Digital transformation initiatives and new workloads are driving all-flash object storage adoption in business, according to a report from IT research firm ESG.
Key findings of the report — The Digital Era Is Fueling Adoption of All-flash Object Storage — are that all-flash object storage is still in its early adoption phase, but ESG expects it to become pervasive. While 95 per cent of organisations are using flash storage systems, only 23 per cent of those use all-flash object storage. At the same time, 87 per cent of those not currently using it intend to evaluate the technology over the next year.
According to ESG, this is because users of all-flash object storage report a variety of benefits in areas such as application development, accelerating AI/ML environments, empowering business intelligence/analytics, and increased infrastructure performance and utilisation, while realising while lowering total cost of ownership (TCO).
The findings of the report are based on a survey of 205 IT professionals with responsibility for storage decisions and infrastructure strategies, in organisations of 1000 employees or more and IT environments with more than 500TB of active unstructured storage.
New workloads appear to be the primary driver of all-flash object storage adoption. The report suggests that factors such as the rise of digital initiatives, cloud-native container-based workloads, business intelligence, analytics, and machine learning, mean that organisations increasingly require high-performance access to large volumes of unstructured data.
According to ESG, all-flash object storage is playing the key role in providing the modern infrastructure necessary to support these new initiatives, with a combined 77 per cent of the respondents stating that all-flash object storage has either been a game changer for them (28 per cent) or has had a high impact on their organisation (49 per cent).
ESG picked out specific uses cases such as application development, AI, and BI/analytics where all-flash object storage has proved to have an ability to accelerate performance in a massive data storage environment, as shown in this chart. But it is also helping IT to deliver on key performance indicators such as improved SLAs, improved resource utilisation, reduced TCO, and lower operational expenses.
In other words, the use of all-flash object storage appears not to be a trade-off between capability and cost, but is instead a win-win approach that delivers improved capabilities and reduces TCO.
For these reasons and more, ESG concludes that all-flash object storage appears well on its way to becoming a foundation of the modern data storage ecosystem.
NetApp grew its revenues 12 per cent year-on-year to $1.46 billion in its first fiscal 2022 quarter, ended July 30, and near the high end of its guidance, with profits up 162.3 per cent to $202 million.
This was not as high a growth rate as Pure’s 23 per cent, but far better than Dell’s one per cent decline in its storage revenues.
George Kurian.
The announcement statement by CEO George Kurian was straightforward: “Building on our accelerating momentum through last year, we are off to a great start to fiscal 2022, with strong revenue, gross margin, and operating leverage across the entire business.”
He was much more enthusiastic in the earnings call: “We just finished a phenomenal quarter. In Q1, we grew our all-flash business by 23 per cent, overall product revenue by 16 per cent and cloud by 155 per cent year-on-year. We raised our fiscal year to eight to nine per cent growth and anticipate delivering close to $5 in earnings per share. These are all record numbers, right, operating margins, full year and earnings per share for the company. So, I feel very, very, very good about where we are.”
Kurian is confident that NetApp gained share in the storage and all-flash markets.
Financial summary:
Operating margin — 69.3 per cent;
Cash and cash equivalents — $4.55B;
Cash provided by operations — $242M compared to $240M a year ago;
Free cash flow — $191M, up from $188M last year;
Gross margin — 69 per cent, an all-time high;
EPS -— $0.88 in contrast to $0.35 a year ago.
A chart shows the renewed growth pattern in its quarterly revenues, with five successive growth quarters since its fiscal 2020 year commenced:
There is still some way to go to get back to fiscal 2012 and 2013 revenue levels, but we are seeing a strong recovery as the COVID pandemic plays out.
NetApp saw strength and momentum with All-Flash Arrays (AFA), which now have a $2.8 billion run rate — although that was down from last quarter’s $2.9 billion. NetApp’s AFAs have a 29 per cent penetration of the installed ONTAP base, so there is still a lot of latent demand ahead.
CFO Mike Berry said “We ended Q1 with over $3.9 billion in deferred revenue — an increase of eight per cent year-over-year. Q1 marks the 14th consecutive quarter of year-over-year deferred revenue growth, which continues to be the best indicator of the health of our recurring revenue.”
