A report put out at the end of February titled “Modernize Your File Storage and Data Services for the Hybrid Cloud Future” by Gartner research VP Julia Palmer pulls a lot into focus about the cloud file services marketing war – which B&F has written about in the past.
Julia Palmer
Palmer starts from more or less the same points: unstructured (file) data is growing and organizations are using the scalability of the public cloud for several things, bursting compute capacity, bursting storage, archival storage, remote worker access and so forth.
There are three groups of suppliers, she says:
Next-generation file platforms: on-premises filers adding hybrid cloud capability and new software-only file services suppliers
Hybrid cloud file data services providing access, movement, life cycle management and orchestration
Hybrid cloud file platforms providing public cloud-based distributed file services
A table lists representative suppliers in each category:
Next-generation file platforms have characteristics such as “being designed to integrate and leverage public cloud IaaS.” Vendors like NetApp and Qumulo have become software-defined and ported their filer operating systems to the public cloud, providing a file system and services abstraction layer covering the on-premises and public cloud worlds. VAST Data is heading the same way. Weka is there already.
At the other end of this spectrum – hybrid cloud file data services are in the middle – are the hybrid cloud file platforms. We have covered CTERA, Nasuni and Panzura often, also LucidLink and to an extent Vcinity, but not really included Zadara in this category. Nor have we looked at the public cloud suppliers themselves or Huawei or Oracle as being in this category.
The mid-spectrum players provide file data services, such as migration – Atempo, Data Dobi, Data Dynamics, Peer Software and WANdisco, for example. Komprise also has a migration offering but is better known for its file lifecycle management capabilities, as is Nodeum. Hammerspace is pioneering its data orchestration technology.
Palmer really nails it with the a tripartite viewpoint, which is a neat way to group vendors and then to compare them in the three categories and map their capabilities to an organization’s needs and direction.
It leaves us asking if the mid-spectrum hybrid cloud file data services players face having their capabilities provided as features by the next-generation file platforms on the one hand and the hybrid cloud file platforms on the other.
The Gartner paper doesn’t look at object storage, which we think may be a limiting factor, especially as combined file and object offerings are becoming common. We can view S3 as AWS’s hybrid cloud object platform and also look at Pure Storage, VAST Data and others as offering next-generation file+object platforms, while Cloudian and Scality layer file access on their object storage products, which already have public cloud support.
Commvault’s earnings were hit in the last quarter by a degree of large deal buyer reluctance, as revenues flattened.
Update: Financial analysts and earnings call-related information added 3 May, 2023.
Sanjay Mirchandani.
Revenues in the fourth FY2023 quarter, ended March 3, were $203.5 million – 1 percent lower than a year ago, but exceeding Commvault’s guidance of $197 million. There was a loss of $43.5 million, dramatically down on the year-ago profit of $8.0 million. Full FY2023 revenues were $784.6 million, 2 percent higher than a year ago, with a loss of $35.8 million – pretty much all due to the loss-making fourth quarter.
Sanjay Mirchandani, Commvault president and CEO, accentuated the positive, saying: “Commvault closed out the year strong, highlighted by Metallic eclipsing the $100 million ARR mark, 15 percent year over year total ARR growth, and strong cash flow. We enter the new fiscal year with momentum and confidence that Commvault customers are future proofed for the road ahead.”
Two up and two down quarters in Commvault’s FY2023.
The loss is partly attributable to an operating expenditure increase. Total Q4 opex rose from $162.5 million a year ago to $206.3 million, and within that there was a non-cash headquarters impairment of $53.5 million. Commvault is selling its 278,000 square foot Tinton Falls HQ to Ashling Development LLC for $40 million, leasing back just 10 percent of it. Remote work is the new normal for everyone, it seems.
Financial summary
Operating cash flow: $67.8 million compared to year-ago $87.1 million
Free cash flow: $66.8 million.
Diluted loss/share: $0.98 vs $0.17 diluted earnings/share a year ago
Total cash: $287.8 million vs $267.5 million a year ago
Software and products brought in $90.2 million, 10 percent lower year on year. There were 187 large deals – transactions with greater than $100,000 of software and products revenue – in the quarter, down from 206 in the prior quarter and 226 a year ago. These large deals represented 72 percent of Commvault’s software and products revenue, so hiccups there directly affect the bottom line.
Services revenue rose 7 percent annually to $113.2 million.
Total recurring revenue in the quarter was flat year on year at $173.9 million, while annual recurring revenue (ARR) was up strongly with a 15 percent jump to $668.4 million. Subscription ARR rose 38 percent year on year to $477 million. The subscription business is 71 percent of Commvault’s ARR and subscription revenue – up 9 percent year on year to $95 million – is 46 percent of Commvault’s total revenue.
Commvault said deferred revenue growth related to Metallic as-a-service offerings continues to be a driver of cash flow. About 70 percent of Metallic customers are new to Commvault and there is a 125 percent net dollar retention rate; customers are spending more.
Its board has increased its share repurchase program funding to $250 million. Commvault notes that free cash flow supports share repurchases and it wants to use around 75 percent of FY2024 free cash flow for repurchasing shares.
Update
Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers notes that Commvault’s perpetual license revenue at $17.561 million was -25 percent y/y and -11 percent q/q, contrasting strongly with the subscription revenue rises. Commvault disclosed that it has ~7,300 subscription customers; about half of its customer base. This compares to 6,600 and 5,000 in the prior and year ago quarters respectively.
