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WD Gold 16TB and 18TB hard drives hit the streets

By
Daniel Robinson
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Western Digital has officially taken the wraps off 16TB and 18TB Gold enterprise-class hard drives. The company is also making Ultrastar 16TB and 18TB versions more widely available and said today a 20TB Ultrastar drive should ship next quarter.

The WD Gold family are conventional magnetic recording (CMR) drive and previously topped out at 14TB. The range is designed for enterprise-class server and storage systems and so carries a five-year warranty. Unlike their Ultrastar counterparts, they feature a SATA interface only.

The 18TB drive data transfer rate is 269MB/s, and the 16TB drive is 262MB/s. Both have 512MB cache buffers. WD Gold drives handle workloads up to 550TB per year, and are rated at up to 2.5M hours MTBF.

Ultrastar DC HC550

WD said today that the Ultrastar DC HC550 is now available for “cloud, large enterprise customers and other data center architects” in 16TB and 18TB capacities. Select hyperscale and enterprise OEM customers have been able to buy the drive since March.

Like the Gold family, the DC HC550 is a CMR drive, but is available with either SATA 6Gb/s or SAS 12Gb/s host interfaces and includes a 512MB cache buffer. According to WD, sustained transfer rates for these models are 257MB/s for the 18TB capacity, and 250MB/s for the 16TB.

WD also has a 20TB Ultrastar disk drive, the DC HC650. This is currently shipping for qualification by OEMs and is expected to become generally available next quarter.

The 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 range are host-managed SMR drives, which means they use shingled magnetic recording in order to deliver their full storage capacity. SMR, recently the cause of much controversy, takes advantage of the fact that disk write heads are wider than read heads to partially overlap tracks as they are written, enabling more tracks to be crammed onto each disk platter.

This complicates matters when blocks have to be rewritten, and so SMR drives are not recommended for random write use cases because the write performance can be unpredictable and much slower in comparison with a CMR drive.

Host-managed SMR means that all the complexity is handled by software in the host system rather than the drive itself. This means such drives must be used in systems or with applications that can manage them.

JBODs

WD today also updated its Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 JBODs, plus the Serv60+8 storage server with the enterprise-class 16TB and 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 hard drives. Ultrastar platforms with upgrades that support the Ultrastar DC HC650 20TB SMR drives are expected to follow next quarter.

The Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 JBODs have up to 24 drive slots and are described as key elements of next-generation disaggregated storage and software-defined storage, while the Ultrastar Serv60+8 is a high-capacity hybrid storage server. Both lines are targeted at enterprise customers, OEMs, cloud service providers and integrators that require dense, shared HDD or hybrid storage.

OwnBackup scores $50m to grow SaaS backup tools

By
Daniel Robinson
-

OwnBackup, the specialist third-party backup app for Salesforce, has bagged $50m in a funding round led by Insight Partners. Salesforce’s investment arm also joined in. Total funding to date stands at “over $100m”.

OwnBackup’s platform integrates with Salesforce to backup data, metadata, and attachments stored in Salesforce. With the funds raised today, the company aims to expand its backup, recovery, archiving, and sandbox seeding services into a unified solution for all corporate data across a variety of SaaS apps.

Co-founder Ori Yankelev told us in April that the company was considering adding Workday to its backup coverage.

OwnBackup focuses on building a platform that integrates with leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) clouds solutions to protect customer data from loss, regardless of whether the cause is human error, accidental deletion, data corruption, or malicious employees.

The firm said its mission is to provide enterprise CIOs with a single pane of glass from where they can backup, protect, and analyse mission-critical SaaS data.

The startup was founded in 2015 and claims 2,000 customers globally, with recent benchmarks including 100 per cent annual revenue growth accomplished two years in a row.

Amazon adds on-premises RDS database support to AWS Outposts

By
Daniel Robinson
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Amazon’s AWS Outposts has been updated to allow customers of the cloud-in-a-box to create and operate instances of the RDS relational database service on their own premises.

AWS Outposts enables customers to run a range of AWS services locally. The service launched in December 2019 and comprises a fully managed infrastructure package made up of racks of AWS compute and storage.

