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Seagate has great fiscal 2022 second quarter and could have a boom year

By
Chris Mellor
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Disk drive manufacturer Seagate could be positioned for a breakout fiscal 2022. It reported revenues of $3.12 billion for its second fiscal 2022 quarter, ended December 31, and up 18.8 per cent on the year-ago number. There were profits of $501 million, up 78.9 per cent year-on-year.

CEO Dave Mosley’s results statement said “Seagate ended calendar year 2021 on a high note delivering another solid performance in the December quarter highlighted by revenue of $3.12 billion, our best in over six years. This performance is all the more impressive in light of the supply chain disruptions and inflationary pressures we are experiencing today.”

“In calendar year 2021, we achieved revenue of nearly $12 billion, up 18 per cent compared with the prior calendar year, we expanded non-GAAP EPS by more than 75 per cent and we grew free cashflow by nearly 40 per cent. Truly an outstanding year of growth that shows we are capitalising on the secular tailwinds driving long-term mass capacity storage demand.”

There is a hint here that fiscal 2022 could be outstanding as well. A chart of Seagate’s revenues by quarter per fiscal year shows the excellent start to its FY22:

Blocks and Files chart. The lines are rising and converging in the latest quarter.

Mosley said “Our execution and product momentum positions Seagate to deliver a third consecutive calendar year of top line growth … revenue to increase three per cent to six per cent with further growth beyond.” Surely he’s saying here fiscal 2022 will be a very good year too.

Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers told subscribers “Seagate increased its FY2022 revenue outlook to grow in the +12–14 per cent y/y range vs prior guided growth in the low double-digit y/y range.”

Financial summary:

  • Gross margin – 30.4 per cent (26.5 per cent a year ago);
  • Diluted EPs – $2.23 compared to year ago $1.12;
  • Cash from operations – $521 million;
  • Free cash flow – $426 million.

The quarter saw high double-digit growth in Seagate 18TB drive shipments to cloud customers. Seagate said there is strong demand for its 20TB drives as well. In fact it was Seagate’s fifth consecutive quarter of record capacity shipment.

Seagate chart.

Mosley said in the earnings call: “Sequential growth from the cloud in the December quarter was somewhat counterbalanced by lower revenue in the enterprise, OEM and legacy PC markets, that we attribute primarily to the COVID-related supply challenges.”

CFO Gianluca Romano said the SSD business was in good shape too. “Non-HDD revenue increased 17 per cent sequentially and 48 per cent year-over-year to a record $294 million boosted by strong SSD demand.”

Mosley was enthusiastic about the 20TB drives. “The 20 terabyte ramp is going to be a very, very aggressive ramp.” Its also shipping 22TB SMR versions of these drives.

The Q3 outlook is for revenues of $2.9 billion +/- $150 million and a 6.2 per cent rise year-on-year at the mid-point. Shares responded positively to the results and the outlook, rising from $95.70 before the results release to $112.47 today. 

We’ll keep a watch on Seagate and look for it completing a great fiscal 2022.

DDN focussing on AI, containers and edge trifecta

By
Chris Mellor
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DDN is focussing on AI, container and edge environments in product developments for this year in its HPC and now enterprise storage supplier journey.

The company presented at an IT Press Tour briefing and said it was powering the next era of data-centric computing. We are seeing the end of the serial data era, according to DDN. NFS is coming to a close as parallel file systems, management, and movement are replacing the old world.

VP marketing Kurt Kuckein said AI has been at the heart of DDN’s growth over past two years. DDN’s 2021 revenues were roughly same as 2020 – although there was big growth in AI and in US Commercial ($4B), there was overall single digit growth in 2021 due to the pandemic.

The briefing touched on NexentaStor, Tintri VMStore and ExaScaler developments. NexentaStor, which is robust, multi-protocol, and lightweight, is running in telco edge environments and there are several 100 implementations at major telcos world-wide. Kuckein said there was a rise in using analytics at the edge, and the product’s use will spread beyond telcos. 

Sean Myers, the field CTO for Tintri, said VMStore product development had fallen behind a little in 2021. It was behind on some of its plug-ins – vSphere, vROPS, etc. – because a lot of Tintri’s engineering talent quit in the troubled times which led up to DDN’s acquisition of Tintri. This “took a while to build back – a couple of years. Now we’re actually growing.” VMStore is now all-NVMe.

Myers said “We’ll allow our APIs to integrate with whatever AI tools a customer has.” The automated Quality of Service (QoS) facility will be expanded. It currently supports and tracks IOs to SQL databases, virtual machines (VM), where it can track up to 2,5000 VMs per VMstore. It also supports VMware Tanzu where it tracks IOs at the PVC (Persistent Volume Claim) level. This will be be extended to go deeper, first tracking IOs to Pods and then the stateful container level.

DDN’s A3I AI storage and NVIDIA GPU system.

Tracking at the stateful container level could involve 5Xm 10x, or more IOs. It’s still being worked out. Per-Pod will be less taxing than per-container.