William Blair Analyst Jason Ader noted: “While subscription revenue boosted growth, the weaker macro environment continued to challenge large deals. Management noted that while macro did not deteriorate from the prior quarter, budget scrutiny and elongated deal cycles persisted,” primarily in the enterprise market.
Ader is cautious about Commvault’s prospects because of competitive pressures; “As noted in our recent VAR tracker note, the data protection market remains highly fragmented and competitive, with newer vendors like Cohesity, Rubrik, Druva, Veeam, HYCU, and OwnBackup all seeing good traction. While VARs continued to see Commvault as the most feature-rich and robust data protection platform on the market, we worry that the company remains at risk of donating market share to newer, innovative, more brand-forward vendors.”
Commvault’s revenue guidance for the next quarter – Q1 fy2024 – is for revenues between $195 million and $199 million; $197 million at the mid-point. This compares with $198 million a year ago (Q1 fy2023). It provided a full fy2024 revenue guide of $805 million to $815 million compared to fy 2023’s $784.6 million, a 3.2 percent rise at the mid-point.
Rakers told subscribers: “We are Overweight CVLT shares, and believe the company’s positioning as a data management play for hybrid cloud, improving competitive positioning with HyperScale, Metallic, and Activate, as well as increasing subscription renewal cycle opportunity should be viewed as positives. We believe Commvault can return to a sustainable mid single-digit revenue growth story.”
Open source data synchronizer Airbyte has a new API, complementing its existing cloud UI, that makes it possible to automate data movement and manage large deployments. Other suppliers can embed Airbyte Cloud’s data movement capabilities directly into their product offerings. Integrating Airbyte Cloud with orchestration tools like Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect makes it easier to manage and monitor data pipelines and ensure data is flowing smoothly between sources and destinations. A Terraform SDK is coming soon to define configurations and automate deployments as part of CI/CD pipelines. This will enable Airbyte resources and configurations to be version-controlled, reviewed, and tested.
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Analyst house KuppingerCole says Arcserve is one of six market champions in its 2023 Leadership Compass for Cloud Backup for Ransomware Protection report. In alphabetical order the champions are Arcserve, Cohesity, Commvault, OpenText (MicroFocus), Veeam and Veritas. Read a blog and download the Arcserve-focused report extract here.
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Backup supplier CrashPlan has a new Partner Program giving channel partners dedicated resources to make onboarding quick and painless, enhance sales opportunity identification, and shorten time-to-revenue. With incumbency protection and CrashPlan’s long lifetime value, it will continue to reliably produce revenue for partners in the program for years to come.
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Data lakehouse supplier Dremio has achieved Microsoft Top Tier Partner status, Microsoft’s highest level of partner designation for Azure IP co-sell partners, driving strategic collaboration, solution differentiation and dynamic go-to-market momentum.
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Data orchestrator Hammerspace said in a quarterly briefing that its business progress is accelerating. It showed a slide listing 50 users:
It says its channel partners are bringing in more opportunities and its pipeline is growing.
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Infinidat has produced a datasheet describing its InfuzeOS’s capabilities. InfuzeOS runs on the InfiniBox, InfiniBox SSA and InfiniGuard systems. Download it here.
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Infinidat is supporting Tech Tackles Cancer through the “Battle of the Tech Rockstars” charity competition in London on May 24 at the O’Meara Nightclub and in Boston on September 21 at The Sinclair (Cambridge). These fundraising events are part of a broad effort within the tech community to advance cancer research and help pediatric cancer patients and their families. Infinidat is actively involved as a Gold Sponsor of both Tech Tackles Cancer London and Tech Tackles Cancer Boston. Infinidat also has a seat on the volunteer-led team that oversees and plans the organization’s activities.
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Semiconductor analyst Mark Webb of MKW Ventures asks “When Will SSD Cost be Lower than HDD Cost?” He says he updated all the numbers he had previously shown at FMS 2022 on April 26 and the answer is still 2034, possibly, as he has previously calculated! He reckons that HDD technology has a few tricks left to pull and NAND scaling will slow over time [see Pure note below].
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Peer Software is partnering with Wasabi Technologies to provide a combination of built-in failover/failback and disaster recovery protection that reduces or eliminates snapshot or backup window limitations to keep critical data current and easily accessible on Wasabi cloud storage. Peer provides PeerGFS, a distributed file system that integrates existing storage systems across multi-site, on-premises and cloud storage. It has local access to data, high availability and redundancy across synchronized storage systems, and continuous data protection, and now supports Wasabi.
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Proact has become a Rubrik Authorized Support Partner.
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Shawn Rosemarin, VP, Product Management at Pure Storage, believes there will be no hard disks sold five years from now. He says NAND cost dynamics, density, energy efficiency, resiliency and innovative storage software are the game changers here and Pure Storage is leading this charge. Flash density will be a major factor in accelerating the move from HDD to Flash. We’re arranging a briefing to find out why he thinks this is true.
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Analyst house TrendForce says SK hynix, Samsung and Micron had 50, 40 and 10 percent HBM market share respectively on 2022. As more customers adopt HBM3, SK hynix, the only mass producer of HBM3 chips, will get a 53 percent HBM market share in 2023 with Samsung and Micron having 38 and 9 percent, respectively. These two are expected to start HBM3 mass production towards the end of this year or in early 2024.
