Managed infrastructure network systems provider 11:11 Systems has completed the acquisition of iland, a global cloud service provider of secure and compliant hosting for infrastructure (IaaS), disaster recovery (DRaaS), and backup as a service (BaaS). 11:11 Systems also recently acquired Green Cloud Defense, a channel-only, cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider. 11:11 reckons that, with these two acquisitions, “a hyper growth pathway has been created.”
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Cyber security/data protector Acronis has found another sporting thing to sponsor. It will be the Official Cyber Protection Partner of the round-the-world sailing competition, The Ocean Race. The partnership will be supported by Ingram Micro, distributor of technology products and services, as the Official #CyberFit Partner, inline with the Acronis #TeamUp Program.
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Arcserve announced an update to ShadowXafe and OneXafe Solo, its data recovery and backup products. They get simplified management at scale, support for immutable storage on the cloud, and improved data recovery. Customers can stagger backup jobs to ensure prioritisation, and partners can assign NFR licenses to multiple sites for better control. There is expanded support for Wasabi cloud object lock for cloud immutability and WAN-optimised replication. Arcserve says ShadowXafe’s patented VirtualBoot technology allows partners to perform a virtual machine recovery in milliseconds and restore an entire infrastructure in minutes. OneXafe Solo is a plug-and-play data protection appliance for business continuity that streams data directly to Arcserve Cloud Services.
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Kalray, which provides processors and acceleration cards from cloud to edge, has entered into exclusive negotiations for the acquisition of 100 per cent of the shares of Arcapix Holdings Ltd, a provider of software-defined storage and data management products for data-intensive applications. Arcapix Holdings is the parent company of pixitmedia and arcastream. The intent is to strengthen Kalray’s position in the growing storage and intelligent data processing market, and accelerate the market penetration of Kalray’s acceleration cards and storage products.
Shridar Subramanian.
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Pavilion Data has appointed Shridar Subramanian, ex-Arcserve CMO, as its chief product and marketing officer (CPMO). He will “spearhead the company’s initiatives to further innovate in the big data storage and analytics marketplace.” He assumed his position at Arcserve after serving as CMO and VP of product management at StorageCraft Technology, which merged with Arcserve in 2021. Previously he was chief revenue and marketing officer at storage systems company Exablox, a company acquired by StorageCraft in 2017. Pavilion CEO Dario Zamarian said “His skills will be invaluable to Pavilion as we continue to expand our offerings for the enterprise analytics market.”
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SmartX has added a Network and Security component to its hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). It uses micro-segmentation to help customers secure east-west traffic in various virtualization scenarios, enhance network security inside datacentres, and build “zero trust” enterprise cloud infrastructure. Customers can isolate infected virtual machines in time, blocking malicious attacks from spreading inside the datacentre, and set virtual machines into “diagnostic isolation” mode for debugging. More info here.
Cloudian and WEKA have partnered to add exabyte-scalable backend HyperStore object storage to WEKA’s scale-out, parallel Data Platform for AI filesystem software.
The two say their combined products, integrated through WEKA’s tiering function, unifies and simplifies the data pipeline for performance-intensive workloads and accelerated DataOps. It’s managed under a single namespace and – they claim – reduces the total cost of ownership of massive data sets used in AI and machine learning activities. They say it offers the simplicity of NAS, the performance of SAN or DAS, and the scale of object storage. It accelerates every stage of the data pipeline from data ingestion to cleansing to modelled results, according to Cloudian and WEKA.
Cloudian CMO Jon Toor played the “no need to compromise” card said in his announcement statement. “When it comes to supporting advanced analytics applications, users shouldn’t have to make tradeoffs between storage performance and capacity. By eliminating any need to compromise, the integration of our HyperStore software with the WEKA Data Platform gives customers a storage foundation that enables them to fully leverage these applications so they can gain new insights from their data and drive greater business and operational success.”
Petabyte to exabyte scale disk storage in the Cloudian object back end can feed fast NVMe SSD storage in the file-munching WEKA front end. Cloudian says its back end costs under $.01 per GB per month, including support. It has policy-based tiering to AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, and is FIPS, CFTC 4511, SEC 17 a-4, Common Criteria compliant and certified at the capacity tier.
