Web3 cheerleaders Protocol Labs and the Filecoin Foundation have set up the Decentralized Storage Alliance (DSA) with AMD, Seagate, and EY as founding members.
The alliance says it will create a trusted forum where enterprises and others can come together and collaborate around new technology to accelerate the adoption of decentralized storage (dStorage) technology. Such dStorage is based on capacity being provided by a global peer-to-peer network of providers whose trustworthiness is verified by blockchain technology with the incentive of blockchain-based cryptopcurrency such as Protocol Labs Filecoin. This Web3 dStorage concept is specifically opposed to the so-called Web2 centralized storage provided by the main public clouds such as AWS, Azure, GCP, Wasabi, and others.
Marta Belcher, president and chair of the Filecoin Foundation, said: “The Filecoin network is a decentralized storage system designed to store humanity’s most important information, and a foundational technology for the next generation of the web. The Decentralized Storage Alliance will help more businesses realize the benefits of decentralized web technology.”
The benefits are claimed to be more efficient, robust, secure storage at a significantly lower cost than traditional data storage, while also giving more businesses the opportunity to participate in the data economy.
The DSA will:
Develop standard specifications and reference architectures for enterprise companies;
Provide access to education materials, technical resources, and best practices;
Improve the data onboarding process to decentralized storage networks;
Enable Working Group creation to solve specific issues with the transition to decentralized storage technologies and Web3.
The three founding DSA members are quite different from each other. EY is a global accounting and business services firm that has a blockchain, Web3, and metaverse focus in the financial services market.
It says: “Web3 is one part technology and one part approach to building an internet that empowers individuals and communities beyond the interests of centralized entities. Anchored largely in technologies like blockchain and IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), its foundation exists on the concept of decentralized infrastructure, design, storage and access.”
AMD is a semiconductor-based CPU, GPU and FPGA builder, second to Intel in the x86 processor space. Blockchain calculations are processor-intensive and AMD thinks it is poised to disrupt virtually every industry.
Seagate supplies disk drives and is currently the number two supplier in the disk drive industry. It worked with IBM blockchain tech to authenticate HDD provenance in 2019 and was involved with the Chia cryptocurrency, based on a proof of having disk (or SDD) space over a time period, last year.
DSA disclaimer
The DSA includes a disclaimer in its formation announcement, which we have not normally seen in the IT industry. It says: “Specifically, the Alliance, Protocol Labs, Filecoin Foundation, Seagate, AMD and EY, each expressly disclaims any liability related to any decision by any person or entity to buy, invest in, or otherwise support any asset.”
It also told us: “The Decentralized Storage Alliance (the ‘Alliance’) may receive certain annual financial contributions in the form of cash or resources from Protocol Labs, Filecoin Foundation, Seagate, AMD, and EY.”
And then this legalese: “No statement made in this press release, on a website, or in any other public context related to the Alliance and/or Filecoin constitutes an offer, endorsement, recommendation, or other favorable report by the Alliance, Protocol Labs, Filecoin Foundation, Seagate, AMD, or EY, or any of their affiliates, or of any product or service provided by any of them, or of any other asset.”
We understand this to mean that if you buy Filecoin cryptocurency and lose money, you’re on your own.
The world’s three major disk drive vendors delivered less capacity to customers in the third 2022 quarter than a year ago, and lower revenues from those shipments as the market reacted to the global economic downturn.
Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers has taken shipment numbers from Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital, and research data from TrendFocus, to present a picture of an industry that’s had to apply the brakes. This is due to the Russia-Ukraine war, inflation, and recession fears all encouraging customers to spend less on spinning drives.
Total capacity shipped in the quarter was 292.7 EB, which is 19 percent less than a year ago. The total revenue derived from this was $4.42 billion, down 29 percent year-on-year.
Nearline drives account for the bulk of disk drive shipments these days:
Such drives represent 77 percent of the total disk drive capacity shipped in the quarter, around 224.7EB. That’s down from the previous quarter’s 80 percent but well up on the year-ago’s 70 percent. As the world’s data is increasing, so too will nearline drive shipments – there is no cost-effective alternative to spinning disk.
The nearline drive revenue chart closely matches the capacity chart:
Disk drive capacity shipped outside the nearline drive market fell 35 percent year-on-year to 68.0EB. That covers mission-critical, notebook, and desktop PC internal and external drives. Seagate shipped 49 percent of this total, Western Digital 38 percent, and Toshiba 14 percent. Seagate is dominating a shrinking market.
The vendors’ nearline capacity shares in the quarter were:
The winner in market share terms is Western Digital, accounting for around half of all nearline (high-capacity) 3.5-inch drive capacity shipped, compared to 44 percent a year ago. That was marginally higher than Seagate’s 43 percent, with Toshiba experiencing a year-on-year decline from Q3 2021’s 13 percent to this latest quarter’s 12 percent.
The capacity share value movements by Seagate and Western Digital are getting wilder, with Seagate having a steep fall in the latest quarter. Seagate is paying for its late introduction of its capacity-increasing HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology while the other two vendors are benefiting from their use of MAMR (Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) to increase capacity before they migrate to HAMR. Seagate believes it can catch up by shipping 30+TB HAMR drives by the middle of next year.
Meeting that schedule looks to be crucial for Seagate regaining lost ground.
