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New moves in AFA driven by QLC flash

By
Chris Mellor
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A new chapter is opening in the all-flash storage array (AFA) world as QLC flash enables closer cost comparisons with hybrid flash/disk and disk drive arrays and filers.

There are now 14 AFA players, some dedicated and others with hybrid array/filer alternatives. They can be placed in three groups. The eight incumbents, long-term enterprise storage array and filer suppliers, are: Dell, DDN, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Huawei, IBM, NetApp and Pure Storage. Pure is the newest incumbent and classed as such by us because of its public ownership status and sustained growth rate. It is not a legacy player, though, as it was only founded in 2009, just 14 years ago.

An updated AFA history graphic – we first used this graphic in 2019 – shows how these incumbents have adopted AFA technology both by developing it in-house and acquiring AFA startups. We have added Huawei to the chart as an incumbent; it is a substantial AFA supplier globally.

AFA market

A second wave of hybrid array startups adopting all-flash technology – Infinidat, Nimble, Tegile and Tintri – have mostly been acquired, HPE buying Nimble, Western Digital buying Tegile, and DDN ending up with Tintri. But Infinidat has grown and grown and added an all-flash SSA model to its InfiniBox product line.

Infinidat is of a similar age to Pure, being founded in 2010, and has unique Neural Cache memory caching technology which it uses to build high-end enterprise arrays competing with Dell EMC’s PowerMax and similar products. It has successfully completed a CEO transition from founder Moshe Yanai to ex-Western Digital business line exec Phil Bullinger, and has been growing strongly for three years. It’s positioned to become a new incumbent.

The third wave was formed of six NVMe-focused startups. They have all gone now as well, either acquired or crashed and burned. NVMe storage and NVMe-oF access proved to be technology features and not products as all the incumbents adopted them and basically blew this group of startups out of the water.

The fourth wave of AFA startups has three startup members and two existing players moving into the AFA space. All five are software-defined, use commodity hardware, and are different from each other.

VAST Data has a reinvented filer using a single tier of QLC flash positioned as being suitable from performance workloads, using SCM-based caching and metadata storage, and parallel access to scale-out storage controllers and nodes, with data reduction making its QLC flash good for capacity data storage as well. Its brand new partnership with HPE gives it access to the mid-range enterprise market while it concentrates its direct sales on high-end customers.

StorONE is a more general-purpose supplier, with a rewritten and highly efficient storage software stack and a completely different philosophy about market and sales growth to VAST Data. VAST has taken $263 million and is prioritizing growth and more growth, while StorONE has raised around $30 million and is focused on profitable growth.

Lightbits is different again, providing a block storage array accessed by NVMe/TCP. It is relatively new, being started up in 2015. 

Kioxia is included this group because it has steadily developed its Kumoscale JBOF software capabilities. The system supports OpenStack and uses Kioxia’s NVMe SSDs. Kioxia does not release any data about its Kumoscale sales or market progress but has kept on developing the software without creating much marketing noise about it.

Lastly Quantum has joined this fourth wave group because of its Myriad software announcement. This provides a unified and scale-out file and object storage software stack. Its development was led by Brian Pawlowski who has deep experience of NetApp’s FlashRay development and and Pure Storage AFA technologies. He characterizes Quantum as a late mover in AFA software technology, aware of the properties and limitations of existing AFA tech, and crafting all-new software to fix them.

We have not included suppliers such as Panasas, Qumulo and Weka in our list. Panasas has an all-flash system but is a relatively small player with an HPC focus. Scale-out filesystem supplier Qumulo also supports all-flash hardware but, in our view, is predominantly a hybrid multi-cloud software supplier. WEKA too is a software-focused supplier

Two object storage suppliers support all-flash hardware – Cloudian and Scality – but the majority of their sales are on disk-based hardware. Scality CEO Jerome Lecat tells us he believes the market is not really there for all-flash object storage. These two players are not included in our AFA suppliers’ list as a result.

