VAST Data has sold enough of its all-flash array software to reach a $300m bookings run rate just three years after it first launched its product.
The Universal Storage offering uses certified scale-out hardware based on Xeon controllers, QLC (4bits/cell) SSDs, Optane or other storage-class memory drives for metadata management, and a DASE (Disaggregated Shared Everything) file system with data reduction, thin provisioning, and other efficiency features. VAST says its system provides disk-array-class costs in a single tier setup covering primary and secondary storage needs, such as backup.
Renen Hallak
VAST Data founder and CEO Renen Hallak said in a statement: “Our singular goal is to empower AI-driven innovation with accessible, infinitely scalable data intelligence. What we’ve accomplished in just a few years is incredible – and we’re just getting started.”
The company says that, since its launch in February 2019, it has become the fastest-selling infrastructure startup in history. It closed out its third fiscal year at the end of January by growing 3.8x year-over-year, with nearly a $300m software bookings run rate.
Last year it claimed it had reached a $150m bookings run rate. That was for both hardware and software. It exited the hardware business in April 2021, switching to a Gemini-branded subscription software business model. Avnet supplies the certified hardware.
The company more than doubled its customer count in the last year with an average 12PB of capacity per customer and one managing more than 240PB. Net revenue retention (NRR) exceeded 300 per cent in the year, demonstrating good data growth from existing customers. Its systems recorded 99.9999 per cent data availability across the entire installed base.
VAST Data ended its year cash flow positive, having added to its cash balance since its Series D funding was announced in April 2021.
VAST expanded its business infrastructure in 2022 across the UK, France, Germany, Israel, Turkey, the Czech Republic, the Middle East, Australia, New Zealand, and Korea. It aims to go further this year, moving into the Benelux region, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Nordics, and Japan.
The company nearly doubled its headcount in the past year and expects to hire more people this year, potentially doubling again.
VAST sees it has huge room for growth as the total addressable market for data platforms that power AI is predicted to represent a $400bn market over the next decade.
Hazelcast has added more SQL streaming data capabilities and tiering to its in-memory data grid software so that real-time and older information can be queried simultaneously.
The company basically stores a load of data in memory so it can be accessed, processed, and analysed much faster than by sequentially reading it from SSDs or disk drives. It unified the IMDG (in-memory data grid) and Jet streaming data processing software last year to make the v5.0 HazelCast Platform. The tiering means that older data can be automatically tiered out to disk initially and later to SSD or the public cloud.
Manish Devgan, Hazelcast’s chief product officer, said in a statement: “When Hazelcast announced its platform last year, the ability to merge real-time data with historical context opened new possibilities to deliver the right offer or insights to the end-user at the right time. By being able to work with datasets at scale within the same data platform, businesses can now enable even better outcomes in a much shorter window.”
Hazelcast graphic
Hazelcast says that enterprises need to operate in a real-time economy, going beyond batch processing and into a state of continuous processing of data as it’s created. That needs a real-time data platform that incorporates streaming and in-memory latencies to operate anywhere and pull data from any source, including databases, data lakes, and data warehouses.
The latest v5.1 Hazelcast Platform release includes streaming aggregation over fixed, tumbling, and hopping windows, additional SQL expressions, improved JOIN support and better performance. It also adds SQL support for JSON so that enterprises can store and query using this data format for adding real-time processing capabilities to functions.
With hopping windows the analytics function hops forward across a dataset by a fixed time period and the windows can overlap. Fixed windows don’t move. Tumbling windows move forward repeatedly by fixed time periods and can overlap. JSON is a Java-derived data format used for data transfers between web applications and servers.
v5.1 adds the ability to create views and indexes, and run troubleshooting explain plans in SQL. It also adds higher availability by needing less maintenance downtime.
Hazelcast would have us believe that its v5.1 software enables enterprises to build applications that take automated, immediate action on data, without the wait times associated with database writes and human intervention. The apps have, as it were, greater contextual awareness.
David Brimley
A blog by Hazelcast’s product management VP, David Brimley, discusses the v5.1 software release. He writes: “Our goal is for the Hazelcast Platform to become the last-mile data storage and processing layer for real-time applications, be they transactional, batch, or streaming. Incorporating data processing, data storage and data integration in one distributed, easy to scale, highly available cluster that is capable of handling terabytes of data and is deployable anywhere.”
This has commonality with Imply and Apache Druid where the combination of real-time streaming and historical data also plays an important role.
Hazelcast Platform 5.1 is generally available via Hazelcast Cloud or as software to be deployed on-premises or within customers’ AWS, Azure or GCP environments. The tiered storage feature is currently in beta and will be generally available for production use in a v5.2 version of the Hazelcast Platform.
