides read speeds up to 1,050MBps, write speeds up to 1,000MBps, and comes with a USB-C to USB-A cable.

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Samsung has doubled the capacity of its 16Gb DDR5 chip to 33Gb, using 12nm-class process technology, and with the same package size – but the die size is probably twice as big. It says this enables the production of 128GB DRAM modules, and it can see a route to producing 1TB DRAM modules with this technology. Development is fast as 16Gb DDR5 DRAM die production only started in May. The 32Gb die does not use Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology (electrically conducting holes through the die), unlike the existing 16Gb die. Specifically, “by using Samsung’s 32Gb DRAM, the 128GB module can now be produced without using the TSV process, while reducing power consumption by approximately 10 percent compared to 128GB modules with 16Gb DRAM.” Mass production of the new 12nm-class 32Gb DDR5 DRAM is scheduled to begin by year-end. What Samsung uses instead of TSVs is not revealed.

Samsung 32Gb DDR5 DRAM storage — Samsung 32Gb DDR5 DRAM die images

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SK hynix is investigating how its NAND and LPDDR5 memory products are being used in Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro smartphone in contravention of US tech export restrictions. Bloomberg reported on the phone including SK hynix components based on a teardown exercise.

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The SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference (SDC23) runs from September 18 to 21 in Fremont, CA. Presentation tracks include Magic Memory Access, Data Security, Emerging Technologies, Cloud Storage, DNA Data & Archival Storage, DPUs, AI/MI, and Data Placement. SNIA members get a $300 discount. View the sessions here. Register attendance here.

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SAN supplier StorPool has announced its integration with Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), a hyperconverged infrastructure hosted KVM hypervisor that can run operating systems like Linux and Windows on x64 hardware. Users get a block storage data platform, running on standard servers available as a fully managed storage-as-a-service (STaaS) bundle. Storpool says its Proxmox VE integration provides millions of IOPS for the most demanding applications.

Everspin MRAM revenue growth up by single digits

By

Chris Mellor

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September 6, 2023

Everspin, a pioneer in MRAM, recently released its earnings report, shedding light on the progess for the technology.

The company supplies Spin-Transfer Torque Magneto-resistive RAM (STT-MRAM) non-volatile memory devices. Thanks to their DRAM-class speed, they function as storage-class memories. However, like Intel’s Optane, the technology has failed to break through the NAND-DRAM gap to become a mainstream technology. Factors such as high chip prices have affected sales volume, while low manufacturing volume has kept costs elevated.

Everspin also supplies Toggle MRAM, a variant of STT-MRAM with lower density.

For Q2 of the company’s fiscal 2023 ended June 30, Everspin reported revenues of $15.7 million, surpassing its guidance and equating to year-on-year growth of six percent.

Actual MRAM product sales in the quarter were $13.4 million, up from the $13.22 million recorded a year earlier. Licensing, royalties, patents, and other revenue was $2.3 million, $857,000 higher than in the first quarter, mostly due to Radiation Hard license deals. Radiation Hard MRAM is used to provide memory for FPGA devices that are exposed to high amounts of radiation and used in defense and space applications.

The resulting net profit came in at $3.9 million, up from $1.671 million in the same quarter of 2022.

The company has sustained profitability for nine consecutive quarters. This suggests it is being run as a mature entity with a focus on profitability rather than as a business with high-growth turnover ambitions being run at a loss. Everspin certainly started out as a VC-funded operation, raising $80.3 million across five funding events with a five-phase B-round closing in 2015, culminating in a successful IPO in 2016 under president and CEO Phil LoPresti. Since then, the company has operated independently for eight years.

LoPresti resigned in September 2017, having, as his LinkedIn profile says, “created vision, mission, strategy and business plan to address a $2B market opportunity with a new product roadmap. Identified staffing requirements and expanded staff to deliver and support $100M+ revenue.” Despite these ambitious goals, six years later, the company is tracking to a $60 million annual run rate.

Board member Kevin Conley succeeded LoPresti as CEO in September 2017 but stepped down in January 2021. Darin Billerbeck, ex-CEO of Lattice Semiconductor and Zilog, joined Everspin’s board in 2018. He became Everspin’s executive chairman in March 2019 then interim CEO when Conley quit following reduced earnings. Sanjeev Aggarwal, previously VP R&D and CTO, became president and CEO in March 2022, with Billerbeck retaining his exec chairman role.

