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HPE revenues flat-line amid supply-chain woes

By
Chris Mellor
-
HPE GreenLake
HPE GreenLake

HPE revenues grew hardly at all in its second 2022 quarter, restrained by supply difficulties, but demand was robust and both orders and backlog grew strongly.

Revenues in the quarter ended April 30 were $6.7 billion, up just 0.2 percent year-on-year, with a profit of $250 million, 3.5 percent less than a year ago. The earnings were near the midpoint of HPE’s guidance with negative effects from the Ukraine war, HPE’s Russia operations closedown, and the China shutdown.

This prompted CEO Antonio Neri to mainly focus on underlying positivity in his results statement: ”Persistent demand led to another quarter of significant order growth and higher revenue for HPE, underscoring the accelerating interest customers have in our unique edge-to-cloud portfolio and our HPE GreenLake platform.” Mentioning “higher revenue” with just 0.2 percent revenue growth is a tad unbelievable.

Neri said he is ”optimistic that demand will continue to be strong, given our customers’ need to accelerate their business resilience and competitiveness. We remain focused on innovating for our customers and on executing with discipline so that we translate that demand into profitable growth for HPE.”

Yes, well, profitable growth has been lacking in HPE for quite some time, and was lacking this quarter too. It was not able to satisfy all the demand for its products due to supply chain woes, and stressed that the underlying business signals are very positive. For example:

  • Annualised revenue run-rate (ARR) was up 25 percent on the year to $829 million
  • Total as-a-service orders were up 107 percent; the third consecutive quarter of orders doubling

Business unit splits

HPE splits its business into several segments and the picture there was mixed;

There are two growth segments; HPC and AI on the one hand and Intelligent Edge on the other. We can see from the table above that these grew revenues year-on-year while the others were almost flat (Compute) or declined.

Yet orders for Compute were 20 percent-plus higher year-on-year for the 4th quarter in a row. The Storage backlog increased to record levels and this segment had the highest as-a-service ARR growth. There was double-digit year-on-year growth in Nimble, Big Data and HCI (Simplivity) although Storage revenue overall declined for the second quarter in a row. That indicates that 3PAR/Primera and the Alletra 9000 did not do so well this quarter.

Within Intelligent Edge orders grew more than 35 percent for the fifth consecutive quarter. Aruba Services revenue was up double-digits from the prior-year period and Intelligent Edge as-a-Service ARR was up 50 percent-plus from the prior-year period. 

The HPC & AI segment had delayed acceptances and the order backlog grew to an impressive $3 billion with 15 percent-plus year-on-year order growth.

This is a jam-tomorrow story, and HPE’s revenues were hobbled by supply chain issues, unlike the revenues in the latest quarters for Dell, NetApp, and Pure Storage. Compared to them, and relatively-speaking, HPE is under-performing in its response to the supply-chain problems that are affecting the entire IT hardware industry.

Another issue is that HPE is withdrawing from Russia and Belarus and took a $126 million charge because of this in the quarter.

Financial summary

  • Gross margin: 32.4 percent, down 170 basis points on the year primarily due to $105 million of Russia-related charges 
  • Diluted EPS:  $0.19, flat from the prior-year period mostly due to $126 million of Russia-related charges 
  • Cash flow from operations: $379 million
  • Free cash flow: -$211 million in line with normal seasonality
  • Capital returns to shareholders of $214 million in the form of share repurchases and dividends 

HPE has not provided a revenue target for the next quarter but suggests it will see 3 to 4 percent revenue growth for the full 2022 year (adjusted for currency changes).

Comment

Storage, for HPE, is not a growth business.  

Like Compute, Storage is classed by HPE as a core business while HPC & AI and Intelligent Edge (Aruba) are the two growth businesses. The aim with core businesses is more to preserve revenues and profitability, and keep margins up than build revenues higher. In contrast, storage is seen as very much a growth business for the storage-product-dominated NetApp and Pure Storage. It’s also seen as a growth opportunity by Dell. And that difference shows in all three of these vendors’ much better storage results. 

