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Storage news ticker – October 28

By
Chris Mellor
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The Wall Street Journal says email protector Mimecast is exploring a sale. It reckons Mimecast has a market value of about $4.5 billion and is working with bankers on a sale, taking in a large investment, or other options. Revenues in Mimecast’s first fiscal 2022 quarter, ended June 30, 2022, were $142.5 million, up 24 per cent year-on-year.  Profits were $10.1 million, compared to $3.1 million year ago. It added 600 net new customers in the quarter, taking its customer count to 40,600 globally. Seems a healthy-enough business.

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IBM has new white paper coming. It will tell the world: “Red Hat and IBM have shown that the combination of IBM Db2 and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation provides robust performance in the face of multiple simulated system failures. With Db2 HADR, database operations can continue unabated even when a database instance has failed and become unavailable. Test systems performed extremely well through simulated failures in OpenShift Data Foundation infrastructure. Together IBM and Red Hat technologies demonstrate the value of a multilayer resilience strategy for providing business continuity.”

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SUSE announced the acquisition of NeuVector, a provider of lifecycle container security that delivers end-to-end security, from DevOps pipeline vulnerability protection to automated security and compliance in production. It says the integration of NeuVector should significantly enhance the enterprise-grade security capabilities in the SUSE Rancher container management platform, providing full lifecycle security in any mission-critical environment and offering the key enterprise security capabilities needed to run Kubernetes at scale.

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We do get notice of research reports that look unlikely, making it worth being cautious about buying them. As a possible example there’s this: “The ‘Memristors Market — Forecasts from 2021 to 2026’ report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com’s offering. The memristors market was valued at $1,126.123 million in 2019 and is expected to grow steadily during the forecast period.” The companies mentioned are Toshiba, Samsung, Texas Instruments, IBM, Fujitsu, Intel, Micron, Unity Semiconductor, Sony and Hewlett-Packard — not written as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is a tad suspicious.

The abstract admits that: “As a result of the high initial cost and the fact that they are still being developed, there are many threats such as error rate, reliability, programming ease, etc., which can cause the memristor market to decline. Further, companies like Rambus, Panasonic & Crossbar are also developing Resistive RAM Technologies, which can be used instead of memristors.” Well, yes.

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Ne-Mo’s Bakery/Horizon Food Group has chosen Veeam Backup & Replication and ExaGrid to protect the company’s most critical IT systems, defend against disaster and ransomware attacks, and deliver high-speed backup and recovery to meet its manufacturing demands. Ne-Mo’s/Horizon’s previous backup system was taking over 20 hours for data backup, at least one hour for recovery and limiting backup retention to only ten days. 

Veeam and ExaGrid were able to protect the IT systems supporting snack manufacturing and boost defence against ransomware attacks, increasing Horizon’s backup speed by 85 per cent (to about three hours), recovery speed by 92 percent (to under five minutes) and data retention from 10 to 30 days.

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Intel’s Innovation Event saw a presentation from Sandra Rivera, EVP & GM, Data Center and AI Group, which contained this comment: “Persistent Memory + Software are binding pieces of an evolving heterogeneous compute ecosystem — from CPUs, IPUs, FPGAs, GPUs, and more.” IPUs are Intel’s Infrastructure Processing Units (its DPU technology). Nick McKeown, SVP & GM, Network and Edge Group, said we are in the midst of a serious inflection point in the datacentre, which includes the proliferation of IPUs to offload infrastructure management from CPUs. 

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Intel announced it is collaborating with Google Cloud on the design and development of its first ASIC-based 200GB/sec+ IPU code-named “Mount Evans”. It is supported by an industry-standard programming language and open sourced Infrastructure Programmer Development kit. (Thanks to Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers.)

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What are containers? A blog by Backblaze writer Molly Clancy provides an intro to container software technology.

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A Backblaze blog: ”Drive Failure Over Time: The Bathtub Curve Is Leaking” by Andy Klein, reveals that back in 2013, 80 per cent of the drives installed would be expected to survive four years. “That fell to 50 per cent after six years. In 2021, the probability of a hard drive being alive at six years is 88 per cent. That’s a substantial increase, but it basically comes down to the fact that hard drives are failing less in our system. We think it is a combination of better drives, better storage servers, and better practices by our data centre teams.”

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 Micron has released its Crucial DDR5 desktop PC memory products, which deliver up to 50 per cent faster data transfer speeds compared to previous-generation DDR4 memory. It is compatible with 12th Gen Intel Core processors that support DDR5 and is available in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB densities. 

Micron Crucial DDR5 DRAM.

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StorMagic announced a DCIG competitive analysis comparing the benefits and strengths of StorMagic’s AQRvault and Quantum’s VS-HCI series in the wake of Quantum’s acquisition of Pivot3 earlier this year. It says the report was developed to educate buyers of video surveillance edge solutions. ARQvault’s key advantage is that it includes a complete video management system, which can store video on any disk storage type — including the Quantum VS-HCI/Pivot3 offering — or on lower-cost tiers, such as tape, optical or cloud.

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STAC recently performed STAC-M3 Benchmarks on a stack involving KX’s kdb+ 4.0 DBMS running on nine Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 servers, each with two 18-core Intel Xeon Gold 6254 CPUs @ 3.10GHz and 384GiB DRAM. Data was accessed via NFS 3 and stored in a Dell EMC PowerScale F900 All-Flash Scale-Out NAS 3-node cluster with 251TiB total physical storage capacity. It was faster than a system involving four database servers accessing an earlier generation of Dell EMC’s flash storage appliance with kdb+ 3.6 (SUT ID KDB190430) in 14 of 17 mean-response time STAC-M3 Antuco benchmarks.

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Veeam’s  “Beat The Gostev” Challenge is looking for the fastest Veeam Backup environment in Benelux — faster than maximum throughput of 11.4GB/sec. SVA System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH of Germany achieved 147GB/sec with IBM and Lenovo gear.

