Home Blog Page 336

This week in storage with Fujitsu, HPE, Intel and more

By
Chris Mellor
-

This week’s data storage standouts include Intel spinning out a fast interconnect business; HPE and Marvell’s high-availability NVMe boot drive kit for ProLiant servers; and Fujitsu going through its own, branded digital transformation

Intel spins out Cornelis

Intel has spun out Cornelis Networks, founded by former Intel interconnect veterans Philip Murphy Jr., Vladimir Tamarkin and Gunnar Gunnarsson.

Cornelis will compete with Nvidia’s Mellanox business unit and technology, and possibly also HPE’s Slingshot interconnect. The latter is used in Cray Shasta supercomputers and HPE’s Apollo high performance computing servers.

Cornelis aims to commercialise Intel’s Omni-Path Architecture (OPA), a low-latency HPC-focused interconnect technology. The technology comes from Intel’s 2012 acquisition of QLogic’s TrueScale InfiniBand technology and Cray’s Aries interconnect IP and engineers, acquired by Intel in April 2012. 

Corneli’s initial funding is a $20m A-round led by Intel Capital, Downing Ventures, and Chestnut Street Ventures.

Fujitsu’s digital twin

Fujitsu is investing $1bn in a massive digital transformation project, which it is calling “Fujitra”.

The aim is to transform rigid corporate cultures such as “vertical division between different units” and “overplanning” by utilising frameworks such as Fujitsu’s Purpose, design-thinking, and agile methodology. Fujitsu’s purpose or mission is “to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation,” which seems entirely Japanese in its scope and seriousness.

Fujitsu will introduce a common digital service throughout the company to collect and analyse quantitative and qualitative data frequently and to manage actions based on such data. All information is centralised in real time to create a Fujitsu digital twin. 

Fujitsu has appointed DX officers for each of the 15 corporate and business units as well as five overseas regions. They will be responsible for promoting reforms across divisions, advance company-wide measures in each division and region, and lead DX at each division level.

Fujitra will be introduced at Fujitsu ActivateNow, an online global event, on Wednesday, October 14.

HPE and Marvell’s NVMe boot switch

Marvell’s 88NR2241 is an intelligent NVMe switch that enables data centres to aggregate, increase reliability and manage resources between multiple NVMe SSD controllers. The 88NR2241 creates enterprise-class performance, system reliability, redundancy, and serviceability with consumer-class NVMe SSDs linked by PCIe. This NVMe switch has a DRAM-less architecture and supports low latency NVMe transactions with minimum overhead. 

HPE NS204i-p NVMe RAID 1 accelerator

HPE has implemented a customised version of the 88NR2241 for ProLIant servers, calling it an NVMe RAID 1 accelerator. One HPE NS204i-p NVMe OS Boot Device is a PCIe add-in card that includes two 480GB M.2 NVMe SSDs. This enables customers to mirror their OS through dedicated RAID 1.  

The accelerator’s dedicated hardware RAID 1 OS boot mirroring eliminates downtime due to a failed OS drive – if one drive fails the business continues running. HPE OS Boot Devices are certified for VMware and Microsoft Azure Stack HCI for increased flexibility.

AWS Partner network news

  • Data protector Druva has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Digital Workplace Competency status. This is Druva’s third AWS Competency designation. Druva has also been certified as VMware Ready for VMware Cloud.
  • Cloud file storage supplier Nasuni has achieved AWS Digital Workplace Competency status. This status is intended to help customers find AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners offering AWS-based products and services in the cloud.
  • Kubernetes storage platform supplier Portworx has achieved Advanced Technology Partner status in the AWS Partner Network (APN). 

The shorter items

DigiTimes speculates that China-based memory chipmakers ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) could be added to the US trade ban export list. This list is currently restricting deliveries of US technology-based semiconductor shipments to Huawei.  

The Nikkei Asian Review reports SK hynix wanted to buy some more shares in Kioxia, taking its stake from 14.4 per cent to 14.96 per cent stake from its existing 14.4 per cent holding. That would link Kioxia and SK hynix in a defensive pact against emerging Chinese NAND suppliers. This plan isnow delayed as Kioxia has postponed its IPO.