VMstore will be converted into container-based software, making it more portable, and able to work with any Kubernetes distribution.

A new IntelliFlash enclosure is coming in the next few months.

James Coomer.

SVP product management James Coomer talked about the ExaScaler Management framework and said DDN will plug in more tools to deploy more clients and ancillary services. It will improve real time nature of monitoring for whole system by making the Collector software run faster.

DDN will apply more analytics to metadata, and allow it, for example, to be accurate when sizing an upgrade path for workloads. The ExScaler (Lustre) system will scale up to larger models, with  NVMe Flash, larger SDDs and HDDs.

There will also be tighter integration into AI frameworks and completely racked systems including more workload data environments with complete software architectures.

We asked if Nvidia’s GPUDirect (GPUD) levels the playing field for DDN and its competitors in feeding data to NVIDIA GPUs. Not so, said Kuckein. “We have a very distinct performance advantage.”

That lies in areas outside the GPDU connection. Coomer said “GPUD prepares us for the future. GPUs will get faster and faster. CPUs will increasingly become bottlenecks. GPUD is a must-have checkbox. But users need more. … We have end to end parallelism [which is] different from others. … We have an intelligent client (100GB/sec plus) so individual applications go faster.”

We expect DDN to spread and develop its product wings broadly across its product range this year, with AI front and centre in its sights. It thinks it can match the competition in feeding data to Nvidia GPUs, but use the GPU connectivity better to speed applications and users relying on the GPUs. The Tintri container-focussed developments should make VMstore a more consistent supplier of storage IO to containers and that could be important in enterprise environments.

Hopefully DDN will, as a result, grow faster in 2022 than in 2021.

Kalista fires a Phalanx software gun to fix SMR disk problems

By
Chris Mellor
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A Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar (C-RAM) weapon system conducts a test fire system at Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan on March 1, 2014. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Jarred Woods, 1st Sustainment Command (Theater))

Kalista IO’s  Phalanx software separates read from write SMR disks in a JBOD to bring big performance gains to server applications which need no code changes, not even for host-managed SMR.

If the foregoing is gobbledegook, then stick with me as I bring a little light to the darkness, learnt at an IT Press Tour briefing. It’ll be worth it.

SMR or Shingled Magnetic Recording disk drives have a 17 per cent or so capacity increase over equivalent technology conventionally-recorded (CMR) drives. Thus a 16TB conventional drive could be an 18.7TB SMR drive with only a software change in the disk controller. SMR works by taking advantage of read tracks being narrower than write tracks – a quirk of HDD technology – and partially overlaps write tracks to leave the read tracks closer together. This enables more of them to exist on a disk platter, thus upping the capacity.

Shingled write tracks diagram.

The downside – and it’s a significant one – is that when data has to be rewritten, a whole block or zone of SMR tracks has to be read, the new data inserted, and then the block written back to the disk. This makes adding data to existing blocks slower than with conventional drives, and entails application or host server system software changes if the server host manages the SMR process (host-managed SMR). These disadvantages have seriously slowed SMR drive adoption, even though a 17 per cent capacity jump would be attractive to any user with tens, hundreds, or thousands of disk drives.

Albert Chen was an engineering program director at Western Digital and spent six and a half years working on its SMR drive technology. He then went to stealth startup Rstor for two years as a senior director working on the the development of an S3-compatible object store.

He realised that there was a fundamental problem with disk drives: the single head per platter has to do both reads and writes and these actions could be random or sequential.

There is contention between reads and writes for the head. SMR performance sucks when sequential data is being re-written in a block and really sucks when random data is being rewritten across blocks. If you had a fleet of disk drives in, say, a hundred-drive JBOD, then you could separate read and write activity and have them take place on different drives, so there was no head contention.

Phalanx scheme

But you could do something really significant on SMR drives. All data to be written would be written sequentially and appended to the existing data. There is no rewriting over existing data as with the existing SMR scheme. Reads would take place on previously written drives. A diagram shows the concept:

Presentation screen image taken on iPhone.

You both read and write on the first disk in the fleet. When it’s full you write to the second disk and only read from the first disk. When the second disk is full you move to writing on the third disk and only read from the second disk. Rinse and repeat. Any data deleted is marked deleted in the Phalanx HDD metadata store on the host but not actually overwritten. With a fleet of drives you can have multiple writers and multiple readers, increasing capacity and concurrency as disks are added, performance and reducing  contention:

As data gets deleted older disks become fragmented and the defrag process is to copy their data to a spare drive in the background, mark the source disk as empty and return it to the write pool for re-use.

So you don’t reclaim deleted capacity straight away, but you do gain performance. In fact, in some circumstances a box of Phalanx-controlled SMR drives can outperform the same box filled with conventional HDDs. For example, on a Mongo DB run the percentage difference between Phalanx-controlled SMR drives and conventional HDDs looked like this:

Some things were slightly slower and some slightly faster.