It’s a great deal for Cloudian, giving it a selling opportunity in WEKA’s customer base and market, while filling a gap nicely in WEKA’s offer. And WEKA gets a doorway into Cloudian’s customer base – win/win, I think.
The new combined offering is available now and you can get more information here.
Datto intends to acquire Infocyte, a threat detection and response company, for an undisclosed amount. Datto will thus add endpoint detection and response (EDR) technologies and managed detection and response (MDR) services into its security portfolio. The acquisition is intended to help its MSPs better address their customers’ security needs.
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Cloud-scale security analytics platform supplier Panther Labs announced a new offering: Panther for Snowflake, developed in partnership with Snowflake to provide purpose-built security monitoring and threat detection. It is available immediately and contains out-of-the-box detections to help security teams monitor activity and validate security configurations in their Snowflake Data Cloud. Security teams can collect and analyse Snowflake logs in real time to detect tampering or unwanted changes to security settings and monitor for incidents or security risks. Snowflake event logs are aggregated, normalised and analysed along with security events from other systems so security teams have greater visibility into potential threats across their entire IT infrastructure from cloud to on-premises.
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RAIDIX has a new version of its ERA software RAID, v3.4.1, which includes Linux kernel Ubuntu 20.04 HWE, and RHEL/CentOS 8.5 operating system support. The developers say they have significantly improved the DKMS functioning and made the XFS support and the initial starting of the scanner functionality more efficient.
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StorPool Storage has published its latest update on the Public Cloud Performance Measurement Report, showing up to 2.5 times better performance for StorPool’s clusters compared to the second-best public cloud offering, Amazon EBS. The report compares the performance of the block storage offerings of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoſt Azure, Linode and OVHcloud and pits them against StorPool’s Katapult public cloud. Katapult is a virtual Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform developed by independent UK web hosting Krystal. See the report and testing results here.
Chart from StorPool’s Public Cloud Performance Measurement Report.
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Industry research outfit TRENDFOCUS has announced a Tape & Archive Storage Service alongside its existing disk and SSD services. Mark Geenen, TRENDFOCUS founder and president, said “We’re expecting a complete re-definition of the technology roadmap for tape, and we’re thrilled by the response we’re receiving from our long-standing clients. Just as hyperscale has already impacted the direction of both HDD and NAND flash storage design and usage, we’re expecting similar movement from tape as enterprise management starts to shift to seeking lower cost options.”
The TRENDFOCUS Tape and Archive Storage Service will initially establish baseline trends on how tape is solving for major providers’ needs, then the service will evolve to include how both HDD and flash solutions could contribute to archive storage in the future. Coverage of other exciting new technologies such as DNA storage will also enlighten the long-term directions for archival storage over the coming decades.
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Veeam co-founder Ratmir Timashev has contributed to a $1.5 million seed round for Latvia-based Monq Lab, which develops a self-hosted, topology-based, AIOps incident control and automation platform for enterprises. The investment will be used for the expansion of marketing and sales operations in North America and EMEA. Monq’s free, fully featured community edition is already available for download from its web page.
Pavilion Data, supplying very fast storage hardware based on network switch architecture, has gained renewed funding — $45 million of it — after recently-appointed CEO Dario Zamarian led the company to double its new customer growth year-on-year in 2021.
Update. CPMO name added. 21 Jan 2022.
The company says it significantly increased deployments within federal agencies and increased penetration into analytics use cases in Fortune 500 companies — including a top-20 banking institution, a top credit agency, and one of the largest hedge funds in the country. It now positions itself as an analytics and AI accelerator because its storage — the HyperParallel Data Platform — is so fast, and because nearly 80 per cent of all deployments in 2021 were to accelerate analytics, legacy and next-generation ML, and streaming applications.
Dario Zamarian.
A Zamarian quote for the funding news read: “Pavilion is proving its market acceptance across a broad range of industry verticals as an analytics acceleration platform for legacy and next-generation applications.”
The company last raised $25 million in a C-round in 2019. This latest round is not being called a D-round although, in a sequential sense, that is what it is. It takes total funding since Pavilion was started up in 2014 to $107 million.
This latest round was led by Kleiner Perkins and Artiman Ventures. All existing investors participated in the funding — including Korea Investment Partners, SK Telecom Ventures, Taiwania Capital, Tyche Partners, DAG Ventures, and RPS Ventures. They were joined by new investors Mirae Asset, Liberty Street Advisors, and Gaingels.