Veritas has bought data governance supplier Globalnet to extend its digital compliance and governance portfolio, with visibility into 80-plus new content sources. These include Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, Symphony and Bloomberg.

Dell has plunked Actifio‘s Database Cloning Appliance (DCA) and Cloud Connect products on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, VxRail and PowerFlex. Sales are fulfilled by Dell Technologies OEM Solutions.

Enmotus has launched an AI-enabled FuzeDrive SSD with 900GB and 1.6TB capacity points. It blends high-speed, high endurance static SLC (1 bit/cell) with QLC (4bits/cell) on the same M.2 board. AI code analyses usage patterns and automatically moves active and write intensive data to the SLC portion of the drive. This speeds drive response and lengthens its endurance.

Exagrid claims it has the only non-network-facing tiered backup storage solution with delayed deletes and immutable deduplication objects. When a ransomware attack occurs, this approach ensures that data can be recovered or VMs booted from the ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage system. Not only can the primary storage be restored, but all retained backups remain intact. Check out an Exagrid 2 minute video.

Deduplicating storage software supplier FalconStor has announced the integration between AC&NC’s JetStor hardware with StorSafe, its long-term data retention and reinstatement offering, and StorGuard, its business continuity product.

HCL Technologies has brought its Actian Avalanche data warehouse migration tool to the Google Cloud Platform.

MemVerge has announced the general availability of its Memory Machine software which transforms DRAM and persistent memory such as Optane into a software-defined memory pool. The software provides access to persistent memory without changes to applications and speeds persistent memory with DRAM-like performance. Penguin Computing use Optane Persistent Memory and Memory Machine software to reduce Facebook Deep Learning Recommendation (DLRM) inference times by more than 35x over SSD.

SanDisk Extreme and Extreme PRO SSDS

Western Digital’s SanDisk operation has announced a new line of Extreme portable SSDs with nearly twice the speed of the previous generation. The Extreme and Extreme PRO products use the NVMe interface and with capacities up to 2TB. They offer a password interface and encryption. The Extreme reads and writes at up to 1,000 MB/s while the Extreme PRO achieves upon to 2,000MB/sec.

Nearline drives are bright spot in Gartner HDD forecast

By
Chris Mellor
-

Nearline disk drive capacity shipments and revenues will grow at double-digit percentages between 2019 and 2024, according to Gartner. The tech research firm predicts other disk categories will decline, with notebook HDDs heading the way of the dodo.

Aaron Rakers, a senior analyst at Wells Fargo, presented subscribers with Gartner hard disk drive (HDD) market notes for Q3 2020 and estimates for 2019-2024.

The total HDD market will decline by 6 per cent y/y in 2020 to $20.7bn, which follows a 12 per cent y/y decline in 2019 at $22.1bn. However, revenue should reach $21.9bn in 2021 (+5 per cent) and $22.6bn in 2022 (+4 per cent).

Gartner forecasts HDD market revenue overall will decline at 1.5 per cent CAGR through to 2024, with sales propped up by nearline disk drive growth and a small surveillance drive contribution.

Nearline 3.5-inch high capacity HDD exabytes shipped will grow 39 per cent 2019-2024 CAGR. Revenue is estimated to grow at 14 per cent CAGR, expanding from $8.9 billion in 2019 to $17.1 billion by 2024.

This implies nearline revenue will grow share of total HDD revenue from 40 per cent in 2019 to 55 per cent in 2020, 62 per cent in 2021, and c.84 per cent by 2024, according to Rakers.

Nearline HDD capacity will expand from 52 per cent of total HDD capacity shipped in 2019 to 70 per cent in 2020 and 86 per cent by 2024.

Total non-nearline HDD capacity shipped will decline at -1.3 per cent CAGR  2019-2024. Overall non-nearline HDD revenue will decline from $13.2bn in 2019 and $9.4bn in 2020 to less than $3.4bn by 2024.

