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

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

PCIe generation speeds.

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.

Intel CES video

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
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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.

Rob Crooke

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: 

Solidigm SSD portfolio
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
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…

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).

…

XPG VAULT.

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
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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 1st 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
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…

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.
Rainer Kaese.

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
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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
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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.

DPU wars: NVIDIA claims BlueField-2 faster than Fungible – and test details show it

By
Chris Mellor
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NVIDIA says its BlueField-2 smartNIC/DPU can link a storage system to a server and run four times as fast as Fungible’s competing hardware and software. But it did not reveal details of its test, making for confusion and incomplete understanding – until detailed tables were supplied, showing an awesome 55 million IOPS number – possibly served from a DRAM cache.

Update 1: NVIDIA BlueField-2 NVMe/TCP and NVMe RoCE detailed numbers tables added. 21 Dec 2021. More Fungible test details added as well.

Update 2: NVIDIA served the data blocks from the storage targets DRAM making this a networking test and not a storage test. It is not directly comparable with Fungible at all. 21 Dec 2021.

NVIDIA’s headline claim, in a blog, by Ami Badani, VP Marketing and DevRel Ecosystem, is that its BlueField-2 data processing unit (DPU) more than quadruples the previous record holder by exceeding 41 million IOPS between server and storage.

But the blog does not reveal the data transport protocol, the data block size nor whether it was for read or write operations – meaning we cannot assess real world relevance at all until the missing details are revealed.

The blog cites these  performance numbers using BlueField-2:

  • >5 million 4KB IOPS with NVMe/TCP
  • 7 million to 20 million 512B IOPS with NVMe/TCP with the variation unexplained
  • 41.5 million IOPS with unspecified block size and transport; presumably RoCE

It says NVMe/RocE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) is faster than NVMe/TCP, but no numbers are cited to justify this.

B&F diagram of NVIDIA BlueField-2 – HPE Server setup

The blog describes the testing methodology and configuration (see diagram above). It says there were two HPE Proliant DL380 Gen 10 Plus servers, one as the application server (storage initiator) and one as the storage system (storage target). Each server had two Intel “Ice Lake” Xeon Platinum 8380 CPUs clocked at 2.3GHz, giving 160 hyperthreaded cores per server, along with 512GB of DRAM, 220MB of L2/L3 cache (110MB) per socket) and a PCIe Gen4 bus. 

We are also told for example that the initiator and target systems were connected with “NVIDIA LinkX 100GbE Direct-Attach Copper (DAC) passive cables.” Wonderful.

We are informed that: “Three different storage initiators were benchmarked: SPDK, the standard kernel storage initiator, and the FIO plugin for SPDK. Workload generation and measurements were run with FIO and SPDK. I/O sizes were tested using 4KB and 512B, which are common medium and small storage I/O sizes, respectively.”

But the cited performance numbers are not connected to SPDK, the standard kernel storage initiator, or the FIO plugin. The storage initiator ran either a default Linux kernel 4.18 or the newer v5.15 Linux kernel – which performed better but, again, no comparison numbers are revealed.

Then we are told: “The NVMe-oF storage protocol was tested with both TCP and RoCE at the network transport layer. Each configuration was tested with 100 per cent read, 100 per cent write and 50/50 read/write workloads with full bidirectional network utilisation.”

Given this level of detail it is then absurd that the blog cites IOPS numbers without identifying which ones were with RoCE – it does say a couple were with NVMe/TCP – and which ones were all-read, all-write or a mixed read/write setup. It just gives us bald numbers instead.

However, on reaching out to NVIDIA it kindly supplied two tables detailing the specific numbers for NVMe/TCP and NVMe RoCE test runs:

NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU Tests using NMe-oF on TCP. Each test result shows the combined performance of two BlueField-2 DPUs.

The 41.5 million IOPS number was achieved with NVMe/TCP using 512B data blocks in a 100 per cent read run. We were surprised, thinking it would have needed NVMe RoCE. But, surprise, guess what we found when we looked at the second table?

NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU Tests using NVMe-oF RoCE. Each test result shows the combined performance of two BlueField-2 DPUs.