The main focus in the AFA market is on taking share from all-disk and hybrid-flash disk suppliers in the nearline bulk storage space. In general they think that SSDs will continue to exceed HDD capacity; 60TB drives are coming before the end of the year and are generally confident they will continue to grow their businesses at the expense of the hybrid array suppliers. Some, like Pure Storage, are even predicting a disk drive wipeout. That prediction may come back to haunt them – or they could be laughing all the way to the QLC-powered flash bank. 

Storage news ticker – May 12

By
Chris Mellor
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Storage news
Storage news

Airbyte, which supplies an open source data integration platform, today announced its first premium support offering for Airbyte Open Source. Until now, Airbyte provided support to its users through its community Slack and Discourse platforms. The premium support plan offers one business day response time for Severity 0 and 1 issues, two business days response time for Severity 2 and 3, one week response time for pull request reviews, and an ability to request a Zoom call.

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Data intelligence supplier Alation has hired former Peloton CFO Jill Woodworth as its CFO, and David Chao, formerly VP and Head of Product Marketing at DataDog, joins as Chief Marketing Officer. Alation has opened new offices in London, UK, and Chennai, India. The new Chennai office will host more than 160 employees from across engineering, product, finance, and HR teams.

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Alluxio has published a Presto Optimization Handbook, downloadable here; Presto being a distributed query engine for data analytics. For customers using Trino (formerly PrestoSQL), check out The Trino Optimization Handbook here. 

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CTERA has expanded its relationship with Hitachi Vantara. This concerns Hitachi’s announcement of Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) reaching end-of-life. CTERA provides a migration path by introducing CTERA Migrate for HDI, a turnkey solution that replaces HDI and preserves the existing storage repository investment. It’s part of the CTERA Enterprise Files Services platform. There’s more info in this blog.

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Data lakehouse supplier Databricks is buying Okera, an AI-centric data governance platform. It says Okera says it addresses data privacy and governance challenges across the spectrum of data and AI. It says it simplifies data visibility and transparency, helping organizations understand their data, necessary in the age of LLMs, and to address concerns about their biases. Okera offers an AI-powered interface and self-service portal to automatically discover, classify, and tag sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII). Okera has been developing a new isolation technology that can support arbitrary workloads while enforcing governance control without sacrificing performance. 

Nong Li, Okera co-founder and CEO, is known for creating Apache Parquet, the open source standard storage format that Databricks and the rest of the industry builds on. 

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DDN says it’s sold more AI storage appliances, like the A1400X2, in the first four months of 2023 than it had for all of 2022, partly due to the broad enthusiasm for generative AI. Dr James Coomer, SVP of Products, said: “The trillions of data objects and parameters required by generative AI cannot be fulfilled without an extremely scalable and high-performance data storage system. DDN has been the solution of choice for thousands of deployments for organizations such as NASA, University of Florida, and Naver.”

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Helmholtz Munich, part of Germany’s largest research organization, the Helmholtz Association, is a DDN customer. It has has four fully populated SFAES7990X systems that span a global namespace, and an SFA NVMe ES400NVX system with GPU integration for faster data throughput with direct datapaths between storage and GPU for its intensive AI applications. Case study here.

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Professor Tom de Greef of the Eindhoven University of Technology expects the first DNA datacenter to be up and running within five to 10 years. New files will be encoded via DNA synthesis. Another part will contain large fields of capsules, each capsule packed with a file. A robotic arm will remove a capsule, read its contents and place it back. De Greef’s research group developed a microcapsule of proteins and a polymer and then anchored one file per capsule. The capsules seal themselves above 50 degrees Celsius, allowing the PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) read process to take place separately in each capsule. In the lab, it has so far managed to read 25 files simultaneously without significant error.

Each file is given a fluorescent label and each capsule its own color. A device can then recognize the colors and separate them from one another. A robotic arm can then select the desired file from the pool of capsules in the future.

DNA data storage
Diagram from Nature Nanotechnology paper

A research paper appeared in the journal Nature Nanotechnology under the title ‘DNA storage in thermoresponsive microcapsules for repeated random multiplexed data access’. DOI: 10.1038/s41565-023-01377-4.

