MSI (Micro-Star International), a gaming company based in Taiwan, has developed a PCIe Gen 5 M.2 add-in interface card which fits on a Intel Z690 chipset-based motherboard. It’s mentioned in a YouTube video at the 1:27:509 time point:
The screengrab shows the card has fan-assisted cooling so it will run hot. PCIe Gen 5 will provide 128GB/sec of bandwidth across 16 lanes – four times faster than PCIe Gen 3’s 32GB/sec. This has been built to enable gamers to use PCIe Gen 5-supporting NVMe SSDs when they arrive. It’s a sign of things to come. Tom’s Hardware notes the card with its 16 lanes actually fits in an 8-lane slot on the motherboard.
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Canonical announced support with Microsoft for Microsoft SQL Server with Ubuntu Pro on Microsoft Azure. This is based around the Ubuntu Pro 20.04 LTS operating system. Customers on Microsoft Azure can launch fully supported instances of SQL Server 2017 or SQL Server 2019 – Web, Standard and Enterprise editions – on both Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS and Ubuntu Pro 20.04 LTS. The SQL Server on Ubuntu Pro Azure solution offers, the two say, an extremely cost effective alternative for enterprise data management.
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STAC recently performed STAC-M3 Benchmarks on the first stack to hold five years of data (57TiB) in Optane Persistent Memory (PMem). The stack under test (SUT) was KX’s kdb+ 4.0 database system configured to run in sharded mode on a 10-node cluster of 2-socket DELL PowerEdge R640 servers, each with 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6240L (Cascade Lake) 18-core CPUS @ 2.6GHz and 6TiB Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory 100 Series. The PMem was configured in Storage over App Direct Mode with Filesystem-DAX namespaces. The SUT used Compatibility Revision H of the kdb+ STAC Packs. Intel chose to highlight that this system:
Outperformed all publicly disclosed results in 16 of 24 STAC-M3 Kanaga benchmarks and seven of the benchmarks had speed-ups exceeding 2.2x compared to the previous best result.
Was faster in 20 of 24 Kanaga benchmarks than a solution involving a parallel filesystem with 14 database servers and 18 storage servers, with 57x to 60x speed-up in the four 10-user market snapshot benchmarks, 3.9x to 7.0x speed-up in the five single-user 12-day VWAB benchmarks and 4.8x speed-up in the 50-user year-one 12-day benchmark.
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Seagate tells us it’s been a year since it started working with Future Mobility Campus Ireland (FMCI) – a Shannon-based smart city test bed where Seagate and some other companies like JLR, Red Hat, Cisco partnered to contribute to the development of smart technologies for future mobility, like for example autonomous vehicles. The data storage infrastructure of the test bed is managed by Seagate. It’s provided the campus with Lyve mobile arrays SSDs which are integrated to Jaguar I-PACE vehicles converted into self-driving prototypes.
These prototypes are set to complete a series of live on-road trials, interacting with the connected roads, smart junctions and local infrastructure to gather data. This data is processed at the edge where Renovo’s Insight node is powered by Seagate’s Exos X 2U24 with Nytro SSDs, allowing the Lyve Mobile Arrays to offload the data directly into the storage system to be staged for immediate processing and screening. In FMCI, the primary hybrid cloud datacentre is powered by Seagate’s high-density Exos E5U84 (Seagate Exos HDDs) and Red Hat Ceph, to provide a secure and scalable long-term repository for data at the core.
Intel’s 10-Q SEC filing for the third 2021 quarter ended September 25 reveals its Optane business lost $473 million in the first nine months of 2020.
The 10-Q contains a fair amount of information about Intel’s Optane revenue and income numbers. The relevant section is page 30 in the Management’s Discussion and Analysis section, which deals with the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG). This is part of Intel’s overall Data Center Group.
NSG revenues in the quarter were $1.1 billion, $48 million less than a year ago. Within that the Optane products – SSDs and Persistent Memory – accounted for $188 million, which was more than twice the $86 million accounted for by Optane revenues in Q3 2020.
As the bulk of the NSG operation – NAND and SSDs – is being sold to SK hynix, the remnant Optane business numbers are included in Intel’s DCG numbers. The 10-Q document states: “Operating income also benefited from the transfer of the Intel Optane memory business from Q3 2021 NSG results (a loss of $116 million in Q3 2020). Optane memory business revenues were $298 million in the year to date 2020 with negative operating income of $473 million.”
Let’s present that more simply:
In the first three quarters of 2020 every dollar of Optane revenue cost Intel $1.59. Chief Analyst Dylan Patel at SemiAnalysis read the 10-Q and tweeted: “No wonder Micron never shipped 3D XPoint and eventually dropped. It was burning hundreds of [millions of dollars] without shipping products for a net loss.”
HPE’s GreenLake edge-to-cloud and service-led strategy includes more HP-owned intellectual storage property and that implies limiting its software partnerships.
