Interview with a Rubrik MSP channel partner

By

-

January 6, 2022

Blocks & Files had the opportunity to meet and interview Simon Chappell, the CEO of Managed Service Provider (MSP) Assured Data Protection which bases its services on Rubrik’s software. We were interested to find out why the company adopted the MSP business model, why it selected Rubrik’s SW, deal registration and what Chappell thought about the cloud titans (AWS, Azure and GCP) entering the data protection market.

Blocks & Files: Could you explain why you adopted the MSP business model when you set up Assured Data Protection?

Simon Chappell: The two founding team members of Assured Data Protection each have over two decades of experience in running a data protection as a service company. As a senior group, we add over 200 years of know how in this space. We know it’s hard to do, but we enjoy the challenge of delivering exceptional service to our customers. It has also been said that we also don’t know how to do anything else!

Blocks & Files: What criteria did you use to choose a backup software supplier?

Simon Chappell: The fundamental requirement has not changed in all the time we have been delivering as an MSP. We require a technology that protects and restores without failure. As technology improves, the demands of our customers are rightly increasing to add additional speed and ease of restore as well as certainty into the requirements.

Blocks & Files: Which suppliers were on your short list and why?

Simon Chappell: When we set up in 2015, we spent a long time considering all the established major backup players and all the emerging next generation data protection vendors present at the time. If you look at the top right of the current Gartner Magic Quadrant, we either knew of or investigated in depth every single vendor. Combining that list with our own vast amount of experience in this space, we were able to make up our short list.

Blocks & Files: What reasons led you to choose Rubrik over Cohesity and Veeam?

Simon Chappell: To put it simply, Rubrik’s team and vision made the difference for us. I made an instant personal connection with Bipul Sinha, Rubrik’s CEO, and our senior technical team made similar connections with the Rubrik senior engineers. It was exciting to team up with such well-funded visionaries. Looking back six years to that initial meeting, it’s amazing to think the big bet we took on a young Rubrik has paid off exactly as we hoped.

Blocks & Files: What is Assured’s USP compared to other backup-as-a-service suppliers?

Simon Chappell: We live in the Enterprise and Mid Market. This creates demands on us in terms of delivery and execution, and we strive to be an extension of our customer’s IT teams. We also have our own proprietary technology called ProtectView which is our single pane of glass management platform, which allows a view into a company’s backup and overall data protection status in one place at a single glance.

Blocks & Files: Do you think Amazon will enter the backup business and why?

Simon Chappell: I’m sure they will focus on the backup space … and in fact they already have established a very strong team. We are developing close relationships with AWS and Microsoft, and the interesting part will be to see if they extend their reach out of the Cloud and into the data centre.

Blocks & Files: If Amazon (and Azure and GCP) enter the backup business how will Assured survive and prosper? What will be Assured’s USP then?

Simon Chappell: The hyperscalers are already offering protection of their native workloads – our current job is to help our customers manage, remediate and report on these. Almost all our customers have hybrid cloud infrastructure at the moment (with varying degrees of workloads still on premises) so our job is more important than ever to present a consistent, verifiable and tested picture of data protection.

Blocks & Files: Could you explain how you view Microsoft’s investment in Rubrik and what it might portend?

Simon Chappell: We were very excited by the announcement. Deeper ties between Microsoft and Rubrik can only be good news for Assured Data Protection, as we are experts in managing and delivering on both platforms.

Blocks & Files: Are you geographically limited in Assured’s operations?

Simon Chappell: We have twin HQs in the UK and US, but operate 24/7 in over 40 countries where we have existing deployments. We also have data centre infrastructure in six worldwide locations, so we are truly global in our reach.

Blocks & Files: How can a software supplier to MSPs organise their MSP channel to prevent poaching? I’m thinking of things like deal registration in an on-premises product suppliers’ channel partner organisation. Is the equivalent possible in the MSP world? Geographic territories for example, or vertical market niches?

