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Hammerspace exec interview on supply shortages — and working for Warren Buffet

By
Chris Mellor
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Are you affected by IT hardware supply shortages? We had an email interview with Hammerspace’s SVP for Strategy and Business Development, Tony Asaro, who’s been hearing from customers about this very issue. It’s real and it is affecting them.

Tony Asaro.

Blocks and Files: What are customers telling you about server and storage hardware order lead times?

Tony Asaro: We’ve heard from multiple customers that getting new hardware has a lead time on average of 16 weeks.  And that is across all suppliers.

What are the causes of the delays?

This is due to supply chain issues including sourcing components but also and perhaps a bit less obvious, transportation challenges, worker-scarcity, and even gas shortages in some parts of the world.

What effects do you see as a result of this in terms of IT projects being delayed and the economy generally?

What is of concern is that new projects that require dedicated hardware are being impacted. Many of them are directly tied to driving revenue, creating content, research, design, analytics, and the list goes on.  

And not only is availability a challenge but prices for hardware are also going up. So, as well as time-to-market being impacted, so too is profitability.  

The negative domino effect on the market doesn’t seem to be overly apparent today but all the signs are there. The question is whether it is a just bump in the road or something far more profound.

If customers are not willing to wait what can they do? Are any cancelling orders?

No-one that I have spoken to on this issue is cancelling, but they are delaying projects instead. They have their purchase orders in and are planning around the extended lead times.  

If the project is at the Proof Of Concept stage, then they are leveraging the cloud, if possible. POCs are becoming almost like staging areas so when their equipment arrives they will be more prepared. They are taking this time to work out nuances, best practices and optimisations.

Do you see customers being more willing to move to the public cloud if orders for on-premises hardware are being delayed?

Keep in mind that Hammerspace has a very strong cloud offering and as such our customers can focus on those aspects of the implementation. We are finding that customers are not necessarily moving their workloads into the cloud in lieu of on-premise system availability. Rather, they are prioritising the parts of their projects that focus on the cloud, which normally may have been done in later stages. It is now going to the top of the list.

At a macro level it certainly could be a boon for the cloud and SaaS providers in the short term, but they will eventually require new hardware as well — not just to meet new demand but to refresh their datacentres as equipment ages out. At some point, they may feel the pressure as well. They have a massive appetite for hardware infrastructure.

How does this affect Hammerspace?

It many ways it is good for Hammerspace. First, we can utilise existing storage assets that our customers have on-premises. As a software-defined storage solution, If their storage systems have spare capacity, whether it is NAS, SAN or object storage, we can utilise it. And of course, we can leverage the cloud for both compute and storage.

The other advantage of being software-defined is that we are not an appliance or pre-packaged with hardware. We can run on any commodity server and our customers tend to allocate the equipment they need especially for early stage projects. Having said that, we are not immune to the server shortages. We have customers that are delayed but luckily we can pivot to the cloud aspects of the projects. 

Can Hammerspace’s technology mitigate the delayed shipments? Could customers move to the public cloud temporarily and then move back?

You bring up a great point. One of our strengths is data orchestration. Once data is stored in our global file system, moving it from cloud to on-premises storage is child’s play for us. We do live, transparent data mobility that does not impact the users or applications.  

Do you have any sense on when the shipment delays may go away?

I wish I did. I would go work for Warren Buffett.

Storage news ticker tape — October 15

By
Chris Mellor
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A partnership between Robin.io, Blue Arcus and KloudSpot will combine the technologies needed to enable end-to-end 4G and 5G services and provide a platform to accelerate deployment of 5G and edge applications. The consortium will bring together capabilities such as location-aware, AI-led video analytics, surveillance, data analysis, hyper automation, network slicing, cloud-native application lifecycle management and hyperscale orchestration. The partners hope this will halve the time-to-market and operating costs for evolving digital businesses at the edge.

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WeRide, China’s leading L4 autonomous driving company, is using Alluxio’s Data Orchestration software as a hybrid cloud storage gateway for applications on-premises to access public cloud storage like AWS S3. There is a localised cache per location to eliminate redundant requests to S3. In addition to removing the complexity of manual data synchronisation, Alluxio directly serves data to engineers working with the same data in the same office, circumventing transfer costs associated with S3 and improving end-user work efficiency several-fold.

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A Cycle and Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage integration enables companies that utilise containers to automate and control stateful data across multiple providers from one dashboard. This partnership enables developers to deploy containers without dealing with Kubernetes complexities, unify their application management, including automating or scheduling backups via an API-connected portal. They can choose the microservices and technologies they need without, the two claim, compromising on functionality.

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Panzura has appointed Brian Brogan as its new VP of Global Sales Channels, looking after system integrators, value-added resellers, technology alliance partners, and OEMs. He comes to Panzura with more than two decades’ experience in the IT channel, having served in leadership roles at Automation Anywhere, SAP, EMC (now Dell EMC), and IBM. 