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Satori, the creator of the world’s first DataSecOps platform, announced the release of “Snowflake Security: Securing Your Snowflake Data Cloud” — a comprehensive guide codifying DataSecOps best practices to enable data teams to secure their data cloud. The book, which was published by Apress, is co-authored by Satori Chief Scientist, Ben Herzberg, and Satori co-founder and CTO, Yoav Cohen, who worked in collaboration with several Snowflake engineers, product, and security leaders on the Snowflake team. The book is now available for purchase on Amazon.com, Target, Book Depository and other major retailers and online shops. 

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A Cassandra Momentum blog by Chris Thornett, senior content strategist, Constantia.io, discusses what the future holds for Apache Cassandra. A Cassandra Enhancement Process (CEP), similar to some other Apache projects, was established last year and makes CEPs the preferred route for broad or disruptive changes to the Cassandra codebase. The blog reads: “The release of Apache Cassandra 4.0 has opened the floodgates to new feature proposals. Many feature ideas have been approved and are in development, such as a cluster and code action simulator, support for general-purpose transaction support while others, such as Storage Attached Indexing are being discussed.”

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Commvault’s Metallic Security IQ dashboard shows security status and attacks

By
Chris Mellor
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Commvault has added scanning and advising Security IQ functions to all its Metallic data protection as-a-service products.

Ask a locksmith how to secure your house and you’ll be told to buy more locks. Ask a data protector how to secure your data and you’ll be told to backup more files and secure them better. Quelle surprise as the French might say. It’s like having automated lead generation embedded in a customer’s IT environment. Still, having ongoing watchful security audits is much better than nothing.

Manoj Nair, Metallic GM, provided the announcement statement: “It’s the sad truth that too many companies hit by ransomware aren’t prepared. With our multi-layered approach to ransomware protection and secure separation of data from customers’ own environments, we help Metallic users to further identify threats as early as possible so they can recover quickly, minimising their data loss risk.” 

An unattributed Commvault blog indicates that, with Security IQ “seamlessly integrated across the entire Metallic portfolio, IT admins can spot risks and vulnerabilities in real-time, limit exposure to cyberthreats at scale, and successfully exceed data recovery objectives.”

Security IQ provides:

  • Security posture scoring of the backup environment by evaluating native controls and parameters actively enabled. This guides users to recommended areas of improvement to continuously bolster security stature of Metallic environments.
  • Cataloguing of abnormal conditions and behaviours on data (such as anomalous root size changes, suspicious files, failed login attempts, offline clients and more), offering insight into unwarranted changes which can adversely impact backup data.
  • Monitoring and tracking anomalous trends in real-time, delivering detailed information on ‘suspect’ data types, providing users with visual guidance on suggested pre-ransomware recovery points.
  • Audits that provide visibility into potential ransomware activity and unauthorised changes to configurations, restores, and user logins.
  • Honeypots to lure and deflect ransomware attempts on file systems and endpoints.
  • A single dashboard across all Metallic services, with actionable insights for multiple Metallic backup environments.

A Metallic micro-site provides a little more information. Commvault has been active with honeypots to combat ransomware for some time. 

Comment

It would be good to have independent audits of the effectiveness of suppliers’ anti-ransomware measures. That would enable customers to make intelligent and more objective choices.

Minority Report: Seagate violated anti-Huawei trade sanctions

By
Chris Mellor
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A US Senate Republicans’ reports says Seagate broke trade rules supplying disk drives to Huawei.

Huawei was first put on a US trade blacklist in May 2019. Western Digital then stopped supplying its disk drives, SSDs and NAND chips to Huawei, halting a strategic co-operation agreement with Huawei which had only been signed in April. Shipments later resumed.

Toshiba temporarily suspended disk and semiconductor-based products shipments at that point but resumed after a few hours, believing that that no US sanctions were being breached.

Seagate did not cease its disk drive supply to Huawei, telling us it “complies with all applicable laws including export control regulations,” and adding: ”We do not comment on specific customers.” 

In June 2020 Huawei was intending to use 20TB SMR drives in its OceanStor Pacific mass data storage array, thought to be sourced from Western Digital which was then shipping a DC H650 20TB SMR drive.

However, the Trump administration added 38 Huawei affiliates in 21 countries to the US government’s economic blacklist in August 2020. This raised the total to 152 affiliates. It also amended the Foreign Direct Product Rule tightening the restrictions on how technology could be supplied to Huawei.

Suppliers could ask for a license to ship technology devices to Huawei.

Republican Senator Roger Wicker, the ranking member of the Commerce Committee, said the 2020 Commerce Department regulation sought to “tighten Huawei’s ability to procure items that are the direct product of specified US technology or software such as hard disk drives”. He asked the CEOs of Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital if their companies were improperly supplying Huawei with disk drives.

Responding to a Reuters query, Western Digital said it “stopped shipping to Huawei in mid-September 2020 to comply with new rules issued by the Department of Commerce. We requested a license to ship products to Huawei in September 2020. Our application is still pending.”

Seagate’s CFO, Gianluca Romano, said on a September 2020 Deutsche Bank call that Seagate was evaluating the situation and had not applied for any licence. He said at the time: “I don’t see any particular restriction for us in terms of being able to continue to ship to Huawei.”

The report

Republicans on the Committee have now issued a Minority report alleging Seagate did not comply with the regulations.

The report states: “Seagate officials told Minority Staff that the company does not hold a valid license to continue shipping hard disk drives to Huawei, likely making transactions for this product unlawful after the effective date.”

It continues: ”Toshiba and Western Digital, the other primary suppliers of hard disk drives, confirmed to the Committee that they ceased shipments to Huawei after the [Foreign Direct Product Rule] rule went into effect.

”Minority Staff estimate that Huawei spends around $800 million annually on hard disk drives for use in data centers, servers, and other bulk-data storage applications — demand prospectively met in large part by Seagate’s monopolisation of the market after the rule went into effect. By shipping these prohibited products to Huawei, it appears Seagate benefitted from an uneven playing field to the detriment of national security and at the expense of its competitors who abide by the rule designed to combat threats posed by companies with known connections to the Chinese government.”