Simon Chappell: I believe it’s hard to replicate traditional vendor deal registration programmes in the MSP world as our service wrap is such an important part of any deal. I think it’s hard to tie down to geographic territory as ultimately many deals we do involve multiple global locations. On vertical assignment is equally difficult as every business has critical data irrespective of the sector they operate in.

Hitachi Vantara rated as best primary storage for large enterprises by GigaOm

By

Chris Mellor

-

January 5, 2022

Analyst outfit GigaOm has rated primary (block) storage suppliers in three groups – small, medium and large enterprises – with Hitachi Vantara leading for large enterprises, and NetApp and Pure leading the pack for mid-sized and small enterprises.

A Radar report evaluates suppliers’ products against a set of key criteria and their impact on evaluation metrics to produce a Radar graphic — a forward-looking perspective on all the vendors in the report, based on their products’ technical capabilities and feature sets.

It’s divided into concentric Leader, Challenger and New Entrant circles modified by by two orthogonal axes, Maturity vs Innovation and Feature Play vs Platform Play, providing four quadrants overlaying the circles. Suppliers are also rated on their speed of movement across the chart.

The small business Radar diagram places DataCore, DDN, HPE, IBM, iXsystems and StorOne in the Challengers’ area with iXsystems the most mature and DataCore, DDN and StorOne scoring highest on innovation. Dell Technologies is classed as a leader, but only just, with NetApp ahead of Pure Storage in that category. All the suppliers are in or moving into the platform half of the diagram.

The mid-sized enterprise picture – see below – has more suppliers but NetApp and Pure lead and are the only vendors in the Leaders’s area. The Challengers’ area has suppliers in each of the four quadrants, differing from the mid-sized enterprise Radar, with StorPool and StorOne rated highly for Features and Maturity than Innovation and with a Platform focus.

Pavilion Data, Excelero and Lightbits Labs are each rated highly on Innovation and Features, with DDN highest in Innovation but weakest on Features as it is moving into the Platform area of the diagram. That half of the diagram positions DataCore, Dell Technologies, Hitachi Vantara, IBM, HPE and Infinidat as Challengers with a platform focus. The sole New Entrant is iXsystems with a high Maturity rating

The large enterprise Radar diagram – see below – is different again. Zadara is the sole New Entrant, down in the Feature Play-Innovation quarter circle. Pavilion Data and Excelero are in the same quarter circle but given Challenger status. HPE has the same status but is in the Maturity-Platform Play quarter circle. So too is Dell Technologies.

IBM, Infinidat, NetApp and Pure Storage are Leaders with IBM rated least innovative compared to the others. Hitachi Vantara is the highest-rated supplier in the Leaders’ area and also rated highest as a Platform Play. Infinidat is rated highest of this group on the Innovation measure.

These three reports are available to GigaOm subscribers.

Exec advisors to guide Hammerspace on strategy and tactics

By

Chris Mellor

-

January 5, 2022

Global data access software startup Hammerspace has set up an Executive Advisory Board to help ensure its products and messages respond to the right business problems – and so grow the firm’s business.

Hammerspace’s Global Data Environment (GDE) software provides user and application data access covering file, block and object storage on-premises and in public clouds, with policy-driven automated data movement and services providing protection, tiering and management.

The 7-person EAB is said to comprise “renowned leaders from across the government, technology, finance and investment communities.” They have been “instrumental in providing insights into the end-user, business and economic challenges created by limited and inefficient access to file data that is currently isolated in disconnected silos.”

Their presence on the EAB can be seen as both validating Hammerspace’s strategy and helps refining its tactics. Hammerspace founder and CEO David Flynn said: “The world needs a revolutionary approach to data access. Hammerspace is committed to making data globally accessible. We break data free from the constraints of the storage system and liberate IT teams from endless manual data management tasks.”

Comment

Flynn’s earlier Primary Data startup had a fairly similar DataSphere concept but closed shop in 2018 without bring product to market. Hammerspace evolved from the ashes, so to speak, and now has a completed product fulfilling the DataSphere’s ambitions.

The data need today, as seen by Hammerspace, is that there is a vast amount of it and it needs distributing in manageable quantities to the IT end-points where it is needed but without causing data traffic jams through clogged up network links.

