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Dremio software Darts make data lakes more like data warehouses

By
Chris Mellor
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Dremio’s latest data lake analytics release provides more than five times faster SQL expression processing than its June version.

Dremio supplies in-memory software, powered by Apache Arrow, to analyse data stores using SQL. Its Dart initiative aims to make it possible to run SQL workloads directly on source data lakes instead of on data warehouses fed by extract, transform and load procedures. It has been pumping out software updates to help achieve this.

Tomer Shiran, founder and Chief Product Officer at Dremio, said: “We want to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the data lakehouse and deliver the best [business intelligence] experience for our customers. To that end, the Dart Initiative has been chipping away at the Zone of Confusion between data lakes and warehouses in critical areas such as query performance and acceleration, SQL coverage, and transactionality.”

The “Zone of Confusion” is a Gartner expression referring to the overlap in analytics processing of data lakes and warehouses. We might say Shiran’s data lakehouse idea adds verbal confusion. The point of running ETL procedures is get more structured data into a data warehouse so that analytic routines can deliver results faster.

This latest software release provides near real-time metadata refresh for datasets by refactoring metadata processing to become a parallel, executor-based process, with metadata stored and managed in Apache Iceberg tables. This delivers metadata refresh times up to 20x faster than previous versions and performance improves as the dataset size increases. This graph illustrates the point:

The company says Arrow component Gandiva is an LLVM-based toolkit that enables vectorised execution directly on in-memory Arrow buffers, by generating code to evaluate SQL expressions that fully leverage the pipelining and SIMD capabilities of modern CPUs. This latest Dart Initiative release enables Dremio to accelerate expression processing rates by over 5x, and in some cases by 30x, as another chart indicates:

The latest release adds Pivot/Unpivot and filtered aggregates functions. Dremio says risk analysis in insurance, maximising revenue in travel and transportation, improving clinical trials in pharma, and enabling credit risk assessment in banking are among the use cases that can benefit from this.

Let the blind see: Datadobi opens up vast file system window to customers

By
Chris Mellor
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Datadobi has opened up its petabyte-scale file mapping technology to customers with a Dobi Query Language.

Datadobi is a data migration technology supplier, with DobiMigrate moving NAS files and objects, and DobiProtect protecting and recovering them. Both products rely on DataDobi’s so-called Data Mobility Engine and are designed to scan large file systems (data lakes) containing billions of files. This produces a catalogue containing huge lists of file paths and their metadata in proprietary format.

Carl D'Halluin
Carl D’Halluin.

Historically, these scan files were only used for doing data migration or protection by Datadobi, but now customers can query them directly using Dobi Query Language (DQL) as part of a file assessment service.

Carl D’Halluin, Datadobi’s CTO, writes in a blog: “The volume of data is only expected to grow over the next few years. IT administrators need a data management solution that can transform data into digestible material in order to allow curated decisions on storage options for migration and protection to be made.”

Step forward DQL. It is a query framework that can look for inside data lakes to: 

  • Identify cold data sets — data that is infrequently accessed;
  • Identify old data sets — data that was created or modified some time ago;
  • Identify data sets owned by a specific user or group, e.g. by users who no longer work at the company;
  • Identify shares, exports or directory trees that are homogeneous (cold, old, owner, file types) and can be handled as one data set, e.g. upon which to take specific lifecycle actions.

Datadobi created the file system assessment offering last year as a customer service to help plan a data migration or reorganisation. DQL allows these assessments to be customisable.

DQL code sample.

DQL is a form of file system analytics. It opens up a door to future possibilities such as  an alerting software layer that can run DQL to find out file system and subset status, and suggest actions — such as a file/object subset move to faster or slower/cheaper storage based on its activity level. A step beyond that would be to set up policies and then have an additional layer of software take automatic actions if threshold values were reached.

For example, move all files or objects of a particular type to archival or cold storage if certain access rate requirements were met (say, if the data were not accessed within 60 days). Datadobi has interesting possibilities here.

Tick the NVMe-oF box – StorONE adopts NVMe-over-Fabrics tech as no-fuss upgrade

By
Chris Mellor
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StorONE has added NVMe-over-Fabrics connectivity to its S1 Enterprise array software, speeding data access to sub-millisecond levels.

