A DCIGblog by Lead Analyst Ken Clipperton claims “The DRAM era of memory — volatile, scarce, and expensive — is drawing to a close. The era of big memory — large, persistent, virtualized, and composable — is about to replace it.” It declares “We are in the early phases of a persistent-memory-enabled revolution in performance, cost, and capacity. Multiple vendors are now shipping storage class memory in their enterprise servers and storage systems. Now that storage class memories are available in production volumes, the ecosystem is coming together. The revolution has begun.”
…
Seagate announced the retirement of Steve Luczo from its board of directors effective October 20, 2021. He served as the company’s chair from 2002 to 2020 and has served on the board since 1998. Mr Luczo joined Seagate in October 1993 as SVP of Corporate Development. In September 1997, he was promoted to the position of president and COO. He became CEO and a member of the board of directors in July 1998. After resigning as CEO in July 2004, he remained as chair of the board of directors, and was later again appointed as Seagate’s president and CEO in 2009, serving in the role until 2017. It’s the end of an era at Seagate.
Stephen Luczo.
Luczo will be remembered for running a tight disk-focussed ship, and also for what he did not do: get Seagate into the flash and SSD business. The ongoing increase in demand for nearline storage means that Seagate has been able to weather the SSD cannibalisation of the PC, notebook and mission-critical 2.5-inch disk drive markets. But Seagate is, for now, a one-trick, 3.5-inch, nearline disk drive pony.
…
SK hynix has received an ISO 26262: 2018 FSM (Functional Safety Management) certification — the international standard for functional safety in automotive semiconductors. It was awarded by the global automotive functional safety certification institute, TUV Nord. It claims this certification provides SK hynix with a solid foundation to lead the automotive semiconductor memory market forward.
…
Reuters reported Toshiba has announced a plan to spin-off two component businesses: its energy and infrastructure business, and its device and storage business. Toshiba itself would still own a 40.6 per cent stake in NAND Flash and SSD maker Kioxia and aim to sell that — either through a Kioxia IPO, or sale — and return the cash to its shareholders. This plan is an attempt to return the company to health after a series of disasters such as the Westinghouse nuclear power station building problems that led to Kioxia being divested in 2018 and to activist investors getting their hooks into the company.
…
As promised in yesterday’s Ticker, we have a confirmed winner in the “fastest storage vendor to reach exascale” stakes. WekaIO has an exabyte under management in just under four years, but the title goes to Infinidat. The latter announced in 2017 that customers had deployed two exabytes from the time the Infinidat product was introduced a couple of years before that. Weka CMO Barbara Murphy graciously said: “Congratulations to the Infinidat team for their phenomenal growth.”
We understand that Infinidat actually sold 2EB of storage where Weka’s 1EB is managed and so includes all the data on object/cloud tiers.
Kioxia has launched EM6 SSDs accessed over RoCE NVMe-over-Fabric links and installed in a 24-slot EBOF — an Ethernet Bunch of Flash box — capable of pumping out 20 million random read IOPS.
Getting your head around this can be tricky. Think of a 2-rack unit Ethernet-accessed JBOF (Just a Bunch of Flash) with 12x 200Gbit/sec uplift ports to hosts which support RoCE (RDMA Over Converged Ethernet). This box is called an ES2000 and made by Foxconn subsidiary Ingrasys. Inside the ES2000 is a Marvell 98EX5630 Ethernet Switch that provides the 12 uplink ports and also connects to 24 SSDs inside the box. There is also an Intel Atom management CPU with 8GB of DDR4 memory to run its software.
The 98EX5630 connects to up to 24 hot-swap NVMe SSDs which can be in U.2 or the E3.S ruler form factor, or to 48 hot-swap NVMe SSDs in the thinner E1.S ruler format drives.
Blocks and Files ES2000 diagram.
Kioxia’s EM6 drives are in the 2.5-inch format and hence will be found in 24-slot versions off the ES2000. The ES2000’s 20 million IOPS rating comes from, we think, having it filled with 48 E1.Sdrives as there will be more parallelism with 48 drives than 24. Also Kioxia’s EM6 announcement makes no mention of a 20 million IOPS capability, reinforcing that assumption.