Phalanx can seriously decrease long tail latency: 

It is use case-dependent. On a MinIO run it increased average write IOPS by 60 per cent and read IOPS by 35 per cent.

Phalanx is, in effect, a host-resident software JBOD controller, similar to a storage array controller. It supports file, blocks and object interfaces and you can mix and match disk drives in a Phalanx fleet.

Its use can expand the use case possibilities for SMR drives significantly:

Who should be interested in looking at Phalanx and checking it out? 

  • Any hyperscaler operation with significant HDD populations in the tens of thousands, such as AWS, Azure, GCP, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
  • Any sub-hyperscaler with thousands of drives, such as Backblaze (hi Gleb Budman), Datto and Wasabi.
  • Any enterprise with hundreds to thousands of drives.
  • Any disk-based storage supplier with tens to hundreds of drives in its arrays – hi Infinidat and Phil Bullinger  especially, Dell EMC, HPE, NetApp, DDN and others like the object storage suppliers.
  • Any disk drive manufacturer making SMR drives and also selling JBODs such as Toshiba’s KumoScale and Seagate’s Exos 4U106.

Kalista IO’s Phalanx could be the rescue party needed for SMR drives and JBODs.

The object of minimalist MinIO’s massive money round

By
Chris Mellor
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The vast market penetration of MinIO’s open source object storage software has enabled the company to raise $103 million at a >$1 billion unicorn valuation. The cash will be used for marketing, and not building out a worldwide sales and branch office infrastructure.

The adoption statistics for its software almost defy belief:

  • ARR grew by over 201 per cent in 2021;
  • Customer count grew by over 208 per cent in 2021;
  • Total Docker pulls of 756,000,000, now averaging over 1,000,000 per day;
  • More than 31,000 GitHub stars and more than 16,000 members of the MinIO Slack community;
  • More than 9,000 pull requests from 855 contributors since 2015.

The round was led by Intel Capital with participation from new investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and existing investors Dell Capital, General Catalyst, and Nexus Ventures. Today’s financing brings MinIO’s total funding raised to $126 million.

AB Periasamy.

CEO and founder Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy told us Intel CEO CEO Pat Gelsinger himself presented the term sheet. We asked why MInIO raised such a sum. He said “Optics matter. If I raise a smaller amount people don’t take it seriously.

“We could have raised $300 million. One investor wanted to put in $200 million. I could have put $300 million in the bank.” But there would have been a poor return.

Sales is relatively easy now that MinIO has got the land grab. It has become the leading object storage brand in what AB characterises as a winner takes all market. Virtually all sales are inbound and MinIO does not have a single commissioned salesperson. In fact there are fewer than 45 people in the company.

AB wants to accelerate and amplify marketing with things like videos, various types of documentation and training and focussing on things like the Edge Cloud.

A MinIO blog indicates MinIO is “a textbook example of how a small, disciplined, motivated and talented team can achieve amazing results.” It goes on to predict “Object storage is growing while SAN/NAS are shrinking. Kubernetes and the cloud are accelerants. We like the horse we bet on back in 2014. It will win the race.”

It also reveals MinIO is working an analytical features. “We are working on some really interesting new features to help enterprises understand that data (think search for example). We have no interest in re-inventing the wheel when it comes to analytics, we have great partners building great products there (Spark, Trino, Splunk, Clickhouse) but we do see areas of research and development (developing the ability to unlock data using AI functions without requiring ML expertise) that will layer additional value onto our object store.”

Simply put, MinIO wants to be “the AWS S3 for the rest of the world.”

Storage news ticker – January 26

By
Chris Mellor
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Wasabi Fields
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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Diamanti has upgraded its Kubernetes cluster management products and expanded its service offering with ten use cases in focus: Containers as a Service, Database as a Service, Software as a Service, Disaster Recovery, Kubernetes Backup, CI/CD, Big Data and AI/ML, Burst to Cloud, Analytics, 5G telecom, Hybrid Cloud, and Multi-Cluster Management. The D20X Ultima Accelerator appliances come with compute, storage, and orchestration software, and the hardware accelerator cards in the appliance deliver the highest level of quality of service. The software-only Ultima Enterprise features container-optimised storage and networking layers, providing developers with integrated data services, CSI and CNI plugins, and I/O acceleration. Spektra Enterprise, also software-only, manages multiple Kubernetes clusters in any Cloud – Google, Azure, Amazon – while providing infrastructure, DevOps, and application teams for running containerised workloads. 

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Let’s throw money at it. Analytics database startup Firebolt, founded in 2019, has pulled in a $100 million C-round at a $1.4 billion valuation 12 months after emerging from stealth. Last year it raised $37 million in an A-round and in double quick time, $127 million in a B-round. It says the funding round was heavily oversubscribed and was finalised in record time. Alkeon Capital led the round which included Sozo Ventures, Glynn Capital, and existing investors Zeev Ventures, Angular Ventures, Dawn Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, K5 Global and TLV Partners. Firebolt its hiring ex-Google’s BigQuery principal engineer Mosha Pasumansky as its CTO and has opened a Seattle office. The Firebolt team, mostly engineers, has almost doubled in the past six months to 200 team members in 25 countries.

