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Kastenated – Backblaze partners Veeam’s container protection BU

By
Chris Mellor
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Storage pod
Storage pod

Kasten — a business unit of Veeam dedicated to protecting Kubernetes application data — has added Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage to its set of supported backup target systems.

Nilay Patel.

B2 Cloud Storage is an S3-compatible public cloud object store with Object Lock capabilities to prevent ransomware corrupting or deleting its stored backups.

Nilay Patel, VP of sales and partnerships at Backblaze, offered a statement: “Kubernetes containers are the standard for many organisations building, deploying, and scaling applications with portability and efficiency. Backblaze and Kasten together offer a compelling solution to support these organisations’ business continuity needs with set-it-and-forget-it ease and cost effectiveness.”

Kasten’s K10 product protects Kubernetes-orchestrated containerised applications. It supports backing up the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, Nutanix Karbon, Red Hat OpenShift, Microsoft Azure Stack, and others, and sending backup to NFS, EMC and NetApp for example, and S3 targets. These include AWS, Azure, Google, MinIO and Scality object storage, meaning both on-premises and public cloud targets. B2 Cloud Storage has now been added to the list.

Backblaze charges customers by storage capacity used ($0.005/GB/month vs AWS $0.021/GB/month) and has low data egress fees ($0.01/GB vs AWS S3’s $0.05/GB) — differentiating it from the the main public clouds. With B2 there are no data retention penalties for deleting past backups either.

Faster data access coming – PCIe generation 6 spec unveiled

By
Chris Mellor
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The PCIe SIG has released the official PCIe gen 6 specification, which doubles PCIe 5 speed to 256GB/sec across 16 lanes.

PCIe system designers can use this to double existing bandwidth across PCIe lanes, or halve the number of lanes for the same bandwidth — thus freeing up PCIe lane slots.

Al Yanes, PCI-SIG chairperson and president, issued a quote: “PCI-SIG is pleased to announce the release of the PCIe 6.0 specification less than three years after the PCIe 5.0 specification. PCIe 6.0 technology is the cost-effective and scalable interconnect solution that will continue to impact data-intensive markets like datacenter, artificial intelligence/machine learning, HPC, automotive, IoT, and military/aerospace, while also protecting industry investments by maintaining backwards compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe technology.”

PCIe SIG chart showing generational speed increases.

Greg Wong, founder and principal analyst at Forward Insights, said: “The PCI Express SSD market [is] forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 40 per cent to over 800 exabytes by 2025. With the storage industry transitioning to PCIe 4.0 technology and on the cusp of introducing PCIe 5.0 technology, companies will begin adopting PCIe 6.0 technology in their roadmaps to future-proof their products and take advantage of the high bandwidth and low latency that PCI Express technology offers.”

PCIe generational transfer speed details table.

NVMe data access across a PCIe 6 bus should be faster, which will increase application execution speed. With the CXL (Compute eXpress Link) bus being developed on a PCIe 5 base, and capable of providing dispersed memory configurations, a future version based on PCIe 6 should reduce the latency of memory accesses across the link.

PCIe market growth estimate. Client systems take the most shipments, followed by cloud hyperscalers.

We expect the first SSDs supporting PCIe 6 to appear in the 2023–2024 timeframe, with gaming system designers leading the way.

Micron’s incredibly dense gumstick SSD

By
Chris Mellor
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Micron has announced the 2400 — a 2TB gumstick-sized PCIe 4 SSD using 176 layer 3D NAND formatted with QLC (4bits/cell), doubling the performance of the prior 2210 96-layer QLC product

Both products have an NVMe interface and are for PCs and notebook systems, including small and thin laptop designs. Micron says the 2400 is the world’s first 176-layer QLC NAND SSD and it uses charge trap technology with a CMOS-under-array design.

Jeremy Werner, corporate VP and GM of Micron’s Storage Business Unit, said in the release that the company expects “the new 2400 PCIe 4 SSD will significantly accelerate the adoption of QLC in client devices as it enables broader design options and more affordable capacity”.

