StorONE CEO Gal Naor today challenged storage array vendors to reveal their prices in public. “Buying an enterprise storage system shouldn’t be as hard as buying a car, but should be as easy as buying a smartphone,” he said.
The software-defined storage startup has built an online configurator with openly available pricing for its TRU (Total Resource Utilisation) S1 software, engineering it for efficiency and speed. The software supports block (Fibre, iSCSI), file (NFS, SMB) and object (S3) use cases and runs on industry standard servers from Dell, HPE and Supermicro.
“S1:TRU price simplifies the storage procurement process,” Naor said. “No more back and forth haggling over solution costs. No more wondering if you would have gotten a better deal at the end of the quarter. S1:TRUprice allows enterprises to get the best pricing, upfront, while also getting the best performance and data resiliency features they need.”
StorONE licenses S1 software in either 1, 3 or 5-year subscriptions. When a user selects a system and confirms purchase, StorONE ships the whole system to the customer for contactless, remote installation and training. And it thinks it has a big price advantage over its rivals.
George Crump, StorONE’s chief marketing officer, said customers “can come to our site, price out their exact solution and compare it to what they are paying now. In most cases, we are confident they will find that the 3-year TCO on our solution will be less than what they are paying for one year of maintenance with their current vendor.”
Playing around with StorONE pricing configurator.
Interested people can trek over to the StorONE website’s pricing section where they can use a three-year TCO pricing configurator without registering their details, and with instant prices as they configure a system’s server, availability, media, capacity and networking cards.
We tried it out. A 736TB high-availability all flash HPE-based system had a $346,318.14 3-year TCO. Changing to a Supermicro server moved the price to $341,860.78. A 1PB standard (not HA) all-disk Supermicro server system would cost $138,36.00. It’s fun playing around with the options and easier to use than the Nimbus Data ExaFlash One pricing configurator, which we also tried out this week.
Will Dell EMC, HPE, Hitachi Vantara, IBM, NetApp and Pure Storage publish their prices? We all know the answer to that.
Update: Media share information added and StorageSphere difference from DataSphere added.
Disk drives will store 54 per cent of the world’s data in 2024, down from 65 per cent in 2019. So says IDC, which has trimmed its 59 per cent forecast from 2018.
The tech research firm thinks core data centres (on-premises and public cloud) will hold 60 per cent of the world’s data in 2024, edge devices will account for less than 10 per cent and endpoint devices will hold about 30 per cent.
The 2024 data storage capacity forecast is revealed in IDC’s latest Global StorageSphere report. IDC analysts estimate the installed base of storage capacity worldwide will grow 16.6 per cent this year to 6.8 zettabytes (ZB). And they reckon the installed base will grow 17.8 per cent CAGR between 2019 and 2024. Our maths says this means an installed base of 11.23ZB in 2024 and 6.06ZB will be stored on disk drives.
John Rydning, IDC’s Research VP, issued a quote: “The volume of data stored in the Global StorageSphere is doubling approximately every four years. While the covid-19 pandemic will hamper economic growth and IT spending, it will have little impact on the expansion of the Global StorageSphere as consumers and organisations are likely to extend the useful life of existing storage capacity to keep up with the demand for storing more data, especially near term.”
Data storage types
IDC looks at storage across six media types: HDDs, SSDs, tape, non-volatile memory – NAND, non-volatile memory – Other, and optical media. A chart from its 2018 study, sponsored by Seagate, shows the share trends from 2010 to 2025 across the six kinds of media:
Update: Rydning supplied us with media share numbers for 2018 and 2024 to provide an indication of how they will change;
HDD – 2018 – 65%, 2024 – 54%
Tape – 2018 – 14%, 2024 – 18%
Other (NAND, et al) – 2018 – 21%, 2024 – 28%
We charted them;
Why is tape increasing its share of the installed base? Rydning told us: “Tape is increasingly being used for archiving data rather than for backups, which increases the length of time tape cartridges are retained before being replaced, thus it stays in the installed base longer.”