Commenting on the latest results, Aggarwal said: “Everspin [managed] through the supply chain constraints for our Toggle business and delivering a strong performance on our Radiation Hard programs. We continue to exceed expectations on our Radiation Hard programs to deliver STT-MRAM based solutions for a ‘high-density memory array’ and a ‘distributed configuration memory’ for instant-on FPGAs with multiple time programmability. Healthy backlog in our industrial and automotive markets indicate strength in our core businesses.”

A look at Everspin’s revenue history shows a rise after the first 2021 quarter to a peak in the fourth quarter of that fiscal, caused by a patent license agreement. But then the wind went out of its sales, so to speak, and it has been generating around $15 million per quarter in revenue since then.

Charting its revenues by fiscal year (above) we can see it passed though a memory market downturn in fiscal 2019, grew somewhat patchily though 2020 and 2021, and is now poised to continue its relatively slow growth.

A cynic would say MRAM is not an emerging technology at all. It is a niche market centered on FPGAs.

Everspin expects next quarter’s revenues to be $15.9 million +/- $500K, and the company warned: “This outlook is dependent on Everspin’s current expectations, which may be impacted by, among other things, evolving external conditions, such as the resurgence of COVID-19 and its variants, local safety guidelines, worsening impacts due to supply chain constraints or interruptions, including due to the military conflict in Ukraine and recent market volatility, semiconductor downturn and the other risk factors.”

Nutanix’s looming profitability helped by Cisco deal, Broadcom-VMware concerns and NVidia support

By

Chris Mellor

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September 6, 2023

Nutanix logo

Interview. Hyper-converged infrastructure supplier Nutanix has good prospects with a newly minted Cisco partnership, current Nvidia relationship, and looming profitability.

Update: Nutanix confirmed it doesn’t support GPUDirect but is considering future support. 8 Sept 2023.

The firm’s software-defined infrastructure software virtualizes on-prem servers and their storage and network connections, as well as running in the public clouds. It creates a hybrid and multi-cloud data platform on which to run applications and is the main alternative to VMware with its vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation offering.

Broadcom’s pending acquisition of VMware has raised doubts about VMware’s future development strategy and general situation. Nutanix is poised to capitalize on such customer concerns, has set up a new route to market with Cisco, and has a strong relationship with Nvidia that’s relevant to customers looking to develop their AI/ML capabilities. These three factors are combining with Nutanix’s improvement in its business operating efficiency and direction to bring profitability and maturity to Nutanix.

We asked Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramswami some questions about these topics, and edited the overall conversation for readability.

Blocks & Files: I wondered whether you thought Nutanix and Dell were both capitalizing or benefiting from doubts over Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware?

Rajiv Ramswami: I would say for that it’s still early days for us. We’ve certainly seen Dell change their positioning from how they used to lead with VxRail before. Not anymore. Now, it’s much more than PowerFlex. And we’ve seen that certainly happened over the last year.

Now, I think, we certainly are seeing a lot of interest from customers. There’s no doubt about that. And we’ve seen some deals starting to close as well – and probably some large ones, you know, seven figure ACV deal with a Fortune 500 company this last quarter. But what remains to be seen here is how many of these engagements actually result in a significant transaction for us [versus] using us as leverage to just try to extract more from VMware when it comes to a price negotiation.

Also, many of these customers have signed up for multi release with VMware to protect themselves prior to the Broadcom deal closing. I think long term this is definitely going to be in our favor. We will see more opportunities as a result of this.

Blocks & Files: How do you see Nutanix competing with external storage vendors? My suspicion is that customers decide whether they’re going to use hyperconverged infrastructure, or not, and then acquire separate compute, separate networking, and separate storage. And you come in after they’ve made that decision. Is that right?

Rajiv Ramswami: So I would agree on the first part of what you said, but not on the second part. The customers have those two choices. They can stick with traditional three tier systems – separate compute, storage, and network – or they can go with hyperconverged, but we’re a big factor in helping them influence that decision.

It’s not like they make that decision up front and then they just say OK, I decided to go HCI and then we’ll look at Nutanix. We are an integral part of saying, look at the benefits of one versus the other. In fact, as part of our selling motion is, “Hey, we can do this better than three tier. And here’s why we can produce a total cost of ownership, we can get a comparable, if not better performance. And many of these storage arrays, we can also provide a platform for hybrid cloud.”

So we go into that motion as actually a core selling motion. We influence a customer’s choice of whether they go with a traditional array, or they try and come to HCI.

Blocks & Files: Do subscription deals like HPE’s GreenLake change this?

