Home Blog Page 137

Dell PowerStore gets more snapshots than a tourist

By
Chris Mellor
-
Tourist
Tourist

Dell is giving its all-flash PowerStore array direct integration with PowerProtect backup appliances, enabling it to provide storage nodes to VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure compute nodes for separate compute and storage scaling, and be more secure and effective.

PowerStore, Dell’s mid-range unified file and block storage array, is receiving a raft of software updates around security, protection, DevOps and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) integration. The relentless Dell software development machine has delivered, it says, more than 2,000 storage portfolio advancements in the past 12 months.

Jeff Boudreau, president and GM of Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, said: “We’re helping customers rise to this challenge by enabling them to make the most of their IT investments with storage software innovation that is more energy efficient, boosts productivity and strengthens cyber resiliency.” Do more with less, as it were.

The watchwords are productivity and protection, both in the data backup and anti-malware senses. 

Security and data protection

PowerStore is getting:

  • STIG hardening – Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) are US federal government and Department of Defense configuration standards and this adds to PowerStore’s compliance with the NIST Cyber Security Framework standard, required for US federal networks and other government entities worldwide.
  • Secure and immutable snapshots to prevent unauthorized deleting or modifying of snapshots before their expiration date. 
  • Streamlined file permissions so storage admins can manage access directly from PowerStore in security threat scenarios.
  • Up to 4x more mounted snapshots per system, meaning more protection points for granular recovery.  
  • Multi-factor authentication.
  • Native integration with PowerProtect and its 65:1 data reduction.

Backups can be configured in less than two minutes, directly from the PowerStore user interface. It works with physical and virtual PowerProtect appliances and can backup to the cloud.

Drew Schulke, Dell VP for product management, said: “The key thing is the ease of use, being able to do it from within the UI, ditching the need for a dedicated backup server, getting the network traffic down.”

Ben Jastrab, Director for Storage Product Marketing, added: “The really beautiful thing about the whole integration is that you can orchestrate and manage the backups and restores directly from PowerStore manager. So you don’t have to go into a separate console, you’re not using a backup system. The storage administrator is able to see what you’re backing up and when, and set the policies. They can do it in 90 seconds or less.” 

Productivity

There are DevOps workflow enhancements such as integrations with Ansible and Terraform. The Ansible support, Jastrab said, “includes some additional VMware support around vVols, VMFS and vCenter.”

Dell Container Storage Modules are open source storage array enablers for containers accessed in Kubernetes environments through CSI plug-ins. These are now supported by PowerStore.

Jastrab told us: “This is enabling actual cloning of stateful applications that are container-based and allows you to move them from one cluster to another.” 

Dell Dynamic AppsON

PowerStore is also now able to provide storage nodes to VxRail dynamic (compute-only) hyperconverged infrastructure nodes with the Dynamic AppsON feature, enabling separate scaling of compute and storage. This is pretty much the same functionality as that just announced by Nutanix. 

The latest PowerStore arrays are Energy Star-certified. Jastrab told us: “We’ve got a few models that are already certified, and there’ll be more that will be coming down the road.”

And there’s more

This update blast from Dell also includes:

  • PowerMax enables an operational airgap for faster recovery of compromised data following a cyberattack.
  • PowerFlex gets enhanced NVMe/TCP and security.
  • ObjectScale has faster enterprise S3 object storage performance and simpler deployment and support experience.
  • CloudIQ, Dell’s AIOps software, is improved and extends its VMware integration.
  • Unity XT has increased Ansible support for storage automation.

Overall this latest set of announcements tells Dell’s customers that it’s committed to developing its products and makes competing with Dell more difficult for smaller suppliers.

Availability

PowerMax, CloudIQ and Unity XT capabilities are globally available today. PowerStore and ObjectScale advancements will be globally available in June 2023, and PowerFlex advancements will be globally available in the third 2023 quarter.

Nebulon sets up TripLine for ransomware scum

By
Chris Mellor
-

Nebulon hopes to give servers a personal anti-ransomware encryption security guard with its TripLine technology.

The hardware heart of Nebulon’s offering is a server-attached card, the services processing unit (SPU). The SPU is managed by Nebulon ON, a SaaS offering with three aspects: smartEdge to manage edge sites as a fleet; smartIaaS; and smartCore to turn a VMware infrastructure into a hyperscale private cloud.

It’s adding smartDefence to that mix – to detect encrypting ransomware attacks on servers, and recover the server to a point in time just before the attack using golden master software.

Siamak Nazari, Nebulon
Siamak Nazari

CEO Siamak Nazari said ransomware defences needed to be comprehensive. They should “cover the entirety of an organization’s infrastructure, and there are woefully few options to protect the server-storage infrastructure.” The AI-enhanced TripLine technology and associated TimeJump restore functionality and protect servers and their storage from ransomware attacks in a new way, according to Nazari. “CISOs and CIOs should demand such capabilities be an inherent part of any modern infrastructure deployment.”

TripLine software is part of a secure enclave on a server fitted with the SPU. This concept was inspired by similar preventative boundaries set up by the cloud hyperscalers around their servers – think AWS Nitro Enclave. This enclave includes server lights-out management, data services, boot and data volumes, and attached SSDs, and is connected to the Nebulon ON cloud control plane. 

Nebulon TripLine diagram
Nebulon TripLine diagram

The SPU’s software runs a machine learning model which monitors block-level I/O to storage drives. It can identify encrypted data blocks among the stream going to storage volumes and sends a count of them and the ratio of encrypted to unencrypted I/Os to the Nebulon ON cloud every 30 seconds. This cloud facility uses its own ML model and statistics to check the historical average of encrypted blocks for a given volume. If it finds five encrypted block count surges in a row for a volume, it will alert the customer about a potential ongoing encrypting ransomware attack.

Nebulon TripLine diagram

Because Nebulon ON is involved, it can share learned patterns across all connected systems and customers.