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Kingston KC3000 M.2 228 SSD.

Kingston Technologies’ forthcoming KC3000 NVMe PCIe Gen-4 SSD with extraordinary performance. Read and write bandwidth is said to be 7GB/sec, and both read and write IOPS are up to 1,000,000. The capacity range for this M.2 2280 format drive is 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB. It uses TLC 3D NAND, a Phison PS5018-E18 controller, and has a graphene heat spreading layer atop the card. The endurance in TB written terms is 512GB: 400TBW, 1TB: 800TBW, 2TB: 1600TBW, and 4TB: 3200TBW.  

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Zerto for Kubernetes (Z4K) delivers disaster recovery, backup, and data mobility to containerized applications. A new version includes support for VMware Tanzu (6.7 and 7.0) and Rook Ceph, protection of stateless applications for both backup and disaster recovery in addition to existing support for stateful applications and persistent volumes, and restore to a separate namespace so you can test recovery without impacting production namespaces. A Zerto blog discusses all this. 

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Tape is green — at least compared to disk — and brings green ($) to FujiFilm. It announced its Sustainable Data Storage Initiative to highlight how tape technology can reduce electricity consumption and CO2 emissions related to data storage. It launches with a sponsored IDC white paper, Accelerating Green Datacenter Progress with Sustainable Storage Strategies, published by technology research firm IDC, providing an analysis of the energy savings and resulting environmental benefits of moving more data to tape storage. And, of course, thereby contributing to Fujifilm’s business. Self-serving? Moi? Mais non!

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Quantum has updated its CatDV 2021 products with major new features, performance enhancements, and a range of new deployment options. It introduces a new review and approval framework with real-time messaging, support for clip stacking meta-folders to flexibly organise content with versioning to make team-based collaboration faster and more focused.

New features include:

  • StorNext filesystem metadata integration for dramatically efficient file-system operations on StorNext systems;
  • Faster duplicate file detection on file moves, copies, and renames;
  • Improvements and updates for playback and export including rendering pipelines powered by Nvidia RTX GPUs;
  • Extended support for image sequences, DPX and EXR content;
  • More performance and support for camera RAW and native formats including Canon, Blackmagic, and RED;
  • Proxy and mezzanine creation from Avid DNx media;
  • Docker deployment support via XML deployment configuration for rapid testing, evaluation, and cloud deployments;
  • Precision web playback support for Google Chrome and Firefox client scrubbing and clip annotation;
  • Extended theming and customisation of web client;
  • Multiple User Roles support and User Directory integration improvements for LDAP/SAML environments;
  • Native CatDV support for Two-Factor Authentication using authenticator applications.

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Storage Made Easy released a new version of its secure multi-cloud data management software product, the Enterprise File Fabric. It features SMBStream Office to office file acceleration, updated Microsoft Teams App, AutoCAD Previewer, Data Automation Rule enhancements, Secure Link Sharing update, and File Fabric’s SMB Connector can now use SAML for delegated authentication. The integrated content search engine has been upgraded to Solr 8 and the Audit event Log sees numerous improvements. Also included: M-Stream Fast File Transfer WAN Acceleration and enhancements to all connectors — RStor, SoftNAS, Qumulo, Pixit  Storage, Seagate Lyve. NetApp Object Storage, NetApp Global File Cache and Lucidlink have been added as certified storage connectors.

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Tintri’s Trickovic: “Never say die”

By
Chris Mellor
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Come back kid Tintri says revenues are growing again after 2020 being pretty much a year to forget. There’s a new management team, a container-influenced product strategy, a hardware refresh coming and a new sense of energy at this DDN subsidiary.

We took a look at some management changes at Tintri last week but didn’t get the whole picture. Gaps have ben filled in — not least concerning the company’s recent history — and a blog by Tintri SVP for Revenue Phil Trickovic puts forward some interesting observations.

Trickovic says: “In the face of impossible odds and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, there is always a path forward. With the proper motivation and focus, temporary failure does not mean the end … Tintri continues to thrive and grow, despite the massive obstacle that has been around for 18 months and counting.”

That massive obstacle is COVID-19 and it was exacerbated by, as we see it, Tintri losing its way in 2020. We get a sense of that from the company announcing that its new executive team — meaning Trickovic, VP Products Graham Breeze and Field CTO Brock Mowry — “has delivered approximately 25 per cent growth in revenue over the past two quarters due to the explosive demand for autonomous, adaptive and composable platforms.”  That was record quarter-on-quarter growth. 

Alex Bouzari.

Alex Bouzari, CEO, DDN and Tintri, was pleased as well. He said: “Our new executive team brings a proven track record and valuable experience … We warmly welcome our new team and look forward to seeing how they will continue to push the envelope of Tintri’s comprehensive, reliable and easy-to-deploy virtual data management platform.” 

