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

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October 20, 2021

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.

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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October 20, 2021

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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.

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

By

Chris Mellor

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October 19, 2021

Fort Knox — Wikipedia public domain image - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Knox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DataGovern

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

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

*DataGovern dashboard. Its black background is dramatically different from SiteContinuity’s dashboard.*

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

Project Fort Knox

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

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

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

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

A Cohesity blog discusses the company’s DMaaS roadmap.

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

By

Chris Mellor

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October 19, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Storage news ticker – October 19

By

Chris Mellor

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October 19, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SoftIron becomes storage manufacturing Wizard of Oz

By

Chris Mellor

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October 19, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Musical Chairs: Acronis gets Maritzed

By

Chris Mellor

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October 18, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By

Chris Mellor

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October 18, 2021

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

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

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

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

Some history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us up to speed

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

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

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

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

Storage news ticker tape — October 18

By

Chris Mellor

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October 18, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Much ado about nothing much: Gartner’s latest primary array MQ

By

Chris Mellor

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October 15, 2021

Gartner’s latest annual primary array Magic Quadrant shows a late-stage mature market with little differentiating innovation and moderately stable supplier positions.

Update; Vast Data Comment added. October 18, 2021.

There is incremental innovation, but it is common to most suppliers. Gartner analysts cite hybrid cloud IT operation models, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), software-defined storage and as-a-service/subscription consumption models as characteristics of the enterprise primary array market.

In the Leaders quadrant Pure stays at the top, where it was last year, Huawei has moved up past IBM on Ability To Execute but is trailing Big Blue on its Completeness of Vision. Infinidat has moved past Hitachi Vantara on both counts. There are eight Leaders — the others are Dell, NetApp, and HPE.

*Gartner Primary Array MQs for November 2020 (left) and October 2021 (right).*

The Challengers box sees Fujitsu exit to become a Niche Player; it has withdrawn from the North American market, with both Inspur and Lenovo getting closer to DDN.

Down in the Niche Players box, Oracle has exited the 2021 MQ, having failed to meet the inclusion criteria — it is increasingly cloud-focussed. A new entrant is managed storage service supplier Zadara.

The Visionaries quadrant is empty, as it was last year. We are a little surprised that VAST Data is not included as a Visionary, but amongst Gartner’s inclusion criteria is a need to “have generated more than $50 million in recognised primary storage revenue (GAAP) during the past four quarters [and/or] an installed base of at least 500 customers in the upper-midsize and large enterprise market.” Newcomer VAST will find that a stretch, especially as it sells to large enterprises.

VAST president Mike Wing tweeted: “The Gartner rules are not designed for a company like VAST Data. We are completely ignoring the low to mid end of the market and winning massive deals at the high end!! That’s okay!! Our revenue results are second to none!!”

The lack of Challengers also points to the maturity of primary array technology, with incumbents rapidly adopting NVMe drives, being supportive of NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF), and moving to subscription and service-based consumption models. All suppliers support a hybrid on-premises/public cloud capability and all are adopting container technology, with Kubernetes CSI plugins as the starting point.

This quick adoption of new technology leaves little scope for startups based on new technology to make inroads. Witness how the past decade’s wave of NVMe drive and NVMe-oF startups has fizzled out, and how Zadara is the sole managed-array-as-a-service startup.

There are other innovative primary array startups, but they are finding it hard going. Pavilion Data is yet to capitalise on its technology, although incoming CEO Dario Zamarian may inject a dose of growth juice into its arteries. Vexata near-failed and was bought up by StorCentric. StorONE is opposed to the idea of buying growth through large-scale VC funding and is making steady but not spectacular progress.

MQ description

Our standard MQ explainer notes: the “Magic Quadrant” is defined by axes labelled “Ability To Execute” and “Completeness of Vision”, and split into four squares tagged “Visionaries”, “Niche Players”, “Challengers” and “Leaders”.

As we wrote in October last year: “A Gartner MQ is like a doubles tennis court with Niche Players and Visionaries one side of the net, and Challengers and Leaders the other. The objective, rather than blast balls across the net and out of court, is to move into the Leaders section of the court and as far from the net and to the edge of the court as possible.”

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

By

Chris Mellor

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October 15, 2021

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

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

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

What are the causes of the delays?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this affect Hammerspace?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Storage news ticker tape — October 15

By

Chris Mellor

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October 15, 2021

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

…

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

New features include:

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

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

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NewsPaperStorages and File System News

NewsPaperStorages and File System News

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

Ransomware security and a speed boost

Centralised management

Storage news ticker – October 20

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

DataGovern

Project Fort Knox

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

Storage news ticker – October 19

SoftIron becomes storage manufacturing Wizard of Oz

Musical Chairs: Acronis gets Maritzed

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

Some history

Which brings us up to speed

Storage news ticker tape — October 18

Much ado about nothing much: Gartner’s latest primary array MQ

MQ description

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

Storage news ticker tape — October 15

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