HPE ran a virtual Security Analysts meeting giving details of the company’s strategy — how it’s going to set up clear clear GreenLake water between itself and its competitors. We took a dive into this to see what it means for its storage products, and found a move to own more of its own storage IP.
Antonio Neri.
CEO Antonio Neri said HPE is focussed on three megatrends with new sources of data, new IT architectures, and new insights from data:
A data explosion at the edge (ROBO and embedded systems);
Adoption of a cloud-everywhere experience, meaning IT-as-a-service, elasticity, subscription/pay-for-use and cloud-native software;
Adoption of data analytics.
HPE says it has an edge-to-cloud strategy with its customers needing to control their data assets wherever they are located, make decisions faster and have a unified service delivery across their IT estate.
The set of HPE’s storage products have to adapt to fit into this view of the world. Data has to be stored, moved where needed, and analysed to give customers a better view of their operations and a faster ability to adapt to changes and opportunities. Neri said digital transformation is incomplete without data-first modernisation from edge to cloud. By 2025 some 85 per cent of data will be unstructured, 60 per cent of it will be generated at the edge and 30 per cent of it will be real-time.
Data, he said, is spread across — even trapped in — a sprawl of silos in legacy and hybrid IT infrastructures. The volume of data being generated at edge sites means much of it must be analysed there. It takes too long to move it to the public cloud for analysis and decision-making.
The HPE message is to use its GreenLake offering to free data and work on it where it makes sense.
HPE virtual SAM event slide.
HPE storage products
If HPE customers buy into this GreenLake edge-to-cloud view of things then they will have an incentive to buy HPE storage products because they fit into the GreenLake scheme.
HPE is building up its capabilities in its edge-to-cloud area by buying companies such as Silver Peak and Zerto, and making strategic investments in others, such as Cohesity and SingleStore.
Neri said the HPE story was being accepted by customers, citing growth in connectivity and compute, in GreenLake revenues and in storage. He said there had been more than 100 per cent year-on-year Primera array revenue growth and more than 140 per cent Nimble dHCI (Disaggregated HCI) revenue growth, both in the first three quarters of HPE’s fiscal 2021. He did not mention SimpliVIty HCI systems though.
He divided HPE’s products into core, growth and AAS (as-a-service) enablers, with the core’s function being cash generation. The core products were compute (ProLiant and Synergy) and storage (Alletra, Primera, Nimble dHCI and Zerto). He said compute was a $55 billion target addressable market growing at four per cent between FY2021 and FY2024. Storage has a $60 billion TAM and a three per cent CAGR.
Growth products encompassed Edge (Aruba, Silver Peak) and HPC and AI (Apollo, Cray, Determined AI) and their function is to generate growth. The AAS enablers are meant to drive AAS adoption and include consumption-driven financing, advisory and professional services.
Ringing the storage changes
The execution priorities for HPE in the storage business are to accelerate the transition to a cloud-native, software-defined data services business, to continue shifting the portfolio to margin-rich, owned-IP offerings, and integrate Zerto to capture the high-growth data protections as-a-Service market.
See second bullet in storage category.
Up until now HPE has partnered with any serious storage software player that could help it sell servers. Witness its deals with Cloudian, MinIO and Scality in the object storage area and WekaIO in the file area. An example of a shift to HPE’s own storage IP has been seen with the Ezmeral Data Fabric which supports the S3 object API and stores object data.
It does not use MinIO software, which we might have expected given HPE’s previous use of embedded MinIO software in its product offerings, nor Cloudian or Scality software. Instead HPE has developed its own object storage software.
All storage software vendors partnering with HPE facing having the scope of their partnership — and even its existence — put under threat by this owned-IP preference expressed by Neri.
VAST Data’s revenues grew seven-fold in its third fiscal 2022 quarter, ended October 31.
This was revealed by President Michael Wing through a tweet and a LinkedIn posting:
Can we estimate VAST Data’s revenues at this point?
If we distil out the main revenue points from VAST’s previous announcements we get this:
April 2019 — First product launch.
April 2020 — First year of sales were were significantly higher than any storage vendor in IT history. Pure Storage reported $6M revenues in its first fiscal year to provide a base comparison.
February 2021 — FY2021 revenues 3.5x higher than FY2020. Finished Q4 FY2021 on $150M run rate.
August 2021 — $30 million in orders announced (2x $10M and 1x $10M)
In order to grow like this VAST must be winning against the competition. And since it sells to large enterprises, that must mean vendors like Dell, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, IBM, NetApp and Pure Storage. How will they respond at a product strategy level, facing VAST’s single-tier QLC flash array with Optane help and efficient software? VAST has no block data access story, no hybrid cloud story, and neither does it have an edge (small, remote datacentres and embedded sites) offering. We expect competitive knock-off documents to focus on these attributes of the competing suppliers’ products.