This trio of new hires replaces previous Tintri sales head Tom Ellery and his team. Irony number one here is that all three newcomers exited Diamanti when that company ran into problems, and two of them — Trickovic and Breeze — were at Tintri before. They left in Fall 2019 to join … yes, Diamanti. Not a stellar move. Irony number two is that they joined Diamanti when Tom Barton was its CEO, and he had been Tintri’s CEO in the period when it was crashing before DDN bought it.

Irony number three is that Diamanti ran into problems at the same time as Tintri, thus opening Diamanti’s exit and Tintri’s entry doors for rehiring Trickovic and Breeze. Have they, so to speak, jumped from a frying pan into a fire though? Not at all, as the two recent quarters of growth show.

In fact, we heard that not one of Tintri’s large customers deserted it during its 2020 annus horribilis. That’s because the basic Tintri idea and software implementation — enabling VMware admins and database admins to manage storage infrastructure through VMware and database lens respectively — is so strong. It also suggest there is a lot of latent demand our there, waiting for a refreshed product to spark it into buying activity.

We understand that this vSphere/database storage management idea is being extended to containers as well, and that Tintri is going to embrace containerisation with enthusiasm and vigour. Ditto AIOps. Apparently the operating system, TXoS, was implemented in cloud-native form back in 2017 but that effort languished. Breeze has found a whole lot of other potential diamonds in Tintri’s software rough, like this, and the engineers are going full speed ahead to turn potential into product.

Our understanding is that there will be quite a strong flow of product news, both hardware and software, in the coming weeks and quarters. And that Tintri is going to catch up and get to a market position where it should have been months ago, if only the previous team had not relaxed their grip. As Trickovic says: “Never say die.” He wants Tintri to come back again — although this time from nowhere near the brink, as it was when DDN bought it.

Verily Veritas doth love Kubernetes — InfoScale becomes cloud-native

By
Chris Mellor
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Courtly Love
God Speed! by Edmund Blair Leighton, 1900: a late Victorian view of a lady giving a favor to a knight about to do battle

Veritas has extended its InfoScale Kubernetes integration from a CSI plug-in to cloud-native InfoScale containers, making it easier to provide high availability to stateful Kubernetes workloads.

InfoScale is Veritas’s storage virtualisation software layer, which can switch applications from one storage infrastructure to another if an infrastructure-halting problem occurs — in other words, disaster recovery. It supports a wide variety of operating environments and Veritas is adapting it to the Kubernetes-orchestrated container world to keep it relevant. It’s also coming up to Red Hat OpenShift.

Veritas made the announcement at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 event. VP of product management Karthik Ramamurthy provided an announcement quote: “Many organisations are hesitant to bring the benefits of containerisation to mission-critical applications that have historically relied on persistent storage. The Kubernetes-native deployment of InfoScale will deliver the features organisations need to migrate their most important applications into environments like OpenShift with confidence. This is a game changer.”  

InfoScale v7.4.3 CSI diagram. In version 8 the CSI layer gets absorbed into the Kubernetes cluster. InfoScale can switch from one underlying storage system to another if the first one fails.

Beginning with version 8, available later this year, cloud-native InfoScale will provide high-availability persistent storage and storage optimisation for stateful Kubernetes workloads, with InfoScale features deployed as containers. Expect to find:

  • Software-defined persistent volume storage classes;
  • Dynamic and static persistent storage provisioning;
  • Non-disruptive scaling of persistent volumes;
  • Non-disruptive migration of persistent volumes;
  • REST APIs for third-party integration;
  • Persistent volume snapshots;
  • Container lifecycle management.

InfoScale 8 will be available as a Red Hat-certified container application and Red Hat OpenShift Certified Operator available in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog with single-click deployment. 

Plug this: Dell open-sources container storage software linking its arrays to CSI pipes

By
Chris Mellor
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Dell is open-sourcing Container Storage Modules (CSM) — software linking enterprise storage services on its arrays to containers through the Kubernetes CSI plug-in.

The CSI (Container Storage Interface) exposes block and file storage systems to Kubernetes-orchestrated containers. Storage suppliers such as Dell can produce CSI plugins to link their storage systems to containers needing storage services without having to write core Kubernetes code. Dell’s CSMs are additional plug-ins between CSI and its arrays, used to expose six services to containers.

A blog by Dell’s Magi Kapoor, Director, Product Management, states: “Container Storage Modules aim to provide additional capabilities beyond the standard lifecycle management of volumes and snapshots for Kubernetes workloads that is currently available with Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers.“

The announcement is part of Dell’s Project Karavi, announced in December last year, as an initiative to add enterprise storage features to the Kubernetes CSI interface.