The S1 file, block and object storage software has a cacheless architecture which delivers high performance through a ground-up redesign of the storage stack using commodity hardware. NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) provides local PCIe-attached drive performance across a network link between a host and an external storage system. The NVMe-oF specification extends NVMe onto suitable storage fabrics such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand.

Gal Naor.

Gal Naor, CEO and co-founder of StorONE, said in a statement: “By integrating the NVMe-oF protocol into our existing platform rather than creating a new product for organisations to purchase, we are better able to fulfill our mission of turning storage from an IT cost centre to a resource that provides critical competitive advantages.”

StorONE says its NVMe-oF implementation supports NVMe-over-TCP and Ethernet RDMA (RoCE) to reduce IO latency while supporting all block IO features, including high availability and asymmetric active-active failover. Existing customers, after upgrading, can take advantage of NVMe-oF using existing hardware, such as iSCSI hardware.

As far as StorONE is concerned NVMe-oF is a feature, not a product. From its viewpoint any block-access all-flash storage array not offering NVMe-oF access is behind the times and at an increasing disadvantage. It has adopted datacentre-class Ethernet lossless (RoCE) and ordinary Ethernet (NVMe/TCP) methods but not NVMe-over-Fibre Channel. 

There has been a flurry of recent NVMe/TCP support announcements, including Lightbits, Fungible, Dell EMC, VMware and NetApp. It’s becoming table stakes in the enterprise storage array game.

Storage news ticker – October 22

By
Chris Mellor
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…

HPE plans to expand its Hewlett Packard Pathfinder venture capital program to help accelerate HPE’s edge-to-cloud strategy. It expects to ramp its rate of investment significantly over the next year starting with three new investments that solve key customer challenges across edge, cloud, and data. Three recent investments support HPE’s vision: 

  • Cellwize is a Radio Access Network (RAN) automation platform that enables telecommunications companies to accelerate 5G network deployment. 
  • vFunction helps companies modernize their legacy applications to run in containerized environments using a lightweight microservices architecture. 
  • SingleStore is a one-stop, single database that unifies data models and data types and offers low-latency, consistent queries and processing for data-intensive workloads across hybrid, on-premises, and cloud environments.  

HPE will evaluate introducing SingleStore to the HPE Ezmeral Marketplace to provide a database with tiered storage spanning RAM, NVMe, SSDs, and cloud object storage.

…

GIGABYTE Technology announced its new R282-Z9G server targets high performance NVMe (Gen-4) SSDs for RAID and incorporates the GRAID SupremeRAID product. The SupremeRAID card works by installing a virtual NVMe controller on the OS while integrating a PCIe device for high performance. Over 100GB/sec of throughput is possible for workloads in HPC, 4K/8K video editing, high-frequency trading, online transaction processing, or database processing.

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Couchbase announced the winners of its Community Customer and Partner Awards at the CONNECT 2021 event. A few interesting ones are: Emirates, winning the EMEA Innovating at the Edge category and Project of the Year, for using Couchbase to optimise aircraft maintenance; Citigroup, scooping up the Advanced NoSQL Architecture EMEA prize for designing a system that could store billions of data points within Couchbase; and Amadeus, the third EMEA winner for Cloud Computing, for using Couchbase to develop a cloud-native platform that sped up the time to market of new applications and offerings, as well as data exchange.

…

VAST Data president Michael Wing made a LinkedIn post showing a complex Dell EMC Isilon/PowerScale data reduction decision tree, posted by an engineer on Slack, contrasting it with VAST’s equivalent tree:

It’s not a high-res image but you can nonetheless see the point he’s making. Wing said the Isilon architecture was “built 20 years ago for hard drives, streaming media workflows and no data reduction. Retrofitting all of this functionality is hard and comes with massive trade offs. Hence the decision tree!”