According to the report: ”In an interview with Minority Staff on October 4, 2021, Seagate officials confirmed that the company has not applied for or obtained a license to ship items covered by the Foreign Direct Product Rule to Huawei.”

According to Wedbush Securities, which was quoted in the report: “[Seagate’s] legal team likely interpreted US restrictions differently than its peers.”

This later changed as, in September, Seagate representatives “disclosed that the company has stopped shipping hard disk drives to Huawei, but declined to provide the date that shipments ended.”

Interestingly the report indicates: ”Minority Staff subsequently received evidence indicating that Seagate may plan to resume shipments to Huawei once the Chinese company is restructured with an operational data server subsidiary to reroute hard disk drives through the supply chain. The purported intent is to avoid shipping the product through currently prohibited entities, even though the destination is Huawei.”

And it concludes: “Based on the evidence available to Minority Staff, it appears that Seagate Technology knowingly violated the Foreign Direct Product Rule for more than one year. Seagate likely made the strategic calculation to continue violating national security regulations based on the prospect of earning significantly greater profits through market monopolisation than the potential cost of regulatory penalties. All unlicensed shipments of prohibited products to Huawei should cease without delay.”

Comment

Wicker’s Minority Report has no regulatory status. It is being published to exert pressure on the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) at the Department of Commerce to investigate Seagate’s  shipments to Huawei and declare the company in breach of the regulations. BIS has no legal duty, as far as we know, to co-operate with such reports, and the report expresses some frustration with BIS’s lack of co-operation.

“Failure of BIS to provide clarity on the rule’s scope, in combination with the lack of enforcement actions taken against violators, has created a commercial environment that incentivises companies to continue shipping prohibited products to Huawei.” 

BIS also told the Committee that “compliance investigations can take as many as five years to complete.”

The Committee took umbrage with this and the report’s final sentence states: “Minority Staff will continue performing oversight of BIS to determine why no enforcement action has been taken against Seagate Technology and to ensure the agency conducts thorough investigations at the scale and urgency required by the security interests at stake.”

Seagate’s lawyers are probably not shivering in their boots.

iXsystems’ open-sorcery – scale-out file/block/object HCI software

By
Chris Mellor
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TrueNAS SCALE is an open-source and scale-out hyperconverged infrastructure software system announced by iXsystems, which has more than a million software deployments and more than 10EB managed by its FreeNAS and TrueNAS products.

Think of iXsystems as an alternative to IBM’s Red Hat business unit. Paid-for TrueNAS and no-charge FreeNAS software are both based on OpenZFS — an open source version of the ZFS file system. TrueNAS software is an alternative to proprietary file/block and object software and software/hardware systems. 

ESG senior analyst Scott Sinclair says: “[With] feature-rich storage that delivers scale-out performance and hyperconverged capabilities, TrueNAS SCALE is a significant entrant into enterprise-grade open source storage.”

iXSystems’ EVP Brett Davis emphasises the open source alternative story in his announcement quote: ”TrueNAS is enabling a new era in open storage data freedom for businesses in every sector that has requirements for reliable, secure, and agile data access that goes beyond the status quo.”

The product is based on the TrueNAS Enterprise software which can scale up to 20PB. TrueNAS SCALE is clusterable and can scale out to 2 exabytes. It provides both file (clustered SMB, Glusterfs) and object storage (S3 API with Minio) access.

“SCALE” is capitalised because it is an acronym — or perhaps an acrostic:

iXsystems graphic for TrueNAS SCALE.

The software has been in alpha and beta testing phases for a year, by more than 4,000 TrueNAS community members and has about 100PB under management. 

Applications can run on TrueNAS SCALE clusters as either KVM VMs, Docker containers, or Kubernetes pods. There are dozens of pre-tested and packaged applications including Plex, Nextcloud, HomeAssistant, and others. Application catalogs enable community contributions such as the free catalog of applications from Truecharts.org.

TrueNAS SCALE runs on the same platforms as TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise and allows for the migration of workloads. Customers can start with TrueNAS Enterprise and migrate to TrueNAS SCALE when their applications need scale-out capabilities.

TrueNAS SCALE is now available for ordering and shipping on a wide range of TrueNAS platforms, including the TrueNAS M-Series, R-Series, and even Minis. The upgradable and single or dual-controller M-Series starts from less than $15,000 with the M30 (24x 3.5-inch drive bays), and runs through the M40 and M50 to the top-end M60 product. This supports up to 20 PB and 20GB/sec on a single node, and 100 of them in a cluster supports 2EB of capacity.

The M-Series will will be developed to support high-availability (controller failover) in the first quarter of 2022.

TrueCommand v20, iXsystems’ management software, includes a cluster webUI for deploying larger TrueNAS SCALE clusters. Its features include granular stats collection, customisable alerts, predictive analytics, Role-Based Access Control capabilities, and auditing. TrueCommand can be deployed as a docker container or provided as a cloud service.

Storage news ticker – October 27

By
Chris Mellor
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Zadara has been placed in the Leader position in GigaOm’s Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) Sonar Report, beating out competitors including HPE, NetApp, IBM, Pure Storage, and more. Zadara says it was highlighted for offering a solid and true STaaS model with no initial commitment for users of all sizes. Also for being easy to use, with integrated EC2-compatible services.

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Enterprise scale-out filesystem supplier Qumulo announced its certified K-432T appliance – an active archive platform for Qumulo Server Q. It has 24x 18TB hard disk drives per node (432TB) and provides consistent throughput of 1GB/sec/node for clients. The appliance can be clustered out to more than 34PB. The K-432T is the highest-density and highest-capacity archive platform that Qumulo has certified to date, and is available from Arrow Electronics.

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Virtuozzo, which supplies cloud infrastructure and platform systems, announced a global partnership with Prov.net – a hosted systems, colocation, connectivity, and cloud services software company headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island. Prov.net will operate as a global reseller, cloud service provider, and technology partner.

