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Spectra Logic takes the Vail – raises attack defences to repel malware boarders

By
Chris Mellor
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Spectra Logic has made managing petabytes and exabytes of distributed data easier by placing it in a single virtual pool, making its BlackPearl and StorCycle systems more resistant to attack, and introducing a new tape library. Phew!

The two-pronged idea is to make it easier to manage massive populations of files and objects spread across on-premises and public cloud storage, and to make Spectra’s own products harder for criminals and malcontents to attack.

CEO Nathan Thompson said Spectra has developed: ”a new generation of data management and storage solutions for multi-cloud environments so that customers can take full advantage of the best aspects of on-premises applications and multiple cloud services with a single easy-to-use interface. With the increase in global ransomware attacks, as well as Spectra’s [own] success in prevailing against a malicious attack, we have added a host of Attack-Hardened features into our entire suite of solutions to enhance ransomware resiliency for our customers.”

Read about a ransomware attack on Spectra Logic and its recovery, without paying a ransom, here.

Vail

Spectra said its Vail software centralises data management across on-premises and multi-cloud architectures, enabling dynamic on-demand data access, placement and storage within a single global namespace. Its mantra for Vail is “Any User, Any Data, Any Site, Any Cloud” — as long as it’s AWS, Azure or Google.

Vail dashboard shot.

The Vail software, covered by multiple awarded and pending patents, features policy-based data orchestration that presents all data stored anywhere in a customer’s IT environment as a single pool of storage. All files appear in their native format and are both accessible and protected. The software features include:

  • Objects in the namespace may be located in multiple locations on varying storage types;
  • Multi-directional data synchronisation across cloud(s) and on-premises;
  • Serverless cloud-based management and configurable policy engine to manage data across multiple clouds and on-premises sites with full consistency;
  • Ability to migrate to the cloud or move between clouds to use the services of particular clouds without vendor lock-in;
  • Egress optimisation for lowest cost and fastest data accessibility independent of data’s physical location;
  • Secure, central repository for long-term data preservation and disaster recovery;
  • On-Premises Glacier-style storage using automated tape libraries.

BlackPearl and StorCycle Attack Hardening

The BlackPearl hybrid (flash/disk) storage systems, which support on-board secondary NAS data and sending S3-formatted data to tape, now support direct S3 object storage with bi-directional synchronisation of data to/from the public cloud.

BlackPearl has been given triggered snapshots, multi-factor authentication, encryption and a virtual air gap for ransomware mitigation as part of an attack-hardening exercise. It already has support for on-premises Glacier-class storage, including spin-down object storage disk and connectivity to automated tape libraries.

The StorCycle file lifecycle management system and Spectra tape libraries both get ”patent pending Attack-Hardened features that help protect customers from cyberattacks, and offer them improved business continuity through rapid restore of clean data after an attack.“

StorCycle v3.6 provides:

  • Ransomware Snapshots via Integration with BlackPearl snapshot feature. StorCycle can initiate snapshots of BlackPearl volumes at the end of migrate jobs, and optionally maintains immutable read-only status of volumes.
  • BlackPearl Bucket Adoption with which allows users to configure an existing BlackPearl object storage system as a storage location, and automatically adopt the contents of the bucket into the StorCycle database. The objects remain in the bucket, but are available for StorCycle restorations. 
Spectra Stack library graphic.

Spectra Stack tape library

This expandable library was introduced in 2018 and now supports LTO-9 tapes. It starts from a 6U chassis with one to six LTO-9 drives and 10 to 80 LTO-9 tape cartridge slots. It can grow eightfold, by stacking the chassis module, to 560 slots and 42 drives. As well as having the traditional physical air gap between cartridges and drives, this library now has a cold partition that locks tapes so that they cannot be overwritten or loaded into a drive if ransomware takes control of the tape library itself. This is, we believe, a unique feature.

Availability

Vail and BlackPearl Platform enhancements will be available in November 2021. StorCycle 3.6 will be available in October 2021. Spectra Stack enhancements are currently available. Spectra’s full line of tape libraries will be adopting Attack-Hardened features in early 2022.

What a fab business! Micron looks for US government subsidies in $150 billion plant program

By
Chris Mellor
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Micron is intending to spend up to $150 billion in the next ten years to expand its fab capability around the globe — particularly in the USA, where it is looking for US government help.

It says that future DRAM and NAND demand is solid enough, boosted by AI and 5G wireless networking roll outs, to justify the overall investment. But US memory manufacturing costs are  35–45 per cent higher than in lower-cost markets with established semiconductor ecosystems. The chip supply shortage and China’s growing ambitions and ability to squeeze component supply chains has encourage the US to look more favourably on semi-conductor fabs located in or closer to the USA.