Public Cloud business
NetApp rejigged its reporting segments with two new classifications: Hybrid Cloud and Public Cloud. The Hybrid Cloud segment covers on-premises/private cloud storage and data management products, such as ONTAP and StorageGRID arrays, with links to the public cloud. The Public Cloud includes products delivered as-a-service from public clouds, such as Spot.
Hybrid Cloud revenues in the quarter were $1.38 billion — up 8.7 per cent on a year ago and driven by AFA growth. The much smaller Public Cloud segment pulled in just $79 million, up a huge 154.8 per cent over the same period. This was driven by driven by Cloud Volumes, Cloud Insights, and Spot by NetApp services. Public Cloud annual recurring revenue rose 89 per cent to $337 million.
We think that NetApp must have high hopes indeed for its Public Cloud segment to be be separating it out at such a low revenue point. It is a completely different business from its traditional storage business — as we pointed out in July when NetApp added a Windows 365/CloudPC offering to its Spot cloud broking business.
Kurian said “Our Public Cloud services not only allow us to participate in the rapidly growing cloud market, they also make us a more strategic data center partner to our enterprise customers, driving share gains in our Hybrid Cloud business.”
He is confident that the Public Cloud business will grow. “I think we see that over the next few years, as businesses deploy more of their core operations on public clouds, the opportunities we have around compute automation management through Spot, storage and data protection and management through Cloud Volumes and monitoring through Cloud Insights will be a very, very strong business. And all of the hyperscaler partners that we work with see it much the same way, which is why they’re building more and more capabilities with us.
“We also see a new growth engine in the Public Cloud segment with all of the cloud native work we are doing around containers and serverless.“
The Public Cloud focus is influencing M&A, with Berry pointing out: “Our acquisition strategy … will remain focused on bolstering our strategic Public Cloud roadmap.”
Outlook
The outlook for the second FY22 quarter is $1.54 billion +/- $50 million — an 8.8 per cent rise on a year ago. The full FY22 outlook is for revenues to be eight to nine per cent higher than FY21’s $5.74 billion, meaning $6.2 billion to $6.26 billion.
Although Dell Technologies announced a more than healthy 15 per cent rise year-on-year in its second fiscal quarter revenues, storage let the side down with a one per cent decline.
In summary, Dell revenues were $26.1 billion in the quarter ended July 30 — a record — and it made a $900 million profit, which sounds a lot but was actually down 18 per cent year-on-year. Our sister pub, The Register, covered the overall results and we’re going to dive deeper into the storage side here.
CFO Tom Sweet’s results announcement statement said: “We had strong results again this quarter, with all business units growing. We are creating long-term value by taking share, pursuing high-value growth opportunities and profitably growing and modernising our core business.”
The company makes its money from VMware, and two large business units: the Client Solutions Group (CSG) selling PCs and associated kit; and the Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) which supplies servers, networking and storage. VMware pulled in $3.1 billion, up eight per cent on the annual compare. CSG raked in $14.3 billion, rising 27 per cent, with ISG earning $8.4 billion, up just three per cent.
Why was ISG growth so low? Servers and networking revenue was $4.5 billion, up six per cent on the year, while storage declined one per cent to $4 billion. This in a market that saw Pure’s revenues rise 23 per cent and NetApp’s 12 per cent. Something went awry.
Charts and shares
Two charts help set the context. Here is one looking at Dell’s server and networking revenues vs its storage revenues over the past few years:
There was a quarter-on-quarter storage rise this quarter but, overall, storage revenues have been lagging server+networking revenues since the start of fiscal 2021. A look at the quarterly storage revenues by fiscal year brings out a pattern of low or no growth since fiscal 2019:
Dell storage has become a no-growth area.
Of course, Dell is huge in storage. According to IDC it has leading shares in:
External enterprise storage — 32.3 per cent;
Storage software — 13.6 per cent;
All-flash arrays — 36.8 per cent;
Hyperconverged systems — 33.1 per cent;
Converged systems — 42.1 per cent;
Purpose-Built Backup Appliances — 50.7 per cent.
Yet its storage revenues sank this quarter while its competitors’ revenues rose.
Earnings call
Sweet supplied an explanation in the earnings call. “On an orders basis, we were encouraged to see positive overall storage growth of two per cent, with ongoing demand in high-growth areas like hyperconverged infrastructure, where VxRail’s orders were up 34 per cent, and in midrange storage, where orders were up 17 per cent. PowerStore continues to ramp nicely, making up approximately 38 per cent of our mid-range storage portfolio. Twenty-three per cent of PowerStore customers in Q2 were new to Dell storage.”
