Storage news roundup – November 3

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November 3, 2022

Data protector Arcserve has appointed Christian van den Branden as CTO, leading the global research and development group, advancing Arcserve’s technology innovation, and driving the strategic direction of the product roadmap. Most recently, van den Branden served as CTO at Qualifacts, a healthcare technology company. Prior to this, he held leadership roles including head of engineering at ZeroNorth, XebiaLabs, SimpliVity, DynamicOps, and EMC Corporation. Prior Arcserve CTO Ivan Pittaluga is still listed on LinkedIn in that role.

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Flash controller firmware startup Burlywood announced on November 1 that Mike Jones has become its CEO, with founder and original CEO Tod Earhart stepping aside to be CTO – a classic tech startup founding CEO move. Funny that: we had him in place in August as a Burlywood press release confirms.

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Data Protector Commvault has announced the Metallic File & Object Archive. It’s Data Management as a Service (DMaaS) offering designed to help organizations deal with Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) requirements. Commvault says it uses data insights, access controls, tagging, metadata search, audit trails, and reports to help manage compliance needs over a large amount of unstructured data. The service provides predictable cost modelling, actionable data insights, flexible bring your own storage (BYOS) options, and compliance-ready operations. It’s virtually air-gapped with logical segmentation of the access keys. More information here.

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Data protector Druva has earned the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification by the International Organization of Standardization. This milestone, it says, proves the company’s commitment to data security and ability to meet the highest standards for security excellence. ISO/IEC 27001 includes more than 100 requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining and continually improving an information security management system.

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World Digital Preservation Day, is taking place today, November 3, 2022 – so-called by the Digital Preservation Coalition. The members are listed here, and don’t include any storage supplier. Steve Santamaria, CEO of Folio Photonics, said about the day: “Storage that is highly reliable, long-lived, easily accessible, and cost-efficient is crucial to any data preservation strategy. We have yet to see an ideal storage technology developed that strikes the right balance between these vectors. However, new technologies such as next-generation tape storage, advanced optical storage, and DNA storage are all currently being developed to sit at the center of data preservation strategies around the globe.”

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MRAM developer Everspin says its EMxxLX chips are now generally available with an xSPI serial interface, and is is the highest-performing persistent memory available today. It offer SRAM-like performance with low latency, and has a full read and write bandwidth of 400MB/sec via eight I/O signals with a clock frequency of 200MHz. The chip is offered in densities from 8 to 64 megabits and can replace alternatives, such as SRAM, BBSRAM, FRAM, NVSRAM, and NOR flash devices. Everspin says these are low-powered devices and deliver the best combination of performance, endurance, and retention available today. Data is retained for more than ten years at 85°C and more than 100 years at 70°C. Write speeds of more than 1000 times faster than most NOR flash memories are claimed.

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Too many companies with no product news and nothing else to say run reports with findings that customers need their products. Today’s example is Kaseya with a Datto Global State of the MSP Report – “a report full of data and insights on topics that range from how MSPs run their business, the services they offer, and what is driving growth in today’s changing landscape.” The hybrid workforce is here to stay (you didn’t read it here first), ransomware and phishing are getting worse (you don’t say) and the biggest challenge facing MSPs is … wait for it … competition (as opposed to the challenges facing literally every other type of business in the world). Yawn. We’re told the most surprising finding is that the revenue generated from break-fix is increasing.

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FD Technologies announced the appointment of Ashok Reddy as CEO of its KX business unit, reporting to Group CEO Seamus Keating. KX is a data analysis software developer and vendor with its KX Insights platform built upon the proprietary time series database kdb+ and its programming language q. The company was founded in 1993 by Janet Lustgarten and Arthur Whitney, developer of the k language. Investor Ireland-based First Derivatives (FD) increased its stake to 65 percent in 2014 and bought them out in 2018.

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NetApp is going even greener. It has announced availability of new ways (BlueXP, Cloud Insights Dashboard, LCA reports, storage efficiency guarantee) for customers to monitor, manage, and optimize their carbon footprints across hybrid, multi-cloud environments. It has a commitment to achieve a 50 percent intensity reduction of Scope 3 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions (those produced by an organization’s value chain) by 2030, and a 42 percent reduction of Scope 1 (emissions controlled or owned by an organization) and Scope 2 (electricity, heat, and cooling purchases) through adoption of a science-aligned target.

The Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) carbon footprint report uses Product Attribute Impact Algorithm (PAIA) methodology. PAIA is a consortium of information and communication technology peers, sponsored by MIT. The PAIA consortium allows NetApp to produce a streamlined LCA for its products that is aligned with leading standards including EPEAT, IEEE 1680.1 and the French product labeling initiative Grenelle.

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Nutanix global channel sales boss, Christian Alvarez, is leaving for another opportunity after spending more time with his family. SVP Global Customer Success Dave Gwynn is taking over the position.

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Pure Storage announced continued momentum within the financial services industry as global banks, asset management firms and financial technology organizations become customers. To date, nine of the top ten global investment banks, seven of the top ten asset management companies, and five of the top ten insurance organizations use Pure Storage products. Pure Storage’s financial services business reached an all-time high last year, growing more than 30 percent year-over-year in FY22.

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In-cloud database accelerator Silk has promoted Chris Buckel from VP business development and alliances to VP strategic partnerships.

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There are press rumors that Toshiba will finally be bought by a Japan Industrial Partners-led consortium for $16.1 billion in cash and loans. The consortium includes domestic Japanese companies Orix Corp and Chubu Electric Power Co, plus global investment firms Baring Private Equity Asia, CVC Capital Partners and others. A Bain-led consortium is also involved in the current (second) round of bidding.