Christian Munafo, chief investment officer and portfolio manager at Liberty Street Advisors, provided a quote: “Demands for data are growing rapidly, so Pavilion’s ability to provide high-speed data ingest feeding an analytics pipeline aligns it perfectly to the reality of today’s market. Plus, its ultra-low latency keeps data flowing in high-performance-database and high-performance-virtualisation workloads.”
Zamarian said “2021 saw the company grow its employee base by 50 per cent across all functions.” He hired four new execs in the year:
SVP of software development Anil Virmani in Dec 2021;
VP of operations Chethan Bachamada also in Dec 2021;
VP of marketing Lynn Orlando in Dec 2021 as well;
Chief Marketing and Product Officer Shridar Subramanian (ex-Arcserve CMO) Jan 2022.
We are told that 75 per cent of Pavilion’s 2020 customers repurchased in 2021. That year saw the company opening new sales offices in Atlanta, Boston, and London, and addressing the US public sector by opening a sales division focused on federal government customers to support its existing presence in the federal space. Pavilion said it also made inroads in the life sciences, financial, and media and entertainment industry verticals.
In 2022, Zamarian and his team have to show the investors that their faith is justified. They have the cash to strengthen the company’s activities, including product development. The HyperParallel Data Platform does very well serving data to Nvidia GPU servers using the GPUDirect protocol, and its hardware and software can be improved further with the new cash. We can surely expect product announcements this year — for example, the possible use of third-generation Xeon controller CPUs.
Pavilion might also reveal its thinking about the use of public cloud capabilities. It should be an interesting year.
Ocient, the startup developing a trillion-rows-a-second RDBMS computation system, has appointed a CTO: Ian Drury, formerly of one of its lead investors.
Update: Ocient CEO says it’s computer-adjacent architecture, not JSON architecture as Otter transcribed it! 21 January 2022.Other notes added too.
Drury was a general and then part-time venture partner at OCA Ventures from July 2014 until December last year. Before that he was a CIO at Falcon Insurance Group in the USA and has more than two decades of experience in the database, data analytics and technology industries and in managing engineering teams at scale.
CEO and Ocient co-founder Chris Gladwin supplied a statement. “Ian brings more than 25 years of experience and understands the complexities of generating intelligence at hyperscale. Our growth demonstrates customers’ fast-growing need to harness trillions of valuable data records in interactive time and to do so with a partner like Ocient that will work closely with them to develop new revenue streams at a fundamentally better price point and with an accelerated time to value.”
Ian Drury.
Drury says he’s “thrilled to join Ocient during this critical moment of growth across new customers and industries. Ocient is accelerating the delivery of previously not possible hyperscale data analysis at high performance levels and low costs never seen before. This market is growing exponentially year-over-year and I look forward to being part of the team redefining how to derive significant business value from data at hyperscale.”
Headcount growth
Ocient announced that it had doubled its workforce in the past 12 months — taking on 63 people, in order to take advantage of significant growth and customer demand. It said it made “additions to its product, engineering, sales, marketing and customer relations teams to support a growing number of customers in pilot and production with its use case-driven solutions for adtech, lawful intercept, telecommunications, operational IT and geospatial.“
It also said it formed channel and alliance partnerships with SS8 Networks, Gigamon, Cubro, Tableau, A-VAR, Axial and Amdocs in 2021.
Ocient’s public profile
The signs are that Ocient is set to raise its profile this year, and that means we should get a closer look at its technology. Gladwin is interviewed on a Cloud Database Report podcast that’s worth a listen to find out more about why Ocient was started up.
He discusses Ocient’s system design in outline, saying it has a computer-adjacent architecture, not relying on separate storage and compute, and uses NVMe SSDs in high core count CPU servers with 100GB NICs. To quote Gladwin directly: “We’ve developed what we call a computer-adjacent architecture, where the storage and the compute are in the same tier, in the same box.”
Its software can run on-premises, as a managed service, or in the public cloud, and “We also have a hybrid deployment model where we’ll put some proxy servers in a public cloud, but then run the back end as a managed service.” That means Orient operates the back end as a service.
It is capable of operating at serious scale. “In some of the queries, we’re running a quarter million parallel tasks across the system.”