Co-COO and Vice-Chairman Jeff Clarke said: “PowerStore, our microservices-based mid-range storage solution … is ramping faster than any new architecture we’ve released, with double-digit increases in net new storage buyers for both Q1 and Q2. We are focused on the mid-range segment of storage and are pleased with the momentum we are seeing, but we know we still have work to do.”
Unfortunately the high-end PowerMax arrays let the side down, with Clarke saying: “we have a very large high-end business. That large high-end business is cyclical in nature. It was down year-over-year, and that’s down year-over-year after a very solid first half of last year.”
He added: “We have the privileged position of having a share position of in excess of 42 per cent [in the high end]. that market is declining. It’s cyclical in nature. Last first half, it grew. This first half, it’s not growing. That business, we’re obviously exposed to a large percentage of that business being the market share leader with 42-plus per cent share, is declining and we’re declining like the market is declining.”
Clarke said Dell was focussed on the storage mid-range, and it looks as if it has taken its eye off the high-end ball. Its competitors VAST Data and Infinidat are both growing, and so appear to be taking high-end share from Dell.
Although Dell’s mid-range storage and hyperconverged sales are growing at a healthy clip, they haven’t been able to compensate for PowerMax revenues slip slip sliding away.
Pure Storage’s revenues grew 23 per cent year-over-year in its its latest quarter and it expects a growth acceleration next quarter, with an eight-figure hyperscaler deal and the COVID recovery gathering pace.
Revenues were $498.8 million in the quarter ended 1 August 2021, with a loss of $45.3 million, compared to the year-ago loss of $65 million. It was the highest second-quarter revenue in Pure’s history, as product and subscription sales both accelerated.
Charles Giancarlo.
Chairman and CEO Charles Giancarlo sounded ecstatic in his prepared remarks: “Pure had an outstanding Q2! As a growing, share-taking company, we expect every quarter to be record breaking, but this quarter was extraordinary. Sales, revenue and profitability were well above expectations [and] we had the highest Q2 operating profit in our history.”
He was keen to tell investors that Pure had made the right choices: “We predicted that Pure’s growth would accelerate as businesses adjusted to the COVID environment. We believe that our growth will be even stronger as businesses return to an in-office environment. We estimated that this would start this past Q2, and we are obviously very pleased with the results.”
He believes that “the current environment enables us to return to our historical double-digit growth rates, with increasing profitability,” but he didn’t forecast when Pure would make a profit. He expects “continued improvements quarter by quarter in our operating profit margins.”
The numbers
On a year-over-year basis:
Pure-as-a-Service revenues tripled;
Portworx revenues tripled;
Total subscription sales and bookings grew 50 per cent and are approaching half of Pure’s total sales;
Subscription services revenue of $171.9M, up 31 per cent year-over-year and 35 per cent of revenues;
FlashArray//C sales tripled and it is the fastest growing new product in Pure’s history;
FlashBlade sales established a new record high for Q2;
Product revenue had its highest year-over-year growth rate in eight quarters.
Pure gained 380 new customers in the quarter, ten per cent year-over-year growth, taking its total customer count, we calculate, to 9647. Sales to large enterprises were more than 50 per cent of sales with the top ten customers spending more than $100 million in the quarter.
Financial highlights and outlook
GAAP gross margin 68.4 per cent;
Operating cash flow $123.4M, a record high;
Free cash flow $95.7M;
Total cash and investments $1.3B;
Deferred revenue $909.8M, up 26 per cent year-over-year.
The outlook for Q3 is $530 million, 29 per cent higher than a year ago. This guidance includes revenue Pure expects to recognise in connection with a more than $10 million sale of the QLC flash-based FlashArray//C to one of the top ten hyper-scalers. Full fiscal 2022 year revenue is forecast to be $2.04 billion, up 21 per cent.
Pure feels comfortable it can grow revenues at more than 20 per cent for the foreseeable future.
FlashArray//C.
Hyperscaler disk bastion
In the earnings call Giancarlo said that the hyperscaler FlashArray//C sale “was won against traditional magnetic disk based on our high performance, small space and power footprint and superior total cost of ownership.“
Answering about the prospects of this win he said: “It’’s a part of their overall operations. … we do feel that this is sustainable both in the sense of continuing with this customer, as well as we think it’s the beginning of seeing other similarly situated hyperscale customers starting to look at flash as a real alternative.