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What fun! Seagate introduced a new family of Star Wars Beskar Ingot Drives, the first release in a collaboration to bring designs inspired by the Star Wars franchise to its PC gaming storage device line – “taking gamers’ battle stations to the next level”. The special edition designs will be available in M.2 NVMe, 2.5-inch SATA, and external HDD formats. Each drive resembles an ingot of Beskar, including its Imperial stamp featured prominently in the series, making these drives the ultimate collectible for Star Wars fans. The Beskar Ingot external 2TB HDD is available this holiday season for $99.99.

Beskar Ingot external 2TB HDD.

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Data protector Rubrik has appointed of Scott Herren, EVP and CFO at Cisco, to its Board of Directors and Chair of the Audit Committee. Herren brings extensive public company finance leadership expertise and a proven track record of successfully guiding companies through complex SaaS transformations. Prior to Cisco, Herren served as CFO for Autodesk and held senior strategy and financial positions at Citrix Systems, FedEx and IBM. It’s the second recent Rubrik board appointment. Something’s up.

A Rubrik spokesperson told us: “With the rapid rise in ransomware, companies are all asking if their data is safe, and whether they can  recover after an attack. This has fueled the growth of Rubrik and its Zero Trust Data Security platform. The recent appointments of Puppet CEO, Yvonne Wassenaar and Cisco CFO, Scott Herren will enable Rubrik to continue this growth now and in the future.”

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HelpSystems has acquired Digital Guardian, the industry’s only SaaS provider of data loss prevention (DLP) solutions for large and mid-sized organisations. Digital Guardian’s offerings give customers visibility and protection of their data across many operating systems and applications. The company also provides a popular managed service to protect sensitive data from threats originating inside and outside the organisation. The team and solutions from Digital Guardian will fit into HelpSystems’ data security portfolio, and combine with powerful security solutions such as GoAnywhere, Clearswift, Agari, and Titus.

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Robin.io and StorCentric today announced the general availability of hyperconverged cloud-native solutions that simplify and accelerate channel solution providers’ and end users’ journey to the private cloud. The joint offerings allow the Robin Cloud Native Platform (CNP) to be coupled with StorCentric’s Nexsan Unity enterprise-class unified storage or with StorCentric’s Nexsan E-Series high-density, high-performance, highly scalable storage to deliver offerings for enterprises that combine agility, as-a-service application delivery, and affordability.

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Prodapt and Robin.io announced a strategic partnership in which Prodapt will host and offer SI support for Robin Cloud-native Platform (CNP) for deployment and life cycle management of 5G/4G network services for the DSP industry. This partnership will enable DSPs to accelerate their cloud-native journey and simplify the end-to-end service lifecycle of virtual network services.

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TigerGraph, provider of a graph analytics platform, is collaborating with HPE and Xilinx on a solution to make graph analytics capabilities more accessible for enterprises to accelerate insight while reducing costs and resources. The bundled solution, comprised of HPE ProLiant servers using Xilinx Alveo accelerator cards and TigerGraph’s native parallel graph database, delivers 48x faster time-to-insight and an 18 per cent boost in accuracy, providing more effective real-time analytics for things like fraud detection, customer360, and supply chain optimisation in manufacturing.

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Commvault revenues disappoint after significant project and hardware delays

By
Chris Mellor
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Commvault undershot its revenue expectations in its latest quarter as customers delayed IT transformation projects and suffered from hardware supply chain issues.

Revenues in its second fiscal 2022 quarter, ended September 30, were $177.8 million — that’s four per cent up year-on-year, but Commvault had expected them to be around $184.5 million. As a consequence, its profit was $1.73 million — far better than the year-ago $41 million loss, but disappointing compared to the prior quarter’s $13.9 million profit. However it is still Commvault’s sixth successive growth quarter.

President and CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said in the results statement “During the quarter we saw a significant increase in new customer revenue. … At the same time, we did not meet our expectations for the quarter.” But he saw good news behind the lower revenue growth. 

Commvault’s revenue and profits history chart shows no breakout happening yet.
Q2 fy2022 was still the sixth successive growth quarter for Commvault.

Reasons to be cheerful

Commvault is transitioning away from hardware to software sales and subscriptions rather than perpetual licenses. Software and products revenue was $75.3 million, up four per cent year-over-year. But, excluding pass-through hardware revenue, software revenue was up nine per cent year over year. 

There was a six per cent increase in larger deals — those greater than $0.1 million — and such deals represented 67 per cent of Commvault’s software and products revenue. The downside of this is that delays in large deals affect Commvault proportionately more than before.

CFO Brian Carolan said in the earnings call: “We’re starting to see longer closing cycles as we get into larger IT transformation projects, and we can’t control the hardware delays that are out there.”

Services revenue in the quarter was $102.6 million, up four per cent year-over-year, with this increase driven primarily by Metallic subscriptions. Metallic is Commvault’s Backup-as-a-Service offering and was first introduced a year ago.

According to Mirchandani: “Metallic landed its largest transaction to date, a high six-figure deal that included multiple product offerings.” The total number of transactions involving more than one Commvault product increased 150 per cent year-over-year. About half of its seven-figure software transactions involve multiple products and services.

Total ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) grew 12 per cent year-over-year to $543 million. Within that category subscription and SaaS ARR grew more than 40 per cent year-over-year to $278 million, representing more than half of total ARR. 

Carolan said: “We added well over 200 net new subscription customers in the quarter. We added over 300 Metallic customers in the quarter — 60 per cent of those were new. We [have] now broken through 1,000 total customers for Metallic.”

He noted a subscription revenue achievement: “We’ve been forecasting … that at some point in time, our subscription and SaaS business will overtake and become the majority of our ARR, and that has happened this past quarter. It now represents over 50 per cent and that high growth is growing at greater than 40 per cent per year.”

Take outs

Commvault says it is winning against competitors, with Mirchandani emphasising: “We are driving this growth through market share gains as evidenced in part by Q2 revenue from new customers which finished at the highest level in years.”

He added: “Our largest transaction this quarter, a multimillion-dollar win at one of the biggest healthcare organisations in the world, was a new customer and a competitive displacement. Over 50 per cent of subscription transactions were new logos for Commvault, and more than 60 per cent of Metallic customers were new to Commvault.”