Rajiv Ramswami: We have actually had deals through HPE and Greenlake, where we are part of that solution as well with hyperconverged. Now, GreenLake to me doesn’t change the dynamic of HCI [versus] separate management, compute, storage, network. It’s just putting a subscription overlay on top of that. It doesn’t really fundamentally change the dynamic of whether you go three tier, or whether you go hyperconverged. In either scenario, you can put it in like an overlay on top of it to consume it in a subscription, pay as you go monthly or annually.

Blocks & Files: Would you be able to position Cisco and Nutanix versus Cisco’s HyperFlex offering?

Rajiv Ramswami: We’re the market leader when it comes to hyperconverged. And Cisco has tried with their own solutions for quite a while, many years, and the market share data clearly indicates that we are by far the market share leader compared to their market share.

The one thing about Cisco, and I spent many years of my life there, is that they understand what could have been in the market, and they want to be a market leader. They don’t want to be a market follower.

So, I think that they made the right decision by saying, look, if we do this, and partner with Nutanix, we can make a lot more in the market, with our customers. And it’s the right thing for the customers because they are really likely to choose Nutanix. They’re winning, so why not? Let’s make that easier. Let’s offer that as a solution. And that’s what drove this relationship.

it’s good for the customer, because now they get to buy a complete solution from Cisco.

Cisco is perfectly complementary to us. They don’t have their own storage arrays and stuff like that, right? … You can take your best in class from us and best in class from them, put it together and really get a winning solution in the market. So it makes sense for the customer, it makes sense for Cisco, it makes sense for us.

Blocks & Files: Could you give your view on NVidia GPUs in Nutanix’s GPT-in-a-Box offering?

Rajiv Ramswami: GPT-in-a-box runs on top of our standard qualified hardware platforms, which are servers with GPUs – Nvidia GPUs. As part of this we are virtualizing the GPUs. We are making them accessible. We also support the full immediate GPU asset. And, after getting certified as a partner for Nvidia, it’s very much an integral part of the offering.

Blocks & Files: When do you see Nutanix becoming profitable in a GAAP sense? In the next 12 months?

Rajiv Ramswami: We are certainly profitable on a non-GAAP basis. And we’re generating good free cash flow, ten times more free cash flow this year. The next milestone for us clearly is GAAP profitability. And if you look at the primary difference for us between non-GAAP and GAAP, it is stock-based compensation. And we have been working over the last several years to bring down stock-based compensation as a function of revenue.

We ask you to hold that question till our next Investor Day. We have one coming in next month. And that’s when we plan to give our investors longer term views in terms of what the output looks like, including GAAP profitability.

Comment

Nutanix is in a favorable market situation. The Cisco partnership should bring in a substantial amount of extra business. Broadcom-VMware worries should also increase Nutanix sales over the next few year or so. Its Nvidia partnership should help it ride the AI interest wave and pick up deals from that.

We predict Nutanix will be profitable in the next quarter or two.

Bootnote: Nvidia GPUDirect support

Nutanix supports Nvidia’s vGPU (virtual GPU) software, which virtualizes a GPU. It creates virtual GPUs that can be shared across multiple virtual machines (VM), accessed by any device, anywhere. The vGPU software enables multiple VMs to have simultaneous, direct access to a single physical GPU, using the same Nvidia graphics drivers that are deployed on non-virtualized operating systems.

Nvidia’s GPUDirect enables network adapters and storage drives to directly read and write to/from GPU memory, without passing through a server host’s CPU and memory as is the case with traditional storage I/O. This speeds data transfer between a server’s storage (DAS or external SAN/filer) and a GPU’s memory.

GPUDirect component technologies – GPUDirect Storage, GPUDirect Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), GPUDirect Peer to Peer (P2P) and GPUDirect Video – are accessed through a set of APIs. The GPUDirect Storage facility enables a direct data path between local or remote storage – such as NVMe or NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) – and GPU memory. It avoids the making of extra and time-consuming copies by the host CPU in a so-called bounce buffer in the CPU’s memory. This enables a direct memory access (DMA) engine near the NIC or storage to move data on a direct path into or out of GPU memory.

VMware’s recently announced Private AI Foundation with Nvidia includes VMware’s vSAN Express Storage Architecture, which will provide NVMe storage and supports GPUDirect storage over RDMA, allowing for direct – and so faster – I/O transfer from storage to GPUs without CPU involvement. Nvidia GPUDirect partners with systems in production are DDN, Dell EMC, HPE, Hitachi, IBM, Kioxia, Liqid, Micron, NetApp, Samsung, ScaleFlux, SuperMicro, VAST Data and Weka. Pure Storage is not listed and neither is Nutanix.

We think that a GPUDirect support capability will be announced by Nutanix in the future. A company spokesperson said: “Nutanix is currently evaluating future support for Nvidia’s GPUDirect storage access protocol.”