As Blocks & Files reported at the time, this tight coupling with the AWS public cloud is a different approach to delivering an on-premises cloud than taken by Dell EMC and other converged infrastructure rack vendors. However, it is similar to offerings such as Oracle’s Cloud@Customer and Microsoft’s Azure Stack, both companies that operate public cloud services but have learned from enterprise customers that there are some workloads they are not prepared to move out of their own data centre.

From today, customers that have deployed AWS Outposts can create and operate RDS DB Instances on the platform, for applications that are latency-sensitive and need to be in close proximity to on-premises assets. Current support only extends to MySQL and PostgreSQL, but Amazon said it will add more database engines in the future.

Announcing the update on the AWS blog, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr said customers have access to key RDS features such as scheduled backups to Amazon S3 storage, built-in encryption at rest and in transit. Bu, he counselled, there are some important things to bear in mind.

For instance, a management fee is charged on an hourly basis for each database that is managed. Pricing starts at $0.075 per hour for a MySQL instance with two virtual CPUs and 8 GiB of memory. Full pricing details are published on the RDS on Outposts page.

Customers cannot make use of read replicas or create highly available clusters, but they can make use of point-in-time recovery, scale instances up and down, and automatic minor version upgrades work as expected, according to Barr.

Storage used for RDS DB instances is encrypted with keys under the AWS Key Management Service (KMS), as are DB snapshots. Automated backups are stored in the AWS region and they can be used to create a fresh DB Instance in the cloud or in a customer’s Outposts. Manual snapshots are also stored in the AWS region, and can be used to create a fresh DB Instance on the same Outpost.

Afi touts resilience and replication for K8s container workloads

By
Daniel Robinson
-

Afi, a cloud data management firm, has released a cloud-based replication and resilience service specifically tailored to provide high availability for containerised applications and services.

Available today, the Afi Data Platform monitors, protects and recovers containerised workloads in Kubernetes. It currently supports applications running on Azure or Google Cloud.

Replicating a complete containerised workload is likely to be more complex than a traditional three-tier enterprise application because of its distributed nature. Also, various capabilities such as persistent storage were not originally part of container architectures and may be delivered through Kubernetes plug-ins or other additional services.

According to the company, the Afi Data Platform uses AI techniques to analyse the target application and its environment, and also to predict potential downtime and abnormalities in the application components.

Analysing involves scanning the application components to identify storage resources, application pods, namespaces and the Kubernetes cluster configuration. An AI engine distinguishes between different types of container workloads such as databases, application servers, load balancers and detect stateful containers.

This information is used to create an equivalent Kubernetes configuration and replicate the primary application instance to a secondary location. Afi claims that its platform can maintain a replication delay of under 15 seconds, using tools native to Azure and GCP combined with proprietary in-line deduplication.

Once the replica application infrastructure is up and running, the Afi Data Platform’s AI-based engine monitors the primary application for abnormalities. The aim here is to spot potential downtime, execute a failover and recover application data in case of a service disruption.

Afi Data Platform is designed to protect cloud-native workloads and legacy applications – the latter often comprises monolithic code that is moved into containers without proper refactoring. Such applications are typically stateful, in that they hold data inside the containers’ ephemeral storage rather than persistent shared storage, which runs the risk of data loss.

However, even cloud-native applications designed for Kubernetes may still suffer from misconfiguration, system failures or malware, according to Afi, so the ability to roll-back changes to applications is required. Afi said its software simplifies this process and reduces recovery times from days or hours to minutes or seconds.

Container-based enterprise workloads are a growing market, according to Afi, which cites IDC forecasts that container instances will grow at a 163 per cent CAGR from 2020 to 2023 and will exceed 1.9 billion. More than a quarter will be being stateful containers.

Software-defined storage: It’s a Thing

By
Daniel Robinson
-

The global software-defined storage market is expected to grow by $42.79 billion over the next four years, according to Technavio.

The UK market research firm forecasts the market will grow 27.45 per cent during 2020, despite the disruption of Covid-19 and its associated shutdowns. It believes that the market will have fully normalised by Q3 2021, or by Q1 2022 at the latest.