Micron President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra pointedly said: “We look forward to working with governments around the world, including in the US where CHIPS funding and the FABS Act would open the door to new industry investments, as we consider sites to support future expansion.”  

Micron reckons funding to support new semiconductor manufacturing capacity and a refundable investment tax credit are critical to potential expansion of US manufacturing as part of its $150 billion investment. EVP of Global Operations Manish Bhatia emphasised the point: “Our markets demand cost-competitive operations. Sustained government support is essential for Micron to ensure a resilient supply chain and reinforce technology leadership for the long term.”

No doubt US states will be invited to tender subsidies to get plants built in exchange for committments on jobs.

Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers told subscribers: “We view this press release as primarily tied to the company’s appeal to the US and other governments in terms of subsidies and other forms of commitments/incentives to help fund industry investments.”

There is a small Micron DRAM & NAND fab in Manassas, Virginia, but its main DRAM fabs are in Taiwan and Japan. Its NAND is primarily made in Singapore. The company sold its Lehi fab to Texas Instruments in July for $1.5 billion.

Micron’s announcement made no mention of reports from Japan saying it intended to build a new fab there, costing up to ¥800 billion ($6.8 billion) with potential Japanese government aid.

Infinidat lures Eric Herzog away from IBM to become its chief marketing honcho

By
Chris Mellor
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Infinidat has hired one of the most recognisable and prominent marketeers in the storage industry as its Chief Marketing Officer — Eric Herzog.

This is the second formal CMO in Infinidat’s history and marks a change in emphasis by CEO Phil Bullinger. He told us that Infinidat is experiencing record growth and it needs to focus on raising brand awareness and increasing its channel partnerships to scale its business even more.

Update; Infinidat CMO history footnote added, 21 October 2021.

Bullinger’s formal statement said: “Eric’s broad product and market knowledge and deep relationships in the enterprise storage industry make him a great asset for the Infinidat team as our CMO. … Eric will play a key role in further accelerating our global momentum at an exciting time of tremendous growth at the company.”

Eric Herzog.

Eric Herzog  is — was — IBM’s divisional CMO for Storage and VP of Global Storage Channels, and has been in the position since February 2015. His CV includes a three and a half year stint at EMC as SVP for product management and marketing, looking after VNX, VNXe and VAMAX arrays, time at Violin, and also Maxtor which was acquired by Seagate. 

He told us it’s not just large companies in his CV: “I’ve worked at eight startups, five of which had been acquired.”

How did Bullinger select Eric? He said: “It was a very thoughtful process” and involved a shortlist of the preferred candidates. He and Bullinger came into contact at EMC, where Bullinger was SVP and GM of the Isilon business unit. 

Why did Eric decide to leave Big Blue and join yet another startup — albeit one that is late-stage and profitable? He said: “I’m an adrenalin junkie. I like innovation and Infinidat is innovating faster than others. Infinidat Is the ultimate adrenaline junkie challenge … It’s a David and Goliath thing” — with Goliath being, amongst others IBM.

Herzog has won awards for his CMO work at IBM. He has been recognized as “Marketer/CMO of the Year” (Jan 2021), “Top 100 Hybrid Cloud Influencers” (March 2021), and “Top 100 AI and Big Data Influencers” (March 2020).

His formal statement said: ”Infinidat is the most innovative enterprise storage company at scale in the world today, delivering an AI-driven set-it-and-forget-it approach with unprecedented 100 per cent availability, superior performance that is faster than all-flash alternatives, an extensive storage software defined portfolio, and lower total cost of ownership.”

This, to our mind, sets the scene for Herzog’s Infinidat marketing pitch. He will be able to raise awareness of Infinidat’s technology uniqueness, such as its memory caching, and its reputation for white glove, concierge-class service, as evidenced by Gartner Peer Insights reports. He’ll also push its profitability, as a pure differentiator against other storage startups.

He said: “I’m excited about the opportunity to reach every enterprise and service provider that will benefit from the power and flexibility of Infinidat solutions. With best-in-class solutions, exceptional support, motivated channel partners, and an exciting vision for the future, we will expand the Infinidat brand to a leadership position in enterprise storage.”

ESG founder and Senior Analyst Steve Duplessis provided a supportive quote: “Eric Herzog is one of the most high-energy and dynamic marketing professionals in the industry that I’ve ever known, and I’ve known everyone. Infinidat has been a ‘best kept secret’ for far too long. That is about to change! Great for the both of them.”