The 2400 is available in three single-sided M.2 formats — 2230, 2242 and 2280 — with three capacity options in each case: 512GB, 1TB and 2TB. There must be a lot of empty space in the 2280 product as this picture indicates:

Micron competitor SK hynix also has a 176-layer 2TB M.2 SSD — its 2280 Platinum P41 drive for gamers. It was announced earlier this month, though SK hynix did not reveal the cell format. We suspect it was TLC (3bits/cell) as it has much higher performance than the 2400.

The 2400 has no on-board DRAM, utilising a host memory buffer instead. Like the 2100 it has an SLC cache-based dynamic write acceleration feature. Other features include hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption, RAIN and SMART, TCG Opal 2.01, TCG Pyrite 2.01, Micron Storage Executive management tool, sanitise erase and secure boot.

We have tabulated the details of Micron’s PCIe 4 M.2 format SSDs for comparison:

Micron says the 2400 has 33 per cent higher I/O speed (ONFI 4.x — 1600MT/s vs 1200MT/s) and 24 per cent lower read latency than the 96-layer QLC NAND used in the 2100. It does not provide an actual latency number. The table above shows that the 2400 is more than twice as fast as the 2100 in terms of random read/write IOPS and sequential read and write performance.

However its endurance is less. This is expressed in terabytes written (TBW) terms, and the 2100 provided 180TBW at the 512GB capacity point, 360TBW at 1TB and 720TBW at 2TB. The equivalent 2400 ratings are: 512GB — 150TBW; 1TB — 300TBW; and 2TB — 600TBW. This lower endurance may be a concern in high write workload environments — think of the 2400 as a boot and mixed read/write device.

Its active idle power has been reduced by half from the 2100. Micron said it is designed to meet Intel Project Athena requirements for more than nine hours of real-world battery life on laptops when using high-definition displays. The power draw is listed in a 2400 product brief table:

According to its product brief the 2100’s active idle power is <400mW — considerably higher. Its active read power is <4,000mW but Micron doesn’t provide an equivalent number for the 2400.

The 2400 will be incorporated into some Micron Crucial consumer SSDs, and available as a component for system designers.

Sticking to its knitting – ExaGrid breaks records again

By
Chris Mellor
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Backup target array supplier ExaGrid has notched up another record-breaking quarter with bookings and revenue highs set in the USA, Canada, Latin America, EMEA and APAC regions.

It brought on 174 new customers in the quarter ended December 31, 2021, with 49 six-figure new customer deals and two seven-figure ones. The total active customer count has passed 3,200 and the company, founded in 2002, has been cash-positive for the last five quarters. It says its competitive win rate is 75 per cent, which must make for some unhappy competitors. Also 40 per cent of its revenue is due to ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

Bill Andrews.

Bill Andrews, ExaGrid’s President and CEO, is clear about why the win rate is high: “ExaGrid reduces the cost of backup storage while maintaining performance and scalability. All of the first-generation deduplication appliances such as Dell EMC Data Domain, HPE StoreOnce, and Veritas 5340, are slow for backup, slow for restores and don’t scale well. 

“Low-cost primary storage disk is too expensive for long-term backup storage. You need to have an integrated approach that brings the performance of backing up to disk but also data deduplication for efficient long-term retention backup storage. ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage provides the best of both worlds.”

The Tiered Backup Storage refers to scale-out ExaGrid’s non-deduplicated landing zone for new backup datasets providing the fastest restores. Then the data in the sets is deduplicated using a global index, not one restricted to the local array, and moved to a non-network-facing repository for longer-term storage.

We have tabulated ExaGrid’s growth numbers for 2021:

The 39 per cent full-year revenue growth rate from 2020 is a good number and we doubt if it will be matched by competitors Dell EMC (PowerProtect), HPE (StoreOnce), Quantum (DXi), and Veritas. ExaGrid is looking to hire another 60 inside and field sales heads because it is growing so quickly.