Technavio cites the adoption of hyperconverged platforms is cited by as one reason for the growth. With hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), enterprises can avoid dependency on multiple storage, compute and networking systems because all three are combined into a virtualized platform. This delivers simplified management and also means that customers have a single vendor to call upon for support.

North America led the software-defined storage market in 2019, followed by APAC, Europe, South America, then the Middle East and Africa. Between now and 2024, North America will experience the highest incremental growth, owing to factors such as increasing demand from enterprises, and the adoption of advanced technologies, such as the expected uptake of 5G networks.

Cloud adoption is another driver for software-defined storage. As enterprises continue to invest in cloud services, this increases the demand for software-defined storage as it simplifies storage management, according to Technavio, and addresses data management challenges in cloud computing.

However, as a Blocks & Files noted last month, while IDC figures show that while demand for converged system is holding up, there is no clear sign of HCI sales eating into the sales of existing external storage platforms.

Slowing growth in NAND shipments follows Covid-19 impact on smartphones

By
Daniel Robinson
-

Falling sales of smartphones in the first months of the pandemic has in turn slowed NAND flash shipment growth. Ssmartphones account for 35-40 per cent of NAND flash consumption.

As noted in a story by The Register and by analysts, smartphone sales suffered “the largest year-over-year decline” in Q1 2020, due in part to consumers being unable or unwilling to visit retail stores and purchase new devices. Also, many of the factories in Asia making components were forced to halt production.

The effect on NAND flash bit growth was disclosed in a note from Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers, who put some figures to the slowdown. In May, growth slowed to eight per cent year-on-year, down from 12 per cent year-on-year for April and 49 per cent growth for the first quarter of the year.

“While we maintain a positive view on industry discipline on supply vs. demand, we believe the slowdown in bit growth could be an incremental negative data point – albeit backwards looking and possibly reflective of the lagging impact of smartphone production slowdowns amid Covid,” Rakers stated.

On a quarterly basis, the total NAND flash bit growth was up 22 per cent year-on-year, but this compares to 64 per cent, 49 per cent and 34 per cent for the same figures covering the three months ending February, March, and April.

The effect on average selling prices has been an increase of 28.5 per cent year-on-year in May 2020, compared with 13 per cent in April and a decline in pricing of 7.5 per cent for the first quarter of the year.

However, as always, this trend should reverse again when demand for smartphones and other devices starts to pick up.

DRAM shipments have also experienced a decline, although presenting a slightly different picture to flash. Capacity shipped in May showed a growth of 20 per cent year-on-year, with the trailing three-monthly figures at 38 per cent, compared with 55 per cent, 43 per cent, and 45.5 per cent for the three-month periods ending February, March, and April.

Blended DRAM average selling prices were down 14 per cent year-on-year for May 2020, which compares to decreases of 40 per cent, 33 per cent, and 20 per cent for February, March, and April. According to Rakers, pricing is stabilising and bit growth remains positive.

“We think the May 2020 DRAM billings, shipment, and implied ASP ($/GB) will be viewed as a net neutral incremental data point,” he commented.

This week in storage with Actifio vs.Rubrik… and more

By
Chris Mellor
-

So, Rubrik is getting sued again – this time by Actifio. Druva is on a roll as business booms, and we have lots of data storage titbits for your delectation in this week’s digest.

Actifio sues Rubrik

Copy data manager Actifio is suing Rubrik for patent infringement, alleging the competitor has infringed and continues to infringe at least one claim of each of U.S. Patents 6,732,244; 6,959,369; 9,495,435; and 10,013,313. These relate to relating to copy data management technologies and it wants injunctive relief and monetary damages.

The patent subjects are:

  • 6,732,244 –  Instant Visual Copy Technique with Expedited Creation of Backup Dataset Inventory from Source Dataset Inventory
  • 6,959,369 – Method, system, and program for data backup
  • 9,495,435 – System and method for intelligent database backup
  • 10,013,313 – Integrated database and log backup

This will give Rubrik’s legal department another potentially long-running case to defend. Commvault filed a patent infringement suit agains Rubrik and Cohesity in April.