In fact, NVMe RoCE is faster than NVMe/TCP as the fourth line of the table shows, specifying the SPDK kernel, and showing a 46 million IOPS result with 512B blocks and 100 per cent reads. The fifth and sixth lines show 54 million IOPS, with 512B blocks and a 50-50 read/write mix, and 55 million IOPS with 100 per cent writes and 512B blocks. Why the blog highlights the 41.5 million IOPS number instead of the much higher 55 million IOPS number is a hard question to answer.

We understand from a source that the NVIDIA storage target served the data blocks from DRAM and not from NVMe SSDs, which make comparison to real world numbers hard. Here are two tweets confirming this;

And;

/dev/null means a virtual device and not a real device like an NVMe SSD. No data was sent to or fetched from any SSD here.

NVIDIA’s blog claims: “The 41.5 million IOPS reached by BlueField is more than 4x the previous world record of 10 million IOPS, set using proprietary storage offerings,” but provides no reference to this 10 million IOPS test so we have no official  idea of the system configuration used.

Fungible comparison

We believe it refers to a Fungible system which was rated at 10 million IOPS using its Storage Initiator cards.  This test system featured a Fungible FS1600 24-slot NVMe SSD array as the storage target. The app server was a Gigabyte R282-Z93 box with a dual 64-core AMD EPYC 7763 processor, 2TB of memory, and five PCIe 4 expansion slots.

These slots were filled with Fungible S1 cards and they linked to single FS1600 equipped with two Fungible DPU chips. A 100Gbit switched Ethernet LAN linked the Gigabyte server and FS1600 and 4K data blocks were used in a 100 operation cent read situation.

So a single Gigabyte 128-core server with 5 x Fungible DPUs linked over 100GbitE to a twin-DPU storage target reached 10 million 4K read IOPS. The NVIDIA test  reached 56 million write IOPS with 512B blocks, using a 160-core server and dual BlueField DPUs talking over a 4 x 100GbitE link to a 160-core storage initiator front-ended by two Bluefield-2 DPUs with data served to/from /dev/null. It certainly appears that NVIDIA basically ran a network test and used a far more powerful storage server than Fungible and possibly 4x the bandwidth.

We’d love to have the detailed performance numbers and link configuration/protocol details for both suppliers’ tests, and understand the price/performance numbers here, to be able to properly compare the NVIDIA and Fungible setups. But, as it is, all we can see are two suppliers pushing out hero numbers with NVIDIA’s being more detailed and an impressive 5.5 times higher than Fungible’s but artificially so. Let’s see what Fungible can do to match, exceed or rebut it.

Hot DRAM: Micron’s NAND/DRAM money machine delivers record Q1 revenues

By
Chris Mellor
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Micron revenues rose 33 per cent to $7.69 billion in its first fiscal 2022 quarter, ended December 2, 2021, as DRAM and NAND sales boomed to a record first quarter level.

There was a profit of $2.31 billion, a 187.7 per cent rise year-on-year, and representing 30 per cent of its revenues.

President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a results statement: “Micron delivered solid fiscal first quarter results led by strong product portfolio momentum. We are now shipping our industry-leading DRAM and NAND technologies across major end markets, and we delivered new solutions to data center, client, mobile, graphics and automotive customers. “

The market for its products looks good: “As powerful secular trends including 5G, AI, and EV adoption fuel demand growth, our technology leadership and world-class execution position us to create significant shareholder value in fiscal 2022 and beyond.”

A seasonal pattern in quarterly revenues is apparent from fy2019 onwards

His results presentation talked of “outstanding results and solid profitability. Micron is “on track to deliver record revenue and robust profitability in fiscal 2022.” This will be helped by Micron rapidly ramping its 1-alpha, said to be industry-leading, and 176-layer NAND products and achieving excellent yields; these products are now shipping across its major end markets. ” 

DRAM represented 73 per cent of its revenues in the quarter, $5.6 billion – up 38 per cent annually, with NAND making up 24 per cent at $1.84 billion, a 19 per cent annual increase.