“As you may know, most of the hyperscalers, the vast majority of what they store, they store on disk. They may have a little bit of flash in their servers, but for the most part, all storage is on disk. And we think this is the beginning of breaking that structure. We finally have the kind of price performance that can really compete within the disk market.”
He added: “the last bastion of mostly disk data centre right now is actually in the cloud. And so it represents a great opportunity for us.”
CTO Rob Lee (see below) said: “FlashArray//C [is] very price competitive … up to 30 per cent price advantage in some cases … price is one element of the equation but all of the other attributes and benefits we are able to bring from flash, such as the performance, such as power, cooling savings, footprint savings, those are all very meaningful across the board. But at the hyperscale, they become super, super meaningful, right? And so, as we look at, for example, this customer, FlashArray//C was the only product that can meet their needs, without them having to go build new data centres.”
Giancarlo commented in the outlook: “We are very pleased with what we’re seeing in terms of the Q3 outlook and the idea that, we’re driving almost 30 per cent growth next year, with the opportunity we highlighted on FlashArray//C.”
This hyperscaler FlashArray//C sale was not the first to a hyperscaler customer, just a very big single sale. Giancarlo also said “it is something that’s easily transferable to other hyperscalers.”
Overlapping visions
Rob Lee becomes Pure’s CTO with the previous incumbent, co-founder John Colgrove, becoming Chief Visionary Officer — a full time role, with Lee reporting to him. According to the company’s leadership web page, Colgrove is “responsible for developing and executing Pure’s global technical strategy” while Lee, in an apparently overlapping role, looks at “global technology strategy, and identifying new innovation (sic) and market expansion opportunities for Pure” That sounds like two people mostly doing the same thing.
Comment. Western Digital has done it a second time, and treated buyers of its storage drives with … well, what? Disregard? Disdain? How would you describe the near silent substitution of inferior flash for the original NAND in its M.2 format Blue SN550 SSD?
This was found out by a Chinese media site Expreview and congratulations to it. It was covered in our sister site, TheRegister, last week, with slower QLC (4bits/cell) replacing the original TLC (3 bits/cell) in the NVMe drive — NVMe being a very fast interface compared to the SAS and SATA interfaces used for SSDs before NVMe came along.
This was a similar tactic to the one used with its 2–6TB Red NAS disk drives in April 2020, when slower shingled magnetic media was used instead of the lower-capacity but faster conventionally recorded media — without initially telling customers of the change.
The Blue SN550 SSD has a speedy SLC cache, and everything is fine and dandy with writing data while the cache has room, but once it fills up writing takes place at the basic non-cached speed. The Ferrari of a drive becomes a slow coach, writing data at 390MB/sec when it should have hit 610MB/sec with the original TLC NAND.
Western Digital fessed up to the change, once it was found out, saying in a statement: “In June 2021 we replaced the NAND on the WD Blue SN550 NVMe SSD and updated the firmware. At that time, we updated the product data sheet. For more transparency going forward, if we make a change to an existing internal SSD, we commit to providing a new model number whenever any relevant published specifications are affected. We value our customers and are committed to providing the best possible solution to their data storage needs.”
Robert Soderbery.
That means the QLC-for-TLC substitution was done after Robert Soderbery joined WD as EVP and General Manager of its flash business unit in September 2020. This was nine months before the substitution was effected. It happened on his watch.
WD did update the SN550 data sheet but did not change the model number or make any public announcement apart from the data sheet notification. After the shingled Red NAS disk media debacle earlier last year we should surely expect better than this from one of the top storage media manufacturers in the industry — and from the executive running its flash business unit.
Bootnote. Samsung has changed the flash chips used to build its 970 EVO Plus SSD in a not-that-similar fashion. This NVMe interface M.2 format drive originally used Samsung’s fifth-generation 3D NAND (V-NAND) in TLC format with c96 layers. This has been changed to sixth-generation TLC V-NAND product with 128 layers and slightly different performance characteristics.
This week’s digest includes acquisitions, a new small form factor removable flash standard from JEDEC, plus 2Q21 NAND flash revenues from TrendForce.
Arcserve’s StorageCraft backup service gets more affordable
Arcserve has enhanced its StorageCraft Cloud Services Basic offering so that managed service providers (MSPs) can offer improved cloud backup and disaster recovery services to a broader range of customers.