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UK law firm Charles Russell Speechlys has selected a StorMagic SvSAN, running on two HPE DL380 servers in a hyperconverged configuration, for nine of its global offices. It says it found SvSAN was easy to deploy, showed better disk latency and offered the easiest storage usage visualization compared to Starwind and Linux Ceph. Speechlys previously used VMware vSAN to manage its business-level applications, including domain controller, Microsoft Exchange databases, and SQL.
Nvidia is running its AI supercomputer on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure with its Lustre file system relying on NVMe block access SSDs.
An Nvidia blog details how its DGX Cloud uses Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to provide compute, networking, and storage infrastructure to OCI users. DGX Cloud is a multi-node AI-training-as-a-service for enterprises through cloud service providers like OCI.
The team says: “DGX Cloud eliminates the need to procure and install a supercomputer for enterprises that are already operating in the cloud – just open a browser to get started.”
With Nvidia DGX Cloud on OCI, “Nvidia pairs Oracle’s bare-metal infrastructure with the Nvidia NVMesh software. This enables file storage that is scalable on demand for use on DGX Cloud.” Nvidia acquired NVMesh technology by buying Excelero in 2022. The software takes block data from SSDs and presents it to remote systems as a pool of block storage, like a SAN (we’ll get to Lustre in a moment).
OCI bare metal E4 DenseIO compute instances, also known as shapes, are the building blocks for this high-performance storage. They consist of:
128 AMD EPYC Milan processor cores
2 TB of system memory
54.4 TB of NVMe storage across a total of 8 NVMe devices (SSDs)
2 x 50 Gbps NICs for Ethernet networking
The two 50Gbps physical NICs on the E4 DenseIO shapes enable high availability. The bare metal instance means no resources are lost to virtualization.
NVMesh takes the raw E4 shape NVMe storage and uses it to build a high-performance data volume. The shapes are combined into pairs with the NVMesh software providing high-availability across the pair. In-built data protection in other words. Encryption is also included.
These shape pairs are then used as the storage underpinnings for a Lustre file system, for both data and metadata storage.
Lustre capacity scales out on-demand dynamically by adding more shape pairs, which also means more metadata capacity is added as well. This ensures metadata capacity limitations don’t cause a processing bottleneck.
The users see Lustre as an Nvidia Base Command Platform (BCP) data set and workspace storage facility. BCP provides a management and control interface to DGX Cloud, acting as its operating system, and providing AI training software as a service. It works with both the DGX Cloud and with an on-premises or co-lo with a deployed DGX SuperPOD. You can access a datasheet to find out more.
Nvidia says testing showed that its DGX Cloud on OCI had storage performance matching on-premises Nvidia Base Command Platform environments. DGX Cloud is also available on Azure with AWS and GCP availability coming.
Kinetica has integrated its streaming real-time analytics data warehouse with ChatGPT so customers can ask conversational queries of their proprietary data and receive answers in seconds. Amit Vij, Kinetica co-founder and president, claimed: “Generative AI revolution is a killer app for data analytics.”
ChatGPT is an application built on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, which are Large Language Models, created by OpenAI which can respond to complex natural language queries and search public data sets, with comprehensive replies which are often right but may also be wrong. Kinetica’s analytics database, which supports both GPUs and CPUs, contains both time-series and spatial data, and they can be analyzed in real time. The database can now use ChatGPT as a front-end interface that converts natural language to Structured Query Language (SQL) and then runs the SQL queries.
Nima Negahban, Kinetica co-founder and CEO, said: “While ChatGPT integration with analytic databases will become table stakes for vendors in 2023, the real value will come from rapid insights to complex ad-hoc questions. Enterprise users will soon expect the same lightning-fast response times to random text-based questions of their data as they currently do for questions against data in the public domain with ChatGPT.”
With the current dash for ChatGPT integration by other analytics data warehouse/lake companies such as Databricks, Pinecone, SingleStore and Zilliz, we’d bet Negahban’s table stakes point is correct.
Kinetica says existing conventional analytic databases require extensive, before-the-fact data engineering, indexing and tuning to enable fast queries, which means the question must be known in advance. If the questions are not known in advance, a query may take hours to run or not complete at all. Using ChatGPT as a conversational front end does away with the need for pre-engineering data and also with the need to write complex SQL queries or navigate through complex user interfaces.
Users can ask questions using natural language. ChatGPT can, Kinetica claims, understand the user’s intent and the logical data model and generate queries based on their questions. The user can then ask follow-up questions or provide additional context. Users get immediate answers to their questions without waiting for long-running queries or data pipelines to be built.
Vij said: “Kinetica plus ChatGPT makes complex, ad-hoc queries truly interactive, avoiding the ‘interactus interruptus’ of other integrations between large language models and databases.”
ChatGPT-type chatbots can provide not just wrong but imaginary answers. The datalakers integrating chatbot front ends which generate SQL queries against proprietary data sets will hope this bounding will stop the chatbot dreaming up false information.
Kinetica background
Kinetica was founded in 2016 and has raised $77.4 million across four funding events, the last a $14.4 million venture round in 2020.
It says its technology uses native vectorization to outperform other cloud analytic databases. In a vectorized query engine, data is stored in fixed-size blocks called vectors, and query operations are performed on these vectors in parallel, rather than on individual data elements. This querying of multiple data elements simultaneously results in faster query execution and improved performance.