It prompts the asking of a question: has HPE made a strategic mistake by not classing Compute and Storage as growth businesses? Is it, as a result, not spending enough R&D dollars to build better – and winning – Compute and Storage products? 

Look at this another way: HPE’s two growth businesses are simply not growing fast enough to offset declines elsewhere, as a chart of HPE’s quarterly segment revenues shows:

We can see that the overall growth in HPC & AI is slight and patchy, and only gradual in the Intelligent Edge segment. The much bigger generally declining $3 billion Compute and billion-dollar-plus Storage segments, not to mention flattish Corporate Investments and gently declining Financial Services areas, mask the positive single digit percent improvements in the two sub-billion dollar growth segments.

HPC & AI could and should grow much more in the future, propelled by HPE’s Frontier exascale supercomputer win. This business is lumpy, going up and down quarter by quarter, and revenues are not yet growing consistently or strongly. But HPE has a $3 billion backlog here so it should turn sharply upwards eventually. The Intelligent Edge needs double-digit growth to start making a real difference to HPE’s revenues and we are waiting for that to happen. Again, the order growth is promising.

All of this is taking place against the background of a transition away from perpetual license sales to GreenLake subscription revenues and that has a dampening effect on revenue growth. And the supply chain problems are also holding back revenue growth. But demand is strong, orders growing, billings growing, and ARR growing so we should – maybe – give HPE the benefit of any doubt and look forward to a glowing future. Antonio and his execs hopefully know what they are doing. 

Let’s close with a comment from EVP and CFO Tarek Robbiati: “With record levels of high-quality backlog, we are well positioned for growth in FY22 and beyond.” 

NetApp grows revenues 8 percent just as it said it would – but CloudOps held it back

By
Chris Mellor
-

Consistency is valued at NetApp and it has grown revenues consistently for eight quarters in a row with its latest fourth fiscal 2022 quarter’s results. But public cloud growth let the side down as poorly integrated CloudOps acquisitions were hard to sell.

Revenues in the quarter ended April 29 were $1.68 billion, 8 percent more than a year ago, with a profit of $259 million, down 20 percent from the year-ago $324 million. Full fiscal 2022 revenues were up 10 percent to $6.32 billion with profits of $937 million, up 28.4 percent on the year.

CEO George Kurian’s results statement said: “Our solid fourth quarter results cap off a strong year. We made sustained progress against our strategic goals: gaining share in enterprise storage, expanding our public cloud business, and, most notably, delivering record levels of gross margin dollars, operating income, and earnings per share.” He talked of an our alignment to customer priorities, strong balance sheet, and prudent operational management. 

Fourth quarter’s financial summary

  • Hybrid Cloud segment revenue: $1.56 billion, compared to $1.49 billion a year ago
  • Public Cloud segment revenue: $120 million, compared to $66 million last year, 99 percent higher
  • Gross margin: 65.7 percent compared to prior quarter’s 67.3 percent and 68.3 percent before that
  • Cash, cash equivalents, and investments: $4.13 billion at quarter end
  • Cash provided by operations: $411 million, compared to $559 million 12 months ago
  • Share repurchase and dividends: Returned $361 million to shareholders through share repurchases and cash dividends

Full-year summary

  • Billings: $6.7 billion, 13 percent higher than a year ago
  • Hybrid Cloud segment revenue: $5.92 billion, compared to last year’s $5.55 billion
  • Public Cloud segment revenue: $396 million, about double the year-ago $199 million
  • Cash provided by operations: $1.21 billion compared to $1.33 billion last year
  • Share repurchase and dividends: Returned $1.05 billion to shareholders through share repurchases and cash dividends

In the Hybrid Cloud category, product revenues were $894 million, up 6 percent annually, with support and other services contributing $666 million. NetApp said it gained share in enterprise storage with strong growth in all-flash array (AFA) and object-storage products. The AFA run rate is $3.2 billion, the same as last quarter, and 12 percent more than a year ago. Actual AFA revenues were up 20 percent annually in the quarter. Object-storage revenues grew faster, at 49 percent.