Craig Nunes, Nebulon
Craig Nunes

COO Craig Nunnes told us: “In conjunction we’ll use TimeJump, which is a very quick recovery of that whole software stack. You can very quickly ring fence where the attack is happening, reboot the server to eliminate the attack and and get on with it.” The attack’s blast surface is limited by this detection and response.

TripLine software protects stored application data and software and the operating system. Nunes claimed: “If you’re attacking the operating system binaries, if you’re trying to get to the the boot volume to execute some bit of code, we’re going to catch it.”

Nebulo says Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) provides no isolation between infrastructure services and application services, and is particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks. When the HCI operating system becomes infected, data services become unavailable and the disks that store snapshots protecting application data become compromised, making fast recovery impossible.

Its SPU-based infrastructure contains master copies of a server’s software, enabling a clean reboot using uncompromized code. Nebulon calls this known good version of the operating system and application stack its ImmutableBoot, and it is stored in the server’s secure enclave.

Nebulon has set up a smartDefence ransomware detection and recovery offering which relies on TripLine and TimeJump. The inclusion of TripLine means customers can identify the precise point of attack within their infrastructure and revert to a secure state using TimeJump. This provides, Nebulon says, faster threat detection and response and a faster recovery than traditional reinstallation of server software.

Exfiltrating ransomware

We asked about Nebulon combating ransomware attacks that exfiltrate data – which would leave no suspicious encrypted data I/Os. Nunes said: “We would again rely on our machine learning technology. We would train it the way we’ve done this, as we’ve trained the technology in the cloud and deployed the model to the secure enclave, we would have to do something similar. 

“The thing we have to look at is exfiltration is going to be a sequential stream, right? And there’s a lot of workloads that kind of look like that – your backup is going to look like that. And so we’re going to have to do some real serious machine learning work to determine is that just a backup or some other normal stream? Or is it something headed off site? It’s a high bar for our engineers to tackle, but they’re up for it.”

There was no commitment to a product offering, but we think Nebulon is researching this area intensively to see what it can develop.

Pure: No more hard drives will be sold after 2028

By
Chris Mellor
-

In the latest blast of the HDD vs SSD culture wars, a Pure Storage exec is predicting that no more hard disk drives will be sold after 2028 because of electricity costs and availability, as well as NAND $/TB declines.

Shawn Rosemarin, Pure Storage
Shawn Rosemarin

Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&D within the Customer Engineering unit at Pure, told B&F: “The ultimate trigger here is power. It’s just fundamentally coming down to the cost of electricity.” Not the declining cost of SSDs and Pure’s DFMs dropping below the cost of disks, although that plays a part.

In his view: “Hard drive technology is 67 years old. We need to herald this technology that went from five megabytes the size of this room to where we are today. And even the latest HAMR technology, putting a laser on the top of the head in order to heat up the platters, is pretty remarkable … But we’re at the end of that era.”

HDD vendors sing a different tune, of course. Back in 2021, HDD vendor Seagate said the SSD most certainly would not kill disk drives. There’s a VAST vs Infinidat angle to it as well, with the former also stating disk drive IO limitations would cripple the use of larger disk drives in petabyte-scale data stores, with Infidat blasting back that it “must be joking.”  Gartner has had a look in too, claiming that enterprise SSDs will hit 35 percent of HDD/SSD exabytes shipped by 2026 – though that would make Rosemarin’s 2028 cutoff unlikely. Pure recently stated SSDs would kill HDDs in a crossover event that would happen “soon.”

We appreciate power

Rosemarin, meanwhile, continued his argument: “Our CEO in many recent events has quoted that 3 percent of the world’s power is in datacenters. Roughly a third of that is storage. Almost all of that is spinning disk. So if I can eliminate the spinning disk, and I can move to flash, and I can in essence reduce the power consumption by 80 or 90 percent while moving density by orders of magnitude in an environment where NAND pricing continues to fall, it’s all becoming evident that hard drives go away.”

Are high electricity prices set to continue?

“I think the UK’s power has gone up almost 5x recently. And here’s the thing … when they go up, they very seldom if ever come down … I’ve been asked many times do I think the cost of electricity will drop over time. And, frankly, while I wish it would and I do think there are technologies like nuclear that could help us over time. I think it’ll take us several years to get there.”

“We’re already seeing countries putting quotas on electricity, and this is a really important one… we’ve already seen major hyperscalers such as one last summer who tried to enter Ireland [and] was told you can’t come here, we don’t have enough power for you.” 

“The next logical step from that is OK, so now if you’re a company and I start to say, well, we only have so much power, so I’m gonna give you X amount of kilowatts per X amount of employees, or I’m gonna give you X amount of kilowatts for X amount of revenue that you contribute to the GDP of the country or whatever metric is acceptable.”

Electricity availability is going to become a factor in siting or expanding datacenters, not just price. Which brings Rosemarin to this point:

“Today, it’s economically unfeasible for many customers to run their entire estate in hard drives. But it’ll actually become impossible. You’ll actually be limited from a density and power consumption perspective of how much data you can actually support. Now (CIOs) go to your organization and say that, based on our power footprint, or allocation or quota, these are the projects I can support. And you now need to constrain how much data you consume or how much data you need.”

This will not be a popular message, not when the latest AI/ML trends are increasing unstructured data storage needs: “Couple that with what’s happened in the last three months, which says all of our projections of data growth were based on what we knew, and now when we look at what’s happening with ChatGPT, and AI developing all this content for us, when we think about the amount of video and audio files that will be created by AI over the next few years, I’m not even sure any of our projections are even within the realm of reasonability of where we’re actually going.”

In summary: “You take this problem and it gets continuously worse in terms of how much data are we going to need to support with the coming advent of this pressure on electricity?”

If Rosemarin’s view is right – as an SSD slinger, Pure competes with HDD makers – then there is going to be a mass move to replacing HDD arrays and filers with flash. None of the hyperscalers have yet announced such a move. If one of them does then this will be a signal that Pure Storage is not alone on its belief that power costs and availability combined with declining NAND acquisition costs and NAND’s total lifetime cost advantage over spinning disk make HDDs unfeasible in the future.