Alation bags $123m in E-round investor funding

By

Chris Mellor

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November 3, 2022

Data catalog and intelligence tech supplier Alation has raised $123 million in an E-round despite the generally uncertain environment for tech startups.

Customers want to know what data they have and then analyze it to seek out potential commercial opportunities and efficiencies, said Satyen Sangani, Alation CEO and co-founder

Satyen Sangani, Alation — *Satyen Sangani*

“The modern enterprise needs data in good times … and even more so in bad,” he said. “In one of the most challenging times to raise capital, especially for late-stage SaaS companies, we sourced the capital needed to continue to grow the business. While negative volatility has many pre-IPO companies slashing valuations and halting investments, we defied the odds, raised $123 million, and increased our valuation.”

Alation will use the cash to increase product research and development, build new products, and make acquisitions to expand its multi-tenant SaaS. The money will also be used to expand Alation’s global head count, currently standing at a little more than 700.

The funding, Alation says, follows five consecutive quarters of accelerated growth. The company was founded in 2012 and now has nearly 450 customers, including more than a quarter of the Fortune 100. It has passed the $100 million ARR mark. Total funding to date is $340 million and the business is now valued at $1.7 billion-plus, about 50 percent more than before.

The latest round was round led by Thoma Bravo, Sanabil Investments, and Costanoa Ventures with participation from new investor Databricks Ventures. Other investors include Dell Technologies Capital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Icon Ventures, Queensland Investment Corporation, Riverwood Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and Union Grove.

Databricks is, of course, a startup as well, founded in 2013. It has raised $3.4 billion, with $2.6 billion coming from two rounds in 2021 alone.

There are more than 100 joint Alation-Databricks customers. Databricks and Alation reckon the two companies will accelerate joint go-to-market initiatives based on product integrations with Databricks’ Delta Lake and Alation’s Unity Catalog. This is intended to deliver data discovery, governance, and end-to-end lineage experiences for data engineering, data science, and analytics use cases on Databricks’ Lakehouse Platform.

Cohesity: Don’t rely on ransomware guarantees

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Chris Mellor

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November 3, 2022

Cohesity has suggested that ransomware recovery failure guarantees – such as the ones that Druva and Rubrik offer – are not worth the paper they are written on.

This is because the most common attack vector for ransomware – phishing (employee error) – is excluded.

The customer also generally has to abide by some definition of best practices, which is a recipe for legal dispute. They don’t cover ransom payments either.

Tim Robbins, Cohesity chief legal officer, told us in a briefing that he’d read the Druva and Rubrik ransomware guarantee documentation. He said: “The first thing that stands out to me is … there’s some right upfront exceptions and these definitions … exclude most forms of ransomware attack – particularly foreign intrusion.”

Our understanding is that if you download software in your environment thinking it’s a harmless application and it turns out it hides ransomware, you are not covered. Additionally, these companies don’t pay the ransom – they pay recovery costs.

A look at the Rubrik and Druva warranty agreement documents bears this out:

Cohesity is critical of such exceptions — *Druva ransomware exception from its resiliency guarantee agreement*

Robbins said these definitions “exclude the things that are most dangerous and most common – for example, losing your credentials, turning your credentials over to the bad guys. That’s the number one cause of ransomware or foreign third-party intrusion into your network.”

Our understanding is that general cyber security companies do not offer ransomware guarantees against phishing and equivalent attacks because they are so difficult to prevent. Robbins agreed.

A disadvantage of ransomware guarantees is that they can put the customer and supplier into an adversarial relationship instead of a cooperative partnership. Robbins characterized this as “a blame game, rather than a team recovering when the chips are down.”

Then he revealed that Cohesity had offered to match these guarantees in some customer deals. “We’ve offered them. We said, if you really need it, to check the box or something, we would match these guarantees. But we tell them why they’re not worth it. We think they’re negative value. And we’ve never had a customer ask us for one.”

Druva and Rubrik

A Druva spokesperson said: “While cyber crime is on the rise and customers are looking for any advantage they can get, they are right to be discerning about the value of recent ‘guarantee programs’. Many programs are 1) singularly focused on specific threats and/or 2) are loaded with legal jargon to exclude, disqualify, or otherwise limit payout. The reality is many of these guarantees are first and foremost marketing campaigns in disguise. Fortunately for Druva customers, none of these conditions apply to our new Data Resiliency Guarantee.

“In fact, our guarantee includes five service-level agreements (SLAs) that cover the ransomware limitations and exclusions that Cohesity references. We also cover four other common data risks including human risk (ie accidental deletion), operational risk (ie data rot/corruption), application risk (ie backup reliability), and environmental risk (ie uptime). More importantly, Druva’s standard customer agreement already includes many of these clauses.

“In other words, our customer commitment, and the technology to support it, has been in place and proven out over years. The Data Resiliency Guarantee simply formalizes our commitment with a financially backed guarantee. As for abiding by best practices, we do require customers to use the features we built to protect their data, and to use industry standard best practices. We do not believe this puts us at odds with our customers.

“Finally, given Druva is 100 percent SaaS, it is in our best interest to help our customers successfully combat ransomware. A well-structured, straightforward guarantee gives customers the confidence that we are putting skin in the game to work with them, rather than making it ‘their problem’.”

When asked about Cohesity’s points, a Rubrik spokesperson replied: “We don’t have anything to share on the topic at the moment.”

Solidigm CEO’s departure takes staff by surprise

By

Chris Mellor

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November 3, 2022

Rob Crooke, the CEO of Solidigm – SK hynix’s acquired Intel SSD business – has suddenly departed.