The Weary Newsboy" by New York City artist James Henry Cafferty (1819-1869)
Cloud storage and backup provider Backblaze has announced better than expected preliminary results for Q3 2022. Revenue is expected to be between $22.0 and $22.1 million versus previous guidance of $21.4 to $21.8 million. Backblaze will report full financial results for its third quarter of 2022 (ending September 30, 2022) on November 9.
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Network connectivity supplier ATTO says its hardware and software fully support the latest operating system from Apple, macOS 13 Ventura.
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Functional verification supplier Avery Design Systems has updated its QEMU software virtual machine emulator based Linux host and SoC RTL co-simulation solution for system-level verification of complete CXL systems. The updates are specifically aimed at enabling pre-silicon validation of the upcoming 3.0 version of the standard, which will double bandwidth with the same latency as previous versions. The entire platform supports pre-silicon design of SoCs using version 3.0 as well as 2.0 and 1.1 versions of the CXL standards. CXL VIP for CXL 3.0/2.0/1.1 is available today.
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Cobalt Iron and research house DCIG have partnered to produce a free data protection maturity assessment survey for use by businesses and other organisations. The pair reckon enterprises want to know how they measure up in critical areas of their business operations. These measurements inform them where they can stand pat and where they need to make changes. Just as importantly, these assessments help them avoid budgetary or operational surprises by pre-emptively identifying existing gaps. Access the survey here.
By 2030, for every product a customer buys, Dell will reuse or recycle an equivalent product.
By 2030, 100 percent of its packaging will be made from recycled or renewable material, and more than half of product content will be made from recycled or renewable material.
By 2030, it will source 75 percent of electricity from renewable sources across all Dell Technologies facilities – and 100 percent by 2040
The company intends to reach net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across Scopes 1, 2 and 3 by 2050
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GPU-powered SupremeRAID provider GRAID has signed up primeLine Solutions GmbH in Germany as an OEM-like integrator of its cards to be used in primeLine’s server and storage systems.
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Global Data Environment (GDE) data orchestration supplier Hammerspace has signed up Titan Data Solutions as a distributor in the UK and Europe. It already has a distribution relationship with Climb Channel Solutions for North America.
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Intel is previewing its next-generation Thunderbolt connectivity product with speeds up to 80 Gbit/sec both ways, support for DisplayPort 2.1, 2x faster PCIe throughput, and compatibility with existing Thunderbolt 4 cables up to a meter long. It has a special mode that allows for 120Gbit/s speeds up and 40Gbit/s down so a single cable can link several monitors. It is built on the USB4 v2 specification.
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Data observability supplier Kensu has released a book entitled “Fundamentals of Data Observability: Implement Trustworthy End-To-End Data Solutions”. It was authored by CPO and founder Andy Petrella, published by O’Reilly Media and available for free on Kensu.io. The book helps data teams understand what data observability is and how it can help them better understand their data usage, troubleshoot data incidents, and more. Get your copy here.
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Meta has introduced a Grand Canyon storage box spec with all major system components serviceable and to be maintained at scale. It is designed such that CPU Board (Barton Springs) can be easily upgraded to the next generation of CPUs. Grand Canyon is Meta’s latest HDD storage server chassis as a follow-on to the previous generation storage platform, Bryce Canyon. The Grand Canyon design retains the high level system architecture from Bryce Canyon – 4U tall, single drawer dense storage chassis that contains up to 72 3.5” hard disk drives (HDDs), 2 compute modules, 1 NIC and 2 SSDs per compute module. This design will have an upgraded 1S Server card, UIC, Storage controller card and is Open Rack v2 (ORv2) compliant.
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Mirantis has announced Mirantis Container Cloud (MCC) updates that enable high performance data storage for large-scale Kubernetes deployments, and also support for Google Cloud Platform to deliver a consistent Kubernetes experience across multiple infrastructure providers. An update to Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE) adds Google Cloud Platform to existing support for virtual machines, bare metal, and hosted bare-metal on Equinix Metal, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. This is part of Mirantis’ plan to deliver ZeroOps and it is said it is now possible to run mission-critical workloads supporting millions of users, with petabytes of data storage accessible by Kubernetes clusters via open source Ceph. More MCC update info’ here and MKE update info’ here.
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The Open Compute Project (OCP) has launched a composable memory systems subgroup. The Composable Memory Systems Project aims to follow a hardware-software co-design strategy, developing a community to standardize and drive adoption of tiered and hybrid memory technologies and solutions that can benefit data center applications across industries such as AI-ML/HPC, Virtualized Servers and Cache/Databases. Many existing OCP members have joined this effort including Meta, Microsoft, Intel, Micron, Samsung, AMD, VMware, Uber, ARM, SMART Modular, Cisco and MemVerge.
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Oracle has announced its MySQL Heatwave Lakehouse, claming it offers 17x faster query performance than Snowflake and 6 x faster than AWS Redshift on a 400TB workload. It further claimed that MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse can load 400 TB data from object storage 8X faster than Redshift and 2.7X faster than Snowflake. MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse scales to 512 nodes, and Oracle said it can process hundreds of terabytes of data in object store in multiple file formats — including Aurora and Redshift backups. MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse is the newest addition to the MySQL HeatWave portfolio, a cloud service that combines transaction processing, analytics, machine learning, and machine learning-based automation within a single MySQL database. Lakehouse expands Heatwave’s parallel processing capabilities to object data stored outside Oracle. MySQL Heatwave will be available on AWS and is already available on Azure.