Invested: WANdisco appoints turnaround CEO 

By
Chris Mellor
-

WANdisco investor Stephen Kelly, who called out the company’s management when the sales misreporting crisis erupted in mid-March, has been appointed as the company’s new CEO by its new chairman, who has already appointed a new CFO.

The data replication business alleged it discovered a single salesperson had booked fake orders and caused inflated revenues of $24 million for calendar 2022. This caused a shares suspension on the AIM market, and chairman, co-founder and CEO Dave Richards and CFO Erik Miller resigned. Ken Lever then became the interim exec chair and CEO. Forensic accountants revealed the revenues should actually have been $9.7 million. Sales bookings of $127 million should have been $11.4 million once the fakery was excluded. A 30 percent headcount reduction is underway to cut costs.

Exec chair Ken Lever said: “The Board is delighted to have secured someone of Stephen’s calibre and track record to lead WANdisco forward.  All of us remain squarely focused on advancing the workstreams that are designed to lift the current suspension in WANdisco’s shares and position the Company for long term success.”

He had already appointed Ijoma Maluza as the new CFO. 

Stephen Kelly

Kelly becomes interim CEO tomorrow and will be made formal CEO when (and if) WANdisco share trading resumes. He said: “I am a firm believer in the potential of WANdisco’s technology to become a market leader and, whilst there is much work to be done, I have relished my previous UK listed turnaround roles and am proud of the successful transformations, profitable growth and value creation they have delivered.”

“I believe Ken has started the rescue, recovery and rebuild process well and, as a team, we have the opportunity to build a high-quality, global UK growth business delivering for all stakeholders.” 

Kelly has an initial focus on customers, channel partners and alliances, the sales organisation, go-to-market strategy and building the sales pipeline. That’s understandable as all customers, channel partners and WANdisco’s own salespeople will be apprehensive about the company’s prospects and facing uphill talks with customers. Salesforce, partner and customer attrition is a real risk.

Kelly joined startup Chordiant in 1997 and became CEO of this NASDAQ listed business between 2001 and 2005. He was CEO of MicroFocus plc between 2006 and 2010, followed by a period as Chief Operating Officer of the UK government until 2014. He then took on the CEO role at Sage, leaving in 2018.

In a LinkedIn post Kelly said: “I loved my times at Sage & Micro Focus leading mammoth turnarounds with fabulous teams. So I am excited to be joining Wandisco. As you know, I am passionate about UK Tech growth and success and feel bad when UK tech companies stumble on the global stage. At WANdisco, the technology deserves global market leadership. From the outside, it feels like a ‘root & branch’ turnaround to earn the right to play.”

Western Digital beats guidance by gnat’s whisker

By
Chris Mellor
-

Western Digital saw Q3 2023 revenues sink 36 percent annually as the HDD and SSD downcycle continues, but it did beat its guidance – just.

Revenues for the three months ended 31 March came in at $2.803 billion, compared to the $2.8 billion guidance, with a loss of $572 million versus a $25 million profit a year ago.

The company has two businesses, making and selling disk drives and SSDs, which use NAND chips from its joint venture with Kioxia. WD took in a $900 million equity investment last quarter connected to an Elliott Management-promoted split between the two businesses and a potential SSD business merger with JV partner Kioxia. Western Digital also undertook restructuring efforts to lower its costs after last quarter’s relatively weaker results.

David Goeckeler, Western Digital
David Goeckeler

WD CEO David Goeckeler, said: “The groundwork we laid, combined with the actions we have taken since the beginning of this fiscal year to right-size and refocus our businesses, have enabled us to navigate a dynamic environment. I am pleased that we delivered non-GAAP gross margin at the higher end of our guidance range due to strong execution across both our HDD and Flash businesses.”

A chart shows WD’s recent revenue and profit/loss history up to the current quarter:

Western Digital profit/loss history

Down, down we go. We can highlight the annual changes in quarterly revenues by cutting the numbers differently and this shows a sustained and deep three-quarter revenue fall:

Western Digital revenues

Financial Summary

  • Gross margin: 10.2 percent vs 27 percent a year ago
  • Operating cash flow: -$381 million
  • Free cash flow: -$527 million
  • Cash & Cash Equivalents: $2.2 billion
  • EPS: -$1.82

WD’s Q3 was another tough quarter as worries around the Ukraine-Russia war persisted, a slowdown in China was noted, while supply chain complexities and rising inflation continued.

Cloud is WD’s main market in revenues terms (43 percent) and it fell 32 percent year-on-year to $1.205 billion. High-capacity nearline disk drive sales were particularly affected as public cloud buyers held off on some new drive purchases to use up existing inventories. SSD shipments to the cloud were also depressed and suffered from lower prices as well. But there were signs of recovery in this vital sector with the quarterly comparison showing a much reduced decline:

Western Digital segment splits

WD’s gross margin on flash tumbled to 5 percent from the year-ago 35.6 percent – a price decline effect – while the disk gross margin was down to 24.3 percent from the year-ago 27.7 percent. 

The client device market brought in $975 million in sales for WD, 44 percent less than a year ago and depressed by SSD price falls and lower SSD and HDD unit shipments for PCs. The consumer market was 22 percent of WD’s revenue, at $623 million, 29 percent down on the year-ago $875 million. There were seasonal declines in disk and SSD ships, and flash price falls didn’t help either.

A look into the three HDD sub-markets shows a sequential unit shipment recovery in the cloud, from  5.5 million last quarter to 6.3 million this quarter, both lower than the year-ago 9.7 million but a sign that cloud inventory digestion may be easing. There were falls in client and consumer units after a prior seasonal uptick.