In conversation with new Panasas CEO Ken Claffey

By

Chris Mellor

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September 6, 2023

HPC parallel file storage supplier Panasas has hired Ken Claffey as its new CEO, replacing Tom Shea who has returned to his COO role.

Panasas was founded in 2000 and has raised around $155 million in funding. It provides PanFS software, with NFS and SMB/CIFS support, and Supermicro-built ActiveStor scale-out hardware with a mix of all-flash, hybrid flash+disk and disk storage capacity. The recent GPT-led surge in AI interest is expanding its market.

Claffey said: “I am honored to join Panasas at this exciting juncture. The company’s unique core parallel file system technology is central to enabling the secular growth of HPC and AI. These areas are driving the increasing need for the performance, scalability, and ease of use that is uniquely inherent to the PanFS software platform.

“I am committed to capitalizing on this momentum by spearheading a strategic agenda that improves software portability and enhances performance and ecosystem integration, all of which will fuel revenue growth. I am confident that Panasas will emerge as a preeminent leader in the HPC and AI storage realm.”

Claffey joins Panasas from Seagate where he was SVP and GM of its enterprise business, which encompassed its Exos RAID array and Corvault JBOD products. He was involved with the high-performance computing (HPC) business in the past, having spent seven years at HPC storage supplier Xyratex, finishing as SVP and GM when it was acquired by Seagate at the end of 2013.

Shea was promoted to Panasas president and CEO in September 2020 after being COO for six years, and now returns to that position, providing continuity for Claffey. Brian Peterson was hired as COO in November 2020 but he left the company at the end of 2022, we’re told.

Panasas competes with DDN on hardware and software, IBM’s Storage Scale, Weka, and BeeGFS in the parallel file system area, and VAST Data in the HPC file storage system market.

HPC customers tend to be sticky and Panasas has a customer base including Airbus, Harvard Medical School, NASA, Northrop Grumman, and many universities. In the last three to five years, Weka and VAST have emerged as fast-growing HPC and file software suppliers, giving Panasas more competition than before.

On top of that, in the scale-out filer area, Dell has rejuvenated Isilon with PowerScale, Qumulo is a fast-growing business, and NetApp continues its market strength.

Q&A

With that background, we asked Claffey some questions about his appointment. His answers have been lightly edited for brevity.

Blocks and Files: Why join Panasas and return to HPC?

Ken Claffey: I think it’s a great community, great market, and being on the cutting edge of technology is really exciting. And then when I was looking for an opportunity to be CEO, I wanted to make sure that I joined a company that was a the right opportunity for me, but also that I was the right person that could make a really positive impact to where the company was at at that time.

Why this company? Look, first principles thinking; doing a parallel file system is really hard. The world of HPC, and indeed AI, needs fast storage, ergo needs a parallel file system. There’s not many companies that have done it and doing it well… We can argue there’s three to four companies that have a true parallel file system today. And Panasas is one of them.

Why wasn’t it even more successful than it’s been? It was tied to a legacy hardware architecture that really underserved and did not really fully explore the value of the underlying software technology. When you look the work the team has done over the last few years; they’ve moved off that proprietary hardware, moved to a software defined architecture, as based on standard Linux, that uses cutting edge, you know, Btrfs file system, as well as made some major enhancements, like adding erasure coding into a parallel file system.

So you put all that together, and, again, first principles, talking markets, their technology is really good. It’s robust, it works, right? This is a great opportunity for me to come in and help scale this business.

Blocks and Files: Why is Tom Shea returning to the COO role?

Ken Claffey: From my conversations with Tom, I really wanted him to continue. Yes, he’s got a lot of tribal knowledge… going back maybe 15 years. Frankly, having gone through a lot of leadership changes myself through my career, I see mistakes that happen. The new person comes in and gets rid of all the old team and all that tribal knowledge walks out the door. That was a mistake that I was very anxious not to make. And, frankly, Tom, having been in the CEO role, and having probably had good conversations with me about where I see the company going, it was like, ‘hey, I can be a partner, I want to help, and I’m very committed to this company’. And I [thought], hey, you’ve got a lot of knowledge. And I would love to learn from that knowledge and help me make sure I don’t make any… new newbie mistakes. And that’s literally the conversation that we’ve had.

Blocks & Files: Are you coming into a company where the employees have a strong sense of commitment to it?

Ken Claffey: When you walk in anywhere and take over any team, whether it’s a kid’s baseball team or soccer team, like a coach, what you look for is commitment from the players, right? Are people engaged? Are people motivated? Do people care? And that came across loud and clear. As the new CEO, if that’s not there, it’s very difficult. [But] if that’s there, then well, what a great advantage that is.