On performance, he says “We ran some stuff like like benchmarks [on Snowflake] the other day, and this wasn’t even hyper, super hyperscale, it was just kind of, you know, looking at hundreds of billions of records. We were performing at one at 1/7 the cost, but five times the performance.”
Gladwin also says Ocient has about 500 potential customers who it approaches directly. There’s no need for external marketing to warm up, so to speak, a large potential customer base. It developed pilot systems in 2020 and initial deployments in 2021. He says: “We’re going to announce it sometime next year [2022]. … Unlike more of a consumer-facing business where you would announce what you do, and … then get customers, we get customers first and then we announce it.”
We’re unlikely to get a brain dump of information though, because: “We’re still going to be generally respectful of our customers’ desires to keep those details of who’s using it and how confidential.”
Bootnote. Ocient says it has, over the past five years, built an ANSI SQL-compliant analytical database for Petabyte and beyond datasets that is 10x to 50x times faster than competitive OLAP databases. This is a near-real-time relational database with analytics software for specific use cases.
One of Ocient’s initial funders was In-Q-Tel (the venture arm of the CIA).
Intel has two new Optane 3D XPoint drives coming, if tests at a New Hampshire Interoperability Lab are anything to go by.
As reported in Tom’s Hardware, the SSD DC P5810X and P85811X were listed by the lab as having passed through NVMe interoperability testing:
The Lab’s listing tells us there are two new drives: the U.2 format P5810X and the E1.S (revised gumstick) format P5811X. Both support PCIe 4 and NVMe v1.4. Other than that, we know nothing more specific, such as capacity ranges and performance numbers.
There are two existing P5800 family drives: the U.2 format P5800X and E1.S format P5801X Optane SSD. Both support PCIe 4. The P5801X, as well as being in a different format from the P5800X, is also slightly faster. Its capacity range is 400GB through 800GB to 1.6TB. On launch, the P5800X had the same capacity levels plus a 3.2TB version — but that high-capacity version is no longer listed in the P5800X product brief.
We think that the P5810X and P5811X may be NVMe version, performance and possibly capacity tweaks of the P5800X/P5801X drives. But if they were significantly different, then surely Intel’s massive marketing machine would be all over them — and it isn’t.
Israeli startup Polar Security officially emerges from stealth with $8.5 million seed funding to build its technology for automatically discovering and securing businesses’ managed, unmanaged and shadow data.
Polar Security’s release says “It is nearly impossible to see, follow and protect managed and unmanaged data throughout a company’s workloads. Even more problematic, in their push for speed, developers unintentionally create complex trails of “shadow data” — data that security and compliance teams don’t know exists — which presents a significant threat.” Such shadow data can include extremely sensitive business-dependent information, including IaaS databases, logs, backups, debug dumps, and data within operational cloud services.
A statement from Guy Shanny, Polar’s co-founder and CEO, said “To solve data security in the cloud, you must focus on the crown jewels — the data stores holding sensitive data — as fast as developers create new data. We built Polar to help companies automate their data security across known and unknown data stores, to continuously prevent cloud data vulnerabilities and compliance violations at any scale — what was until now an unsolvable challenge.”
The funding round was led by Glilot Capital Partners with participation from IBI Tech Fund, as well as angel investors, including:
Jim Reavis, co-founder & CEO of Cloud Security Alliance;
Tim Belcher, former RSA CTO;
Ann Johnson, former president of Qualys;
Tom Noonan, co-founder & CEO of Internet Security Systems and VP & GM of IBM Security.
Kobi Samboursky, founder and managing partner at Glilot Capital Partners, justified his firm’s investment. “As basic as it seems, many companies don’t know where their data stores are, what’s inside that data, and where that data is going. This is what excites us about Polar Security. By ensuring data stores are secured as well as in compliance with the company’s regulatory policies as soon as they are created, Polar’s technology will become a foundational piece of every CISO’s toolkit moving forward.”
Existing supplier VC-backed startup Securiti offers shadow data discovery as part of its AI-powered data privacy and security technology. It was started up in November 2018, and has pulled in $81 million in four rounds of funding, including funding from Cisco Investments in April last year. It claims its product suite is the world’s first PrivacyOps platform that helps automate all major functions needed for privacy compliance in one place.