SSD cannibalisation will eat up mission-critical enterprise HDD revenue – $1.8bn in 2019, and zero in 2024. Gartner expects  notebook PCs to move to a 100 per cent SSD/flash attach rate by 2024, an increase from 88 per cent in 2020.

The mobile and consumer HDD market will decline from $5.65bn in 2019 and $3.7bn in 2020 to slightly more than $820m by 2024. The 3.5-inch client and consumer HDD market is estimated to decline from $5.72bn in 2019 and $4.2bn in 2020 to $2.55bn by 2024. 

Surveillance drives will see some growth; with shipped units growing at nearly four per cent CAGR for 2019-2024.

3D XPoint patent suit against Micron and Intel is allowed to proceed

By
Chris Mellor
-

A US lawsuit filed two years ago by the liquidator of a bankrupt patent company against Intel and Micron has been allowed to proceed. The ruling issued on October 1 by Judge Thomas J. Tucker, exposes Intel to claims that its has no right to its core 3D XPoint technology.

ECDL Trust accuses Micron and Intel of colluding fraudulently in transferring intellectual property to Micron and arranging royalty free licenses with Intel. The plaintiff also alleges Intel has no right to certain technology used in its Optane 3D XPoint products.

In its filing, ECDL Trust said the technology, including non-volatile chalcongenide phase-change memory (PCM) and an Ovonic switch, was developed by Energy Conversion Devices (ECD, a company founded by Stan Ovshinsky to commercialise his inventions.

In 1998-1999, ECD signed a deal with Micron CTO Tyler Lowrey and Ovonyx, a newly-formed company that was set up to commercialise this IP. The royalty deal required Ovonyx to pay 0.5 per cent of its revenues on a quarterly basis to ECD. Lowrey subsequently became Ovonyx CEO.

Ovonyx earned $58m revenues from sub-licensing the ECD technology from the beginning of 2000 until 2012, when it stopped paying royalties to ECD.

Ovonyx stockholders included ECD, Lowrey, Intel, and former Micron CEO and chairman Ward Parkinson. He was also a VP and Director of Ovonyx.

ECD went bankrupt under Chapter 11 in February 2012. Energy Conversion Devices Liquidation Trust (ECDL Trust) was set up in the ECD liquidation plan and ECD subsequently sold its Ovonyx stock to Micron in August 2012. Micron owned 100 per cent of Ovonyx after July 2015.

In July 2015 the patents held by Ovonyx were transferred to a separate company, Ovonyx Memory Technology LLC (OMC), three days after Intel and Micron publicly launched 3D XPoint memory.

ECDL Trust argues the royalty payments to ECD should have continued after 2012 and is suing Lowrey, Ovonyx, OMC, Intel and Micron for the missing payments, in a Michigan bankruptcy court.

The defendants in the ECDL Trust lawsuit filed seven motions to dismiss ECDL Trust’s claims. Judge Tucker issued his judgement on October 1st, granting some motions and denying others. Tucker denied OMT’s motion to dismiss the fraudulent transfer complaint, and denied Intel’s motion to dismiss ECDL Trust’s claim it has no right to the Ovonyx IP used in 3D XPoint products.

The lawsuit is Case No. 12-43166 in the United States Bankruptcy Court, Eastern district of Michigan, Southern Division.

Hardware fault shuts Tokyo Stock Exchange for the day

By
Chris Mellor
-

A data storage hardware failure was to blame for day-long Tokyo Stock Exchange outage on Thursday October 1.

In a press conference, TSE executives “squarely accepted responsibility for the incident, rather than trying to deflect blame onto the system vendor Fujitsu Ltd,” Bloomberg reports. “All the responsibility lies with us as the market operator, TSE CEO Koichiro Miyahara said. “Fujitsu is merely a vendor that supplies the equipment.”

Fujitsu spokesman Takeo Tanaka said: “We apologise for any inconvenience caused to the concerned parties because of a failure in the hardware we delivered.” Fujitsu is working with the TSE to prevent a recurrence of the problem.