Revenues by business unit:

  • Compute and networking – $3.4 billion, up 34 per cent Y/Y
  • Mobile – $1.91 billion, up 27 per cent
  • Storage – $1.15 billion, up 26 per cent
  • Embedded – $1.22 billion – the second highest in Micron’s history and up 51 per cent – reflecting strength in auto and IoT markets.

The auto growth momentum was mentioned by Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers, who said Micron currently sees Level 3 ADAS designs with 140GB of DRAM capacity vs. Gartner estimates that it’s currently at ~2.5GB/vehicle today. In NAND, Micron is seeing Level 3 ADAS vehicles with 1TB of capacity versus Gartner estimates of ~70GB/vehicle currently. These are huge rises.

Financial summary:

  • Gross margin – 46.4 per cent compared to 30.1 per cent a year ago
  • Cash from operations – $3.9 billion
  • Diluted EPS – $2.04 compared to $0.71 a year ago
  • Cash and cash equivalents – $8.68bn

Mehrotra said Micron was combatting supply chain issues with longer-term arrangements: ”We are seeing greater commitment and collaboration on supply planning, including the use of long-term agreements. Today, over 75 per cent of our revenue comes from volume-based annual agreements, a significant increase from five years ago when they accounted for around 10 per cent of our revenue.“

Micron will deal with demand for denser chips by employing transitions to smaller nodes in DRAM and continued layer count increases in 3D NAND. This strategy could run out of steam for DRAM after 2025 and it may then have to add more DRAM foundry capacity on a greenfield site.

The outlook for next quarter is for revenues of  $7.5 billion plus/minus $200 million, a 20.3 per cent increase year-on-year. It is planning to deliver record revenue with solid profitability in FY22 with stronger bit shipment growth in the second half of the fiscal year.

Christmas storage quiz

By
Chris Mellor
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Think you know the storage industry? Here is a quiz to test your knowledge. See if you can name pictured CEOs, match press release descriptions to suppliers, explain what acronyms mean, name more CEOs, and match logo symbols to suppliers. Answers at the bottom of this article.

Nine CEOs

Name the nine storage CEOs in this set of pictures:

Can you recognise them from their profile?

Storage companies like to provide concise descriptions of what they are about in their press releases. See if you can match the descriptions to the suppliers in the categories below:

a) File sharing suppliers – CTERA, Nasuni and Egnyte

A leading provider of cloud file storage,

A leader in cloud content security and governance

The edge-to-cloud file services leader

b) Storage software suppliers  – Databricks, DataCore Software, Delphix, Diamanti, Komprise, Minio, Nutanix, SingleStore, Snowflake, and WekaIO:

The data platform for AI,

The data and AI company,

A leader in hybrid multicloud computing

The leader in analytics-driven data management as a service,

The largest independent vendor of Software-Defined Storage solutions, 

The Data Cloud company,

The industry leading data company for DevOps,

The company that streamlines Kubernetes applications and data management for global enterprises,

The single database for all data-intensive applications,

A pioneer in high performance, Kubernetes-native object storage.

c) SmartNIC and DPU suppliers – Fungible, Liqid, Nebulon and Pensando:

The world’s leading software company delivering data center composability,

A pioneer in data-centric computing,

The leader in distributed computing for the new edge,

The pioneer of smart infrastructure, server-embedded infrastructure software delivered as-a-service.

d) Array suppliers – DDN, Hitachi Vantara, Infinidat, NetApp, Pure Storage, Qumulo and VAST Data:

A global cloud-led, data-centric software company,

The global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and multicloud data management solutions

The digital infrastructure, data management and analytics, and digital solutions subsidiary of …

The storage software company breaking decades-old tradeoffs

A leading provider of enterprise-class storage solutions,

The IT pioneer that delivers storage as-a-service in a multi-cloud world,

The breakthrough leader in radically simplifying enterprise file data management across hybrid-cloud environments.

e) Media suppliers; an easy one with just Kioxia, Seagate and Western Digital:

A data infrastructure leader,

A world leader in memory solutions,

A world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions

f) Data Protection – Acronis, Clumio, ExaGrid, Rubrik and Veeam:

The industry’s only Tiered Backup Storage solution,

The leader in backup, recovery and data management solutions that deliver Modern Data Protection

An industry leader in simplifying cloud data protection,

The Zero Trust Data Security Company

The global leader in cyber protection

Acronyms

What is the meaning of these acronyms?