StorageSphere and DataSphere
The Global StorageSphere measures the worldwide installed base of storage capacity, and how much of this capacity is utilised or available each year. IDC predicts that the share of utilised storage in the Global StorageSphere installed base is expected to climb seven per cent in 2019 to 67.5 per cent in 2024.
Update: We should be aware that IDC’s DataShere and StorageSphere are different. Rydning clarified the difference: ” IDC’s Global DataSphere is a measure of the amount of data created each year. The Global StorageSphere is a measure of the installed base of storage capacity, and the amount of data stored each year. Some folks tend to use DataSphere metrics as an indicator of demand for storage. The two metrics are definitely related, but it can be misleading to show the growth of the DataSphere as a proxy for the demand for storage capacity.”
READER SURVEY Relational database systems are in many ways the workhorses of IT. But how are they holding up in the modern age?
There are newer types of data stores, such as NoSQL and graph databases, waiting in the wings, capable of handling large and complex datasets your business may accumulate.
Take those, and add in technologies designed to run seamlessly across a hybrid infrastructure – think containers, serverless applications, and cloud-native software – and fast-changing programs built on modern Agile, DevOps and CI/CD principles, and it’s possible your IT infrastructure, and in particular your storage, will be stressed in ways it was never designed for.
The question, then, is what are the best ways to deal with all of this?
For instance, what capabilities are missing from your infrastructure, and what would appropriately modern storage look like to you? How well do others in your organization understand the challenges and the opportunities? In this Register and Blocks & Files reader survey, we want to find what’s really going on.
Click here to take part. Once we have analysed the results, we will report back to you on the state of play.
As usual, your responses will be anonymous and your privacy assured.
Samsung has introduced its first ‘ruler’ SSD and says the new format opens the door to large increases in server flash capacity.
The Samsung PM9A3 SSD uses the E1.S enlarged gumstick format. In a flash-optimised 1U server reference design, 32 x 7.68TB drives fit in the front bays of a 1U server, to give 245.76TB of capacity.
Jongyoul Lee, Samsung SVP for memory software development team, who presented the drive at the OCP Virtual Global Summit on May 12, said: “Offering the most 1U server-optimised form-factor, the PM9A3 will improve space utilisation, add PCIe Gen4 speeds, enable increased capacity and more. We see it eventually becoming the most sought-after storage solution on the market for tier one and tier two cloud data centre servers, and one of the more cost-effective.”
Specifications
The PM9A3 has a PCIe gen 4 interface and uses Samsung’s sixth generation V-NAND with 100+ layers and TLC (3bits/cell) format. Capacities range from 960GB to 7.68TB.
SNIA E1.S diagram
E1.S – S for ‘short’ – is an SNIA-approved variant of the EDSFF or ruler form factor and measures 111.49mmx31.5mm. The current M.2 gumstick format is 110.0mm long by 30.5mm wide. According to Intel, the E1.S design is said to be three times more thermally efficient than U.2 (2.5-inch) form factor SSDs. It is also hot-pluggable.
The E1.L – L for ‘long’ – form factor measures 318.75mm x 38.4mm wide. The greater surface area cand hold three to four times as many flash chips – potentially 30.7TB per drive and 983TB in a 1U server. Intel says the E1.L is twice as thermally efficient as U.2 drives.
Supermicro U.2, M.2, E1.S and E1.L diagram
Samsung is making the PM9A3 available in E1.S, M.2 and U.2 formats. E1.S and U.2 performance is: 900,000/180,000 random read/write IOPS, up to 6.5GB/sec sequential reads and 3.5GB/sec sequential writes.
It is slower in the M.2 form factor, reflecting the PCIe gen 3 and gen 4 speed difference; 500,000/70,000 random read/write IOPS, up to 3.5GB/sec sequential reads and 1.75GB/sec sequential writes.