His departure from IBM leaves a marketing vacancy there. His arrival at Infinidat is a trumpet blast to the rest of the storage industry that they will need to raise their marketing game — and volume — if they compete with Infinidat.

Footnote

Infinidat’s first CMO was Randy Arseneau, who was in post from 2015 to 2018 when he left to join IBM and its Cloud Object Storage team. Infinidat then had an acting CMO with Matthew (Doc) D’Errico a VP in the office of the CTO from January 2018. He, unfortunately, passed away in July this year.

Vastly better ransomware defences, more security, fleet control and analytics for VAST Data customers

By
Chris Mellor
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The fourth major release of VAST Data’s array operating system introduces indestructible snapshots, NFS v4.1 security and speed measures, central control for fleets of VAST systems, and analytics for long-range planning.

Admins can manage larger groups of arrays through a single, cloud-based pane of glass, and look into capacity usage inside an individual array in more detail. This set of incremental improvements will help its customers grow their VAST Data deployments without increasing their management and security burden while being better able to understand array usage history and trends.

Renen Hallak.

Co-founder and CEO Renen Hallak provided the announcement quote for VASTOS v4: ”Data is the lifeblood of every organisation, and providing fast, affordable and safe access to that data is our mission. … Now customers have the only platform they need for their modern applications, including AI, big data, backup, containers, and beyond.”

Ah yes, containers. Let’s cover that before getting into the meat of VASTOS. Version 4 provides quality of service (QoS) across pools of highly-available containers. VIP-pool view policies enable customers to limit data exports to specific pools and/or VLANs, making it possible to restrict data access along hardware and network boundaries.

Ransomware security and a speed boost

VASTOS now has purportedly indestructible data snapshots. The read-only snapshots and snapshot policies are immutable and so immune from ransomware attacks, accidental and deliberate deletion.

VAST says its NFS v4.1 implementation has support for V5 Kerberos’s authentication/authorisation and NFS 4 access control lists (ACLs), integrated file and byte-range locking for fine-grained and secure permissions to files and directories.

It also supports NFS 4 nconnect, to provide multiple network connections between the NFS client and the storage port. This bypasses the throughput limitations of a single TCP connection.

Centralised management

A Data Uplink provides the ability for enterprise VAST array managers to look after a fleet of VAST arrays anywhere in the world using a cloud connection. This cloud-based scheme uses the same centralised portal that VAST’s Co-Pilot and support teams use to manage the company’s global fleet of Universal Storage systems.

Array systems now provide so-called Data Flows which are visually displayed performance statistics with a drill-down feature to look at specific data flows.

V4 VASTOS also brings the ability for admins to look in more detail at how both logical and physical capacity is being used, with visual indicators, to help with capacity planning.

VASTOS v4 is now available to VAST customers.

Storage news ticker – October 20

By
Chris Mellor
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…

Japan’s Nikkan Kogyo newspaper reports Micron is going to spend up to ¥800 billion ($6.98 billion) on a new fab at Higashihiroshima city in the Hiroshima prefecture, Japan, near its existing fab there. The Japanese government could contribute to the cost. The plant would start outputting DRAM wafers in 2024 and employ 2,000 to 3,000 workers. Micron did not comment.

…

Veritas Technologies announced NetBackup Recovery Vault, a fully-managed storage as a service data repository for NetBackup. Generally available later this year, Recovery Vault will provide ransomware resiliency as a purpose-built, [virtual] air-gapped storage tier for backups, while reducing the cost and complexity of using cloud storage from a selection of leading providers for long-term retention and recovery of backup data. NetBackup is the management and cloud storage provisioning interface.

…

William Blair analyst Jason Ader runs a periodic VAR survey. His October-quarter survey of 111 VARs revealed a steadily improving demand environment, with more (and larger) projects getting approved and better quoting activity. Project velocity has not slowed down and long hardware lead times are driving more customers to place orders early. The lead times have lengthened — three to seven months for many products — with network devices (switches, access points, network firewalls) and endpoints seeing the worst delays. The gap between bookings and billings is the highest in memory and most hardware vendors have raised prices to account for component price increases, which is exacerbating customer and VAR frustrations.

…

Ader’s VAR survey revealed NetApp is taking market share. VARs said NetApp’s market momentum and share gains are continuing, with multiple seven- and eight-figure wins. The general view in the storage space is that in 2020 customers delayed refreshing storage arrays in favor of higher-priority items. A year later, customers have resumed spending on storage to keep pace with data growth, refresh aging infrastructure, and support IT modernization initiatives. While long-term headwinds to on-premises storage have not gone away, people may be underestimating the staying power of on-premises storage, especially for mission-critical, data-intensive workloads where cloud costs can be prohibitive.