Public Cloud annual recurring revenue (ARR) was $505 million, 68 percent more than 12 months ago, with strength in Cloud Storage, led by Azure NetApp Files, but it was lower than hoped for. That was due to shortfalls in the Cloud Insights and Spot areas, which grew less than expected, not helped by sales force attrition, particularly with Spot.

Kurian referred to this in the earnings call, saying: “Our Public Cloud ARR came short of our expectations. Demand for our cloud storage solutions was strong in Q4. We also saw a healthy number of new customer additions across both cloud storage and cloud operations services in the quarter. Unfortunately, these tailwinds were not enough to offset the lower than expected growth created by higher churn, lower expansion rates, and sales force turnover in our cloud operations portfolio.”

NetApp has made organizational changes to increase its focus on renewal and expansion motions, refreshed the sales team and strengthened the leadership ranks. CFO Mike Berry talked about improving the operational rigor across the CloudOps products and NetApp is speeding up the integration of its CloudOps product portfolio, particularly Instaclustr, so that it’s easier to buy. This should also help the sales force cross-sell and upsell NetApp products and services to its CloudOps customers.

It emerged on the call that since some point this year, sales reps cannot hit their numbers without selling cloud as part of their overall quotas.

Kurian admitted mistakes had been made: “I think where we could do better is learn from the mistakes we made around integration, and we’re going to – everybody learns from that and we’re going to own that.”

In general NetApp plans to slow the pace of CloudOps-related acquisitions and reprioritize its use of cash in FY 2023 to favor shareholder returns. It is convinced it can achieve $2 billion in ARR exiting fiscal year 2026.

In the Hybrid Cloud segment of its business, issues with supply chains hindered its ability to ship product. Product revenues grew 10 percent in the full year, but only 6 percent in the fourth quarter reflecting this. Berry mentioned supply-constrained shipments, elevated freight and logistical expense, and component cost headwinds.

The company’s revenue growth rate has declined during the year, starting at 11.9 percent in Q1 and passing through 10.6 percent and 9.8 percent to the latest quarter’s 8 percent. Gross margin has also declined, with Berry saying Q4 should be the trough with gross margin improving during fiscal 2023. Pricing changes – increases – will help it as will supply-chain improvements. It sees customer demand as being steady and its ability to satisfy that demand will be gated by supply-chain issues, as it has been for the past two quarters.

Eight consecutive growth quarters in 2021 and 2022.

NetApp has not grown its revenues in the quarter anywhere near Pure’s 50 percent growth rate. Instead it’s nearly matched Dell’s 9 percent storage revenue growth rate. Pure’s run rate is $2.48 billion, which compares to NetApp’s AFA run rate of $3.2 billion, up as we have seen 12 percent annually. If Pure continues growing faster than NetApp’s AFA revenues then it could eventually overtake NetApp on the AFA front.

Neither has NetApp seen customers wanting to pull shipments forward as happened with Pure in its comparable quarter.

Asked about the competitive environment and if it had changed, Kurian answered: “I think it’s pretty much the same, Pure and NetApp taking share from Dell and HP and several other players. So I would characterize it as no fundamental change, to be honest.”

The outlook for NetApp’s next quarter (Q1 FY 2023) is for revenues between $1.475 billion and $1.625 billion, $1.55 billion at the mid-point which Berry said is 6 percent higher than the year-ago quarter. Full FY 2023 revenues are expected to be 6 to 8 percent higher than for FY 2022.

NetApp anticipates sustained demand for its AFA and object-storage products, and continued share gain momentum, which should lead to product revenue growth in the mid-single digits.

SCSI

By
Chris Mellor
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SCSI – Small Computer Systems Interface pronounced as ‘Scuzzee.’ It is an interconnect standard for PCs and servers linking to peripheral devices, such as disk drives and SSDs, and covers physical connections and data transfer. It was originally a parallel interface but later moved to a serial one. Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) is a physical version of this and iSCSI is another version. See Wikipedia for a detailed look at SCSI.