Crooke ran the Intel SSD business when it was sold to SK hynix for $9 billion in January. SK hynix set it up as a separate business unit and branded it Solidigm with Crooke as the CEO.

Rob Crooke, former Solidigm CEO — *Rob Crooke*

Now SK Hynix has confirmed a new leader: “Noh-Jung (NJ) Kwak, current co-CEO of SK hynix, has been appointed Interim Chief Executive Officer. This change follows the departure of Rob Crooke, who served as Solidigm’s CEO since the company’s launch. We are grateful to Rob for his leadership and important contributions in establishing Solidigm. Our team members remain focused on delivering an unmatched product portfolio and best-in-class service to our customers.”

Solidigm told us that “Woody Young, a current member of the Solidigm Board, has been appointed President of Solidigm.” Young is an ex-investment banker.

In addition we’re told: “The Solidigm Board has commenced a search for a new CEO to lead Solidigm. In the interim, we are confident that this senior leadership team is very well-positioned to lead Solidigm and to continue to serve the best interests of our customers.”

The company reiterated: “All of us at Solidigm are grateful to Rob for his leadership and important contributions in establishing Solidigm.”

Noh-Jung Kwak, Solidigm — *Noh-Jung Kwak*

A person close to the situation told B&F that Solidigm employees were informed at the same time as official statement was released. “Rob was simply gone,” they said.

In Crooke’s time as Solidigm’s CEO the company upgraded its datacenter PCIe 4 connected SSDs, released the P44 Pro gaming SSD. It also started promoting the penta-level cell (5bits/cell or PLC) NAND concept as the follow-on to today’s QLC (4bits/cell) flash.

Crooke also was involved in the decision to keep Solidigm’s NAND technology separate from SK hynix technology for a period, with eventual fusion assumed to take place some years in the future. It is more costly for a company to have two NAND production technologies.

SK hynix recently reported a 7 percent revenue drop in its third 2022 quarter to ₩11 trillion ($7.7 billion) with net profit falling 67 percent year-on-year to ₩1.10 trillion ($771 million) and is reducing cap-ex investments.

It may be that a strategic difference over Solidigm’s technology independence from SK hynix and capital spending contributed to Crooke’s departure, however, this just speculation.

Micron is also feeling the squeeze from the global economic situation and has announced capital spending reductions.

Kioxia brings SSDs to AI and Arm environments

By

Chris Mellor

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November 2, 2022

Kioxia has extended the market for its SSDs by getting them qualified for Arm servers, and by devising an AI image classification method using SSD data.

It seems counterintuitive, but apparently AI models can get dumber as they learn. Kioxia says that when existing neural network models are retrained with fresh data, leading to revised parameter weights, knowledge acquired in the past can be lost, leading to deterioration of classification accuracy. It calls this “catastrophic forgetting.”

One possible fix is unpalatable: retrain the neural network from the beginning, which can require huge amounts of time and energy costs. The other fix is obvious, and conceptually simple: have the existing neural network knowledge – image data, labels and image feature maps – stored in SSDs, and refer to this when the model is being retrained with fresh data.

Using this method, knowledge can be updated by adding newly obtained image labels and feature maps to the stored data, and image classification can be maintained more accurately.

Kioxia says there are two benefits. First, by using the data referred from the storage when the neural network classifies images, the basis for the classification results can be visualized, which is expected to improve the explainability of AI and allow the selective modification of knowledge sources. Second, by analyzing the referred data, the contribution of each stored data item can be evaluated according to the frequency of references.

This technology was presented on October 25 at the oral session of the European Conference on Computer Vision 2022 (ECCV 2022) in Tel Aviv. The paper title was “Revisiting a kNN-based Image Classification System with High-capacity Storage”. More information can be found here and here.

Kioxia hopes to apply it to other neural network problems areas.

Kioxia getting Arm-powered

Kioxia and Ampere have qualified Kioxia’s CD6, CM6, and XD6 Series SSDs with platforms based on Ampere’s Arm CPU-based Altra and Altra Max Cloud Native Processors. The CD6 and CM6 SSDs have PCIe 4 interfaces and a U.3 format. The XD6 has an EDSFF E1.S format and a PCIe 4 interconnect as well.

Sean Varley, senior director of product marketing at Ampere, said: “We’ve worked with Kioxia to certify its broad offering of NVMe SSDs with our Ampere Altra family of platforms for our mutual customers, including the top hyperscale cloud customers and leading ODM/OEM server manufacturers.”

HP’s latest generation of ProLiant servers include x86-powered models and Ampere processor products as well. Other SSD manufacturers can be expected to follow Kioxia in getting their SSDs similarly qualified.

Supermicro partnering with GRAID and Qumulo

By

Chris Mellor

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November 2, 2022

Supermicro is partnering with GRAID and Qumulo in two separate deals to have customers buy its servers fitted with GRAID’s GPU-powered RAID cards or used to run Qumulo’s scale-out filesystem software.

Update: GRAID erasure coding capability added. 7 Nov 2022.

These deals give GRAID a new channel to market for its SupremeRAID card, and Qumulo a value-oriented filesystem node.

Supermicro and GRAID Technology are co-operating in customer deals. Supermicro EMEA President Vik Malyala said: “We are thrilled to team with an innovative and sustainable company as GRAID Technology.” GRAID’s card “offloads RAID and NVMe data durability tasks from the CPU, freeing server resources for compute intensive workloads. Customers will quickly see the benefits in applications ranging from VMs and Containers to AI and HPC. It’s a very effective addition to high performance storage based on Supermicro’s flexible Building Block Solutions.”