Comment

As SSDs and the public cloud come to dominate enterprise IT, we see these things as potential opportunities for ExaGrid. For example, its disk-based landing zone could expand to include QLC (4bits/cell) SSDs, possibly deduplicated to lower the cost, and so enable faster restores still, with a view to responding to Pure Storage’s FlashBlade and also to VAST Data.

Bill Andrews is not a fan of using SSDs though. He tells us “It is very expensive and drives the cost of backup storage through the Moon. Very few organisations can afford SSD for backup.” Also “Customers are blown away that we are the same or faster than SSD for backup. SSD is really optimized for small writes such as database transactions. It is not optimized for extremely large backup jobs. We do side by side testing all the time.”

ExaGrid could port its software to the public cloud — meaning Amazon, Azure and GCP — and provide a multi-hybrid cloud backup environment. It all depends upon how ExaGrid sees itself: as an on-premises backup target array supplier, at which it is clearly doing very well, or as a potential hybrid and multi-cloud backup target supplier with a cloud-like business model.

Andrews said ExaGrid is adapting to the cloud. “We currently replicate from a physical onsite appliances into AWS for disaster recovery. By summer of this year we’ll replicate from physical onsite appliances into Azure for disaster recovery. Longer term (no rush as we are getting no market pressure) we will have a version of ExaGrid that runs in the clouds for data that lives and is backed up in the clouds.”

Contain yourselves: VMware says Tanzu AP smashes the wall of YAMLs, and it’s out now

By
Chris Mellor
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VMware has announced general availability of its Tanzu Application Platform.

The Tanzu AP provides an app-aware method, with pre-configured templates and a Kubernetes abstraction layer, for developing containerised applications in a multi-cloud environment. Tanzu is VMware’s project to provide DevOps Kubernetes development facilities, so that containerised applications can run alongside virtual machines (VMs) in VMware’s vSphere hypervisor environment.

The aim is to enable Kubernetes app development to become mainstream without killing the VM app environment. A VMware blog, shown to us before going live, reads “many enterprises are experiencing the challenges of navigating the sprawling and complex cloud-native ecosystem and the steep learning curve that comes with it.” It mentions “seemingly incoherent tools that are tough to set up and maintain, work inconsistently across teams and connecting them to other apps and infrastructure is extremely complex,” with developers having to deal with a “wall of YAMLs”* to configure applications.

Tanzu is intended to bring order to this chaos and so increase developer productivity. On the operations side, “Operation teams … need to manage too many bespoke software supply chains and face trouble integrating existing DevOps and security practices, while managing multiple cloud environments running multiple apps.”

The blog argues that “VMware Tanzu Application Platform is a modular, application-aware platform that provides a rich set of developer tooling and a pre-paved path to production to build and deploy software quickly and securely on any compliant public cloud or on-premises Kubernetes cluster.”

It claims that “With Tanzu Application Platform you can deliver revenue-generating applications to market faster because your developers can spend more time building great software instead of toiling and stitching components together.”

The YAML wall is replaced with “an end-to-end supply chain, with its components pre-instrumented to work together seamlessly out of the box”. This is called a Secure Software Supply Chain workflow. A Tanzu build service uses Cloud Native Buildpacks to automatically create containers from validated building blocks and update them with no manual intervention. VMware claims that “As developers commit code, the software supply chain is triggered automatically, providing a continuous path to production.”

It all sounds wonderful.

*Bootnote: YAML is an acronym originally standing for for “Yet Another Markup Language” but then altered to mean “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”. 

Storage News ticker – January 11

By
Chris Mellor
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Storage news
Storage news

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Cobalt Iron, which provides SaaS-based enterprise data protection, has received US Patent 11206306 on its technology for analytics-based cloud brokering of data protection operations. The patented techniques use unique operational and infrastructure analytics to respond to changing conditions and to determine optimal usage of cloud and on-premises resources. If there is a cyber-event in process against certain cloud computing resources, or if there is a change in the cost or availability of a cloud resource, the techniques can dynamically reconfigure cloud computing operations to use a combination of on-premises and/or other cloud resources.They will be implemented in Cobalt Iron’s Compass offering, and will enable Compass to optimize cloud and on-premises computing resources automatically, making IT operations more secure, more cost-effective, and better-performing. 