This is a refreshing example of companies taking it on the chin.

Failover failure

The Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) runs on a Fujitsu-developed Arrowhead hardware and software system. On Thursday, a data storage component, called the Number 1 Shared Disk device, detected a memory error.

in the event of primary database failure, the database software was supposed to initiate an automated switchover to the secondary database. However, the automated failover process to the Number 2 Shared Disk device did not happen.

TSE IT staff manually forced a change over to the Number 2 device. But they then faced a total system reboot to start trading, with ongoing trading orders left hanging and incomplete.

That was unacceptable and the exchange, the third largest in the world, had to shut down while a proper recovery took place.

The Shared Disk device has a central role, storing management data used by 400 Fujitsu Primergy RX2540 M4 system servers in the Arrowhead trading system. It also handles commands and ID/password combinations for terminals that monitor trades.

ETERNUS 8900 S4 Array.

Arrowhead uses Fujitsu’s PRIMEFLEX for HA Database, a converged infrastructure system, with software running on integrated Fujitsu hardware. This includes PCIe-connected SSDs and an ETERNUS storage array. There are primary and secondary databases synchronised through mirroring technology. Fujitsu discontinued the PRIMEFLEX for HA Database in March 2017. 

AWS Outposts racks up S3 support

By
Chris Mellor
-

Amazon has added S3 support to the on-premises AWS Outposts cloud-in-a-rack.

Using the Outposts converged infrastructure rack, customers deploy an all-AWS hybrid cloud within their own data centres.

AWS Outposts rack

They can now execute applications on the Outpost servers using faster-access local data instead of S3 stores in the AWS cloud. The same S3 Console, APIs, and SDKs is used for for both environments.

This enables admins to redundantly store data across multiple devices and servers on an Outposts rack. The new service is size limited: users can only add 48TB or 96TB of S3 storage capacity to each rack and create up to 100 buckets.

If you are using no more than 11TB of EBS storage on an existing Outpost today you can add 48TB of S3 storage with no hardware changes on the existing systems. Other configurations require additional hardware.

AWS video about S3 on Outposts

All S3 data stored in Outposts is encrypted with SSE-S3. An AWS DataSync service moves data to and from AWS cloud regions. The transfer is encrypted and can be automated, with selectable network bandwidth. The data can be deduped and compressed to lower network costs.

AWS Outposts is not priced as a pay-as-you-go service. Customers purchase capacity for a three-year term with a number of different payment schedules.

AWS Outposts launched late last year and at the time came with Elastic Block Store (EBS) support. RDS (Relational Database System) support added in July. In September, various third-party filesystems and data protection services were made available from Clumio, Cohesity, Commvault, CTERA, Pure Storage, Qumulo and WekaIO, with more added since.

Glean more information from an AWS News Blog by tech evangelist Martin Beeby.

GigaOm: Qumulo tops Scale Out File Systems leader group

By
Chris Mellor
-

GigaOm lists 20 scale-out file system (SOFS) suppliers in a hotly-contested market, and a dozen, led by Qumulo, are duking it out in a leaders’ category.

Report author Enrico Signoretti places the suppliers in a 4-circle, 4-axis, 4-quadrant Radar screen. Qumulo, VAST Data, Quobyte, DDN, and Commvault are the top five in the Leaders’ area.

GigaOm SOFS radar screen diagram,

Unstructured data today accounts for up to 90 per cent of the total data under management for many enterprises. This explains the strong demand for SOFS and why so many suppliers are jockeying for position. The vendors form three distinct groups.

Scale-out file systems have received a consistent boost as enterprises have turned to high-performance computing (HPC) set-ups to analyse and process massive datasets. That means the parallel access file systems such as IBM Spectrum Scale, Panasas have moved into enterprise space. Conversely, the mainstream enterprise filers such as Dell EMC Isilon and NetApp have moved upmarket.

Also a bunch of startups such as Qumulo, VAST Data and Weka have arrived on the scene. They scent an opportunity to scale more and speed performance with software and hardware developments.