So let’s summarise what we know and can surmise about VAST’s revenues even further:
FY2020 — say $10M revenues (based on Pure $6M base).
Cash flow positive exiting FY2020.
FY2021 — Revenues 3.5x higher than FY2020 = $35 million.
Q2 revenue growth of 490 per cent year-on-year.
Q4 run rate $150M.
Q3 FY2022 — 7x year-on-year growth.
As a stake in the ground I think its run rate is heading towards $500 million, and FY2022 revenues could reach $250 million, with an IPO possible in its FY2024 or possibly earlier. We could be witnessing the probable fastest-ever storage startup growth — to $500 million in annual revenues in just four years since product launch.
Facebook engineers have invented a new way to cache billions of small objects in flash that saves DRAM and reduces the flash wear-out rate, and called it Kangaroo.
The company encountered a problem when caching small (<100 bytes) objects in flash as the two existing methods either wore out the flash with too many writes, or needed too much DRAM to index the objects in the flash cache.
One existing method is the set-associative cache, and this stores cache data in 4KB flash pages. Adding any object to the cache incurs a minimum 4KB write. Facebook has many small objects that are less than 100 bytes in size, such as edges in its social graph. Sticking a 100-byte edge object in a set-associative flash cache means about 40 times too many bytes are written.
The problem with the second method, log-structured caching, is that an entry in a DRAM cache is needed for every object in the flash cache. If Facebook puts millions of small objects in a flash cache then there is a commensurately sized index in DRAM.
Facebook software engineers Sathya Gunasekar and Jimmy Lu write: “Flash caches require either too much DRAM, which loses the efficiency benefits of flash, or too many writes, which wears out the flash device too quickly. In either case, flash caching fails to live up to its potential as an efficient, large cache for tiny objects.”
The Kangaroo flash cache alternative has a hierarchical design with two parts: KLog, a small log-structured flash cache; and KSet, a large set-associative flash cache.
The engineers write: “Kangaroo can amortize writes to KSet over multiple objects, decreasing the overall number of bytes written to flash. KLog accomplishes this goal with a small capacity (~5 per cent of flash), so Kangaroo needs only a small amount of DRAM to index KLog’s entire capacity.“
Kangaroo uses KLog to find multiple objects mapping to the same set in KSet. Whenever an object is evicted from KLog, Kangaroo proactively evicts other objects from KLog to minimize write amplification in KSet.
Kangaroo can reduce cache misses by 29 per cent as well as help extend the working life of SSDs.
The details of how Kangaroo works are described in a downloadable Facebook research paper — “Kangaroo: Caching Billions of Tiny Objects on Flash“ — written by a team of Facebook engineers including Gunasekar and Lu.
Kangaroo is implemented within CacheLib, Facebook’s open source caching engine, and developers can use Kangaroo through CacheLib’s API to build their own customised cache services.
Molly Presley – who left the storage industry in January this year when she resigned as Qumulo’s Global Product Marketing Head to become VP Marketing at Pantheon (SaaS website operations platform) – is back. She has joined David Flynn’s Hammerspace in a senior marketing role and it looks like Hammerspace expansion is on the cards.
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Huawei reported its revenues decreased for the fourth consecutive quarter as US trade sanctions hurt the business. Bloomberg calculates Huawei’s revenues were ¥135.4 billion ($21.2B) in the quarter ended September 30. Its smart phone revenues were particularly depressed. Rotating Chairman Guo Ping said this about the first three 2021 quarters: “Overall performance was in line with forecast. While our B2C business has been significantly impacted, our B2B businesses remain stable.”
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OWC, a provider of Memory, External Drives, SSDs, Mac & PC docking solutions and performance upgrade kits, announced the availability of SoftRAID 6.2 for Mac – adding compatibility for macOS 12 Monterey and, for the first time, support for APFS volumes. The product features multiple RAID options and predictive disk failure monitoring.
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SUSE announced the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Micro 5.1, a lightweight and secure operating system built for containerised and virtualised workloads. It adds edge-focused security features such as secure device onboarding and live patching, and it supports IBM Z and LinuxONE. Customers can incorporate SLE Micro at the edge or supporting edge deployments with mainframes – in a way that allows them to transition workload designs from monolithic to microservices. They can start with container workloads or virtualising their current legacy workloads, then move to containerised workloads, with no change in the underlying system platform.
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Jonathan Symonds.
MinIo Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Symonds told us that an HPE Object Store article “was quite interesting from our perspective. The fact that new entrants feel the need to say they aren’t based on MinIO not only underscores all those that are, but the mere fact that it must be stated outright continues to advance the narrative that a first-rate object store is either based on MinIO or must be compared to it. Both warm our hearts.
“Either way, the high-performance object storage market is getting the attention it warrants. Dell is making noise (but still not producing downloadable product), Cloudflare has people all abuzz and now HPE wants in. Granted no one is putting out performance figures to back up their claims of performance (which is independent of fast hardware) but the time is now. Should be an interesting few quarters.”