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Filesystem supplier Quobyte announced its availability in the SUSE Rancher Apps Catalogue during KubeCon last week. It said this is a validation of Quobyte’s Kubernetes and container performance and adds to SUSE Ranchers growing stable of K8 applications.
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A SmartXblogger has posted an article about multi-tenancy in Kubernetes. The blog says the Kubernetes community has seen an emergence of projects for multi-tenancy. It discusses issues around multi-tenancy in Kubernetes. In particular, it examines the two implementations of multi-tenancy – cluster sharing and multi-cluster – and provide suggestions for enterprises caught in a bind.
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Swissbit has introduced an SSD using Burlywood FlashOS firmware in its controller. It said the N4200 offers two- to five-times faster constant write speed versus the previous generation, while maintaining low latency and two-times greater endurance over its lifetime. The drive uses 3D NAND in TLC format., with a PCIe 4×4 NVMe 1.4 interface, and has an initial 8TB capacity with a 16TB version to follow. It delivers up to 800,000/130,000 random read/write IOPS and 7GB/sec and 4GB/sec sequential read and write throughput respectively. The endurance is 1 to 3DWPD configurable and it can be based on live telemetry recorded in a test run.
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The USB-IF has published a USB4 v2.0 spec to enable 80Gbit/s performance over a USB Type-C cable and connector. The updated USB4 specification doubles the maximum aggregate bandwidth of USB to the benefit of higher-performance displays, storage, and USB-based hubs and docks. The USB Type-C and USB Power Delivery (USB PD) specifications have also been updated to support this higher level of data performance. It utilizes a new physical layer architecture based on PAM3 signal encoding, over existing 40Gbps USB Type-C passive cables and newly defined 80Gbps USB Type-C active cables.
Seagate has integrated Hammerspace’s Global Data Environment (GDE) with its Lyve Cloud storage-as-a-service and Exos Corvault JBOD, as was foreshadowed in May.
Lyve Cloud is an S3-compatible object storage service. The GDE provides globally distributed access to block, file, and object data across a customer’s edge sites, on-premises data centers, and the public clouds. Exos Corvault is a 2.12PB (raw) SAS JBOD (just a bunch of disks) taking up four rack units.
Hammerspace distribution partner Climb Channel Solutions – the rebranded Lifeboat Distribution – has put out a blog saying: “One of the major challenges across all industries is the growth of unstructured data and how to store it. Data sprawl causes enterprises to struggle with tracing where their data goes, how it is stored, and who can access it within the cloud.”
“In addition, data gravity creates stagnant and stuck data. Finally, the costs to maintain and store that data within physical infrastructure prevents efficient data mobility when managing it across multiple data centers or the cloud.”
Seagate hasn’t said anything about this added Lyve Cloud availability because, we understand, it has been in a quiet period around its results.
Climb’s blog suggests that Hammerspace’s GDE software can locate and position data or access using Corvault and the Lyve Cloud, as a Seagate-Hammerspace graphic shows:
We expect Corvault to power past its 2.12PB capacity limit as Seagate introduces higher-capacity disk drives than its current 20TB Exos range-topper. A 22TB drive would up the capacity limit to 2.33PB raw.
The Climb blog states: “One of the most compelling parts of the solution is its ability to handle burst computing for workloads that require thousands of compute cores. Hammerspace’s data orchestration power allows organizations to leverage compute resources, access compute power within the cloud, and compute in the lowest cost region.” In other words, Hammmerspace’s GDE can move the data to the compute cores.
The blog also says: “With Hammerspace, data-placement policies between multiple on-premises storage types and Lyve Cloud is completely transparent as a background operation. Users simply see their data in their applications or at the same mount point as always…no matter if the files are still on primary storage, or have moved to secondary storage or the cloud.”
A customer can “move data where you want and make it fully transparent to users or applications.”
Hammerspace’s partnering activity is ramping up, with AMPD Ventures becoming a reseller, Climb Channel Solutions a distributor, Titan Data solutions another distributor, and Seagate a technology integration partner. Climb distributes products from more than 300 suppliers, making Hammerspace just another brick in its wall, so to speak, but Hammerspace is present on Climb’s list and being actively marketed. We expect more such announcements to follow.
Veeam can now protect a Salesforce user’s data and metadata, extending its protection surface from on-premises and the public cloud to the SaaS app sphere.
This is a significant addition to Veeam’s capabilities. Like other data protection vendors, it backed up on-premises bare metal and virtualized servers and then extended into protecting users data in the public cloud because AWS, Azure and GCP did not do that. But a whole new data protection front opened up as SaaS apps like Salesforce and ServiceNow became wildly popular. Vendors like OwnBackup specialized in protecting those users’ data and now Veeam has stepped in too.
Rick Vanover
Rick Vanover, Veeam’s Senior Director for Product Strategy, writes: “Mass data imports are common for most organizations that use Salesforce, and these imports are the number one reason for data corruption and deletion.”
Veeam gave a preview of its Salesforce backup offering in May.