…

TrendForce says contract prices of NAND Flash products are expected to undergo a marginal drop of 0–5 per cent quarter-on-quarter in Q421 as demand slows. The current cyclical upturn in NAND Flash prices will have lasted for only two consecutive quarters. NAND Flash suppliers appear likely to downsize their capacity expansion activities for 2022, resulting in a 31.8 per cent year-on-year increase in NAND Flash bit supply next year. Annual bit demand is projected to increase by 30.8 per cent year on year. With demand being outpaced by supply, and competition intensifying among suppliers for higher-layer products, the NAND Flash market will likely experience a cyclical downturn in prices in 2022.

…

SolarWinds introduced SolarWinds Database Mapper for DataOps staff, providing a one-stop shop for data teams to maintain current documentation and visually track data dependencies and comparisons across the environment, streamlining data projects. Database Mapper includes support for Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL databases. It’s available on-premises or as a SaaS offering and can be bought from the Azure Marketplace.

SolarWinds DataMapper screenshot.

Cohesity adds DRaaS offering, data safety, and plans a virtual Fort Knox to manage data

By
Chris Mellor
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Wikipedia public domain image - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Knox

Data protector and manager, and soon governess, Cohesity has announced a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service offering along with DataGovern, a data security and governance service, and Project Fort Knox, a virtual secure vault service for customers’ data. The company is building a suite of cloud-provided threat defence features.

Announced at its Cohesity Connect virtual event, these follow on from the DataProtect Backup-as-a-Service news and extends the automated disaster recovery (DR) capabilities of Cohesity’s SiteContinuity. Its DRaaS adds the ability to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a recovery location for failover and failback in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

Matt Waxman, Cohesity VP of product management, said: “In an age of crippling ransomware attacks, the number-one concern many IT leaders have is maintaining business continuity if they get hit. DRaaS can help organisations recover quickly and cost effectively. … customers can manage everything through the Cohesity Helios multi-cloud platform.” He finished with a verbal flourish: “It’s simplicity redefined.” 

SiteContinuity dashboard.

Cohesity says customers can avoid paying for a secondary datacentre to act as a DR site. Instead they can use the on-demand pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure from AWS, including Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in the event of a disaster. Customers can spin up a disaster recovery strategy without having to procure additional hardware or physical datacentres.

It’s unlikely that customers would consider setting up a secondary DR datacentre just for the applications that use the data that their Cohesity products manage and protect, but you get the picture.

Francois Lepage, cybersecurity and architecture manager at Cohesity customer The Master Group, provided a  telling comment: “The Cohesity DRaaS offering provides multiple benefits … Application uptime and the ability to recover in the cloud top the list. But, we also like the pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure model from AWS, which can help reduce costs. And, we like the simplicity of it all. We can manage this offering along with our on-premises Cohesity deployment through one platform on one UI.”

If and when Cohesity customers pursue as-a-Service IT strategies then Cohesity is there, ready and willing to help them on their way.

Cohesity has said that it has an overall Data Management-as-a-Service strategy, transitioning its on-premises products to functions delivered as a a service from the public cloud. First there was BaaS, now we have DRaaS, DataGovern and Project Fort Knox. This DRaaS capability is generally available.

DataGovern

This early access preview service uses AI/ML to automate discovery of sensitive data and detect anomalous access and usage patterns which could indicate ransomware activity or an attempt to exfiltrate data. DataGovern:

  • Identifies sensitive items, such as personally identifiable information (PII), in backup and production data and determines who has access to it, so helping to harden environments before attacks occur;
  • Automates and simplifies data classification with predefined policies for common regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA to meet compliance and governance mandates;
  • Detects behavioural anomalies in near real time, such as when a user suddenly accesses large volumes of sensitive data — an activity that could be a precursor to a data exfiltration exercise.  
DataGovern dashboard. Its black background is dramatically different from SiteContinuity’s dashboard.

A future release will trigger remediation workflows as determined by policy through integration with third-party security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms.

Project Fort Knox 

This planned SaaS offering will enable customers to maintain an isolated public cloud-based copy of their data in a Cohesity-managed, immutable and online vault to improve data resiliency in the face of ransomware and other attacks. The features should include:

  • Connect, vault, and recover with no need, Cohesity says, to shuttle tapes around, attempt to construct a do-it-yourself (DIY) cloud-based data vault, build out additional storage infrastructure, or devise bespoke recovery processes to adhere to well-known “3-2-1” best practices;
  • If and when a ransomware attack takes place, identify a clean copy of data at online access speed and recover to a safe desired target location, either on-premises or in the public cloud;
  • Run drills to test attack preparedness. 