Comment
Polar Security is building technology to discover data that an organisation doesn’t know it has — shadow data — and then secure it and ensure regulatory compliance. Its use represents another cost for its customers and will be justified by the avoidance of fines for not being compliant and, harder to cost-justify, prevention of data loss.
No business knows the extent of its shadow data and Polar will have to discover a fair chunk of it to justify its use, particularly its ongoing use, in an as-a-service deal for example. How a company can not know about backups seems a little far-fetched but, presumably, Polar has examples. And if it can bring management discipline to a data Wild West, then that will be a good thing.
Diamanti, led by CEO Chris Hickey who was appointed seven months ago, has hired 36 sales and engineering people since he took up the post.
Chris Hickey.
The firm originally supplied hyper-converged system software and pivoted to selling software on which to manage and run Kubernetes-orchestrated software, in which it claims a performance advantage. We noted eight exec departures after Hickey joined and he has been busy replenishing the exec head count as well as building up the customer-facing and engineering ranks.
According to Hickey, “Diamanti is recruiting the top sales and development talent in cloud infrastructure to power our expansion and accelerated product roadmap. … with the most experienced sales and engineering leaders in the industry, we are well positioned to innovate and make the case for the most powerful Kubernetes management platform available.”
Relatively recent exec joiners include:
Jaganathan “JJ” Jeyapaul, CTO/EVP of engineering, ex-Oracle;
Mark Glasgow, SVP of worldwide sales, Oct 2021, ex-Hammerspace and Micron;
Arnaldo Perez, CFO, June 2021.
We also know of:
Amandeep S, SVP global operations. India base, June 2021, ex-Quark like Hickey;
Vivek Gupta, VP engineering, Nov 2021;
Taha Hasan, channel sales manager, Nov 2021, ex-SUSE, Rancher Labs;
Fahem Z, sales director, Nov 2021, ex-SUSE and Rancher Labs;
Foster Nichols, sales director, Aug 2021, ex-Palo Alto Networks;
Paul (Ho) Bae, sales director, Oct 2021, ex-VMware;
Erikjan Franssen, promoted to VP international sales, Nov 2021;
Roger Laing, Kubernetes UK&I exec, Sep 2021;
Gareth Holland, business development rep, Jan 2022;
Halee Enderle, business development rep, Jan 2022.
You can see from the last two that recruitment is ongoing. Diamanti has no exec publicly identified as responsible specifically for marketing but it does have an active Twitter posting account — @Diamanticom — which posts details of new joiners and spreads good cheer. Perhaps a marketing exec hire is on the cards.
LinkedIn says Diamanti has 99 employees it knows about, meaning almost a third are new to the company in the last seven months.
The company has also opened an office at the campus of Stony Brook University, in the Charles B. Wang Center, where it says it “will recruit untapped talent and focus on mentoring the next generation of cloud leaders”.
Glassdoor has some vicious Diamanti reviews from severely disenchanted leavers, but you might expect some of that from departed employees when a new CEO comes on board to turn a troubled company around and makes waves. Then again, they may have a point. We shall have to wait and seee how the company progresses.
Funding-wise Diamanti has taken in a total of $78 million since being founded in 2014. The last round was a $35 million C-round in 2019. Presumably it is burning cash. It may be that Hickey will be able to demonstrate significant sales growth and product development this year and so persuade VCs to stump up more funding to enable accelerated growth in 2023/2024.
Enterprise storage array supplier Infinidat reported 40 per cent year-on-year bookings growth in 2021.
This included an end-of year boost, with 68 per cent growth in the final quarter, and Infinidat says it has accelerated its double-digit growth.
Phil Bullinger.
Phil Bullinger, CEO of Infinidat, who was appointed a year ago, has had a very good year and the board should be happy. He said “It has been a transformational year for the company, and our expansion demonstrates our proven growth strategy and reflects the rapidly increasing demand for Infinidat’s software-defined storage technology. The customer, partner, and product momentum we achieved in 2021 position Infinidat for continued success and growth.”
More than 25 per cent of the Fortune 50 are now Infinidat customers, and Infinidat achieved more than 130 per cent year-over-year revenue growth in the company’s Fortune 100 customer base in 2021. It also increased its channel base in 2021 from under 400 partners to more than 500 — a >25 per cent increase, and achieved close to 90 per cent channel revenue.