Vanover says: “Veeam provides complete access and control of Salesforce data and metadata, as well as providing powerful, rapid-recovery capabilities for IT departments and Salesforce administrators. This includes granular and bulk data recovery of Salesforce records, hierarchies, fields and files.
“IT professionals overwhelmingly agree that Salesforce data loss is inevitable within an organization, they tend to rarely back it up.”
Veeam graphic
Veeam Backup for Salesforce features:
Being purpose-built and using Salesforce APIs
Restore Salesforce records, hierarchies, fields, files and metadata
Deploy on-premises or in the cloud (AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc.)
Set granular backup schedules and retention settings at the object level
Manage several Salesforce instances from one console
Incremental sync and flexible scheduling means customers can back up Salesforce data and metadata almost continuously
Run backup policies and restore jobs in minutes from the Veeam GUI
See versions of records and metadata and compare them with production version
Granularly restore linked objects to any record, including parent/child records
OwnBackup has grown at a high rate since it was founded in 2012, as a customer count list indicates. In July 2020 it had 2,000, but in July 2022 that number had gone up to 4,700.
It offers secure, automated daily backups of Salesforce SaaS and PaaS data, restoration, disaster recovery and management tools to pinpoint backup gaps. The company has raised $507 million across seven funding events. It has expanded to protect Microsoft Dynamics 365 and ServiceNow users.
There is a back-up feeding frenzy, of sorts, and Salesforce users are spoilt for choice:
Veritas has Salesforce user data protection coming in Netbackup, as Santhosh Rao, senior director for product and portfolio strategy, told us in May: “Salesforce protection is coming soon.”
Other suppliers protecting Salesforce data include AvePoint, CloudAlly, Cohesity, Druva, Odaseva, Kaseya’s Spanning, and Skyvia.
Veeam has more than 400,000 customers and aims to offer them complete data protection. Holes in its coverage, such as for major SaaS apps, will let competitors enter its customer base. We expect Veeam and the other major backup vendors to increase their SaaS app coverage and give OwnBackup a real fight in the marketplace.
The standard one to five-year subscription pricing for Veeam’s Salesforce backup is $36/user/year but there are two introductory offers:
Up to 300 users for a year – $2,000
Unlimited users for a year – $10,000
Veeam also has a free version of the Salesforce backup service, Veeam Backup for Salesforce Community Edition, which provides fully functional, no-charge backup and recovery of Salesforce data for organizations with 50 Salesforce user licenses or less.
Get a Veeam Backup for Salesforce product overview here and a user guide here.
Western Digital saw a 26 percent revenue drop in its latest earnings report compared to last year – which was better than Seagate’s 35 percent fall and with no layoffs signalled.
Its revenues were $3.74 billion in the quarter ended September 30, with profit down a whopping 96 percent from the year-ago $6100 million to $27 million. It made $2 billion from selling disk drives, down 21 percent annually, and $1.7 billion from punting SSDs, down 31 percent.
David Goeckeler.
CEO David Goeckeler’s statement said: “I am pleased to see the Western Digital team work together to deliver revenue at the upper half of the guidance range and operating income at the upper half as implied by the midpoints of our guidance, in the midst of an incredibly dynamic and challenging macroeconomic environment.” In his view it’s a consumer-led downturn and there are signs of stabilization.
Financial summary
Gross margin – 26.3 percent compared to year-ago 33 percent
EPS – $0.08, 96 percent down from last year’s $1.93
Operating cash flow – $6 million, down 92 percent from $521 million a year ago
Free cash flow – $215 million compared to $224 million last year
Cash and cash equivalents – $2 billion
Its three business segment results were:
Cloud – $1.83 billion, down 18 percent annually and 49 percent of total revenue (44 percent a year ago)
Client – $1.23 billion, down 34 percent and 33 percent of total revenue
Consumer – $678 million, down 30 percent and just 18 percent of total revenue
Cloud customers bought less than a year ago, but both business and consumer customers bought fewer client device drives. Plus consumers bought fewer drives anyway.
WD shipped 14.7 million disk drives – 39 percent fewer than a year ago. The average selling price per disk rose to $125 from $102 a year ago, reflecting higher capacity per drive. Shingled magnetic recording drives exceeded 25 percent of total capacity shipped, which is three months ahead of WD’s expectations.
Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers said WD outperformed Seagate in nearline disk drive shipments, saying WD shipped ~112EB of nearline capacity, up ~3 percent annually, which compares to Seagate’s 20 percent year-on-year drop to ~85EB.
Flash bit shipments exceeded WD’s forecast but were down, Rakers estimates, 7 percent annually to about 21EB.
The company is reducing its gross capex to around $2.7 billion – lower than the previous guidance of about $3.2 billion. Rakers said: “This reflects a ~30 percent reduction for NAND capex, and a ~10–15 percent reduction for HDD.” WD is delaying its BiCS6 (162-layer 3D NAND) transition due to the lowered capex, and sees a possible jump over it direct to BiCS 7 (212-layer) if market conditions permit.
Analysts were told WD’s retail and channel flash demand is leveling out, and orders from PC customers (cSSDs) are stabilizing.
WD says it is deep into the process of qualifying its latest generation hard drives, including 26-terabyte UltraSMR drives, at multiple US cloud and OEM customers.
WD’s outlook for the next quarter is for revenues between $2.9 billion and $3.1 billion. At the $3 billion mid-point that means a 38 percent decline from a year ago. Things are about to get worse – and that could lead to layoffs.