Signoretti comments: “Most of the complexity of scale-out architectures is hidden behind the scenes today. Systems are more balanced than in the past, with improved efficiency, while providing the same or even better performance. All of this is thanks to the adoption of new technologies and integrations that take advantage of public cloud and other types of storage systems.”

He says the list of suppliers in the market is very long: “All scale to multi-petabyte capacities or more, and most exhibit performance as their other primary characteristic. But it is also true that there is increasing demand for data management and hybrid cloud integration – an area where most solutions remain immature. Many vendors are concentrating their efforts in this area to meet growing demand.”

Signoretti’s reports are available to subscribers but you can read the introductory paragraphs and inspect the diagrams by visiting GigaOm’s website.

VMware wants to play nice with Nvidia DPUs

By
Chris Mellor
-

VMware and Nvidia announced yesterday they are working to make VMware software work better with Nvidia chips. They say the joint initiative, dubbed Project Monterey, will “introduce a new security model that offloads hypervisor, networking, security and storage tasks from the CPU to the DPU”.

The aim is to offload hypervisor, networking, security and storage tasks from a host CPU to Nvidia’s BlueField data processing unit (DPU). This should be useful for AI, machine learning, and high-throughput, data-centric applications, according to the companies.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the launch announcement: “Nvidia DPUs will give companies the ability to build secure, programmable, software-defined data centres that can accelerate all enterprise applications at exceptional value.”

Paul Perez, SVP and CTO, Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell Technologies, also provided a statement: “We believe the enterprise of the future will comprise a disaggregated and composable environment.” 

SmartNIC, DPU and BlueField-2

Dell said VMware Cloud Foundation will be able to maintain compute virtualization on the server CPU while offloading networking and storage I/O functions to the SmartNIC CPU. VMware has taken the first step to achieve this by enabling VMware ESXi to run on SmartNICs.

A SmartNIC or DPU is a programmable co-processor that runs non-application tasks from a server CPU, so enabling the server to run more applications faster. DPUs can compose disaggregated data centre server compute, networking and storage resources. They can also function as intelligent network interface cards that provide security services and network acceleration.

Nvidia’s BlueField-2 is a Mellanox system-on-chip (SoC) that integrates a ConnectX-6 Dx ASIC network adapter with a PCIe Gen 4 x16 lane switch, 2 x 25/50/100 GbitE or 1 x 200GbitE ports, and an array of 8-core, 64-bit Arm processors. This provides an integrated crypto engine for IPsec and TLS cryptography, integrated RDMA and NVMe-oF acceleration, and dedupe and compression.

Use cases

Three use cases are envisaged. First, BlueField-2 can be used with disaggregated storage, which it virtualizes and enables remote, networked storage to be part of a composable infrastructure. Second, BlueField-2 can provision bare metal servers as a CSP operator service to cloud tenants.

VMware said it will re-architect VMware Cloud Foundation to enable disaggregation of the server including support for bare metal servers, a new Cloud Foundation facility. It will enable an application running on one physical server to consume hardware accelerator resources such as FPGAs from other physical servers. 

With ESXi running on the SmartNIC, customers will be able to use a single management framework to manage all their virtualized and bare metal compute infrastructure.

Thirdly, BlueField-2 can be used for micro-segmentation at endpoints to isolate application workloads and their resources from each other. 

There is a security aspect to Project Monterey. Each SmartNIC is capable of running a fully-featured stateful firewall and advanced security suite. Up to thousands of tiny firewalls will be able to be deployed and automatically tuned to protect specific application services that make up the application.

Project Monterey is available as preview code.

Multiple open DPU partnering

VMware is collaborating with Intel, Nvidia and Pensando, and system vendors Dell, HPE and Lenovo to deliver Project Monterey systems. Dell said it could deliver automated systems using SmartNICS from a broad set of vendors.