  • HAMR
  • MAS-MAMR
  • CXL
  • HBM2e
  • ETL
  • EAMR
  • ZNS
  • EMIB
  • iSCSI
  • RoCE

Nine more Storage Supplier CEOs

Match the names and faces of storage supplier CEOs:

Storage supplier logos

Which storage suppliers from Druva, Hitachi Vantara, Liqid, Rubrik, StorONE, WekaIO, Qumulo, Panzura and DDN do the logos belong to?

Spoiler alert! Answers below

Nine storage CEOs – from top to bottom by row left to right

  • Hock Tan of Broadcom
  • Antonio Neri of HPE
  • Liran Eschel of CTERA
  • Jill Stellfox of Panzura,
  • Liran Zvebel of WekaIO
  • Phil Bullinger of Infinidat
  • Sumit Puri of Liqid
  • Dario Zamarian of Pavilion Data
  • Alex Bouzari of DDN

Press Release descriptions;

  • (a) Nasuni, Egnyte, CTERA in order
  • (b) WekaIO, Databricks, Nutanix, Komprise, DataCore Software, Snowflake, Delphix,  Diamanti, SingleStore, MinIO in order.
  • (c) Liqid, Fungible, Pensando, Nebulon in order.
  • (d) NetApp, DDN, Hitachi Vantara, VAST Data, Infinidat, Pure Sturage and Qumulo in order.
  • (e) Western Digital, Kioxia, and Seagate in order.
  • (f) ExaGrid, Veeam, Clumio, Rubrik and Acronis in order.

Acronyms

  • HAMR – Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording
  • MAS-MAMR – Microwave Assisted Switching-Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording
  • CXL – Compute Express Link
  • HBM2e – High Bandwidth Memory gen 2 Extended
  • ETL – Extract, Transform and Load
  • EAMR – Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording
  • ZNS – Zone Nemespace Specification
  • EMIB – Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge
  • iSCSi – Internet Small Computer Systems Interface
  • RoCE – RDMA over Converged Ethernet with RDMA being Remote Direct Memory Access

Nine More CEOs

From top to bottom by row left to right;

  • Herb Hunt – Nyriad,
  • Coby Hannnoch – Weebit Nano
  • Evan Powell – MayaData – now ex-CEO too
  • Chris Gladwyn – Ocient
  • Anand Eswaran – Veeam
  • Mohit Aron – Cohesity
  • Kumar Goswami – Komprise
  • Rajiv Ramaswami – Nutanix
  • Bill Andrews – ExaGrid.

Storage supplier logos

From top to bottom by row left to right;

  • DDN, Panzura and Qumulo,
  • WekaIO, StorONE and Rubrik,
  • Liqid, Hitachi Vantara, and Druva.

Cohesity talking IPO at $3.7 billion valuation – report

By
Chris Mellor
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Data protector and manager Cohesity is talking about an IPO.

Mohit Aron

The firm’s CEO, Mohit Aron, told newswire Bloomberg there will be a $145 million tender offer for employees shares. He said Cohesity, backed by a Softbank fund, is valued at $3.7 billion.

That valuation and the tender offer were revealed back in March,and, according to the newswire, the tender offer is being led by Steadfast Capital Ventures, with participation from existing investors, including SoftBank Vision Fund, DFJ Growth, Foundation Capital and Wing Venture Capital.

Bloomberg interviewed Aron, who claimed Cohesity’s annual revenues were in the hundreds of millions of dollars area – $300 million was mentioned in September – and it is nearing break-even on a cash flow basis. The CEO, who is also a co-founder, also said an IPO was quite near. That is Bloomberg’s big point.

In September, CFO Robert O’Donovan said of Cohesity’s fourth fiscal 2020 results: “In Q4, we had our biggest day, week, month, and quarter, all resulting in our biggest year. From rapidly increasing ARR, to an outstanding net expansion rate, to strong customer growth — including impressive gains in the Fortune 500, the company is firing on all cylinders and breaking records at every turn.”