StorageCraft Cloud Services Basic now includes 500GB backup per machine, annual retention points, and cloud portal management for £18 per machine. This also includes an on-premises data protection licence for either ShadowXafe or ShadowProtect.
According to Arcserve, MSPs can now service a wider range of customer use cases such as small businesses and data protection for physical or virtual workstations, which are now economically viable with StorageCraft Cloud Services Basic.
Arcserve said that operations such as moving customer data in and out of the cloud or recovering files in the event of failure are standard in StorageCraft Cloud Services, rather than being subject to extra fees.
Arcserve and StorageCraft merged earlier this year, with StorageCraft becoming an Arcserve subsidiary brand.
JEDEC pushes out small, thin removable flash standard
The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association has published specifications for a new Crossover Flash Memory (XFM) format that is intended to target everything from IoT devices, to automotive applications and laptops.
The JESD233: XFM Embedded and Removable Memory Device (XFMD) standard is designed to bring removable storage to devices that would typically feature memory soldered in because of their small physical size or because they are used in an embedded application.
XFMD is a universal data storage media in a small, thin form factor. It specifies a PCIe interface for fundamental bus connectivity, while NVMe serves as the higher-level protocol for accessing the non-volatile media as a low-latency logical storage device.
This makes XFMD sound very similar to the XFMEXPRESS format (pictured) that Toshiba announced back in 2019, but it isn’t clear if the JEDEC standard is based on this.
The use of PCIe and NVMe means that XFMD support should be easy to integrate into laptops and other systems that already use PCIe. MediaTek and Kioxia are two flash chipmakers that are already backing the standard.
“Platform developers and device makers can easily adopt XFMD with minimal effort to enable new, expandable storage options for end users,” said Harrison Hsieh, senior general manager for Silicon Product Development at MediaTek.
“We are convinced that the XFM Embedded and Removable Memory Device (XFMD) standard will be used as a game changer for semi-removable storage in many electronic and IOT devices, taking advantage of its balanced performance, small size, and easy maintenance,” said Kioxia’s Atsushi Inoue, Senior Director for Memory Division.
Cloudian HyperStore object storage melds with Tanzu Greenplum
Cloudian has achieved certification for its HyperStore object storage with VMware’s Tanzu Greenplum data warehouse platform. According to Cloudian, it can provide the scalability, robust security and cost efficiency needed to support modern enterprise analytics applications in VMware Tanzu Greenplum environments.
HyperStore is an S3-compatible object store available in a hardware appliance or as software for deployment on bare-metal servers or virtual machines. Tanzu Greenplum is a massively parallel database that supports next generation data warehousing and large-scale analytics processing.
Combining HyperStore with Tanzu Greenplum enables the creation and deployment of analytics models for complex applications in cybersecurity, predictive maintenance, risk management and others, Cloudian said.
OpsRamp offers free trial of cloud monitoring services
Cloud monitoring provider OpsRamp is offering a free trial of its platform to lure potential customers. The trial version is free for 14 days and combines discovery, monitoring, alerting, and dashboards for cloud infrastructure services.
The trial is targeting cloud operators in mid-to-large enterprises (500+ employees) who have a need for a modern IT infrastructure monitoring solution for cloud and cloud native environments.
OpsRamp claims that users will be able to link up their cloud resources, access their first metrics and alerts, and track the performance of their cloud resources within 20 minutes of registering for the trial.
Cloud operators can use OpsRamp to track the health and performance of more than 160 cloud services across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The free trial also can monitor performance of on-prem Kubernetes clusters as well as managed Kubernetes environments in the cloud.
However, after the trial period, users will be prompted to upgrade to the paid version, which will allow them to transition their existing resources without any friction, according to OpsRamp.
NAND flash revenues rise again in second quarter
Market research firm TrendForce reports that NAND flash revenues for 2Q21 rose by 10.8 per cent quarter-on-quarter, which it attributes to clients in the data centre market gradually stepping up enterprise SSD procurement after previous inventory adjustments. The overall average selling price (ASP) also rose by nearly seven per cent in response to the growing demand for NAND flash products.
The adoption rate of 4TB and 8TB products in the enterprise SSD market increased substantially, which TrendForce puts down to the introduction and adoption of new server processor platforms from Intel and AMD.