Pure Storage has announced a trifecta of Portworx upgrades for containerized app developers: a data access speed bump, new object storage and faster disaster recovery, and a fully managed service offering. There’s also a free version of Portworx Backup.
Portworx, acquired by Pure in 2020, is a container storage and backup software business in the process of being developed into a general Kubernetes operations facility. A Portworx Data Service supports different databases and includes a Kubernetes Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). There is a Portworx Enterprise Kubernetes data management product, and a Portworx Backup-as-a-Service on AWS.
Murli Thirumale, VP & GM of Pure’s Cloud Native Business Unit, said: “By delivering the fully managed service for the Portworx platform, the #1 Kubernetes data platform, we are bringing the cloud experience, on any storage infrastructure, to the fingertips of any developer who wants to work with Kubernetes apps in production.”
Portworx Enterprise 3.0
This latest version has a PX-Fast feature providing higher performance for low latency data services such as Kafka, Elastic, and MongoDB. These services can have fast ingestion and high throughput needs for online transaction processing (OLTP), online analytical processing (OLAP), and machine learning (ML) workloads.
The Portworx Kubernetes Data Management platform promises throughput and IOPS almost as fast as writing directly to NVMe SSDs, with a claimed 1 million-plus IOPS rating. Pure says PX-Fast makes Kubernetes data storage look like local storage for containerized apps and data.
The Portworx product supports disaster recovery (DR) capabilities with zero RPO and fast RTO between two metro region clusters with circa 10ms latency. Portworx disaster recovery is improved with a Near-Sync DR capability providing a claimed 24-second RPO and a fast RTO between two cloud regions or geographically distant datacenters with higher network latencies.
Portworx already supports file and block storage access. Version 3 adds S3 access, so that users can manage and access object storage buckets with native Kubernetes integration and a single consistent experience across cloud and on-premises S3 stores.
The easy button and a free offering
Users of Amazon EKS, RedHat OpenShift, and any other Kubernetes services (fully managed or upstream distributions) can consume all of the Portworx products as a fully managed service. Pure says it delivers a no install, easy to use, and easy to manage experience to users with no container expertise required. They get, Pure claims, ease of use and faster deployment of Kubernetes data on any cloud or on-premises storage, enabling DevOps and platform teams to operate and scale containerized apps into production in seconds, versus weeks or months.
Pure is also introducing a free fully managed service tier of Portworx Backup. Users get no feature restrictions, and can protect up to 1TB of data at no cost and for an indefinite period. Each backup instance can manage hundreds of Kubernetes clusters.
Portworx Enterprise v3.0 and the fully managed service will be available in early 2023.
Commvault is protecting K8s workloads with its Complete Data Protection and Metallic offerings. It promises cloud-native protection and recoverability for the entire Kubernetes ecosystem, including full clusters, namespaces, and ETCD and SSL certification protection. It provides migrations of Kubernetes apps between clusters, distributions, versions, storage and DR by replacing business-critical applications offsite for on-demand application recovery.
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DataCore claims the upcoming release of Mayastor 2.0, the performance engine in OpenEBS built around SPDK, brings additional HA redundancy options in its NVMe oF/TCP data IO fabric. These are designed to prevent data loss by intelligently routing data around failed IO paths. The release also includes fine grained thin provisioning management of K8s pooled volumes, intended to reduce costs and simplify scale-up. OpenEBS is a CNCF sandbox project that was originally built by MayaData, which was acquired by DataCore in November 2021.
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Datadobi has released a technical validation report from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Global. ESG found that StorageMAP enables users to utilize multi-vendor, multi-cloud unstructured data management capabilities to optimize data assets to reduce cost, carbon footprint, and risk, and maximize unstructured data value.
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Cassandra NoSL database supplier DataStax has updated its Stargate open-source data gateway to v2. It offers a high-performance gRPC API that enables developers to scale Cassandra data to serve billions of global devices with speed, in real time. The v2 architecture lets developers scale usage and tune performance more granularly by making each service independently deployable, using dedicated node types for data storage, query coordination, and API services. Stargate supports a range of APIs: JSON, CQL, GraphQL, REST and now gRPC APIs. CQL over gRPC is now the fastest growing way to query DataStax Astra DB; the Stargate gRPC interface is a transport for CQL queries, preserving developers’ existing CQL skills.
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Enterprise file sync ‘n sharer and collaboration biz Egnyte has appointed Johanna Bowley as its VP for global channel sales and go-to-market. She has has held top channel and sales positions at Rubrik, Citrix, Riverbed Technology and others.
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GRAID GPU-powered SupremeRAID cards are being distributed by TD SYNNEX. GRAID’s go-to-market efforts are growing quickly.
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Hazelcast, which provides real-time streaming data products, has announced Hazelcast Platform 5.2. This includes a Tiered Storage function to keep hot data in memory to increase throughput, reduce latency and maintain cold data in more cost-effective storage. It has added stream-to-stream join functionality so customers can merge multiple data streams and handle late-arriving records. Now customers can join multiple streams of live data and merge them with large volumes of stored data to provide historical context, within a single data processing platform.