Doug Balog.

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Cloud-enabled Backup-as-a-Service and StorSafe container-based archiver vendor FalconStor has appointed former IBM executive Doug Balog as its Strategic Executive Advisor. Blog said: “I am impressed by the progress the team has made in bringing this expertise to the hybrid cloud data protection market and by the commitment it is making to the MSP community to help make customers and partners successful technically and financially. Particularly, IBM i customers and MSPs would seem to benefit materially from FalconStor’s deep technology integration with the IBM i platform for deduplication, backup, replication and data migration to the cloud.”

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HPE StoreEver tape libraries now support LTO-9 tape, with its up to 45TB compressed capacity (18TB native) and transfer speeds of up to 1000MB/sec (for systems with full height drives and 800MB/sec for those with half height). It’s available for the following entry- and mid-range HPE StoreEver solutions:

  • HPE StoreEver LTO-9 45000 internal and external standalone tape drives
  • HPE StoreEver MSL 1/8 autoloader
  • HPE StoreEver MSL 2024 tape library
  • HPE StoreEver MSL3040 tape library
  • HPE StoreEver MSL6480 tape library

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Infinidat, which gets 90 per cent of its revenues from a 500+ partner channel, has announced some channel awards:

  • Partner of the Year 
    • Americas – Mainline Information Systems, Inc.
    • EMEA – I.A.N. s.r.l.
    • APJ – SCSK Corporation
  • The High Velocity Award – Mark III Systems
  • The High Flyer – Dynamix Group, Inc.
  • The Ultimate Contributor – OneNeck IT Solutions
  • The Cloud Buster Award – SnowCap Technologies
  • Distributor of the Year
    • EMEA – Pinnacle Micro (Pty) Ltd.
    • APJ – Networld Corporation
  • Marketing Partner of the Year – ASBISc Enterprises Plc

…

File and object data manager and analyser Komprise more than doubled its revenues and the amount of data under management in 2021 compared to 2020. It says it “has seen rampant market uptake of its value proposition for unstructured data management, enabling massive data storage savings while facilitating faster, more automated analytics projects in the cloud.” Komprise revenues, which are subscriptions, grew by 115 per cent year-over-year. New customer acquisition grew 200 per cent year-on-year.

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NSA Inc. says it buys in used backup tapes, cleans them, and sells them on. It purchases thousands of used tapes per month, brings them to facilities near Boston, eradicates all the data off every tape that comes in and then offers a Certificate of Data Destruction upon completion. NSA has a buyback offer or a “Sort N’ Settle” option where it sorts and inventories the tapes in house and sends a cheque out accordingly. It also sells a full line of Certified LTO Tapes (LTO-6 for older) at lower cost than brand new tapes.

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Phison Electronics Corp. announced that its SD Express storage offering is the first product to pass the SD Association’s SD Express/UHS-II Verification Program (SVP). This verification indicates that these products meet interface standards, and will operate and perform properly.

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Data management and SaaS protection company Redstor announced a growth investment from Bregal Milestone, a European technology growth capital firm. Redstor will use the undisclosed amount of financing to fuel its international expansion into the United States and accelerate its AI-enabled platform and overall growth. It has more than 40,000 customers worldwide. Previous Redstor investor Beech Tree Private Equity realized its investment in full as part of the transaction.

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RiverMeadow has an integrated cloud migration and disaster recovery offering. It applies to VMware vSphere workloads that run on-premise or in VMware on any public cloud with the use of Object Storage for cost-effective DR. A table lists the options;

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Intel poaches Micron’s CFO to look after its own finances

By
Chris Mellor
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Intel has hired a new EVP and CFO: David Zinsner has moved across from Micron, Intel’s former 3D XPoint manufacturing partner, where he held the same positions.

