A study of Kubernetes storage supplier performance has revealed that efficiency of storage code is exposed in cloud-native environments. This has a knock-on effect on performance.
In a recently updated review, Jakub Pavlík of Volterra determined that Portworx and MayaData’s OpenEBS Mayastor performed best in delivering block storage IO to containers.
It is not immediately intuitive that the efficiency of different Kubernetes storage performers should differ. A cloud-native server has a hypervisor/operating system core running containers. Containers should be efficient users of hardware resource. There is little or no OS duplication – unlike a virtual server, which has a hypervisor running guest virtual machines, each with an operating system inside them as well as application code.
Pavlik’s evaluation of block storage for containers also included Ceph Octopus, Rancher Labs Longhorn, Gluster FS and Azure PVC. Ceph was third fastest in container storage speed for the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Portworx was ahead of every other supplier with random reads.
Supplier comparison for random reads ands random writes
Mayastor was ahead with mixed read and writes.
Supplier comparison with 50/50 mixed read/writes.
Mayastor benchmarks
MayaData’s Mayastor is based on OpenEBS, an open source CNCF project that it created. OpenEBS is a foundational storage layer that enables Mayastor and others to abstract storage in a way that Kubernetes abstracts compute.
Mayadata established baseline Optane performance using the Fio Flexible IO tester from Github to obtain 585K, 516K and 476K random read, write and 50/50 mixed read/write performance from an Optane SSD with an NVMe interface.
Then OpenEBS had Mayastor provide storage to containers by reading from and writing to the Optane drive using NVMe-oF as the data transport method across a network. It measured the delivered IOPS and found little difference (1 – 5.6 per cent).
Mayastor delivered IOPS across NVMe-oF from Optane SSD
Cloud data warehouser Snowflake has updated its product with access to unstructured data, data service providers, expanded data ingress and row access policies. Also, CEO Frank Slootman has written another book.
Let’s deal with the book first. With co-author Steve Hamm, Slootman has penned “Rise of The Data Cloud.” You can read a sample chapter to see if you want it as a Christmas present ($16.84 hardback on Amazon). Slootman clearly likes the writing – or ghost-written – lark. In 2009 he wrote “TAPE SUCKS: Inside Data Domain, A Silicon Valley Growth Story”. Now back to Snowflake.
The company, which enjoyed the biggest ever software IPO in September, is broadening its data ingest pipeline and increasing services for processing customer data in its warehouse.
Benoit Dageville
“Many of today’s organisations still struggle to mobilise all of their data in service of their enterprise, “Snowflake co-founder and president of products Benoit Dageville said in a statement.
“The Data Cloud contains a massive amount of data from Snowflake customers and commercial data providers, creating a powerful global data network effect for mobilising data to drive innovation and create new revenue streams.”
Data in the Snowpark
SnowPark is a new data ingress portal in which data engineers, data scientists and developers can write code in their languages of choice, using familiar programming concepts, and then execute workloads such as ETL/ELT, data preparation, and feature engineering on Snowflake. It brings more data pipelines into Snowflake’s core data platform and is currently available in testing environments.
The company has added more than 100 data service providers to the Snowflake Data Marketplace, which enables customers to discover and access live, ready-to-query, third-party data sets, without needing to copy files or move the data. Services such as running a risk assessment, behavioural scoring, predictive and prescriptive data analysis can be outsourced to a data service provider.
Snowflake has announced private preview support for unstructured data such as audio, video, pdfs, imaging data and more – which will provide the ability to orchestrate pipeline executions of that data. This looks like specific types of unstructured data and not general file storage data.
Upcoming row access policies will allow Snowflake customers to create policies for restricting returned result sets when queries are executed. By creating an umbrella policy to restrict access to row data in its database, users no longer need to ensure their queries each time contain all the right constraints. This feature is slated for private preview before the end of the year.
A quiet week for data storage news, what with Thanksgiving and all. Which means that for the first time in many moons there is no Kubernetes or container product news to speak of. So let’s see what else is cooking.