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced general availability of Babelfish for PostgreSQL, which gives customers the ability to run applications written for Microsoft SQL Server directly on Amazon Aurora with little to no code changes. Customers can now more easily move applications running on SQL Server to Aurora to simplify operations and reduce costs by eliminating the expensive, constrained licenses of SQL Server.
The source code for Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL is now available on GitHub under the permissive Apache 2.0 and PostgreSQL licenses for anyone to view. Organizations can use it for any purpose including distributing it, modifying it, and distributing modified versions of it under the terms of the licenses.
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ATTO Technology is using Halloween (indirectly) to push its tape connectivity products. Richard Root, its Digital Marketing Specialist, sent us a blog-type article saying tape was a good idea for three reasons. First, RAID is not enough because a write may not complete if the RAID subsystem fails.
For another thing, customers with no offsite backup could suffer a disaster and offsite tape is worthwhile to prevent data loss. It’s equally good for defeating backup corruption attacks from ransomware due to its air-gap. This is all a bit Noddy but it’s interesting to see ransomware sparking a resurgence of interest in tape.
Revenues in Western Digital’s latest quarter grew 29 per cent – more than the previous quarter’s 15 per cent as demand held up at a high level – but supply chain issues are coming to the fore.
Its first fiscal 2022 quarter ended on September 30 and saw revenues of $5.05 billion with profits of $610 million – a whole lot better than the year-ago $60 million loss. Hard disk drive revenues were $2.56 billion – 38.9 per cent more than a year ago – while NAND Flash revenues saw an increase of 19.8 per cent year-on-year to land at $2.49 billion. There was nearly 30 per cent sequential growth in enterprise SSD revenue.
CEO David Goekler put out a results statement: “Strong demand across diverse end markets, particularly for our cloud products, combined with Western Digital’s strong innovation engine, broad routes to market and sharpened execution, enabled us to deliver solid results within our guidance range, even in the face of significant COVID impacts and supply chain disruptions.”
Blocks and Files chart.
Flash revenues were driven by enterprise SSD demand and 5G phone production ramps using WD’s BiCS5 node NAND. Disk revenues soared due to mass capacity nearline drive demand.
WD used to divide its overall revenues into three end market segments: datacentre devices and solutions, client solutions, and client devices. That’s all changed with three new segments: Cloud (enterprise datacentres and hyperscalers), Client (desktop/notebook, etc. via OEM and distribution), and Consumer (retail and other end-user) – nice and simple. The results for each segment:
Cloud – $2.23B, up 72 per cent year-on-year;
Client – $1.85B, up 6 per cent;
Consumer – $973M, up 10 per cent.
Cloud is the boom end market segment.
WD said Cloud represented a record 44 per cent of total revenue, led by record capacity enterprise hard drive revenue and nearly 30 per cent sequential growth in enterprise SSD revenue. In the Client sector the flash business unit experienced growth in mobile, gaming, automotive, IoT and industrial applications. It sold 24.1 million disk drives, compared to 23 million a year ago, with the average price rising from $79 to $102 as capacities rose.
In Consumer, revenue from both the flash and hard drive business units declined on a sequential basis due to supply disruptions and uneven geographic demand due to COVID lockdowns.
The outlook for next quarter is $4.8 billion give or take $100 million, which will be a 21.7 per cent increase at the mid-point.
Financial summary
Cash flow from operations – $521M ($363M a year ago);
Free cash flow – $224M ($196M a year ago);
Gross margin – 33 per cent (23 per cent a year ago);
EPS – $1.93 ($0.20 a year ago);
Cash and cash equivalents – $3.3B.
Earnings call
In the earnings call with analysts, Goekler and CFO Bob Eulau both highlighted growing component supply chain issues affecting WD itself and its customers.
Goekler said: “Maybe a quarter or two ago we were seeing it in maybe certain parts of the business, some of the OEM, PC OEMs. Now we’re seeing it more broadly. Even the big datacenter players are having their demand impacted … So, it’s really become a much more broad-based issue across the portfolio.”
The HDD revenue guide for the next quarter is down 15 per cent sequentially due to this issue, with HDD controller supply a large part of that. The company thinks the supply chain issues will improve after the next (December) quarter. It described the past quarter as an aberration, and not the new normal.
Goekler was asked about the media focus on Kioxia and Western Digital merging. All he said was that Kioxia is a tremendous and valued partner. “We’re really happy with the partnership and we’re going to … continue to get the best out of it.”
After the call Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers thought WD’s flash revenues in the quarter were weaker than those of Samsung and SK hynix in average system price (ASP) terms. Overall, he told subscribers, the results and the guidance for next quarter were both disappointing.
NetApp has lowered its marketing game – or raised it, depending on your point of view – by running video ads attacking Dell and Pure Storage.
The Not Top 5 marketing initiative claims to identify “The biggest flops in hybrid cloud … ranking the worst moves other vendors make in competition”.