Mirchandani rejected an earnings call suggestion that Commvault was losing out to competitors: ”A good number, two-thirds of our business — the big business we’ve closed last quarter was competitive displacements.”

Analyst caution

Cognisant of Commvault’s history before Mirchandani, of over-promising and under-delivering with contributory sales execution issues, analysts on the call were concerned about a resumption of these historic patterns. The CEO rebutted such worries: “Nothing fundamentally changed with the business. It’s strong, we feel good about it, and we’re focused on getting back to where we were a quarter ago.”

Nevertheless analysts like William Blair’s Jason Ader were cautious: “We worry that rising competitive pressures and uneven sales execution may also be contributing to the recent slowdown in Commvault’s business.”

Commvault is forecasting revenues of about $192 million for the next quarter, a two per cent year-on-year increase, as it sees no immediate improvement in supply chain constraints or large project slowdowns. We think Mirchandani and his team are highly motivated to make it a seventh consecutive revenue growth quarter.

Ditch the switch: stealth-exiting Rockport Networks says it has a better way

By
Chris Mellor
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Rockport Networks has exited stealth with a switchless datacentre network product that it claims can carry data traffic faster and with better latency than switched networks, yet is a drop-in replacement for Ethernet and InfiniBand cabling and switches with no application software changes.

It says switch-based networks are reaching a dead-end of increased complexity and cost. Matt Williams, Rockport’s CTO, said in a statement: “When the root of the problem is the architecture, building a better switch just didn’t make sense. With sophisticated algorithms and other purpose-built software breakthroughs, we have solved for congestion, so our customers no longer need to just throw bandwidth at their networking issues. We’ve focused on real-world performance requirements to set a new standard for what the market should expect for the fabrics of the future.”

Doug Carwardine, Rockport Networks CEO and co-founder, said: “Rockport was founded on the fact that switching, and networking in general, is extremely complicated. … We made it our mission to get data from a source to a destination faster than other technologies. Removing the switch was crucial to achieve significant performance advantages in an environmentally and commercially sustainable way.”

How it works

Network switch functionality has been distributed to intelligent endpoint network cards — most definitely not called NICs or even SmartNICs — which have an FPGA and connect up to 24 endpoints to a dedicated 1U SHFL (pronounced “shuffle”) optical device using passive cabling. SHFLs need no power or cooling and can be linked together to scale out the network. Ethernet and InfiniBand traffic can be carried over the Rockport network. The network cards are standard, low-profile half height, half length (HHHL) cards fitting in a PCIe slot. 

CTO Matt Williams told us: “People can remove their Ethernet NICs and InfiniBand cards, use the Rockport Network Card, and it just works.”

Video of Matt Williams giving a high-level description of Rockport’s approach.

The Network Card contains a Mellanox ConnectX unit, and that’s what Ethernet and InfiniBand-using applications in servers and other devices see: a Mellanox ConnectX-5 Ethernet NIC, providing verbs (RoCE) and sockets (TCP/UDP) API support. In effect Rockport provides OSI layer 1 and 1.5 networking. As Williams explains: “We transport Ethernet frames but don’t switch them.”

Traffic is divided into small chunks called FLITS by the network card’s Rockport Network Operating System (rNOS) software. These are interleaved and transmitted together so that large frame or packet network transfers don’t hold up smaller ones, eliminating the noisy neighbour problem and resulting tail latency. Rockport’s NC1225 network card has 300Gbit/sec bandwidth and enables each endpoint or node to be connected to 12 other nodes. 

This switchless network is a fully distributed direct interconnect system based on supercomputer topologies. It supports small and large scale clusters with greater bandwidth efficiency and lower power requirements than a comparable traditional switching environment. 

Network technology

We had a look at Rockport’s 6D torus-based networking technology back in 2015 and reported: “Its idea is that storage and server nodes in a network should be directly interconnected using a Direct Interconnect (torus mesh) of optical cables. A torus mesh is a geometric shape analogy of their interconnection scheme, being a ring with a circular cross-section and a hole inside the middle of the ring — think doughnut.”

This design favours east-west network traffic in a datacentre as much as north-south traffic, unlike a traditional switch-based network. Rockport says a hierarchical switch-based scheme rapidly becomes excessively complex as it scales.

Rockport switch network diagram.

It contrasts this with its relatively simple Network Card and SHFL scheme;

Network admins  use the Rockport Autonomous Network Manager (ANM) user interface (UI) to configure, manage, and troubleshoot the Rockport Switchless Network. The ANM continuously captures all aspects of the network (health status, performance metrics, error counters, events, alarms, and the UI status) in a temporal or a time-series database. It stores 30 days of historical data, with the last seven days of history stored at high fidelity within the temporal database, available from the timeline. This lets network administrators scroll back in time to insert themselves into that context for troubleshooting. 

Nodes autonomously detect failed links and automatically avoid the impacted paths in real time at hardware speed. A downloadable Rockport technology primer document explains more.

Benefits

Rockport says that its users are seeing an average 28 per cent reduction in workload completion time because of its faster networking with lower and more consistent latency. It claims a one per cent improvement in workload completion times translates to approximately one per cent improvement in overall AI/ML/HPC cluster utilisation.

It also argues that eliminating centralised switches and using its scheme reduces power and resulting cooling requirements of network equipment by over 60 per cent, with overall datacentre energy savings of 12 per cent or better. Cabling is reduced by up to 75 per cent. The larger the infrastructure, the greater the savings in both material and personpower to install and manage networks. 

This means Rockport’s gear can provide, it says, benefits for customers with one to many switches.

Users

There are 396 Rockport Network Card nodes in production at TACC, the Texas Advanced Computing Centre, is both a customer and a Rockport Centre of Excellence. TACC houses “Frontera” — the tenth most powerful supercomputer in the world — and Rockport’s switchless network is part of the system.

Dr Dan Stanzione, director of TACC and associate VP for research at UT-Austin, said: “We’re excited to work with innovative new technology like Rockport’s switchless network design. Our team is seeing promising initial results in terms of congestion and latency control. We’ve been impressed by the simplicity of installation and management. We look forward to continuing to test on new and larger workloads and expanding the Rockport Switchless Network further into our data centre.”