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IBM Storage Fusion HCI System caching accelerates watsonx.data queries, watsonx being the upcoming enterprise-ready AI and data platform designed to apply AI across a business.  IBM watsonx.data is delivered on-prem with an appliance-like experience. Watch a video about it here.

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Web3 storage supplier Impossible Cloud has certified its first German datacenter, located in Frankfurt, with plans to handle client data beginning June 1.

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Informatica has announced the launch of its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) on Google Cloud in Europe to address data sovereignty and localization concerns. There are new capabilities for IDMC including security features to control access to security assets and master data management enhancements for financial services and ESG compliance. Informatica has more product integration on Amazon Redshift with Informatica’s no code/no setup software as a service (SaaS) AI-powered cloud data integration-free directly from the Amazon Redshift console and industry certifications for financial services, healthcare and life sciences.

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MSP-focused data protector N-able announced revenues of $99.8 million for Q1 this year, up 9 percent year over year, with a $3.5 million profit, lower than last year’s $5.1 million. Its subscription revenues were $97.4 million, another 9 percent rise. This is becoming a fairly predictable business revenue-wise. 

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Serene Investment Management-owned Nexsan has surpassed its aggressive Q1 earnings target for its SAN and file storage product line. This includes E-Series, Unity, and the Assureon Data Vault. We don’t know what the target was. Serene bought Storcentric and thus Nexsan in February this year for $5 million in a DIP loan, retaining key employees and leaders as it restructured the business. Prior Nexsan owner StorCentric filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July 2022 and looked for a buyer.

Update. Storcentric’s Drobo operation closed down at the end of January, as its website indicates;

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Scale-out filesystem supplier Qumulo has announced integration with the Varonis Data Security Platform and introduced its new Snapshot-Locking capability to protect customers against ransomware. The Varonis Data Security Platform provides real-time visibility and control over cloud and on-premises data and automatically remediates risk. Its behavior-based threat models detect abnormal activity proactively and can stop threats to data before they become breaches. Qumulo’s Snapshot-Locking feature uses cryptographic protection, where only the customer has access to the cryptographic key-pair required to unlock the snapshot.

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Rakuten Symphony is partnering with Google Cloud to provide its Symcloud SDS K8s data management and persistent storage for Google Anthos Distributed Cloud offerings. Symcloud SDS releases will be aligned with GDC’s Anthos releases. Symcloud SDS is available through the Google Marketplace.

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Pre-registration has opened for the SmartNICs Summit for its second annual event. It will occur on June 13-15 at the San Jose Doubletree Hotel. “We are now seeing the full impact of SmartNICs. They offload overhead from CPUs and make solutions more scalable,” said Chuck Sobey, Summit General Chair. “Distributed compute power is essential to handle the demands of incredibly fast emerging applications such as ChatGPT. SmartNICs Summit will help designers select  the right architectures.” 

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Storage analyst firm DCIG has named StorMagic SvSAN a global top five HCI solution. The “2023-24 DCIG TOP 5 Rising Vendors HCI Software Solutions” report evaluates offerings from 11 rising vendor HCI software solutions to provide IT decision makers with succinct analysis of the market’s HCI solutions.  

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Synology tells us the BC500 is available for sale in the US as of May 10. The TC500 is still slated for June 14, and MSRP is $219.99 for both models. The BC500 should be available from retailers soon, and also just launched on its web store.

Hammerspace buys RozoFS for erasure coding tech

By
Chris Mellor
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Data orchestrator Hammerspace has quietly bought French startup RozoFS for its transformational erasure coding technology, the Mojette transform.

RozoFS was started up in 2010 by CEO Pierre Evenou in Nantes, France, and has raised €700,000 in what funding it has made public, $764,000 in today’s money. Evenou was an academic researcher at the Institut de Recherche en Communications et Cybernétique de Nantes (IRCCyN) which worked on Mojette transform mathematics in discrete geometry. He took these ideas and set up RozoFS to commercialize them by building a NAS software system using patented Mojette transform erasure coding technology. Evenou moved to Silicon Valley in 2015 to set up RozoFS in the USA.

Tony Asaro.