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UK-based DIY retail chain Toolstation is working with Percona‘s MySQL open source database to help run database services that underpin its applications and services – as the company moved over to more e-commerce activities during the pandemic. Toolstation is one of the UK’s largest tool and building supplies retailers with a network of over 600 branches across the UK and Europe. The company uses MySQL as part of its stock management, extranet, e-commerce and web applications, with the European e-commerce environment currently hosted on-premises and the remainder hosted on Google Cloud. 

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The SmartNICs Summit, produced by Semper Technologies, will run in the DoubleTree by Hilton, San Jose, April 26–28, 2022. it will showcase the mainstream applications, key technologies, and leading vendors that are driving the emerging SmartNICs market. It is the first event featuring the trends, innovations, and influencers driving the adoption of SmartNICs in demanding enterprise applications, as well as in clouds, high-performance computing, and cybersecurity.

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Storage portfolio company StorCentric announced the Nexsan Partner Certification Program enhancement to its Global Nexsan Partner Program. This includes certification on Unity Software v7.0 and Nexsan Unbreakable Backup, meaning anti-ransomware. Existing partners can find the Product Certification on the Nexsan Partner Portal. Potential new partners can apply here.

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Wasabi is announcing a partnership with Axis Communications (the industry leader in network video) to bring the AXIS Camera Station (ACS) VMS to the cloud. The two say new developments in AI, 4K cameras, increasingly higher resolutions and frame rates, intelligent network cameras and analytical applications are driving video surveillance data volumes to new heights and pushing on-premises video surveillance storage to its limits. 

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Hammerspace differentiates file copies from file instantiations

By
Chris Mellor
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Hammerspace, the global file data environment company, says copies are different examples of the same file, and therefore forks, whereas instantiations are not and therefore not forks.

What does this mean, and why does it matter?

The point was made to attendees on an IT Press Tour in Palo Alto. Let’s start with a file: Testfile.dat. It consists of data and metadata and let’s suppose it takes 100 blocks on a storage drive for data and one block for the metadata – 101 blocks in total. Now let’s make a copy.

David Flynn.

The copy consists of the file data, 100 blocks, and the metadata, one block, totalling up to the same 101 blocks. Hammerspace founder and CEO David Flynn says this is a separate file – in effect, a fork of the original file. It can have changes made to it that are not propagated back to the original file. Its contents can thus diverge form the original file. And vice versa if the original file changes.

Now let’s envisage Hammerspace’s GDE (Global Data Environment) making an instantiation – as it calls it – of the original file. This can happen when a user at a datacentre in San Francisco accesses a file that’s present in their local GDE setup but whose data is stored in New York. That’s its base location. In the Hammerspace scheme, file metadata is shared between sites on a peer-to-peer basis so that all the users everywhere in the GDE see the same files in their file:folder structure. 

When the user at San Francisco decides to access Testfile.dat the constituent data blocks are transmitted from New York to San Francisco and instantiated there. This file instantiation has exactly the same metadata as the New York master copy. Any changes are propagated back to New York so that there is one version of the file contents’ truth, and no file fork takes place.

So Hammerspace GDE instantiations are use exactly the same metadata as the master copy. In the GDE filesystem metadata is a control plane.

Attendees also learnt that GDE is structured to work synchronously in  local domains (datacentres) and asynchronously across geo-distributed datacentres – where it is eventually consistent.

We were told that data is digital but is in desperate need of digital transformation – to make it less manual in its management. Hammerspace presentations have a way of resetting one’s preconceptions 

Server fleet management less complex and nebulous with Nebulon

By
Chris Mellor
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Nebulon is getting customer traction with its server fleet management server control cards and cloud management, as customers realise they can save big bucks by buying servers integrated with the cards.

The company briefed IT Press Tour attendees about its vision and progress on the partner, customer and product development front. Its technology is based around intelligent so-called Storage Processing Units (SPUs), each hooked up to a host server across a PCIe 3 link and providing a means of booting the server, its direct-attached storage, and managing its software and firmware environment. 

The briefing took place under Covid-19 restrictions and here a masked Craig Nunes holds up a Nebulon swag t-shirt.

Co-founder and CEO Siamak Nazari said Nebulon was partnering several server vendors –  Dell, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro – and customers buy servers plus Nebulon cards from their strategic server supplier.

We asked about Cisco and COO Craig Nunes said “We haven’t spoken to them recently.” He implied Cisco preferred to sell its HyperFlex hyper-converged system rather than a UCS server + Nebulon card combination.

Nebulon has aspirations to partner with global system integrators, such as Capgemini, but doesn’t have contracted resellers – they are contracted to the server vendors and Nebulon’s invite-only smartPartner program aims to help them sell Nebulon card-equipped servers with rebate incentives, training, and demand creation programs, etc.