E1.S reference design
Samsung is open sourcing an E1.S platform reference design to help data centre managers adopt and deploy the E1.S-based storage system. An Inspur-built reference system is available.
Blocks & Files thinks Intel, Kioxia, Micron, SK hynix and Western Digital will have E1.S designs in their pockets and bring them to market this year and next. The E1.L format will enable a bigger jump in 1U server capacity than E1.S, but adoption may be held back by concerns about the effects of drive failure. A drive crash would put more data at risk, increasing the so-called failure blast radius.
Commvault, the data management vendor, missed analyst revenue estimates for the fourth quarter ended March 31, citing the effects of covid-19.
Revenues fell nine per cent to $164.7m. Full fy2020 revenues were down six per cent to $670.9m and net loss was $5.6m (2019: $3.6m net income).
CEO Sanjay Mirchandani expressed confidence in the “long-term opportunities for the company, our strategy, and our return to profitable growth. Our products are mission critical; our large enterprise customer base remains strong; and our employees are resilient.
“All of this, when combined with our financial stability, will enable us to weather these challenges and continue to deliver industry-leading solutions to our customers.”
Steep Q4 fy2020 revenue decline due to Coronavirus pandemic.
Software and products revenue in Q4 was $66.4m, down 18 per cent. Services revenue in the quarter declined two per cent to $98.3m. For the full year, software and products revenue was $275.3m, a decrease of 11 per cent, and services revenue eased one per cent to $395.6m.
The quarter’s operating cash flow was $32.5m, down a tad from the year-ago $36.6m. Full year operating cash flow was $88.5m, down a tad more from fy2019’s $110.2m. Total cash, restricted cash and short-term investments were $339.7 million at quarter end.
In the earnings call Mirchandani said the company experienced a “decline in the volume of smaller portfolio transactions, due to – likely due to this SMB customers that may be disproportionately challenged. Additionally, we believe customers may differ routine capacity add-ons until economic conditions … begin to stabilise. Even with the mission critical nature of our products, we expect new customer signings to remain challenged, because they require a higher touch sales process.”
Growing pains
Mirchandani joined Commvault just over a year ago, with the remit to return the company to growth impatient for growth. In the earnings call he said: “I joined Commvault with a commitment to return the company to responsible growth and this continues to be our number one priority.” He is convinced Commvault will weather the storm and succeed in the long run.
However, the company has reported three declining quarters in a row and it has the additional complication of having to deal with the activist investor Starboard Management, which sank its claws into the company last month.
Mirchandani said: “We’ve had a number of constructive conversations with [Starboard] …And I think … their expectations and their wants are the same as ours. We’re aligned in terms of the long-term shareholder value and a balanced growth profile for the business and we’re excited
Comment on subscriptions
Commvault is experiencing a triple whammy: a prolonged switch from perpetual licenses to subscriptions; a switch from on-premises to SaaS-delivered services; and intensified competition, led by Veeam, Cohesity and Rubrik. Earlier this month it sued Cohesty and Rubrik for patent infringement.
Mirchandani is bullish about the switch to recurring revenue from subscriptions: “They are [a] growth driver for us in fiscal year 2021. In Q4, we added approximately150 subscription customers and revenues now represent over 40 per cent of our software and product revenue. With fiscal year 2021 as our first full renewal cycle, we are focused on this opportunity.”
Commvault started its move to subscriptions in 2018, with three-year contracts. These come up for renewal in the current fiscal year, fy2021. Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers told subscribers: “Commvault’s shift to subscription (now around 40 per cent plus of software revenue) has been a headwind on top-line revenue growth given the pricing difference vs. traditional perpetual licenses.”
He added: “The company estimates $50m of software renewal opportunity for fy2021 – mostly weighted to 2H fy2021; company noting conservatism at this point on upsell opportunity.”