The CSMs inject storage code into Kubernetes so users can access features of Dell’s PowerMax (high-end block and file), PowerStore (mid-range unified file and block), PowerScale (scale-out filers), PowerFlex (HCI Software) and Unity XT (pre-PowerStore unified file and block) arrays.

The six additional services are:

  • Observability — delivers a high-level view of storage capacity and performance usage via Grafana dashboards to the Kubernetes users. Kubernetes admins get insight into CSI Driver persistent storage topology, usage, and performance.
  • Replication — enables array replication to implement a high availability/disaster recovery architecture.
  • Authorization — gives storage administrators the ability to limit and control storage consumption in Kubernetes environments by applying quotas and Role-Based Access Control rules that instantly and automatically restrict cluster tenants’ usage of storage resources.
  • Resiliency — designed to make Kubernetes applications more resilient by detecting node failures (power failure), K8s control plane network failures and array I/O network failures, and move the protected pods to functioning hardware.
  • Volume Placement — analyses capacity and automates volume placement for Kubernetes workloads.
  • Snapshots — Built on top of the CSI snapshot feature, this module delivers additional features such as group/crash consistent snapshots with referential integrity. 

Each of the six modules plus all CSI drivers are available for download from GitHub, such as CSM for authorization. There is also a CSM installer. A CSM FAQ on GitHub supplies more information as well as a CSM module-storage array coverage table: 

Not all arrays are covered by all the CSM modules yet.

There’s a short-term CSM roadmap there as well.

Storage news ticker tape — 14 October 2021

By
Chris Mellor
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Rambus has announced the industry’s first 5600 MT/s DDR5 Registering Clock Driver (RCD) — a 17 per cent increase in data rate over the first-generation 4800 MT/s. This improvement is on top of lower latency and power requirements and made possible through improvements to its RCD. The second-generation RCD provides enhancements for data rate speed and efficiency while optimising timing parameters for improved RDIMM margins. 

Rambus 5600 MT/s DDR5 RCD Eye diagram.

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TrendForce research says DRAM contract prices are likely to be on the downswing in 4Q21 at a quarter on quarter decline of three to eight per cent, attributed to declining procurement activities of DRAM buyers going forward, and a drop in DRAM spot prices ahead of contract prices. The DRAM market’s movement in 2022 will primarily be determined by suppliers’ capacity expansion strategies and demand changes. The capacity expansion plans of the three largest DRAM suppliers (Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron) for 2022 are expected to remain conservative, resulting in a 17.9 per cent growth in total DRAM bit supply next year. DRAM bit demand is expected to grow by 16.3 per cent next year, lagging behind bit supply growth — meaning a shift in the DRAM market from shortage to surplus.

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Red Hat announced general availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.2, with tighter integration with Red Hat OpenShift. It can run VMs and cloud-native applications in parallel, and achieve bare metal performance. The software provides continuous feature updates without the disruption or potential downtime associated with major upgrades. It supports third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and other next-generation x86 architectures. There is claimed simplified and easier storage by it aggregating a wide variety of vendors and formats, with less need to maintain bespoke or custom storage systems.

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UiPath announced a partnership with Snowflake that integrates UiPath Insights with Snowflake’s platform. UiPath Insights is a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) analytics solution that measures, reports, and aligns enterprise automation operations with strategic business outcomes. This combined offering of UiPath with Snowflake’s compute, elastic scaling, and enterprise-grade secure data sharing capabilities provides customers with faster data processing, while enabling them to perform long-term historical analysis to scale their automation journeys.

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Following a recent rebrand from StorageOS, Kubernetes-native storage platform provider Ondat said it has seen 100 per cent team growth in 2021, and that is set to continue based on strong demand from customers. Richard Olver has been appointed as the new chief revenue officer. Olver has over 20 years of go-to-market experience in high-growth enterprise start-ups, having built international sales and operations for the portfolios of Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, GV — through acquisition and IPO — and most recently running international operations for StackRox, funded by Sequoia and acquired by IBM RedHat. Also recently appointed is James Brown as head of online platforms, responsible for driving the product-led growth strategy at Ondat.

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Hyperconverged Infrastructure SW provider Virtuozzo has won telco DT Technology Group as a customer. Through the use of Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure, DT has deployed a public cloud as well as new revenue streams via DevOps services — while reducing its total cost of ownership by 30 per cent.

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South Korea-based KLEVV has launched two USB 3.2 Gen-2 SSDs. The portable S1 connects by USB 3.2 Gen2x2 and USB-C to offer 2,000MB/sec speed and connectivity, supports both Windows and macOS, and is available in 1TB and 2TB capacities. Type-C to C cable and C to A adapter are provided with the product for easy connectivity. The pocket-sized R1 delivers read /write speed of up to 1,000MB/sec, supports Windows, macOS, and Android, and connects via a USB-C port. It’s available in 500GB and 1TB capacities and comes with corresponding Type-C to C and C to A cables inside the package. 