Disk drive ASPs rose to $109.00 from the prior quarter’s $99.00 as cloud buyers bought higher capacity drives. Western Digital said its 22TB conventional (not shingled) drive became its highest volume product at the 20TB and above capacity points. Goeckeler mentioned a “gross margin upside and profitable market share gains in HDD” during the earnings call. HDD revenues of $1.5 billion were down 30 percent year-on-year but up 3 percent sequentially – yes, up after five consecutive quarterly falls. Overall, the disk market could be stabilizing.

Earnings call

B&F turned into the earnings call for execs’ views on market trends and background matters such as the HDD/SSD demerger, and any information about the ongoing data breach and recovery.

There was no substantive CEO statement on the demerger other than: “The strategic review process is ongoing, and we will provide updates as we have them.” And this: “It’s progressing, very active. Everybody in it is under NDA, so I can’t say anything about it. And we look forward to talking about it when we reach a conclusion.” That sounds positive.

As for general market recovery, Goeckeler said: “Clearly, we’re going through one of the most severe downturns in a while, but we think as we move through the second half of the year, the market will come into balance.”

The effect of AI engines such as ChatGPT will be to provide a secular boost to both HDD and SSD sales to the datacenter and cloud. Specifically: “HDD is the lion’s share of storage in the cloud. So you would expect that’s where the bigger lift would be across those two technologies.”

Responding to a question about HAMR, he said: “Future technologies like HAMR will be there. We’re still a ways away before that product is going to be a volume-type product. The volume products are the 22s going in, and then SMR [26TB] are going to be the big volume products over the next couple of years. And after that, we’ll get to HAMR … I think everybody’s excited that it’ll be the roadmap for 30 and above when we need it.”

This implies Western Digital will have its 30TB or higher HAMR disk products in 2025 and beyond, while, if it meets its schedule, Seagate will be shipping them this year, giving it a two-year lead. That seems to be a substantial opportunity for Seagate to pick up HDD market share, particularly in the cloud.

As for the data breach, Goeckeler was in an almost congratulatory mood. WD has been very transparent about the incident: “We basically disconnected ourselves from the public internet to protect ourselves and then restore the environment … we’re nearly all the way back now as far as operations. We’ve got to bring the store online in another week or so.”

He added: “It was really, really good to see our business continuity plans. You don’t want to rely on them too often, but when we had to, they were there and they kept the company moving forward.”

Excuse us for pointing this out, but the consumer online and MyCloud business shut down. This wasn’t business continuity, it was business cessation – some would say a disaster. A seven-week recovery period suggests the business continuity plan basically failed, or there was no real plan for such an incident. Yes, the breach was a devilishly clever thing and WD’s technical staff no doubt achieved marvels, but this is just sugarcoating WD’s close-the-doors actions as business continuity.

CFO Wissam Jabre confirmed our view about the impact of this shutdown being felt next quarter: “For fiscal Q3 we don’t have any impact in the numbers related to the network security.” It was not mentioned as a factor in the guidance for the next quarter, though.

Guidance

Guidance for the final fiscal 2023 quarter is $2.5 billion give or take $1 billion, and a 44.8 percent fall year-on-year at the midpoint – more pain in other words. The CFO said this is partly due to continuing HDD inventory digestion by cloud customers and also lower flash prices. 

Western Digital expects to complete qualification of its 26TB UltraSMR technology in the quarter and that will be competing with Seagate’s expected >30TB HAMR drives. Will Seagate’s HAMR attack on WD succeed? It will be a closely watched fight.

Confluent profitability keeps streaming away

By
Chris Mellor
-
Confluent central nervous system graphic from its S1 filing.

Streaming data storage and analysis platform Confluent continued making heavy financial losses during calendar Q1 of 2023, according to recently filed profit and loss accounts.

For the three months ended 31 March, the business reported a loss of $152.6 million compared to a loss of $113 million a year earlier. This is latest in a string of quarterly losses since Confluent IPO’d in June 2021 with a share price of $36 giving it a market cap of $9.1 billion. The share price – at the time of writing – was $22.12 and company valuation was $6.5 billion.

Confluent did, however, beat its own revenue guidance by coming in at $174.3 million, up 38 pecent year-on-year and higher than the $167-168 million management estimated.

Co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps said: “Confluent started fiscal year 2023 with a strong first quarter, beating all guided metrics and highlighted by 89 percent year-over-year growth in Confluent Cloud revenue. Achieving this high growth as companies scrutinize every dollar spent is a testament to the mission criticality of our cloud-native platform and the lower total cost of ownership customers receive from using Confluent.” Cloud revenue in Q1 was $74 million.

A revenue and profit/loss history chart daubed in red ink shows that Confluence has heavily prioritized top-line growth over profitability:

Confluent revenue, profit and loss

CFO Steffan Tomlinson said Confluent has a “consumption-oriented land and expand strategy,” but added: “We remain focused on driving efficient growth and building a profitable business.”

Venture capitalists made a highly profitable exit as Confluent had raised $455.9 million in its pre-IPO life and went public with a $9 billion valuation. Following the IPO, Confluent execs and board members moved their focus to running the business for the longer term. Confluent’s shares peaked at $93.60 on November 5, 2021, and then took a dive. They ducked below $40 on April 2, 2022, and have remained mostly in a $20-$30 range since.

Google finance chart showing Confluent share price
Google finance chart showing Confluent share price

Confluent has started emphasising RPO (Remaining Performance Obligations) and large deal growth in its quarterly reports. RPO represents the amount of contracted future revenue from a customer that has not yet been recognized as of the end of each quarterly period. RPOs this quarter totalled $742.6 million, increasing 35 percent year-over-year, and there were 1,075 large deals, meaning customers with >$100,000 in annual recurring revenue, up from last quarter’s 991 and 34 percent higher than a year ago. It has 4,690 customers in total.

Bootnote

Confluent was started by the founders of Apache Kafka, software for a distributed event store, ingesting data streams in real time and supporting low-latency data processing. William Blair analyst Jason Ader described Confluent in May 2021 as “the No. 1 contributor to the Kafka open source project as well as its primary commercial vendor.”