And, of course, there is the now take-for-granted move from a Capex to an Opex expenditure business model. 

We note that tapes are physically air-gapped which, as tape aficionados will assert, is more secure in principle than online, virtual air-gaps like the Project Fort Knox repository.

A Cohesity blog discusses the company’s DMaaS roadmap.

Hello little siblings: Tintri’s loner T7080 gets a family

By
Chris Mellor
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DDN’s Tintri enterprise array business unit has added entry and mid-range models alongside an updated VMstore T7000 dual-controller, all-NVMe flash array product.

Tintri’s VMstore arrays are organised to supply storage capabilities to VMware virtual machines using a VMware administrator’s language and concepts. They can also provide storage in a similar way for SQL Server database admins. The original T7080 model now has added T7040 and T7060 sibling products  in the same 2RU 24-slot chassis. There are new 100GbitE data and replication port options and expanded vDisk support. Virtual disks (vDisks) are a virtual machine’s view of its physical storage devices.

Graham Breeze, Tintri VP of Products, provided an announcement statement which reiterated VMstore’s capabilities: “The Workload Intelligence-driven efficiencies and optimisations of VMstore are the reason it has held the title of the most revolutionary storage management appliance on the market for more than a decade. VMstore truly is a self-driving system that provides the unparalleled VM density required for deploying virtual infrastructures and accommodating the enterprise’s dynamics and changing needs.” 

Now more customers can buy the all-NVMe T7000 systems with these new entry-level and mid-range systems with their tiered vDisks and maximum supported VMs. Tintri’s new exec team will be using these new systems to increase product sales.

We’ve tabulated the basic size and performance parameter for the new T7000 line up along with the prior T7080 product for comparison purposes:

We can see that the maximum supported vDisks on the prior high-end T7080, 15,000, has increased to 22,500 — a near 50 per cent increase. The minimum and maximum raw SSD capacity is the same for all three T7000 models and we think that the maximum number of Virtual Machines (VMs) and vDisks supported is down to controller CPU variations.

The systems start at ten populated drive bays and can grow to 24 fully-populated bays with no disruption to operations.

Tintri says the T7000s have fully autonomous operations, granular per-VM and per-Database management, real-time and predictive analytics. The predictive analytics is said to be able to forecast resource requirements to optimise performance and capacity up to 18 months in advance.  

The company’s marketing stance is based on its arrays being far easier to use and manage by VMware and SQL database admin staff than competing arrays. Tintri believes that their capabilities have been under-valued and it has a significant time-to-market lead which it can extend into Kubernetes environments and beyond.

The T7080, T7060, and T7040 are now available, either directly from Tintri or through certified partners. 

Storage news ticker – October 19

By
Chris Mellor
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Storage news
Storage news

The “3-2-1” backup rule says you should store three copies of your data on two different media with one copy stored off-site. A more advanced “3-2-1-1-0” strategy goes further — you should maintain at least three data copies, on at least two different types of storage media, with one copy of the backups off-site, one copy offline or air-gapped, and ensure all recoverability arrangements have zero errors.

Cloud storage provider Wasabi paraphrases this by saying “you should keep three copies of your data and one of them should be immutable.” Err … OK. Brevity is the soul of wit after all. And it then says it offers S3 “Object Lock at no additional cost so you know that your data is safe.”  

…

Acronis has released its annual Cyber Readiness Report, based on findings from 3,600 IT managers and remote employees at small and medium-sized companies in 18 countries across the globe. It states that 53 per cent of global companies have a false sense of security when it comes to supply chain attacks. Despite the globally recognised attacks on trusted software vendors, like Kaseya or SolarWinds, over half of IT leaders believe that using “known, trusted software” is sufficient protection — making them an easy target. Full report and assets available here.

…

OWC announced docks and SSDs for Apple’s new MacBook Pros. The product range includes Thunderbolt docks, a Thunderbolt hub, Thunderbolt/USB-C cable, Envoy Pro SSDs, blades, bays and Flex enclosures.

…

Nextcloud GmbH, which supplies an on-premises content collaboration platform, and iXsystems inc., developer of the industry’s number-one Open Storage platform, announced a partnership to bring Nextcloud Hub features to TrueNAS. Tens of thousands of TrueNAS systems already run Nextcloud and availability of a supported, well-integrated offering will give larger organisations more confidence to deploy.