Louhi, Mistress of the North, attacking Väinämöinen in the form of a giant eagle with her troops on her back when she was trying to steal Sampo; in the Finnish epic poetry Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot. (The Defense of the Sampo, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, 1896)
Imply has added a Polaris database service and faster query engine to its open-source Druid core.
Apache Druid is a database providing real-time query answers from vast sets of streaming and historical data. Imply is a startup founded by Druid’s code originators – CEO Fangjin Yang, chief experience officer Vadim Ogievetsky, and CTO Gian Merlino – and it is announcing the first delivery milestone of its 12-month Project Shapeshift to develop a hardware-abstracting, auto-scaling control plane and SaaS service for Druid.
Yang said in a statement: “Today, we are at an inflection point with the adoption of Apache Druid, as every organization now needs to build modern analytics applications. This is why it’s now time to take Druid to the next level. Project Shapeshift is all about making things easier for developers, so they can drive the analytics evolution inside their companies.”
The Shapeshift project is intended to simplify the end-to-end developer experience and extend the Druid architecture to power more analytics use cases for applications from a single database.
Polaris is a cloud-native database service based on Druid and built on the Confluent push-based event-streaming cloud, which runs on AWS. This can support an ingest rate of up to 10 million events per second and means users no longer have to build a streaming ingest engine of their own.
Imply says Polaris does more than cloudifying Druid as it is a fully managed database service with automated configuration, optimisation through performance monitoring, streaming ingest from Confluent, and a visualization engine all accessed through a single UI.
Imply chief product officer Jad Naous said the Polaris cloud service “deploys instantly, scales effortlessly, and doesn’t requires any Druid expertise, enabling any developer to build modern analytics applications.” It doesn’t require any infrastructure management by its users unlike raw Druid.
Query engine
This open-source multi-stage query engine breaks a query into stages, which are executed in parallel to speed up the querying process. The engine delivers sub-second response on queries to PB of data, and hundreds to more than a hundred thousand queries can be run a second.
Imply multi-stage query engine diagram
The query engine is accessed with SQL commands and enables Druid reporting, both simple and complex with long-running and heavyweight queries. It also enables alerting through checking a large number of streaming and/or historical entities with complex conditions.
Imply diagram showing parallelized query elements running on different servers for speed
It enables simplified data ingestion from object stores, including HDFS, Amazon S3, Azure Blob and Google GCS, with in-database transformation.
Imply claims that there’s no other database that has the breadth of Druid, its interactivity at scale, concurrency, real-time data, and now ingestion and query flexibility. Users no longer need to be Druid experts and developers can do more.
Comment
Imply believes that business analytics use is going to become widespread and needs interactive query access to both historical and real-time data logging millions of events. A scale-out multi-stage query engine is a necessity as is a single logical database and enterprise ease-of-use features so that querying users don’t have to be infrastructure managers as well.
Ocient and Firebolt are building products and services applicable to this same use case, which all three say goes far beyond what Snowflake and its companions can achieve.
The multi-stage query engine is available in private preview and will be included in Polaris, which is generally available. Email contact@imply.io to request access to the preview.
Six months after launching its 7400 PCIe gen 4 Enterprise SSD, Micron has released a lower latency, faster, and higher capacity 7450 line in the same M.2, U.3, and E1.S form factors as well as Max and Pro variants.
The new 7450 uses Micron’s 176-layer 3D NAND, set in TLC (3bits/cell) format, like the 7400’s 96-layer flash.
Jeremy Werner, corporate VP and GM of Micron’s Storage Business Unit, issued a statement, saying: “We’re launching the Micron 7450 SSD at the same time PCIe Gen4 is becoming the most widely adopted SSD interface in servers. This product… brings consistent, reliable latencies below 2 milliseconds, critical to enabling quality of service in scale-out data centre workloads.”
A table shows how the 7450’s performance compares to that of the 7400. We have emboldened all the 7450 numbers higher than the equivalent 7400 numbers to bring out the differences:
The Max models are for mixed read/write workloads while the Pro models are optimised for read performance. The latency numbers have become uniform across the 7450 products.
In some cases, such as the 7400 Pro U.3 and 7400 Max M.2, maximum capacity has doubled to 15.36TB and 6.4TB respectively with the equivalent 7450 models. The 7.68TB capacity for the 7450 Pro E1.S is claimed to be industry-leading. Sequential read and write performance has improved over the 7400 for all the 7450 models while all random read and write IOPS numbers have also improved, except for the 7450 Max and Pro U.3 variants.
Quality of Service (QoS) latency shows how many read/write operations can be completed within a unit of time. Micron’s internal 7450 testing shows 2ms or lower latency in 6×9 (six nines), and QoS latency below QD 32 for the Micron 7450 SSD at 15.36TB, which it says aligns to common data centre workload queue depth (QD) for a broad variety of applications.