Infinidat also hired a slew of new execs in 2021, such as CMO Eric Herzog and EMEA and AJP sales head Richard Bradbury, as Bullinger built up its market-facing capabilities.
Dave Vellante, co-founder of SiliconAngle and chief analyst at Wikibon, provides a fitting end-of-story quote: “The company’s double-digit growth underscores its traction and ability to respond to evolving customer requirements in areas such as cyber resilience. It’s good to see management accelerating Infinidat’s original vision with an approach that has always been non-conventional. That’s what it takes to compete with established incumbents in today’s market.”
Dell Technologies is announcing storage and data protection services across the on-premises and multiple public cloud environments, along with enhanced Kubernetes support for enterprises adopting hybrid multi-cloud and cloud-native app development.
The company believes the mainstream enterprise storage, and systems, market is adopting the hybrid, multi-cloud model with a mix of on-premises and public cloud application deployments. On that basis customers want public cloud-like service deals for on-premises hardware and software, consistent application storage environments across the on-premises and multiple public cloud environments, and consistent support for cloud-native DevOps developers, app development and deployments. This positions Dell as responding to customer concerns and various multiple competitive moves by HPE, NetApp and Pure Storage as well as a group of suppliers offering SaaS backup services.
Jeff Boudreau, Dell Technologies Infrastructure Solutions Group president, was quoted in Dell’s announcement: “Today’s multi-cloud reality is complex as data becomes more distributed across on-premises and colocation datacentres, multiple public clouds and edge environments.”
Dell, he claimed, is uniquely positioned “to help customers take control of their multi-cloud strategy” because “we have the industry’s broadest technology portfolio, consistent tools, experience building open ecosystems and leading data storage capabilities, services and supply chain.”
There are futures here because not everything Dell is talking about is ready. The company is announcing APEX Multi-Cloud Data Services delivering storage and data protection as-a-service with simultaneous access to all major public clouds through a single console. This includes:
APEX Backup Services for SaaS applications, endpoints and hybrid workloads in the public cloud;
Project Alpine to offer Dell’s block and file storage software on the main public clouds;
Enhanced Kubernetes support for DevOps and developer portal.
Dell APEX slide, October 2020.
Dell’s APEX initiative was first announced in October 2020 with a set of pay-as-you-go services covering hardware and software products.
The idea is to make the on-premises and public cloud IT worlds similar in terms of IT component delivery, scalability and payment. Dell says APEX Multi-Cloud Data Services, integrated with an APEX Console, will will provide file, block, object and data protection services for simultaneous access to all major public clouds from a single source of data. It will, Dell claims, help avoid public cloud vendor lock-in, excessive egress fees, and the cost and risk associated with moving data from one cloud to another.
Regarding APEX Backup Services, we wrote in April last year, “Dell EMC today officially confirmed backup-as-a-service, built on PowerProtect systems and Druva software. PowerProtect Backup Service supports SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce and other cloud-based workloads, as well as endpoints and hybrid workloads.”
Dell’s Caitlin Gordon, VP for product management, said various ecosystem partners may have roles in the APEX initiative but Dell was not sharing who was providing what technology or services.
Sample Dell APEX customer order screenshot.
Dell says APEX Backup Services can be deployed in minutes, scales on demand, and protects against cyberattacks with instant detection, rapid response and accelerated recovery.
Project Alpine
This is the future bit, with Dell saying it will build on its data protection cloud offerings to bring the software IP of its block and file storage platforms to leading public clouds. Think AWS, Azure, GCP and the Oracle cloud. Supporting Oracle cloud alongside the others is, we think, unique to Dell. The actual block and file storage software will be based on Dell’s flagship products.
Gordon said “We will be bringing our flagship block and file storage software to the major public clouds. This is really huge for our customers. … Our storage portfolio today is predominantly delivered in purpose-built appliances. Technically, what we’re doing here is we’re abstracting that storage software from that underlying physical hardware. We’re enabling that to run on the general purpose instances that are in the different public clouds.”
We asked, is this PowerStore (block) and PowerScale (file) software? Gordon said “We’re not sharing the specific platforms. … What we have prioritised right now, and the roadmap that very much exists and is being developed, is focused on our two flagship [technologies or products] one in … block, and one in file.”