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Lenovo has announced a TruScale Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix, hosted on Lenovo’s ThinkAgile HX HCI platform. It uses core software from Nutanix, including Nutanix Acropolis AOS operating system, AHV Hypervisor and Prism. Lenovo has also joined forces with Red Hat to create Lenovo TruScale Hybrid Cloud with Red Hat, providing a Kubernetes container platform hosted on Lenovo’s ThinkAgile and ThinkSystem. Enterprise customers will get a fully managed as-a-service hybrid cloud for running their business applications. Lenovo is also working with Veeam – see below.
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Silicon IP developer Rambus has announced the availability of its PCIe 6.0 Interface Subsystem, comprised of PHY and controller IP. The Rambus PCIe Express 6.0 PHY also supports the latest version of the Compute Express Link (CXL) specification, version 3.0. It delivers data rates of up to 64 Gigatransfers per second (GT/s) and the PCIe controller features an Integrity and Data Encryption (IDE) engine, dedicated to protecting the PCIe links. Full support for CXL 3.0 is available to enable chip-level solutions for cache-coherent memory sharing, expansion and pooling. There is more information here.
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Samsung, as expected, has reported weak memory results with revenue falling 27 percent year-on-year to ₩15.23 trillion ($11.4 billion). Demand was slower in servers, mobile, and PC segments with some customers using existing inventory. Demand is expected to remain tepid into the second half of 2023. Samsung reported DRAM bit shipment declines in the high-teen percentage range. Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers estimates Samsung’s NAND bit shipments were down 8%-10% y/y in 3Q22. Taken together with SK hynix results (see below) this looks like a repeat of the 2019 downcycle.
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HCI supplier Scale Computing is partnering Mako Networks to provide an edge infrastructure that includes robust, reliable compute, and standards-compliant network devices (including PCI DSS), simplified enterprise edge deployment and management, and full-stack support. The PCI-certified, cloud-managed, carrier-independent Mako System networking consists of the CMS hosted cloud management application and a range of managed networking devices.
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A Silicon Motion MonTitan SM8366 controller for PCIe gen 5 NVMe SSDs has achieved more than 3.6 million random read IOPS and 13.6GB/sec sequential read throughput at the 2022 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit, according to Storage Review. This is more IOPS than the Fadu Echo’s 3.4 million, but a lower bandwidth than the Echo’s 14.6GB/sec.
Silicon Motion SM8366 controller
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Korean DRAM and NAND fabber SK hynix has announced downbeat results for the 3rd 2022 quarter, with revenues of ₩10.98 trillion ($7.7 billion), down 7 percent from a year ago, and a profit of ₩1.1 trillion ($1.2 billion), down 60% from last years ₩3.3 trillion ($3.6 billion). This follows 10 consecutive quarters of rising revenues and confirms that a recession is hitting storage media suppliers due to the overall global economic situation – see also Micron and Seagate.
SK hynix said the semiconductor memory industry is facing an unprecedented deterioration in market conditions. Shipments of PCs and smartphones – products which are major consumers of memory chips – have decreased. SK hynix will reduce investment in 2023 by more than 50% YoY, focusing production volume on more profitable products.
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Veeam Backup & Replication software is being loaded onto Lenovo ThinkSystem appliances (servers) to provide Lenovo’s TruScale Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and DRaaS. Backup storage targets include Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series and DM Series storage with secondary copies sent to an AWS S3 or other repository, a tape library or another cloud. Lenovo may well add other backup software as an option to its TruScale BaaS. TruScale Backup-as-a-Service with Veeam general availability is expected in 2023 via Lenovo.
Veeam graphic
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Veeam’s Kaasten BU released K10 V5.5, which aims to simplify Kubernetes data protection with the addition of automation and a cloud-native expansion. It factors in the application’s non-peak usage hours and specifies a backup window accordingly to optimise the utilisation of underlying infrastructure and automatically handle conflict resolution when multiple policies are scheduled. There is a graphical wizard that generates the most suitable install manifests that can be visualised and repeated for multiple installs. Customers now get the most up-to-date advancements across increasing workload types, geographic regions, storage types, and security.
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Mike Wall
Data center virtualizer Verge.io has appointed Mike Wall as board chairman. He was chairman and CEO of Amplidata, a leading object storage software company, and led its sale to Western Digital in March 2015. Prior to Amplidata he was CEO and member of the board of storage innovator Atempo (acquired by Allen Systems Group), and before that, CEO and member of the board of the cloud SaaS medical imaging platform DICOM Grid. Wall was GM of Intel’s Storage Group, where revenue grew from zero to a $500 million annual run rate.
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Weebit Nano has successfully completed full technology qualification of its Resistive Random-Access Memory (ReRAM) module manufactured by its R&D partner CEA-Leti. All the dies successfully passed the entire set of qualification tests. It confirmed the suitability of Weebit’s embedded technology for volume production. This is the first full qualification of Weebit ReRAM technology, a step that must be completed for every semiconductor product on each new target process.
Seagate has announced a restructuring plan that includes around 3,000 layoffs – 8 percent of its workforce – after revenues dived 35 percent to $2.04 billion in its first quarter of fiscal 2023.
There was a profit of $29 million in the three months ended September 30, down 94 percent from last year’s $526 million. The disk drive maker blamed the downturn on global macro factors – the Russia-Ukraine war, COVID, inflation, China slowdown, supply chain issues – and customers running down disk drive inventories instead of buying new drives.