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DDN has doubled the number of employees in its US Federal division over the past nine months and seen more than 30 per cent annual sales growth in its fiscal 2021. This has taken place with Jeff Jordan in place as VP of Federal Sales since May 2021 — he’s had a good six months and wants to hire more staff. DDN wants expanded collaboration with government-focused channel resellers, systems integrators, and technology partners such as Nvidia and Intel. 

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Digistor has announced its Series C secure SSDs — the first Digistor SSDs to add Cigent D3E cybersecurity software. They virtually eliminate the barrier to securing DAR (data at rest) with military-grade encryption for hardware and software. It also announced that its full line of FIPS 140-2 L2 certified SSDs are undergoing Common Criteria certification, added multi-drive support for Citadel SSDs, and introduced the Citadel GL SSD — which prevents unauthorised access to data where no monitor or screen is available for user interaction.

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Toshiba says Optima Networks uses its 18TB S300 Pro Surveillance disk drives in its ONX-series video management system, which captures images from video surveillance cameras. The overall system has a workload of 140TB/month and also uses Toshiba’s MG series drives, which store up to 18TB per drive.

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An ESG Validation Report investigated Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage and concluded it provides up to 92 per cent time savings, 71 per cent storage cost savings and 3.7 times lower total cost than the (not identified) cloud storage-providing competition. The report is freely available here.

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An interesting, though inconclusive, Backblaze blog is available looking at using machine learning to predict hard disk drive failures. Spoiler alert: they will happen.

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Cloud file storage supplier Nasuni has announced a record-setting Q3 after a record-breaking Q2. Both bookings and revenue recorded new all-time highs for the firm. Capacity under management has grown more than 139 per cent over the past four quarters and UK and EMEA sales have increased more than 175 per cent for the first nine months of 2021. Nasuni has appointed Chris Addis as VP of Sales in the UK and EMEA.

Happy memories: MemVerge CEO visits Capitola, says hi to VMware

By
Chris Mellor
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Startup MemVerge’s Big Memory software converges different types of memory into a single pool for applications. 

Two much larger companies made recent software announcements concerning memory tiering and virtualisation: VMware’s Project Capitola and Samsung’s SMDK to accompany its CXL Expander. Will established players like these walk away with the market? We asked MemVerge CEO Charles Fan how he views these events.

Charles Fan.

Blocks & Files: Could you review MemVerge’s approach to expanding memory?

Charles Fan: MemVerge software today includes two important parts.  The first part is the memory virtualization layer that manages heterogeneous memory types including DRAM, Persistent Memory (PMem) and in the near future CXL-connected memory. This layer includes intelligent tiering between these memory types and delivers the combination of their capacities as software-defined memory service to the applications without requiring application change. This part in effect “expands memory”.  

There is also a second part of MemVerge technology that delivers an in-memory snapshot on top of the memory virtualization that can capture an application’s running state and allows the application to roll-back to this point-in-time. Such snapshots can also be moved in the background to another server, to a storage service, and the application can be restarted from this point-in-time, anytime from anywhere.

How does MemVerge’s technology virtualize (if that is the right term) the different memory types in a server, such as DRAM and NAND, for an application’s use?

As described above, MemVerge uses intelligent tiering between different memory types.

MemVerge Memory Machine concept.

How does MemVerge view VMware’s Project Capitola? Does it render MemVerge’s technology redundant? How might MemVerge work with a Project Capitola version of ESXi and multiple memory tiers, such as DRAM + Optane PMem?

We are excited to hear VMware’s announcement of Project Capitola. (Please see our blog). The biggest bottleneck of our customer adoption over the last year was the lack of customer awareness of Big Memory software. Having VMware joining this area really validated this emerging market.  

Yes, conceptually Project Capitola may be considered a competitor to the first of the two MemVerge technologies.  However, MemVerge is different from Project Capitola in the following ways:

  • Project Capitola is only for vSphere environments, while MemVerge Memory Machine can run in all environments, including in AWS, Azure or GPS cloud;
  • Project Capitola can set different DRAM/PMem ratios per VM, while MemVerge Memory Machine can set different DRAM/PMem ratios per application process;
  • Project Capitola will lose the persistence capabilities of PMem, while MemVerge Memory Machine does not. In fact, the MemVerge in-memory snapshot capability takes advantage of PMem’s persistence capability.
  • Project Capitola will only be available later next year, while MemVerge Memory Machine is available now as Version 2.0 and has been on the market for over a year getting mileage from dozens of customers.

How does MemVerge view CXL in general and does CXL support have a role in MemVerge’s technology roadmap?

MemVerge is very excited about the advent of CXL. We believe CXL will be the new memory fabric that enables memory disaggregation and makes memory a first class-citizen in a datacentre for the first time — meaning memory can be scaled independently to the compute. This will increase the need for software to manage and scale memory.