Update. SPC and SPEC benchmark submissions covered. 29 Oct 2021.
Episodes one and two focus on Pure and Dell, with new episodes promised soon. Each episode has a video featuring Logan Carrington, a senior global product marketing manager at NetApp, and a text playbook analysis. We had a look at these and found them short, snappy and … disappointing.
NetApp’s Logan Carrington.
Anti-Pure attack video
NetApp’s supporting Playbook material for its Not Top 5 video contains five items. The first criticises Pure for having separate storage silos for file and block, unlike NetApp:
But if you want to throw stones like this don’t do it from a glass house. NetApp has multiple silos too: SolidFire systems, E-Series systems, StorageGRID system, ONTAP systems – come on NetApp, some might think this is almost embarrassing.
Its number 5 item says “Pure innovates first … not.” NetApp asserts: “They like to think they do – like in their recent announcement about a joint offering with Equinix.” But if you look at the Pure-Equinix press release it makes no claim about Pure innovating first with this offering.
We have asked NetApp for the justification it uses to make these claims against Pure Storage.
Anti-Dell attack video
NetApp’s five claims against Dell include one saying Dell doesn’t prove its performance claims:
NetApp says it, unlike Dell, regularly submits new hardware systems to the SPC for benchmark validation. We checked the SPC website and found 16 NetApp benchmark results, with just one since 2018;
2008 – 3
2009 – 0
2010 – 0
2011 – 0
2012 – 1
2013 – 0
2014 – 1
2015 – 3
2016 – 2
2017 – 3
2018 – 2
2019 – 0
2020 – 1
2021 – 0
The only regular submission period was 2014 to 2018 and since then NetApp has made just one submission. Some might think this pattern isn’t enough to justify NetApp saying it regularly submits new hardware systems to SPC for benchmark validation.
We also checked the Storage Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) website for storage benchmarks and found two types:
There are no published NetApp results for the SPECstorage Solution 2020 benchmark and four for one aspect of the SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark:
SPEC SFS2014_database – no NetApp result
SPEC SFS2014_eda – no NetApp result
SPEC SFS2014_swbuild – 4 NetApp results;
August 2017 – FAS8200 with FlexGroup
November 2018 – 4-node FAS A8000 with FlexGroup
November 2018 – 8-node AFF A800 with FlexGroup
November 2018 – 12-node AFF A800 with FlexGroup
SPEC SFS2014_vda – no NetApp result
SPEC SFS2014_vdi – no NetApp result
Again there is no regular pattern of benchmark submissions by NetApp.
Ww have asked NetApp how it justifies the regular benchmark submission claim.
Comment
Direct attacks on competitors by suppliers can give the impression that the attacks validate the competition and also indicate how effective that competition is. However, attack ads could serve to strengthen customer attachment to a supplier’s products – much the way attack political ads can strengthen partisan support for the attacking party but rarely persuade opponents to change their minds.
The Wall Street Journal says email protector Mimecast is exploring a sale. It reckons Mimecast has a market value of about $4.5 billion and is working with bankers on a sale, taking in a large investment, or other options. Revenues in Mimecast’s first fiscal 2022 quarter, ended June 30, 2022, were $142.5 million, up 24 per cent year-on-year. Profits were $10.1 million, compared to $3.1 million year ago. It added 600 net new customers in the quarter, taking its customer count to 40,600 globally. Seems a healthy-enough business.
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IBM has new white paper coming. It will tell the world: “Red Hat and IBM have shown that the combination of IBM Db2 and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation provides robust performance in the face of multiple simulated system failures. With Db2 HADR, database operations can continue unabated even when a database instance has failed and become unavailable. Test systems performed extremely well through simulated failures in OpenShift Data Foundation infrastructure. Together IBM and Red Hat technologies demonstrate the value of a multilayer resilience strategy for providing business continuity.”
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SUSE announced the acquisition of NeuVector, a provider of lifecycle container security that delivers end-to-end security, from DevOps pipeline vulnerability protection to automated security and compliance in production. It says the integration of NeuVector should significantly enhance the enterprise-grade security capabilities in the SUSE Rancher container management platform, providing full lifecycle security in any mission-critical environment and offering the key enterprise security capabilities needed to run Kubernetes at scale.
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We do get notice of research reports that look unlikely, making it worth being cautious about buying them. As a possible example there’s this: “The ‘Memristors Market — Forecasts from 2021 to 2026’ report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com’s offering. The memristors market was valued at $1,126.123 million in 2019 and is expected to grow steadily during the forecast period.” The companies mentioned are Toshiba, Samsung, Texas Instruments, IBM, Fujitsu, Intel, Micron, Unity Semiconductor, Sony and Hewlett-Packard — not written as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is a tad suspicious.