The company’s on-premises software acts as an event broker, forwarding incoming data (time-stamped events) to the database, and data warehouse repositories that need it, and providing data pipelines for analysis runs. Confluent Cloud is sold as Software-as-a-Service, hosted across AWS, Azure and GCP, to provide data pipelining services software. With it, Ader said, customers don’t have to manage the back end or worry about how to scale it.

Western Digital’s online store still closed six weeks after cyberattack

By
Chris Mellor
-

Western Digital’s online store is still offline, six weeks after a March 26 cyberattack. WD has not yet completed its probe into how much of its data was copied by the attackers. It warned customers to be wary of unsolicited emails asking for personal details or asking you to download and run suspicious looking stuff on your computer, in relation to the attack.

An SEC filing by WD on May 5 stated the drive maker’s investigation into the IT intrusion is still underway and the majority of impacted systems and services are now operational, including MyCloud. The closed MyStore operation should be back online in the week beginning May 15. The filing confirmed that, when it discovered the attack, WD disconnected its systems and services from the public internet at the beginning of April. It was and is still shipping devices from its factories to business and other non-consumer customers.

Its statement confirms miscreants copied out an internal database used for WD’s online store, which contained “customer names, billing and shipping addresses, email addresses and telephone numbers. In addition, the database contained, in encrypted format, hashed and salted passwords and partial credit card numbers.” WD said it has begun emailing affected customers directly, letting them know their information fell into the wrong hands.

Cybersecurity researcher and analyst Dominic Alvieri tweeted in late April that BlackCat – the ransomware gang also known as ALPHV that was said to have infiltrated WD – had publicly shared copies of internal data swiped from Western Digital, and even invaded a video-conference call said to involve WD staff or those working for them. Below is a snap of BlackCat-ALPHV’s website where it brags about the businesses it’s turned over, including WD:


BlackCat began leaking snippets of the stolen WD files on a weekly basis via its blog in an attempt to coerce the hard drive maker into paying millions of dollars to keep what’s said to be 10TB of purloined documents under wraps. That data haul was said to include firmware files and personally identifiable information pertaining to customers. The ransomware gang threatened to sell the data to others if WD didn’t pay up; so far, Western Digital hasn’t coughed up the ransom, to the best of our knowledge.

WD’s filing stated it is “aware that other alleged Western Digital information has been made public,” without saying what that information is. On April 13 Techcrunch reported the thieves had gained access to WD’s SAP BackOffice system and the drive maker’s code-signing certificate, used to digitally sign files as being authentic WD material.

If crooks in future can deceive victims by using WD’s stolen signing certificate to digitally sign emails and files, no one would be able to trust any download or document from WD.

WD’s SEC statement goes on to say: “Regarding reports of the potential to fraudulently use digital signing technology allegedly attributed to Western Digital in consumer products, we can confirm that we have control over our digital certificate infrastructure. In the event we need to take precautionary measures to protect customers, we are equipped to revoke certificates as needed. We’d like to remind consumers to always use caution when downloading applications from non-reputable sources on the Internet.”

So on the one hand, Western Digital can cancel those stolen certs so that they can’t, in theory, be used in future for malicious purposes. On the other, it will require cooperation with operating system makers and other partners. WD will need to understand the scope of the possible certificate fraud and tell customers it was revoking and replacing affected certificates. This could have cost implications.

WD reports its third fiscal 2023 quarter results today, after the US stock markets close. Its Q3 finishes at the end of March and the revenue impact from the cyber attack will affect its fourth FY 23 quarter, ending June 30, and not the third quarter. Even so, earnings call analysts can be expected to question WD’s execs about the issue.

NetApp gets file storage benchmark boost

By
Chris Mellor
-

NetApp has a world-record SPEC Electronic Design Automation (EDA) score of 6300, easily exceeding the previous best result: 3,600 from a WEKA system.

Update. SPEC comment added. 6 May 2023.

This SPECstorage Solution 2020 benchmark test is a Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) validated test of file storage performance in five workload scenarios: AI image processing, electronic design automation (EDA), genomics, software builds, and video data acquisition. The workload stats include jobs or builds, ORT (Overall Response Time), and MBps. Supplier test configurations are detailed with the test runs in an SPEC website.

Octavian Tanase, SVP of Engineering for NetApp’s Hybrid Cloud Group, has written about the result, saying: “This achievement showcases our ability to provide predictable, high-performance storage environments that can manage more concurrent job sets than any other vendor – 75 percent more than the nearest competitor.”

NetApp tops the table
Nettrix is a Chinese vendor

That competitor was WEKA running on a system using 90 x Samsung PM9A3 NVMe PCIe gen 4 SSDs with 3.84TB capacity. They were spread across 6 Dell R7515 storage servers with 8 Dell client systems.

NetApp used 4 x A900 all-flash arrays (dual-controller high-availability pairs), each fitted with a 24-drive shelf containing 1.92TB NVMe SSDs. Each storage controller was connected to its own and partner’s NVMe drives in a multi-path HA configuration. There were 8 x Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 v2 clients running the benchmark app workload and connecting to the A900s using RoCE.

NetApp system

Charts from the WEKA and NetApp SPEC filing show the two results. WEKA: 

WEKA SPC filing

And NetApp:

NetApp SPC filing

Tanese says the NetApp result shows “predictable, consistent high performance, which results in more concurrent job sets than any other vendor [and] better scaling, with continued low latency as demands increase from more EDA workloads.”

We think it credible that WEKA could surpass a 6,300 EDA jobs run score by adding more nodes to its test setup; that’s a feature of scale-out systems. Overall it’s a welcome thing to see a major vendor like NetApp using industry-standard benchmarks and better enabling cross-vendor comparisons. More please.

Bootnote

A SPEC spokesperson said: “A majority of the major storage system vendors are members of SPEC and collaborate on the SPECstorage Solution 2020 benchmark and more.  You can find a listing of SPEC members at: https://spec.org/consortium/.”