The software supports a large number of spatial and temporal join types, graph operations, hundreds of analytic SQL functions, and enables visualization of billions of data points on a map. Customers include Liberty Mutual, TD Bank, the NBA, Lockheed Martin, USPS, T-Mobile, FAA, Ford, Point72, Verizon and Citi. Its streaming data warehouse can ingest, analyze, and visualize data sets with trillions of rows to model possible outcomes and assess risk for the US Air Force by tracking airborne objects for example.
In February Kinetica announced 90 percent annual recurring revenue growth over the past 12 months, a net dollar retention rate of 163 percent, and a doubling of its customer base.
Vector embeddings and ChatGPT are the key to database startup Pinecone unlocking a $100 million funding round.
Pinecone says it provides long-term memory for AI, meaning a vector database that stores numeric descriptors – vector embeddings – of the parameters describing an item such as an object, an activity, an image, video, audio file etc. The database can be searched for items that match a starting vector to detect likely recommendations to suggest to a purchaser, potentially fraudulent transactions, facial detection and so forth. Such databases are needed for large language models such as ChatGPT in the machine learning arena.
Edo Liberty
Edo Liberty, founder and CEO of Pinecone, said: “The new wave of AI-powered applications create, store, and search through a large number of vector embeddings, which are AI representations of data. We created Pinecone and the vector database category as a whole to let all AI developers easily work with a scalable and cost efficient database for this workload.”
Pinecone was set up in 2019 and its funding progress has accelerated, with a $10 million seed round in 2021, an A-round worth $28 million in 2022, and now a $100 million B-round. This was led by led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from ICONIQ Growth and previous investors Menlo Ventures and Wing Venture Capital.
The funding is in response to Pinecone’s progress in 2022; it claimed to have experienced an explosion in paying customers across all industries and customer sizes, mentioning Gong with its revenue intelligence offering, and Zapier, with is workflow automation tools.
There has been a sudden surge in ChatGPT-related activity in the storage area, with widespread adoption of the ML tool needing data storage facilities and being applied as a tool to query stored information.
SingleStore sees it as a database querying possibility.
Databricks sees it as a new way to query analytics datasets.
Panmnesia wants to run recommendation models faster.
SK hynix wants to supply HBM chips to servers running chatbots.
Peter Levine, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said: “The rise of AI is driving a fundamental shift in the way companies approach data management. In a very short amount of time, Pinecone has become a standard and critical component of the modern AI stack.”
B&F expects all storage data management, datalake, data warehouse and AIOps suppliers to be exploring chatbot technology.
Bob Wiederhold, Pinecone president, encapsulated the fervor around the ChatGPT area: “With this funding, we will capitalize on our hypergrowth amidst the AI revolution transforming every line of business and even creating new ones, from AI search to AI chatbots to AI agents and beyond.”
Chatbot technology is experiencing hypergrowth, and has found a place on Gartner’s hype curve where it is rocketing up to the peak of hyper-inflated expectations. Then it will tumble down to the trough of disillusionment, assuming the status of forgotten technologies like phrenology and holographic storage. But the hope is that it will emerge and climb the slope of enlightenment. The race is on to provide the platform technologies that will be needed when the chatbot phenomenon passes that phase and becomes widely deployed in the plateau of productivity.
UniFabriX says its CXL memory expansion technology can double the number of servers in a CSP’s datacenter racks.
The Israeli startup has developed a Smart Memory Node with 32TB of DDR5 DRAM in a 2RU chassis. The pitch is that attached servers need less local DRAM, sharing the Smart Memory Node’s memory. That way they don’t have local stranded DRAM that’s not being used efficiently.
Ronen Hyatt
CEO and co-founder Ronen Hyatt told an IT Press Tour: “For Cloud Service Providers we can 2x servers on a rack, up from 12 to 24. We take some memory from existing 12 servers and put it in Smart Memory Node. CSPs can then improve their server/DRAM granularity. We do it when the CSP builds new server racks. You don’t physically move DRAM DIMMS from the existing servers; you populate the rack with servers with smaller DRAM capacity than before.”
The reason is that by using the Smart Memory Node each server needs half as much electrical power as before, and the benefit is that the CSPs get twice as much revenue from a rack; more servers means more compute instances available to the CSP’s customers.
UnifabriX Smart Memory Node’s SK hynix DDR5 DIMM
The UniFabriX node uses standard DDR5 DIMMs on a main printed circuit board with FPGAs running the controlling software which provisions and deprovisions memory. Hyatt said the DIMMs are denser than a CXL memory expander card such as one from Samsung. Thermal considerations were also important in the DIMM choice, he added..
UniFabriX had to develop special cables to link the Smart Memory Node to the servers in a rack. The node has 10 x PCIe gen 5 ports in its rear face and each port can be bifurcated. It developed a 16-lane PCIe gen 5 cable with each lane carrying 32Gbps full duplex.
CTO and co-founder Danny Volkind, the cable guy, holding up the PCIe gen 5 cable
UniFabriX’s software provides CXL 1.1. (memory expansion) and 2.0 (switching and memory pooling) functions and most of CXL 3.0 but not the multi-level switching and some security features. Hyatt said: “We can abstract 90 percent of CXL 3.0 features and make them usable in CXL 1.1 and 2.0 environments.”