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Seagate has announced the launch of its Lyve Mobile Edge Storage and Data Transfer Services in the UK. The subscription-based service offers businesses a means to transfer massive amounts of data via mobile shuttles and arrays. Customers subscribe through the Lyve Management Portal and a web-based purchasing model gives end-customers or resellers flexible subscription plans ranging from month-to-month plans to longer-term annual plans. Once registered and an account is established, customers can order a project in less than three minutes. Seagate then provisions the devices and ships them to the desired location. Seagate is already providing support to the development of autonomous vehicles at FMCI, Europe’s largest autonomous vehicle testbed, with its Lyve Mobile service.

…

File lifecycle manager Komprise says St Luke’s Health System — a non-profit in Boise, Idaho, with petabytes of NAS storage — is using its software in a tiered storage architecture. Brett Sayles, storage engineer with St Luke’s, said: “We have 20 years of files from various medical systems and we have been treating all data the same. We are nearing capacity on our NetApp and Pure storage, and we know that a lot of these files can go to cheaper storage.” St Luke’s will use Komprise to archive data from Pure Storage Flash Array and NetApp to secondary storage on Qumulo spinning disk. It expects to save as much as 80 per cent on storage with this initiative.

…

Database, data integration and analytics supplier Actian announced GA of its DataConnect 12 integration platform, with new functionality for data quality, enhanced scheduling and automation, and the availability of additional software development toolkits (SDKs) to improve development integrations.

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Object (and file) storage supplier Scality tells the world it “delivers the most comprehensive and rock-solid portfolio of Disaster Recovery-enabled SmartStore ready deployment options as validated by Splunk.” Scality offers three SmartStore-ready architectures: single site, two-site asynchronous replicated, and three-site synchronous writes, capable of ensuring zero recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives. There’s a blog if you want to know more.

…

Storage news ticker – October 21

By
Chris Mellor
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.…

Weka IO has hired Frederik Schroeder as VP of Strategic Partners and Sean Hiss as the new VP of GTM Operations. Schroeder joins from Hitachi Vantara, where he was VP and GM of Global Inside Sales. Hiss also comes from Hitachi Vantara where he was VP of Marketing Strategy and Planning as well as Global Head of Revenue Marketing. 

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Iguazio, the MLOps (machine learning operations) company, announced support for FSx for ONTAP. This provides fully managed shared file and block storage on AWS Cloud with the data access and management capabilities of ONTAP. 

…

Yvonne Wassenaar.

Rubrik has appointed of Yvonne Wassenaar, the CEO of Puppet, to its Board of Directors. She serves on the Board of Directors for Forrester, Anaplan, and Harvey Mudd College and, Rubrik says, brings deep experience in SaaS and enterprise go-to-market, having previously held key leadership positions at VMware, Accenture, and New Relic. 

…

Data protector and manager Quest Software announced the availability of Quest QoreStor v7.1, providing customers with enhanced ransomware prevention capabilities and cloud support. It provides Cloud Reader Mode — an alternative QoreStor instance that can be configured to read a QoreStor Cloud tier that is active, enabling users to test their cloud data. There is integration with Quest’s QorePortal for SaaS-based management of QoreStor instances from anywhere on anything. QorePortal comes with built in organisational structure and role-based access.

…

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) support has been deleted from the codebase in the latest stable build of the Chrome browser, version 95. See here for more details.

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Kubernetes-as-a-Service supplier Platform9 announced a Profile Engine for template-based cross-cluster governance, IDE enhancements for fast access to running workloads, user-specified upgrade strategies (sequential, parallel node percentage or batch , KubeVirt enhancements, and CIS benchmarking compliance. The Profile Engine enables GitOps style automation in multi-cloud environments by allowing administrators to define cluster configurations as desired state templates, and then deploy those to any target cluster.

…

Amazon Web Services announced the introduction of AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift, making it even easier to find, subscribe to, and use thousands of third-party datasets from within Amazon Redshift with just a few clicks and no need to extract, transform, and load it. Customers can directly query third-party data from AWS Data Exchange and combine it with their own first-party data in Amazon Redshift to generate more relevant, comprehensive insights for their business.