Micron 7450 SSD formats.
Put another way, the 7450 has latency at or below 2ms for 99.9999 per cent QoS in common, mixed, random workloads. This makes databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, RocksDB, Cassandra, and Aerospike faster.
It also supports Meta’s Open Compute Project (OCP). Ross Stenfort, a hardware systems engineer at Meta, said: “The Micron 7450 [has] support for the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD Specification and E1.S with 8TB in a compact form factor. These specifications enable improved thermals, performance and simplified management at scale.”
The 7450 U.3 products come in both 15mm and 7mm thicknesses and support 2.5-inch NVMe drives with their 7mm thickness. Security measures include a Secure Execution Environment (SEE) with dedicated security processing hardware with physical isolation, dedicated memory, secure code, and a security processing engine.
The 7450 is a fast replacement for the 7400 and advances its abilities in terms of capacity, latency, IOPS and bandwidth, while retaining the same endurance of 3 Drive Writes per Day (DWPD) for the Max and 1 DWPD for the Pro models.
The 7450 products are sample shipping to customers now with general availability set for later this year.
Ahana has added new security features to its Ahana Cloud for Presto managed service. These include multi-user support for Presto and Ahana, fine-grained access control for data lakes with deep Apache Ranger integration, and audit support for all access. These are in addition to the recently announced one-click integration with AWS Lake Formation, a service that is intended to enable users to set up a secure data lake in a matter of hours.
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Object storage supplier Cloudian has announced HyperCare, a remote managed service offering providing complete “lights out” management of Cloudian object storage in a customer’s own data centre. HyperCare includes monitoring, upgrades and expansions, incident and change management, monthly service level and health check reporting, and a dedicated advisor to ensure best practices in ongoing operations and future planning. Cloudian says HyperCare frees customers of all day-to-day management tasks and enables them to consume storage resources just as they would in a public cloud, but behind their firewall and under their control. Also a new Support Plus offering provides 24×7 advanced monitoring for all service priority levels as well as personalised guidance on software and hardware maintenance and cluster management plus remote assistance for customer upgrades.
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Data integrator Equalum has announced its Continuous Data Integration Platform (CDIP) v3.0, saying it’s the first to natively support all data integration use cases under one unified platform with zero coding, including all required Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud targets. Equalum supports real-time streaming use cases as well as Batch ETL, Replication and Tier One Change Data Capture. CDIP provides a drag-and-drop interface for real-time and batch data pipeline creation and dozens of new capabilities to facilitate complex transformations and data manipulations.
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Eduardo Ciliendo
Eduardo Ciliendo, former director of worldwide sales for IBM Z, has been appointed VP for worldwide technology and strategy at storage startup Model9. The company is developing its VTL offering that replaces mainframe tape backup software, moving it into a cloud data services gateway for mainframe customers looking to adopt a hybrid cloud environment and making mainframe data available for AI/ML and analytics applications in the cloud. Ciliendo was worldwide product manager for IBM Z, and led the IBM Z, LinuxONE, and High Secure Blockchain businesses in Asia-Pacific. He was also formerly a director at Swiss Reinsurance, leading the Enterprise Compute Services department of the world’s largest reinsurance company.
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Seagate has expanded its cloud storage-as-a-service Lyve Cloud coverage to Singapore with a view to provide more services further into the Asia-Pacific region. Lyve Cloud was launched in the US in 2021 and now has over 50 companies in its ecosystem including Zadara, Equinix, and PacketFabric.
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Australia’s National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) is buying 12.5PB of SoftIron’s HyperDrive Ceph-optimised appliances to provide object storage for researchers with high-performance computing (HPC), cloud computing, and data services. NCI said SoftIron became the natural choice after an examination of its Ceph-based HyperDrive appliances, which “provide a robust array of benefits through their task-specific engineering.” SoftIron said it was setting up a manufacturing base in Australia in October last year.
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Toshiba CEO Satoshi Tsunakawa has abruptly resigned, just weeks before a 24 March shareholder vote on its restructuring plan to split it into two businesses. Disk drive manufacture would go into a so-called new Deviceco spin-off. The plan had received internal opposition, according to the Nikkei Asia news outlet. Taro Shimada is now interim CEO. Toshiba had abandoned an earlier plan involving a three-way split because of shareholder opposition. The Register has more details.
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ReRAM developer Weebit Nano says its immediate focus is the partnership with SkyWater Technology and moving towards mass production. It is transferring technology to their fab and preparing for tape-out and qualification. Weebit says sample chips will be ready later this year.