The node provides memory checkpointing, useful during long application runs as a way of recovering from any failures. Hyatt said that UniFabriX provides software primitives and a mediation layer for hyperscalers to compose Smart Memory with servers, providing memory as a service.
The company has paying customers – the HPC market was mentioned – and is looking for OEM deals. There has also been interest from a composability company, but UniFabriX did not want to follow up that opportunity, preferring to focus on the CSP and HSP server memory expansion market.
It believes the CXL memory market could have a $20 billion total addressable market (TAM) by 2030, with the specific memory pooling TAM being in the $14 billion to $17 billion range. If UniFabriX can capture a decent percentage of that, its backers will be very happy with CXL memory expansion and pooling driving their own revenues.
WANdisco has confirmed that one senior sales rep entered $14.9 million in fictitious orders in 2022, dwarfing the $9.7 million brought in by the rest of the sales team.
The company sells replication-based software to move data from edge and central databases to the public cloud under commit-to-consume contracts. Recorded sales bookings for 2022 of $127 million had grown so fast that co-founder, chairman and CEO Dave Richards thought his business was unstoppable. He told us days before the fiasco was uncovered in March that in the live data movement market WANdisco has no competition: “We have 100 percent market share.”
Days later the company’s share trading on AIM was suspended when its 2022 results were found to be unauditable due to fake sales, and it hired an accountant to go over its books.
Richards and his CFO, both duped, subsequently resigned, a new chairman, Ken Lever, and new CFO, Ijoma Maluza, were put in place. The search for a new permanent CEO is under way.
Forensic accounting firm FRP Advisory confirmed today that the fake sales were all due to a single senior sales employee. Lever said: “We are pleased to receive these findings, which confirm the limits of the impact of the identified irregularities in line with our announcement of April 3.”
That statement early this month said sales bookings of $127 million, initally reported for 2022, were false and should have been $11.4 million. Revenue was actually $9.7 million and not $24 million. Now that FRP’s conclusions are being sent to the auditors, 2022 accounts will be forthcoming.
A WANdisco statement is admirably clear: “All of the purchase orders associated with the senior sales employee in question are illegitimate… all other purchase orders… are legitimate.”
In summary: “It remains the case that the evidence identified supports the initial view that the irregularities are as a result of the actions of one senior sales employee only.”
The board wants share trading for WANdisco stock to resume and is working to that end, with Lever saying: “The Board remains squarely focused on workstreams to lift the suspension of our shares as soon as is practicable and position WANdisco for long-term growth and success.”
Komprise has an Intelligent Tiering for Azure service in the Azure marketplace to scan on-premises NAS stores and transfer cold files to Azure blob stores, saving customers cash.
The Komprise Intelligent Data Management (KIDM) offering enables customers to scan data across all on-prem and public cloud NAS and Object storage silos and analyze, migrate, tier, archive, replicate and generally manage it through policies. Komprise launched an offering, based on its Elastic Data Migration software in KIDM, with Azure to migrate on-prem and non-Azure cloud files and S3 object stores to the Azure cloud in February last year. Targets included Azure Blob Storage, Azure Files, or Azure NetApp Files. Now it has a simpler offering – just moving files from on-prem NAS and non-Azure and Azure file stores to Azure Blob buckets.
Krishna Subramanian.
Krishna Subramanian, president and COO of Komprise, issued a statement: “More than 100 enterprises are already using Komprise through the Microsoft Azure Storage Migration Program because of its simplicity and convenience. The new Komprise Intelligent Tiering for Azure extends this ease of use by allowing customers to use services such as Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Defender for Storage, Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure AI with data copied or tiered from on-premises.”
That is to say, pump the files up to Azure Blob storage and then they can be accessed by services such as Microsoft Purview and Defender for Storage, Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure AI.
KIDM connects to any file storage including NetApp, Dell PowerScale, Dell Isilon, Dell Unity/VNX, Windows Server, Nutanix, Pure, Azure Files, Azure NetApp Files, Qumulo and any NFS, SMB or dual-mode, mixed-mode, It identifies cold data, and based on the policies you set, it transparently tiers cold files to Azure Blob. It provides analytics on how much data you have, how fast it is growing, who is using it and how much it costs.
Komprise Transparent Move Technology.
Users can then set policies on what data should be tiered and when and to which tier of Azure Blob. It then tiers data with Komprise’s Transparent Move Technology to the appropriate Azure tiers.
The pricing is $0.008/GB/month based on annual Azure subscription of 250TB+. That’s an annual payment of $25,000. If the Azure subscription is for 100TB then the annual payment is $15,000, 500TB costs $50,000 and 1PB is priced at $100,000.
According to Subramanian: “Azure customers can use their existing Azure contracts and utilize their Azure Consumption Commitments through this specially priced Komprise offer in the Azure Marketplace.”
Jurgen Willis, VP Azure Specialized Workloads and Storage, said: “Every organization in the current environment is looking to do more with less while reducing cost. … Since Komprise tiers data to Microsoft Azure in native readable format and provides data workflows, customers can cut costs and leverage the full power of Azure services to address AI, big data, security and compliance use cases.”
SPC-1, the performance benchmark dominated by Chinese suppliers, has claimed a new price/performance champion – CECT using 240 Optane SSDs.
The Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 benchmark measures storage array business-critical workload IO request performance, recording SPC-1 input/output operations per second (IOPS), price per IOPS, response time, capacity and price per gigabyte. In recent years it was abandoned by Western manufacturers and became dominated by Chinese storage vendors such as Huawei and Inspur.
CECT (China Electronics Cloud Technology Company) has submitted its first SPC-1 benchmark, recording 10,000,690 SPC IOPS with a system costing just $1,658,233. The result is seemingly astonishing as systems above and below its score are much more expensive.
B&F table of top ten SPC-1 results with CECT result highlighted. The right hand column shows total system costs
Inspur’s AS5600G recorded 7,520,358 IOPS with a $2.9 million all-flash system in 2020. The Fujitsu ETERNUS DX8900 S4 hybrid SSD/HDD array came in with a 10,001.522 IOPS score and a system costing $6,442,522.88 back in 2019.
Even more surprising is that the CECT configuration included 240 x 256GB Optane PMEM 200 SSDs and 180 x 1.6TB Intel DC P4610 NVMe SSDs in 30 CeaStor 18116E storage nodes; 8 x Optane/node and 6 x NVMe/node for a total of 349,440GB capacity. The Optane drives were used to store metadata with the NVMe SSDs used for data.
High-end SPC-1 results in in a 2D space defined by a $/KIOPS vertical axis and SPC-1 IOPS horizontal axis. The lower the dot and the further to the right the better. CECT has established a new price/performance level
This is a simple and clear result showing the price/performance value of Optane SSDs in a mission-critical storage IO benchmark. It is perhaps a pity that it should emerge now after Intel has withdrawn the product and is just selling drives from its inventory. B&F wonders whether the availability of such a clear-cut and dramatic result five years ago would have altered the general perception of the usefulness of Optane SSD.
Interview The separate IT environments of backup and security are merging to become a single operational area for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs). This is the view put forward by Simon Chappell, the CEO of UK-based Assured Data Protection (ADP), who B&F interviewed about the state of data protection. ADP has been involved in the field since 2016 and has a relationship with Rubrik. In fact it is Rubrik’s largest global partner.
Blocks & Files: With security having an ever stronger influence on data protection and security officers wanting to control, reduce and manage their attack surface, do you think there will be a trend for organizations to reduce their number of backup suppliers and concentrate on ones who have a cybersecurity posture and can help CISOs in their work?
Simon Chappell
Simon Chappell: For over two decades there has been a division of focus (and budget) between security and data protection. At Assured we are seeing this division change, and the responsibility for data security is increasingly seen as a single risk that needs to be mitigated.
Essentially, there are three ways to stop attackers. You either prevent them from entering in the first place, or you detect and eliminate them if they get through the defenses. But you’ve got to have a robust recovery strategy in place if the first two fail. So it’s becoming more likely that the CISO’s who understand all three are required will opt for service providers who can deliver each layer.
However, I never envisaged having to deal with CISOs when we started out, but these days we can’t get away from them. We seem to be speaking to them all the time. It’s not surprising really, especially when you consider how much pressure they’re under to secure their organizations. So it makes sense they would want to have DR (Disaster Recovery) and backup as part of their remit. Although you must appreciate that DR and security professionals are from different sides of the tracks, we’re still developing a better understanding of each other and how we can work together.
For example, we’ve always dealt with the CTO or other IT professionals, but right now we’re working on a deployment where we’re only dealing with the CISO; it’s been quite a sea change.
Blocks & Files: Going further, do you think a need to have data protection suppliers that can cover all of an organization’s data silos and contribute to a CISO’s concerns could trigger a consolidation in the backup industry?
Simon Chappell: Potentially, yes. As previously mentioned, DR and backup address many of the CISO’s concerns, and they’re looking to work with suppliers that meet all their requirements. From an industry perspective we’re seeing aspects of cybersecurity encroaching onto the DR space and vice versa. As a result, we’re now involved in broader discussions about a more holistic approach to cybersecurity and data protection – and how we fit into that. It’s great to be part of the conversation, but it’s new territory for everyone.
However, it’s given us the chance to refine our proposition to cover all aspects of a customer’s workloads, whether they’re on-prem or in the cloud. But ultimately, I don’t envisage any major consolidation in the data protection world. There’s more likely to be consolidation in the “managed detection and response” sector.
Blocks & Files: How would you advise organizations to protect their data at edge computing sites with limited or no IT staff and, possibly, limited network connectivity bandwidth?
Simon Chappell: The great advantage of a fully managed service is that no IT staff are required, and reporting can be shared with whichever operational team members require it. We increasingly find that network connectivity is less of an issue than it used to be. There seems to be a good correlation between data sizes at edge sites and bandwidth. Assured have some well-rehearsed workarounds where the data sizes and bandwidth available are out of sync.
Blocks & Files: Some suppliers in the data protection industry have suffered data breaches, such as Rubrik via a Fortra zero-day attack, Exagrid in June 2021, and Kaseya in July 2021. How damaging are such attacks and can data protection suppliers absolutely prevent themselves getting attacked?
Simon Chappell: The world is suffering a tsunami of cyber-attacks, and no one is immune to the threat including data protection providers. Continued threats only underline the requirement for strong data security practices, irrespective of whether the data is mission-critical production data or in a development environment.
Blocks & Files: Has Assured Data Protection ever been (a) attacked and (b) had its systems penetrated by hackers? How do you prevent such penetrations of your IT systems?