On January 17 Zinsner will take over from retiring Intel CFO George Davis, 62, who leaves in May, providing a transition period in which the new CFO can learn the ropes. Zinsner joined Micron as its CFO in February 2018, coming from being President and COO at Affirmed Networks, and SVP and CFO at Analog Devices before that.

David Zinsner.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, to whom Zinsner will report, provided the main announcement quote: “Dave is a proven finance leader, who brings a unique combination of strategic thought, deep knowledge of semiconductors and manufacturing, capital allocation discipline, and a track record of value creation for shareholders. I look forward to partnering with Dave as we continue to execute our strategy to usher in a new era of innovation and achieve our goal of unquestioned leadership in every category in which we compete.”

Zinsner was similarly upbeat. “Intel’s scale, re-invigorated culture and depth of technical talent positions the company to capitalise on the unprecedented demand for semiconductors across the globe.”

Davis announced his forthcoming retirement in August last year, eight months after Gelsinger was hired as Intel’s CEO. An Intel spokesperson assured the Wall Street Journal that the two events were unrelated.

As a CFO at a US NAND and DRAM semiconductor company, Zinsner has knowledge and experience relevant to his Intel role — not least Micron’s view on 3D XPoint, which may now feed into Intel’s own view of the prospects for its 3D XPoint-based Optane product range. Micron exited the 3D XPoint manufacturing business in March last year, preferring to spend the invested cash elsewhere for a greater potential return.

Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers told subscribers that Micron EVP and Chief Business Officer, Sumit Sadana, will be Micron’s interim CFO while the firm runs a search for his replacement. Rakers thinks that Zinsner’s hire is a net positive for Intel.

Intel has also promoted 25-year company veteran EVP Michelle Johnston Holthaus, currently EVP and GM of the Sales, Marketing and Communications Group,  to run its Client Computing Group. Gregory Bryant, the current Client Computing Group EVP and GM, is resigning at the end of January.

Stealth startup Polar Security wants to prevent pain deep in the DevOps security vortex

By
Chris Mellor
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Stealthy Israeli data security startup Polar Security has published a website explaining its intention to discover businesses’ managed, unmanaged and shadow data automatically — and secure it.

The company was started up in January 2021 by co-founders Guy Shanny (CEO) and Roey Yaacovi (CTO), and its chairman is Dov Yoran. Glilot Capital Partners and IBI TechFund are listed as investors with an undisclosed amount of funding. Polar has offices in Tel Aviv and, already, in San Jose.

Guy Shanny (left) and Roey Yaacovi (right).

The website claims its product will halt exhausting gap-bridging ping-pong between R&D, Security, and Data Governance teams to ensure data compliance and respond to security pain in the DevOps security vortex.

Polar’s technology platform, which is agentless and non-intrusive, is claimed to automatically detect all cloud-native data stores, and maintains continuous visibility across cloud accounts, regions, VPCs and subnets, and their shadow data. It says this is constantly created by R&D, often without documentation. Once detected, the data is automatically labelled to identify valuable and sensitive data with reference to GDPR, CCPA, PCI, PIIs, HIPPA, and other data classifications.

There can be automated enforcement of pre-emptive sensitive data security and compliance controls. Also, once identified, data flow and access can be tracked. Polar says this can prevent sensitive data leakage and pre-empt regulatory exposure. The platform can identify data at risk and provide actionable recommendations to restore data security, mitigate data vulnerability and compliance violations before costly escalation.

Polar Security home page.

Polar’s software can connect to a business’s IT system in minutes and is zero-touch — with no SDKs, network scanners or sidecars (supporting processes or services) needed, just read-only data access permission.

Identified use cases include automated data store inventory, auditing data flow security, preventing sensitive data exposure, ensuring ransomware-resilient sensitive data stores, and preventing compliance violations.