*Hammerspace GDE diagram.* *See the sphere?*

Hammerspace, conceptually, is using metadata to sort out data access supply chains and logistics to make a business’s data organisation – its metadata – available everywhere but the data itself is sent only where it is needed and in the amounts it is needed. This is done while using the existing storage silos as data depots from which to access and despatch precise data consignments around a customer’s hybrid and multi-cloud network.

Having completed its v1.0 GDE software, Hammerspace then set about recruiting a quartet of sales and marketing executives:

Chris Bowen, SVP Global Sales – August 2021,
Jim Choumas, VP Channel Sales – August 2021,
Molly Presley, SVP Marketing – November 2021,
Floyd Christofferson, VP Product Marketing, January 2022.

They are now revving up and accelerating Hammerspace’s sales and marketing activities.

The EAB members are:

Bob Flores – Senior Partner with OODA consulting, founder and CTO of Applicology Inc, former Chief Technology Officer of the UA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
Roxane Googin – Chief Futurist of Group 11, over 20 years’ experience predicting macroeconomic technology trends as editor of The High Tech Observer,
Brendon Howe – Technology thought leader, VP/General Manager of Blockchain at VMWare, and former NetApp exec managing cloud data services and emerging products,
Kai Li – Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, prior founder and Chief Scientist at Data Domain (now part of Dell EMC),
Greg McGowan – Senior Strategic Advisor at Franklin Templeton Investments, previous EVP, Director and General Counsel of Templeton International, Inc.,
Eric Scollard – global sales exec and strategic sales advisor who has led sales organisations at Qumulo, ExtraHop, Bycast, Isilon Systems, IBM, and Veritas,
Eyal Waldman – Chairman Waldo Holdings, former president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies, bought by NVIDIA.

Waldman provided an apposite quote: “The amount of data generated in the world has been increasing exponentially for years. Despite increases in networking and compute power, the inability of data storage and file system technologies to make an organisation’s entire dataset available to distributed environments has been holding back taking full advantage of advanced applications, network, and computing systems.

“Hammerspace is bringing to market the global file system technology needed to unlock the full potential of an organisation’s entire data set in edge, multi-datacenter and cloud environments.”

Kai Li brought out another angle: “At Data Domain, we focused on making the storage of massive quantities of data cost-effective while optimising moving that data across networks efficiently. I am excited to see Hammerspace expanding the focus beyond efficiency and cost savings to address the challenges of making data available to users and applications on a global scale.”

Now we wait and see if Hammerspace’s sales and marketing activities, guided by the EAB, resonate with pandemic-battered customers drowning under rising seas of data.

WekaIO ramps up its funding to $140 million

By

Chris Mellor

-

January 4, 2022

Scale-out parallel filesystem supplier WekaIO has raised $73 million in a fourth-round, taking total funding to $140 million.

Update: Jan 6. Not a D-round. Feb 7; Cisco removed as an investor.

Hitachi Ventures led this round accompanied by a spread of strategic investors, including HPE, NVIDIA, Micron, and financial investors including MoreTech Ventures, Ibex Investors, and Key 1 Capital. WekaIO will use the funds to accelerate go-to-market activities, operations, and engineering. The round would be a D-round sequentially but we have been told it is not actually a D-round – which means it could be an extension of the previous C-round or something different. Weka’s valuation for this round is unknown.

Liran Zvibel, Co-Founder and CEO of WEKA – it now calls itself WEKA rather than WekaIO – issued a statement: “The Global 1000s are now aggressively integrating Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning practices and technology into their core business processes, creating new products and services that were impossible to even imagine previously.

“GPUs and accelerated computing technologies are rapidly replacing traditional CPU compute at 100-1000 times performance, shifting the AI bottleneck from CPU access to data access, and creating a huge market opportunity for WEKA’s modern Data Platform for AI. … Our latest round will enable WEKA to deliver better and faster outcomes to more customers and improved integration with our ecosystem.”

Gal Gitter, Partner and Managing Director at Ibex Investors, is utterly convinced about WEKA’s relevance, as you would expect having put money in. His announcement quote stands out.