The abstract admits that: “As a result of the high initial cost and the fact that they are still being developed, there are many threats such as error rate, reliability, programming ease, etc., which can cause the memristor market to decline. Further, companies like Rambus, Panasonic & Crossbar are also developing Resistive RAM Technologies, which can be used instead of memristors.” Well, yes.
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Ne-Mo’s Bakery/Horizon Food Group has chosen Veeam Backup & Replication and ExaGrid to protect the company’s most critical IT systems, defend against disaster and ransomware attacks, and deliver high-speed backup and recovery to meet its manufacturing demands. Ne-Mo’s/Horizon’s previous backup system was taking over 20 hours for data backup, at least one hour for recovery and limiting backup retention to only ten days.
Veeam and ExaGrid were able to protect the IT systems supporting snack manufacturing and boost defence against ransomware attacks, increasing Horizon’s backup speed by 85 per cent (to about three hours), recovery speed by 92 percent (to under five minutes) and data retention from 10 to 30 days.
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Intel’s Innovation Event saw a presentation from Sandra Rivera, EVP & GM, Data Center and AI Group, which contained this comment: “Persistent Memory + Software are binding pieces of an evolving heterogeneous compute ecosystem — from CPUs, IPUs, FPGAs, GPUs, and more.” IPUs are Intel’s Infrastructure Processing Units (its DPU technology). Nick McKeown, SVP & GM, Network and Edge Group, said we are in the midst of a serious inflection point in the datacentre, which includes the proliferation of IPUs to offload infrastructure management from CPUs.
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Intel announced it is collaborating with Google Cloud on the design and development of its first ASIC-based 200GB/sec+ IPU code-named “Mount Evans”. It is supported by an industry-standard programming language and open sourced Infrastructure Programmer Development kit. (Thanks to Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers.)
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What are containers? A blog by Backblaze writer Molly Clancy provides an intro to container software technology.
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A Backblazeblog: ”Drive Failure Over Time: The Bathtub Curve Is Leaking” by Andy Klein, reveals that back in 2013, 80 per cent of the drives installed would be expected to survive four years. “That fell to 50 per cent after six years. In 2021, the probability of a hard drive being alive at six years is 88 per cent. That’s a substantial increase, but it basically comes down to the fact that hard drives are failing less in our system. We think it is a combination of better drives, better storage servers, and better practices by our data centre teams.”
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Micron has released its Crucial DDR5 desktop PC memory products, which deliver up to 50 per cent faster data transfer speeds compared to previous-generation DDR4 memory. It is compatible with 12th Gen Intel Core processors that support DDR5 and is available in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB densities.
Micron Crucial DDR5 DRAM.
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StorMagic announced a DCIG competitive analysis comparing the benefits and strengths of StorMagic’s AQRvault and Quantum’s VS-HCI series in the wake of Quantum’s acquisition of Pivot3 earlier this year. It says the report was developed to educate buyers of video surveillance edge solutions. ARQvault’s key advantage is that it includes a complete video management system, which can store video on any disk storage type — including the Quantum VS-HCI/Pivot3 offering — or on lower-cost tiers, such as tape, optical or cloud.
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STAC recently performed STAC-M3 Benchmarks on a stack involving KX’s kdb+ 4.0 DBMS running on nine Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 servers, each with two 18-core Intel Xeon Gold 6254 CPUs @ 3.10GHz and 384GiB DRAM. Data was accessed via NFS 3 and stored in a Dell EMC PowerScale F900 All-Flash Scale-Out NAS 3-node cluster with 251TiB total physical storage capacity. It was faster than a system involving four database servers accessing an earlier generation of Dell EMC’s flash storage appliance with kdb+ 3.6 (SUT ID KDB190430) in 14 of 17 mean-response time STAC-M3 Antuco benchmarks.
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Veeam’s “Beat The Gostev” Challenge is looking for the fastest Veeam Backup environment in Benelux — faster than maximum throughput of 11.4GB/sec. SVA System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH of Germany achieved 147GB/sec with IBM and Lenovo gear.
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Satori, the creator of the world’s first DataSecOps platform, announced the release of “Snowflake Security: Securing Your Snowflake Data Cloud” — a comprehensive guide codifying DataSecOps best practices to enable data teams to secure their data cloud. The book, which was published by Apress, is co-authored by Satori Chief Scientist, Ben Herzberg, and Satori co-founder and CTO, Yoav Cohen, who worked in collaboration with several Snowflake engineers, product, and security leaders on the Snowflake team. The book is now available for purchase on Amazon.com, Target, Book Depository and other major retailers and online shops.
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A Cassandra Momentumblog by Chris Thornett, senior content strategist, Constantia.io, discusses what the future holds for Apache Cassandra. A Cassandra Enhancement Process (CEP), similar to some other Apache projects, was established last year and makes CEPs the preferred route for broad or disruptive changes to the Cassandra codebase. The blog reads: “The release of Apache Cassandra 4.0 has opened the floodgates to new feature proposals. Many feature ideas have been approved and are in development, such as a cluster and code action simulator, support for general-purpose transaction support while others, such as Storage Attached Indexing are being discussed.”