You can watch a video session with Stanzione here (but you might need to get a Vimeo login to do so).

Alastair Basden of DiRAC/Durham University and technical manager of the COSMA HPC Cluster, said: “Based on a 6D torus, we found the Rockport Switchless Network to be remarkably easy to setup and install. We looked at codes that rely on point-to-point communications between all nodes with varying packet sizes where — typically — congestion can reduce performance on traditional networks. We were able to achieve consistent low latency under load and look forward to seeing the impact this will have on even larger-scale cosmology simulations.”

Rockport background

Rockport was founded in 2012 by CEO Doug Carwardine, initial CTO and now Chief Scientist Dan Oprea and COO Michael McLay. It has taken in just $18.8 million of VC, grant and debt financing according to Cunchbase, with about $15 million of that raised in 2019.

The company has 165 employees, up from around 80 a year ago, with 100 of them being engineers, and it has filed around 80 patents. It is talking to potential OEMs and tier-1 channel partners and we might expect announcements about partnerships in the future.

2021 is a banner year for SK hynix

By
Chris Mellor
-

Korean DRAM and NAND supplier SK hynix reported record quarterly revenues on the back of strong semiconductor memory demand, and its NAND business made its first surplus.

Revenues in the quarter ended September 30 were 11.805 trillion won ($10.13 billion), up 45.2 per cent year-on-year, with a profit of 3.3156 trillion won ($2.84 billion) – 206 per cent higher than a year ago. 

Kevin (Jongwon) Noh, EVP and Head of Corporate Center (CFO) at SK hynix, issued a results statement, saying: “Despite the concerns over recent global supply chain disruptions, the remarkable quarterly performance signals that the semiconductor memory industry is continuing its growth momentum.”

Revenues have just grown past the Q3 2018 peak, possibly signalling the coming end of the DRAM/NAND growth cycle. Profits are still lower though.

The company increased its production of leading-edge 1nm DRAM, which saw yield improvements, and 128-layer 4D NAND flash, lowering its product costs relative to DRAM and NAND density. It said 128L accounted for 75 per cent of its quarterly bit output. This, and increased DRAM and NAND demand in the server and smartphone markets, enabled its significant quarterly revenue and profits rise.

Notice the Q3 2021 growth acceleration.

It expects demand to stay high, and the NAND business should get even better because of the coming completion of the Intel NAND and SSD business acquisition.

Noh said: “After the completion of the acquisition, SK hynix will establish [a] complementary product portfolio which maximises both companies’ strengths, and seek to achieve economies of scale. For the future SK hynix will expand its R&D foothold and evolve into a global semiconductor memory leader.”

There won’t be a single, combined product portfolio. Instead the individual SK hynix and Intel NAND technologies will stay separate.

Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers added some colour to reported results, telling subscribers: “Hynix reported [a] DRAM bit shipment decline in the low-single-digit q/q range in 3Q21, falling below the company’s expectation of low-single-digit q/q bit growth (driven by PC slowdown).”

NAND bit shipments did the opposite, and Rakers enthused: “Bit ship grew in the low-20 per cent q/q range, which was ahead of the company’s prior expectations of high-teens per cent growth q/q in 3Q21. … Hynix expects its 4Q21 DRAM bit shipments to grow in the mid-/high-single-digit q/q range and NAND bit shipments to grow in the double-digit q/q range.”

More generally, he observed: “Hynix noted that it expects to see improved Chromebook PC demand trends into late-2021/2022, while also pointing to an expectation of improved smartphone demand in 4Q21 and continued strength in server DRAM demand.” The company was: “particularly positive on the demand trends it is seeing in enterprise SSDs (eSSDs), which continues to be somewhat constrained by component supply.”

It looks like the boom times for SK hynix are set to continue; its product and company strategies are winning in won terms.

Storage news ticker – October 26

By
Chris Mellor
-

…

Robin.io and AirHop Communications today announced a strategic partnership to provide solutions that deliver automated improvements in the performance of Open Radio Access Networks and end-user quality of experience while reducing the costs, complexities and deployment times for Mobile Network Operators and Cloud Service Providers rolling out 5G and other next-gen networks and services.

…

Kingston Digital announced its KC3000 PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 2280 SSD for desktop and laptop PCs. It uses 3D TLC NAND and PCIe Gen-4×4 NVME access to deliver speeds up to 7,000MB/sec read and write from its 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and  4TB capacity points.  Random read or write IOPS range up to 1 million. The endurance in total bytes written terms for each capacity is: 400TBW (512GB), 800TBW (1TB), 1.6PBW (2TB) and 3.2PBW (4TB). It’s intended for personal compute device use and not for servers.

Kingston KC3000 PCIe Gen-4 SSD.

…

Edge HCI supplier Scale Computing and data protector/securor Acronis jointly announced the availability of Business Resilience System for MSPs, Purpose Built for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud — a scalable appliance that allows for instant recovery of all workloads in an environment, regardless of where those workloads are running. This hybrid cloud platform delivers MSPs everything they need to ensure clients avoid downtime, lost revenue, and fallout from cyber attacks.

…

ionir, which supplies Kubernetes Data Services, announced updates to its cloud-native data services platform with new capabilities focused on CI/CD acceleration and performance. Kubernetes, now considered the operating system of the cloud, reinvents the concept of infrastructure — everything is a resource, with no notion of fixed assets. Resources are fluid, transportable, orchestrated, and automated. There are:

  • Updates to mobility/cloning — Users can instantly clone volumes after they have been teleported to another location, and view the contents on a remote system, reducing cost and facilitating data movement oacross clouds.  
  • Increased performance — A new class of volumes for high performance applications with low latency requirements. A heterogeneous install balances the ionir system on the hosting cluster in a more detailed way, good for efficiency and rightsizing infrastructure for each application. 
  • New solution guides — A program of integrated technical guides provides validated solution architectures for common Kubernetes applications and tools such as Jenkins, MongoDB, JFrog, CircleCI, and others.