Druva drums up lots of business

Druva, the endpoint, data centre and SaaS backup startup, has boasted of its most successful year to date, with a 70 per cent recurring revenue increase for data centre protection software, and 50 per cent growth in overall data under management.

Druva claims it is the largest and most trusted company delivering SaaS-based data protection. 

CEO and founder Jaspreet Singh issued a quote: “The spring of 2020 will be forever remembered as the inflection point of the cloud era, when years of planning and discussion transformed into action and massive migration efforts nearly overnight.”

The company claims more than 4,000 customers and reckons they have performed over 1.5 billion backups in the last 12 months. Druva aims to grow faster still this year and is prepping various product enhancements.

Shorts

Actifio has launched backup and disaster recovery services for Google Cloud’s Bare Metal Solution (BMS). It supports on-premises Oracle workloads, migration from on-premises and-or other clouds to Google Cloud, and rapid database cloning in BMS to accelerate testing.

SaaS backup provider Cobalt Iron has introduced multi-tenancy capabilities for the virtual tape library (VTL) ingest feature of Compass, its enterprise SaaS backup system. These make Compass the first enterprise SaaS backup solution to provide multi-tenancy at tape ingest, according to the company.

Couchbase has announced the general availability of Couchbase Cloud, its database-as-a-service. This is available initially on AWS, and support is slated for Azure and Google Cloud by year-end.

DDN Tintri has formed a partnership with DP Facilities, a data centre firm, to deliver integrated VDI systems. This combines VDI-optimised storage with colocation services within DP Facilities’ secure Wise, VA, data centre.

Nasuni‘s cloud file services platform is now available for purchase in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

UC San Diego Center for Microbiome Innovation (CMI) has bought an additional 2PB of ActiveStor capacity to add to its Panasas installation. This will help support the organisation’s Covid-19 research studies. A case study document provides more information.

Cinesite Studios, a global producer of special effects and feature animation, has chosen Qumulo’s file software to support its rendering workloads. Cinesite uses Qumulo across multiple AWS Availability Zones, supporting artists and staff dispersed geographically. Qumulo replicates data between on-premises and AWS.

Object storage supplier Scality has announced its founder status and membership of SODA Foundation, an open source community under the Linux Foundation umbrella. Scality joins Fujitsu, IBM, Sony and others to figure out data management across multiple clouds, edge and core environments for end users.

SK hynix has started mass-production of high-speed DRAM, HBM2E, which supports over 460GB/s with 1,024 I/Os based on 3.6Gbit/s performance per pin. It is the fastest DRAM in the industry, SK hynix, able to transmit 124 full-HD movies (3.7GB each) per second. The density is 16GB by vertically stacking eight 16Gb chips through TSV (Through Silicon Via) technology, and it is more than doubled from the previous generation HBM2.

WANdisco has signed a deal worth up to $1m initially with a major British supermarket for its replication software. In addition, it reports strong uptake for the Group’s Azure Cloud product, with 11 companies registered in the first month of public preview.

Yellowbrick Data has announced the general availability of the Cloud Disaster Recovery service, and new database replication and enhanced backup and restore features. These support backups at near-line speed, allow for incremental backups, and provide transactional consistency (ACID) of restored data. They also enable the automation of backup and restore operations without intermediate storage.

Zadara Storage, which supplies on-premises SAN arrays as a service, is claiming record growth. No hard numbers, as is the way with privately-held US startups, but the company said gross profits increased 93 per cent y/y and that it has delivered 17 consecutive quarters of recurring revenue growth. New customer accounts grew over 100 per cent y/y – as did its global partner network.

People

Hitachi Vantara announced a new CEO, Gajen Kandiah, who replacies current CEO, Toshiaki Tokunaga, effective July 13, 2020. Tokunaga will transition responsibilities to Kandiah through Oct. 1, 2020, after which he’ll remain as chairman of the Board for Hitachi Vantara, and also take an expanded role for Hitachi Ltd’s Services and Platform Business Unit in Japan. Kandiah recently spent 15 years with Cognizant, where he helped grow the company from $368m in annual revenues to more than $16bn.