UFS

By
Chris Mellor
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UFS – Universal Flash Storage is a drive specification for smart phones, digital cameras and similar devices. It’s the size of a (very) large fingernail and replaces earlier eMMC and SD card specifications. For example, a Micron UFS 4.0 card is 11 x 12mm in size with an extended one coming 9 x 13mm in size. UFS is SCSI-based, supports SCSI tagged command queuing and the standard is looked after by JEDEC. The JEDEC UFS standard refers to both embedded memory storage and removable memory cards.

Kioxia UFS memory card.

Here is a table showing how the standard has developed;

Micron is building an extended UFS 4.0 card with more speed and SK hynix is developing a UFS 5.0 card.

Pure’s blowout first fiscal 2023 quarter

By
Chris Mellor
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Pure beat its first fiscal 2023 quarter guidance by $100 million with 50 percent year-on-year growth as several enterprise customers brought order shipments forward. There were supply chain issues but Pure virtually snuffed them out.

Revenues in the quarter ended May 8 were $620.4 million compared to $412.7 million a year ago. There was a net loss of $11.5 million, better than the year-ago loss of $84.2 million. Dell’s most recent quarter was good too, with 16 percent revenue growth overall and storage growing at 9 percent to $4.2 billion. Pure grew its storage revenues more than five times faster.

CEO and chairman Charlie Giancarlo said in the earnings call: “We drove 50 percent year-over-year revenue growth with exceptional performance in both US and international markets.” This was higher than the 41 percent revenue growth in the previous quarter. He said: “FlashArray, FlashArray//C, and FlashBlade all saw strong growth during the quarter, setting multiple individual records. … Despite pandemic, war, and market turmoil, Pure has thrived and grown.” Revenue growth was good both in the US, where revenues grew 55 percent, and internationally, including Europe where IT budgets remain strong despite the Ukraine war.

Pure added 360 new customers in the quarter, rather less than the 470 least quarter, bringing its total customer count to 10,822, including 54 percent of the Fortune 500. It said it managed to mitigate component supply chain issues, partly because its products have fewer components than competing products.

Giancarlo believes Pure has opened up a second phase of growth. In its early days, he said, Pure had technically advanced products that beat competitors products easily – “It was the only product of its type, and therefore, allowed us very, very rapid early growth.” But competitors “were able to use their larger sales forces and their greater portfolio to compete with us more effectively and so our growth slowed a bit.”

Giancarlo said: “Our competitors play a commodity game. … They’ve been marketing storage as a commodity. The customers should only care about price and nothing else. And we’re playing a high technology game. We invest in it like it’s high technology. It’s an entirely different business strategy, and it’s going to be very difficult, I think, for them to respond.”

The commodity-based competitors he is referring to will be, we understand, Dell, HPE, Hitachi Vantara and NetApp.

Pure has made investments in R&D and in “broadening out our sales focus and capabilities, sales, and support such that we could support enterprise customers with a larger portfolio. … we’re seeing the fruits of that bear out. And so the second phase of growth is the fact that we can penetrate more into larger customers with an expanded and superior portfolio, and that’s going to give us a runway, a pretty long runway to continue what I believe is going to be a second phase of growth.”

He is convinced Pure is gaining market share.

A chart of revenues by fiscal year by quarter supports this view, showing accelerated growth in recent quarters:

Pure has exhibited accelerated growth rates in the most recent three quarters.

 Financial summary

  • Subscription services revenue $219.2 million, up 35 percent year-over-year;
  • Subscription Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) $899.8 million, up 29 percent year-over-year;
  • Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) $1.4 billion, up 26 percent year-over-year;
  • Gross margin 68.7 percent;
  • Operating cash flow $220.1 million;
  • Free cash flow $187.3 million;
  • Total cash, cash equivalents, and investments $1.3 billion.

Guidance for next quarter is for revenues of approximately $635 million – 28 percent year-on-year growth – with the full fiscal 2023 revenue guide being approximately $2.66 billion, indicating 22 percent annual growth. The lower growth next quarter (Q2) than the 50 percent recorded in Q1 is due to customers pulling shipments forward to Q1.