It is claimed that the combination of Supermicro and SupremeRAID will offer customers an easy-to-configure option for data protection with a lower cost of deployment and outstanding NVMe and NVMeoF performance.

GRAID CEO Leander Yu spoke of Supermicro and GRAID having “a true competitive advantage in the NVMe and NVMeoF marketplace where together we will have an unbeatable combination.”

Supermicro now gets added to the existing list of GRAID’s technology and go-to-market partners:

Qumulo and Supermicro

Scale-out filesystem supplier Qumulo has announced it’s supplying a hybrid-NVMe SSD and disk drive product from Supermicro that optimizes performance and price in a single platform.

Qumulo CTO Kiran Bhageshpur said: “We are thrilled to offer our customers more platform choices. Qumulo’s intelligent caching technology, which ensures that most reads and all writes are NVMe-first for best performance, takes advantage of the new Supermicro NVMe + HDD platform to maximize performance at an affordable price point.”

Don Clegg, SVP Worldwide Sales at Supermicro, said: “Our continued collaboration with Qumulo delivers industry-leading storage solutions for customers demanding higher performance and lower TCO.”

The actual Supermicro product isn’t specified but we are told these “new Hybrid-NVMe nodes provide high-density storage in just 1U of rack space.” Scanning Supermicro’s website product pages reveals storage servers like the 1U SSG-610P-ACR12N4H and SSG-610P-ACR12N4L which would fit that description:

These have gen 3 Xeon CPUs, 12 x 3.5-inch drive bays, and 2 or 4 SDD bays. Twelve 20TB HDDS would give them 240TB of raw disk capacity and 10 would provide 2.4PB, plenty enough for Qumulo nodes.

An all-flash Supermicro system fitted with GRAID’s card and running Qumulo’s software ought to provide a screamingly fast scale-out filesystem package. Qumulo implements erasure coding, but GRAID already has that, so the possibility is obvious.

VAST Data to ‘revolutionize’ data lake market

By

Chris Mellor

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November 2, 2022

VAST Data claims to have has grown its business significantly faster than the general storage industry and says it will revolutionize the data lake market by onboarding OEMs in the coming months.

More than a dozen customers spent more than $10 million on its Universal Storage product in the first half of 2022, in dicating a potential $120 million run rate from them alone. Its Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) at the end of the period was 4.2x higher than a year ago. Three customers have now exceeded more than $100 million in commitments for Universal Storage since first buying the product. VAST has been cash flow positive, on average, for the last six quarters.

Renen Hallak, VAST Data — *Renen Hallak*

Renen Hallak, VAST co-founder and CEO, said in a statement: “Organizations are waking up to the fact that they need more utility from their data than legacy data platforms will allow them to realize… The platform revolution is only just beginning, and we can’t wait to show everyone our next acts which will be unveiled over the coming months.”

The announcement says VAST’s momentum will continue as it ”doubles down on the all-flash cloud, revolutionizes the data lake and onboards world-leading OEM partners, global system integrators and key ISV partners.”

Board member Gary Reiner said of VAST’s growth: “We are even more excited about VAST’s near-term plans to continue innovating, expanding further into the cloud with remarkably advanced data management capabilities.”

So VAST will be adding data lake and data management capabilities, and OEM partners that are world-leading, without saying if they are in the IT hardware systems, data lake or data management business. Should we be thinking of Databricks, Dremio, and Snowflake, or traditional system OEMs like Dell and HPE? Or both even, and where does the public cloud play in this?

Co-founder and CMO Jeff Denworth has written a blog in which he says “VAST wants to be a killer of categories in the future” with the URL linking to a Blocks & Files story about VAST working on the Thinking Machines vision. It appears we were getting close to what VAST is doing with data science infrastructure software development. Stay tuned.

How simple, stateful storage and Kubernetes streamlines developer productivity

By

David Gordon

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November 1, 2022

By iterating on standards, HPE CSI Driver and storage approach smooths application dev lifecycles

SPONSORED FEATURE Containers have become the wellspring of application developer productivity gains, especially in the cloud-native world. However, owners of stateful applications now have the same capabilities at their fingertips, all without the storage-based limitations of years gone by.

It’s worth taking a look back at the evolution of Kubernetes and storage if only to show how far companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have advanced. Plus, it gives us a sense of the progress made toward allowing users to instantly provision storage and clone production-level datasets while steering performance and capacity during runtime for peak reliability that yields better application response times, especially during periods of high congestion.

No more storage bottlenecks

For application developers and release engineers, storage was long considered a bottleneck which hindered successful Kubernetes deployments. While this might have been the case in the early days when various plugins offered little or no data management or dynamic provisioning capabilities, times have changed.

It used to be challenging to incorporate vendor-specific storage drivers into Kubernetes. And while there were plenty of efforts to that effect, they did not deliver the broad functionality that standardization initiatives generally provide. This is one reason why Google and others worked to develop the Container Storage Interface (CSI) specification, which allows third parties to write a driver within their own domain that could present standard constructs onto Kubernetes.

CSI provides a thin shim between the container orchestrator and the backend storage systems that is unique for each vendor. Now that it is mature and widely recognized by developers, customers can pop to the CSI documentation and see all the drivers for various storage interfaces. While this is certainly helpful, it can still be a bit of a jumble to sift through, however.

HPE has laid its engineering and storage systems expertise on top of this vendor-neutral effort to allow users to tap into a container storage provider (CSP – a REST API specification that defines how provisioning, mounting and deallocation workflows are invoked from a host client) which is able to handle all the data management operations on a range of storage infrastructure.