In other words the next quarter and the one after that may still show revenue decline but then, at long last, revenues could increase and go on increasing: “We think Commvault’s ability to sustain an approximate 90 per cent subscription renewal rate, coupled with upsell opportunities … should be viewed as positive growth drivers into 2021 plus.”
CFO Brian Carolan said next quarter’s revenue outlook is $150m to $155m, a six per cent decline from a year ago at the $152.5m mid-point. He said: “Our revenue outlook is underpinned by the successful renewal of two of our largest subscription customers. These renewals were signed in Q4 before their contract expirations and will represent combined software revenue of approximately $10m in Q1, FY 2021. We are working diligently to exceed our guidance and to deliver year-over-year software revenue growth.”
Saganworks, a US startup, aims to revitalise file:folder user interfaces with virtual reality rooms that create a memory or mindmap of user files.
The thinking is that storing files in a 3D space makes finding them easier than storing them in lists in a 2D space such as on a computer desktop. This is analgous to mind mapping, as Shanley Carlton, Saganworks QA testing and customer support manager, explains.
Users navigate the VR rooms with arrow key functions with file or folder objects stored on make-believe tables, bookshelves or the walls and double click on objects to open them. Files – documents, pictures, spreadsheets, etc. – or folders are dragged into the rooms and dropped where you want them placed.
CEO Donald Hicks issued a canned quote: “We don’t live in a 2D world, yet that’s how we’ve been retaining knowledge and memories from the time of early cave dwellers until now. Human interaction is due for innovation. We can do that by giving people tools to store their memories, work and interests in a 3D space that they can create and relate to.”
Sagan stands for Spatially Accessible Gallery of Archived kNowledge and is a tribute to Carl Sagan, the celebrated American astronomer. User rooms – or ‘Sagans’ – are stored in Azure and delivered as a service. The video below shows the software in action:
There are sample free, individual and various advanced pricing plans with a range of features. Individual pricing is $59.99 per year and gives you unlimited rooms, 80GB of storage, sharing, room furniture, and unlimited community access. Family access is coming shortly. Business plans exist but pricing details are not public. Saganworks apps run on IOS and Android smartphones and tablets.
Saganworks was founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan by Hicks, the co-founder and CEO at LLamasoft, a venture-backed supply chain software startup, which was sold in 2017 to a private equity consortium. LLamasoft had $55m revenue in 2016 and more than 700 customers.
Micron has updated its NVMe SSD product range with two 2TB devices – one using TLC flash memory and the other using QLC.
The 2210 uses 96-layer QLC flash and the 2300 has 96-layer TLC NAND. They sit above the 1300 and 2200 client SSDs in Micron’s portfolio and the company is pitching the drives as desktop and notebook disk drive replacements. It claims they are up to 15 times more power efficient than similar capacity disk drives.
Both devices are single-sided M.2 format and have SLC write caches (which Micron brands ‘Dynamic Write Acceleration’). The SLC caching means the random write IOPS performance is better than the read performance.
The 2210 is effectively a QLC makeover for the 2200, which uses 64-layer TLC flash and tops out at 1TB in its single-sided M.2 form factor.
The 2210 handles up to 265,000/320,000 random read and write IOPS and has up to 2.2 GB/sec sequential read and 1.8 GB/sec write bandwidth.
The 2300 benefits from TLC flash’s faster access speed to deliver up to 430,000/500,000 random read/write IOPS and up to 3.3/2.7 sequential read/write bandwidth in GB/sec terms. TLC flash also has greater endurance – a longer working life – than QLC. At the 2TB capacity level the 2210 has a 720TB-written rating and the 2300 has a written rating of 1,200TB.
Both drives have two million hours MTBF rating and support TCG Opal 2.0 and Pyrite 2.0 for security You can check out a 2210 and a 2300 product brief. Both products are available now but we don’t have pricing information. Micron’s announcement does talk about offering flash capabilities at hard disk drive-like price points.
Scale Computing, the hyperconverged infrastructure supplier, has launched the HC3250D, an all-NVMe data centre system for performance-centric database, analytics and VDI work.