Shanny spent ten and a half years in the Office of the Prime Minster of Israel working in the cybersecurity field. While a teenage high school student he started FreshServ — a private web vulnerability and hosting company. Yaacovi also worked in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office but then joined Check Point Software Technologies as a software engineer.

Yoran has a background of working at Cisco — founding malware analysis startup ThreatGRID which was bought by Cisco — and Symantec. He is based in New York and a partner at MetroSITE Group which participates in early-stage cybersecurity investments and provides advisory services.

Storage news ticker – January 10

By
Chris Mellor
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Kelly Hopping.

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According to the UK Guardian, EU police agency Europol will have to delete at least 4PB of personal data it is unlawfully storing. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), the responsible agency, says the data came from crime reports, encrypted phone services, and asylum seekers never convicted of crimes. In effect Europol has been found guilty of mass surveillance of at least 250,000 people. Europol argues it is in the right and EDPS has misinterpreted the current rules.

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Data protector HYCU has appointed Kelly Hopping as its first CMO after she had completed a six-month sabbatical way from paid employment. Hopping was a Global VP and CMO for Garner Digital Markets from April 2019 to March 2021. Prior to that she was a marketing exec for Rackspace, AMD, Dell and Kraft Foods Group. At HYCU she will be responsible for results-driven marketing, brand awareness campaigns and strategy.

Bill Basinas.

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Enterprise storage array vendor Infinidat has hired Bill Basinas as its senior director for product marketing. He’s been a product director for major accounts at Firefly Holdings, providing pre-sales tech enablement to the Dell EMC customer base, with previous stints at HPE (twice), Tarmin (twice) , EMC (where he was a colleague of Infinidat CMO Eric Herzog), Avamar and Legato before that. 

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DRAM and NAND manufacturer Micron is on the hunt for a huge US semiconductor foundry location, according to the Idaho Statesman news outlet. Micron will spend up to $40 billion building and equipping the plant and potential sites are in Arizona, California, Texas and North Carolina, where it is looking at a 2,150-acre site southwest of Raleigh. It told the Statesman: “Locations are being vetted across a number of factors including site availability suitable for a fab, access to a strong talent pool, reliable and cost-competitive utility services, alignment with our corporate sustainability objectives, and a favourable regulatory environment. … There are multiple factors that inform our decision to invest billions of dollars to construct and operate a fab. We will share specific locations as we close on unique investment targets.”

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Korea-based Samsung says its fourth 2021 quarter should show revenues up 23.5 per cent to ₩76 trillion ($63.1 billion) with ₩3.8 trillion ($11.5 billion) operating profit — up 52.5 per cent. This is due to record DRAM and NAND demand for servers. The operating profit was lower than some analysts expected due to a bonus payment to employees, mobile phone marketing costs and display panel manufacturing ramp costs. Full results should be published around the end of January.

…

GigaOm rates high-performance scale-out file storage vendors and products

By
Chris Mellor
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DDN, Pavilion Data and IBM lead the 16 suppliers in GigaOm’s High-Performance Scale-Out File Storage (SCOFS) Radar report.

The SCOFS products are focussed on performance — obviously — plus scalability and Nvidia GPUDirect support, and aimed at data analytics, AI/ML/DL, and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

GigaOm’s Radar reports evaluate products’ technical capabilities and feature sets against 14 criteria to produce a circular graph. This is divided into concentric inner Leader, mid-way Challenger and outer New Entrant rings modified by by two orthogonal axes: Maturity vs Innovation, and Feature Play vs Platform Play. Suppliers are also rated on their forecast speed of development over the next year to 18 months.

Sixteen high-performance scale-out file storage suppliers are evaluated with a rough balance between seven feature plays and nine platform plays. Six are classed as more mature than innovative, leaving ten suppliers — including mature players DDN and Dell — moving into the innovation half of the diagram.

The Leader (closest to centre) is DDN, followed by IBM and Pavilion Data, then NetApp, Dell EMC and Pure Storage. The Challengers — the majority of suppliers — are Qumulo, WekaIO, VAST Data, Pananas, Hammerspace, Quantum, OSNexus, SoftIron, and Quobyte. ThinkParQ is the sole New Entrant.