Commvault has added scanning and advising Security IQ functions to all its Metallic data protection as-a-service products.
Ask a locksmith how to secure your house and you’ll be told to buy more locks. Ask a data protector how to secure your data and you’ll be told to backup more files and secure them better. Quelle surprise as the French might say. It’s like having automated lead generation embedded in a customer’s IT environment. Still, having ongoing watchful security audits is much better than nothing.
Manoj Nair, Metallic GM, provided the announcement statement: “It’s the sad truth that too many companies hit by ransomware aren’t prepared. With our multi-layered approach to ransomware protection and secure separation of data from customers’ own environments, we help Metallic users to further identify threats as early as possible so they can recover quickly, minimising their data loss risk.”
An unattributed Commvault blog indicates that, with Security IQ “seamlessly integrated across the entire Metallic portfolio, IT admins can spot risks and vulnerabilities in real-time, limit exposure to cyberthreats at scale, and successfully exceed data recovery objectives.”
Security IQ provides:
Security posture scoring of the backup environment by evaluating native controls and parameters actively enabled. This guides users to recommended areas of improvement to continuously bolster security stature of Metallic environments.
Cataloguing of abnormal conditions and behaviours on data (such as anomalous root size changes, suspicious files, failed login attempts, offline clients and more), offering insight into unwarranted changes which can adversely impact backup data.
Monitoring and tracking anomalous trends in real-time, delivering detailed information on ‘suspect’ data types, providing users with visual guidance on suggested pre-ransomware recovery points.
Audits that provide visibility into potential ransomware activity and unauthorised changes to configurations, restores, and user logins.
Honeypots to lure and deflect ransomware attempts on file systems and endpoints.
A single dashboard across all Metallic services, with actionable insights for multiple Metallic backup environments.
A Metallic micro-site provides a little more information. Commvault has been active with honeypots to combat ransomware for some time.
Comment
It would be good to have independent audits of the effectiveness of suppliers’ anti-ransomware measures. That would enable customers to make intelligent and more objective choices.
A US Senate Republicans’ reports says Seagate broke trade rules supplying disk drives to Huawei.
Huawei was first put on a US trade blacklist in May 2019. Western Digital then stopped supplying its disk drives, SSDs and NAND chips to Huawei, halting a strategic co-operation agreement with Huawei which had only been signed in April. Shipments later resumed.
Toshiba temporarily suspended disk and semiconductor-based products shipments at that point but resumed after a few hours, believing that that no US sanctions were being breached.
Seagate did not cease its disk drive supply to Huawei, telling us it “complies with all applicable laws including export control regulations,” and adding: ”We do not comment on specific customers.”
In June 2020 Huawei was intending to use 20TB SMR drives in its OceanStor Pacific mass data storage array, thought to be sourced from Western Digital which was then shipping a DC H650 20TB SMR drive.
However, the Trump administration added 38 Huawei affiliates in 21 countries to the US government’s economic blacklist in August 2020. This raised the total to 152 affiliates. It also amended the Foreign Direct Product Rule tightening the restrictions on how technology could be supplied to Huawei.
Suppliers could ask for a license to ship technology devices to Huawei.
Republican Senator Roger Wicker, the ranking member of the Commerce Committee, said the 2020 Commerce Department regulation sought to “tighten Huawei’s ability to procure items that are the direct product of specified US technology or software such as hard disk drives”. He asked the CEOs of Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital if their companies were improperly supplying Huawei with disk drives.
Responding to a Reuters query, Western Digital said it “stopped shipping to Huawei in mid-September 2020 to comply with new rules issued by the Department of Commerce. We requested a license to ship products to Huawei in September 2020. Our application is still pending.”
Seagate’s CFO, Gianluca Romano, said on a September 2020 Deutsche Bank call that Seagate was evaluating the situation and had not applied for any licence. He said at the time: “I don’t see any particular restriction for us in terms of being able to continue to ship to Huawei.”
The report
Republicans on the Committee have now issued a Minority report alleging Seagate did not comply with the regulations.
The report states: “Seagate officials told Minority Staff that the company does not hold a valid license to continue shipping hard disk drives to Huawei, likely making transactions for this product unlawful after the effective date.”
It continues: ”Toshiba and Western Digital, the other primary suppliers of hard disk drives, confirmed to the Committee that they ceased shipments to Huawei after the [Foreign Direct Product Rule] rule went into effect.
”Minority Staff estimate that Huawei spends around $800 million annually on hard disk drives for use in data centers, servers, and other bulk-data storage applications — demand prospectively met in large part by Seagate’s monopolisation of the market after the rule went into effect. By shipping these prohibited products to Huawei, it appears Seagate benefitted from an uneven playing field to the detriment of national security and at the expense of its competitors who abide by the rule designed to combat threats posed by companies with known connections to the Chinese government.”