Quarterly total NAND Flash bit shipments rose by nearly nine per cent, thanks to PC manufacturers issuing plenty of component orders in 2Q21 due to robust laptop demand during the period.
TrendForce expects that the quarterly total NAND Flash revenue will hit a record high in the next quarter, 3Q21.
The suppliers performed as follows:
Samsung’s NAND flash revenue went up by 12 per cent QoQ to $5.59B;
SK hynix’s NAND flash revenue went up by 10.8 per cent to $2.025B;
Kioxia’s revenue saw an 8.5 per cent increase to $3.011B;
Western Digital’s NAND flash revenue rose by 11.2 per cent to $2.419B;
Micron’s revenue was $1.812B, a 9.8 per cent increase;
Intel’s revenue from its NAND flash business was $1.098B, a 0.8 per cent quarter-on-quarter decline. TrendForce attributes this to a shortage of key components such as controller ICs, which Intel mainly procures from a single source.
Quantum to absorb HCI startup
Quantum is set to acquire EnCloudEn, a startup based in India developing a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software platform. The move follows Quantum’s acquisition of the assets of Pivot3, an early pioneer of hyperconverged infrastructure used for video surveillance workloads.
According to Quantum, The EnCloudEn buy-up will enable it to expand the addressable market for the company’s video surveillance portfolio, offering customers a solution using their server hardware of choice with a flexible subscription-based software model.
Quantum chief executive Jamie Lerner said that EnCloudEn’s technology brings an open and flexible HCI software stack that strengthens Quantum’s position in the video surveillance market.
“We can now extend HCI solutions to a broader set of customers, accelerate our development roadmap for HCI-based solutions and employ a subscription-based software purchasing model which is fast becoming the way businesses want to procure and manage their software investments.”
The acquisition is expected to close later this quarter, subject to the usual closing conditions.
StorCentric picks up Coughlan as new CFO
John P. Coughlan
Growing storage newcomer StorCentric has a new Chief Financial Officer, John P. Coughlan, replacing current CFO Rob Eggers, who has stepped down for personal reasons.
Coughlan joins StorCentric having served as CFO of CoreBTS, a value-added reseller of “Cisco- and Microsoft-centric software, technology, security services and related IT infrastructure”. He also previously held the position of CFO at Penthera Partners, a SaaS venture focused on addressing the challenges of moving large data files between wireless devices and the cloud.
A report from cloud data management specialist Komprise finds that organisations are increasingly looking to migrate data to the cloud in response to the growing volumes of data they have to manage — particularly unstructured data. However, the report also finds that many organisations have a lack of visibility into how data is used, which is hampering their planning and their ability to minimise storage costs.
Findings include that over 60 per cent of enterprises are managing more than 1PB of data, while nearly 40 per cent are managing more than 5PB of data. As a result, organisations are spending much of the their IT budget on data management, with a majority indicating that spending on storage, backups and disaster recovery is between 30 and 40 per cent of their entire IT budget. The figure is over 40 and as high 50 per cent of budget for some 21 per cent of respondents.
In response to this, the report finds that over 56 per cent of respondents are seeking to migrate more data to the cloud, because unstructured data is growing too fast and getting too expensive to store and back up.
When it comes to the main objectives for improving their unstructured data management strategy, about 44 per cent indicated they needed the visibility to plan better. A similar percentage said they wanted to avoid rising storage and backup costs.
As Komprise is a cloud data management firm, the report happily finds that at least 45 per cent of respondents are looking to invest in analytics tools for better visibility into their data usage patterns within the next year.
According to Komprise COO Krishna Subramanian, better visibility is critical for cutting costs, planning migrations, and understanding business usage.
“The survey finds that 65 per cent of organisations are already spending 30 per cent or more of their IT budgets on storage, and most expect their spending to grow. This is why companies see getting visibility into how data is being used as key to managing [data] costs and transforming to the cloud. Businesses also find it useful for compliance and security reasons to get analytics on data usage,” she said.
Another finding from the report is that companies need to stop treating all data the same, and should let usage patterns dictate policies.
“We find that 70 to 80 per cent of data in most companies has not been accessed in over a year and is cold. Yet most of this data is being actively managed, consuming not just expensive storage but also backups and DR resources,” Subramanian said.