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HPE’s Zerto business unit has announced the availability of a new two-day technical training offering for resellers and end users. The content is designed for hands-on administrators and technical users who want to better understand deployment, configuration, and management of Zerto in VMware vSphere environments.
Robin.io, the Kubernetes storage startup with a 5G edge infrastructure operations and management software stack, has been snapped up by Rakuten Symphony.
Rakuten, regarded as Japan’s version of Amazon, is an online retail company that owns mobile carrier Rakuten Symphony, originally Rakuten Mobile. The Symphony business unit was spun off in August 2021 and has both 4G/5G technology and services in its portfolio.
Rakuten Symphony CEO Tareq Amin said in a statement: “We plan to continue to invest into Robin.io’s cloud-native portfolio of products to further advance our capabilities and offer the most advanced and highly integrated cloud platform mobile operators demand.
“Edge cloud requirements are unique and critical as mobile operators transition to 5G. The next era of digital experience requires another level of performance, responsiveness and consistency that enables telecom operator and enterprise transformation to be safely accelerated while creating a platform to support the next 10 years of experiences.”
Robin.io diagram
Robin.io was founded in 2013 by CEO Partha Seetala and has raised $86m in venture capital funding. It has more than 70 patents for its cloud-native storage and associated technologies, and started collaborating with Rakuten in 2019 when Rakuten Mobile used Robin.io in production for the Japanese deployment of the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualised cloud-native mobile network. Robin.io has petabyte-size deployments with its software running on tens of thousands of servers in production.
Rakuten said that “the addition of Robin.io’s multi-cloud mobility, hyper automation and orchestration capabilities to the Rakuten Symphony portfolio allows the creation of highly efficient, consistent high performance cloud infrastructure and operations, from edge to central data centre.” The new business unit wants to accelerate and strengthen the complete end-to-end automated cloud offering for customers across the globe.
Seetala, who will become president of Rakuten Symphony’s Unified Cloud business unit, said: “I am delighted that Robin.io’s technology innovations over the last several years will now get a much bigger canvas to lead the vision for cloud-native transformation for the industry. Our vision to deliver simple to use, easy to deploy hyperscale automation is very well aligned.”
The acquisition terms are confidential and the deal is subject to closing conditions. As Robin.io is apparently doing extremely well and has unique cloud-native, 5G edge automation technology, we might expect a 4x or 5x return for its investors.
A DCIG report examined software-defined object storage and named its top five picks but failed to evaluate Dell EMC’s ECS or NetApp’s StorageGRID.
Update. DCIG reasons for not including Dell ECS and NetApp StorageGRID added. 1 March 2022.
Eighteen suppliers’ products were evaluated and the top five were Scality RING, Cloudian HyperStore, Hitachi Vantara HCP, MinIO, and Nutanix Objects. These five products featured robust technical support facilities, public cloud support, wide deployment options (bare-metal, Linux, virtual machines, etc.), directory services integration, role-based access controls, data protection (erasure coding, replication), immutable storage (object lock), robust analytics, and value-added services. The report does not state if they are ranked in any particular way.
A November 2021 Gartner Critical Capabilities report evaluating 17 products from 15 vendors in the distributed file systems and object storage area put Scality at the top. It also included Dell EMC’s ECS and NetApp’s StorageGRID in its set of evaluated suppliers and products.
The report author writes: “To arrive at the DCIG TOP 5 solutions included in this report, DCIG went through a seven-step process to come to the most objective conclusions possible. The process is as follows:
DCIG established which features would be evaluated.
The features were grouped into five general categories.
A survey was created and completed for each solution. Vendors were given the opportunity to review and complete the survey.
DCIG identified solutions that met DCIG’s definition for an On-Premises SDS Object Storage Solution.
DCIG weighted each feature to establish a scoring rubric.
DCIG evaluated each solution based on information gathered in its survey.
Solutions were ranked using standard scoring techniques.
However, the actual supplier scores have not been revealed by DCIG.
The 13 lesser suppliers and products were:
Cohesity Helios
DataCore Software Swarm
Hammerspace
IBM Cloud Object Storage
iXsystems TrueNAS
Nexustorage Limited Nexfs
OpenIO
Red Hat Ceph Storage
StoneFly StoneFusion
StorONE S1 Enterprise Storage Platform
Swiftstack Storage
WekaIO WekaFS
Zadara VPSA
DCIG’s report inclusion criteria included:
Commercially available as of 1 January 2022.
Sufficient, publicly available information available for DCIG to make an informed decision.
The solution must support the S3 API.
The product may be available as a pre-integrated software and hardware appliance from a solution provider.
If available as a pre-integrated appliance, the product must also be available on servers from multiple OEMs, as software that can be installed on hardware from other providers or run in the cloud.