The EM6 comes in 3.84TB or 7.658TB capacities with a one Drive Write Per Day (DWPD) endurance rating. They are native NVMe SSDs fitted with a Marvell 88SN2400 NVMe-oF SSD converter controller that provides dual-port 256Gbit/sec Ethernet access. Having 24 of them would total up to 48 links.
Lid-off unpopulated ES2000 chassis.
Kioxia says that the EM6 Series drives which support NVMe v1.4 and NVMe-oF v1.1, expose the entire SSD bandwidth to the network. The ES2000 can provide a high-availability (HA) for high-performance computing hosts because it can have multiple and redundant network connections between the hosts and the NVME SSDs. It can also provide scalable throughput by adding SSDs up to the enclosure’s maximum and then by adding enclosures.
The company also suggests that, in a high-availability disaggregated block storage expansion use case, the same configuration could accommodate multiple host systems, providing shared and scalable block storage with high bandwidth utilisation of the NVMe SSDs.
The EM6 drives EM6 Series drives have successfully undergone NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage (GDS) certification testing so they can hook up to NVIDIA A100-based systems forAI and other GPU-driven applications. Kioxia says the EM6 drives are available now through Ingrasys and doesn’t mention any other channel.
Kioxia has not revealed the type of flash used in the EM6 SSDs. We suspect it’s 96-layer BiCS4 generation flash organised in TLC (3bits/cell) format.
It seems to us at Blocks and Files that the two capacity options are limited and we might have expected a 15.6TB variant as well. Kioxia has just announced its CD7 SSD in the ES.3 format and it is strange that this is not available for the ES2000. Conceptually it would seem possible to stick a Marvell 88SN2400 controller front end on it, and maybe that work is going on behind the scenes.
Kioxia also produces KumoScale storage software systems which can scale to hundreds of storage nodes. These are certified servers running KumoScale software and fitted with Kioxia NVMe SSDs. The Kumoscale software supports NVMe-oF RoCE and NVMe/TCP access. Kumoscale systems are available through suppliers such as Supermicro, Tyan and Quanta.
High-end, all-flash, enterprise filer supplier VAST Data has appointed George Axberg, a 16-year Dell EMC veteran, as its VP of the Data Protection division.
We’re told he is responsible for leading and expanding VAST Data’s position within the Data Protection and Security market, as well as defining VAST Data’s sales strategy and execution plans. The aim is to apply VAST’s Universal Storage to all data protection use cases and establish the company as the essential data protection storage platform.
VAST Data president Michael Wing said: “His expertise and leadership at VAST will help drive the next major inflection point in data protection applications: the move from disk to all-flash architectures.”
Do we smell FlashBlade competition coming?
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Pure’s FlashBlade, launched in March 2016, has reached the billion dollar sales level. It is an all-flash array marketed as a fast restore, data protection, backup target system, and pioneered the all-flash backup storage target market. The system has an effective maximum capacity of 3.3PB.
George Axberg.
FlashBlade uses TLC (3bits/cell) NAND whereas VAST uses less expensive QLC (4bits/cell) flash. Pure positions FlashBlade as a backup storage system, separate from and alongside its primary storage FlashArray. VAST says its Universal Storage system, launched in February 2019, three years after FlashBlade arrived, supports both primary and secondary (backup) use cases and can scale out to multiple petabytes.
It says customers can deploy Universal Storage to restore and recover thousands of virtual machines in minutes, not hours, and at a cost that is comparable to hard-drive-based backup appliances.
Axberg said: “VAST Data’s all-flash storage architecture can help companies recover data up to 50 times faster than HDD-based systems. This is the biggest thing to happen to backup targets since they moved from tape to disk 20 years ago.”
DDN’s latest Lustre-based AI400X2 array is faster than a WekaIO system running in Amazon’s cloud.