Gitter said: “The sheer speed in which we see the Enterprise AI market is developing is staggering. We are seeing a massive increase in the use of AI/ML and HPC applications that are driving new products and services for enterprises. However, supporting these applications at scale entails really difficult storage challenges or tradeoffs. This is where WEKA comes in, enabling a tremendous acceleration for enterprises’ AI applications: from ingestion to cleansing to storage. WEKA has been adding customers and partners at an explosive pace, and we could not be more excited to back them. Simply put, if your enterprise is serious about AI – you need WEKA.”

WEKA was founded in 2013 and its most recent prior round was a $31.7 million C-round in 2019. It reported hyper growth in December at the end of 2021. The new funding helps keep the momentum up at the start of 2022.

Storage news ticker tape – January 4

By

Chris Mellor

-

January 4, 2022

…

Hammerspace has hired Floyd Christofferson from StrongBox to be its VPO Of Product Marketing. Christofferson’s availability occurred when Strongbox’ exec roster was reorganised by incoming CEO Andrew Hall in November last year, and his CEO role went away. We are told that Christofferson “will help further the company’s thought leadership in creating metadata-driven workflows and advance the Hammerspace vision that global access to data is the next frontier to propel innovation in all different data-driven markets such as aerospace, autonomous vehicles, media and entertainment, oil and gas research, medical research, and electronic design automation.”

…

Hammerspace co-founder and CEO David Flynn has some predictions for 2022 that are not self-serving, except maybe one. They are:

ARM will begin taking over x86 in the data center
Custom designed chips will be increasingly common
Software engineering talent will be in short supply
Data will need to be a globally accessible resource
Edge will no longer be just for data capture, it will be for data use
Technology (bitcoin, cryptocurrency) will solve problems previously considered the domain of governments
Innovators will more rapidly embrace patent open source (eg, Tesla).

…

IBM has published an updated Spectrum Scale FAQ. It details what is supported on Spectrum Scale for AIX, Linux, Power, and Windows, the pre-reqs and compatibility matrix for using Spectrum Scales as a backend for containers, and supported upgrade paths for Spectrum Scale CSI and Container native.

…

The Xi’an anti-Covid lockdown (closure) has reduced Micron’s team and contractor workforce at its Xi’an site, resulting in some impact to output levels of its DRAM assembly and test operations. It thinks its efforts will allow it to meet most customer demand, however there may be some near-term delays. New or more stringent restrictions impacting its operations in Xi’an may be increasingly difficult to mitigate.

…

Orico has announced its FEN300 portable SSD with a fingerprint reader safeguarding access. Capacity options are 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB for this USB 3.1 Type-C device. It measures 90mm long, 55mm wide and 9.7mm high. Prices are $79.99 (256GB), $99.99 (512GB) and$159.99 (1TB).

…

Phison is demoing preview products at Virtual CES. One is the PCIe gen 5 E26 Series Controller and SSD supporting dual-port access, SR-IOV and ZNS, ONFI 5.x and Toggle 5.x. The E26 is a customisable SSD platform that will be available in M.2, U.3, E1.S, and E3.S form factors and ship in H2 2022. It’s looking for OEMs. Phison is also showing the DRAM-less PCIe gen 4 E21T drive for mobile gaming, also the E13T BGA SSD for mobile gaming.

…

Pure Storage announced new momentum within the U.S. public sector. (1) A large agency within the Department of Treasury chose Pure to replace their legacy storage arrays. (2) A core agency within the Department of Homeland Security chose Pure FlashBlade to help power its advanced analytics and AI operations. (3) The Commonwealth of Massachusetts adopted Pure as-a-Service with FlashArray, FlashStack for Block Performance and Block Capacity, FlashBlade and the Portworx Suite to containerise applications. More than 175 of the United States’ 440 federal agencies are Pure customers. At the state, local, and education (SLED) level, 48 of the 50 U.S. states are Pure customers.