We are currently working with a number of hardware companies which are working on CXL products, and it is in our roadmap to support these CXL products as they come to market.  

Would MemVerge be able to support and integrate Samsung’s CXL Expander and its CXL SMDK? Does it agree memory tiering should not necessitate application software change?

It is in our plan to support all CXL memory cards, including Samsung’s. We are still learning about SMDK. In our current discussion with CXL hardware companies, we all agree memory tiering should not necessitate application software changes.

How does MemVerge see an industry standard emerging to cover memory tiering and virtualization? Is there a role for the SNIA here?

We believe it is an interesting area. Perhaps similar to how storage was disaggregated from compute in the early ’90s with SAN and the late ’90s with NAS, a similar phenomenon will occur with memory disaggregation with the emergence of industry standards or de facto standards. I believe there is a role for SNIA or other standards groups.

IBM sprays storage improvements across its Spectrums

By
Chris Mellor
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IBM has announced enhancements across its Spectrum storage software products, supporting Azure, boosting AIOps, speeding data to GPUs and adding a larger proprietary flash drive.

The news was revealed in an IBM blog with no identified author.

The blog summed things up by blandly announcing: “Today, IBM is announcing new capabilities and integrations designed to help organisations reduce IT complexity, deploy cost-effective solutions and improve data and cyber resilience for hybrid cloud environments.”

The announcements cover Spectrums Virtualize, Protect, Protect Plus, Scale, AIOps for FlashSystem and the ESS 3200, which runs Spectrum Scale software.

Spectrum Virtualize

Spectrum Virtualize is the operating, management and virtualization software used in the Storwize and FlashSystem arrays and SAN Volume Controller. The Storwize brand was absorbed into the FlashSystem brand in February 2020.

Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud (SVPC) is available for the IBM public cloud and was made available on AWS in April 2019, providing a hybrid on-premises-to-AWS capability; it’s been a long time coming to Azure. IBM announced a forthcoming beta program for Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud on Azure in February this year and now, eight months later, the software is generally available.

That means on-premises FlashSystem and SAN Volume Controller deployments can have public cloud-based disaster recovery sites, can migrate data to SVPC in the cloud and support what IBM calls cloud DevOps. This set of disaster recovery, migration and cloud DevOps facilities can function between public clouds as well.

SVPC on Azure supports IBM Safeguarded Copy, which automatically creates isolated immutable snapshot copies designed to be inaccessible by software. That means it functions as ransomware data protection.

Will we see SVPC supporting the Google Cloud Platform? We think so.

AIOps

IBM’s FlashSystem AIOps capabilities are being boosted by acquired Turbonomic AI-powered Application Resource Management (ARM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) software technology.

In effect we have IBM’s response to HPE’s industry-leading InfoSight system monitoring and predictive analytics technology. IBM says:

  • Turbonomic will collect FlashSystem array information such as capacity, IOPS, and latency.
  • Turbonomic’s analysis engine combines FlashSystem data, virtualization data and application data to continuously automate non-disruptive actions and optimise array performance.

Big Blue says this reduces the need for over-provisioning the arrays and means their density can be increased, by up to 30 per cent on average, with no performance impact. That is surely good news.

It gets better for FlashSystem users with Instana, Red Hat OpenShift, VMware m vSphere or other major hypervisors, since Turbonomic will observe the entire stack from application to array. In IBM speak, “This enables all operations teams to quickly visualise and automate corrective actions to mitigate performance risk caused by resource congestion, while safely increasing density.”

Elsewhere across Big Blue’s Spectrums

Other IBM storage news:

  • Spectrum Protect Plus has been enhanced for Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes to support data protection for containerised workloads. This includes Red Hat certification, support for OpenShift workloads deployed on Azure, and direct backup to S3 object storage.
  • Spectrum Protect now supports replicating backup data to additional but unspecified data protection servers. 
  • IBM Spectrum Protect now supports using object storage for long-term data retention to reduce the cost of backup. (Assume an S3 interface.)
  • Spectrum Scale global data fabric gains a high-performance S3 object interface, bypassing the typical delay for object storage. 
  • IBM Elastic Storage System 3200 now includes a 38TB IBM FlashCore Module, double the size of the previous largest option, and doubling ESS 3200 max capacity to 912TB in two rack units.
  • Spectrum Scale has a new GPU-direct storage (GDS) interface which enables Nvidia applications to run up to 100 per cent faster with IBM Spectrum Scale. 

There are no public numbers to allow a comparison with other GDS supporting suppliers such as DDN, Pavilion, VAST Data and WekaIO.

In March we reported that Spectrum Scale delivered 94GB/sec to Nvidia GPUs across GDS. A 100 per cent increase would take this to 188GB/sec — still shy of Pavilion’s 191GB/sec.