3D DRAM could be revolutionary – if it works

By
Chris Mellor
-

We have become so used to 3D NAND that we forget how revolutionary it was back in 2013. The idea that you could radically increase the density of a NAND wafer by stacking cells instead of just laying them out side by side is now taken for granted. We have 176-layer 3D NAND in production, 230-layer product coming, and 300-layers in development.

Update: Bootnote about Samsung interest in 3D DRAM added, 5 May 2023.

Yet DRAM is stuck fast in the planar era. It is fastened so solidly to 2D production technology that storage-class memories such as Intel’s Optane 3D XPoint were developed to provide near-DRAM speed but costs closer to NAND. Optane failed because its costs were kept high by limited production and the complexity of programming its non-volatile memory was too high.

Stacking DRAM cells is an obvious architectural approach to getting DRAM costs down and chip density up. Yet it is difficult and startup NEO Semiconductor believes it has found a way to do this with its 3D X-DRAM technology. Here we have a startup managing to create a 3D DRAM architecture before the main DRAM fabricators Micron, Samsung and SK hynix. NEO is a fabless operation and will need to have one or more of the three major DRAM foundry operators license its technology for it to succeed.

Semiconductor industry analyst Jim Handy
Jim Handy

We asked memory semiconductor industry analyst Jim Handy of Objective Analysis how he viewed 3D DRAM technology.

He told us: ”The 3D NAND ‘Punch & Plug’ approach is well understood now, so a DRAM that uses this process should be able to ramp quickly, as long as it doesn’t use any new materials. Intel showed something similar in an 2020 IEDM paper. Tom Coughlin and I covered it briefly in our emerging memory report.

“The only drawback of the Intel approach is that it uses a doped HfO (hafnium oxide) antiferroelectric layer that’s not widely used in semiconductors. This renders it a little difficult to manufacture, simply because it’s not completely under the production floor’s control. I believe that it’s similar to the HfO that Germany’s Ferroelectric Memory Company (FMC) is working to develop into a production process. NaMLab at the University of Dresden discovered HfO’s ferroelectric properties in 2011, and the past 12 years its spin-off FMC has been spent trying to bring it under control.  Things always look easy until you try to actually manufacture them!“

Intel of course is no longer in the memory business.

We asked Jim Handy a set of questions about NEO’s technology:

Blocks & Files: Do you have a public view of this technology and also of the company? 

Jim Handy: NEO has been promoting a novel NAND flash concept at the Flash Memory Summit for a few years now. It uses the inherent capacitance of the bit lines as DRAM capacitors to vastly accelerate the performance of NAND flash. I’m not aware of any commercial product that has taken advantage of this technology yet. As for the DRAM technology, I only know what’s in the press release.

Blocks & Files: Is its claim to be able to have the technology progress to be capable of producing a 1Tbit DRAM chip in the be 2030-2035 period reasonable? 

Jim Handy: As long as this is a production-worthy process that uses well-understood materials and a well-established 3D-NAND process, there’s no reason why a terabit DRAM could not be built sooner than that. If new materials are involved then the challenge of rendering them production-worthy would make that outlook much more difficult to predict.

Blocks & Files: If the 3D X-DRAM technology is viable, could it lead to a cost/bit reduction for DRAM in the same way as 3D NAND has helped lower the cost/bit for NAND? 

Jim Handy: You bet! DRAM scaling has slowed significantly, and any low-cost breakthrough that would multiply DRAM density would accelerate DRAM’s slowing cost/bit declines.

Blocks & Files: Will 8x higher density DRAM chips overwhelm the x86 socket interfaces and be used more for HBM and CXL-accessed remote memory than server DIMMs? 

Jim Handy: Computers can never have enough DRAM. If DRAM were free, and if its pin capacitance didn’t slow down the bus, then everyone would use considerably more than they use today. Instead, DRAM’s a costly thing to add, and the more chips/packages you add to any one channel, the slower you have to run that channel, so designers often limit themselves to only one or two DIMMs per channel.  

In other words: cost is a limiter, and DRAM package count is a limiter.  An 8x-denser DRAM would not only dramatically lower costs, but it would also support very large DRAM arrays with the same package count and capacitance that computers already deal with today.

One further advantage is that higher-density DRAMs provide more memory per watt. Datacenters have issues with DRAM’s power consumption and heat dissipation, so this would be a big plus for them as well.

Comment

NEO needs to find a memory fab operator that tests out the idea that 3D X-DRAM represents. In Handy’s words: “A production-worthy process that uses well-understood materials and a well-established 3D-NAND process.” Running an initial test shouldn’t take longer than a few weeks. 

Intel’s experience with its doped HfO antiferroelectric layer shows how difficult it can be to get new materials into production. With 3D NAND, the flash foundry people had to step back to legacy cell technology, with physically larger cells, to bring it into production. Micron and the other DRAM producers are having to use smaller and smaller cells to increase DRAM wafer density. They could, we suppose, step back to legacy DRAM cell sizes to experiment with Neo’s 3D DRAM notion.  

Let’s hope that this attempt at bringing 3D DRAM to production succeeds and we can all get the application speed benefits of x86 and GPU servers with much larger memory capacity.

Bootnote

Here is evidence of Samsung interest in 3D NAND with a paper from its researchers being presented at the 2023 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Japan, June 11-16.

It’s entitled “Ongoing Evolution of DRAM Scaling via Third Dimension – Vertically Stacked DRAM. The papers abstract states: “For the past decades, the density of DRAM has been remarkably increased by making access transistors and capacitors smaller in size per unit area. However, shrinking devices far beyond the 10 nm process node increasingly poses process and reliability challenges. As Flash technology made a pivotal and successful innovation via 3D NAND, DRAM technology may also adopt vertical stacking memory cells. Vertically stacked DRAM (VS-DRAM) continues to increase bit density on a die by increasing the number of layers along with reducing the size of the transistor. In this paper, the opportunities and challenges of VS-DRAM are discussed.”