…

Samsung is experiencing difficulties in shift scheduling at its Xi’an plant because of a Chinese state anti-Covid lockdown in the area, but output is not yet affected. TrendForce researchers suggest it could run into output problems if the lockdown measures worsen and/or if it runs out of component inventory for smart phones and laptops.

…

SK hynix has announced a Platinum P41 gumstick format (M.2 2280) PCIe gen 4 x 4 SSD in 500GB, 1 and 2 TB capacities using 176-layer 3D NAND. It delivers 1.4 million/1.3 million random read/write IOPS, 7GB/sec sequential read and 6.5GB/sec sequential writes. The drive is for gamers and content creators and supports up to to 1,200TBW (2TB), 750TBW (1TB), and 500TBW (500GB). It has a 1.5 million hour MTBF rating.

…

A magnitude 6.0 earthquake occurred off the east coast of Taiwan at 5:46PM local time on January 3, 2022. Most local DRAM and foundry fabs are located in the northern and central parts of the island and TrendForce thinks there will be no notable damages to the equipment from these fabs. Production should continue as normal and the earthquake’s impact on the output of Taiwan’s DRAM and foundry industries will likely be limited.

…

In a series of articles (part 1, part 2) for Forbes, industry consultant Tom Coughlin suggests general availability of dual actuator HDDs will occur sometime in 2022. He thinks CXL should start bringing memory networks into data centre server architectures in 2022 as well. (That implies PCIe gen 5 gets rolled out.) IBM, he says, is touting its Open Memory Interface (OMI) as a high-speed, low latency (very) local area network with OMI supporting more memory capacity than either DDR5 or HBM2E – see chart above. Coughlin’s articles also include a chart projecting MRAM, 3D XPoint, DRAM and NAND shipments out to 2031.

…

Speed demon: Samsung and Intel demo PCIe gen 5 SSD setup

By

Chris Mellor

-

January 4, 2022

PCIe gen 5, quadruple PCIe 3.1’s interface speed, looks set to near revolutionise database, AI and analytics performance.

Intel has released a video for CES showing how Samsung’s PCIe gen 5.0-using PM1743 SSD performs when hooked up to a server host powered by Intel’s Core i9-12900K CPU. The demo bod showed a PCIe gen 4 SSD delivering 7GB/sec of throughput while Sammy’s PM1743 pumped out 13.8GB/sec, nearly double.

It’s early days and we have four PCIe gen 5 SSD suppliers in our files:

The IO rates from these SSDs will be up to 14GB/sec for reads and 12GB/sec for writes – phenomenally fast. Kioxia’s CD7 seems slow and, we think, its performance will get uprated pretty quickly.

Micron, SK hynix and its Solidigm subsidiary, and Western Digital have yet to show their PCIe gen 5 hands and, when they do, the prospect of having storage arrays and server storage boxes filled with PCIe gen 5 drives is mouth-watering in terms of IO. We are facing a dramatic uplift from today’s PCIe gen 3.1 SSDs with performance around the 3.5GB/sec read and 2.5GB/sec write levels to drives four times faster.

NetApp’s A900 has a 300GB/sec cluster throughput. Imagine that doubling, tripling, even quadrupling, with PCIe gen 5 drives; to an awesome 1.2TB/sec throughput. Servers are going to have to deploy massive numbers of cores and terabytes of memory to be able to handle these extraordinary data delivery rates. Think what the public cloud suppliers could do with these drives.

The potential dramatic IO rate increases of databases, machine learning models and analytic data sets could realise wholly new levels of transaction, AI and analytics performance as we progress through to 2025.

SK Hynix rebrands so solid SSD crew – Solidigm

By

Chris Mellor

-

January 4, 2022

SK Hynix is rebranding its acquired Intel SSD business as Solidigm with Intel’s ex-non-volatile products boss Rob Crooke as its CEO.

This is only the first phase of a 2-stage transaction, and SK Hynix is making a $7 billion stage payment to buy Intel’s SSD business and the Dalian NAND flash manufacturing facility in China.