This shift means that Kubernetes deployments are no longer restricted to the more ephemeral world of stateless applications. Stateful application developers can also capture the full promise of container-based development with better data management, higher efficiency, secure multi-tenancy and far faster development times, even for traditional applications going through modernization.

Pushing productivity

Most applications that deploy on Kubernetes and run in containers are derived from stateful applications of one sort or another (databases, for instance). As storage flexibility has increased, this means the next challenge is to integrate production datasets into test workflows, especially as higher productivity leads to faster software releases, which drives higher quality deployments.

All of this also means testing needs to improve with the addition of production-like data in the dev/test and staging environment.

That is where the functionality of the HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes comes in. Stateful application owners can integrate that level of data early on in test cycles using instant zero-copy clones of production instances in Kubernetes and other functions inherent in their enterprise storage. With the ability to clone and attach that data to basically any type of container infrastructure where the driver is available, the bar for application development in containers has been raised.

Although vendor-neutral, the HPE CSI Driver has support for HPE’s entire storage portfolio, which is especially useful as large enterprises go on their application modernization journeys.

The HPE CSI Driver’s power is in allowing the ability to dynamically provision persistent volumes which can be set by system and storage admins. The focus of HPE’s driver is to provide a consistent experience across private cloud environments.

Control runtime storage performance/capacity

HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes – when attached to primary storage like the all-NVMe HPE Alletra cloud-native data infrastructure (powered by HPE GreenLake), HPE Primera or HPE Nimble storage systems – means users can instantly provision storage and clone production datasets while controlling volume performance and capacity during runtime to minimize operational disruption and downtime. Users can also deploy multiple Kubernetes clusters on the same infrastructure with top-line storage infrastructure backing production-level data for full developer productivity.

When storage is kept distinct from the Kubernetes cluster, existing clusters can be wound down and redeployed without changing the data, which remains shielded and can be made active again as soon as a new cluster is provisioned. In short, the development environment can be deployed and recovered quickly, without too much concern over the safety of the data—a major advantage for test-to-production projects.

Combining these external storage lines delivers an ideal environment for customers who want to scale compute, network, and storage individually. In addition to snapshots and clones, users can also get sophisticated multitenancy so you can run production, staging, and test/dev on the same storage by compartmentalizing all the storage resources to support a particular workload, and then you can scale that back or grow as the need for capacity or performance changes.

Existing HPE customers won’t need to know the details of the various HPE storage systems, and they can replicate data between the Alletra 9000 and Primera and between the Alletra 6000 and Nimble systems, for even better scaling and flexibility of performance.

HPE hyperconverged solutions such as HPE Alletra dHCI (disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure) or HPE SimpliVity data virtualization platform can give customers the flexibility of using storage provided by the infrastructure layer CSI drivers, with the option of using HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes for richer data management for stateful applications.

Easy storage provisioning for Kubernetes clusters

But perhaps the most important aspect of the HPE CSI Driver is that storage managers can delegate control and command and conversely, application developers writing containerized microservices applications don’t know – and don’t have to care – that enterprise-grade storage with features such as zero copy snapshots are making their stateful storage more scalable and resilient. They can do it in a self-service manner, just like they could provision virtual machines and stateful storage on server virtualization hypervisors in the days before containerization.

All of which leaves the application developers to do what they do best, and the storage managers to make sure the scale is there to support applications as they move from test/dev through qualification and into production. All on enterprise-class, scalable storage.

“Containers are designed for portability, so any organization using them must create an architecture that allows for data to be wherever it needs to be, whenever it needs to be,” says Michael Mattsson, Technical Marketing Engineer at HPE.

“Containerization, and Kubernetes in particular, helps businesses move away from imperative operational models that require multiple teams to perform tedious tasks on a regular basis. It allows them to adopt an agile declarative model where there’s a clean separation of concerns, along with a high degree of automation and abstractions that make sense for running a high-performance technology company,” he adds.

Developers already have enough to think about in getting stateful applications into production as quickly as possible – the HPE CSI Driver might at least mean that having sufficient underlying storage resources ready and available isn’t one of them.

Sponsored by HPE.

Backblaze: Buying less reliable disk drives can make financial sense

By

Chris Mellor

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November 1, 2022

Backblaze has published its quarterly disk drive reliability stats and explained how buying less reliable drives can be cheaper in the long run.

There is little change from last quarter’s report: the average annualized failure rate (AFR) in the quarterly table was 1.64 percent measured across 226,697 drives, with the worst performers being Seagate’s 4TB (4.38 percent), 12TB (4.96 percent), and 14TB (9.2 percent) models. A Toshiba 4TB drive had an 8.25 percent AFR, but Andy Klein, Backblaze principal cloud story teller, pointed out: “The high AFR (8.25 percent) is due to the limited number of drive days in the quarter (8,849) from only 95 drives.”

“Three drives had zero failures this quarter: the 8TB HGST (model: HUH728080ALE604), the 8TB Seagate (model: ST8000NM000A), and the 16TB WDC (model: WUH721816ALE6L0). For the 8TB HGST, that was the second quarter in a row with zero failures. Of the three, only the WDC model has enough lifetime data (drive days) to be comfortable with the calculated annualized failure rate (AFR).”

The Backblaze drive fleet is getting older. Klein noted: “The AFR for Q3 2022 was 1.64 percent, increasing from 1.46 percent in Q2 2022 and from 1.10 percent a year ago. As noted previously, this is related to the aging of the entire drive fleet and we would expect this number to go down as older drives are retired and replaced over the next year.”