“In fact, 80 per cent of the cost of data is not in the storage but in the active management. By giving visibility into what data is hot and what data is cold, we can transparently move the cold data to a resilient cloud object store and cut 80 per cent of storage and backup costs.”
Subramanian also had some best practice tips for organisations:
Analyse data usage and growth and have a system for doing this continuously;
Create strategies and select storage and data management partners that give you the flexibility to adopt new technologies whenever your business requires it;
Educate your business stakeholders on the data lifecycle.
Disk drive and SSD maker Western Digital is said to be in advanced merger talks with Kioxia, in a deal that may close as soon as mid-September.
The news comes from a report in The Wall Street Journal, which claims that long-running discussions between the companies have “heated up” in the past few weeks. The talks may be leading up to a deal likely to be valued at more than $20 billion and see further consolidation in the global chip industry.
Earlier in the year Blocks & Files reported that both Micron and Western Digital were considering bids for Kioxia, formerly known as Toshiba Memory Corporation. It now appears that Micron is out of the running, leaving Western Digital — which already has a joint venture with Kioxia for the manufacture of NAND flash chips — to press ahead.
However, the WSJ cautions that there is no guarantee that Western Digital will manage to seal an agreement, and Kioxia could instead opt for an initial public offering it had previously been planning, or take a different path. Kioxia was set to IPO in August 2020, but this was called off due to the pandemic and issues with US-China trade restrictions.
Any such merger would also need to be approved by the Japanese government before it would be allowed to go ahead, and governments around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about foreign takeovers of tech companies.
Because of the NAND flash joint venture Western Digital has with Kioxia, the merger would give it sole ownership. According to 2Q21 figures from TrendForce, Kioxia has an 18.3 per cent share of the NAND flash market, while Western Digital stands at 14.7 per cent. A merged company would theoretically come within spitting distance of market leader Samsung, which currently has a 34 per cent share.
According to Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers, this would be seen as a good outcome in the industry.
“Consolidation in the cyclical NAND flash industry will likely be viewed as a positive. The combined WD + Toshiba would account for around 30 per cent to 35 per cent of NAND flash industry bit production and revenue,” he stated.
There is also an expectation that acquiring Kioxia and taking sole ownership of the NAND flash joint venture will allow Western Digital to improve its execution in enterprise SSDs, according to Rakers. It remains to be seen if this will happen.
Dell has announced that its VxRail hyperconverged systems are certified for Nvidia’s newly available AI Enterprise software suite, making it simpler for organisations to deploy GPU-accelerated infrastructure for processing AI and data analytics workloads.
VxRail is based on Dell EMC PowerEdge server hardware and is designed to provide a fully integrated and pre-configured HCI system optimised for VMware’s hypervisor with vSAN providing the storage layer. This has made VxRail a popular choice for enterprises that wish to stand up virtualised infrastructure with a minimum of fuss.
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s AI Enterprise is described as a comprehensive software suite of AI tools and frameworks that has likewise been optimised for systems running VMware vSphere and certified by Nvidia. Unsurprisingly, Dell’s VxRail is the first HCI system to achieve such certification.
In a blog posting, Dell’s senior manager for CI/HCI product marketing, Nancy Hurley, stated that the VxRail certified systems have been tested specifically with Nvidia AI Enterprise workloads.
“While VxRail and Nvidia GPUs deliver the performance needed for AI workloads, the big story here is how we have worked together to simplify the entire experience — from procurement to deployment, to day to day operations and lifecycle management,” she said.
VxRail configurations that have been tested with Nvidia AI Enterprise comprise the V570, V570F and V670F, and choosing these should enable customers to deploy faster, since these offer known working configurations for the software stack.
In June, Dell announced that the VxRail V Series is available with Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPU options. When combined with Nvidia AI Enterprise and NVMe caching capabilities, these configurations offer greater performance and simpler deployment for demanding AI and machine learning applications, the firm claims.
Nvidia’s AI Enterprise suite includes the RAPIDS software development kit, which supports accelerated data science on GPUs, plus Nvidia’s Triton Inference Server which simplifies the deployment of AI models at scale and machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch.
HPC storage supplier Panasas has made available PanFS 9, the latest version of its parallel file system, introducing security features that it promises will not impact performance. There are also enhancements to its Dynamic Data Acceleration (DDA) technology to improve performance.