In addition, the video surveillance market was affected by the global economic slowdown which delayed project budgets and installation timing. Legacy drive revenues declined due to the COVID pandemic and inflation. Mission-critical drive demand fell meaningfully compared to the prior quarter, and consumer spending on disk drives also fell.
Dave Mosley
CEO Dave Mosley said: “Global economic uncertainties and broad-based customer inventory corrections worsened in the latter stages of the September quarter, and these dynamics are reflected in both near-term industry demand and Seagate’s financial performance.”
He added that Seagate is “adjusting our production output and annual capital expenditure plans, and announcing a restructuring plan that will deliver meaningful cost savings while maintaining investments in the mass capacity solutions driving our future growth.”
The 3,000 layoffs will cost $60-70 million in pre-tax charges for employee severance and one-time termination benefits, and will be mostly completed by the end of the second quarter. Annualized savings of $110 million are expected.
Mosley hopes the dip in demand is relatively short-term : “We continue to meet our development milestones for the 30+ terabyte product family, which is based on industry leading HAMR technology. Our team is executing well on our innovation roadmap and we are seeing strong engagement from cloud customers. Looking beyond the current macro uncertainties, we are confident in the secular demand for mass capacity storage driven by the underlying growth in data and believe Seagate is in a great position to capture growth opportunities over the long term.”
Financial summary
Operating cash flow: $245 million compared to year-ago $496 million
Free cash flow: $112 million compared to year-ago $379 million
Gross margin: 23.7 percent compared to year-ago 30.7 percent
Diluted EPS: $0.14, it was $2.28 this time last year
Seagate said its shipped exabytes totalled 118EB, down 26 percent from last year’s Q1. The average capacity per drive was 7.5TB, down from last quarter’s 7.8TB but still well up on the year ago quarter’s 5.5TB.
Disk drive revenues were $1.8 billion, 38 percent down on the year, but SSDs and other system (Lyve Cloud, etc.) revenues rose 5 percent to $263 million.
Seagate’s 20+TB disk drive platform is now its highest volume shipping product, representing over 40 percent of mass capacity drive EB shipped. Next-generation CMR products have started qualification at multiple US cloud customers and its HAMR technology is achieving development milestones, being on-track for mid-2023 shipments of 30+TB.
The outlook for the next quarter, which could change if circumstances get worse, is $1.85 billion plus or minus $150 million, which is 59 percent less than the year-ago second quarter’s $3.12 billion.
Western Digital quarterly earnings are due in a day or so and are expected to be similarly bad. Micron and SK hynix have already posted downbeat earnings for their DRAM and NAND products. As far as storage media producers are concerned, the recession is here already.
In an effort to combine AHV virtualization with Kubernetes-orchestrated containers, Nutanix has revealed at the Kubecon event that a raft of containerized app support items are being added to its Cloud Platform software.
It announced broad support for the main Kubernetes container platforms, built-in infrastructure-as-code capabilities, and enhanced data services for cloud-native applications. The pitch is that developing and running containers inside Nutanix’s Cloud Platform environment gives developers linear scalability, performance and governance, and manages IT operating cost control by eliminating unused compute and storage resources.
Thomas Cornely
Nutanix SVP for Product Management Thomas Cornely said: “Running Kubernetes container platforms cost-effectively at large scale requires developer-ready infrastructure that seamlessly adapts to changing requirements. … The Nutanix Cloud Platform now supports a broad choice of Kubernetes container platforms, provides integrated data services for modern applications, and enables developers to provision Infrastructure as Code.”
The company is adding:
Amazon EKS-A support, which adds to existing support for Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher, Google Anthos, Microsoft Azure Arc for edge deployments, and the native Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE).
Updated API family along with its SDKs in Java, JS, Go and Python currently under development. It will provide automation at scale and consistent operations in the datacenter, public cloud, and edge sites.
Combining these APIs with Red Hat Ansible Certified Content or the Nutanix Terraform provider means an automated DevOps methodology can provide Infrastructure as code.
Nutanix Database Service Operator for Kubernete enables developers to provision and attach databases to app stacks directly from development environments. The open source operator is available via artifacthub.io as well as by direct download at GitHub.
Nutanix Objects supports a Container Object Storage Interface (COSI) reference implementation for easier orchestration and self-service provisioning. It also adds support for observability using Prometheus.
Nutanix Objects has been validated with the Presto, Dremio, and Vertica analytics apps, plus Confluent Kafka to support data pipelines in real-time streaming applications.
Nutanix reminded us it provides license portability across edge, datacenter, service provider, and hyperscaler points of presence.
Paul Nashawaty, senior analyst at ESG, said that by having a virtual machine app, containerized app development and runtime environments in the same place, Nutanix Cloud Platform brings the best of both worlds: “Container development platforms promise faster application development speed, but will only be deployed by organizations who can maintain compliance, day 2 operations, and cost management control at scale. Nutanix offers a compelling path to speed the deployment of modern applications at scale and in a cost-effective manner, with full choice of Kubernetes container development environments and cloud endpoints.”
Kioxia has confirmed its IPO plans are on hold as it opened Fab7 at Yokkaichi in Japan with NAND foundry partner Western Digital.