In terms of lifetime stats, a couple of Seagate drives have greater than 3 percent annual failure rates; a 16TB one with a 3.3 percent AFR and a 14TB one failed more often with a 5.47 percent AFR. The average quarterly AFR was 1.41 percent across 226,000 drives.

Buying less reliable HDDs

Having accumulated all this data over many quarters, Klein posed the question: “Why would we continue to buy a drive model that has a higher annualized failure rate versus a comparably sized, but more expensive, model?” The answer comes from studying the relationship between acquisition costs and drive failure rates.

He supplies a theoretical table showing the acquisition costs, annual replacement costs, and failure rates for three 14TB hard disk drives to answer his question:

The three drives are priced as low, medium, and high with AFR values of 1.5, 1, and 0.5 percent respectively. They share the same replacement labor cost, $300. There is no drive replacement cost as “all drives are returned for credit or replacement to the manufacturer or their agent.”

The table lists the total cost of the drives over five years, factoring in the total lifetime drive replacement cost, which is added to the total cost of each drive model.

Even though, with the low-end model, more drives fail and the total drive replacement cost is higher than for the middle and top-end models, the acquisition cost is low enough for the total drive cost to be lowest of the three. The last line in the table shows this comparison.

Klein then asked: “How much failure can we tolerate before our original purchase decision is wrong?” Using the values in the table he computes that:

Model 1 and Model 2 have the same total drive cost ($1,325,000) when the annualized failure rate for Model 1 is 2.67 percent
Model 1 and Model 3 have the same total drive cost ($1,412,500) when the annualized failure rate for Model 1 is 3.83 percent.

He said that modeling drive costs and failure rates this way is important when buying thousands of drives a year: “The need for such a model is important in our business if you are interested in optimizing the efficiency of your cloud storage platform. Otherwise, just robotically buying the most expensive, or least expensive, drives is turning a blind eye to the expense side of the ledger.”

Commvault delivers 10 quarters of growth

By

Chris Mellor

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November 1, 2022

Against a background of storage media suppliers announcing downturns, Commvault reported its tenth growth quarter in a row, beating analysts’ earnings and profits estimates.

Revenues were up 5.8 percent year-on-year to $188.1 million in its second quarter of fiscal 2023 ended September 30, and profits rose to $4.5 million from $1.73 million.

Businesses may be buying fewer disk and solid state drives, but they need to protect the data they have. CEO and president Sanjay Mirchandani said: “Our fiscal Q2 record results and double-digit constant currency growth reinforce that customers see the value of Commvault’s software and SaaS solutions. We believe our comprehensive data protection portfolio has never been more important in today’s increasingly difficult world.”

Annual recurring revenue (ARR) represented 84 percent of Commvault’s earnings. It was 79 percent a year ago Q2 and 75 percent a year before that.

Revenue segments:

Software and products revenue: $82.8 million, up 10 percent
Service revenues: $105.2 million, up 3 percent
Total recurring revenue: $158.2 million, up 12 per cent year-on-year
Annualized recurring revenue: $604.4 million, up 11 percent

There were 173 large deal transactions compared to 163 a year ago. The average dollar amount of these was approximately $346,000, an 11 percent increase from the prior year. Large deals accounted for 72 percent of Commvault’s software and products revenues, $59.6 million, and 32 percent of Commvault’s revenues for the quarter.

Commvault revenues by quarter — *Ten quarters of growth*

Commvault reported $49.8 million in operating cash flow, up 90.8 percent annually. Total cash at quarter end was $262.5 million compared to $267.5 million as of March 31, and it has no debt. It said earnings per share were $0.57 compared to $0.48 a year ago.

Customers stored 3EB of data in the cloud, a 2.5x increase since Q2 of fiscal 2022.

Mirchandani said in an earnings call that the exec team had returned Commvault to responsible growth. Customers, he said, wanted both software and SaaS approaches to data protection and Commvault supplies both via it’s Metallic SaaS. There were more than 2,500 Metallic customers at quarter end, 72 percent of them new to Commvault. There were fewer than 2,000 at the end of fiscal 2021.

Metallic surpassed $75 million in ARR this quarter, up 50 percent since the start of the fiscal year, and half of the Metallic customers had also bought another Commvault product. It is a land-and-expand strategy and Commvault wants to accelerate this. Mirchandani said he expects every customer over time to need both Metallic and Commvault’s Complete Data Protection software product: “That’s our playbook. That’s how we go to market.”

The outlook for the next quarter is $203.5 million plus/minus $1.5 million, up just 0.54 percent year-on-year. CFO Gary Merrill said it was taking longer to close new business, and Mirchandani agreed, adding that closing got harder across the quarter, particularly in Europe. Merrill said this longer time to close was factored into the outlook.

NetApp introduces Blue XP data management

By

Chris Mellor

-

November 1, 2022

NetApp is announcing the availability of Blue XP, a software control plane to manage a customer’s data estate in a hybrid on-premises and multi-cloud environment with extensibility beyond NetApp tech.

NetApp CEO George Kurian’s Insight 2022 pitch spoke about the evolved cloud idea “where cloud is fully integrated into your architecture and operations and not just another silo walled garden.

“A true evolved cloud solution has common data management capabilities at the storage infrastructure layer, common infrastructure management capabilities, common API’s and open source databases, data pipelines, and workflows for stateful applications.”

Blue XP is the common data management capability. It is a single, unified NetApp control plane for a data estate in a hybrid multi-cloud environment, consumed as SaaS. Blue XP has deployment, management, observability, security and consumption of data and application services, and operates in an open architecture.