Blocks and Files: Since 2020, Qumulo has grown and grown, Dell has rejuvenated Isilon with PowerScale, and VAST Data and WekaIO have sprung upon the scene as well. How do you see Panasas going forward against that background?

Ken Claffey: The first thing I’ve got to say is, why are all these companies investing in this space? So back to first principles, it must be a really good space to be in? Yes, all these new companies are coming along, but the reality is, Panasas has been here, has been executing and building its capabilities for much longer. So that was the attraction piece. And then you know you understand or respect those competitors tremendously, but also recognize that there’s some inherent [Panasas] strengths and capabilities and classes that have been built on. And, frankly, we were held back by being tied to that legacy architecture.

Now that we too have taken [our] history of robustness, scalability, but moved to a software-defined architecture, then that creates some really interesting options for us from a technology roadmap and even business model perspective.

Blocks and Files: Will you be doing more to link with the public cloud and porting PanFS to operate on the three main public clouds?

Ken Claffey: If you look at us, we are a software company, right? It may sometimes not have felt that way to people looking on the outside. Today we deliver our software value to our customers through an appliance. This model will certainly continue to be used to do that. But you mentioned many competitors in this space. I think when you look at many of the competitors, they have an omni-channel model that includes public-private hybrid architectures. That’s certainly something that will be part of our vision.

Blocks and Files: Panasas doesn’t yet support Nvidia’s GPU direct. Is that likely to be something on your roadmap?

Ken Claffey: That is likely to be something on our roadmap. When you look at the attractiveness and the need for our parallel file system, whether it’s a traditional x86, your supercluster, your supercomputer, or you’ve got an Nvidia SuperPod, you need a parallel file system. And … we may just have the best one for that application in particular.

Blocks and Files: What’s the appeal of Panasas’s parallel file system compared to the other suppliers?

Ken Claffey: I do think if there’s one thing that we all know, from our history of supercomputing, there is a very good reason why you use parallel file systems when you get to scale them… a true parallel file system that is robust and enterprise class like PanFS… If you’re spending huge amounts of money on a super cluster, a SuperPod, you must have the fast [speed] but you want something that’s robust and reliable and easy.

You want to spend time building your inference models. You do not want to spend time administering your storage, or worrying about your storage… When you look at the actual architecture of PanFS versus other parallel file systems, you’ll see that robustness was designed in from the ground up. And that is extremely attractive to enterprise-class customers.

Why are customers so passionate about trying PanFS and buying Panasas? It’s because of that ease of use; you just set it and forget it. It just works. And it’s super, super reliable.

Blocks and Files: Suppose I say that a parallel file system software is very, very sticky. It’s like a backup application. Customers really don’t want to change it once they’re embraced it. But that means that your ability to convert other people to using your parallel file system and not storage scale, say, is very limited because they will not want to move. So to grow your market, does that mean you have to find greenfield customers? Or you have to find greenfield HPC applications? Or greenfield application locations such as edge sites? How is Panasas going to grow?

Ken Claffey: I’m not sure I agree with you. I respectfully agree and disagree. So one of the things that I’ve seen, even in my short time here, is the growing customer list. So this company has been growing for the last couple of years. That was awesome. One of the things that was attractive for me was, when you look at the customers that are converting from other parallel file systems… if it’s not working, and the customer is not happy. It’s not very sticky, right?

What we’re seeing already is customers converting from other parallel file systems… It appears to be the level, the reputation of Panasas for being easy to use, and reliable at scale, is maybe not something that’s offered by some of the other alternatives out there.

Blocks and Files: Would you want to see Panasas have close relationships with some processor, hardware and system vendors to differentiate yourself from being just another piece of software that runs on x86 servers?

Ken Claffey: I think there’s a tremendous amount of untapped opportunity across the entire ecosystem of devices. When you’re a software company, everyone thinks it’s all about software. When you’re a hardware company, it’s all about hardware. And the reality is for customers, no, irrespective of your deployment model, it’s about all the above and having worked together, no matter what level of virtualization you put in, understanding the underlying fundamental devices and their architecture and our capabilities is really important. And I think there’s a lot of opportunity there… I think we can have the balance of being software defined, but still take advantage of some of the inherent capabilities that are there at a device level.

Nasuni working with Presidio to manage AWS costs

By

Chris Mellor

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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

-

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

-

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.

…

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.

…

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.

…

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.

…

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

-

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

-

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

-

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.

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