…

Snowflake launched a Media Data Cloud, enabling media and advertising businesses to utilise their data for insights, analysis and measurement. This makes it possible to carry out first-party data matching, create audience insights and activate and measure campaigns. Media Data Cloud enables businesses to dynamically share, join and analyse collaborative data for identity, audience insights, targeting, activation, and measurement. Customers and partners in the Media Data Cloud include industry leaders like AWS, Disney Advertising Sales, Experian, Horizon Media, The Trade Desk, and more.

…

AnalyticsIQ is set to announce that its B2C and B2B data will now be available through the AWS Data Exchange. Through this integration, millions of Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers will have secure access to AnalyticsIQ’s wealth of B2B and B2C data, including individual-level data for niche audiences and organizations in the auto, finance, health and wellness, and media industries.

SoftIron becomes storage manufacturing Wizard of Oz

By
Chris Mellor
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Ceph-based integrated HW/SW array manufacturer SoftIron is setting up a manufacturing base in Australia.

The plant is based in Sydney and building will begin this month. It will enable SoftIron to supply locally-built arrays in the same way as it does in the USA. SoftIron was awarded a Sovereign Industrial Capability Priority Grant of $1.5 million from the Department of Defence to support the Department’s stated Sovereign Industrial Capability Priorities. SoftIron’s facility is believed to mark the first time that component-level computer manufacturing has taken place on Australian soil.

SoftIron COO Jason Van der Schyff issued a statement saying: “By establishing our first ever factory on Australian soil, we will help further bolster Australia’s data infrastructure resilience by locally manufacturing our world-leading datacentre solutions. Our products will help our local customers deploy a credible, transparent and trusted alternative to public clouds that are based on imported, opaque hardware.”

SoftIron bezel.

The company strongly believes that by closely controlling the design and manufacturing of its arrays it can deliver a certified hardware supply chain and higher performance — claimed wire speed — and efficiency — not least power efficiency — than competing arrays based on commodity components and contract manufacturing. The certified hardware supply chain means it can provide auditable provenance for strategic markets.

In turn this will help customers gain transparency, resiliency, and achieve complete data sovereignty.

The overall idea is to set up global edge manufacturing capabilities. SoftIron is developing a digital twin in Berlin, Germany, mirroring each edge manufacturing location. This should enable analysis, planning and optimisation to take place at a global level while still delivering locally manufactured product capitalising on local skills and a local supply chain. 

Van der Schyff hammered this home by saying: “The global supply chain is quite complex, with major security gaps. The reality is that most datacentres don’t know if their appliances are secure since manufacturers tend to operate opaque processes. Our goal is to offer our customers in Australia complete transparency with a range of appliances that are true to their design. Nothing more, nothing less.”

SoftIron is unique. No other storage company, as far was we know, offers such auditable provenance in support of data sovereignty.

Musical Chairs: Acronis gets Maritzed

By
Chris Mellor
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Cyber data protector Acronis has appointed ex-VMware CEO Paul Maritz to chair its board, replacing René Bonvanie who had been Chairman since February 2014.

Serguei (SB) Belousssov founded Acronis in 2003 and is now its Chief Research Officer and an executive board member. He gave up the CEO role in July this year, having been CEO since May 2013 and also Chairman before Bonvanie. Patrick Pulvermüller was appointed CEO in July. He was hired two months after a $250 million funding round, only the third in Acronis’ history, valuing the company at $2.5 billion. At that time it said it was focussing on growing its managed service providers (MSPs) network, which has more than 12,000 members.

A quote from Pulvermüller said: “Paul brings a wealth of experience developing products to meet market demands and take companies to the next level. His … experience with innovations at scale will help us to continue delivering easy, efficient, and secure cyber protection to service providers and their customers of any size.”

Paul Maritz.

Acronis has made four significant moves since the start of May. First Maritz joined the board and there was the funding round. Then Pulvermüller gets the CEO spot, and now Maritz becomes Chairman. It looks like a plan in action.

Maritz’s history includes a stint as an SVP at Microsoft, co-founding and being CRO of Pi Corp, acquired by EMC in 2008, with Maritz then being appointed to run VMware. He was replaced by Pat Gelsinger in 2012 and then became CEO of GoPivotal, founded by GE, EMC and VMware. Maritz left the CEO role in 2015 but has been Chairman since April 2013.

Acronis said this about Maritz’s role: “Maritz will be responsible for the governance and leadership of Acronis as it strengthens its position in the service provider market preparing for significant growth in the future.” 