Kaminario CTO Eyal David is now ex-Kaminario as he has resigned and is joining Model9, a startup replacing mainframe tape and VTL systems with object storage in the cloud.

Qumulo has appointed Adriana Gil Miner as its CMO. She joins from Tableau where she was SVP of Brand, Communications and Events. It’s a year since the previous Qumulo CMO, Peter Zaballos, left.

Zadara has appointed Tim DaRosa as Chief Marketing Officer. He comes from being SVP of global marketing for HackerOne, where helped build brand awareness and go-to-market strategies that propelled the Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity business to record growth over the past four years.

Pure pushes past IBM for top three place in all-flash array market

By
Chris Mellor
-

Pure Storage has overtaken IBM for the third slot in Gartner’s revenue league table for the first quarter. Dell EMC and NetApp maintain first and second places and IBM drops to fourth, followed by HPE, Hitachi Vantara and Huawei.

However, we note that Q1 is a seaonal low point for IBM which has duked it out for third place with Pure Storage for several quarters. It will take a few more quarters to see if this represents a permanent changing of the guard,

Selected Gartner numbers and a chart were revealed by Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers, in a mail to subscribers. Here is the chart:

Rakers’ storage market data comes from a Gartner external storage market report for the first 2020 quarter. He provided certain vendor all-flash array (AFA) market share percentages, a NetApp revenue amount, the share of the external storage market taken by AFAs and other segment percentages, from which we’ve been able to calculate vendor revenues.

AFA vendor shares:

  • Dell EMC – 34.8 per cent (calculated $766m) vs 33.7 per cent a year ago
  • NetApp – 19.3 per cent at $425m vs 26.7 per cent a year ago
  • Pure Storage – 12.7 per cent at calculated $279.7m vs 10.1 per cent a year ago
  • HPE – 8.4 per cent – $185m vs 10 per cent a year ago
  • Others – 24.8 per cent – $546m – meaning IBM, Hitachi V, Huawei, Fujitsu, etc.

Total AFA revenues are 44.9 per cent of the total external storage market vs 46.8 per cent a year ago.

We calculate total AFA revenues of $2.2bn for the quarter and the total external storage market at $4.9bn. Gartner said total external storage market revenues declined eight per cent y/y, with AFA revenues falling 12 per cent and HDD and hybrid storage revenues declining 5.1 per cent.

Rakers has also provided some more detailed vendor information. Dell EMC external storage revenues declined 11 per cent y/y and capacity shipped went down three per cent. AFA revenues shrank nine per cent.

Pure Storage revenues rose 10 per cent y/y and grew market share to 12.7 per cent. FlashBlade revenue was up 33 per cent and accounts for about 19 per cent of Pure’s AFA revenue vs 13 per cent a year ago. FlashArray revenue rose 12.8 per cent and accounts for 80 per cent of Pure’s AFA revenue vs a calculated 87 per cent a year ago.

NetApp external storage revenues went downhill 16 per cent y/y. AFA revenue fell 16.4 per cent and there was a 21 per cent decline in FAS revenue. However, total HDD/hybrid revenue rose an impressive 62 per cent.

HPE external storage revenues declined 19 per cent y/y, with AFA revenue slumping 26 per cent and HDD/hybrid revenue falling 14 per cent.

Igneous CEO hands over reins to storage industry vet

By
Chris Mellor
-

Igneous co-founder Kiran Bhageshpur has relinquished his CEO spot while retaining a seat on the board. His replacement is Dean Darwin, a data storage industry veteran and fellow board member. Meanwhile Christian Smith, VP Products, has left the company for a business development role at AWS.

Igneous has developed a UDMaaS (Unstructured Data Management as a Service) and offers petabyte-scale unstructured data backup, archive and storage system with a public cloud backend. The startup sells DataDiscover and DataProtect services under the UDMaaS umbrella.