Tony Asaro, SVP of Business Development for Hammerspace, was – we’re told – instrumental in making the acquisition happen, and said in a statement: “Rozo’s best-in-class erasure coding provides the right balance of price, performance, capacity efficiency, resiliency and availability. This is essential for organizations with massive amounts of data for multi-site and hybrid cloud environments.”

We understand the acquisition actually took place in late 2022 but was only disclosed today. The acquisition price was not confirmed.

Evenou is now VP Advanced Technology at Hammerspace and said: “Organizations need performance throughout their workflows. The integration of Rozo’s technology into the Hammerspace Data Orchestration System will help organizations get the most out of their expensive data creation instruments and compute clusters while also accelerating data analytics and collaboration.” 

In 2018 RozoFS  provided a high-performance file system on AWS in which fast metadata services provided asynchronous incremental replication between an on-premises storage system and an AWS-based copy. Incremental changes in the on-prem file system could be quickly computed. Using this information, the source cluster uses all its nodes to parallelize synchronization of the on-prem and AWS clusters. The cloud copy can be automatically updated as frequently as needed without impacting application performance. It reduced production dead time because there was no need for lengthy data synchronization. 

The software speeds data transfers by reducing the amount of data needed. It can deliver more than 1Tbps with only eight commodity servers working in parallel and connected on a 200GbitE network, we’re told. Used by Hammerspace it allows customers to move files directly to the compute, application, or user at peak performance, nearly saturating the capabilities of their infrastructure.

Two RozoFS  engineers have joined Hammerspace: CTO Didier Féron and VP Engineering Jean-Pierre Monchanin are new members of the Hammerspace development team as senior software engineers.

Background

Why “mojette”? It’s a French word meaning a white (haricot) bean – the beans used in baked beans – and such beans (sans the sauce) have been used in French schools to teach addition and subtraction. The usage is reflected in the term for accountants: beancounters. The transform only uses addition and subtraction, hence its name.

What’s the big beancounting deal for Hammerspace?

As we wrote several years ago: Mojette transform erasure coding starts from the concept of a grid of numbers. Imagine a 4×4 grid. We can draw straight lines along the rows, up and down the columns, and diagonally through the grid cells to the left and right. Figure 1 in the diagram below shows this.

Mojette grid and projections concepts

The lines are extended outside the grid. For each line, the values in the intersected grid cells can be added or subtracted and written at the end of the line. In fig. 1 the value b19 is the sum of the values in cells p1, p6, p11 and p16. 

The line of values from b22 to b16 is a kind of projection of the source grid along a particular dimension (diagonally from lower right to top left). The grid values can be viewed as being transformed into the projected values.

Figure 2 shows four such projections with the grid cells identified by Cartesian coordinates, such as cell 0,0; the bottom left cell. Figure 3 shows the projection direction in colour, blue, red, green and black.

If original data is lost somehow when the source data grid is read, then the projected values can be used to reconstruct a missing cell value, with two or more projections intersecting the missing cell such that its value can be re-computed.

Mojette transform erasure coding is quicker than other forms of erasure coding, such as Reed-Solomon and comparatively less storage space is needed. It’s also scalable out to billions of files.

A PDF doc, The Mojette Erasure Code, Benoît Parrein, Univ-Nantes/IRCCyN, Journée inter GDR ISIS/SoCSiP, 4/11/2014, Brest, provides more information on the basic maths and operations behind it.

IBM’s lowercase watsonx.data capitalizes on lakehouses

By
Chris Mellor
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IBM has unveiled its watsonx.data datastore using lakehouse uderpinnings to run multiple query engines for AI and analytics workloads, and claims this can cut data warehouse costs by up to 50 percent.

This datastore is the core part of an overall watsonx AI and data platform launched at the IBM Think event, and include an AI development studio. IBM says watsonx.data’s lakehouse bridges the gap between data warehouses and data lakes, offering the flexibility of a data lake with the performance and structure of a data warehouse.

The announcement comes bundled with quotes from Intel and Cloudera but not, oddly, IBM. This is a partnership-focused release.