We can’t see how these criteria could exclude Dell EMC and NetApp, unless there wasn’t ”sufficient, publicly available information available for DCIG to make an informed decision.”
Ken Clipperton, the Lead Analyst for Storage at DCIG told us: “We decided not to cover Dell ECS and NetApp StorageGRID as a review of the material on their websites showed a focus on their own branded appliances.”
Dell describes the ECS product as: “Exabyte-scale. Extreme performance. Enterprise-grade.ECS, the leading object storage platform from Dell EMC, boasts unmatched scalability, performance, resilience, and economics. Deployable as a turnkey appliance or in a software-defined model, ECS delivers rich S3-compatibility on a globally distributed architecture, empowering organisations to support enterprise workloads such as cloud-native, archive, IoT, AI, and big data analytics applications at scale.“
A Dell spokesperson confirmed: “We weren’t asked to participate.”
NetApp says: “StorageGRID software-defined object storage suite supports a wide range of use cases across public, private, and in hybrid multi-cloud environments seamlessly. With industry leading innovations, NetApp StorageGRID stores, secures, protects, and preserves unstructured data for multi-purpose use including automated lifecycle management for long periods of time.”
As well as ignoring Dell and NetApp, the DCIG report did not look at Huawei’s Fusion Storage, Intel’s open-source DAOS (Distributed Application Object Storage) product, nor Quantum’s ActiveScale, but that may be because it was not classed as software-defined.
Clipperton said: ” Regarding Intel DAOS, we decided not to include it as it focuses on Intel Optane technology and HPC use cases rather than general-purpose on-premises object storage.”
Blocks and Files has asked Dell EMC and NetApp to comment.
Startup Nyriad, which was going to hold a Future of Storage event this month for its combined CPU+GPU storage controller product, has changed its CEO instead, sixteen months after appointing him.
Back in November Nyriad had $28 million pumped in by investors following a CEO change in October 2020. At that time lead investor and chairman of the board, Guy Haddleton, in place since March 2019, saw Herb Hunt appointed CEO. Hunt migrated the company HQ from New Zealand to the USA, recruited new sales and marketing execs, and oversaw the development – or rather redevelopment – of its first product: the combined CPU/GPU storage controller.
The GPUs replace RAID controller functions and bring parallel processing techniques to things like erasure coding, encryption and data I/O, increasing bandwidth and data durability. An x86 CPU controls the whole show while the GPUs carry out computational storage functions, and NVMe SSDs provide a fast hardware storage base. All this would enable more storage capacity and faster access to more data. That, in principle, makes the Nyriad controller a good fit for a world of increasing unstructured data needing fast ingest and real-time analytics.
Now Huddlestone relinquishes the chairmanship and Herb Hunt moves upstairs from the CEO’s office to become exec chairman of the board, thus guiding the reins of incoming CEO Derek Dicker who takes over on March 1.
Derek Dicker.
Dicker is an independent Nyriad board member who has not been a CEO before. His most senior previous position was corporate VP and GM of Micron’s Storage Business Unit. We are told he has more than 25 years of industry experience leading organisations that span pre-revenue “intrapreneurial” startups to multi-billion-dollar businesses. In other words he is not an entrepreneur.
We had been told the Future of Storage event would take place this month. That looks to be unlikely now that there’s only one working day left in the month. The future has likely been delayed, and the reasons for Hunt’s move upstairs and Huddlestone’s board chair role exit have not been revealed. None of this gives an impression that the company knows what it is doing.
Hitachi Vantara hopes to improve the resilience of its customers’ cloud workloads through a package of consulting and managed services, called Hitachi Application Reliability Services, delivered from physical and virtual Application Reliability Centres (ARC).
This is all very legacy enterprise IT department-focussed. The vendor says that cloud operating models are complex with a variety of application types, limited visibility into how apps and infrastructure align, security issues and time consuming IT-DevOps co-ordination. Infrastructure of course includes Hitachi Vantara storage systems. The company claims its consultants and services can improve this situation with a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) approach and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Frank Antonysamy, Chief Digital Solutions Officer at Hitachi Vantara, said: “Hitachi Vantara’s Application Reliability Centres and engineering-led cloud operations enables our clients to achieve true DevOps by fully integrating operations with engineering.” In his view: “Achieving KPI-driven outcomes for cloud workloads requires a fundamental shift from simply managing infrastructure to managing the efficiency and reliability of the applications.”
The geographically dispersed physical and virtual ARCs’ centres of excellence, are where cloud applications are monitored and optimised by Hitachi V’s professional services to ensure client-defined KPIs are consistently achieved. The first physical centers will be in Dallas, Texas and Hyderabad, India.