Nebulon says it provides Nebulon smart infrastructure for cloud repatriation and four products:

  • smartCore for VMware;
  • smartCore for Kubernetes;
  • smartiaaS for CSPs;
  • smartEdge – single-API, centralised fleet automation and monitoring [2-node HA starting footprint – zero-config cloud quorum].

It sees interest from large customers buying lots of servers who are burdened with server fleet management tasks, requiring servers to run them and admin time to update operating systems and firmware.

Nunes talked about a global CSP customer which had 250 VMware servers, and 60 storage arrays with 2PB of capacity, spread across 10 datacentres. This CSP did look at using HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure) but it needed some of the HCI servers to run the infrastructure and thought that overhead was inefficient.

It decided to migrate to a Nebulon-equipped infrastructure and the migration is about a third of the way through. The CSP has about 100 Nebulon-enabled servers and 1PB+ storage across four datacentres in Europe and North America. Storage vMotion was used to move data from the arrays to the Nebulon-equipped servers, which have between 12 and 30TB of capacity.

Coming features

Nazari said “We allow 30TB attached capacity per CPU. It will soon double to 60TB.” He also said Nebulon supports PCIe 3 now and will add PCIe 4 support in 2023.

Tobias Flitsch, head of product, said that, over the next two quarters, Nebulon will add:

  • Server management integration – centralised hardware and firmware inventory and management across heterogeneous server vendors;
  • Nebulon Ansible collection – tools to configure servers post-deployment just with Ansible without needing extra software/services (Ansible connects to Nebulon-loaded server and loads system software items);
  • Instant cluster recovery – instantly recover an entire cluster.

The latter might be needed when network monitoring of IO patterns indicates a malware attack – ie. dedupe ratios change or IO pattern changes from random to sequential. In future Nebulon could add machine learning to detect this and tell the customer it has detect anomalous behaviour on the storage layer.

Commvault revenue growth recovers as Metallic gets stronger

By
Chris Mellor
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Commvault reported eight per cent year-on-year revenue growth in its third fiscal 2022 quarter, recovering strongly after a flat second quarter.

Revenues in the quarter ended December 31 2021 were $202.4 million compared to $188 million a year ago. There was a profit of $10 million, much improved from the $1.67 million in seen in Q3 FY2021. Total recurring revenue was $164.4 million, representing 81 per cent of total revenue. Annualised recurring revenue (ARR) was $561.2 million, up 11 per cent year-over-year.

Sanjay Mirchandani.

President and CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said “Increasingly, customers are turning to us because we provide one platform for software and SaaS offerings to address a multitude of data management needs. This is fueling our growth and accelerating our journey to a cloud-first recurring revenue model.”

Software and products revenue was $98.6 million, an increase of 11 per cent year over year, a 24 per cent increase in larger deals (ones greater than $0.1 million). Larger deal revenue represented 76 per cent of its software and products revenue and the average large deal size was $332,000. There were 225 large deals in the quarter, up 20 per cent year-over-year.

Services revenue in the quarter was $103.8 million, up four per cent year over year, driven primarily by the increase in Metallic software as a service revenue. A four per cent rise might be thought disappointing, but Commvault added 400-plus Metallic customers in the quarter and now has around 1,500.

Operating cash flow totaled $26.8 million compared to $17.0 million in the year-ago quarter.

Total cash and short-term investments were $233.7 million at quarter end, compared to $397.2 million as of March 31, 2021.

Blocks & Files chart showing Commvaut’s quarterly revenues by fiscal year.

Commvault is guiding Q4 FY2022 revenue to be ~$202 million, which would be a 5.6 per cent increase on a year ago and indicates total FY2022 revenues around $759 million. This compares to the $723.5 million reported for FY2021, meaning an about five per cent increase.

Analyst views

What did analysts think? Aaron Rakers from Wells Fargo argued “With subdued investor expectations on CVLT following disappointing F2Q22 (Sept) results and F3Q22 (Dec) guide, CVLT delivered what we believe should be considered POSITIVE F3Q22 results and F4Q22 guide.”

He wrote: “Sixty per cent of the company’s new Metallic customers are net-new to Commvault and more than 50 per cent of the Metallic customers are using another Commvault product.”

Rakers thinks “that the company is now approximately two-thirds through its targeted transition of perpetual customers to subscription, a transition that we believe is driving a 30–40 per cent uplift in per customer revenue opportunities over a couple of years.”

Willam Blair’s Jason Ader told subscribers “Commvault reported a solid quarter, with top- and bottom-line beats ($7.3 million and $0.02, respectively) and a strong revenue guide for the fourth quarter ($5.3 million above consensus).

“Management attributed the improved results to the highest number of new customer additions in years (including several Fortune 500 wins), coupled with healthy expansion in the installed base (NDR of 110 per cent).