Well, Backblaze is using more inclusive terms for its repository software. And Filecoin says it has an exibibyte of competitively price cloud storage capacity available for users – but you have to pay with bitcoin. Also Acronis’s hyperactive PR department continues its heroic efforts to get the company onto our storage digest every week. Last but not least Kioxia is upping the ante with its PCIe 4.0 roll out.
Backblaze embraces 21st Century
Cloud backup provider Backblaze is replacing loaded terms in its repository software. The company is changing ‘master’, ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitelist’ to “main”, “denylist” and “allowlist”. (It doesn’t use the term “slave”).
Lora Maslenitsyna.
Backblaze blogger Lora Maslenitsyna says: “The full team at Backblaze understands that these changes might be small in the grand scheme of things, but we’re hopeful our intentional approach to those issues we can address will encourage other business and individuals to look into what’s possible for them.”
Shorts
Acronis has updated True Image 2021 with a professional-grade vulnerability assessment tool. Users can now scan their operating systems and applications for exploitable vulnerabilities and get recommendations on closing security gaps.
SMB cloud storage provider Datto has released its third quarter results, with $130.7m in revenues, up 11 per cent Y/Y, and profits of $19.5m, up, 617 per cent. According to William Blair analyst Jason Ader, Datto is a key enabler of SMB digital transformation and the pandemic will ultimately accelerate the outsourcing shift, creating secular demand tailwinds for the company
IP storage turned archiver survivor FalconStor has delivered near-startling results for its third 2020 quarter ended Sep 30. Revenues of $$.4m grew 10 per cent Y/Y to $4.4m and there was a profit of $1.1m, neatly reversing the year-ago $1m loss.
Peer-to-peer based cloud storage provider Filecoin says its mainnet blockchain-based public storage cloud has reached 1.2EB (1 exbibyte) of capacity and claims to offer a hyper-competitive alternative to AWS, Azure and Google. The service is priced in bitcoin and the capacity is available across thousands of servers and PCs worldwide who assign spare capacity to Filecoin.
IBM’sSpectrum Scale parallel access file system has templates (called terraform templates) to provision public cloud infrastructure (i.e. AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM Cloud) where Spectrum Scale can be deployed for users. They get highly available access to a shared namespace across multiple instances.
Kaseya has launched Unitrends Recovery Series Gen 9 which includes Automated Regulatory Compliance, 88 per cent more SSD and up to 2x faster computer and network power than Gen 8, AI-based ransomware detection, Helix SaaS self-healing backup software integrations, and a better management console. Gen 9 also has a new transparent subscription option.
Kioxia has added PCIe 4.0 support to the KumoScale flash array via v3.16 of the KumoScale software. This enable the array to serve more users per storage node.
Quantum has released StorNext 7, with a feature to automate data placement on NVMe, SSD and HDD storage for high-throughput, low-latency workloads. The app has a new GUI and expanded web services APIs that provide new ways to query metadata, automate data movement, configure and manage the file system. There is also a simplified, capacity-based licensing model. GA is slated for mid-December.
Server memory expander ScaleMP has announced GA for vSMP Foundation Version 10.0. ScaleMP MemoryONE tech pools DRAM, NVDIMMs and NVMe SSD capacity into a single coherent memory space for x86 systems. V10 adds support for support for VMware ESXi, Linux KVM and AWS Cloud virtual-instance users. Support for Azure Cloud and Oracle Cloud is expected by year end. SAP HANA, Redis, Apache/Spark, MongoDB, MySQL and Lotus (Filecoin) are claimed to have proven performance gains with v10.
France’s Dassault Systèmes’ cloud subsidiary, 3DS Outscale has launched the Outscale Object Storage (OOS) service based on Scality RING technology. By 2024, companies’ unstructured data, stored as files or objects, will triple compared to 2019, according to Scality, which cites Gartner forecasts.
Ceph storage array supplier SoftIron has gained a “Veeam Ready – Object and Object with Immutability” qualification for its HyperDrive storage system. This means a HyperDrive array can be a target store for Veeam backup data and replication.
Tuxera, a Finnish software firm, has introduced Microsoft SMB file compression to Linux. “We can open up entirely new use cases for enterprise customers – especially for hosted storage and software-defined storage vendors,” Heinrich von Keler, director of enterprise solutions, said.