The services on offer should gladden a legacy IT department when it’s worried about piratical DevOps inroads into its sphere of influence:
• Cloud Advisory Services to Define Cloud Modernisation Strategies: consulting services that provide a comprehensive assessment of each client’s application portfolio, in terms of application cost, reliability and criticality, to create a strategy for cloud adoption. Customers can better determine which workloads make financial and operational sense to be kept on-premises or moved to the cloud, and which applications should be retired, rehosted and re-architected.
• AI-Driven Accelerators and Observability: These leverage claimed 360-degree observability to provide smarter insights into the health of cloud services and automate root-cause analysis and issue remediation to deliver up to 25 per cent improvement in mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to recover (MTTR).
• SRE Strategies and Management: Using SRE KPIs and principles (fault tolerances, error budgets and a common backlog), IT teams can better collaborate to establish and meet their organization’s SLOs and goals for application and data performance, governance, compliance, and cost. The combination of these strategies with integrated release management can yield up to 15 per cent improvement in change failure rates.
• Resilience Engineering Services: Engineer resiliency into workloads through fault-awareness, fault-tolerance and self-healing capabilities and adoption of failure identification and prevention strategies such as Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). This service validates resilience through various chaos engineering techniques and integrates them with any existing CI/CD pipelines.
• Application Modernization and Migration: Hitachi has implemented SRE principles into its Application Modernization services to help organizations optimise applications for innovation, performance and cost. A portfolio of proven blueprints and accelerators have helped hundreds of clients build, deploy and modernize applications for the cloud.
This introduction of Hitachi Application Reliability Services builds on its September 2021 launch of Cloud FinOps Services. Hitachi Vantara’s FinOps consulting services assess clients’ cloud consumption costs relative to benchmarks and identify areas where costs can be optimised delivering average savings of up to 30 per cent. It says this includes an always-on, managed service to optimise and govern cloud spend against business objectives. This includes automated enterprise-wide cloud consumption reporting, resource tracking, cost monitoring and continuous cost optimisation through right-sizing and usage of correct cloud services.
Comment
Pure Storage has a FinOps approach and so too does NetApp with its Spot portfolio. The Pure approach is based on giving FinOps teams information about Pure’s product capabilities and performance and looks rudimentary when set against NetApp and Hitachi Vantara.
NetApp’s Spot portfolio is based on SaaS services and doesn’t have the heavyweight (and traditional) consulting aspect that is part of Hitachi Vantara’s offering. If an IT department needs lots of in-person hand-holding to get the DevOps beast controlled then Hitachi Vantara has the people to do it
Hitachi Application Reliability Services are available now from Hitachi Vantara
MSP data protector N-able’s revenues for its fourth calendar 2021 quarter were $89.5 million, up 12 per cent from a year ago, with a profit of $2.1 million. That compares to a $9.94 million loss a year ago. Full 2021 revenues were $346.5 million, 14 per cent higher than a year ago, with profits of just $100,000. Still, that’s better than the year-ago $7.2 million loss.
The company was spun out of malware-stricken SolarWinds last year and we now get to see its business numbers.
What we see is a barely profitable business with relatively small but decent and growing revenues. Looking at similar companies, cloud backup provider Datto’s most recent quarter had revenues twice N-able’s at $164.3 million with a $5.7 million profit. The latest Commvault quarter saw revenues of $202.4 million with a $10 million profit; again much healthier, but it is mostly an on-premises data protector with a growing SaaS business.
John Pagliuca (left) and Tim O’Brien (right)
N-able EVP and CFO Tim O’Brien issued a statement: “We had a strong finish to the year, with our highest level of new bookings in 2021 occurring in the fourth quarter … Our trailing 12 months dollar-based net retention rate remained consistent at 110 per cent, reflecting healthy expansion among our existing MSP partners. The go-to-market and product investments that we started making in 2021 are beginning to generate dividends and will contribute to revenue acceleration throughout the year as well as margin improvement in the back half of 2022.”
The company had Q4 subscription revenue of $87.3 million, 13 per cent up on the year. It was $336.8 million for the full year, up 15 per cent.
N-able added more than 25 partners to a tech alliance programme in the year, taking total membership to 65.
On 31 December 2021, total cash and cash equivalents were $66.7 million and total debt was $338.9 million.
President and CEO John Pagliuca said “With our 2021 foundational efforts behind us, we have turned our focus squarely to elevating and accelerating our business. We are seeing progress in each of our key investment areas, which include building a multi-pronged go-to-market approach, bolstering our partner success resources, and bringing powerful and secure products to market faster.”