The second phase will see SK Hynix pay Intel $2 billion around March 2025 to complete the deal and get IP related to the manufacture and design of NAND flash wafers, R&D employees for NAND flash wafers, the Dalian facility workforce, and the other associated tangible and intangible assets.

SK Hynix vice chairman and co-CEO Park Jung-ho issued a statement: “This acquisition will present a paradigm shifting moment for SK Hynix’s NAND flash business to enter the global top tier level. With this acquisition, SK hynix will be one step further in its path towards [becoming a] global first technology company.”

Crooke said: “Solidigm is poised to be the world’s next big semiconductor company, which presents an unprecedented opportunity to reinvent the data memory and storage industry. We are steadfast in our commitment to lead the data industry in a way that can truly fuel human advancement.”

Steady on. Let’s not get carried away Rob.

SK Hynix subsidiary Solidgm is headquartered in San Jose and will manage product development, manufacturing, and sales of its SSD products separate from SK Hynix’s NAND products. The name Solidigm, it says, refers to it creating “a new solid-state paradigm that provides unmatched customer service and revolutionises the memory storage industry.”

It’s not clear how it will do that as it is lagging the industry in terms of 3D layer count. While competitors are introducing 176-layer product Solidigm is at the 144-layer level. Secondly it has no storage-class memory technology as Intel is retaining its Optane business. SK Hynix says it, Solidigm, and Intel will cooperate with each other for a successful final close of the acquisition deal. It seems to us that, were Solidigm to introduce a storage-class memory product competing with Optane, then Intel would be mightily displeased.

Solidigm product portfolio

According to its website there are a dozen Solidigm data centre SSD products, organised into three product groups, and just two client SSD products:

*SK hynix and Solidigm 3D NAND layer counts*

A look at the table of products suggests that the company needs to roll out its 144-later technology further across its D7, D5 and D3 products as well as extending its PCIe 4.0 capabilities.

We would expect it to be developing a greater-than-144-layer product, technology, particularly as SK Hynix is already developing 176-layer products, such as its Platinum P41 PCIe gen 4.0 gaming SSD.

We would also expect Solidigm to have PCIe gen 5.0 interface technology under development. Competitor Kioxia is active in this area as is Samsung with its PM1743 enterprise server SSD. If Solidigm really does want to revolutionise the memory storage industry then it has to get ahead of its competitors in terms of 3D NAND layers and PCIe interface technology, and have a presence in the storage-class memory area.

Storage news ticker tape – December 24

By

Chris Mellor

-

December 24, 2021

…

Lenovo has published a reference architecture for the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.9 solution based on the Lenovo ThinkSystem platform. The document provides a technical overview of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, which is built around a core of application containers powered by CRI-O, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes, on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS).

…

TrendForce says the Chinese city of Xi’an has been placed under lockdown due to a local outbreak of the Delta variant. Samsung operates two 3D NAND memory fabs in Xi’an and wafer inputs at the two fabs account for 42.5 per cent of Samsung’s total NAND Flash production capacity. At the moment, the lockdown of the city is not expected to have a notable impact on these fabs.The municipal government has been authorized to enforce very severe restrictions on the movements of people and goods. While Samsung has finished arranging most of the memory product shipments for the period from the end of 2021 to middle of January next year, the company could face logistical issues related to the Xi’an lockdown in the near future and experience delays in shipments.

TrendForce’s investigations indicate that the lockdown will have no impact on Micron’s packaging and testing operations, although potential issues with logistics still remain to be seen.

…

Adata’s XPG (Xtreme Performance Gear) will demo a concept product at CES 2022 called XPG VAULT, a wired USB-C mouse that wants to be “your gaming library, in the palm of your hand”. It c an integrate up to 1TB of Solid State memory running at 985MB/sec and a Gaming Launcher software to make gaming libraries conveniently portable and a higher level of game integration with XPG Prime Software Ecosystem.