Storage news ticker – May 4

By
Chris Mellor
-
Storage news
Storage news

Apricorn has announced the release of the USB 10Gbps Aegis NVX, the first Apricorn encrypted device to feature an NVMe SSD inside. The NVX’s high-speed read/write capabilities at 1,000MBps are said to be sought after in the fields of military intelligence, digital forensics, film making, and healthcare, where write speeds over 600MBps are critical. Initial capacity offerings are 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB, with a price range of $352-$754 MSRP. 

…

Couchbase has made its Capella Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace. It has also launched its Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Starter Factory, which provides ISVs with enhanced support for database management, migration, and cloud infrastructure. The new program is for those looking to develop and monetize applications using Couchbase Capella on AWS. It combines technical workshops with proof of concepts, training certifications, best practices, and aligning System Integrators (SIs) that are part of the AWS partner network. Acting as a one-stop shop, it empowers organizations to become developer-friendly while offering a low total cost of ownership.

…

Dell has announced the availability of Dynamic AppsON, which is the combination of VxRail dynamic nodes and PowerStore that delivers simplicity, scalability and ease of management, with advanced storage capabilities and data management features. This pairing combines compute-only VxRail dynamic nodes with PowerStore in a tightly integrated solution that now extends Lifecycle Management to PowerStore via the VxRail HCI System Software to simplify operations. More info in a blog.

Dell PowerStore storage system

…

We heard about some layoffs at SaaS data protector Druva. Justin Augat, Drive’s SVP for portfolio management, said: “We started a new fiscal year (April 1) and did a minor reduction based on business priorities and individual performance. We are still hiring and growing strong as a business.”Mike Houghton was appointed SVP w-w Partners and Alliances on April 23.

…

The FCIA has a preview webcast on June 21 looking at 128Gbps Fibre Channel, “128GFC: A Preview of the New Fibre Channel Speed.” The latest generation of Fibre Channel (128GFC) has a rate of 112.2Gbps (PAM4) for a single lane variant. This speed is 5.6 percent faster than 100Gbps Ethernet single lane variants. Fibre Channel was able to increase the speed and still maintain two generations of backward compatibility. Previous generation SFP optical modules (32GFC and 64GFC) will be able to plug into the latest generation of Fibre Channel 128GFC products. 

128GFC products will support existing infrastructure of fiber cables for multi-mode variants and single mode variants. 128GFC is also able to support the previous reach of 100 meters of OM4 without sacrificing performance in link quality or increasing errors. 

…

Giga Computing, a subsidiary of Gigabyte and producer of servers, server motherboards, and workstations, has announced continued collaboration with Graid Technology, and the creation of Gigabyte R Series servers to overcome NVMe bottlenecks in storage applications. The Gigabyte R283-S92 server became the first server to support the SupremeRAID SR-1010 RAID card. In addition, all future Gigabyte R283 and R183 servers will incorporate this optimization and become servers with the highest compatibility for Graid Technology’s next-generation GPU-based RAID card.

…

HYCU has revealed a customer win – the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox are using HYCU Protégé DPaaS platform as part of their IT modernization efforts, starting with more cost-efficient and effective backup to Wasabi as part of their overall cloud migration work. It’s also going to be rolling out support for SaaS integrations for Atlassian and Okta as part of the recent R-Cloud introduction. The HYCU brand will be prominently displayed inside Fenway Park throughout the 2023 season.

…

Infinidat has been named a Customers’ Choice in the Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer”: Primary Storage for a fourth year, along with Huawei and Pure Storage. There are surprises in the chart, not least the relatively strong showing by Seagate (Exos SAN arrays), the presence of iXsystems and Synology, and the absence of Dell and IBM.

Get details here. 

…

Pure Storage has announced a partnership between Portworx and MongoDB, which includes a first-of-its-kind integration between Portworx Data Services (the industry’s first Database-Platform-as-a-Service) and MongoDB Enterprise Advanced. With this integration, Portworx Data Services offers a single pane of glass to deploy and manage MongoDB clusters in conjunction with the end customer’s technology stacks. Benefits – we’re told – include automated MongoDB lifecycle management, lower infrastructure costs and increased operational efficiency, and a single platform interface across hybrid environments.

…

Quantum’s recently released all-flash file and object storage software solution, Myriad, was recognized with three industry awards at the 2023 NAB Show: TV Tech Best of Show, TVBEurope Best of Show, and the NAB Product of the Year in the Cloud Computing and Storage Category.

…

Rockset reckons its product achieved up to 4x higher throughput and 2.5x lower latency than Elasticsearch for streaming data ingestion. It shares more in-depth results and details on the benchmark framework and configuration in a Rockset blog.  

Rockset performance

…

Satori has released its Universal Data Permissions Scanner (UDPS), a free open source tool that enables companies to understand which employees have access to what data, intended to reduce the risks associated with overprivileged or unauthorized users and streamlining compliance reporting. The answer to the question “who has access to what data?” is often unclear because of complex role hierarchies, different authorization models used for different technologies, and the variety of data that may be accessible across technologies and clouds. The sales pitch is that UDPS simplifies this complexity. Also, using the UDPS reduces the security risk from overprivileged users by ensuring that access controls are appropriately applied and revoked, we’re told.

…

When the US Department of Commerce imposed semiconductor restrictions on Chinese imports of equipment for processes of 18nm and below last October, SK hynix’s Wuxi fab was granted a one-year production license. TrendForce reports SK hynix had planned to transition its Wuxi fab’s mainstream process from 1Y nm to 1Z nm, decreasing the output of legacy processes. But because of limitations imposed by the US ban, it’s focusing on legacy DDR3 and DDR4 4Gb products. SK hynix’s long-term strategy involves shifting its capacity expansion back to South Korea, while the Wuxi fab caters to domestic demand in China and the legacy-process consumer DRAM market.