DDN, VAST Data, WekaIO and Qumulo are classed as outperformers, referring to each supplier’s product evolution over the coming 12 to 18 months, with OSNexus, Panasas, SoftIron and ThinkParQ rated as the slowest performers in that sense.

Report authors Enrico Signoretti, Max Mortillaro and Arjan Timmerman commented that:

  • DDN impresses for the effort it places on evolving its platform and adapting it for new use cases and enterprise needs, showing an evolution from a mature platform play toward an innovative platform play;
  • Qumulo offers a very balanced platform with excellent integration capabilities; however, the lack of GPUDirect support can become a roadblock to supporting the most demanding GPU-based workloads;
  • WekaIO presents a flexible and scalable solution that can be deployed everywhere;
  • VAST Data has an enviable technology stack that can really make a difference for some use cases while keeping a low $/GB ratio.

The authors add that “IBM … Spectrum Scale is a very mature architecture. It is favoured still by many organisations, delivers great value, and is more than capable of addressing the most complex requirements, putting it on par with DDN and among the leaders of this Radar.”

There is an overlap between this GigaOm Radar and the firm’s Enterprise Scale Out File Storage Radar:

The Enterprise SCOFS Radar report includes suppliers whose products are optimised for security, data protection with a focus on data services, flexibility and enterprise features. Many suppliers feature in both reports but DDN, IBM, Panasas, Pavilion Data, ThinkParQ and WekaIO are confined to the high-performance SCOFS Radar while enterprise SCOFS suppliers Cohesity, Commvault, Nutanix, Red Hat and Scality do not appear in the High-Performance SCOFS Radar.

The High-Performance SCOFS Radar report is available to GigaOm subscribers and accompanied by a Key Criteria report that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line system characteristics — such as scalability, performance, and TCO — that affect purchase decisions.

Abbamatic trio sings MAMR mia – here we go again

By
Chris Mellor
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A three-way collaboration between Showa Denko, TDK and Toshiba has resulted in a demonstration of MAMR recording technology showing that 30+ terabyte disk drives are possible.

Toshiba disk drives use Showa Denko platters and TDK read/write heads, and the three suppliers have been engaged in a joint effort to develop Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) technology as a way of overcoming the thermal stability limitations of current Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology. PMR bits become unstable as their size shrinks below the 2TB/platter areal density point. MAMR records bits in a more stable but resistant recording medium, which needs beamed microwave energy to assist the read/write heads in writing bits.

The microwaves are generated by a Spin Torque Oscillator (STO) positioned next to the write head. Toshiba is using a MAMR precursor, Flux Control MAMR (FC-MAMR), in its current MG09 and MN09 18TB drives. The STO used includes a microwave Field Generation Layer (FGL) and a Spin Injection Layer (SIL). FC-MAMR is an approach technology for full MAMR. It involves reversing the direction of the STO and so providing a 20 per cent areal density gain to PMR technology.

Toshiba MAS-MAMR diagram showing a MAS-MAMR head writing to bit areas of magnetic grains in a disk recording medium.

The next step in Toshiba’s development was Microwave Assisted Switching-Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAS-MAMR) and this appeared in December last year as a strong possibility with a Showa Denko platter development. It uses resonance-enhanced magnetic oscillations between the STO and the recording medium, which enables writing data in narrower tracks in the media. MAS-MAMR drives capacity gains higher than FC-MAMR.

Toshiba says it has invented a “bi-oscillation type spin torque oscillator device (dual FGL STO)” that irradiates microwaves with a two-layer field generator. The “dual FGL STO” generates microwaves more efficiently, with less current and on focused spots. 

It has confirmed stable oscillation of STOs in new TDK recording heads. It has also confirmed the MAS-MAMR effect by combining the newly developed STOs, recording heads and media, and demonstrated an approximately 6dB improvement in recording performance with MAS-MAMR.