Panasas says that version 9 has been developed to further address the demanding requirements of HPC and AI/ML workloads, while customers are increasingly concerned about safeguarding sensitive and confidential data. So the latest version of the file system has also been engineered with features required to deploy a secure, multi-tenancy environment.
“We architected our latest PanFS parallel file system specifically with an eye on the growing performance and security requirements our HPC and AI/ML customers encounter from new diverse and exponentially expanding workloads,” Panasas VP for Products and Alliances Brian Reed said in a statement.
These features include hardware-based encryption-at-rest, with zero performance degradation or cost impact, according to the firm. This is achieved by PanFS 9 implementing support for self-encrypting drives (SEDs) with AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption at the physical data layer, through which it delivers NIST-approved data protection.
It also supports automatic cryptographic erasure if a drive is removed without authorisation, which basically means that the encryption key gets deleted so it is effectively impossible to access the data on the drive.
Panasas said it has teamed up with security specialist Thales to deliver the key management system it has implemented in PanFS 9.
At the file layer, PanFS 9 delivers access control by adding file labeling support for Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), the Linux kernel security module that implements mechanisms for access control security. The file labeling support provides SELinux Context information as per-file security labels for use by SELinux and Multi-Level Security (MLS) policies, according to Panasas.
This new release also implements additional enhancements to the Dynamic Data Acceleration (DDA) technology that Panasas introduced last year. This is designed to tune the file system behaviour automatically to optimise its performance to match the IO patterns of differing workloads — a key capability for a storage system that may be used for a mixture of HPC and AI/ML processing.
DDA already sees NVMe SSDs used to store metadata, with small files stored on SSD and large files on low-cost, high-bandwidth disk drives.
Panasas has not offered details on these enhancements, stating only that they include performance optimisations to the software stacks on both the storage and metadata nodes, but we will update if the firm provides further information. However, increased metadata performance for DirectFlow, NFS, and SMB protocols is also implemented.
Infinidat and Virtana have announced the integration of Infinidat’s Infinibox storage arrays with Virtana’s VirtualWisdom Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) platform that uses AIOps to automate and optimise IT infrastructure operations.
AIOps is the use of artificial intelligence applied to IT operations, and builds on the collection of telemetry from applications and IT infrastructure to detect problems and respond to them — either directly or by alerting IT staff. However, the ultimate aim of AIOps is to deliver infrastructure that is largely self-managing.
According to the two firms, the new integration provides cross-domain visibility into mission-critical application workloads that run on InfiniBox storage, while extending Virtana’s IPM solution across a broader range of customer environments.
This makes it a win-win situation, especially for customers that have both Infinidat storage and have deployed Virtana — but according to Infinidat Vice President Erik Kaulberg, there is more to it than that.
“I think the broader story is that no one’s operating with this scale, or this fidelity, across these two pieces of the infrastructure stack,” Kaulberg told Blocks & Files. It was requests from large organisations which are joint customers that drove the integration, he added.
Infinidat has already deployed its own AIOps technology, but this is restricted to monitoring and optimising Infinidat arrays. For customers to get the full benefit, AIOps has to cover the entire infrastructure, Kaulberg said, and this means operating at three levels.
“First, you have AIOps capabilities inside the box. This is things like our neural cache, which drives data placement, plus a lot of other intelligence at the system level that essentially makes each InfiniBox storage array a self-driving or self-managing type environment,” he explained.
Then there is AIOps outside the box, which in Infinidat’s case pulls together the intelligence of all the individual InfiniBox systems via its InfiniVerse cloud service. The third part is the broader AIOps ecosystem.
“The first two are all about what Infinidat can see, which is quite a bit — we can we can go all the way up to host-level actions, we can see VMs, that sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, most customers with complex IT environments need a solution that knits together the intelligence — not just from the storage, but also from the compute, from the software layers and the entire stack,” Kaulberg said. And that’s where Virtana fits in.
“VirtualWisdom visualises the service delivery across the infrastructure stack, mostly eliminating the human component in mapping applications to service tiers, to their infrastructure services, so our tool allows you to do all of that automatically,” said Virtana VP of Product Management Jon Cyr.
For its part, Virtana said that it brings to the party the ability to ensure uptime, availability, and performance, combined with advanced capacity forecasting.
The Infinidat-Virtana integration is available immediately to Virtana customers. Some customers have been involved in beta testing for the past several months, so it is already incorporating feedback from customers with Infinidat systems, Cyr said.
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