He thinks “industry tailwinds, such as increased IT complexity, labour scarcity, and rising cyber threats, remain as strong as ever” and that N-able has “exciting projects in the pipeline that position us well to solve our MSP partners’ pain points. As the N-able team moves forward together, we are focused on execution and on carrying the momentum we have generated into a successful 2022.”
The next quarter’s outlook is for revenues between $90.1 million and $90.6 million. Full 22 year outlook is for revenues between $384 million and $388 million, representing 11 per cent to 12 per cent year-over-year growth.
Dell’s full fiscal 2022 results include pockets of storage glory but PCs sales led the charge with servers following behind as the US business battled supply chain problems that restricted order fulfilment.
The Texan-headquartered tech giant grew revenues to $101.2bn for the year ended 28 January, a 17 per cent year-on-year rise driven by record PC shipments and some growth across the infrastructure division. Profit was $5.71bn, up 62.8 per cent year-on-year, and it could have been even higher, as we shall see by looking at the fourth-quarter numbers.
Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and co-COO at Dell Technologies, said in a statement: “Fiscal 2022 was the best year in Dell Technologies history. We reached more than $100 billion in revenue and grew 17 per cent – a huge achievement and ahead of our long-term growth targets.”
CFO Tom Sweet added: “We achieved a number of milestones that unleashed shareholder value. We generated cash flow of $10.3 billion, achieved investment grade rating, and spun-off VMware.”
Fourth-quarter revenues increased 16 per cent annually to $28bn but they were down sequentially from $28.4bn in the third quarter. The traditional seasonal pattern for Dell is for Q4 to be higher than Q3. That happened in fiscal 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018. What’s worse, Q4’s profit was just $1m, according to Dell’s financial tables.
See the net income number in the bottom row of the table.
A look at Dell’s Q4 financial tables suggests this was due to VMware dividends and debt repayments.
Supply chain
Clarke said in prepared remarks: “The global supply chain shortage of semiconductors and global logistics challenges for goods and components continues to impact just about every industry. We are still experiencing shortages of integrated circuits across a wide range of devices, including network controllers and microcontrollers…. freight costs have continued to rise… we expect PC backlog to grow in Q1… Our higher margin ISG backlog increased again in Q4 to a record level due to a combination of very strong demand and a lack of component availability. We expect our ISG backlog to remain elevated through at least the first half of the year as part shortages continue.”
The Kioxia/WD chemical contamination incident could make things worse. “We are awaiting information from the recent NAND contamination announcement from Kioxa/WD to evaluate the impact on Dell,” said Clark.
Other suppliers such as Quantum and NetApp are also suffering supply chain woes, although NetApp just recorded its seventh growth quarter in a row.
A look at ISG and CSG
Dell has two overarching business units: the Client Solutions Group (CSG) – PCs basically – and the Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), which sells servers, networking, and storage. CSG revenues in Q4 were $17.33bn, a rise of 26 per cent. PCs and laptops must have been flying off the warehouse shelves. ISG did not do so well: revenues were $9.2bn, a relatively anaemic rise of 3 per cent but its fourth consecutive quarter of year-on-year growth.
The chart above shows how CSG revenues are outstripping those of the ISG unit. We can see that ISG revenues have been flattish compared to those of CSG.
Dell’s Q4 servers + networking was $4.7bn, up 7 per cent annually, while storage was $4.5bn, a 2.3 per cent rise. The contributed least to Dell’s record quarter and year. However, Dell’s performance review slides pointed out that ISG saw the fastest growth in storage orders since Dell bought EMC in Q3 2017.
We can see a good sequential storage rise in Q4 fy2022, the seasonal pattern, but storage has been flatlining in a $3.5bn to 4.5bn quarterly revenue band for five years or so.
Dell said mid-range storage orders were up double digits in fiscal 2022, and PowerStore remains the fastest ramping storage product in Dell’s history. PowerStore was launched in May last year and unified prior mid-range storage products such as Unity/VNX, XtremIO, and the SC (Compellent) lines. The company also said that storage demand rose for the third consecutive quarter and was in the high single digits.
Storage revenues trail that and have risen slightly for two quarters in a row as the chart illustrates:
Flatlining storage is only too evident here
Co-COO Chuck Whitten said storage order growth was great. “We saw double-digit demand growth in the high-end driven by select enterprise customers, 25 per cent demand growth for our unstructured storage solutions and 8 per cent growth for HCI despite a tough Y/Y comparison. Within midrange, PowerStore demand continued to ramp in Q4, up +34 per cent sequentially and [is] now approximately 50 per cent of our midrange SAN mix. Encouragingly, 26 per cent of PowerStore buyers are new to Dell storage and 29 per cent were repeat buyers, important leading indicators of future growth.”
But he added: “Storage revenue was roughly flat Y/Y due to the aforementioned backlog build and storage software and services content that gets deferred and amortized over time.”