Blocks & Files diagram showing Igneous’ UDMaaS concept

Go to market

Kiran Bhageshpur

Bhageshpur has written a blog in which he says: “Over the last few months, the opportunity to step back from my role as the CEO of Igneous presented itself and I took it!” 

He will spend his free time volunteer work for the coming US elections, supporting candidates and voter registration, and also whitewater kayaking. That looks like an almost retirement.

Dean Darwin

Darwin has run business operations at NetApp, Palo Alto Networks and other firms and is a board adviser to several companies. He told us Kiran had grown the company for seven years and thought it now needed a go-to-market CEO: “So we kind of flipped roles.”

“There’s no change in company strategy [but] we want to tell the story a little better than we had in the past.”

Christian Smith.

We asked about Smith’s departure for Amazon. “Christian spent six years at Igneous and it was time for a change. AWS made him a dynamite offer.” 

The Igneous product management bench under Christian is very strong, Darwin added. Also, “What’s good news for Christian is not bad news for Igneous.” He can spread the need for Igneous-type technology inside AWS.

File population

Igneous finds 70 per cent of its business with Dell EMC Isilon and NetApp customers, Darwin told us. These vendors’ systems can’t cope with huge file populations – “We’re constantly cleaning up after failed SLAs with every single vendor deployment.”

Igneous claims Cohesity, Commvault, Rubrik, Veeam and other data protectors run out of gas as file populations head towards and past a 100PB point and trillions of files. At the end of 2019, the company said it had 40-60 customers, mostly large enterprises – not surprisingly, as few smaller companies handle trillions of files.

Pure Storage ObjectEngine backup is toast

By
Chris Mellor
-

Pure Storage has canned its ObjectEngine backup.

We learnt of this via the cancellation of an archived joint Pure and AWS webinar about ObjectEngine, originally run on May 29, 2019. The webinar provider, ActualTech Media, changed the promo on its website: “PURE ASKED US TO REMOVE THIS – product discontinued-How It Works: Pure Storage ObjectEngine and AWS.”

Ask not for whom the bells toll

The webinar blurb said: “The Pure Storage ObjectEngine platform combines on-premises flash with the AWS cloud to modernise data protection for data-centric enterprises.” During the webinar attendees could find out “how this solution might finally be the real death knell for tape.”

Presumptuous. The bells tolled for ObjectEngine instead. ObjectEngine is not listed on Pure’s product webpage.

We asked Pure if it had canned Object Engine. We were sent this statement:

“With the knowledge that backup is a favored use case for hybrid and private cloud deployments and enabling backup and restore is a key focus area for Pure, we continue to help our customers improve the efficiency of their data protection workflows and better connect them to the cloud.

“Today, we are working with select data protection partners, which we see as a more cohesive path to enhancing those solutions with native high performance and cloud-connected fast file and object storage to satisfy the needs in the market.”  

That’s a “yes”, then.

ObitEngine

Pure launched the ObjectEngine appliance in February last year. It used variable-length deduplication technology from StorReduce, a company that Pure acquired in August 2018.

The dedupe software runs on ObjectEngine//A hardware, with a FlashBlade as the underlying storage array, and in ObjectEngine//Cloud instances running in AWS.

ObjectEngine hardware: a 4-node, twin box OE//A270 with single FlashBlade backend box underneath. In effect, two dedupe servers feed reduced data to FlashBlade, and also rehydrate it.

Update: webinar date and status corrected; 3 July 2020.

VMware fleshes out DRaaS with Datrium acquisition

By
Chris Mellor
-

VMware is buying Datrium, an HCI startup that pivoted to disaster recovery in the cloud, for an undisclosed amount.

But the fact that the company revealed the acquisition via a blog shows that VMware does not consider this to be a material acquisition.

John Gilmartin, VMware’s VP and GM of its SDDC Suite business unit, said in the blog: “VMware has announced its intent to acquire Datrium, to expand the current VMware Site Recovery disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offering with Datrium’s world-class cost-optimized DRaaS solution.”

VMware will combine “the consistent infrastructure and operations of VMware Cloud with Datrium DRaaS to reduce the cost and complexity of business continuity”.