That sound like a good basis for an IPO.

Cohesity, founded in 2013, has raised a total of $660 million with the latest raise being an E-round for $250 million last year. Earlier this month we predicted Cohesity would file for an IPO. It looks like that prediction is coming true.

Storage news ticker – December 21

By
Chris Mellor
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Clumio announced the general availability (GA) of Clumio Protect for Amazon S3, its backup as a service (BaaS) offering that provides protection against ransomware, simplified compliance reporting, and a low recovery time objective (RTO), while reducing the cost to protect data in Amazon S3. Since the announcement of its early access (EA) program in September, Clumio says it has successfully performed thousands of backups for EA customers.

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CodeNotary has a useful website resource discussing the Apache Log4j vulnerability. It says CodeNotary Cloud gives you the tools needed to create, track and query your software including the SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials).

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Data I/O Corp, a global provider of advanced data and security deployment systems for flash, flash-memory based intelligent devices and microcontrollers, has said that Dr Cheemin Bo-Linn will be joining its board. Dr Bo-Linn is the CEO of Peritus Partners, a valuation accelerator, for industry sectors including automotive, electronics, consumer, and medical sectors with integrated security.

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HPE said NTT Business Solutions, part of NTT WEST Group, a Japanese network and system integrator, has selected the GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to deliver its “Regional Revitalization Cloud” and provide a hybrid cloud service to local governments, educational institutions and businesses across western Japan. 

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IBM Spectrum Scale container native storage access v5.1.2.1 is now generally available. What’s new?

IBM Spectrum Scale CSI Driver v2.4.0 is now generally available. What’s new:

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LucidLink, whose FileSpaces software presents public cloud object storage as a local filer, is partnering AVIWEST, a provider of live video contribution systems. The two will offer to offer an easy-to-use cloud video production and delivery system. By using this , which includes LucidLink Filespaces and AVIWEST’s bonded cellular setup, broadcasters can capture camera feeds, deliver data to the cloud, and gain global access to the same file, with real-time collaboration from anywhere.

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Consultant Mark Webb of MKW Ventures contributed a cutting assessment of the info provided by Floadia about its 7-bit NAND cell, saying the data provided in the announcement wasn’t sufficient. He told us the idea was something “many people looked at 20-30 years ago. Multiple gate, SONOS, etc.. lots of papers back then…. Macronix did some real nice work in this area.”

After taking a critical look, he detailed some questions he had about the information the firm provided:

  1. The cross section [graphic] is something lined up with 130nm or higher. [It should be something] more like 250nm.
  2. Did they test one bit on retention? A couple bits? 10 years at 150°C is tough. 
  3. Then someone hinted it is for OTP…. WORM. There are many technologies that are better at this …. Fuse/antifuse and ReRAM can work well as OTP
  4. Why have 7bits per cell at a cell size 10x bigger than planar technologies from 5 year ago? 
  5. It’s not clear whether anyone made one working cell.

Finally, Webb added that he believed this would not be “useful for SSD or cellphone,” claiming he had “10 better ways to get similar results on embedded.” He went on to pronounce it: “A very vague announcement.”
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Global IT services provider phoenixNAP announced a collaboration with MemVerge, which supplies Big Memory. The collaboration involves running MemVerge’s Memory Machine on phoenixNAP’s Bare Metal Cloud and so providing an infrastructure solution for Big Memory workloads. Bare Metal Cloud can be deployed in minutes and managed using its API, CLI, and Infrastructure as Code integrations. It comes with 15 TB of free bandwidth (5 TB in Singapore) and flexible bandwidth packages. The platform also provides access to S3-compatible object storage, phoenixNAP’s global DDoS-protected network, and strategic global locations. 

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Oracle is buying electronic health records (EHR) vendor Cerner Corp for $28.3 billion in an all-cash transaction, and Oracle’s largest ever acquisition. The deal will strengthen Oracle’s presence in the large and strategic healthcare market. William Blair analyst Jason Ader points out that “Oracle is acquiring a slow-growth, lower-margin business at a time when management has been touting top- and bottom-line acceleration. In sum, given that the deal does not address our longer-term structural concerns for Oracle (e.g., steady share loss in database market, playing catch-up in public cloud) and, in fact, injects new risks to the investment thesis.” There’s more about the deal in The Register.