Namespace

By
Chris Mellor
-

Namespace – In NVMe terms a namespace is a set of logical block addresses (LBAs) on an NVMe SSD and they form a logical partition. There can be more than one namespace on an NVMe SSD. The namespace can have a namespace ID to identify it. The NVM Express organisation says: “There are many reasons why host software would want to break up an NVMe SSD into multiple namespaces: for logical isolation, multi-tenancy, security isolation (encryption per namespace), write protecting a namespace for recovery purposes, over-provisioning to improve write performance and endurance and so on.

Folio Photonics joins Active Archive Alliance

By
Chris Mellor
-

Archive optical disk developer Folio Photonics has joined the Active Archive Alliance, bringing it a step closer to delivering product into an archive ecosystem.

The Folio Photonics DataFilm Disk (DFD) has 8 to 16 layers per side and will come in a 10-platter cartridge with 10TB to 20TB of capacity at a  $2-$3/TB acquisition cost. It has a data read/write rate of around ~365MB/sec.

In a statement, Rich Gadomski, co-chairman of the Active Archive Alliance and head of tape evangelism at FUJIFILM Recording Media, said: “Organizations are increasingly adopting active archive solutions as part of their data transformation strategies. Folio Photonics expands the Active Archive Alliance’s ecosystem and breadth of innovation, and we are pleased to welcome them.”

 Active archive file systems span multiple media types, including flash, disk, tape, optical, cloud, file, block or object storage systems. Folio Photonics disks have a lower cost than tape, at about v$2.50/TB versus tape’s $10/TB or so. They should also be cheaper than existing optical disks such as Sony Optical Data Archive product which cost around $45/TB.

Folio Photonics DFD cartridge
Folio Photonics DFD cartridge

If Folio Photonics can produce enterprise-grade disks and drives, meaning ones with consistent and reliable performance, the media pricing should make them attractive.

CEO Steven Santamaria said: “Active archive solutions frequently utilize multiple forms of media. We envision photonic storage media as an ideal complement to hard drives and tape media, creating an ideal active archive to satisfy any workload while remaining cost-effective and adhering to stringent cyber-security/compliance requirements.” 

We asked Travis Johnston, director of market strategy at Folio Photonics, how its optical disk technology is positioned against tape media.

He said: “By offering a write-once, immutable media with a long life and random access, we see many existing and emerging use cases for our technology as part of an immutable active archive and other archival storage configurations.”

The write-once, read-many (WORM) attribute is key to the positioning versus tape, and Johnston said: “We are fundamentally a write-once media with a smaller capacity [and] there are instances where tape’s high capacity, high throughput, and rewritability may be preferred.”

Phison demos PCIe 5 SSD performance

By
Chris Mellor
-

Phison has tested its PCIe 5 controller in a proof-of-concept SSD with impressive IOPS and bandwidth numbers presaging what we can expect from enterprise SSDs using the fifth PCIe generation bus.

Update: Kioxia views re E26 performance added 27 June 2022.

PCIe 5 operates at 4GB/sec per lane, twice PCIe 4’s 2GB/sec per lane, and four times as fast as  PCIe 3’s 1GB/sec per lane. PCIe 3 is used by the vast majority of installed and shipping NVMe-access SSDs. Phison has been building up to producing a PCIe 5 controller and has now tried out its PS5026-E26 device using an M.2 2580 format gumstick card populated with 1TB of Micron 3D NAND in TLC format.

SK hynix’s Platinum P41 M.2 SSD delivers sequential read speeds up to 7,000 MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 6,500 MB/s, and up to 1,400K random read IOPS and up to 1,300K random write IOPS on PCIe 4.

The PS5026-E26 delivered 12,457 MB/sec sequential read and 10,047 MB/sec sequential write bandwidth using a CrystalDiskMark test, almost doubling the Platinum’s P41 bandwidth numbers.