DPU suppliers include three startups: Fungible, Nebulon, and Pensando. Pensando recently announced it will provide its DPU as a factory-supported option on HPE servers across the VMware Cloud Foundation product line, including vSphere, VSAN, and NSX. Customers will be able to access Pensando’s platform directly within VMware hardware. 

Second VMware Nvidia partnership

Separately, VMware announced at VMworld 2020 yesterday that it is jointly building a deployment platform for VMware-controlled servers to run AI software on attached Nvidia A100 GPUs. The platform combines VMware’s vSphere, Cloud Foundation and Tanzu container orchestration software with Nvidia’s NGC software.  

NGC (Nvidia GPU Cloud) is a website catalogue of GPU-optimised software for deep learning, machine learning, and high performance computing. NGC software is supported on a select set of pre-tested Nvidia A100-powered servers expected from leading system manufacturers.

Scality’s SOFS in Azure makes Blobs blindingly fast

By
Chris Mellor
-

Scality has reached 1Tbit/sec in technical previews of its SOFS (scale-out file system) software on Azure.

According to a Scality FAQ, SOFS in Azure has “really massive performance that is typically achievable only by specialised HPC file systems on costly direct  attached storage. The real power here is that linear scaling of cloud VMs lets SOFS achieve essentially any level of performance. This is very powerful, and can be used to solve key use cases in energy research, media and  entertainment, big data analytics, AI/ML and more.” 

The object storage supplier suggests many other cloud file services can only use capacity allocated to the local virtual machines they sit on. For example, Microsoft Azure Files has limitations in single file system size (100TB storage capacity) and maximum throughput per file system (300MB/sec). 

Scality SOFS on the other hand scales out to hundreds of petabytes with over 80GB/sec of performance.

The preview code has been measured at 1 terabit per second (c125,000MB/sec) on Azure premium flash storage, and the performance scales out linearly for both read and write workloads. Azure SOFS scales to over 650Gbits/sec (81,250MB/sec) throughput on Azure’s Blob Hot Access Tier.

SOFS in Azure

Giorgio Regni

Scality announced the Azure SOFS development in February. File system metadata is stored in the Azure Cosmos DB and file data payloads are kept as objects in Azure Blob storage.

Giorgio Regni, CTO, said: “In late 2019, we decided to port our proven SOFS code base to Azure. … some of Azure’s differentiated features, such as a single API for storage tiers and Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), enabled us to quickly deliver an integrated solution on top of Azure Blob storage.”  

By using the Blob service for data, instead of the Azure Files service,  customers get charged $0.0184 per GB per month. Azure Files costs more – $0.24/GiB/month for the premium Files service, $0.06/GiB/month for transaction-optimised and $0.0255/GiB/month for general purpose (hot) files, and $0.015/GiB/month for cool tiers.

Scality Azure SOFS diagram.

SOFS in Azure supports SMB 3.0, and NFS v3 and v4.1. Data remains in native Azure format and is fully accessible by any Azure service.

Target customers need 100TB or more of storage capacity, GB/sec to 100 GB/sec of throughput, and on-demand, bursty use cases (applications do not require 100 per cent full-time processing).

SOFS in Azure is stateless and delivered as a software image that can be deployed on Azure cloud Virtual Machine (VM) instances. It is hosted in a customer’s Azure subscription and connects to the customer’s Azure Blob storage accounts. Any number of virtual machines can be spun up on-demand to linearly scale performance, and SOFS tiers data across Azure Blob to optimise performance and costs.

SOFS in Azure is available for selected customers.

Intel tech and Lightbits Labs make NVMe/TCP faster

By
Chris Mellor
-

Lightbits Labs is working with Intel to make its NVMe/TCP all-flash arrays almost as fast as RoCe and InfiniBand options, which require much more expensive cabling.

And Intel Capital has plunked an undisclosed sum into the startup to help make it happen. Eran Kirzner, Lightbits Labs CEO, issued a quote: “We are excited to partner with Intel Corporation, and our joint solutions will set the bar for generating new ROI metrics for enterprise and cloud customers.”