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Pure Storage tells us that the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker came out this month and it shows that external storage is accelerating and continuing the turnaround that started in Q2. Pure experienced a good Q3 on a global basis; it claimed it had the highest YoY growth rate across every major region compared to the other major global storage providers.

  • Pure grew 26 per cent in a global external storage market that just grew 7 per cent. 
  • In EMEA Pure grew 10x faster than the market, 21 per cent in a market that only grew just 2.1 per cent
  • In APJ Pure grew 3.5x the market, 53.5 per cent in a market that grew 15.3 per cent
  • In Latin America Pure grew 80.9 per cent in a market that grew just 0.92 per cent
  • In North America Pure grew 24.2 per cent in a market that grew just 3.6 per cent

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RAIDIX has been granted patent number US 20200371942A1, a method for performing read-ahead operations in the data storage systems. It says read-ahead is a caching technology that analyses the workload and predicts which fragment of data will be requested in the future. Then, for overall system acceleration, the data is cached on a faster RAM or SSD. RAIDIX engineers have developed a new approach to operating data intervals and it’s implemented in RAIDIX products for software-defined storage solutions.  RAIDIX says it  brings better data accessibility to businesses depending on huge volumes of critical data (media production, video surveillance, data centres).

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SingleStore  announced it has been recognised (as a niche player) for the first time by Gartner in the 2021 Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management Systems (CDBMS). Amazon led the rankings, closely followed by Microsoft with Oracle in third place and Google fourth.

MariaDB also announced its SkySQL was named for the first time in this MQ, as a niche player.

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Teradata announced that Vantage, its multi-cloud data platform, ranked highest in all analytical use cases with the top scores in the 2021 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management Systems for Analytical Use Cases, issued December 14, 2021. Teradata was also named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS), issued this month.

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SANBlaze Technology announced the availability of the industry’s first platform to support NVMe over PCIe Gen5 validation and compliance testing. The SBExpress-RM5 platform is a 16-bay enterprise-class NVMe test appliance supporting hot-plug and PCIe speeds from Gen1 to Gen5.

The system features a unique modular “riser” design that enables user-configurable variable slot support, as well as field-upgradable support for all Gen5 connector form factors, including U.2, M.2, EDSFF, and the new E3/EDSFF form factor. It provides test capabilities for development, QA, validation, and manufacturing teams, and includes the company’s Certified by SANBlaze (SBCert) compliance test suite.

SANBlaze SBExpress-RM5

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The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has moved its SM (Storage Management) Lab from an SNIA Tech Centre in Colorado Springs to a data centre co-lo elsewhere in Colorado. The program has provided an environment for over 15 years to support and coordinate vendors’ development efforts to deliver SMI-S compliant products to market, and is now tailored for SNIA Swordfish. The new facility is said to be highly secure and efficient and enables a focus on lab use rather than lab management. It is helping partner organisations DMTF Redfish Forum and SNIA’s CMSI by providing a shared space to accommodate their needs.

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WANdisco, the live data replication supplier, announced a significant contract win through its IBM channel; IBM has secured a $3.3m three-year license contract with a large North American multinational investment bank for the use of LiveData Migrator. The initial use case will be for on-premises data replication with further use cases for cloud migration providing opportunities to expand the relationship. WANdisco’s revenue share will be 50 per cent of the license under its OEM agreement with IBM. WANdisco now expects FY21 revenues to be meaningfully ahead of current market estimates.

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Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers is telling his subscribers that “the HDD industry appears to be poised to achieve 10 per cent+ y/y revenue growth in 2021 — representing the first y/y growth in HDD industry revenue since 2012; vs. HDD industry revenue declining at a 4-5 per cent CAGR over the past 10- and 5-year periods. … we think overall nearline HDD capacity shipments can sustain a 30-40 per cent y/y growth trend in 2022.”

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