Phison test
Phison CrystalDiskMark test run screen image

Phison claims it will deliver up to 13,500 MB/sec sequential read bandwidth and 12,000 MB/sec sequential write bandwidth. We placed these numbers in a table along with other PCIe 5 SSD numbers to get a sense of how Phison’s controller performed:

Phison comparison

FADU’s Echo is the random read IOPS king, with its 3.4 million random read IOPS but comparatively poor 735,000 random write IOPS. Its sequential bandwidth is excellent too: 14,600 MB/s reading and 10,400 MB/s when writing. 

Samsung’s PM1743 is next best on the random read IOPS front with 2.5 million and a slow 250,000 random write IOPS. Its sequential read bandwidth at 13,000 MB/s isn’t far off FADU, but sequential write is much poorer – just 6,600 MB/sec.

The Phison PS5026-E26 delivered 1.31 million random read IOPS and 1.16 million random write IOPS; a balanced read-write performance profile. But these are lower IOPS numbers than the PCIe 4-using SK hynix Platinum P41 drive; an odd result. Its sequential bandwidth is back to PCIe 5 goodness – 13,500 MB/sec for reads and 12,000 MB/sec for writes – again a balanced picture with no read optimization to speak of.

The two Kioxia CD8 drives are slightly slower than the Phison rig on random read IOPS, at 1.25 million, but slower on random write IOPS at just 200,000. They are quite severely lacking in sequential bandwidth, 7,200 MB/sec reads and 6,000 MB/sec writes – PCIe 4 territory – and look to be outclassed.

Update: A Kioxia source said: “The CD8 really is designed for the Data Center and Enterprise applications and this wasn’t really an apples to apples comparison. The numbers with the E26 Demo were based on a CrystalDiskMark test in a Client environment. While the CD8 specs are based on tests with enterprise usage. Other factors like reliability and use cases like mixed use or read intensive applications really aren’t captured here.”

Phison’s PS5026-E26 controller features 2 x Arm Cortex-R5 cores and 3 x  Phison CoXprocessor 2.0 accelerators. It supports TLC and QLC format NAND with capacities up to 32TB, and the ZNS, SR-IOV, ONFI 5.x, Toggle 5.5, and NVMe v2.0 standards.

AMD’s Zen 4 CPU with AM5 motherboards will support PCIe 5 and is expected later this year.  Intel’s Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids CPUs will also support PCIe 5 with appropriate motherboards.

We might hope to see SSD suppliers shipping products using the PS5026-E26 controller possibly in the fourth quarter but likelier in early 2023. Phison says it’s meant for both client and enterprise use so gamers might get a first sight of such SSDs. 

Cisco + NetApp + Pure = CI as a service

By
Chris Mellor
-

Converged Infrastructure (CI) is being offered as a Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud service based on existing FlexPod and FlashStack deals with NetApp and Pure Storage.

Cisco+ is an as-a-service brand combining Cisco and partner products with unified subscriptions: either pay as you use or pay as you grow. It was introduced last year and started out with network-as-a-service (NaaS) products presented under a Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud rubric and led by Tier 1 partners. CI refers to combined rackscale systems made from Cisco networking gear and UCS servers and, originally, Dell EMC storage, as in VBlock and VXBlock.

It evolved to include the networking and servers with NetApp ONTAP storage in a FlexPod reference architecture scheme, and Pure Storage FlashArray or FlashBlade arrays in a FlashStack reference architecture. These were all bought with traditional perpetual license schemes.

So now we have FlexPod-as-a-service and FlashStack-as-a-service. Mike Arterbury, NetApp VP/GM for Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure & OEM Solutions, said: “FlexPod-as-a-service is now available as an integrated offer allowing customers to buy what they need, when they need it… Customers can now choose the FlexPod consumption model that matches their needs while leveraging our full portfolio of validated designs.”  

Cisco graphic

 AJ Kapase, VP Global Strategic Alliances at Pure Storage, added: “We are excited to combine our own Pure Storage as-a-service (STaaS)… with Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud to create FlashStack as-a-service (FSaaS)… Our joint customers can scale capacity up or down as needed, and only pay for the IT services they consume.”  