Compressing SMB files for network transfer saves transit time and bandwidth. Tuxera has added SMB compression to its Fusion File Share by Tuxera software. The implementation is based on Microsoft’s documentation, and the company said compatibility is seamless between Windows, Mac, and Linux environments.
Microsoft made SMB file compression for Windows Server in September this year with the Robocopy /compress and Xcopy /compress parameters. The company intends to extend this feature to Azure.
Robocopy, or “Robust File Copy”, is a command line file and file directory replication facility. The Robocopy compression removes ‘white space’ from a file – things like spaces, carriage returns, tabs, and also repeated byte patterns. Virtual machine disks, raw graphics, scientific data, and other large file formats may contain a lot of white space and can shrink substantially when it is removed .
Szabolcs Szakacsits, Tuxera CTO said: “This feature is … highly useful in Microsoft Hyper-V or virtual environments, where there are large disk images containing lots of repeated byte patterns. Those repeating bytes are easy to compress and can be moved rapidly over the network. So, very large containers or disk images used by virtual machines can be migrated to another server with minimal downtime in between.”
Tuxera claims compression is on par with Microsoft’s implementation, with transfer speed-ups of 30 – 300 per cent, and network bandwidth savings of 20 –70 per cent, depending on the data pattern.
NAND market revenues held steady in Q3, inching up 0.3 per cent to $14.5bn in Q3. However, average selling prices fell nine per cent due to oversupply while bit shipments rose nine per cent.
TrendForce, which compiled the figures, expects lower market revenues in the fourth 2020 quarter.
Shipments last quarter were bolstered by rising demand for PCs, smartphones and stockpiling by Huawei, ahead of US technology import bans. TrendForce reports falling server and data centre demand in the quarter.
As the TrendForce table above shows, Samsung stands out with rises in revenue and market share, attributed to the iPhone 12 and Huawei stockpiling. Kioxia also saw a good revenue rise in the quarter, on the back of its acquisition of Lite-On.
Intel experienced 30.5 per cent drop in NAND revenues in Q3. TrendForce notes: “Since Intel has a large market share for enterprise SSDs, the increasing pressure on server OEMs to reduce their component inventories turned this advantage into a disadvantage in bit shipments.”
TrendForce expects fourth quarter NAND demand to be affected by Huawei’s withdrawal from the market, and continued digestion of NAND inventories by server and data centre customers. Also, Samsung and YMTC intend to raise production output, adding to the supply glut.
Chinese smartphone makers are expected to stock up as they attack Huawei’s market share. But, nonetheless, “their demand together with the demand related to the iPhone 12 series is not enough to reverse the oversupply situation that will be affecting the entire NAND Flash market through 4Q20.”
Dell Technologies has posted a strong quarter, with remote work driving up client systems and VMware revenues but servers and storage experienced declines. But it’s impatient for PowerStore sales to ramp up and solve its mid-range storage problem.
Dell’s storage sales in the third quarter ended October 30 were flat at $3.9bn, while group revenues grew three per cent to $23.5bn.
In the earnings call yesterday COO Jeff Clarke said: “Storage demand was mixed, we were pleased with our relative performance given current market dynamics.”
In the third quarter there was continued strong demand for VxRail and PowerMax products, with double-digit orders growth in both for the third straight quarter. Dell EMC retained top position with 27.9 per cent market revenue share, according to IDC. PowerEdge server orders were up single digits sequentially.
Dell claims the leading market share in external enterprise storage, storage software, all-flash arrays, purpose-built backup appliance, converged systems, as well as server units, all according to IDC.
PowerStore
CFO Tom Sweet said in the earnings call that although PowerMax and HCI did well the company “continued to see softness in other areas of core storage, including midrange.” That’s where the new PowerStore, launched in May, is positioned.
Clarke added: “PowerStore is so important for us, getting our mid-range trajectory on a take-share trajectory, which quite frankly it’s not with our performance.”
Dell’s results presentation noted “PowerStore is trending in the right direction and we expect it to ramp through the rest of this year and into FY22.”