Bare-faced metal-weaving cheek — Dell pachyderm moves into RobinIO’s 5G telco room

By
Chris Mellor
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A great big Dell elephant has invaded Robin.io’s telco market for Kubernetes-based orchestration with its Bare Metal Orchestrator.

Robin.io has grown its Kubernetes storage facility into a complete 5G system roll-out orchestrator for telcos, putting great vertical market distance between it and other Kubernetes storage providers such as MayaData, Pure’s Portworx, Red Hat OpenShift, NetApp’s Astra, OnDat and others.

A statement from Dennis Hoffman, SBP and GM of Dell’s Telecom Systems Business, said: “Bare Metal Orchestrator gives communication services providers an easier way to deploy and manage open network infrastructure while saving costs and time, allowing them to focus on delivering new and differentiated services to their customers.”

Back in June, Dell said it was anchoring an open, cloud-native telecom ecosystem with infrastructure and solutions, industry partners and an Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab. Dell would launch a cloud-native network infrastructure with a full stack of open, scalable carrier-grade server and software offerings to help telcos provide 5G facilities at the edge.

This involved Project Metalweaver — software enabling CSPs to select, autonomously deploy and manage thousands of multi-vendor compute, network and storage devices across multiple locations. It also includes reference architectures to span telecommunications in edge, core and Open RAN environments. 

CSPs would be offered deployment possibilities based on Dell hardware and software, the VMware Telco Cloud Platform and Red Hat OpenShift, and using:

  • Core software solutions from Affirmed Networks, 
  • Private network solutions from CommScope Ruckus,
  • Multi-access edge computing (MEC) solutions with Intel Smart Edge,
  • 5G Open RAN software developed by Dell Technologies in collaboration with Mavenir on Dell EMC PowerEdge XR11 ruggedised servers,
  • Core software solutions from Nokia.

Mavenir is an end-to-end, cloud-native network software provider, and a Robin.io competitor.

Dell’s Bare Metal Orchestrator is the first software to come from Project Metalweaver and gives CSPs tools to discover and inventory networked servers, bring them online and deploy software in them. It uses so-called declarative automation to tell these servers to deploy software stacks and workloads. This can, Dell says, eliminate days or weeks of configuration and provisioning to bring network hardware into a workload-ready state in an Open RAN environment. 

Dell also announced a validated Solution for Mavenir Open vRAN and VMware Telco Cloud Platform, a reference architecture for Wind River Studio, and Respond and Restore for Telecom support services.

Comment

We are seeing the development of automated provisioning of potentially hundreds of thousands of embedded server/networking/cloud-native software systems at 5G edge locations with lifecycle management built in. Storage, inevitably local and direct-attached storage, is a small but necessary part of this.

Dell is going to use its IT industry status, worldwide supply and support capabilities, along with specialist technology partners such as Mavenir to blast its way into this market as a major player from day one.

Robin.io is going to have to learn how to tap dance around Michael Dell’s marauding pachyderm. Maybe it needs to ally with some other server supplier — someone like HPE or Lenovo.

Can data protector Arcserve pull itself up by its new Lacey?

By
Chris Mellor
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Private equity-owned Arcserve has hired Brannon Lacey to replace departed CEO Tom Signorello.

Signorello became Arcserve’s boss in October 2017 and helped steer it through the StorageCraft acquisition/merger. He departed to become the CEO at PlanSource in August. PlanSource automates employee benefit programs for employees and HR — quite a change from backup. More than 7.5 million consumers receive their benefits through the PlanSource platform.

Brannon Lacey.

Arcserve chairman Dave Hansen provided the hiring statement: “Brannon is an exceptional business leader. He brings a tremendous track record in leading fast-growth global companies and achieving strong and sustainable growth in highly competitive markets. His deep experience with channel-driven organisations from both vendor and customer perspective will be of immense value to Arcserve as a 100 per cent channel-centric company.”

Lacey said: “I am excited and proud to take the leadership of Arcserve as we invest and focus on aggressive and sustainable global market growth.”

Arcserve chairman Dave Hansen has been interim CEO since Signorello quit; he was also the interim CEO prior to Signorello’s appointment. He now relinquishes that role. 

Brannon Lacey is a first-time CEO, and data protection virgin. He moves across from being President at People Scout (Sep 2020–Oct 2021) and President at Alight Solutions (Aug 2019–May 2020). He spent almost five years at Rackspace before that. PeopleScout is the world’s largest recruitment process outsourcing firm.

Arcserve says he is a 20-year veteran of the technology industry, and brings extensive experience and success in building high-performance global software, cloud, cyber security, and infrastructure organisations. 

3-2-1 — Portworx PX-Backup supports golden rule

By
Chris Mellor
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Pure’s Portworx business unit has updated its container PX-Backup software to add support for file shares, object storage targets, inter-cloud portability and encryption.