Both of these bulk up the basic Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud offering, which has Hyperflex HCI as its storage component:

Cisco graphic

Cisco says we can expect to see more of its storage partners jumping aboard, and we understand Dell and Hitachi Vantara are likely candidates. 

There is more information here.

Storage news ticker – May 31

By
Chris Mellor
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HPC storage supplier Panasas has announced a new global strategy with added benefits and incentives to grow sales reach through channel and alliance partners. New features include a partner portal hub with marketing collaboration tools, learning pathways, and a library of resources, partner marketing and demand generation support, and deal registration. Panasas is showing at ISC High Performance in Hamburg, Germany, over May 29-June 2, booth #E507.

…

Data protector Asigra has announced a Tiger’s Den Channel Program with significant updates to tiered discounting, new product marketing materials, enhanced partner services and support, as well as a new engagement package for value-added distributors (VADs) designed to increase global product availability. Asigra’s Tigris Data Protection platform prevents ransomware 2.0 and other advanced forms of malicious malware from accessing and affecting backup data. The platform includes the industry’s first zero-day Attack-Loop preventative technology using bi-directional malware detection, zero-day exploit protection, variable repository naming, and Deep MFA (multi-factor authentication) for a defensive suite against ransomware variants and other cyber-attacks on backup data. 

…

DDN has released EXAScaler 6.1 of its parallel file system, billed as delivering optimized AI integration and data security. Its Hot Pools and Hot Nodes features, both enabling flash performance for applications, can be combined with DDN’s end-to-end encryption. DDN updated its A3I AI400X2 systems and customers can now deploy up 900 disk drives and 16 petabytes of data in a single rack. DDN has a presence at ISC 2022.

…

HPE Frontier

HPE’s exascale Frontier supercomputer has an overall Orion file storage system, a multi-tier ClusterStor E1000 storage system, and an in-system SSD storage setup with local SSDs connected to compute nodes by PCIe 4. There is more than 700PB of Cray ClusterStor E1000 capacity, peak write speeds of >35 TB/sec, peak read speeds of >75 TB/sec, and >15 billion random read IOPS. Orion uses Lustre and ZFS software, and is possibly the largest and fastest single Posix namespace in the world. There are three Orion tiers: a 480 x NVMe flash drive metadata tier; a 5,400 x NVMe SSD performance tier with 11.5PB of capacity; and 47,700 x HDD capacity tier with 679PB of capacity. There are 40 Lustre metadata server nodes and 450 Lustre object storage service (OSS) nodes. One OSS node has one performance-optimized object storage device (OST) and two capacity-optimized OSTs. There are also 160 Orion nodes used for routing.

…

The containerized version of IBM Spectrum Scale includes IBM Spectrum Scale Data Access Services (DAS), which supports the S3 access protocol. This enables clients to access data stored in IBM Spectrum Scale file systems as objects. Spectrum Scale DAS requires a dedicated Red Hat OpenShift cluster that runs only Spectrum Scale CNSA and Spectrum Scale DAS. S3 applications run on colocated, separate servers using any operating system or Kubernetes platform. The Spectrum Scale container native cluster imports (remotely mounts) one Spectrum Scale file system, which is provided by a colocated Spectrum Scale storage cluster. More info is contained in this blog and the docs can be found here. 

IBM Spectrum Scale storage cluster

With IBM’s ESS3500 Spectrum Scale Server, NFS/SMB Services can now run in the box itself as container workload. For larger NAS workloads, the classic way of running protocol nodes is still valid. 

…

Cloud storage provider IDrive e2 has added a new edge location in Ireland, bringing fast object storage to EU customers. Launched last month, IDrive e2 is taking aim at Backblaze and Wasabi with no fees for ingress/egress, fast speeds, and pricing starting at $0.004/GB/month. Data can be accessed via the IDrive e2 web console or a third-party tool such as MSP360, Veeam, Cyberduck, Cloudflare, Fastly, iconik, Arq, QNAP, Synology, Arcserve, Duplicati, WinSCP, and S3 Browser.