Clarke said: “We delivered nearly double the [PowerStore] orders revenue achieved in the second quarter, albeit on a small base, we are still early in the ramp. … more than 15 per cent of the PowerStore customers are new storage buyers. We feel great about the future of PowerStore and our storage leadership.”
Clare said PowerStore in its first three quarters is ahead of XtremIO and VxRail in their equivalent ramps. Also the number of competitive takeouts Dell had in Q3 over Q2 with PowerStore nearly doubled.
Clarke added: “We expect it to continue to ramp in Q4 and all through next year and that ramp is the key to our success in growing our storage business as we have strong success in the above -$2,050 segments and has actually taken share there.”
Midrange share shrink
Answering a question about possible storage mis-execution, Clarke denied it had happened but admitted: “Our midrange is shrinking. I think we’ve mentioned that each of the previous three quarters this year. And it’s why PowerStore is important. PowerStore is the catalyst. I think we’ve said this for the past couple of years in anticipation of the product. It is the catalyst for us to change our share trajectory in the midrange, which is the single largest segment in storage, that’s why it’s important.”
He said he and Sweet “are impatient with the team. We want to see a more accelerated ramp.”
Pure Storage CFO Kevan Krysler said yesterday: “We’re just not seeing PowerStore. I mean, the little we’re seeing of it is not being terribly successful.“
“It’s been a wild year and it’s not over yet,” Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo said on the Q3 earnings call yesterday.
2022 can’t come too soon for the data storage vendor, which missed analyst profit expectations by a country mile, recording a net loss of $74m for the quarter ended November 1. Consensus forecasts were breakeven point – it lost $29m for the same quarter last year.
Pure estimates Q4 revenues will come in at $480m, down two per cent Y/Y. That translates to $1.66bn revenue for the full fiscal year, up 1.1 per cent – effectively flat after years of high growth.
The company is still chewing through the effects of the ongoing transition from selling hardware+software, to renting stuff on a subscriptions basis. And the pandemic ain’t helping. Revenues are holding up fairly well nonetheless at $410.6m for the quarter, down 4.2 per cent Y/Y. It anticipates growth will pick up again in Spring 2021.
On the bright side, Pure reported record FlashArray//C and FlashBlade sales, and subscription services revenues climbed 29.5 per cent Y/Y to $136.1m. Product revenue was $274.5m, down 15.1 per cent Y/Y. Pure acquired 316 new customers in the quarter compared to 379 a year ago.
CEO Charlie Giancarlo said in prepared remarks: “The challenges and the changes we’ve experienced this year have been extraordinary and seem never ending and they have certainly reset all of our expectations and assumptions.”
Post-pandemic pickup
The twin headwinds of the pandemic and move to subscriptions have made Pure’s fiscal 2021 one to forget. But CFO Kevan Krysler declared the company is positioned for “strong revenue growth, including growth of our recurring revenues.“
It’s apparent that FlashArray//X sales are not growing as well as //C and FlashBlade. Did Pure see competition from Dell’s recently launched PowerStore array? Krysler said: “We’re just not seeing PowerStore. I mean, the little we’re seeing of it is not being terribly successful.“
Perhaps a FlashArray//X refresh is needed.
Financial summary
Gross margin 67.3 per cent
Operating cash flow was $32.8m
Free cash flow was $7.9m
Total cash and investments of $1.2bn
Deferred revenue $762.8m, up 19 per cent Y/Y
Remaining performance obligations (RPO) exceeding $1.0bn, up 25 per cent Y/Y
We’ve charted Pure’s quarterly revenues by fiscal year to illustrate its wild year.
Pure Storage has updated Pure-as-a-Service with service catalogs, transparent pricing, a cheaper entry price for block storage and a subscription version of the FlashStack reference architecture.
Pure products are available on-premises as a pay-as-you use managed service or in the cloud. With this update the company aims to make procurement of all its technology akin to ordering services in the public cloud.
Rob Walters, GM for Pure as-a-Service, said today in a press statement: “With the new service catalog and expanded offerings, we are once again leading the market in delivering the flexibility and transparency that customers are looking for in subscription services to accelerate their initiatives.”