“Longer term, management expressed optimism around 1) Commvault’s ability to take share from both legacy and start-up data protection vendors based on its comprehensive data protection technology; 2) Metallic momentum; and 3) its ability to gain additional leverage from its MSP, VAR and SI partners.”

But Ader has two main concerns: “1) the competitive environment is intensifying with well-funded private vendors such as Cohesity, Rubrik, Veeam, Druva, OwnBackup, Acronis, and HYCU all growing rapidly and targeting Commvault’s customer base; and 2) Commvault’s financial model is in a tricky transition period where management is trying to balance Commvault’s slower-growth, high-margin core software business with the ramp-up in its high-growth, ratable, but lower-margin Metallic business.”

Storage news ticker – January 25

By
Chris Mellor
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Storage
Ticker tape women in Waldorf Astoria

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SQL data lakehouse company Dremio has closed a $160 million series E funding round, bringing the company’s valuation to $2 billion. The preemptive fundraising round, led by Adams Street Partners, comes soon after its $135 million round last year led by Sapphire Ventures just one year ago. Total funding is now $410 million. The investment will help Dremio accelerate its technology innovation, grow its customer-facing organisation, contribute to open-source initiatives, and invest heavily in educating and enabling a growing community of data lake practitioners.

Dremio says it has achieved breakout velocity, doubling revenue for several years in a row, accelerating hiring of employees in the past year, and acquiring some of the biggest enterprise brands in the world, while working closely with its strategic partners such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Tableau. With this investment, it says it is poised for hypergrowth in the years to come.

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Centralised object storage supplier Filebase announced an integration with multi-cloud storage virtualisation and migration provider Flexify.IO. Flexify.IO creates a cloud-agnostic storage layer, enabling flexible data migration across clouds. The service enables clients to migrate data in seconds from dozens of cloud providers and storage systems such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and Google Cloud Platform. Starting today, data can now be migrated onto decentralised storage networks, thanks to the integration with Filebase.

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Global managed service provider CDW has selected HPE’s GreenLake edge-to-cloud offering for its core UK ServiceWorks infrastructure-as-a-service cloud suite of products. GreenLake will enable ServiceWorks to meet increasing demand, accelerate deployment of new services and improve overall customer experience for its Desktop-as-a-Service platform. CDW wanted to expand its ServiceWorks platform to offer increased flexibility and meet growing customer demand while avoiding costly over-provisioning and unnecessary upfront capital investment. ServiceWorks also needed to scale to meet rising demand for its Desktop-as-a-Service product  during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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IMSCAD will offer Panzura CloudFS and its global file system as a core file collaboration and data resiliency solution for customers. This to accelerate deployment of graphical applications for VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) in the cloud including intensive CAD and 3D applications. With hundreds of these solutions deployed across the UK, US, Europe, the Middle East, and around the world, IMSCAD and Panzura say they are uniquely able to eliminate the IT hassles and costs associated with high-performance cloud-based VDI solutions and in-house infrastructure.

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Veeam ARR growth impressive in final 2021 quarter as Kasten grows out of sight

By
Chris Mellor
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Veeam recorded 27 per cent annual recurring revenue growth in 2021’s final quarter – its 16th consecutive double-digit growth quarter – while the Kasten by Veeam business unit grew booking 900 per cent – an amazing amount. But five Fortune 500 Veeam customers appear to have walked. Is Veeam’s actual revenue growth slowing?

Update. Veeam response to slow growth suggestion. 27 January 2022.

Although Veeam did not reveal actual revenue growth for the quarter it’s still a good introductory quarter for incoming CEO Anand Eswaran who issued the results statement quote. “Veeam is outpacing the overall market maturation, growing at a much more rapid rate, and is firmly at the epicentre of the data ecosystem. This is a testament to our employees and company culture, the pace of development and innovation, and our collaboration with partners to deliver solutions that exceed customer expectations and build trust.”

Veeam tells us more than 450,000 users have downloaded Veeam Backup & Replication v11 since its launch in Q1 ’21. Its quarterly ARR growth rates throughout 2021 started at 25 per cent and progressed to 26, 28 and then 27 per cent. Veeam’s quarterly results announcements imply its lost five Fortune 500 customers as the customer base in the Fortune 500 was 82 per cent in Q1 of 2021, the same in Q2 but 81 per cent in Q3 and Q4. That’s a one per cent fall, meaning five customers.

Eswaran said IDC was underestimating the DPaaS market. “IDC expects the total Data Protection-as-a-Service market to reach $18.4 billion in spending by 2025. Given the current global landscape and the fact that businesses now have more data than ever to protect – from ransomware and cyberattacks, compliance and new regulations, and the complexities of remote working environments – I believe that the market opportunity is even larger than what is being predicted.”

He didn’t supply his own growth number. If other DPaaS vendors think the same thing then the market looks great for all of them.

Veeam bought Kubernetes container-protecting Kasten in October 2020. In its first full year of results since then reported a 900 per cent year-over-year increase in bookings for 2021 and quadrupled the size of its staff. If there were any doubts about the size of the cloud-native app backup market they can be laid to rest. 