So it was the supply chain issues that limited Dell’s ability to ship its storage hardware. When that is resolved, hopefully over the next two quarters, then Dell’s storage revenues should bounce higher.
Dell instituted quarterly dividend payments of $0.33 per share and the the company has also gained an investment grade rating.
The outlook for the next quarter is for revenues of $24.5-25.7bn, $25.1bn at the mid-point and an 11 per cent increase on a year ago.
Source Massive X-Class Solar Flare uploaded by PD Tillman; Author - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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The Backblaze S3 Compatible API implements the most commonly used S3 operations, allowing applications to integrate with Backblaze B2 in exactly the same way as with Amazon S3. Postman is a platform for building and using APIs. Developers can interact with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage via a new Postman Collection for the Backblaze S3 Compatible API. The Backblaze S3 Compatible API Documentation page is the definitive reference for developers wishing to access Backblaze B2 directly via the S3 Compatible API. Backblaze has also said CrashPlan is sunsetting its On-Premises backup service as of 28 February. CrashPlan users can transition their backups to Backblaze. More info here.
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Fujitsu has been selected for the “Green Innovation Fund Project/Construction of Next Generation Digital Infrastructure” project in the field of “Technology Development of the Next Generation Green Data Center” by Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). Fujitsu has been selected along with NEC, AIO Core, Kioxia, Fujitsu Optical Components, and KYOCERA. Fujitsu will lead the development of low-power CPUs and photonics smartNICs optimised for next-generation green data centres. Additionally, Fujitsu Optical Components will work with Fujitsu to develop a photonics smartNIC that reduces network power consumption in data centres by applying optical transmission technology that achieves greater efficiency in size and energy consumption and greater data capacity. This will involve hardware and software.
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HPE and chip-to-chip optical connectivity supplier Ayar Labs have announced a multi-year strategic collaboration to develop optical I/O technology using silicon photonics for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). It will focus on Ayar Labs’ development of high-speed, high-density, low-power optical interconnects to target future generations of HPE Slingshot, the high-performance Ethernet fabric designed for HPC and AI. HPE and Ayar Labs will partner on photonics research and commercial development, building a joint ecosystem of solution providers and customer engagements. HPE’s venture arm, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, has made a strategic investment in Ayar Labs.
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Kioxia Holdings Corporation has entered into a definitive agreement with Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation to acquire all of the outstanding shares of its subsidiary, Chubu Toshiba Engineering (CTE) Corporation, to further strengthen Kioxia Group’s technology development capabilities. CTE specialises in semiconductor-related hardware and software design, prototyping, and evaluation. Acquisition of the shares will be completed in the first half of 2022, following completion of the necessary procedures, and CTE will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Kioxia Corporation.
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Cloud file server and sharer Nasuni said it had a good 2021 with 54 per cent growth in enterprise logos [customers] choosing Nasuni, and the initial deal size of capacity under management for new customers expanded 196 per cent Y/Y. There was 81 per cent growth in new customer Annual Contract Value bookings, gross customer retention rates of over 98 per cent, and net customer retention rates of 118 per cent. Some 35 per cent of annual subscription contacts are now valued above $350,000 per year.
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Server-offloading XDP storage processor developer Pliops has appointed Sudhanshu Jain as VP of product management and strategic alliances. Jain will lead product strategy and forge deeper relationships with key ecosystem partners. He comes to Pliops after nearly a decade at VMware, where he led product management for Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) and converged infrastructure. Before that he was at Alcatel-Lucent and Aruba Networks.
Pliops XDP storage processor
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Redstor, a data management and SaaS protection supplier, has launched a service to improve the way MSPs and CSPs protect Kubernetes environments in AWS. It has added support for the Amazon EKS managed container service for handling applications in the cloud or on-premises, giving partners the ability to backup applications and configurations, and scale customer backups. MSP and CSPs will be able to recover a Kubernetes environment by injecting data back into an existing cluster for fast resolution of ransomware, accidental or malicious deletion, or misconfiguration while managing multiple accounts with a single solution purpose-built for cloud partners.
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Research house TrendForce says that, in 4Q21, NAND Flash bit shipments grew by only 3.3 per cent quarter-on-quarter, a significant decrease from nearly 10 per cent growth in 3Q21. ASP fell by nearly 5 per cent and the overall industry posted revenue of $18.5bn, a quarter-on-quarter decrease of 2.1 per cent. This was primarily due to a decline in the purchase demand of various products and a market shift to oversupply causing a drop in contract prices. In 4Q21, with the exception of enterprise SSDs, the supply of which was limited by insufficient upstream components, the prices of other NAND Flash products such as eMMC, UFS, and client SSDs all fell.