Simon Chappell: We are acutely aware of the continued threat, and we practice what we preach when it comes to data security.
Blocks & Files: Do you think that ransomware and similar attacks will force a move away from daily backups or half-daily backups towards more continuous data protection so as to reduce the time window in which potential damage can be wreaked?
Simon Chappell: Not necessarily, but risk vectors have changed considerably in the last few years. Businesses need to be more diligent these days because of the persistent threat posed by breaches and ransomware.
Life felt a lot simpler when all you had to do at the end of the day was change a tape. Nowadays it seems that even a daily backup is no longer sufficient and it’s better to have real-time monitoring capabilities in place, especially for mission-critical workloads. The days of staging ad hoc disaster recovery drills are over it would seem.
We haven’t stood still, however, and we’ve responded to this by developing a continuous recovery testing model for our customers using our own proprietary software platform.
Blocks & Files: The Canadian standards institute is adopting an IT standard that says don’t make data copies for new applications. How do you think this applies to backups, which make copies? My thinking is that, if the standard is applied absolutely then all backups of new applications are forbidden – which seems crazy.
Simon Chappell: The way backup software operates is to create a different file or snapshot within the backup environment. This will be encrypted and secure, and ideally should be held in immutable storage. In this sense it isn’t an exact replica of the original file.
Blocks & Files: Oh that’s a clever take. Moving on, HYCU and Asigra are asking third parties to create API-level connectors between SaaS applications and the HYCU and Asigra backup software. What do you think of this? Should Rubrik do the same?
Simon Chappell: Rubrik is ideally positioned to expand SaaS coverage given the focus on the cloud native Rubrik Security Cloud platform. Assured’s customer base is happily served by the existing Rubrik feature set and we don’t currently see any major gaps in protection scope.
Blocks & Files: In five years’ time how will data protection processes have changed and why?
Simon Chappell: The fundamentals won’t change and will probably be very similar to today. I’ve been in this business for over 20 years, and if I’m honest five years doesn’t feel like a long time to me. The DR and backup world may think it’s going to change radically in that time, but I doubt it will change that much.
One thing that will change, though, are customer expectations. They will expect a quick response following an incident, they won’t want to be inconvenienced for long. They will assume that speed and ease of recovery will be standard across their on-prem and cloud installations. As far as they’re concerned, complex and large systems should be recoverable to any chosen point in time in a short time frame. Automation is going to play a huge part in delivering on that expectation, which is something that we’ve invested heavily in to improve our own automation platforms.
The Active Archive Alliance has announced its 2023 State of the Industry Report: Effective Data Management Through Active Archives. It’s not yet available on the alliance’s website but we have a downloadable copy. It’s basically marketing SSD, disk, optical and tape storage as archive hardware operated by active archive software for file placement. Separately, Swiss Vault with its Vault File System has joined the Active Archive Aliance.
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Cigenthas announced an SSD with built-in ransomware protection. But the drive must be installed as a boot drive in a Windows endpoint system, limiting its usefulness. It has an onboard processor running ML models to check for ransomware access patterns detectable in telemetry data from the drive controller. It operates out of the main SSD data path. The Secure SSD+ drives, as covered by sister site The Register, will have capacities of 480GB, 960GB and 1920GB. Linux support is coming soon.
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CloudSoda, which supplies an accelerated data movement and storage cost analytics application, announced it has won a NAB Show Product of the Year award. Its storage-agnostic and ecosystem-aware application is built to help companies gain insights into unstructured data by intelligently moving data across tiers and from edge to cloud, optimizing data placement and performance. Its functionality eliminates hidden storage costs, we’re told, making data management more efficient and affordable.
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SaaS-based data protector Cobalt Iron has been awarded US Patent 11632374 concerning techniques to be implemented in its Compass SaaS backup offering. It will apply ML techniques to device behaviors and health status so that infrastructures and business security controls will become more intelligent over time by learning from past operational outcomes, the documents say. Cobalt Iron’s newly patented ML techniques continually improve authentication controls over time by learning from the results of past controls. The technology, Cobalt Iron says, automatically adjusts authorization controls based on conditions, events, project status, access activities etc. and makes the entire IT infrastructure more secure and intelligent.
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Startup Fluree has raised $10 million in A-round funding. It has a graph ledger database and data pipeline toolset for trusted, secure data management in the Web3 market. Its graph database technology allows developers to store and manage data in a decentralized format for interoperable data exchange across distributed parties. Fluree will use the new capital to expand its Web3 data platforms and enterprise offerings, enabling digital trust for new applications in verifiable credentials, enterprise blockchain and decentralized data management. The company has raised a total of $16.5 million to date. It closed a $6.5 million seed round in 2019.
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GRAID is banging the performance drum with a document comparing its RAID5 speed with PCIe gen 5 NVMe SSDs vs alternative hardware RAID cards and also software RAID technology. It says SupremeRAID uses more of the available SSD performance, shown as dark blue bars in the chart below. Up to 97 percent of total SSD performance is wasted when using alternative hardware or software RAID5, we’re told.