Blue XP has an AIOps-driven experience. NetApp says it allows users to manage their broad data estate, including on-premises unified storage and first-party native storage with public cloud providers. It’s not aimed at managing data on IBM mainframes, Apple iPads etc. being focused on data stored in common enterprise NFS/SMB, block, and object data stores across the Windows/Linux spectrum and the workloads found there.

NetApp Blue XP dashboard — *Blue XP dashboard*

BlueXP provides a range of services across file systems, object stores, SAN environments, virtual machine instances, and Kubernetes clusters, as well as database instances including SQL, Oracle, SAP/HANA, Jenkins, MongoDB, and others. The services include:

Unified Storage Management: Ability to manage NetApp AFF, FAS, StorageGRID, and E-Series on-premises storage, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Azure NetApp Files, Google Cloud Volumes Service, and Cloud Volumes ONTAP in a single console.
AIOps-Driven Health: BlueXP integrates NetApp’s Active IQ technology for always-on telemetry with AI-enabled health and status monitoring to detect and alert infrastructure and workload issues, and offer proactive guidance.
Cyber-Resilience: Unified control of data protection and security with an integrated zero-trust model and a single ransomware dashboard for company-wide visibility into ransomware vulnerabilities with the ability to fix many issues automatically with a single click.
Governance: A complete view of the Blue XP-managed digital estate to monitor compliance and permissions, detecting anomalies, and taking prescribed actions.
Mobility: Integrated data movers allow for copying, syncing, tiering, and caching data across all major clouds and the datacenter, with data protected in transit and stored on the lowest-cost storage tier possible.
Usage Billing: Customers are billed on usage. A Digital Wallet allows for licenses for data services to be interchanged as needs change. NetApp’s Keystone Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) offering is integrated so customers can manage their consumption-based datacenter storage alongside their cloud storage.

Ransomware dashboard

A single BlueXP ransomware dashboard provides company-wide visibility into ransomware vulnerabilities. NetApp’s Cloud Data Sense service is integrated into Blue XP enabling it to scan data across multiple repositories as well as NetApp stores. It can scan into various third-party products, including AWS S3, Azure Blob, Google Drive, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Oracle SAP HANA, and many more.

ONTAP’s built-in anti-ransomware detection capabilities can populate this ransomware protection dashboard and provide a ransomware protection score. Vulnerabilities can be exposed and reported to third-party vendors, such as a wide range of permissions being exposed or noticeably higher rates of encryption occurring.

Blue XP is available in disconnected mode. Ronen Schwartz, NetApp’s SVP and GM of cloud storage, told us: “Customers [like] three letter agencies in certain government branches, etc they need to be in disconnected mode. They can run Blue XP inside their VPC without any external connection.”

Future potential

We asked Schwartz if NetApp was thinking about partnerships with third-party data protection providers so that the status of their activities could be surfaced in the Blue XP dashboard.

He said: “This is a very big step forward. It’s a very exciting, but you’re calling out the potential, which is … absolutely right. And it goes to data protection vendors, it will go to catalog and scanning privacy technologies, everything that has to do with data, this is a very good place for vendors to surface their value.”

Broader observability is another aspect of potential third-party integration. How about adding automated decision-making?

Schwartz said: “The goal is to be fully autonomous.”

We understand that this could apply to ransomware and to data protection generally. There is a significant ONTAP engineering project around adding autonomy to the OS.

Blue XP and Spot

NetApp has made a group of acquisitions to build a CloudOps service set – CloudJumper, Spot, Cloud Insights, CloudHawk, Data Mechanics, CloudCheckr, Filament, and InstaCluster. It is building a Spot by NetApp portfolio for CloudOps, a CloudOps control plane that complements the Blue XP control plane. The company will integrate its complete CloudOps portfolio into a unified Spot console, as well as harmonizing back-end services and APIs across BlueXP and Spot in areas such as authentication, billing, tenancy, and more.

The Spot CloudOps suite will be available next month with three service groups:

Application services: Fully managed services for deployment, databases, data processing, and productivity
Infrastructure optimization: Automated and continuous based on telemetry and predictive analysis applying to containers, compute, networking, storage, observability, and connections
Operations Automation: Data-driven automation of scaling, monitoring, governance across deployments, teams, and clouds

ONTAP update

ONTAP, NetApp’s AFF and FAS array OS, has been updated to v9.12.1 and its added features include:

NetApp is also introducing what it terms as a storage efficiency guarantee. Kurian’s Insight presentation script says that this is “a 4-to-1 storage efficiency guarantee for SAN workloads on all of our ONTAP all-flash systems, including AFF … and even FAS500f.”

“With our 4-to-1 efficiency guarantee and our cloud tiering, which typically sees 60 percent or more of data being tiered to the public cloud, this means you could use up to 80 percent less on-premises storage with NetApp than you would with a typical competitive storage array.”

A green sustainability blanket is laid over this: “If you were to replace 80 percent of the on-premises storage shipped by a competitor this year with NetApp using our 4-to-1 efficiency guarantee, and cloud tiering to a net zero cloud provider, it would save over 5.5 million kilograms of carbon dioxide.”

The competitor is not identifed. We understand net-zero cloud providers, such as Azure and Google, can claim net-zero status by carbon offsetting; buying renewable energy certificates (RECs), for example, to offset fossil fuel energy supplies. AWS is intending to go further and only use renewable energy by 2025 for its datacenters.

Data Dynamics and the era of irreplaceability

By

Chris Mellor

-

October 31, 2022

File and object lifecycle management software suites like that supplied by Data Dynamics will become essential and virtually irreplaceable as the only way of making unceasing unstructured data sprawl manageable.