Susan Middleton, research director at the tech analyst firm IDC, offered a supportive quote: “Customers want cost transparency, simplicity and operational efficiency, as well as a straightforward on-ramp to the cloud that enables them to preserve capital.”
There will be tiers
Pure as-a-Service is delivered wholly via partners. There are now four block and two unified file and object tiers in the catalog.
The block tiers have different performance levels;
Capacity Tier – lower commitments with a minimum of 200 TiB, and for tier 2 workloads, decreasing the minimum entry point by one third. Other tiers retain their minimum commitment of 50 TiB .
Faster Performance Tier to accelerate hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Even faster Premium Tier to support specialised tier 1 workloads such as containers and test and dev applications.
The fastest UItra Tier designed for in-memory databases.
Pure-as-a-Service catalog tiers.
Block party
Pure is following StorOne and making its prices public. //Block Capacity is the cheapest block plan, with a 33 per cent reduction in the minimum commitment. The 200TiB total monthly cost is $4,098, based on $0.020/GiB/month charge. A 400TiB subscription for 36 months works out $5,322/month based on $0.017/GiB/month..
Pure block and file offerings are included in Pure aaS but only the block services are available in the AWS and Azure clouds. There is a unified subscription for hybrid cloud deployments. Subscriptions are listed in the Pure Service Catalog and can be ordered from it.
The array hardware and software can be located in a customer’s premises or a co-location centre with a connection to the public cloud. This can use AWS DirectConnect, Azure ExpressRoute or Google Partner Interconnect.
A software-only subscription will run in the public cloud. Non-disruptive expansions and maintenance are included in Pure aaS and customer installation is managed and monitored through the Pure1 service.
Customers can transition Pure kit bought outright to the Opex Pure aaS model with an Active Cluster set up combining the Capex and Opex systems. Volumes are migrated non-disruptively to the Pure aaS kit and then Pure removes the old Capex array.
FlashStack becomes Full Stack as-a-Service
Pure kit has been a component of the FlashStack converged system reference architecture, integrated with Cisco network switches and UCS servers, since 2016. Pure will now offer Full Stack as a service, with its partners providing compute and networking options. This is built on FlashStack, and supports the existing Cisco-validated designs.
Use cases, according to Pure, include Oracle RAC, VMware Horizon View with 2,000 users and Citrix Xen Desktop with 1,250 users. Example pricing for Xen Desktop is $16,000/month with 125TiB capacity directly connected. It’s $20,800/month if the storage is network-connected.
Pure-as-Service launched in September 2019 as a rebranding of the company’s ES2 (Evergreen Storage-as-a-Service). Here is an evolution chart for your edification.
Pure with Pure as-a-Service, Dell Technologies with APEX, HPE with GreenLake and NetApp with Keystone now all have cloud-like branded subscription services. Nutanix is also moving to subscriptions.
The latest results from hyperconverged player Nutanix show that business growth is slowing down, with the move to subscriptions and Covid-19 lockdown effects having unhelpful effects. Analyst Jason Ader sees this as a temporary setback, with subscription revenue growth taking up the slack.
Our sister publication The Register covered Nutanix’s Q1 fy21 earnings. We focus here on William Blair analyst Jason Ader’s insights into the underlying growth story,
Nutanix continues to make substantial losses, but Ader reckons the company can fund its way to profitability, on the back of Bain Capital Private Equity’s $750m investment in the company in August.
He remains “optimistic about Nutanix’s long-term growth opportunity, as the company evolves from an HCI appliance vendor into a broader, software platform play, with offerings extending from storage to hypervisor to hybrid cloud. We also see room for multiple expansion, especially as the shift to subscriptions enhances predictability.”
According to Ader, the overall Q1 results “marked a strong out-of-the-gate performance for Nutanix in its first quarter transitioning to an ACV (annual contract value) billings model.”
Nutanix argues investors should look at annual contract value (ACV) numbers rather than revenue, because it has switched to subscriptions. Seen through that lens this part of Nutanix’ business is growing. Total ACV grew 10 per cent Y/Y to $137.8m and there was 87 per cent ACV growth Y/Y from add-on products like Files, Objects, Flow, Calm and Era.