Lightbits and Intel have demonstrated NVMe/TCP with a 146μs access latency by using Intel’s Ethernet 800 Series network adapters with application device queues (ADQ) technology.

ADQ sets up application specific queues so that high priority packets get dealt with faster. The companies say ADQ enables NVMe oF/TCP to achieve distributed storage performance in the same range as RDMA-based protocols, meaning 100 – 120μs.

The test system also showed up to 70 per cent increase in IOPS at high queue depths. A white paper describes the testing in much more detail.

The topology Lightbits used in performing NVMe/TCP with ADQ cluster testing.

Composable

The two are so pleased with this that Lightbits will optimise its LightOS to work with an all-flash array using five Intel technologies:

  • Optane persistent memory
  • Intel 3D NAND SSDs based on QLC flash 
  • Xeon Scalable processors with artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration capabilities 
  • Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters with Application Device Queues (ADQ) technology.
  • Intel’s FPGAs to handle dedupe and compression

The idea is that Optane DIMMs will make the array operations faster, QLC SSDs will send capacity up and cost/GB down, and the AI-optimised Xeons will speed machine learning and similar work. The LightOS and array will provide a composable and disaggregated storage system.

Remi El-Ouazzane, Intel Data Platforms chief strategy and business development officer, said: “The data centre is being transformed, with disaggregation and composability of resources being essential to meet the efficiency requirements needed to address the explosion of data.

“Our differentiated hardware capabilities coupled with Lightbits innovative NVMe over Fabrics software gives our joint customers an exceptional economic solution to address this strategic inflection point.”

Neither Intel nor Lightbits is providing any details on what composability will mean in practice.

Micron reports ‘extraordinary’ growth in QLC shipments

By
Chris Mellor
-

Micron’s latest quarterly results show it climbing out of a revenue trough, on the back of strong sales of quad-level flash. But the pandemic and the US trade ban on Huawei are expected to put a crimp on growth next quarter

The US chipmaker reported revenues of $6.06bn for the fourth fiscal 2020 quarter, up 24.4 per cent on the year-ago $4.87bn. Net income was $988m, up 76 per cent on last year’s $561m.

Sanjay Mehrotra

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra noted “strong DRAM sales in cloud, PC and gaming consoles and an extraordinary increase in QLC NAND shipments.”

In the earnings call he said “economic recovery from the sharp recession in calendar Q2 is under way, but the pace has been limited by the continuation of the pandemic. … our short-term outlook has weakened due to a combination of factors.”

He cited the pandemic and US government restrictions on exports to Huawei, which had accounted for 10 per cent of Micron’s Q4fy20 sales. 

Micron sees the market improving throughout calendar 2021, driven by 5G, cloud and automotive industry growth, but its own revenue growth is almost slowing to a halt next quarter. It thinks it will see revenues of $5.2bn plus or minus $200m – up one per cent.

Also Micron said there was a risk of NAND over-supply in 2021 as suppliers could build too much manufacturing capacity.

By the numbers

Full fy2020 revenues were $21.4bn, compared to fy19’s $23.4bn, down 8.5 per cent, with profits of $2.69bn, down 57.4 per cent on the year-ago’s $6.3bn.

Financial summary:

  • Gross margin: 34.9 per cent
  • Free cash flow: $111m
  • Operating cash flow: $2.27bn vs $2.23bn a year ago.
  • Net cash: $2.613bn
  • CAPEX: $2.16bn vs $2.23bn a year ago

Micron has two basic product lines; DRAM and NAND. DRAM revenues in the quarter were $4.37bn, up 29 per cent from the year-ago $3.39bn.  NAND revenues of $1.53bn, up 27 per cent Y/Y.

There are four business units selling DRAM and NAND and Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers provided numbers to his subscribers;

  • Computer and Networking BU – $3.02bn revenues up 59 per cent Y/Y with greater than doubled bit shipments to the cloud customers as on-premises demand declined with weak enterprise server demand.
  • Mobile BU – $1.46bn revenues up 4 per cent Y/Y. 5G phone adoption will drive the market higher.
  • Embedded BU – $654m revenues down 7 per cent Y/Y with a predicted recovery in the automotive market coming. 
  • Storage BU – $913m revenues, up 8 per cent Y/Y as consumer SSD sales grew to a record and data centre SSD revenue grew strongly.