IDrive e2 storage

…

Datacenter software supplier Liqid is demonstrating its Matrix composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) software at ISC High Performance 2022 (booth #B211) in Hamburg. 

…

Nvidia says HPC systems are using its BlueField-2 DPUs to increase overall system power and offload compute nodes, and identifies Los Alamos Nuclear Labs and TACC as examples. Another is Ohio State University, where researchers offloaded parts of the message passing interface (MPI) and accelerated P3DFFT, a library used in many large-scale HPC simulations. The resulting programming models run up to 26 percent faster. A consortium called the Unified Communication Framework is enabling heterogeneous computing for HPC apps and members include Arm, IBM, Nvidia, US national labs and universities. It is helping to define OpenSNAPI, a general application interface for DPUs. 

…

Rambus has announced the successful completion of the acquisition of Hardent. Hardent’s employees will provide skills and building blocks for the Rambus CXL Memory Initiative products.

…

Redgate Software announced updates to its SQL Data Catalog with maintenance advantages so users can reduce the amount of time spent on data classification and protection. It includes customization based on regulatory requirements and automated capabilities to better streamline data management processes. Redgate says its product can help ensure sensitive, personal data is protected before databases are made available for use in development, testing, and more.

Venture capitalists issue startup funding warning

By
Chris Mellor
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Downturn
Downturn

Venture capitalists including Sequoia and Y Combinator are warning that an economic downturn is to threaten future fundraising, meaning start-ups should look to raise cash right now or conserve it.

The pair are responding to rising inflation, ever-climbing interest rates, the continued conflict in Ukraine, the pandemic and other geopolitical tensions.

Sequoia held a Zoom conference with its founders and the presentation, seen by The Information, talked about avoiding a commercial death spiral in any coming downturn with fledgling businesses urged to start thinking about trimming costs and pulling in spending.

Y Combinator, which backs hundreds of small businesses, sent out a letter to start-ups in its portfoilio entitled “Economic Downturn” – reported by TechCrunch – saying they should focus on reaching a so-called Default Alive status. That means a startup business can reach profitability with its current funding. The opposite, Default Dead, is when a startup runs out of cash before profits arrive.

The letter urges start-ups to “plan for the worst” following a tumultuous time for tech stocks, with declines reported in the past seven weeks. It states:

  • No one can predict how bad the economy will get, but things don’t look good.
  • The safe move is to plan for the worst. If the current situation is as bad as the last two economic downturns, the best way to prepare is to cut costs and extend your runway within the next 30 days.  Your goal should be to get to Default Alive.
  • If your plan is to raise money in the next 6-12 months, you might be raising at the peak of the downturn. Remember that your chances of success are extremely low even if your company is doing well. We recommend you change your plan.

The YC letter finishes by saying: “Remember that many of your competitors will not plan well, maintain high burn, and only figure out they are screwed when they try to raise their next round.  You can often pick up significant market share in an economic downturn by just staying alive.”

Our thinking is that storage startups that could be feeling the heat include ones whose last round was in 2019/2020 and who are still burning cash.

Multiple technology vendors have filed financial results in recent weeks that highlight the challenges they are currently facing in the industry. Cisco, Nutanix, Arista, NetApp, Dell and more said underlying demand was strong but meeting demand in a troubled global supply chain is no easy task. Yet the apparent direction of travel in the stock markets is clearly causing investors some concern.

UALink

By
Chris Mellor
-

UALink – In May 2024 AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, Google, HPE, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft announced the formation of a group that will form a new industry standard, UALink (Ultra Accelerator Link), to create an ecosystem and provide an alternative to NVIDIA’s NVLink.

  • UALink creates an open ecosystem for Scale-up connections of many Al accelerators
  • Effectively communicate between accelerators using an open protocol
  • Easily expand the number of accelerators in a pod
  • Provide the performance needed for compute-intensive workloads now and in the future

A scale-up memory semantic fabric has significant advantages. Scale-out is covered by Ultra Ethernet and the industry is aligned behind the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) to connect multiple pods with the ability to scale multiple pods.

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