Dheeraj Pandey, Nutanix founder and (soon-to-retire) chairman and CEO, said: “ACV billings were 14 per cent ahead of the midpoint of our guidance and consensus and notably Q1 was our best ACV bookings quarter ever, the pandemic notwithstanding.”
Ader notes ACV contract duration has fallen, and that this is a good thing because it indicates lower levels of discountin, even though less revenue is recognised up-front. He expects one year contracts will help with “higher attach rates for add-on products, which are predominantly sold under annual contracts.”
He points out that “attach rates for add-on products reached a record 35 per cent (up 7 points from the year-ago quarter).”
Nutanix will save money as contracts renew because “renewal deals are transacted at much lower cost than new or up-sell deals.” Also, Ader says, “in fiscal years 2022/2023, this dynamic should be even more pronounced as Nutanix will benefit from both a large pool of term license renewals and a significant renewal cycle for its life-of-device licenses.”
Micron told the Sanford C. Bernstein Operational Decisions Conference last week that it has 3D XPoint SSD and memory DIMM roadmaps. This will take the company into direct competition on all fronts with the Intel Optane portfolio – in a couple of years or so.
In a wide-ranging interview, CFO Dave Zinsner said (transcript): “We want to continue to build out a portfolio for 3D XPoint.” He noted the technology “has some pretty interesting use cases particularly in the AI space.”
Zinsner’s remarks will resolve any ambiguity concerning Micron’s resolve to build and market 3D XPoint product on its own account. Many industry observers have questioned its commitment on this score. For instance, the technology analyst Jim Handy wrote last year that Micron might “desire to extricate itself from the 3D XPoint business while still satisfying alternate-sourcing agreements made by the company prior to XPoint’s 2015 introduction”.
Zinsner said the company is working with some of the “really big players in the space with this technology. The early read has been very positive, quite honestly, about it. But like all emerging technologies, adoption takes some time to get the use cases to the right place and get the cost and the performance at the right place… but we’re optimistic we’ll get there.”
Dave Zinsner
Micron currently builds 3D XPoint dies for Intel’s Optane 200 series products and Micron’s own X100 SSDs, which launched in October 2019.
This “was just kind of a teaser product to get it out there, “Zinsner said, “and there’s certainly a road map of products, both continued road map on SSDs, but also a road map on the memory front. And I think we should look for those products coming over the next couple of years.” At that point Micron will have second generation XPoint SSDs and also XPoint DIMMs.
Intel Optane 200 series products use generation 2 (4-deck) XPoint, launched in June, but it is unclear if Micron’s X100 SSDs have moved yet from gen 1 to gen 2 XPoint.
In reply to question about their status, Zinsner said: “We’re in really early stages… then we got to continually move to better generations that have better cost structure and also hopefully increase the performance.”
This implies the addition of more layers so that the cost per XPoint bit goes down. Zinsner declined to discuss layer counts on the call.
Zinsner said Micron still have not had any meaningful revenue outside of wafers that we’re selling to our prior partner in 3D XPoint, Intel… I think for the next couple of years, it’s probably not going to be a meaningful portion of our revenue as we kind of build out the portfolio and work on the cost side of things. But eventually, we’re fairly optimistic about this business.”
Micron’s XPoint fab is currently under-utilised, which affects costs: “We peaked out at around $155m or so in the third quarter [to end August] of underload charges associated with that fab. They were down in the fourth quarter to more like $135m. They’ll probably be down again in the first quarter [which finishes at the end of February 2021].”
Intel’s Ice Lake servers will unblock storage performance by reading data faster and loading it into a larger memory space. Storage writes are quicker too – that’s because Ice Lake supports PCIe 4.0, more memory channels and Optane 200 series persistent memory.
Ice Lake is Intel’s code name for the 10th generation Xeon processors which were introduced for laptops in August 2019. The server version, Ice Lake SP, is due in early 2021.
The company teased out some performance details last week to coincide with SC20. In her presentation for the supercomputing event, Trish Damkroger, GM of Intel’s High Performance Computing Group, proclaimed: “The convergence of HPC and AI is a critical inflection point. The Xeon SP is optimised for this convergence.”
We’ll discuss that another time. Let’s dive into the numbers.