Das Kamhout, VP and Senior Principal Engineer of the Cloud and Enterprise Solutions Group at Intel, said: “We recognize the importance of watsonx.data and the development of the open-source components that it’s built upon. We look forward to partnering with IBM to optimize the watsonx.data stack, achieving breakthrough performance through our joint technological contributions to the Presto open-source community.”

watsonx.data runs on-premises or in public clouds like AWS. The lakehouse underneath can contain both structured and unstructured data. It can support open data formats, such as Apache Parquet and Avro, and table formats like Apache Iceberg. This is open source software for enabling SQL commands to work on petabyte-scale analytic tables. Underneath this can be object storage.

The platform is intended to be a single point of entry to the lakehouse and provide access to multiple query engines such as Presto, Spark and Meta’s Velox open source unified execution engine acceleration library.

Presto, the in-memory distributed SQL datalake query engine, has a starring role here, building on IBM’s acquisition of Ahana in April.

IBM says watsonx.data offers built-in governance, automation, observability and integrations with an organization’s existing databases and tools to simplify setup and user experience. It is engineered to use Intel’s built-in accelerators on Intel’s new 4th Gen Xeon SP CPUs.

IBM’s tech partners are at the fore here. Paul Codding, EVP of Product Management of Cloudera, said: “IBM and Cloudera customers will benefit from a truly open and interoperable hybrid data platform that fuels and accelerates the adoption of AI across an ever-increasing range of use cases and business processes.”

Soo Lee, Director Worldwide Strategic Alliances at AWS, said: “Making watsonx.data available as a service in AWS Marketplace further supports our customers’ increasing needs around hybrid cloud – giving them greater flexibility to run their business processes wherever they are, while providing choice of a wide range of AWS services and IBM cloud native software attuned to their unique requirements.”

But watsonx.data is not yet available in the AWS Marketplace. We checked:

IBM watsonx.data not in AWS Marketplace

IBM says watsonx.data integrates with StepZen, Databand.ai, IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog, IBM zSystems, IBM Watson Studio, and IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson. IBM says these integrations enable watsonx.data users to implement various data catalog, lineage, governance, and observability offerings across their data ecosystems.

The watsonx.data roadmap includes incorporating the latest performance enhancements to Presto via Velox and Ahana. It will also incorporate IBM’s Storage Fusion technology to enhance data caching across remote sources as well as semantic automation capabilities built on IBM Research’s foundation models to automate data discovery, exploration, and enrichment through conversational user experiences.

A diagram in an IBM watsonx.data ebook shows multiple query engines accessing a metadata store, underneath which is an object store with links to structured, data warehouse, semi-structured, unstructured and data lake data.

IBM watsonx.data

There is no mention from IBM about the types of datalakes and lakehouses that are supported; Dremio is not identified, for example.

IBM claims watsonx.data will extend its market leadership in data and AI, but there is no word in IBM’s announcement of using ChatGPT-like large language models.

watsonx.data is in a closed beta phase and expected to be generally available in July 2023. Download an ebook here. It won’t tell you much more but you’ll get a flavor of IBM’s thinking.

Storage news ticker – 10 May

By
Chris Mellor
-

AWS has announced general availability of new storage-optimized Amazon EC2 I4g instances featuring AWS-designed Graviton processors and AWS Nitro SSDs. With up to 64 vCPUs, 512 GiB of memory, and 15 TB of NVMe storage, they deliver up to 15% better compute performance than other AWS storage-optimized instances, we’re told. There are 6 sizes: 

Storage volumes built from the Nitro NVMe SSDs deliver:

  • Up to 800K random write IOPS
  • Up to 1 million random read IOPS
  • Up to 5600 MB/second of sequential writes
  • Up to 8000 MB/second of sequential reads

(All measured using 4 KiB blocks.)

Torn Write Protection is supported for 4 KiB, 8 KiB, and 16 KiB blocks. Target storage-intensive workloads include relational and non-relational databases, search engines, file systems, in-memory analytics, batch processing, streaming, and so forth. These workloads are generally very sensitive to I/O latency, and require plenty of random read/write IOPS along with high CPU performance. 