The STAC benchmark council tests audited system stacks running benchmark tests suited to the applications favoured by the council’s members in the financial services sector. This DDN stack under test was KX’s kdb+ 4.0 DBMS distributed across 15 Intel HNS2600BPB servers using DDN EXAScaler 6.0.0 software to access a single DDN AI400X2 All-Flash appliance through a parallel filesystem. The results are available on the STAC website.
DDN highlighted that it was faster than a system in a public cloud involving a parallel filesystem with 15 database servers, 40 storage servers, and previous versions of the kdb+ STAC Packs. That benchmark is also available from STAC.
It involved kdb+ 4.0 on 15 Amazon EC2 C5n.9xlarge instances with Intel Xeon Platinum 8124 CPU @ 3.0GHz and WekaIO’s WekaFS v3.10.1 Parallel Filesystem on 40x Amazon EC2 i3en.6xlarge instances. The DDN benchmark Intel servers were fitted with Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs. It was faster than the WekaIO-based system in in 12 of 17 mean response time Antuco benchmarks and 12 of 24 mean response time Kanaga benchmarks.
DDN’s AI400X2 STAC result was also faster than a 3-node Dell PowerScale F900 all-flash system and nine database servers in 11 of 17 mean response time Antuco benchmarks.
In the tense game of poker whose stakes are defining the component interconnect post-PCIe, the Gen-Z consortium has folded. It will be absorbed into the Computer Express Link (CXL) initiative.
CXL is based on PCIe 5. We wrote in April last year: “CXL and Gen-Z technologies are read and write memory semantic protocols focused on low latency sharing of memory and storage resource pools for processing engines like CPUs, GPUs, AI accelerators or FPGAs.” At that time the two consortia announced a memorandum of understanding which opened the door to future collaboration on a combined CXL/Gen-Z specification.
It’s taken a long time — 19 months — for that effort to come into the open. But the two consortia have issued a joint statement saying they have signed “a Letter of Intent which, if passed and agreed upon by all parties, would transfer the Gen-Z Specifications and all Gen-Z assets to the CXL Consortium”.
Both organisations now want to focus on “the development of a memory coherent interface under the CXL Consortium with CXL as the sole industry standard moving forward”.
Jim Pappas, CXL Consortium board chairman and Hiren Patel, Gen-Z Consortium president, say in the statement: “We believe that this is the right step forward for our members and the industry ecosystem.”
Clearly this will avoid duplicating component interconnect development efforts and wasteful competitive work. It seems clear that CXL has more momentum that Gen-Z and a unified development will give up-stack developers of, for example, datacentre composability systems a single interconnect on which to base their efforts.
Seagate has produced an NVMe-accessed bunch of disk drives at the Open Compute Summit, with a 2U JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) enclosure housing 12x 3.5-inch disk drives and accessed through an onboard PCIe 3 switch.
NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is a parallel access protocol for flash (non-volatile) storage, whereas hard disk drives (HDD), with one or latterly two read-write head actuators, have traditionally been accessed by serial protocols such as SAS and SATA, which are much slower. But, even so, the the NVM Express organisation released the NVMe v2.0 spec in June this year, broadening NVMe’s scope to cover enterprise and client SSDs, removable cards, compute accelerators and HDDs.
Seagate announced its NVMe-accessed HDDs in a blog, writing: “The implementation provides integrated NVMe protocol support within the HDD controller itself and requires no bridge. The goal is to pave the way for a seamless consolidated NVMe interface across HDDs and SSDs.“
Seagate OCP NVMe HDD demo graphic.
In its view this will support streamlined storage composability, reduced total cost of ownership (TCO); energy savings; streamlined feature development, performance enhancements, minimised components required for infrastructure systems; easier and more flexible scaling; and the removal of proprietary code.
The Seagate demonstration system used ports with a native NVMe SoC featuring tri-mode transceivers supporting SAS, SATA and NVMe. It included support for multi-actuator hard drives, which Seagate has been developing (MACH.2), and SNIA Redfish management APIs. A phase two system will add PCIe 4 support and an NVMe-oF x16 RNIC (RDMA Network Interface Card).