It reckons the challenge of providing MSPs with effective tools to manage the environments of their customers is becoming increasingly complex — particularly in a world where security is becoming an overwhelming issue. The MSP needs to provide integrated and automated cyber protection, covering what Acronis calls SAPAS: safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security. MSPs can do this better than individual businesses in Acronis’s view 

A Maritz statement mentioned cyber-protection and said: “Acronis Cyber Protect is a great example of what can be done. Acronis will continue extensive research and development in this direction, helping partners optimise their operations and stay ahead of the competition.”

There are some half-million Acronis business customers and more than 5.5 million consumer customers. The privately-owned firm has over 1,700 employees with offices in 34 locations across 19 countries. There are 38,000 non-MSP channel partners. The firm says it is preparing for significant growth and will “continue to make acquisitions to become one of the world’s major players of providing the most innovative backup, security, and management tools on the market.

We think Acronis is gearing up to become a much more significant supplier of cyber-protection services to businesses and that an IPO lies ahead. How else will the VCs get a return on their investment? A man like Maritz at the helm, with his business track record, will give confidence to potential investors if and when an IPO takes place.

This ship is for turning: Pavilion Data is regaining its lost ground

By
Chris Mellor
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Pavilion Data, provider of the claimed fastest storage array in the universe, appointed a new CEO in July as its VC backers are trying to a grip on the company, which lost its way after a promising start.

Founded in 2014, Pavilion Data developed a proprietary storage array design based on a network switch with massively parallel design features. In November 2018 its RF100 array had up 20 controllers talking to 72 flash drives across a PCIe fabric inside a 4U chassis. Host access was by RoCE and NVMe/TCP.

Pavilion Data hardware scheme.

The performance was remarkable — average read latency of 117μs, up to 120GB/sec read bandwidth, 60GB/sec write bandwidth and 20 million 4K Random Read IOPS. Since then the HyperOS software has been developed, gaining file and object capabilities in 2019, and global file and object namespace in 2021 along with multi-chassis scale-out, a CSI plug-in and more. The performance has been boosted with HyperOS v3 on the block side offering 20 million read IOPS, five million write IOPS, 100μs read latency, 25μs write latency, 120GB/sec read and 90GB/sec write bandwidth.

But the array hardware and software has not fulfilled its potential. Three years later, it has just 20–25 customers (apparently concentrated in the US federal sector), relatively few channel partners, and a funding history more indicative of financial starvation than generous growth funding.

Some history

There were plentiful funding rounds during product development, with $21 million in a two-part A-round in 2016 and 2017, then an $11 million B-round in 2018, followed by a $25 million C-round in 2019 and then … nothing, giving a total of $58 million. Compare that to Qumulo, a scale-out filer startup founded in 2012 which has received $351 million in funding — more than six times as much.

Software-based scale-out parallel file system startup WekaIO has received $66.7 million. Hardware/software-based VAST Data has received $263 million — more than 4x Pavilion’s total. Pavilion is a hardware-based startup that has been funded more like a software-based one.

It has suffered a little founder and CEO attrition as well. The original founders were CEO Kiran Malwankar and VP Software Engineering (now Chief Development Officer) Sundar Kanthadai. VR Satish joined as CTO in December 2015 from Symantec/Veritas and contributed so much he is classed as a co-founder too.

Malwankar was replaced as CEO by Shri Dodani in 2016, became VP Hardware Engineering and then quit in January 2018 — first to join another startup and then CPU developer Tachyum. Dodani went in April 2017, replaced by Gurpreet Singh who came from being VP Product management at Pure Storage via an intervening 11-month stint as CEO and co-founder of Dynamix IO.

Some of the early marketing and product strategy was bizarre. Customers could buy an unpopulated array and fill it with their own SSDs — supposedly as a way of highlighting the great price/performance, but hardly suitable for an enterprise customer. 

The picture here is of a high technology company run by two CEOs who were not effective in growing the company at all. They misunderstood its place in the market, and failed to get the funds needed to build up an effective route to customers.

Dario Zamarian.

Which brings us up to speed

That was why the board — the investors in other words — replaced Singh with Dario Zamarian and tasked him with getting the company back on track. How does he plan to do it? He says that Pavilion so far has secured customers in Life Science, Media & Entertainment, Financial Services, and other high-performance computing applications.

It isn’t selling into a horizontal market, but segments that require low latency and high IOPS and throughput performance. His first quarter in the big chair has seen Zamarian grow the business and improve its focus. He is pursuing more funding and seems hopeful he might be able to announce big ticket news in a few months. 