…

Storage news ticker tape – December 23

By

Chris Mellor

-

December 23, 2021

…

ADATA will exhibit two prototype PCIe Gen5 x 4 SSDs in M.2 format at CES 2022. ‘Project Nighthawk,’ has a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller and can deliver sequential read/write performance of up to 14/12GB/sec. ‘Project Blackbird’ has an InnoGrit IG5666 controller and is slightly slower at 14/10GB/sec. Both SSDs have capacities of up to 8TB. ADATA’s new Elite SE920 USB4 external SSD will also be there, capable of transfer rates of up to 40Gbit/s and with a proprietary thermal cooling design that features a built-in fan.

…

SaaS data protector Druva has appointed Tracey Newell to its board of directors. She will support the company as it prioritises expanding routes to market and capturing more of the rapidly growing data protection market. Newell is the former president of Informatica, where she also served as a member of the company’s board of directors for two years prior to being asked to join the management team. Prior to joining Informatica, Newell served as executive vice president of global field operations at Proofpoint, where she led sales through a five-year period of hypergrowth.

…

Samsung announced the PM1743 SSD for enterprise servers, a PCIe Gen5 product using Samsung’s sixth-generation 128-layer V-NAND and with dual-port support. Yong Ho Song, EVP and Head of the Memory Controller Development Team at Samsung Electronics, said: “The introduction of our PCIe 5.0 SSD, along with PCIe 6.0-based product developments that are underway, will further solidify our technological leadership in the enterprise server market.”

The sequential read/write speeds will be up to 13GB/sec and 6.6GB/sec respectively. Random read/write IOPS will be 2,500,000 and 250,000 – it’s heavily skewed to sequential and random reads. The PM1743 can provide improved power efficiency of up to 608 MB/sec per watt, which represents about a 30 per cent boost over the previous generation.

Capacities range from 1.92TB to 15.36TB and they come in 2.5-inch, E3.S (3-inch EDSFF). Customers deploying 7.5mm EDSFF SSDs will be able to double the storage density in their systems, compared to when the 15mm 2.5-inch form factor is used.

The drive is sampling now with mass production beginning in Q1 2022.

…

SK hynix has received merger clearance from the Chinese antitrust authority, State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) for its acquisition of Intel’s NAND and SSD business. It has now received all required merger clearances in eight jurisdictions from the relevant competition authorities and will continue to prepare to close the transaction and continue the remaining post-merger integration process. The consideration for the 1^st Closing is $7 billion and SK hynix will then the Intel SSD business (including SSD-associated IP and employees) and Dalian facility. SK hynix said it sincerely welcomes and appreciates SAMR’s merger clearance for the deal.

…

Storage news ticker – December 22

By

Chris Mellor

-

December 22, 2021

…

iXsystems has introduced TrueCharts, a first app catalog for TrueNAS SCALE, its scale-out storage and hyperconverged infrastructure offering. It includes Kubernetes for deploying containerised (e.g. Docker) applications. Many apps are now preconfigured for easy deployment using a TrueNAS-enhanced implementation of Helm Charts. Users and third parties can now build catalogs of application charts for deployment with the ease of an app store experience. TrueCharts delivers over 180 easily-deployed and diverse applications to the TrueNAS community and is free/Open Source.

…

Mawari, an XR streaming system provider, announced its 3DXR Content Streaming Platform for the Metaverse will debut on the AWS Marketplace next month. It’s a managed and curated software catalogue from Amazon Web Services that allows customers to find, buy and immediately deploy third party software. This platform leverages the ultra-low latencies enabled by AWS Wavelength which embeds AWS compute and storage services at the edge of 5G networks and enables developers to build applications and services that require increased speeds, massive bandwidth, and ultra-low latency.

…

Soda, a provider of data reliability tools and an observability platform, announced a partnership with Xebia’s data & AI consultancy, GoDataDriven. It includes the co-development of a new Open Source Software (OSS) Spark library that supports organisations with a big data friendly offering for maintaining data quality, and an agreement to build optimal data quality workflows for joint customers.