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InfluxData, supplier of the time series analytics database InfluxDB, announced version 3.0, rebuilt on Apache Arrow as a columnar database, with significant gains in performance, high-volume ingestion and compression, real-time querying, and unlimited scale. It also announced InfluxDB 3.0 Clustered and InfluxDB 3.0 Edge to give developers next-gen time series capabilities in a self-managed database. InfluxDB supports metrics, events and traces time series data. Customers can upgrade to InfluxDB 3.0 from 1.X and 2.X and run existing workloads faster and at a lower cost with minimal key changes.
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Kaseya is sponsoring the Miami Heat basketball sports team as its IT solutions partner, and its stadium has been renamed the Kaseya Center. There was much assistance from the Miami-Dade County administration after the team’s previous sponsorship deal with the now bankrupt FTX collapsed. Kaseya has its headquarters in Miami.
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Kioxia employees received the Award for Science and Technology from the Commendation for Science and Technology from Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology for their invention of a high-density 3D NAND memory device and its production lines.
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Komprise has a blog about its new filesystem analytics reporting capabilities, now available from the Reports Tab in Komprise’s Intelligent Data Management software. Some of these require a Deep Analytics subscription. They cover showback reports for data tiering and migrations, orphaned data and more.
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Memory module producer Netlist has won a long-running multiple LRDIMM patent infringement lawsuit against Samsung, which has been ordered to pay Netlist $303 million by a jury in a Texas court. The case started in 2021. The case is Netlist Inc v. Samsung Electronics Co, US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, No. 2:21-cv-00463. Netlist has previously won a similar case against SK hynix, netting $40 million and a cross-licensing deal in 2021. We imagine it will hope for a licensing deal offer from Samsung and not an appeal against the judgement. Netlist is also suing Google and Micron for similar reasons.
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Scale-out filer software supplier Qumulo has announced special effects company MARZ (Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies) is using its File Data Platform for its production-ready Vanity AI system. This enables visual effects (VFX) teams to deliver large volumes of high-end 2D aging, de-aging, cosmetic, wig, and prosthetic fixes, we’re told. The technology is 300 times faster than traditional VFX pipelines with no capacity constraints and a lower cost, according to Qumulo. Instead of taking anywhere from one to five days for a VFX artist to complete a shot, Vanity AI can be used to complete feature-film shots in as little as three minutes. Vanity AI uses Qumulo’s software when running on-premises. It will launch as a publicly available, web-based service later this year. Qumulo software is available on AWS, Azure and GCP.
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Samsung has been hit by the memory slump. Calendar Q1 revenue for the company was ₩63.75 trillion ($56.1 billion) compared to ₩77.78 trillion ($68.4 billion) a year ago, with net profit of ₩1.57 trillion ($1.38 billion), well down on last year’s ₩11.32 trillion ($9.96 billion). The memory (DRAM+NAND) business saw revenues of ₩8.92 trillion ($7.85 billion), down 56 percent on a year ago. Samsung experienced price declines in its memory business as customers, facing macro-economic concerns, used up their inventories rather than buy new DRAM and NAND chips. In response it’s cutting production in legacy product areas and tuning business mixes. Samsung moved its DRAM business mix up to higher density (more profitable) chips but didn’t ship as much capacity as it hoped (low bit growth). It shipped more NAND bits than it expected by also moving the NAND product mix to high density product. It hopes high-end mobiles, new high-core CPU servers and the need for AI hardware will drive a DRAM demand recovery. Samsung will focus on its V7 (176-layer) and V8 (238-layer) technologies in the NAND market.
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A SeagateESG report said it has extended the life of over one million hard disk drives and solid state drives through its refurbishment program in fiscal 2022, preventing 540 metric tons of e-waste from going to landfill. The business is over halfway toward its 2030 goal of powering 100 percent of its global footprint with renewable energy. It has launched an UltraTouch consumer external HDD that is manufactured from 30 percent post-consumer recycled materials by weight and features 100 percent recyclable packaging.
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Like Samsung, SK hynix had a dreadful first 2023 quarter with weaker memory chip (NAND and DRAM) demand and lower prices. Revenues of ₩5.1 trillion ($3.9 billion) were 58 percent down on a year ago, and it made a loss of ₩2.6 trillion ($1.9 billion) compared to the year-ago ₩1.2 trillion ($912 million) profit.
DRAM revenues were ₩2.95 trillion ($2.24 billion), down 66 percent year-on-year while NAND revenues were ₩1.679 trillion ($1.275 billion) and down 61 percent annually. The company said: “We expect revenues to rebound in the second quarter after bottoming out in the first, driven by a gradual increase in sales volume.” It forecasts an improvement in market conditions from the second half of 2023 after memory inventory levels at customers declined throughout the first quarter. Sk hynix will invest for mass production readiness of 1b nanometer DRAM (the fifth generation of 10nm technology) and 238-layer NAND to support a quick business turnaround once market conditions improve.
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Betsy Doughty has resigned as VP Corporate Marketing at SpectraLogic after nearly 18 years in the position. We are not yet aware of where she will move to next.
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Veeam has been ranked #1 global provider for Data Replication & Protection software in IDC’s latest Semiannual Software Tracker for the second half of 2022. Veeam, with a year-over-year growth rate of 8.1 percent, grew faster than the other top five vendors and the overall market average. Its revenue grew 8.4 percent sequentially over the first half of 2022.
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Zadara has validated a combined offering of its zStorage and the Kasten K10 data management platform providing integrated data protection with backup, disaster recovery (DR) and application mobility for Kubernetes environments.