Data Dynamics’s software moves, manages, analyzes and secures data. Founder and CEO Piyush Mehta said his New Jersey-based company is 10 years old. It was started to build software to move files from one supplier’s filer to another. The company has evolved this migration capability to move files to lower-cost cloud and on-premises object storage.

And it has evolved its original file-scanning capability into a file and object scanning capability, leading to policy-directed user-managed file and object actions. Data retention rates and locations can be varied and manipulated based on access activity for example.

Mehta said that, as customers’ unstructured data has grown in amount, from terabytes to petabytes, and spread across hybrid-multi-cloud location then its management has become increasingly burdensome. His company lessens this burden and saves its customers time and money.

For example, an F200 bank enjoyed a 78.7 percent lower TCO with Data Dynamics’ data storage lifecycle management by moving little-used files to cheaper object storage. It had a total cost of ownership of $80.72 million for 57.67PB of data on file storage and $13.46 million for 26.39PB of object storage data. The bank used only 53 percent of its total usable file storage and paid a surplus of $26.38 million yearly for the unused storage capacity. The average cost of file storage per TB was $1,333, whereas it was $475 for object storage, ie 64 percent lower than file storage.

Business background

Data Dynamics is privately-owned and not VC-funded. It is profitable and so not being pushed towards an exit (IPO or acquisition) by VC backers wanting to get a return on their investment. However it did take in $9 million in July 2020 from investment banker DH Capital to expand its sales and marketing teams and grow its product portfolio.

The company has 145 employees – 119 in India focusing on R&D, 23 in the USA and three in Europe. It says it has analyzed and migrated more than 468PB of data in its existence to date and has a net customer retention rate of 160 percent.

Data Dynamics has more than 350 customers for its offerings, 28 of whom are in the Fortune 100. These buy from Data Dynamics and also from system integrators such as Capgemini, HCL, Infosys. Kyndryl and Tata Consultancy Services. Data Dynamics is resold by NetApp (migrate files to StorageGRID) and Lenovo, and has a go-to-market deal with Microsoft (free migration of data into Azure). It has relationships with Dell EMC and VAST Data to help their customers with file migrations.

Products

It presents itself as having three products and also four modules in a Unified Unstructured Data Management Platform, classified as solutions, and based on the three products:

StorageX unstructured data migration software;
Insight AnalytiX analytics software to discover, scan and tag unstructured data;
ControlX to manage sensitive data and limit its exposure, decreasing risk and increasing compliance and governance, and based on acquired Infinitus Innovations content analytics software.

“Sensitive” means data containing personally identifiable information (PII) such as social security, credit card and passport numbers, etc. StorageX v9 came along in August and implemented Share and DFS analytics, NFSv4 and NFSv3 POSIX security translation, and support for versioned object mobility. InsightAnalytiX v1.4 was announced in March and added the ability to generate a Data Insight report on a dataset by building advanced multi-level logical expressions and a combination of logical operators.

The four UUDMP modules are Data Analytics, Mobility, Security and Compliance, Data Analytics relates to the Insight AnalytiX product. The ControlX product relates to the Security and Compliance Modules while Mobility relies on the StorageX product.

Competition and roadmap

Mehta presented Data Dynamics’ competitive positioning to briefing attendees, using this slide:

It positions the company’s competition as providing point product capabilities around the edge of a unified unstructured data management platform area. The subtext is for customers to use Data Dynamics software instead of multiple products from competing suppliers. The competing suppliers may well provide a different view.

Datadobi, for example, says it is a data management supplier, with its StorageMap product scanning entire file and object storage estates and identifying non-active and little used data. ESG supported this and said the StorageMap product can reduce data storage cost, carbon footprint, and risk.

Mehta presented a roadmap slide:

We can see that using machine learning for data classification is the next item followed by DataOps and then increasing the ability of ordinary users to run data management and analytics functions on data without having to go through data scientist intermediaries (data democratization). Competitor Komprise is adding similar functionality to its Intelligent Data Management product.

We understand Data Dynamics is looking at bring structured data into its grasp as well.

Comment

Although Data Dynamics is a SaaS business and so customers can, in theory, switch to an alternative supplier easily, the products are sticky and have more and more utility as a customer’s unstructured data grows and grows, making its management a growing burden. This writer finds managing thousands of user files on one PC and a notebook takes an hour or so a week. A business with millions of files and objects spread across multiple servers, filers and object stores located in various datacenters and cloud locations faces gigantic task in comparison.

And then it becomes tens of million and hundreds of millions. File and object lifecycle management software suites like Data Dynamics will become essential and virtually irreplaceable. It’s a great niche business.

Boot Note

Net revenue retention rate is percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a given time period. A greater than 100 percent score means customers spend more with a supplier over time and the business can grow without having to acquire new customers.

DataOps refers to processes, workflows and automation to bring data to the people that needed it.

NewsPaperStorages and File System News

NewsPaperStorages and File System News

Storage news roundup – November 3

Alation bags $123m in E-round investor funding

Cohesity: Don’t rely on ransomware guarantees

Druva and Rubrik

Solidigm CEO’s departure takes staff by surprise

Kioxia brings SSDs to AI and Arm environments

Kioxia getting Arm-powered

Supermicro partnering with GRAID and Qumulo

Qumulo and Supermicro

VAST Data to ‘revolutionize’ data lake market

How simple, stateful storage and Kubernetes streamlines developer productivity

Backblaze: Buying less reliable disk drives can make financial sense

Buying less reliable HDDs

Commvault delivers 10 quarters of growth

NetApp introduces Blue XP data management

Ransomware dashboard

Future potential

Blue XP and Spot

ONTAP update

Data Dynamics and the era of irreplaceability

Business background

Products

Competition and roadmap

Comment

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