Andy Langsam, senior vice president of Kasten by Veeam, said “As Kubernetes adoption dramatically accelerates, customer demand for backup and disaster recovery tools continues to grow. We are building our team, strengthening our community efforts, solidifying partnerships and investing in product enhancements.”

A source in the data protection industry was asked if Veeam’s growth could be slowing, and said “It has slowed to next to nothing in the last two years. Their growth rate was in the 20s. They reported $963 million in 2018, nothing in 2019, $1 billion in 2020. That’s 3.8 per cent in two years. It didn’t slow. It stalled. Now they’re not giving total revenue numbers, only focusing on ARR. Of course ARR is growing, they didn’t have it before 2020 (save support fees).”

Veeam response

A Veeam spokesperson said: “We feel these comments are inaccurate.

“As you know, over the past few years Veeam has transitioned from reporting total bookings to annual recurring revenue (ARR), like a number of vendors in the market, to better reflect the state of the business.  This is not unusual, and in fact aligns to many organizations across the IT space; you have spoken to us before about this when reporting on financials.  Per your article and your ‘source’, let’s look at the facts and review recent announcements, market data etc..

“Your ‘source’ suggests we are stagnating with only 3.8 per cent growth over two years.  This is inaccurate.  Look back at our financial announcements (see below and what is on veeam.com, and what you have reported on before), which state that for FY’2018 we reported $963M in bookings, and then one quarter later in Q1’2019, we reported annual (i.e., trailing 12 months) bookings of $1B… or ~3.8 per cent growth in one quarter… not over two years as your ‘source’ stated.  Add to this the data from IDC: IDC positioned us as #2 WW with year-over-year growth during H1’21 of 25.3% compared with 17.9% in H2’20.  I believe that the information presented here paints a very different picture, and is something that shows your ‘source’ was wrong in their interpretation.”

Atempo’s data protection and management iceberg is taking on a bi-modal shape

By
Chris Mellor
-

Atempo is like a data protection and data management iceberg – some of its activities are in view but the bulk are hidden underneath the waterline – because it has, so far, chosen not to market itself with much energy. 

Attendees at an IT Press Tour briefing in Sunnyvale were given an introduction to the whole company, its strategy and roadmap, and found it had a focussed and disciplined plan to improve its branding and product set capabilities in today’s multi-hybrid cloud environment.

Geographically Atempo does not have a strong presence in the North American market, having built its customer base in Europe and the Far East from its France-based HQ. This adds to its general lack of visibility. It also has a relatively large number of products which contribute to a level of brand confusion – this is being addressed. 

Ferhat Kaddour, VP sales & alliances, and Louis-Frederic Laszlo , director of product management, briefed tour attendees and provided the initial introduction. Atempo sells its products to enterprise and mid-size organisations and has more than 2,000 customers in the media and entertainment, HPC-research, healthcare and public sector markets. It had 20 per cent year-on-year revenue growth in 2021 and hired 100 more employees.

Atempo has built separate products for different data protection market niches – Lina, Tina and YOO Backup – with its Miria data management product set also offering a backup capability. In fact Miria was an enterprise data backup, archive and migration suite which is now becoming Atempo’s data management product technology with added AI smarts.

  • Lina (Live Navigator) – backup for workstations and laptops;
  • Tina (Time Navigator) – on-premises and SaaS backup/restore physical and virtual server systems, apps including 365 and file data;
  • Backstone Appliances – data protection of data, systems, apps and files with disaster recovery and business continuity;
  • YooBackup – DRaaS and virtualisation backup;
  • Miria Data Management with Miria modules for analytics, migration, backup, archiving and synchronisation and supporting billions of files, all based on core data moving technology.

This multi-product set will, Kaddour said, be slimmed down to two brands: Atempo Data Protection (Lina, Tina, Backstone and YooBackup), and Atempo Data Management (Miria’s 5 modules). Atempo DP will focus on cyber crime, hybrid infrastructures and something called data atomisation – which we understand to refer to silos. Atempo DM’s focus is on massive data growth, regulation and compliance.

Laszlo said the rebranding should be complete this year but the technology convergence could take two years.

Atempo Miria can work with with other suppliers as well but has contractual relationships with the suppliers on the slide.

Atempo roadmap

Atempo DP will be 100 per cent MSP-driven with a multi-services portal and a multi-storage service from SaaS to on-premises and to the appliance. We have condensed three separate roadmap slides from the briefing into a single table and it shows an impressive body of work to be done:

There is no data protection support for Kubernetes-orchestrated containers. Kaddour said “It’s not the top priority of our customers.” They need their existing complex IT environments protected better first. We might suppose that Atempo’s customers do not have extensive DevOps activities.

The enhanced integration with dedupe appliances refers to Dell PowerProtect/Data Domain and Quantum with its DXi line. Kasddour didn’t mention any relationships with Veritas or HPE (StoreOnce) but did say Atempo has started talking to ExaGrid, with NDAs signed to ease the talks forward.