Dave Demlow, Scale VP of product management, said in a statement: “Both persistent and non-persistent VDI workloads thrive on the newly redesigned underlying storage layer, which is created to maximise performance. With the new pressure on IT to enable remote work whenever necessary, this appliance is an excellent foundation for VDI deployments from a several hundred users to a few thousand.”
Steve McDowell, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, supplied a canned quote: “Enterprise and SMB customers have a need for an HCI solution that can service larger databases, mid-range VDI, and other performance-intensive use cases.”
The HC3250D is the first model in the HC3000 Series and operates in enterprise and SMB data centres and also at rack-equipped remote and branch office and edge sites. Its NVMe storage architecture requires no manual configuration and consumes less system RAM, according to Scale, which means more RAM is made available to virtual machines and their applications.
The HC3250D has more CPU power, faster networking and speedier storage than its HCxxxx sisters. This HC3000 Series sits between the HC1000 entry-level data centre appliances and the high-end HC5000 appliances.
A comparison with the HC1000 and HC5000 shows the HC3250D is the only product in Scale’s HCxxxx range going above 10gigabit Ethernet, with its support of 2 x 25GbitE links. It has the same 128GB to 1538GB memory range as the HC5250D. Also the HC3250D is the only Scale data centre product with all-NVMe SSD storage – up to 76.8TB raw capacity in its 1U cabinet. Other models use slower access SDS and/or nearline disk drives.
HC3250D in minimum cluster configuration of 3 appliances.
All Scale system run HyperCore OS, with applications running in KVM virtual machines and accessing ‘Scribe’ storage resources. They feature intelligent automation for self-healing and high availability to keep clusters running through component and appliance failures. Scale supplies integrated disaster recovery capabilities to protect data and workloads to remote sites for fast failover and recovery.
Recently HPE boosted its SimpliVity 325 HCI system for VDI use by giving it dual AMD EPYC 7002 processors. The SimpliVity 325, 1U in size, has more memory than Scale’s HC3250D, at 2,048GB, but slower networking, with only 1 and 10GbitE. It also has less storage; up to 6 x 1.92TB SSDs, understood to be SAS interface drives.
Scale had not released HC3250D pricing and availability details, at time of publication.
StorageOS, a UK startup, has released version 2 of its eponymous software, which effectively reinvents virtual SANs for containers.
Alex Chircop, CEO, said StorageOS 2 delivers production grade storage in increasingly complex large clustered Kubernetes deployments.
According to StorageOS, traditional storage arrays cannot handle the complexity of clustered deployments at scale. “Kubernetes users working with increasingly complex deployments require storage that delivers predictability for replication and failover,” Chirchop said in a statement. “Users are also deploying more mature Kubernetes environments resulting in a need for production-grade storage.”
StorageOS was founded by three storage-skilled execs at major financial institutions and a fourth exec who was involved enterprise storage. Such institutions are customers for mainstream enterprise storage arrays, virtually all of which have CSI plug-ins for Kubernetes – meaning they can provide storage for containers. Such institutions will also have much experience of VMware and knowledge of VSAN.
The companysaid paying customers include financial services and life sciences firms and service providers, which have made more than 3000 cluster installs since releasing the first version of its product.
StorageOS architecture
StorageOS aggregates the local disk storage in a cluster of servers (nodes) into a one or more virtual block storage pools. The cluster can be a traditional cluster or a hyperconverged system or a set of several clusters. The multi-cluster scenarios we can envisage include topologies such as a centralised storage cluster with satellites consuming the storage, and data replicated between the clusters for high-availability and disaster recovery
There must be a minimum of three nodes in the cluster. Storage in the pool is carved out into thinly provisioned virtual volumes. Each node has a storage container in which StorageOS is deployed. Application containers in the nodes mount and access these virtual volumes via the storage container.