…

NetApp’s new Spot Security offering provides automates security monitoring in the cloud by scanning cloud resource usage and the relationship between dynamically changing cloud resources to understand the scope and breadth that a compromised resource may have on the overall account. It ingests data from cloud APIs, network traffic, and user activity to monitor cloud infrastructure events like access, utilisation, and configuration changes. Spot Security will be available for private preview soon, to be followed by general availability on AWS and Azure.  Spot Security supports EC2, S3, IAM, RDS,  VPCs and other commonly used services, with more to come. Find out more here.

NetApp Spot Security graphic.

IBM has flat revenue third quarter with a bright spot in – gasp – storage

By
Chris Mellor
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Revenues in IBM’s third fiscal 2021 quarter, ended September 30, were $17.6 billion — up 0.3 per cent year-on-year. There was a profit of $1.1 billion — 33.5 per cent lower than a year ago — but storage revenues rose 11 per cent annually.

The revenues were effectively flat and profit was down — not a lot to write home about. SVP and CFO James Kavanaugh’s results statement emphasised the positives and said: “We again had solid cash generation for the quarter and over the last year, while maintaining a strong balance sheet and the liquidity to support our hybrid cloud and AI strategy.”

IBM’s Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna’s results statement ignored the headline numbers and looked ahead: “With the separation of Kyndryl early next month, IBM takes the next step in our evolution as a platform-centric hybrid cloud and AI company. We continue to make progress in our software and consulting businesses, which represent our higher growth opportunities. With our increased focus and agility to better serve clients, we are confident in achieving our medium-term objectives of mid-single digit revenue growth and strong free cash flow generation.”

Kyndryl is the name of the to-be-separated-out IT Infrastructure Services unit of IBM’s Global Technology Services business unit, and will become an independent company next month. The corporation reckons it will exit this fiscal year able to deliver mid-single-digit revenue growth and $35 billion free cash flow in 2022–2024. 

IBM’s business segment results:

  • Cloud & Cognitive software — $5.7 billion, up 2.5 per cent;
  • Global Business Services — $4.4 billion, up 11.6 per cent;
  • Global Technology Services — $6.2 billion, down 4.8 per cent;
  • Systems — $1.107 billion, down 11.9 per cent;
  • Global Financing — $220 million, down 19.2 per cent;

The Systems segment revenue decline was driven by declines in Z mainframes (down 33 per cent) and Power systems (down 24 per cent). Storage Systems grew 11 per cent. Cloud revenue was down 42 per cent. The growth in storage was driven by entry-level and tape systems. 

IBM launched an entry-level FlashSystem 5200 in February — faster and higher in capacity, yet 20 per cent lower in price than the prior 5100 — and it has obviously done well. The growth in archival data storage needs has probably accounted for the tape systems revenue increase.

FlashSystem 9200.

The mainframe and Power revenue declines were attributed to cycle dynamics, implying a revenue uplift should  hopefully be coming from new hardware and software.

Systems provided $0.8 billion in hardware revenues and $0.3 billion in operating systems software revenues. IBM has provided percentage change numbers for the storage part of its systems business, and our records anchor these to an actual storage revenue number provided many quarters ago. We have recalculated the quarterly storage revenue number using these percentage changes and expect we are progressively becoming less accurate as a result.

This proviso is spelled out before we include our chart of IBM’s quarterly storage revenues by fiscal year to show the historical trends:

One quarter’s growth after many declining quarters does not make a trend, but IBM can be hopeful that a corner may have been turned.

We must note that most of IBM’s storage software revenues are not included in the Systems storage segment number. IBM is odd in that it does not provide a central and all-inclusive storage revenue number — at least in its public numbers. We simply do not know how IBM is doing from a storage software revenue perspective.

NetApp previews high-end array and adds automatic anti-ransomware weapons to ONTAP

By
Chris Mellor
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At a virtual Insight 2021 event, NetApp has unveiled planned automated ransomware defences in the latest release of its ONTAP array operating system, along with enhanced data services and a sketchy preview of an upcoming high-end all-flash array: the AFF A900.

The announcements strengthened the on-premises end of its hybrid cloud story, but also saw NetApp emphasising its public cloud credentials with native ONTAP services in AWS, Azure and the Google Cloud Platform.

NetApp’s EVP for its Hybrid Cloud Group, Brad Anderson, provided the main announcement quote: “The promised benefits of migrating to the cloud may be profound, but many IT departments are still working to overcome on-premises challenges like managing the complexity and costs of moving data, protecting against ransomware, and ensuring reliable performance for critical applications.”