Seagate told us: “Engineering demo units of the HDDs with NVMe will be sent to key customers by September 2022. By the middle of 2024, Seagate will ship customer demo units.” That’s 30 months away and today’s Seagate drives may well have given way to 30TB HAMR drives by then. A 12-slot NVMe JBOD containing a dozen of those in multi-actuator form would have 360TB of capacity and possibly 24 or even more actuators. That would help to keep its PCIe lanes busy.
We ask ourselves if Toshiba and Western Digital have similar NVMe HDD systems in their R&D labs, and expect they do.
Cloud backup service supplier Datto reported $157.9 million revenues for calendar Q3 2021, up 20 per cent year-on year, with profits of $13.5 million, up 31 per cent. Tim Weller, Datto CEO, said: “The third quarter was another record quarter for Datto. Our revenue growth exceeded 20 per cent for a second consecutive quarter and our subscription revenue growth continued to accelerate.” It ended the quarter with more than 18,200 MSP partners, a net increase of 400 from the previous quarter. Its guidance for the next quarter is for revenues between $161 and $163 million.
William Blair analyst Jason Ader said: “Strong growth from Datto’s SaaS protection and RMM products, as well as a rebound in core business continuity and disaster recovery, helped drive nearly 20 per cent ARR growth and an estimated 116.6 per cent NRR, with both metrics reaching their highest levels since the start of the pandemic. Looking ahead, management highlighted significant incremental opportunities emerging from the launch of Datto’s new email protection and Azure Continuity products, which address topical focus areas for MSPs and fill important product gaps in the Datto portfolio.”
…
Disaster recovery and backup software supplier FalconStor reported Q3 2021 revenues of $3.3 million compared to $4l.4 million in the year ago calendar quarter. It made a $400,000 profit — down from the year-ago $1.5 million. Subscription revenue was 23 per cent of total revenues, up from 13 per cent a year ago. That saw a a 35 per cent year-over-year increase in software subscription revenue for Q3 and a 54 per cent year-over-year increase for the first nine months of 2021. Quarter-end cash was $3.5 million, compared to $0.9 million in Q3 2020. Todd Brooks, FalconStor CEO, said: “We continue to make solid progress against our strategic plans to reinvent FalconStor and enable secure hybrid cloud backup and data protection. … we accelerated our strategic focus on a recurring revenue model better aligned with today’s market.“
…
Cloud file storage supplier Nasuni has appointed Thomas Stanley to its Board of Directors. A 30-year tech industry veteran, Thomas is Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) for cybersecurity supplier Tanium. Nasuni says it is experiencing record demand for its cloud file storage platform. No doubt Thomas will help enhance its security strategy.
…
WekaIO says its customers are managing more than an exabyte of data with its parallel scale-out filesystem software. The company’s product first became available in December 2017, a shade under four years ago. Weka claims it’s the fastest storage vendor to reach exascale on the market today. It attributes this to the need for file (and S3 object) on-premises and public cloud data for artificial intelligence, machine learning, high-performance data analytics and other GPU-intensive workloads. Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO of WekaIO, said: “We believe our strategy to embrace disk-based S3 object storage as a data lake tier has propelled our growth beyond Exascale. Our software platform has proven that a software solution that integrates high-performance flash storage with low-cost S3-based hard-disk technology is the winning solution.”
(Note: Infinidat, the high-end storage array maker, announced in October 2017 that it had deployed two exabytes of storage. Infinidat launched its InfiniBox array in April 2015. If it reached 2EB shipped 2.5 years after launch that’s faster than WekaIO. We are asking the two firms to check this point and will update if and when we hear back.)
Public cloud SaaS data protector Clumio announced availability of Clumio Protect for Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cluster (EC2). Its air-gapped SQL backups provide ransomware protection for applications, low RPO and RTO with rapid database point-in-time recovery, and an agent-less backup as a service with zero impact to database performance. Clumio Protect for Microsoft SQL Server on EC2 is available now. Clumio Protect also support SQL Server protection on Amazon RDS and VMware Cloud.