Atempo can already send VM backups to S3 but wants to go further with dedupe engine support for S3. That means that it could use S3-compliant systems such as those from Cloudian, MinIO and Scality as targets for its backup software, or, of course, AWS.

Miria software handles very large populations of files, in the billions, the PB to EB unstructured data area, and this is not something that the Tina product or other constituent technologies in what will become Atempo DP can handle. He said that combining the two backup technologies – Miria and Tina for example – was not in Atempo’s plans because it was simply not desirable to build a combined product that was not as well suited to the two separate workload classes as Tina and Miria are today.

Miria’s massive file handling capabilities explains why Atempo partners Qumulo and VAST Data. We should note that Miria has S3 Object Lock support already. It can also snap from Isilon to Qumulo, which must be an attractive capability for Qumulo to exploit.

We heard that Atempo wants to ensure that the automated malware detection, which will use third-party plug-ins, does not interfere with file transmission times across network links.

We note that, with its Data Management plans, Atempo will compete more strongly with Nasuni, Egnyte and Panzura (file sync), and Komprise (file lifecycle management).

We also heard that OVH and Atempo are developing an S3 Glacier alternative.

Comment

Atempo is undertaking a vigorous product development plan and should end up with a much cleaner and simpler branding and marketing message. There are some alliances that we could imagine it would like to have, such as certifications from NetApp and WekaIO. The company has a quite large and, we understand, loyal base of customers but has not, as we understand it, embarked in any substantial marketing activities to gain new customers. It works as it were in the shadows and relies on its products’ quality and support to impress customers and help word-of-mouth marketing and case studies.

We think this will change as this French-based company does more in the USA and adopts USA ways.

Pure gets Meta (Facebook) blessing

By
Chris Mellor
-

Meta (Facebook as was) has announced its AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) which it claims is among the fastest AI supercomputers running today and will be the fastest in the world once fully built out in mid-2022.

Pure Storage is providing both FlashArray and FlashBlade storage for the RSC and says “RSC will have unparalleled performance to rapidly analyse both structured and unstructured data.” Pure says it helped to design the first generation of Meta’s AI research infrastructure in 2017. That version had 22,000 Nvidia V100 Tensor Core GPUs in a single cluster and performed 35,000 training jobs a day.

Rob Lee, CTO, Pure Storage, issued a statement. “The technologies powering the metaverse will require massively powerful computing solutions capable of instantly analysing ever increasing amounts of data. Meta’s RSC is a breakthrough in supercomputing that will lead to new technologies and customer experiences enabled by AI. We are thrilled to be a part of this project and look forward to seeing the progress Meta’s AI researchers will make.”

Nvidia RSC AI supercomputer.

RSC is powered by 760 Nvidia DGX A100 systems linked with Nvidia Quantum 200Gbit/sec InfiniBand fabric, delivering 1,896 petaflops of TF32 performance. The system is expected to be the largest customer installation of Nvidia DGX A100 systems to date once fully deployed later this year. An Nvidia blog has much more detail.

RSC will help Meta’s AI researchers build better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples; work across hundreds of different languages; seamlessly analyse text, images and video together; develop new augmented reality tools and more; build for the metaverse, in other words.

Its storage tier has 175 petabytes of Pure Storage FlashArray//C, 46 petabytes of cache storage in Penguin Computing Altus systems, and 10 petabytes of Pure Storage FlashBlade.

The Meta blog reads “Through 2022, we’ll work to increase the number of GPUs from 6,080 to 16,000, which will increase AI training performance by more than 2.5x. The InfiniBand fabric will expand to support 16,000 ports in a two-layer topology with no oversubscription. The storage system will have a target delivery bandwidth of 16TB/sec and exabyte-scale capacity to meet increased demand.” Good news for Pure.

This system is expected to deliver, according to Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers, “~5 exaflops of mixed-precision AI performance (~220 Linpack petaflops).”

Rakers told subscribers “Today’s announcement serves as a significant additional validation of Pure’s positioning as an all-flash array platform provider into a large hyperscale cloud customer (Meta was the cloud customer contributing to Pure F3Q22). … Pure had announced that it was deploying its AFAs at a hyperscale cloud customer impacting their F3Q22 (Oct ’21) quarter – now confirmed to be Meta; we estimate ~$30 million revenue contribution.” 

Meta says its researchers have already started using RSC to train large models in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision for research, with the aim of one day training models with trillions of parameters. Its blog goes into ore detail. “We hope RSC will help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together.”

It wanted to design a new generation RSC because “We wanted this infrastructure to be able to train models with more than a trillion parameters on data sets as large as an exabyte – which, to provide a sense of scale, is the equivalent of 36,000 years of high-quality video.”

Meta expects RSC to provide “a step function change in compute capability to enable us not only to create more accurate AI models for our existing services, but also to enable completely new user experiences, especially in the metaverse.”

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