We expect to her about more focus on channel partners in the future. Marketing firepower should be concentrated in target niches that need Pavilion’s low latency and high IOPS/bandwidth numbers in mixed and scale-out block, file and object workloads. Zamarian cannot go head-to-head across the overall storage market with VAST Data, Dell EMC, NetApp, Pure Storage and and HPE.

But it must find market niches that give it growth — not least so that it can avoid the fate of Violin and Vexata, now resident in the low-growth area of the storage business. Come on VCs — put your hands in your wallets and feed this financially starved company. It’s the only way it will fullfil its potential and give you an exit that will make you smile.

Storage news ticker tape — October 18

By
Chris Mellor
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…

Marvell is sampling its Octeon 10 DPU (Data Processing Unit) with between 8 and 36 Arm Neoverse N2 cores based on Arm’s Armv9 architecture. The chip is built using TSMC’s 5nm manufacturing process and is said to be 3x more powerful than the prior Octeon TX2 product yet draw half as much electricity. The Octeon 10 includes cryptography-acceleration units, packet parsers, DDR5 support, PCIe 5.0 interconnects, up to 400Gbit/sec Ethernet, functions for IPSec, and vector packet processing (VPP). It is destined for edge-network processing work such as packet filtering and machine-learning on a 5G wireless network and should be available by the year-end. We now have Fungible, Intel, Marvell and Pensando producing specialised DPU/SmartNIC chips.

…

Samsung is producing DDR5 DRAM using a 14nm process and EUV (Extreme Ultra Violet lithography). It can operate at up to 7.2Gbit/sec, more than 2x DDR4 speed of up to 3.2Gbit/sec. Samsung claims it is the industry’s highest-density DDRAM chip. DDR5 DIMMS can have up to 2TB capacity per DIMM vs 128GB DIMMs available currently. Samsung expects growing DDR5 adoption in 2022, which could mean servers with far higher memory capacity.

…

A third generation of high bandwidth memory (HBM3) is emerging and was discussed in SemiConductor Engineering. AI Training models need more memory and HBM3 can offer a high-capacity, high-bandwidth and power-efficient tier of memory below DRAM in the memory hierarchy. A couple of diagrams illustrate HBM generation developments and interposer use.

HBM relies on an interposer layer connecting it to a closely-located System-on-Chip (SoC) containing a processor. It’s unclear how or if such a pool of memory could work in a CXL environment, since the interposer functions as a CPU-memory link instead of CXL.

…

Italian oil company ENI has upgraded its HPC4 supercomputer with an HPE GreenLake utility pricing scheme whereby existing nodes will be replaced with ProLiant DL385 Gen 10 Plus nodes with 2x AMD Rome 24-core processors. 1,375 nodes will have 2x Nvidia V100 GPUs. 122 nodes will have 2x Nividia A100 GPUs and 22 nodes will carry 2x AMD Instinct M100 GPUs. There will be 22 log-in-only CPU nodes. The whole processing bundle will use data from a ten-petabyte ClusterStor E1000 parallel file system, which is almost twice the capacity of the current HPC4 system.

…

Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers traps some storage company job listings. He’s noticed NetApp’s open job positions have risen by 28 compared to last week, totalling 721. This compares to 192 a year ago. A chart shows a recent spurt with NetApp recruiting heavily and steadily since September 2020.

We think this is due in whole or part to the rise of its cloud business unit.

…

JEDEC is developing a Crossover Flash Memory (XFM) Embedded and Removable Memory Device (XFMD) standard whereby soldered NVMe/PCIe NAND chips can be replaced. These chips are soldered in to devices such as gaming consoles, virtual and augment reality glasses/headsets, drones and surveillance video recorders, and in the automotive industry. An XFMD unit will measure 13mm x 18mm x 1.4mm high — smaller than a standard SD card and  larger than a microSD card.

…

Metrolink.ai, a data management omniplatform, officially launches today. It has completed a $22 million seed round in just a few months since its inception. Trusted by Grove Ventures and Eclipse Ventures, Metrolink.ai plans to expand its R&D team to make data extractable and accessible through a dedicated generic platform, allowing customer companies to:

  • Free data scientists from cleaning up messy data and cataloguing;
  • Design their own data pipelines by mixing ready-made ‘building blocks’;
  • Support a ‘no code’ model that covers a wide variety of automated, advanced data transformations;
  • White-label product that integrates with existing business processes and databases, and deployable on-premises or in the cloud;
  • Retrieve and process complex data in hours.

…

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