…
Inspur is at the Open Compute Project (OCP) summit in San Jose. It has launched, jointly with Samsung, the Poseidon V2 E3.x reference system which adopted composable architecture to maximise the benefits of the EDSFF E3.x form factor. Poseidon V2 system can accommodate PCIe 5 SSDs and various devices like AI/ML accelerators or CXL Memory Expanders. Datacentre users can configure the system according to their application’s needs.
…
Nvidia announced its Quantum-2 400Gbit/sec switches, ConnectX-7 NICs, and BlueField-3 Data Processing Units (DPUs). The switch can support up to 2,048 400Gbit/sec ports, or 4,096 200Gbit/sec ports — five times more than the prior Quantum-1 switches. Quantum-2 switches use a 54 billion transistor chip made with 7nm technology. BlueField-3 DPUs have a 22 billion transistor chip, again built with 7nm technology, with 16x 64-bit Arm CPUs for offloading and isolation (disaggregation) of datacentre infrastructure stacks. Quantum-2 switches are available from Dell, HP Enterprise, Lenovo, Supermicro, QCT, and others. ConnectX-7 NICs will start sampling in January 2022 and BlueField-3 DPU sample shipping will start in May 2022.
…
The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) together with its partners the DMTF, SNIA, and the Gen-Z Consortium, are developing a new open source fabric management “framework” to provide a unified set of tools to control and monitor multiple network fabric types. A Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at SuperComputing ’21 — November 16 at 12:15pm CST (18:15 UTC) — will seek input from the HPC network, storage, and security communities to provide useful tools to meet their needs, as well as open participation in the development of the OpenFabrics Management Framework.
…
OWC announced the world’s fastest and highest capacity PCIe SSD. Its Accelsior 8M2 PCIe flash storage device is for 2019 Mac Pros, Windows or Linux computers, and PCIe expansion systems. Speeds are up to 26GB/sec. The 8M2 has 8x NVMe M.2 SSD slots with four lanes of PCIe 4 lanes and up to 64TB of capacity. It has a softwareRAID capability supporting multiple RAID levels and RAID sets. There is a cooling fan in the aluminium heat shield. The Accelsior 8M2 SSD is available now in capacities ranging from 0TB (add your own drives) starting at $799 and 2TB, 4TB, 8TB, 16TB, 32TB and 64TB models starting at $1,299.
OWC Accelsior 8M2
…
ScaleOut Software announced extensions to its ScaleOut Digital Twin Streaming Service that integrate its Azure-based in-memory computing platform with Microsoft’s Azure Digital Twins cloud service. This integration adds new capabilities for real-time analytics to Azure Digital Twins and unlocks new use cases in a variety of applications, such as predictive maintenance, logistics, telematics, disaster recovery, cyber and physical security, health-device tracking, IoT, smart cities, financial services, and ecommerce. Users can gain real-time, scalable message processing with no-code machine learning, actionable insights and real-time visualisation for Azure Digital Twins.
…
Database company SingleStore announced that Henock Gessesse has joined the company as general counsel. He will contribute his significant business and legal expertise to SingleStore, which added the general counsel position to provide more fuel to its growing operation.
…
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today announced it is being joined by five standards organisations in a dedicated Open Standards Pavilion at SuperComputing ’21. The SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative (SMI) and Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative (CMSI) will be represented along with the CXL Consortium, Ethernet Alliance, Fibre Channel Industry Association, Gen-Z Consortium, and OpenFabrics Alliance. Representatives will be on hand to discuss computational storage, CXL, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Gen-Z, open fabrics, persistent memory, SNIA Swordfish, SSD and SFF standards.
DDN has boosted the sequential bandwidth performance of its high-end A3I AI400X all-flash array almost twice over with an AI400X2 upgraded system in the same chassis.
The A3I arrays are based on DDN’s EXAScaler arrays running Lustre parallel file system software. They are optimised for artificial intelligence (AI) applications and support Nvidia’s DGX servers — the A100, the Pod and the SuperPod.