…

Iguazio, a machine learning operations (MLOps) company, announced that it has become a Pure Storage technology partner. With the new partnership, Iguazio offers an MLOps platform that automates and accelerates machine learning and deep learning pipelines. Its serverless and managed services approach shifts the focus from managing a sprawl of Kubernetes resources to delivering a set of higher-level MLOps services, over elastic resources, thereby reducing significant capital and operational costs, and accelerating time to market. Pure provides enterprise-grade data management capabilities and products that are optimal for the challenges of data science, built for speed and simplicity at scale.

…

Totenpass stores data on a gold-plated nickel slab

By
Chris Mellor
-

Totenpass, a New York state company run by a contrarian investor, gold trader, jeweller, and bitcoin miner, is beta-testing a system for storing data for 100 years on credit card-sized slabs of gold-plated nickel.

The founder and CEO is Roy Sebag, and he explains: ”Our revolutionary storage drive helps you to retain control of your data while reducing your dependence on third parties and the internet, where these files can be easily erased or stolen. We invite you to make your personal history into a tangible and everlasting treasure.”

Totenpass is a German word meaning “passport of the dead” and Sebag says:  “I believe that Totenpass technology will be a giant leap forward for the permanent archival of mankind.“ Others might disagree.

Totenpass examples.

Product

There are two Totenpass sizes. The small one is credit card size, 54mm x 85mm, contains 0.2 grams of gold and has 1TB of digital capacity or 2,196 pages of analog visual or textual data. The larger card is smart phone size, 71mm x 143mm, with 0.4 grams of gold and 4TB or 3,894 pages of capacity. 

Customers get a card created by uploading data through a website, paying $50 for the small card or $75 for the larger one (with credit card or cryptocurrency — of course), and having the finished product posted to them. Digital information on the card is neither encrypted nor passphrase protected, unless requested. Digital data can be read by a smartphone app. Beta users of Totenpass will not yet have access to the reader app, which is expected to launch in 2022.

Analog data is seen by eye, possibly with the aid of a magnifying glass.

Totenpass analog Venus.

The card requires no electrical power for it to function and so is claimed to support environmental concerns; gold is green.

Technology

The technology relies on digital data being written by collimated laser light and a proprietary light diffraction imprinting technology producing “patterns written into multiple dimensions of the gold surface.” The laser has ”a highly focused 405nm wavelength creating feature sizes of 125nm or 1/1000th of a human hair”

For analog data storage, “the diffractive patterns are arranged with billions of diffractive bits to form pixels that comprise the formats familiar to our human experience such as visual documents and photos.” We’re told “textual files including spreadsheets and Powerpoints, photographs, images, documents and even audio files may be etched directly onto the surface of the Totenpass.”

And: “Totenpass technology prints over 10 billion pixels at a resolution of 25,000 dots per inch at a speed of 1,000 pages per minute making it the fastest analog nano printing technology in the world.”

Technology gibberish

Sebag explains his thinking in a lengthy, 22-page white paper full of partial knowledge, questionable comparisons, portentous language and mistaken assertions.

For example, he says that floppy disks can store data for 20 years while SSDs and magnetic tape only last for ten years. We find this floppy disk lifespan claim bizarre.

Sebag writes: “We believe authors, artists, and thinkers will embrace the Totenpass as the primary method for protecting their intellectual property.” Right.

He boasts the “Totenpass is built from solid gold and nickel, which inherently resist destruction, never tarnish and will therefore outlive all other ephemeral forms of data storage, from hard drives to Cloud servers.” The Totenpass cards are claimed to be disaster-proof.

This idea of the Totenpass’s ability to “inherently resist destruction” is meaningless. It doesn’t consider attack by file, drill or grinding wheel, to state the obvious. It also neglects to consider aqua regia — a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid that can dissolve gold. 

Sebag mentions DNA storage but doesn’t consider the alternative of Piql film reels in a Svalbard coalmine for 1,000 year storage.

There’s also this: ”The Totenpass user experience interface is beautiful, simple, and login free thus being privacy oriented.” Er … no — not unless the digital data is encrypted and passphrase-protected. Analog data is immediately visible; no privacy there at all.

We think the Totenpass’s natural marketing home is in the advert pages of in-flight magazines along with earwax removal devices, peletons, and outdoor bluetooth speakers. It will probably do very well there indeed.

Storage news ticker – October 25

By
Chris Mellor
-

…

Reuters has reported that $20 billion merger talks between Kioxia and its joint-venture partner Western Digital have come to a roadblock. Sticking points are differences in how to value Kioxia, securing Japanese government blessing and an uncertain outcome from an internal strategy review at Toshiba Corporation, which owns 40 per cent of Kioxia.

…

André Rievers.

NAS supplier OpenDrives has appointed André Rievers as its VP of Operations. It raised $20 million in funding in January and has been recruiting since then. Rievers was most recently Head of Post-Production Department for Activision’s Esports division, supporting and overseeing all digital and broadcast content for “Overwatch League,” “Call of Duty League,” “Hearthstone,” “World of Warcraft,” and “Starcraft.” OpenDrives wants to expand into supplying video management software and Rievers looks a good fit to that aim.

…

Yilan county in NE Taiwan has been struck by a magnitude 6.5 earthquake at about 1.11pm on Sunday October 24. This could interrupt operations at Micron’s two DRAM fabs in the country. Such fabs typically automatically shutdown if an earthquake takes place. Buildings shook in the quake but only minor damage was reported. TSMC evacuated some of its plants.

Bloomberg later reported that Micron experienced some DRAM production impact in Fab 11 (Tao Yuan) from the earthquake. Micron is evaluating the impact and working out how to return to full production.

…

Research house TrendForce has ranked the top ten SSD module manufacturers, giving Kingston the top position with a 27 per cent market share. ADATA, and Kimtigo occupy the next two spots. TrendForce says that, looking at the channel market for SSDs as a whole, NAND Flash suppliers accounted for around 35 per cent of the total shipments in 2020, while SSD module makers accounted for the other 65 per cent. The top ten module makers accounted for 71 per cent of channel-market SSD shipments from all SSD module makers. 