The pandemic appears to have cut car sales which affecte revenues for Micron’s embedded BU.

PowerMax maxes more with vVOL replication, better DR and cloud tiering

By
Chris Mellor
-

Dell EMC today updated the high-end PowerMax storage array to run more VMware Virtual Volumes (vVOLs), migrate data to the public cloud and improve disaster recovery capability.

vVOLS and SRDF/A

With today’s update, VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 8.3 can access a PowerMax array replication feature called SRDF/A, to automate VM movement between sites. SRDF maintains real-time or near real time copies of data on a production storage array at a remote site. It can work synchronously or, with the/A version, asynchronously.

A disaster recovery version of SRDF – SRDF/Metro – pairs the remote site target with the primary site. The primary and secondary site arrays may appear as a single virtual device for presentation to a single host or host cluster. If one of the primary arrays is unavailable, a new Smart DR facility maintains data resiliency by copying data from both primary arrays in a cluster to one remote array.

A new CloudMobility feature enables a PowerMax array to move, via snapshots, data to the public cloud or on-premises object storage for cheaper long-term retention. CloudMobility targets are AWS, Azure and Dell EMC’s ECS object storage system. This is a two-way system and data can be returned to the PowerMax array.  Using a Dell EMC vApp, PowerMax admins can move snapshot data from S3 object storage to Amazon’s elastic block storage (EBS).

Dell EMC has added Thales end-to-end encryption software to PowerMax arrays.

All these new PowerMax features are generally available.

Dell bakes VMware support into VXRail, ObjectScale and PowerProtect systems

By
Chris Mellor
-

Dell Technologies has added a raft of VMware-support across its Cloud Platform, VxRail, ObjectScale and PowerProtect systems.

The updates, announced today at VMworld 2020, include:

  • Cloud Platform and VxRail hyperconverged systems now support the latest VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere, vSphere with Tanzu and vSAN releases. VxRail now supports cloud-native workloads via Tanzu.
  • PowerProtect Data Manager backup has added support for Tanzu, VMware’s software to run containers and virtual machines side-by-side.
  • VMware Cloud on PowerEdge servers now support remote workforces with VMware Horizon virtual desktop software, gets a larger node, new compliance certifications, and supports VMware HCX workload mobility.
  • The new ObjectScale software, directly deployable through vSphere, is available for preview in an early access program.

Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (DTCP) is an integrated VMware Cloud Foundation and VxRail offering, and available with subscription pricing. VMware Cloud Foundation combines vSphere (compute), vSAN (storage), NSX (networking), and vRealize Suite (management).

There is tighter integration between VMware Cloud Director and DTCP, which reduces time to provision and manage multi-tenant cloud environments. According to Dell, cloud service providers can create virtual data centres in minutes and deploy them in seconds.

PowerProtect

PowerProtect Data Manager (PPDM) now protects Tanzu Kubernetes clusters, Kubernetes clusters in vSphere, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated (TKGI) on-premises and in public clouds.

PowerProtect and Tanzu

PPDM admin staff use vSphere workflows to assign data protection policies. PPDM has a new snapshot and data mover feature, to prevent the pausing of a VM during backup, in preview. PowerProtect VM backup stops being disruptive and, when enacted, this will ensure all VMs are protected and active all the time.

1...335336337...446Page 336 of 446

ABOUT US

Blocks & Files is a storage news, information and analysis site covering storage media, devices from drives through arrays to server-based storage, cloud storage, networking and protocols, data management, suppliers and standards. We publish news, views, opinions and analysis of storage industry events and developments, aiming to keep storage users, developers, consultants, marketeers, salespeople, support staff, analysts and everyone else involved in IT storage up to date with what’s going on.

FOLLOW US

© Situation Publishing, 2018-2024