Update – AI400X2 performance data added. November 11.
Dr James Coomer, SVP of products at DDN, provided an announcement quote: “We designed this next generation of A3I solutions to give customers the most efficient, scalable and reliable AI data platform.” Well, what else would it be for?
DDN AI400X2 array.
As well as the faster performance, the AI400X2 features so-called EXAScaler Hot Node integration, a streamlined user interface and enhanced security. The Hot Node technology, co-developed with Nvidia, caches files on the accessing client’s local NVMe flash storage to speed data access.
The better UI capabilities include granular visibility into AI workloads and client GPU-level utilisation to simplify configuration management and system monitoring, and optimise end-to-end performance. On the security front there are client-side encryption and role-based access control configurations and policies.
Doubled performance
The new AI400X2 uses the same enclosure as the existing AI400X and DDN’s announcement claims it has ”twice the performance of the previous generation appliance in the same footprint”. This refers to its sequential bandwidth as the table below, comparing it to the existing A3I models, illustrates;
Blocks and Files table.
The added performance comes from a change to an internal PCIe Gen 4 switch fabric with up to 288 lanes of PCle Gen 4, plus up to 64 lanes providing client connectivity. We understand that DDN actually measured 94GB/sec sequential read and 70GB/sec sequential write bandwidth, but put more conservative numbers in the datasheet.
The new system also uses four of the latest gen 3 Xeon CPUs and has a larger memory footprint than the AI400X.
EXAScaler base systems
We decided to check the EXAScaler product family to try and discover a base system for the AI400X R2. There are four EXAScaler EXA6 products: ES200NVX, ES400NVX, ES7990X and ES18K.
DDN EXAScaler information.
We can see from our own table above that the AI7990X is clearly based on the ES79909X, the AI200X on the ES200NVX and the AI400X uses the ES400NVX as its base. However there is no EXAScaler base system for the new AI400X2 array. This leads us to expect that an EXAScaler ES400NVX refresh is coming. And, we understand, indeed one is.
Pure Storage says it’s launching another FlashArray system on December 8.
The marketing blurb gushes about “an entirely new level of performance to the FlashArray family, powering the next era of cloud-like scale with Pure Fusion. Delivering performance and agility never before seen behind the firewall, the new FlashArray platform is designed to support your most demanding business-critical applications. It’s your power and your cloud.”
A launch microsite provides a few clues about the new system in its text:
Pure Storage’s December 8 FlashArray//X launch microsite.
The implication here is that the new FlashArray will be a scale-out and scale-up system. Witness this text: “Power more business services with bigger databases, more users, and more app workloads — all on fewer arrays.”
We are told the new systems will “blow past current IOPS, latency, and throughput targets”. That surely means faster controller processors, faster internal networking and external network access speeds, and data access from quicker responding media. Thus the lower latency claim.
The current FlashArray//X can use Optane storage-class memory for caching which enables its latency to be “as low as 100µs”.
Pure Fusion is a way of federating Pure devices, on- and off-premises, with a cloud-like hyperscaler consumption model. It includes a self-service, autonomous, SaaS management plane, enhanced Pure1 operational management, and Portworx Data Services (PDS).
FlashArray//X release 3
There are two FlashArray// systems currently: the //X R3 family and low end //C products. The R3 family consists of the //X10, //X20, //X50, //X70 and //X90 models along with a DirectFlash Shelf.
Pure’s FlashArray//X R3 product family.
We believe we are looking at a fourth release of the FlashArray//X family with non-disruptive upgrades to the new range, probably by controller swap-outs, with the new controllers using later generation Xeon (or AMD) CPUs. There may also be new and higher-capacity flash drives in the systems.
Ukrainian national Yaroslav Vasinskyi was arrested in Poland on October 8 under a sealed US Justice Department indictment, accusing him of committing the Kaseya ransomware attack in July this year and trying to extort a $70 million ransom.