PX-Backup v2.1 can back up Kubernetes applications running in one cloud — AWS, Azure or GCP — or on-premises datacentre and restore them in any other cloud or datacentre and across Kubernetes versions, stateful or not. Customers can restore into a Portworx target volume from a non-Portworx source volume.

It can also send backups from CSI snapshots to object storage. (We guess this basically means it can export them to an S3 target.)This helps customers satisfy a 3-2-1 backup regimen in which there are three copies of data on two different media with a copy off site for disaster recovery. 

Customers running Kubernetes apps on Portworx PX-Store, any CSI-compliant storage service, or cloud-based storage can now use PX-Backup to maintain three copies of data (production, snapshots, backup copy) across both disk and object storage. But, unless the object storage is not on disk, the two-media part of the rule is not obeyed. If production is on flash and the other copies are on disk then the two-media rule is honoured. 

Portworx PX-Backup file backup video.

Version 2.1 can now back up and recover applications running on read-write-many (RWX) persistent volumes provisioned as file shares from FlashBlade, Portworx proxy volumes, or any NFS server. A video discusses this.

PX-Backup users can now leverage both the role-based access controls and encryption services offered in Portworx PX-Secure, gaining an added layer of security.

A blog by Portworx technical marketing manager Ryan Wallner discusses PX-Backup v2.1 in more detail. PX-Backup 2.1 will be available in next month. 

Storage news ticker tape … …

By
Chris Mellor
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Storage news
Storage news

Storage news comes in waves and there’s so much of it right now that the production of a weekly digest can’t keep up. Here’s the latest batch of news presented in a ticker tape-style format as a kind of experiment to see if we can keep up with the rush better.

…

Consultancy DCIG evaluated Large Enterprise VMware vSphere Backup Solutions suppliers: Acronis Cyber Protect, Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP),Cobalt Iron Compass, Cohesity DataProtect, Commvault Complete  Data Protection, Dell EMC NetWorker, HYCU for VMware, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Quest NetVault Plus, Rubrik Polaris, Unitrends Unified BCDR and Veritas NetBackup.

The top 5 were Cobalt Iron Compass, Commvault Complete  Data Protection, HYCU for VMware, Unitrends Unified BCDR and Veritas NetBackup.

…

Cohesity is hosting its inaugural user conference Cohesity Connect, a global, virtual event with a focus on cyber-resilience and ransomware in particular. It runs from October 19 to 21, and has more than 30 dynamic sessions and breakout discussions. Attendees can also obtain free professional certifications in data protection, file and object services, and multi-cloud solutions during half-day Cohesity Academy sessions.

…

Kasten by Veeam announced the launch of the Kasten Kubernetes Learning Series — a free educational program designed to improve the Kubernetes skill sets of all levels of practitioners, including novices, developers, operations and Kubernetes administrators.

…

SaaS-based data protector Druva introduced Druva Rollback Actions, which temporarily stores data from 24 hours up to seven days. It enables customers to roll back unauthorised or accidental deletion activity. In the case of credential misuse — where a bad actor may maliciously remove endpoints, users, virtual machines, NAS or file shares or even databases — Druva Rollback Actions will allow administrators to quickly recover not only the data from deleted backups but also environmental objects as well. Customers can safeguard against accidental or unintended deletions, with the ability to revert the unintended action without any loss of data.

…

Blogger Ronen Schwartz, SVP and GM of NetApp’s Cloud Volumes business, announced the integration of Google Cloud VMware Engine with NetApp Cloud Volumes Service support for virtual machine (VM) datastores. It will be a fully-managed service which scales storage independent of compute and supports Google Cloud regional DR VMware deployments. Register for a preview. General availability is expected in 2022.

…

ATTO announced support for LTO-9 tape technology across its product lines: HBAs, bridges, and Thunderbolt devices.

…

Synopsys announced the industry’s first complete HBM3 IP solution — including controller, PHY, and verification IP for 2.5D multi-die package systems. Its pre-hardened or configurable HBM3 PHY in 5nm process operates at 7200Mbit/sec for up to 2x the data rate and improves power efficiency by up to 60 per cent compared to HBM2E. Micron, Samsung and SK hynix provided supporting statements.

…

Quantum has set up a StorNext + CatDV + archiving offering for Adobe Premier Pro teams based in offices and/or working remotely. It’s called a Collaborative Workflow Solution and the components are:

  • StorNext shared storage provides the workflow storage,
  • CatDV Asset Management, with included CatDV Cloud Panel for Adobe Creative Cloud, delivers asset and project management and orchestration,
  • Archiving can be done to Scalar tape, ActiveScale object storage or any S3 target system.

The complete, integrated, tested and turnkey offering is installed and supported by Quantum Professional Services and reseller partners certified to install StorNext and CatDV.

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