She added: “This is the beginning of a pretty significant investment focus for us. … We’re going to continue to add more over time.”
How will customers get this technology? Gordon said “We will deliver that based … on both hyperscaler capability as well as market demand … either as software that a customer will manage, or … as a fully-managed service. That could be a Dell service or it could be a hyperscaler service.”
Customers will be able to purchase storage software as a managed service from the various cloud marketplaces, using existing cloud credits. There will be a consistent storage experience across the on-premises block and file and public cloud environments with easy sharing of data across multiple clouds.
We should see milestone announcements from Dell over the next 12 months. However, object storage is not included. Our belief is that object services will eventually be included but there is a problem in that, as Caitlin Gordon said: “In APEX Multi-Cloud Data Services that is ECS object absolutely today [but] in APEX Data Storage Services object is actually based off of the object access in PowerScale.” For consistency one object stack, or both, or a unified object stack, needs to be used.
The competitive environment. Blocks and Files diagram.
The obvious competitive comparisons are with NetApp and its OEM deals with the top three public clouds. Pure also has its Cloud Block Store for AWS and Azure.
Kubernetes expansion
Dell is adding increased support for Kubernetes including:
Amazon EKS Anywhere on PowerFlex and PowerStore, enabling customers to run Kubernetes orchestration across public or on-premises clouds;
SUSE Rancher on VxRail, providing multi-cluster, multi-cloud Kubernetes management and giving customers the flexibility to choose their cloud orchestration platform.
The Dell Technologies Developer portal capabilities are being expanded, from a one-stop shop point of view both for developers and DevOps teams. The portal will provide continual access to the latest Dell APIs, SDKs, modules and plug-ins.
Availability
APEX Multi-Cloud Data Services is planned for deployment in the USA, UK, Germany and Australia later this quarter. APEX Backup Services are now globally available.
The previously announced APEX Data Storage Services, which provides Dell-managed enterprise storage as-a-service, is available with colocation services via Equinix International Business Exchange datacentres. It is now available in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Singapore.
APEX Cloud Services with VMware Cloud, also previously announced, is now available in the USA, UK, France and Germany.
Flash fabber Kioxia is sampling a thinner and denser phone flash drive, saying it has faster read and write speeds — but with no details about that, its 3D layer count, or its thickness.
Update. Kioxia response to questions added – 21 January 2022. See end of article.
It is a a proof-of-concept (PoC) device for phones needing to work in 5G environments and handle 4K plus video and high-res photos, and uses QLC (4bits/cell) NAND.
Axel Stoermann, VP memory marketing & engineering for Kioxia Europe, issued an announcement statement, discussing “expanding our already broad lineup with new UFS Memory products for applications that demand superior interface performance. With QLC UFS we can offer another solution which will meet the increasing requirements for Flash memory devices.”
Kioxia has followed up its August 2021 phone memory card announcement, in which it promised faster phone drives built with its BiCS 5 (112-layer 3D NAND) and adhering to the UFS 3.1 standard. It then said the card improved performance by 30 per cent for random reads and 40 per cent for random writes.
Today’s news is equally light on details. Faster than what? Thinner than what? Kioxia does not say.
We guesstimated that meant around 2GB/sec sequential read bandwidth and 1GB/sec sequential write bandwidth back in August. Today’s news merely says the QLC drives use 1Tbit dies, and “For applications needing high density, such as cutting-edge smartphones, Kioxia’s QLC technology enables the capability to achieve the highest densities available in a single package” — meaning 512GB.
Let’s not get too excited at that 512GB.
Kioxia fab partner Western Digital announced a Gen 2 UFS 3.1 drive in June last year with 128, 256 and 512GB capacities.
Back in March 2020, Kioxia was sampling a UFS v3.1 card built with BiCS 3 3D NAND technology, meaning 64 layers, and, we understand TLC (3bits/cell) at 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB capacities. Here we are, 22 months later, two BiCS generations later, and with one more bit per cell, yet capacity has dropped back to 512GB — when it could, we estimate, have reached 2TB. Presumably the phone makers don’t need that much capacity.
We think that using QLC flash means Kioxia has had to overcome inherently lower QLC speeds, compared to the prior or existing TLC flash. By not releasing performance numbers it leaves the door open to doubts about the actual read and write speeds achieved.