Kaseya’s VSA remote monitoring and management tool was used as an attack vector to inject ransomware into the systems of up to 1,500 end-customers of some 30 managed service providers (MSPs) at the start of the USA’s Independence Day weekend on July 2 this year.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke at a press conference on November 8 and said: “Vasinskyi crossed the border from Ukraine into Poland. There, upon our request, Polish authorities arrested him pursuant to a provisional arrest warrant. We have now requested that he be extradited from Poland to the United States pursuant to the extradition treaty between our countries.”
Garland said that: “On July 2, the multinational information software company Kaseya and its customers were attacked by one of the most prolific strains of ransomware, known as REvil, or Sodinokibi. To date REvil ransomware has been deployed on approximately 175,000 computers worldwide, with at least $200 million paid in ransom.”
Vasinski arrest announcement video. Source: Reuters. The transcription software needs a little help as “Kassala” should be “Kaseya.”
He added that: “The Justice Department has seized $6.1 million tied to the ransom proceeds of another alleged REvil ransom where attacker, Russian national Yevgyeniy Polyanin … [who] is alleged to have conducted approximately 3,000 random ransomware attacks. … Polyanin ultimately extorted approximately $13 million from his victims.”
Vasinskyi and Polyanin could face sentences of up to 100 years in jail if convicted in the USA.
Kaseya’s CISO hire
Separately Kaseya has appointed Jason Manar as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) in October. Manar was assistant special agent in charge for the FBI overseeing cyber, counterintelligence, intelligence and the language service programs for the San Diego office.
Fred Voccola, Kaseya’s CEO, said: “We worked closely with him during the July attack on Kaseya’s VSA customers and were so impressed with his qualifications and handling of the situation that we asked him to join Kaseya as CISO. We only hire the best, and Jason is top-of-the-line.”
Commenting on the VSA ransomware attack, Manar said: “Kaseya provided the most transparency of any company I have seen, by delivering near-real-time information to its customers. I was amazed to see the level of commitment, care, and integrity Kaseya showed; it surpassed anything I had seen in 16 years.”
Wider anti-REvil activities
Interpol has announced that a four-year operation across five continents has disrupted a ransomware cybercrime gang, with the arrest of seven suspects. The operation was codenamed Quicksand (or GoldDust) and carried out by 19 law enforcement agencies in 17 countries. They were focussed on a global threat picture about attacks by ransomware software families, particularly GandCrab and REvil-Sodinokibi, and suspects behind them.
The suspects arrested during Operation Quicksand are suspected of perpetrating tens of thousands of ransomware attacks and demanding more than €200 million in ransom. Interpol said private partners Trend Micro, CDI, Kaspersky Lab and Palo Alto Networks contributed to the investigations by sharing information and technical expertise.
Bitdefender supported operations by releasing tailor-made decryption tools to unlock ransomware and enable victims to recover files. This enabled more than 1,400 companies to decrypt their networks, saving them almost €475 million in potential losses. KPN, McAfee, and S2W helped investigations by providing cyber and malware technical expertise to Interpol and its member countries.
The Europol organisation, which participated in Operation Quicksand/GoldDust, said that, on November 4, Romanian authorities arrested two individuals suspected of cyber-attacks by deploying Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware. They are allegedly responsible for 5,000 infections, which in total pocketed €500,000 in ransom payments. Since February 2021, law enforcement authorities have arrested three other affiliates of Sodinokibi/REvil and two suspects connected to GandCrab.
Additionally, in February, April and October this year, authorities in South Korea arrested three affiliates involved in the GandCrab and Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware families, which had more than 1,500 victims.
On November 4, Kuwaiti authorities arrested another GandGrab affiliate, meaning a total of seven suspects linked to the two ransomware families have been arrested since February 2021. They are suspected of attacking about 7,000 victims in total.
US anti-ransomware vigour
Reported ransomware payments in the United States so far have reached $590 million in the first half of 2021, compared to a total of $416 million in 2020.
US president Joe Biden met Russian president Vladimir Putin in June, and said that the USA would take action to stop the activities of international cyber-criminals. What we see with the US Justice Department, Interpol and Europol activities above is that pledge put into action.