Toshiba chart showing an approximate 6dB (23 per cent) improvement in magnetic signal recording capability over PMR.

Toshiba says it aims to realise early commercialisation of nearline HDDs with capacities exceeding 30TB. No timescales have been provided, but we are thinking four to six years. It says it will continue to develop FC-MAMR and MAS-MAMR technologies to expand the capacity of nearline HDDs. Toshiba will also continue to develop the Thermal Assisted Magnetic Recording (TAMR or HAMR as it is generally known) technology in parallel, to meet a wide range of storage needs. This is what Western Digital is doing as well.

Competitor Seagate is focusing on HAMR, with no publicly revealed MAMR developments.

Toshiba is announcing details of its MAS-MAMR demo and technology at the international Joint MMM-INTERMAG Conference 2022, being held in New Orleans from January 10–14, 2022.

Strategic move: NetApp’s top legal eagle becomes Chief Strategy Officer

By
Chris Mellor
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In a seemingly unusual move, NetApp has appointed Matt Fawcett, its now ex-General Counsel, as Chief Strategy Officer.

Matt Fawcett

Fawcett has been NetApp’s top internal lawyer for 10 years, being appointed as General Counsel in September 2010. He was promoted to Chief Strategy and Legal Officer in January 2020. Now, NetApp’s announcement says, it “is decoupling its strategy and legal teams, enabling Fawcett to have a dedicated focus on accelerating the next phase of NetApp’s evolution as Chief Strategy Officer.”

An announcement quote by Fawcett said: “I’m laser focused on accelerating NetApp’s strategy to extend our market leadership as we continue transforming our business in today’s digital economy, building on the success we’ve already achieved.”

Elizabeth O’Callahan, who was an SVP and General Counsel reporting to Fawcett, becomes NetApp’s Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel. That is impressive but Fawcett’s move is unexpected. Corporate lawyers are a vital force in a firm, managing risk for their companies, looking after contracts, ensuring compliance and managing other legal bureaucratic activities. Doing this well, controlling costs and working effectively with other parts of the company are clearly important but don’t generally lead to corporate strategy roles in a technology company.

CEO George Kurian issued a statement too: “Recognising we have many opportunities before us to grow and win in the marketplace, I’m proud to have two strong leaders in Matt Fawcett leading strategy and corporate development, and Beth O’Callahan taking on an expanded role as Chief Legal Officer reporting to me.”

NetApp’s leadership webpage says Fawcett will lead “Corporate Strategy, Corporate Development, and Government Relations. He and his organisation are routinely recognised for leadership at the intersection of innovation, technology, and law.”

A look at some of Fawcett’s articles and blogs is revealing. In Reflections on a Decade at in-house counsel outlet ACC Docket, Fawcett writes: “In 2010, we declared a war on paper. At that time, we had to fight our own team to adopt electronic signatures (which seems so quaint today). It was hard to get going, but it proved a huge positive in our speed and efficiency. And of course, just a few years later, this is a basic tool for every team. I am glad we didn’t wait.

“A few years later, we were early movers again, embracing the vision of a smaller and more nimble team. This was both a response to challenges in our business, but also a calculated bet that a tight, disciplined team connected through technology and efficient processes could ultimately be more productive. Looking backwards, and watching our team effectively manage through today’s WFH paradigm, that was a winning bet.”

In a 2013 Forbes article “How Your General Counsel Sees Business Blind Spots” he wrote: “The role of the General Counsel (GC) is undergoing profound expansion. They’re no longer just, ‘the top lawyer in the company’ … The effective GC identifies issues that are invisible to other parts of the organisation. In volatile, highly inter-dependent businesses, these ‘blind spots’ represent zones of opportunity or unmitigated risks.  To see through the blind spots, you need an effective combination of functions. … GCs are business catalysts, identifying opportunities, capturing them, and creating competitive advantage. Forward-looking leaders of tomorrow’s business won’t overlook this vital resource. The GC’s influence can be felt in virtually every area of an organisation.”

Fawcett YouTube video

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