TrendForce’s ranking of SSD module makers for 2020 only takes account of products bound for the channel market and under brands owned by the module makers themselves; NAND Flash suppliers were excluded from the top ten ranking.

…

Multi-cloud service provider Scaleway has made its Kosmos managed Kubernetes engine generally available. Developers can attach nodes on any cloud provider or local resource, whether or not other providers offer a managed Kubernetes solution — with a fixed price per cluster of €99 per month, regardless of the number of nodes. Scaleway has already released its Kapsule managed Kubernetes engine and Kosmos enables developers to extend Kapsule beyond the compute infrastructure to any machine — instances from any provider, bare metal products, colocated machines, or their personal infrastructure.

…

US SSD and memory module supplier Netlist announced the Federal District Court for the Central District of California granted summary judgements in favour of Netlist and against Samsung for material breach of various obligations under a Joint Development and License Agreement (JDLA), which the two executed in November 2015. A summary judgment is a final determination rendered by the judge and has the same force and effect as a final ruling after a jury trial in litigation. The Court held that Netlist properly terminated the JDLA and confirmed that Samsung no longer has a valid license to Netlist’s patent portfolio. The jury is left to decide on direct damages related to the breach of contract during the trial set to commence on November 30, 2021 in the Central District of California.

…

Mass-capacity drive demand sends Seagate revenues soaring to the clouds

By
Chris Mellor
-

Seagate has benefitted from an extraordinary secular change in the disk drive market as cloud-scale datacentre demand sends its quarterly revenues up 35 per cent year-on-year — its fourth consecutive growth quarter.

Revenues in the quarter ended October 1 were $3.12 billion, compared to $2.3 billion a year ago, with profits of $526 million — a 135.9 per cent increase year-on-year. Seagate is a cash-generating machine.

CEO Dave Mosley was enthused in the earnings call: “Seagate had an outstanding start to fiscal 2022, underscored by our September quarter results. … Overall, our results reflect record demand for our industry-leading mass capacity products and solid execution on cost reduction plans and our ongoing focus of balancing supply with demand. We are confident in our ability to deliver excellent results for the fiscal year.”

Demand growth is set to continue for the rest of the year and its raised its outlook to greater than ten per cent full year growth from around eight per cent. The company also raised its dividend, confirming its confidence in the future.

Mosley said: “Without question, the HDD industry is being driven by long-term secular demand for mass capacity storage, a market that we expect to more than double by calendar 2026 to $26 billion, and Seagate is well equipped to answer the call. “

Total capacity shipped was 159.1EB — a 39 per cent rise on the year.

The year-on-year revenue growth was spectacular, as two charts show: 

Note the four recent quarters of consecutive growth and the first $3 billion-plus quarter in five years.
See the sharp revenue uplift in Q1 FY2021 (blue) line.

Seagate revenues have been in a trough since the glory years of FY2012 to FY2015: 

If its growth expectations for the 2022 financial year come true then we could see $12 billion full year revenues, ending a six-year slump since the glory days. If Seagate maintains its share (~43 per cent) of the HDD market, and it does double to $26 billion in 2026, then annual revenues should grow larger still.

Business segments

Seagate has two main business segments: its HDD business that covers mass-capacity disk drives, legacy drives, and the rest; and non-HDD business referred to as Enterprise Data Solutions, SSD & Other. There are three mass capacity HDD product groups — Nearline, VIA (Video and Image Apps) and NAS — and the three account for 71 per cent of its revenues with 132.3EB of shipped capacity ( up 53 per cent year-on-year).

Mosley said: “Revenue from the mass capacity markets exceeded $2 billion for the first time, reflecting broad-based growth across each of the end markets.” These are cloud, enterprise and OEM customers.

Mosley again: “The cloud is the strongest contributor to the mass capacity markets and Seagate’s revenue growth. Ongoing investments to build and equip new datacentres have translated into stable healthy demand for multiple quarters now and we expect this trend to continue. Over the past five years, the number of hyperscale datacentres has more than doubled to nearly 600 worldwide, with approximately 200 more on the way.”

The enterprise and OEM business grew for the fourth time in a row, though not as much as cloud. VIA demand grew significantly driven by higher-definition cameras and more use of analytics. That’s expected to continue this quarter. 

The Lyve Mobile and Lyve Cloud business numbers were not called out, although Mosley said there was progress in the customer qualifications and a video comms provider partnership. He said: “We will continue to be deliberate in scaling infrastructure and developing an ecosystem.” No drama here.

Seagate shipped 106EB of nearline capacity, up 65 per cent annually.

Mosley said dual actuator (MACH.2) drives were shipping at large scale and that technology could become mainstream once capacities reach 30TB and beyond. He said HAMR drives were shipping with good recent test results, confirmed it was the gateway to 30TB and beyond, but didn’t say there would be a fixed cross-over date from current perpendicular recording (PMER) to HAMR drives. 

We see a gradual increase in the proportion of HAMR drives shipping vs PMR drives, as capacities climb the staircase from 20TB to 24TB, 26TB, and on to 30TB. Mosley said he was very confident about the HAMR pathway to 30TB and beyond.

The legacy business — 29 per cent of Seagate’s revenue at $831 million and up five per cent year-on-year — is divided between consumer drives (mostly PC and branded) and mission-critical (2.5-inch) drives. Mission-critical drive sales rose, offsetting a consumer drive fall. Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers told subscribers legacy HDDs dipped below 30 per cent of Seagate’s revenues for the first time. 

The non-HDD business grew from $177 million a year ago to $251 million and Mosley commented: ”The non-HDD business has been a little choppy. I mean, there are certain places where we can use our brand for continued strength. But there are opportunities and we take advantage of them and sometimes those opportunities wax and wane a little bit.” It’s small potatoes compared to the HDD business.

Seagate generated $496 million in cash flow from operations and $379 million in free cash flow in the quarter. It estimates it will make $3.1 billion revenues in the second FY2022 quarter, plus/minus $150 million, which would be 18.2 per cent annual growth at the mid-point.

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