AWS server chassis containing a AWS Nitro SSD.

EC2 I4g instances are available today in the US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) AWS Regions in On-Demand, Spot, Reserved Instance, and Savings Plan form.

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Microsoft Azure Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VM series instances are the first Azure VM series to support NVMe storage protocol.  NVMe support enables these series to achieve the highest Disk Storage IOPS and throughput of any Azure VMs to date, we’re told.  More info here.

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Backblaze has announced Q1 cy2023 results for its cloud-based backup and general storage services. Revenues of $23.4 million were up 20% with a loss of $17.1 million vs the year-ago $12.1 million loss. Computer backup revenues rose 8% to $13.4 million but B2 cloud storage rose 42% to $10 million. B2 revenues could eclipse backup revenues next quarter. CEO Gleb Budman said: “We were pleased to deliver 42% year-on-year revenue growth for B2 Cloud Storage in Q1— well above that of our competitors like Amazon Web Services (AWS). Additionally, our Q1 results support our goal to approach Adjusted EBITDA breakeven in Q4 of 2023.” 

Backblaze expects Q2 revenues to be between $24.1 million to $24.5 million.

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Block data migrator Cirrus has announced the availability of Cirrus Migrate Cloud with Cloud Recommendation Wizard in the Azure Marketplace. The pitch is that Cirrus Migrate Cloud (CMC) enables organizations to migrate block-level storage data from any source to Azure and between Microsoft Azure Disk Storage with near-zero downtime.

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DataStax has launched a new open source support service around machine learning and AI. Luna ML will be aimed at companies that want to get into using their data for ML projects based on the newly open sourced Kaskada real-time event processing engine. This will help make it easier to get started around these kinds of projects, as well as combining Kaskada with other open source projects for larger ML initiatives, like Cassandra for running a feature store or Pulsar for data streaming. Kaskada is a real-time event processing service that supports real-time AI

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Grafana Labs has announced updates to its fully managed Grafana Cloud observability platform; specifically a new Adaptive Metrics feature, which enables users to aggregate unused and partially used time series data to lower costs. It’s now available for broader public access. Read a blog about it.

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Michael Hay has rejoined Hitachi Vantara as VP Technology and Research, coming from Teradata. He was previously VP and Chief Engineer at Hitachi V from 2013 to 2018.

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Data security provide Immuta announced a strategic investment from Databricks Ventures, the investment arm of Databricks, the data lakehouse supplier. It comes after a year of growth for Immuta in which the company reported a 200% increase in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) for its Data Security Platform SaaS offering as it expanded into EMEA and APAC. The investment will go towards product innovation to strengthen the integration between both platforms and new go-to-market initiatives to increase enterprise adoption.

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At OpenWorks 2023, MariaDB has unveiled its vision to bring the power of distributed SQL through its Xpand database to both the MariaDB/MySQL and PostgreSQL communities. CEO Michael Howard said the intent is: “to take databases to new heights of scale and resilience, in any cloud at a fraction of the cost of competitors.”

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Large (>20GB) file transfer provider MASV has revealed lower prices, new enterprise plans and compliance with SOC2 Type II. MASV previously announced ISO27001 and TPN, with HIPAA coming soon. Its new MASV Professional membership cuts its customers’ costs by 20 percent. Egress data over 200GB each month is billed on a flexible usage-based discounted plan of $0.20/GB. All MASV Professional plans include unlimited users at no additional cost. User plans are available from massive.io or on AWS Marketplace.

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MSP-focussed Data protector N-able has expanded the Continuity features in Cove Data Protection with Standby Image recovery in Microsoft Azure. This delivers smarter disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), helping MSPs and IT professionals provide a full range of recovery services to end users, now including recovery in Azure.

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The latest release of NetApp’s ONTAP has increased performance of NFS over RDMA and GDS , and customers can get more than 171GiBps from an ONTAP storage cluster to a single NVIDIA DGX A100 compute node. If your existing ONTAP systems have the appropriate network adapters, you can add this level of performance with a free upgrade by updating to ONTAP 9.12.1 or later versions. Read test onfig etails and more in a blog.