In general, Ice Lake should provide up to 38 per cent faster SPEC floating point rate benchmark performance, at identical core count and frequency as a Cascade Lake Xeon. The greater memory capacity of Xeon SP Ice Lake servers translates into fewer IOs slowing down the processor, hence significantly faster app processing speed and storage IO overall.
PCIe Gen 4 is twice as fast as the current PCIe Gen 3’s 32GB/sec maximum. The standard supports up to 16 lanes and 16Gbit/s data link speed to deliver 64GB/sec. This means stored data can be loaded into memory faster – and that memory can be larger with Ice Lake.
Ice Lake SP increases memory capacity with two more memory channels per socket, with eight x DDR4 channels. Xeon Scalable Performance (Skylake) series processors have two built-in memory controllers that each control up to three channels. That equals six memory channels per CPU [socket]. Up to two DIMMs are possible per channel, totting up at 12 DIMMs per CPU. So, a Xeon SP M-class CPU has a maximum of 1.5TB of memory, or 0.25TB per channel. Ice Lake increases the memory channel count to eight, handling 2TB of DRAM.
Trish Damkroger slide from her SC20 presentation.
Memory performance is faster at 3,200 MT/s, up from 2,933 MT/s. And bandwidth is increased to 190.7 GiB/s, up from 143.1 GiB/s.
In conjunction with Optane persistent memory, Xeon Cascade Lake has 4.5TB overall memory capacity. Ice Lake increases this to 6TB, using gen 2 Optane with sequential read bandwidth of 8.10GB/sec and 3.15GB/sec for write bandwidth. The first generation Optane PMem series runs up to 6.8GB/sec read and c2.3GB/sec writes.
Ice Lake and Sunny Cove
Intel is to introduce Sunny Cove, a new core microarchitecture, for Ice Lake. This is designed for Intel’s 10nm+ technology and provides about 18 per cent more instructions per clock (IPC) than its predecessor in the Xeon Skylake chips. Things that make Sunny Cove chips faster include a 1.5x large level 1 cache, 2x larger Level 2 cache and elements such as higher load-store bandwidth and lower effective access latencies.
Multiple data storage vendors surfed on this week’s Kubecon conference to push out Kubernetes announcements. But first, let’s kick off with a little acquisition.
P.S. Check out my stories on The Register this week.
Data protector Acronis has bought CyberLynx, a small Israeli IT security consultancy. This will increase training and solutions options for Acronis Security Services, in particular for serving managed service providers;(MSPs) and managed security service providers (MSSPs).
Five mainstream storage suppliers have announced containerised app news to coincide with this week’s KubeCon.
Commvault’s Metallic VM & Kubernetes Backup is available and provides SaaS data protection for containers. Protected workloads include any CNCF-Certified Kubernetes distribution with validated support for Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes, Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and VMware Tanzu. The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform has been enhanced to store, protect, and migrate containers across hybrid multi-cloud environments.
NetApp is the starting member of a Rancher Labs OEM and Embedded Alliances Program, and is working to pioneer the next evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) services. NetApp HCI will be the first to embed Rancher’s enterprise Kubernetes management platform.
Pure Storage-owned Portworx has updated PX-Backup to v1.2 which works with any Kubernetes CSI-supporting backend. It works with Portworx’s own PX-Store, Amazon EBS, Google Persistent Disk, Azure Managed Disks, VMWare Storage, Pure FlashArray, and any other CSI-compatible storage system. PX-Backup v1.2 has a usage-based billing model priced at 20 cents/node/hour.
Veritas has added Kubernetes support to InfoScale automated high-availability software, which will support multi-vendor cloud and on-premises environments. It adds high availability for containerised applications with non-disruptive scaling of persistent volumes; three storageclasses of persistent volumes (performance, resiliency and secure; and. quality of service features to provide predictable performance.
Disaster Recovery supplier Zerto is adding data protection and disaster recovery for containerised apps with the beta program of Zerto for Kubernetes (Z4K), an extension of its core Zerto Platform. The Z4K beta program includes access to a remote access hands-on lab running the Z4K beta code. The lab has no-charge, on-demand training on how to set up, configure, and manage a Z4K environment.