Blocks & Files diagram of StorageOS’ architecture. Disk drives can also be SSDs ad it’s optimised for NVMe SSDs
Any container can mount a StorageOS virtual volume on any node, regardless of whether the container and volume are colocated on the same node or if the volume is remote. Applications may be started or restarted on any node and access volumes transparently, meaning on another nodes physical storage. Volumes are cached in DRAM to improve read performance and compressed to reduce network traffic.
This is, in effect, a virtual SAN set up expressly for containers. It has a control plane to set it up and maintain operation. The containers perform their storage IO, using a data plane.
StorageOS runs on physical servers, virtualized servers or in the public cloud. It interoperates with Kubernetes, OpenShift, Amazon EKS, Azure EKS, Rancher and Docker. A StorageOS cluster will typically map one-to-one to a Kubernetes or similar orchestrator cluster.
The StorageOS container runs on all nodes in the cluster where app containers need to consume storage. The etcd distributed key:value store is used to to maintain state and manage distributed consensus between nodes. This helps in recovery from node failure.
StorageOS V2.0
Storage OS V2.0 improves four aspects of the software. General performance has been accelerated and recovery time from a failure has been reduced. Synchronous replication has been added for high-availability, supporting up to five replicas of a primary volume.
Resiliency has been strengthened in large clustered environments that may experience more transient failures. A Delta Sync feature reduces the time to recovery on transient failures, allowing faster cluster convergence by only replicating the missed data to the node. It is designed to cope with unpredictable failure scenarios.
Also the StorageOS container runs like any other application, with no dependencies on proprietary kernels, storage protocols or other layered services meaning customers don’t suffer from these kinds of lock-in.
V2.0 is designed to enable security at every layer of the stack, improving security with encryption in transit. Traffic between nodes is encrypted and authenticated.
A free developer edition of StorageOS V2.0 with 5TB is available and users can upgrade to Project and Platform editions for enterprise capabilities and comprehensive product support.
Competition
Blocks and Files asked StorageOS about competing products from Portworx, Kasten, Diamanti and mainstream storage array providers.
B&F: How is StorageOS better than/different from Portworx?
StorageOS: StorageOS differentiates itself in the market through a number of features:
Disaggregated Consensus for volume management – each StorageOS volume has a “mini-brain” capable of managing recovery and placement independently, effectively reducing the blast radius of any component failure. This enables the highest levels of reliability for clusters at scale by distributing redundancy whilst improving the bandwidth and lowering latency for deterministic performance.
Delta Sync – reduces the time to recovery on transient failures, allowing rapid cluster convergence by only replicating the missed data to the node
Runs Anywhere – deployed as a container, all data services are optimized and integrated inline to the StorageOS data plane ensuring the lowest resource overhead and low latency performance. The StorageOS container runs like any other application, with no dependencies on proprietary kernels, storage protocols or other layered services.
Secure by default – StorageOS enables security at every layer of the stack with automated certificate management, secure endpoints and encryption of data between nodes.
B&F: How is StorageOS better than/different from Kasten?
StorageOS: StorageOS and Kasten are complementary and provide different services.
StorageOS is a software defined, cloud native storage platform, providing automation and self-service via a control plane and data services (such as replication, compression, encryption) through a data plane. Kasten is a data management product, providing, for example, backup and restore services that layer on top of other storage solutions.
B&F: How is StorageOS better than/different from Diamanti?
StorageOS: StorageOS is a software-only solution and has no dependencies on hardware. Diamanti has a special focus on providing Kubernetes solutions in a hardware appliance form factor.
B&F: If I have a storage array with a CSI plugin (e.g. Infinidat) or strong Kubernetes support (NetApp) where is the benefit in using StorageOS?
StorageOS: StorageOS provides a number of benefits compared to a traditional storage system:
As a software defined solution, deployed as a container, StorageOS runs anywhere a container can – on-prem, in the cloud or any hybrid.