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Nutanix announced 3 dataservices-oriented offerings at its .NEXT conference. 

  • Nutanix Central provides a single cloud-delivered console for visibility, monitoring and management across public cloud, on-premises, hosted or Edge infrastructure.
  • Unified data services across hybrid multicloud environments, enabling integrated data management of containerized and virtualized applications on-premises, on public cloud and at the Edge, with comprehensive data services for Kubernetes applications as well as cross-cloud data mobility. Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) enables snapshots directly to cloud native object stores, starting with the AWS S3 object storage service.
  • Project Beacon is a multi-year effort to deliver a portfolio of data-centric Platform as a Service (PaaS) services available natively on Nutanix or public clouds. This is an upgrade from the NDS managed Database-as-a-Service offering. The vision is of decoupling apps and data from the underlying infrastructure so developers can build applications once and run them anywhere.

Nutanix also rediscovered converged infrastructure by deciding to offer separate compute and storage nodes. This matches what Dell is doing with Dynamic AppsON, the linking of PowerStore storage arrays with VxRail HCI dynamic (compute-ony) nodes to sepatately scale compute and storage in an HCI environment. HPE has had this for some time with its Nimble dHCI offering (now Alletra).

Nutanix Objects Storage now integrates with Snowflake so customers can use the Snowflake Data Cloud to analyze data directly on Nutanix Objects Storage ensuring data stays local.

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HC storage supplier Panasas announced 50 percent Y/Y growth in total partners since the launch of a new channel strategy a year ago. In addition, more than half of Panasas’ total revenue in the past year was partner-driven, with nearly a fifth of that revenue being net new logos.

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Cloud file services supplier Panzura has been named to Inc. magazine’s annual Best Workplaces list in the May/June 2023 issue. This is its second such ranking in 2023. Pure has achieved three-year revenue growth of 485%, and in the past year has joined Inc.’s 5000 list of Fastest Growing Companies in the US.

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Pure Storage announced the results of a new end user survey, “IT Leader Insights: The State of IT Modernization Priorities and Challenges Amid Economic Headwinds.” Ninety percent of IT buyers state that the pressure of their digital transformation agenda led them to buy technology their infrastructure could not support. Access the report here.

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Real-time database supplier Redis announced the appointment of Spencer Tuttle as its Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). He joins from business intelligence analytics company ThoughtSpot, with over 15 years of experience in the tech industry and experience in growing revenues and expanding operations.

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Seagate announced the launch of its cloud import service in the UK, as part of Lyve data transfer solutions. With this new service, customers can upload large data sets to any major public cloud destination, including Amazon S3, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, IBM Cloud Object Storage, OVHcloud, Wasabi, and Lyve Cloud.

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Snowflake is opening a new UK office and Customer Experience Centre (CEC) in London, providing a “workplace experience” for employees and an area for collaboration with prospective clients. Snowflake’s fy2023 product revenue in EMEA grew 72 percent YoY. It also expanded its team in EMEA by 68 percent, reaching 1,289 in total as of January 31, 2023. In fy 2023 it continued to shift the EMEA sales team to a vertical-focused model.

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Research house TrendForce’s latest research indicates that, as production cuts to DRAM and NAND Flash have not kept pace with weakening demand, the ASP of some products is expected to decline further in 2Q23. DRAM prices are projected to fall 13~18 percent; NAND Flash is expected to fall between 8~13 percent.

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Cloud storage provider Wasabi strengthened its EMEA presence with the appointment of Jon Howes as VP and GM for EMEA. He will build on Wasabi’s growth in the region, highlighted by a flagship deal with Liverpool Football Club, 1,800 new partners, and a nearly 90 percent ARR growth rate. A full region go-to-market team has been established to support the growth of cloud storage, with Eric Peters as Country Manager of Benelux & Southern Europe based in France; Daniel Arabié, Country Manager of Central Europe/DACH based in Germany, and Kevin Dunn, Country Manager for the UK/I & Nordics based in the UK.  

Dell PowerStore gets more snapshots than a tourist

By
Chris Mellor
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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.

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