The US Department of State announced a Transnational Organized Crime Reward offer of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of any individual(s) who hold a key leadership position in the Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware variant transnational organised crime group.
It also also announced a reward offer of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction in any country of any individual conspiring to participate in or attempting to participate in a Sodinokibi variant ransomware incident.
The US Treasury Department announced that it was taking actions against Chatex, a virtual currency exchange for facilitating financial transactions for ransomware actors. Analysis of Chatex’s known transactions indicates that over half are directly traced to illicit or high-risk activities such as darknet markets, high-risk exchanges, and ransomware. Chatex has direct ties with Suex, using Suex’s function as a nested exchange to conduct transactions. Suex was sanctioned on September 21, 2021, for facilitating financial transactions for ransomware actors.
Latvian government authorities have suspended with immediate effect the operations of Chatextech; assessed a fine for breaches of company registration and business conduct laws and regulations; and will identify current and former Chatextech board members — none of whom were Latvian nationals — in Latvia’s registry of high-risk individuals.
Comment
It is now clear that the US State Department, Treasury Department, Interpol, Europol, South Korea and Kuwait are acting in a concerted and organised manner to identify, interdict, arrest and hopefully convict the perpetrators of ransomware — wherever they are.
Such activity will be welcomed by all victims of ransomware attacks.
Archiver and cross-silo data manager StrongBox Data appears to have lost its exec leadership team, and a new CEO has been appointed.
The company’s StrongLink software provides a single file and object namespace across on-premises and public cloud locations with policy-driven tiering, migration, business continuity and disaster recovery. Data can be indexed, ingested and accessed via a variety of protocols, such as NFS, SMB, S3 and LTFS.
Update: Andrew Hall has been appointed as the new StrongBox CEO. 10 November 2022.
Its CEO is — or was — Floyd Christofferson, and the company numbers NASA, the Library of Congress, Bosch, Canon, Amadeus and numerous other well-known organisations as its customers. In October it was functioning normally, and announced a distribution agreement with Titan Data Solutions — a value-added distributor in the UK and Benelux, offering end-to-end data management solutions and cybersecurity services.
StrongBox Data Solutions (SBDS) was a privately owned, multi-vendor data management and tiering company. It was bought out by CEO David Cerf in March 2016 from ETI-NET, which had bought Strongbox and Sphinx products from crashed and burning Crossroads. The main product was then StrongLink which harvested stored file metadata and provided cross-storage tier data movement to optimise file storage performance and cost.
In late 2017 The Quebec-based Fonds de solidarité FTQ, a C$13 billion development capital investment fund, put $20 million into SBDS’ parent company, along with $7 million from SBDS controlling shareholder Partner One Capital. This was intended to help StrongBox expand around the globe.
Christofferson was appointed CEO in February 2019 with Erik Murrey becoming the CTO a month earlier. Anne Murrey, the CMO for PartnerOne, was StrongBox’s marketing head but resigned in July this year.
PartnerOne Capital presents itself as a leader in Big Data management through hyper-automation, virtualised cloud tiering, metadata and artificial intelligence. We view it as a private equity operation with Big Data management being its investment focus. It says it is a portfolio company and owns several companies specialising in enterprise tape, virtual tape, and storage management solutions. PartnerOne lists portfolio company CEOs on its own company web page. Examples include Brian Hawley, Luminex Software president, Riz Khaliq, Assima CEO, and Cort Dougan, CEO at FSMLabs. There is no overall PartnerOne CEO. There is a board of directors of course, and Andrew Hall is listed as its Portfolio Manager.
With all this in mind it rather looks as if SBDS is going through an executive namespace reorganisation of its own with some execs tiered out to cold storage, so to speak. We have sent off an inquiry to the company’s spokesperson and a spokesperson said: “There have been a few changes at StrongBox. … Andrew Hall [is] the new CEO …PartnerOne is putting additional investment into StrongBox, driving some improved product enhancements and leveraging PartnerOne’s resources.”
Andrew Hall was the overall PartnerOne portfolio manager before assuming the StrongBox CEO role.