Ransomware attack detection

ONTAP, v9.10.1 as we understand it, will be able to protect against ransomware attacks autonomously, based on machine learning with integrated preemptive detection and accelerated data recovery. The system will monitor IO patterns and, if it detects unusual activity, will inform the cloud- and AI-based Active IQ array monitoring system. ONTAP will also make a snapshot of the relevant data as a preventive measure.

A NetApp blog by Matt Trudewind, senior technical marketing engineer (security), says the system: “leverages built-in on-box machine learning (ML) that looks at volume workload activity plus data entropy to automatically detect ransomware. It keeps an eye out for activity that is different from user behavioural analytics (UBA), so it may detect attacks that UBA does not.” UBA is focused on a single user, whereas a ransomware attack could involve multiple user accounts.

Trudewind says: “The anti-ransomware feature starts off in learning mode. NetApp recommends a period of at least 30 days, so that the ML gets a chance to understand the typical workloads on the NAS volumes. Once anti-ransomware is put into active mode, it starts looking for the abnormal volume activity that might potentially be ransomware.”

ONTAP anti-ransomware protection is part of the ONTAP Security and Compliance software bundle, configurable via the ONTAP System Manager, and enabled on a per-volume basis.

The OS has also been given expanded object storage capabilities whereby customers can protect ONTAP S3 data with SnapMirror replication to back up to an on-premises StorageGRID array, to S3 in AWS, or to an ONTAP S3 bucket in AFF and FAS arrays. 

The September announcement of ONTAP’s NVMe/TCP support is now in place. ONTAP admins can automatically update firmware for array hardware components such as disks, shelves, and service processors.

Data services

NetApp’s Cloud Manager console has added a digital wallet capability. It supports pre-payment for credits and provides more information about customers’ data services license usage in hybrid clouds. CloudManager has been given integrations with the Keystone subscription facility and Active IQ deployed array monitoring scheme, so that it can provide a more comprehensive picture of a NetApp customer’s activities.

There are also:

  • Enhancements to NetApp Cloud Backup and Cloud Data Sense services;
  • Simplified deployment of Cloud Volumes ONTAP with new customer-ready templates;
  • Fully embedded Active IQ;
  • Deeper integrations with NetApp Cloud Insights;
  • ONTAP software support for Kubernetes workloads.

NetApp is making it cheaper to use Cloud Volumes ONTAP with a freemium service tier in its Flex subscription scheme — a fully featured, perpetual license to use ONTAP in the cloud for up to 500GB of storage capacity. This could be used for dev-and-test and upgraded to a subscription for more capacity at deployment time.

Two professional services offerings were announced. SupportEdge Advisor for Cloud provides direct access to trained specialists, and Flexible Professional Services (FlexPS) is  available for customers wanting on-demand and ongoing support as they adopt a hybrid cloud strategy.

AFF A900

The A900, due next month, will be faster than the current high-end all-NVMe SSD A800. It is effectively the A700 with a new memory processor controller board. That means it uses the 8U A700 chassis, and not the 4U A800 chassis, meaning more in-chassis capacity. In total the A700 supports 5,760 SSDs with an effective 702.7PB capacity, while the A800 can handle 2,880 SSDs at an effective 316.3 capacity.

Our thinking is that NetApp is crafting an NVMe-supporting version of the A700 with a faster processor than the A800 and more memory as well. If the A900 controllers support SAS and NVMe SSDS then existing A700 systems can be upgraded, potentially, with a main board swap for each controller.

We understand NetApp will use the A900 controller in a hybrid flash/disk FAS 9500 in a few months’ time. The FAS 9500 will probably be an upgrade of the existing FAS 9000 which, like the AFF A700, has an 8U chassis.

Comment

We think the proof of ONTAP’s autonomous ransomware defences will lie in: one, ONTAP’s ability to prevent ransomware attacks that get through competing storage system defences; two, not falling prey to ransomware attacks that competing systems repel; and three, telling ONTAP admins how successful it has been at repelling attacks.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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