A Zerto-sponsored ESG survey of North American enterprises revealed that containers adoption is in full acceleration and in position to become the preferred for production deployment in 24 months. 71 per cent of survey respondents have deployed or plan to deploy container-based applications in a hybrid-cloud strategy.
Shorts
Cloud providers in the VMware Partner Connect program can protect healthcare data from ransomware with free Cloudian software. For every healthcare organisation enrolled, VMware cloud service providers serving this industry receive a free 50 TB, year-long license for Cloudian object storage, including Cloudian’s government-certified Object Lock technology.
Datadobi has announced support for NAS file data migration to and protection on Microsoft Azure. Data integrity is fully preserved between the two locations.
DDN‘s SFA18K’s storage platform has been selected for tier 2 storage for the Fugaku supercomputer. Five SFA18KE and 25 SFA18KXE devices will provide a total effective capacity of at least 150 PB, with a minimum effective throughput of 1.5 TB/sec. They will be compute nodes for OSS (object storage servers), which serve as a gateway to other data storage units. Fugaku is a joint development with RIKEN and Fujitsu, and ranks first in the Top500 list. It goes into operation 2021.
DDN’s A³I A1400X all-NVMe flash storage system will be used by the University of Florida’s HiPerGator supercomputer to help make it the world’s fastest AI supercomputer in academia. HiPerGator will use 4PB of storage to feed 140 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems, which contain 1,120 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, with data flowing through an Nvidia Mellanox HDR 200Gbit/s InfiniBand network.
DDN A³I
Druva has added detection of unauthorised or non-compliant admin access into the backup environment and unusual data activity alerts. Users can search for and delete malicious files across endpoint backups to prevent re-infection. The software automatically creates a recovery snapshot from the last known good snapshots at the backup and file level, and scans for malware during recovery to prevent re-infection.
Druva acquired sfApex, a Salesforce developer tools and data migration service provider. Druva says its SaaS offering, combined with sfApex, delivers comprehensive SaaS data protection and management for Salesforce with granular backup and data recovery, streamlined and automated migrations, and improved tools for developers
Central Pacific Bank, a commercial bank in Hawaii, has implemented HPE Nimble Storage dHCI to support 1,000 virtual desktops, allowing expanded remote working for employees, continuity of regulatory compliance and improved performance, efficiency and cost savings overall.
HPE and StorMagic have announced a joint hyperconverged edge system, with StorMagic SvSAN validated with HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems. SvSAN runs on any hypervisor as a guest virtual machine to enable highly-available shared storage and virtualisation with two Edgeline servers per site. Active-active synchronous mirroring creates a copy of data on both servers, eliminating downtime.
Microsoft’sAzure HPC team has used the BeeOND (“BeeGFS On Demand”) filesystem, 300 HBv2 virtual machines and 250TB of NVMe SSD capacity to reach 1.46 TB/sec of read throughput and 456GB/sec of write bandwidth. They claim this is at least 3.6 higher read performance than that demonstrated or claimed elsewhere on the public cloud.
Pure Storage has had an episode of minor lay-offitis with people leaving, we heard, in New Zealand and elsewhere. A Pure spokesperson said: “We undertook a minor workforce rebalancing initiative in one function to align our employees with company priorities and areas that are strategic to the business. The employees affected by this initiative were encouraged to seek other open positions within the company and we also put support in place to aid them through the workforce transition if seeking a new role outside of Pure.”
Pure Storage has announced the Pure Validated Design (PVD) program to help partners deliver simplified deployments. PVDs are available, for Commvault data protection and Vertica for analytics. More PVDs will arrive in the coming months.
Storj Labs has announced Velero (data recovery and migration in K8s environments) and Docker Registry integrations with its Tardigrade Decentralised Cloud Storage Service, launched earlier this year. Tardigrade’s network capacity has grown from 22PB to 78PB and the user count from 3,600 to 11,200. Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland are new Tardigrade storage partners.
WekaIO has set up a validation and certification program to help server partners certify their hardware running the Weka File System (WekaFS) with Nvidia DGX A100. It has also published a reference architecture for using Weka with the DGX A100.