The $4.5bn DRaaS market is the fastest growing segment for data protection use cases, Gilmartin notes, growing at 15 per cent CAGR according to IDC’s Worldwide Data Protection as a Service Forecast for 2019–2023.

He added: “After the deal closes, the Datrium disaster recovery (DR) service will expand on the existing performance-optimised VMware Site Recovery DRaaS solution with a cost-optimised option.” That translates to DR in AWS.

Datrium’s engineering teams will join VMware. The future for other Datrium staff was not revealed.

Background

Datrium was founded in 2012 and has taken in $165m in funding, with the last raise a $60m D-round in 2018.

The company began by developing disaggregated HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) with hyperconverged nodes running storage controller software that linked them to a shared storage box.

As part of that this it devised a way of providing disaster recovery of its on-premises systems to other Datrium systems, and to a Datrium system in the public cloud. This evolved to recovering VMware on-premises applications in the cloud. The software has deep integration with the VMware Cloud in AWS and enables a data centre VMware site to failover to the VMware Cloud on AWS.

Datrium DR in AWS scheme for on-premises VMware systems.

Datrium marketed this as a way to defeat ransomware, seeing it as a killer app.

Diamanti smooths out the multi-cloud Kubernetes rough

By
Chris Mellor
-

Diamanti, a hyperconverged appliance startup, has updated its Spektra management software to allow customers to deploy, replicate, and migrate Kubernetes-orchestrated applications across bare metal and public cloud infrastructures.

Diamanti CEO Tom Barton declared in a canned quote: “Our cloud-neutral Kubernetes management platform provides users the ability to make real-time, data-driven decisions, enable access to applications, and maintain data security across the data centre, cloud, and at the edge.”

Spektra 3.0 sits above Kubernetes, providing hybrid cloud data management to integrate on-premises Diamanti D20 hyperconverged clusters with the AWS, Azure and Google clouds.

Diamanti Spektra multi-tenant admin

Cloud-native apps will be mobile

According to 451 Research, stateful applications like databases, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) now make up a majority of containerised applications in the enterprise. Diamanti thinks enterprises will need to move these workloads for cost-optimisation, disaster recovery and geographic expansion. 

Jay Lyman, principal analyst of cloud native and DevOps at 451 Research, said: “The more applications that are in containers – regardless of state – the more likely the organisation is to be truly agile and flexible in responding to challenges and opportunities.”

“Given that enterprises are seeking to containerise more applications, including stateful ones, we expect continued growth of data-rich applications and services in containers, as well as expanded use of data services in container applications.”

With Diamanti Spektra 3.0, users can provision and administer Kubernetes clusters hosted on-premises in the data centre or at the edge or in the cloud, and manage them from a single control plane. New features include improved resource management and access controls, application deployment and migration across multiple clusters, and policy-based replication for disaster recovery.

‘Full-stack visibility’

Diamanti said its full-stack visibility supports the multi-site DR and application migration, and no other suppliers can do this, not VMware (Tanzu), nor Rancher Labs, Red Hat OpenShift or Docker Enterprise. 

Blocks & Files asked Diamanti how VMware and Rancher compare with this capability.

Diamanti failover preserves application state and data.

A spokesperson replied: “The main method for multi-cluster management today is merely connecting each clusters’ APIs to a central management plane. So while every vendor has the ability to visually see a cluster’s resources with some access control between clusters, the application-level features are limited to essentially ‘restarting; stateless applications in new clusters. 

“That is, the existing solutions rely on powering up containers from a shared or imported image file in a new cluster – without state. There are methods to leverage a third party storage solution to migrate volumes and re-attach them in a new location, but this is a very manual process.”

It’s all integrated with Diamanti so that an application owner can target a migration or set up a DR policy for one of their applications from the same UI where they manage the application.

Diamanti will first add support for Azure followed by AWS, the Google Cloud Platform, and other cloud providers.

The new release of Diamanti Spektra is available on Diamanti D20 hyperconverged infrastructure from Diamanti, Dell or Lenovo. A Diamanti blog provides more information.

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