…

Synlogy has launched the SA3410 and SA3610 NAS, 12-bay rackmount devices built for enterprise applications with a focus on scalability and speed for business file serving, VM storage, and petabyte-scale backup applications. Key points include:

  • Expandable up to 1.7PB/96 drive bays with optional RX1222sas expansion units as deployment grows
  • CPUs are Intel Xeon D-1541 and Xeon D-1567, respectively
  • 2x10GbE built-in, upgradable to 25GbE or 40GbE
  • Dual PSUs to reduce single points of failure
  • Covered by Synology’s five-year limited warranty, including technical support and hardware replacement services
  • OOB management capable
  • Over 6,200/3,000 MB/s sequential read/write

…

Swissbit’s U.3 SSD N4200 offers two to five times faster constant write performance than standard datacenter SSDs while maintaining low latency and high endurance over its lifetime, the company has claimed. Where conventional SSDs lose performance, endurance, and response time over time, Swissbit takes a novel approach with the N4200. The unique firmware, OEM’d from Burlywood, enables the SSD to be optimized for specific application profiles and tuned according to the performance and endurance of a customer application’s actual workload, we’re told. The 2.5-inch N4200 SSD series is based on enterprise-grade 3D-TLC-NAND (eTLC), is backward compatible with U.2, and features a four-lane PCIe interface compliant with PCIe 4.0 for up to 8,000MBps bandwidth in both directions. The SSD is available with storage capacities of 7.68TB and 15.4TB.

Swissbit storage performance

We have a chart from Burlywood which helps identify the mainstream SSD suppliers in Swissbit’s chart above:

Burlywood storage performance

Solidigm makes SSD file access zippier

By
Chris Mellor
-

Solidigm has smartened up its Synergy software to make reading data from its client SSDs faster, with the P41 Plus’s QLC flash delivering up to 858,000 random read IOPS across its PCIe gen 4 interface.

That’s more than double the base 390,000 IOPS and comes from the host-resident Synergy software watching IOs to the drive and telling its firmware to prioritize the most frequently accessed files for faster access, bumping their read speed by up to 120 percent. Synergy was introduced in August last year and helps the firmware on Solidigm SSDs better manage their cache. v2.0 has three new features to speed IO to the drives.

A spokesperson told us: “The Synergy software suite offers users a free performance upgrade by improving overall system performance and delivering a better user experience than hardware alone can provide.”

Solidigm Synergy table

The refreshed Synergy software features include:

  • Fast Lane, which learns what files are accessed most frequently tells the drive firmware to give them faster access. When paired with the P41 Plus SSD, users can expect up to 120 percent faster random read speeds even when the drive is at 50 percent capacity. The original random read IOPS maximum for this drive is 390,000 so the 120 percent faster speed means  up to 858,000.
  • Smart Prefetch, which can improve game loads by accelerating sequential reads by up to 350 percent (4.5x).
  • Dynamic Queue Assignment, which improves random writes by up to 20 percent.  

This release of Synergy also includes a Synergy Toolkit which is for all SSDs, not just drives from Solidigm. It is a drive activity monitor. Users can view the drive’s operating temperature, check drive health, run diagnostics for drive integrity testing, apply Secure Erase to delete data and know it is unavailable, and SMART reporting for detailed drive usage characteristics.

Solidigm Synergy v2.0 Toolkit report
Synergy v2.0 Toolkit report

Synergy v2.0 can be freely downloaded from Solidigm’s website, as can a white paper describing the software’s capabilities.

WANdisco cuts staff in wake of sales scandal

By
Chris Mellor
-

Stricken data replicator WANdisco is chopping around 30 percent of its workforce as part of a restructure following the March discovery that a single salesperson had booked fake orders to inflate revenues for calendar 2022.

The London Stock Exchange-listed business brought in a forensic accountant to review its books, and concluded that audited recognized revenue of $24 million was “false” as were sales bookings of $115.46 million. Instead, sales should have been $9.7 million and bookings some $11.4 million.

Today the business told investors it was reorganizing the business and as a result 30 percent of staff are being chopped. WANdisco said it employed 159 people at the end of 2021 but no more recent figures are available.

The layoffs come in the wake of allegations that one single senior sales employee misrepresented their sales in 2022, according to forensic accountants FRP Advisory brought in by new chairman and interim CEO Ken Lever. The previous chairman and CEO Dave Richards and CFO Erik Miller resigned after the huge and potentially fraudulent sales reporting was discovered, leading the company to suspend its share trading on the UK’s AIM exchange. WANdisco had been flying high after a supposed record 2022 year with talk of seeking a US listing for its shares.

The restructuring confirmed today was expected. Lever said: “Regrettably, the proposed action is a necessary step to responsibly position WANdisco for long-term growth.” There has been a detailed review of the business which signaled a need for difficult but necessary changes to its size, WANdisco said.

Management had to reduce WANdisco’s costs to perhaps demonstrate to investors that it has regained its grip on business controls and can resume share trading.

The proposed restructuring, Lever said, “was considered at great length,” and involves a reorganization and review process covering all areas of its operations and geographic presence. The main offices are in Sheffield, UK, and San Ramon, California. All local laws covering layoffs are being followed and the individuals concerned will be given support, the company said.

Even with the decrease in 2022 revenues to $9.7 million from the prior and false $24 million, WANdisco grew 2022 revenues from the $7.4 million reported in 2021, so there is hope a growing business could emerge from this fiasco.

WANdisco added in its statement to investors that it was continuing to trade normally and is making progress on its objective to lift the suspension of its shares as soon as is practicable.

1...136137138...443Page 137 of 443

ABOUT US

Blocks & Files is a storage news, information and analysis site covering storage media, devices from drives through arrays to server-based storage, cloud storage, networking and protocols, data management, suppliers and standards. We publish news, views, opinions and analysis of storage industry events and developments, aiming to keep storage users, developers, consultants, marketeers, salespeople, support staff, analysts and everyone else involved in IT storage up to date with what’s going on.

FOLLOW US

© Situation Publishing, 2018-2024