…

*Toshiba graphic for Rainer Kaiser’s blog showing Toshiba’s highest-capacity drive – a 9-platter 18TB product.*

We saw an advance issue of a blog by Toshiba Electronics Europe senior manager Rainer Kaese (The Value of Hard Disk Drives Still Evident) in which he discusses 18TB, 9-platter FC-MAMR drives and says: “Further generations of MAMR, combined with a larger magnetic surface and more platters will soon bring +20TB capacities to single HDD units.” “Platters” plural indicates 11-platter drives are coming and not just 10 platters. He also writes with reference to Shingled Magnetic Recording; “the benefit of up to double the capacity on the same physical resource is very compelling.” We had understood, from Western Digital, that shingling provided 15 per cent to 20 per cent extra capacity, not up to double. Does he mean that, for example, Toshiba’s latest 18TB drive could be a 36TB capacity drive with shingling? We have asked Toshiba about this.

Update, Jan 4, 2022 – Rainer Kaese’s reply is: “15% to 20% gain through SMR is true for highly capacity optimized CMR-based Nearline Disks. However, for client HDD in the lower TB range ( = not optimized yet for the highest capacity) gain could be double. (i.e. Toshiba P300: CMR 1 platter 1TB, SMR 2TB; CMR 3 platter 3TB, SMR 6TB, similar situation for L200 – what used to be 2TB with CMR is now 4TB with SMR).”

…

Weebit Nano, a ReRAM (Resistive Random-Access Memory) developer has announced it has received from manufacturing the first silicon wafers that integrate its embedded ReRAM module inside complete subsystem demonstration chips. The chips will be used for testing and characterisation, as well as for demonstration to potential customers. The demo chips will allow customers to run applications to test Weebit’s ReRAM technology ahead of potential commercial orders and volume production for their specific chips.

…

Brrr – Coldago goes on its annual file and object mapping exercise

By

Chris Mellor

-

December 22, 2021

Research analyst Philippe Nicolas, otherwise known as monsieur Coldago, has issued its 2021 editions of its file and object storage maps, which list and ranks vendors. Surprisingly WekaIO is not a file storage leader and neither is Scality, a leader in object storage.

The maps position vendors in four columns ranged along a vision and strategy axis from left (niches) through specialists and challengers to leaders (right). There is a vertical axis running from low to high and rating execution and capabilities. The size of a vendor’s dot indicates its market presence.

File storage leaders ranked in execution and capabilities order are DDN, NetApp, IBM, Pure Storage, Qumulo and VAST Data. Intel, with DAOS, is not mentioned, and neither is Egnyte.

The file storage map;

We note that HPE has a low ranking and it partners with several file storage vendors.

The leading object storage vendors are IBM, Pure Storage, NetApp, Hitachi Vantara, Cloudian and MinIO. The object storage map;

HPE has no presence and, again, it partners with object storage vendors. The two storage map reports are available from Coldago as paid-for research.

Cohesity files for IPO

By

Chris Mellor

-

December 21, 2021

Cohesity, the data management vendor, has filed for an IPO. According to a Bloomberg report, the target valuation for the company ranges from $5bn up to $10bn.

Cohesity today said it has submitted a confidential draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.” (SEC)

It said “the number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. The initial public offering is expected to take place after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions.”

The SEC filing will, assuming a successful review, reveal details of Cohesity’s financial performance over the past few quarters. This will make interesting reading.

Backblaze signalled its intention to go public last month, but otherwise storage-flavoured IPOs have been thin on the ground recently. We anticipate the Cohesity IPO will take place in the first half of 2022.

NewsPaperStorages and File System News

NewsPaperStorages and File System News

Interview with a Rubrik MSP channel partner

Hitachi Vantara rated as best primary storage for large enterprises by GigaOm

Exec advisors to guide Hammerspace on strategy and tactics

Comment

WekaIO ramps up its funding to $140 million

Storage news ticker tape – January 4

Speed demon: Samsung and Intel demo PCIe gen 5 SSD setup

SK Hynix rebrands so solid SSD crew – Solidigm

Solidigm product portfolio

Storage news ticker tape – December 24

Storage news ticker tape – December 23

Storage news ticker – December 22

Brrr – Coldago goes on its annual file and object mapping exercise

Cohesity files for IPO

ABOUT US

FOLLOW US