The plans were filed in August 2020 and sought to raise $3.2 billion but were delayed in September that year when the US government banned certain technology exports to China. This affected future Kioxia revenues. Now the extension of these bans has caused a likely downturn in Kioxia exports to China. This, together with a NAND oversupply situation, threatens to depress Kioxia’s revenues.
The IPO would have provided cash for beleaguered Toshiba, which owns 40 percent of Kioxia. Toshiba is talking to bidders about a potential buyout of its poorly performing and loss-making company. The flotation would also provide investment cash for Kioxia.
Bloomberg quoted president and CEO Nobuo Hayasaka as saying: “Now is not the time. We remain on the alert for the best possible timing for an IPO, but as always will also evaluate other financial options.”
New Kioxia fab
Fab7
On a brighter note, Fab7 will produce 162-layer 3D NAND chips, the sixth generation of Kioxia and WD’s BiCS technology, followed by later generations, such as BiCS 7’s 212-layer flash. The 162-layer product will ship in early 2023. Fab7’s total cost will be ¥1 trillion ($6.8 billion).
Hayasaka said: “Fab7 is the latest and most technologically advanced semiconductor manufacturing facility in Japan and will be indispensable for Kioxia’s future. Long-term global demand for memory products is expected to increase as the world consumes more data across a variety of connected devices.”
Kioxia and WD’s Fab7 cleanroom
In other words, although we’re currently seeing a relatively short-term dip in NAND demand, the medium and long-term picture is great. Kioxia and other NAND manufacturers, including Micron and SK hynix, are cutting capex and lowering production output as they ride out the supply glut and wait for customers to use up their flash chip inventories, and for smartphone and PC demand to recover.
Dr Siva Sivaram, President of Technology & Strategy at Western Digital, said: “With its innovative design and production efficiencies, the new Fab7 facility underscores Western Digital’s commitment to deliver sustainable memory and storage technologies to our customers globally. We value our tremendous relationship with Kioxia.”
This is a nod to the end of disruption to the relationship during prior WD CEO Steve Milligan’s tenure.
Fab7 uses AI techniques to increase production efficiency and has a larger cleanroom area relative to its overall space than prior Kioxia fabs, meaning a larger manufacturing area. It has an earthquake-resistant design and Kioxia says it will use energy-efficient equipment to increase its sustainability rating.
The Flux Web 3.0 decentralized and cryptocurrency-based compute network is adding storage services based on IPFS, the Inter-Planetary File System.
Web 3.0 is a concept being pushed by blockchain and cryptocurrency enthusiasts as an open and accessible alternative to what they see as the centralized and supplier-dominated internet of today – which they call Web 2.0. What Filecoin is to decentralized storage, Flux is to decentralized compute, but now it is stepping on Filecoin’s turf.
Co-founder Daniel Keller said: “At Flux, we have made it our mission to offer business and developers operating on Web2 cloud services the same experience in a Web3 environment, and the launch of FluxIPFS is our latest step in doing so… We have added FluxIFPS to the Flux platform to strengthen our current portfolio of product offerings and further establish Flux as the one-stop shop for those looking to launch decentralized applications in a cloud environment.”
IPFS is a content-addressed peer-to-peer file sharing network based on linked IPFS hosts, each holding a part of a file. Every file has a unique ID in an IPFS global namespace.
Keller wants users to be able to “deploy decentralized applications using familiar tooling found in Web2 cloud services, like decentralized file storage.” It would operate in way similar to BitTorrent with an F-drive concept.
The company is bringing FluxIPFS to its ecosystem to provide this file storage for NFTs, static web pages, file services, and images. This move brings it into competition with Filecoin, Storj, and other decentralized storage providers.
Dazz Williams, IPFS development lead, said: “Business leaders are looking for ways to speed up their digital transformation and we are pleased to offer a decentralized file-sharing network to help protect against infrastructure damage, offer immunity from data corruption, and provide an invaluable backup in the Web3 space. We will continue to help Flux grow the quality of its product portfolio by developing even greater capabilities through IPFS.”
FluxIPFS is in beta and more will be revealed by Flux in coming weeks. There is no information about the file access protocols to be used or file IO speed. Don’t bother searching for FluxIPFS in the Flux website; it’s not present, except briefly in a roadmap webpage.
The Flux network
The Flux network uses a native POW (Proof-of-Work) coin (Flux cryptocurrency) to power its ecosystem, providing incentives for hardware hosters. The network is based on Fluxnodes’ decentralized infrastructure, FluxOS cloud operating system, Zelcore self-custody multi-asset wallet and blockchain app suite, and Flux blockchain for on-chain governance, economics, and parallel assets to provide interoperability with other blockchains and DeFi (Decentralized Finance) access.
FluxNodes are operated in a decentralized manner by individual holders, and geographically spaced all over the world, so that applications are accessible by users at all times and locations. Operators of Flux nodes can choose from three tiers of hardware requirements to stand up after providing the necessary Flux capital soft-locked in their wallet. Flux says its ecosystem technology allows anyone to be rewarded for providing hardware to the network, from anywhere in the world.
DeFi is a general term for peer-to-peer financial services on public blockchains, such as Ethereum. Flux is mined using the ZelHash algorithm. ZelHash is a GPU minable implementation of Equihash 125_4, harnessing ASIC/FPGA resistance, developed by Wilke Trei of lolMiner.