Kioxia could say it’s using an SLC write cache, as partner WD revealed back in June, yet it does not.
Here is the table we used in August last year to try and work out what Kioxia’s UFS product technology speeds are:
For now we’ll stick at the 2GB/sec sequential read bandwidth and 1GB/sec sequential write bandwidth for the new drives, and hope more details will come through later.
Kioxia says it is sampling its 512GB QLC UFS PoC devices to select OEM customers.
Update
We asked Kioxia for performance details and why it hadn’t built a 1TB device.
A spokesperson said the answers to our spec questions are confidential, and: “This 512GB QLC UFS device is just for sampling as Proof of Concept, for customers to assess if QLC-based UFS can be a viable solution for their applications (in terms of performance/etc), and for what [use] cases…for Smartphones in particular.
“This will also help us to assess the market for QLC-based UFS parts, and what breadth of densities the market will desire. So we certainly foresee that QLC-based UFS would support higher densities than this … this is just [a] PoC.
“As for why we picked 512GB instead of some larger density as PoC samples, it’s simply that the density, at least at this level, is not so key in terms of figuring out the performance viability of QLC UFS, and therefore is more cost effective way to investigate this (i.e., the same test case, at about half the cost relative to testing with 1TB devices). Note that we do actually already have a TLC-based 1TB UFS in production.”
DataCore Software announced its DataCore Swarm object storage (from acquired Caingo) has qualified as a “Veeam Ready-Object” and “Veeam Ready – Object with Immutability” solution by Veeam. Customers can deploy Swarm as the scalable capacity tier for Veeam Backup & Replication, or Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. The combined offering, DataCore says, enables more frequent backups with less effort at a lower cost, for rapid recovery.
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According to the IDCWorldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment, spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud infrastructure, including dedicated and shared environments, increased 6.6 per cent year over year in Q3 2021 to $18.6 billion. This increase resumes the trend of net positive quarterly year-on-year spending growth, which saw a pause in Q2 2021 when spend decreased 1.9 per cent. This follows seven quarters of year-on-year spending growth, highlighted by 38.4 per cent growth in Q2 2020 as the first global pandemic wave led to business and country closures causing a spike in investments in cloud services and infrastructure. Investments in non-cloud infrastructure increased 7.3 per cent in Q3 2021 to $14.6 billion — the third consecutive quarter to see an increase in such spend after a period of declining spending that started in 2Q19.
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Pure Storage announced a series of updates and new benefits for its Partner Program. They include providing specific requirements and benefits for partners whether they are reselling or offering managed services, as-a-service solutions, or cloud-native architecture. This also applies to cloud-native and Kubernetes-based applications. There are differentiated benefits for Elite partners including incentives, discounts, marketing resources, and more. A new Service Specialization Program enables partner-branded professional and support services around Pure technology. Pure has a formal program to support Pure distribution partners and there is a simplification of the requirements by aligning to solutions, further enabling partners to invest in multiple routes-to-market enablement. The Pure Partner Program will adhere to Pure’s fiscal year, beginning February 7, 2022.
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Satori, which supplies a DataSecOps platform for cloud-based data stores and infrastructure, released annual growth metrics revealing a rapidly expanding user base and soaring data store query volumes, a steady increase in brand visibility, and a new official partnership with AWS. These milestones come less than three months after the company closed a Series A funding round with $20 million in venture capital and added two execs: Gaurav Deshpande, VP of marketing, and Ediz Ertekin, VP of sales.
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Open source software supplier SUSE has announced the NeuVector codebase is available on GitHub, saying this makes NeuVector the “first truly open source, end-to-end security solution”. It will allow Rancher users to address deep network visibility, inspection and segmentation, manage vulnerability, configuration and compliance management, do risk profiling, threat detection and incident response. A blog from SUSE’s president of engineering & innovation Sheng Liang will tell you more.
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Open source distributed SQL database supplier Yugabyte has a strategic partnership agreement with Intuita, a UK-based lifecycle data services provider, to support the growth of enterprise-class, cloud-native, transactional database technology cloud initiatives across EMEA. Both claim that enterprise digital transformations are stalling due to the unsuitability of monolithic databases for cloud native applications, and the inadequacy of NoSQL databases to handle transactional systems of engagement and systems of record. The partners believe YugabyteDB can fix these problems.