According to the report: ”In an interview with Minority Staff on October 4, 2021, Seagate officials confirmed that the company has not applied for or obtained a license to ship items covered by the Foreign Direct Product Rule to Huawei.”
According to Wedbush Securities, which was quoted in the report: “[Seagate’s] legal team likely interpreted US restrictions differently than its peers.”
This later changed as, in September, Seagate representatives “disclosed that the company has stopped shipping hard disk drives to Huawei, but declined to provide the date that shipments ended.”
Interestingly the report indicates: ”Minority Staff subsequently received evidence indicating that Seagate may plan to resume shipments to Huawei once the Chinese company is restructured with an operational data server subsidiary to reroute hard disk drives through the supply chain. The purported intent is to avoid shipping the product through currently prohibited entities, even though the destination is Huawei.”
And it concludes: “Based on the evidence available to Minority Staff, it appears that Seagate Technology knowingly violated the Foreign Direct Product Rule for more than one year. Seagate likely made the strategic calculation to continue violating national security regulations based on the prospect of earning significantly greater profits through market monopolisation than the potential cost of regulatory penalties. All unlicensed shipments of prohibited products to Huawei should cease without delay.”
Comment
Wicker’s Minority Report has no regulatory status. It is being published to exert pressure on the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) at the Department of Commerce to investigate Seagate’s shipments to Huawei and declare the company in breach of the regulations. BIS has no legal duty, as far as we know, to co-operate with such reports, and the report expresses some frustration with BIS’s lack of co-operation.
“Failure of BIS to provide clarity on the rule’s scope, in combination with the lack of enforcement actions taken against violators, has created a commercial environment that incentivises companies to continue shipping prohibited products to Huawei.”
BIS also told the Committee that “compliance investigations can take as many as five years to complete.”
The Committee took umbrage with this and the report’s final sentence states: “Minority Staff will continue performing oversight of BIS to determine why no enforcement action has been taken against Seagate Technology and to ensure the agency conducts thorough investigations at the scale and urgency required by the security interests at stake.”
Seagate’s lawyers are probably not shivering in their boots.
TrueNAS SCALE is an open-source and scale-out hyperconverged infrastructure software system announced by iXsystems, which has more than a million software deployments and more than 10EB managed by its FreeNAS and TrueNAS products.
Think of iXsystems as an alternative to IBM’s Red Hat business unit. Paid-for TrueNAS and no-charge FreeNAS software are both based on OpenZFS — an open source version of the ZFS file system. TrueNAS software is an alternative to proprietary file/block and object software and software/hardware systems.
ESG senior analyst Scott Sinclair says: “[With] feature-rich storage that delivers scale-out performance and hyperconverged capabilities, TrueNAS SCALE is a significant entrant into enterprise-grade open source storage.”
iXSystems’ EVP Brett Davis emphasises the open source alternative story in his announcement quote: ”TrueNAS is enabling a new era in open storage data freedom for businesses in every sector that has requirements for reliable, secure, and agile data access that goes beyond the status quo.”
The product is based on the TrueNAS Enterprise software which can scale up to 20PB. TrueNAS SCALE is clusterable and can scale out to 2 exabytes. It provides both file (clustered SMB, Glusterfs) and object storage (S3 API with Minio) access.
“SCALE” is capitalised because it is an acronym — or perhaps an acrostic:
iXsystems graphic for TrueNAS SCALE.
The software has been in alpha and beta testing phases for a year, by more than 4,000 TrueNAS community members and has about 100PB under management.
Applications can run on TrueNAS SCALE clusters as either KVM VMs, Docker containers, or Kubernetes pods. There are dozens of pre-tested and packaged applications including Plex, Nextcloud, HomeAssistant, and others. Application catalogs enable community contributions such as the free catalog of applications from Truecharts.org.
TrueNAS SCALE runs on the same platforms as TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise and allows for the migration of workloads. Customers can start with TrueNAS Enterprise and migrate to TrueNAS SCALE when their applications need scale-out capabilities.
TrueNAS SCALE is now available for ordering and shipping on a wide range of TrueNAS platforms, including the TrueNAS M-Series, R-Series, and even Minis. The upgradable and single or dual-controller M-Series starts from less than $15,000 with the M30 (24x 3.5-inch drive bays), and runs through the M40 and M50 to the top-end M60 product. This supports up to 20 PB and 20GB/sec on a single node, and 100 of them in a cluster supports 2EB of capacity.
The M-Series will will be developed to support high-availability (controller failover) in the first quarter of 2022.
TrueCommand v20, iXsystems’ management software, includes a cluster webUI for deploying larger TrueNAS SCALE clusters. Its features include granular stats collection, customisable alerts, predictive analytics, Role-Based Access Control capabilities, and auditing. TrueCommand can be deployed as a docker container or provided as a cloud service.