StorageOS is Application Centric – storage volumes are provisioned to an application not a server/node, allowing storage to be able to follow an application as it scales, grows and moves between platforms.
Cloud Native Scalability – Cloud Native Workloads are very demanding, supporting thousands of containers, advanced workflows and dynamic scaling. StorageOS performs provisioning and cluster operations in milliseconds.
Comment
StorageOS performs provisioning and cluster operations in milliseconds, which does not seem that fast when compared with the sub-millisecond latencies that all-flash NVMe arrays deliver.
Wouldn’t any all-flash array with a CSI plug-in be as fast?
Dell EMC VP for Technology (PowerStore, XtremIO, VxFlexOS) Itzik Reich says: “Of course [but] it has nothing to do with the SSD drives, it’s all about the control path. What matters is how fast the mapping of a volume (and in some cases, the time it takes to format the FS).”
We asked storage consultant Chris Evans for the reasons an enterprise storage customer would use StorageOS software when they can get all-flash arrays with CSI plugins or VMware/Tanzu.
He said: “I guess the question is why use any SDS solution. Flexibility, cost, lock-in, these are the most obvious, however, I think with container integrated solutions the benefits are a bit more nuanced.
“I can integrate provisioning and other functionality into my application workflow in a way that operates way better than using a fixed array. I can make that infrastructure truly portable – move it to the cloud, another platform, all abstracted with nothing more than Kubernetes and some local disks.
“It means I can build on-demand test environments and tear them down five minutes later etc., etc. I doubt any storage array could cope with creating and destroying hundreds of volumes per hour (or more), whereas on StorageOS, those constructs are mainly in software on the same node as the application, so can be created/destroyed in milliseconds.”
Quantum Corp has told Blocks & Files it believes it is eligible for the $10m US Paycheck Protection Program loan it took in April, after being asked (PDF) on Friday by a US House of Representatives committee to repay it.
It told B&F the loan was “saving American jobs at Quantum” and said it was looking forward to “engaging with the committee”.
The House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, chaired by South Carolina Democrat Representative James Clyburn, wants the money returned so smaller firms can benefit from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans instead. It wrote to five companies on May 8: Evo Transportation & Energy Services, Gulf Island Fabrication, MiMedx Group, Quantum and Universal Stainless & Alloy Product, requesting they return the money.
The letter said: “Since your company is a public entity with a substantial investor base and access to capital markets, we ask that you return these funds immediately.
‘“Returning these funds would allow truly small businesses — which do not have access to alternative sources of capital — to obtain the emergency loans they need to avoid layoffs, stay in business, and weather the economic disruption caused by the coronavirus crisis.”
MiMex and Evo Transportation Responses
MiMex Group decided to return the cash. Its statement said it had: “implemented numerous cost containment measures, including a temporary gradated reduction in compensation for all salaried employees in order to avoid layoffs. … While registered as a public company, MiMedx is currently delisted from NASDAQ and does not have access to the public markets.”
Nevertheless it is returning the cash.
Evo Transportation & Energy Services did not do so. A statement said: “EVO’s stock is highly illiquid and rarely trades, EVO does not have access to capital markets (it sought unsuccessfully in March to raise equity from third parties in a private placement) and presently nearly all of EVO’s investors are unable to sell shares. EVO’s small market float is measured in thousands of dollars, not hundreds of millions of dollars. All of these factors support EVO’s application to the PPP which was consistent with the letter and spirit of the law. EVO has and will continue to use the PPP proceeds for payroll.
“EVO is proud of the critical and essential services provided by its workforce which has continued to perform day in and day out delivering all over the country, including in some of the areas hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. The PPP proceeds permitted EVO to fulfill its obligations to do this important work. Return of the proceeds could jeopardize EVO’s survival and the more than 1,600 jobs that exist through EVO’s continued operation.”
Quantum response
A Quantum spokesperson told us: “We have just recently received the letter sent by Chairman Clyburn. Quantum will be responding and looks forward to engaging with the Committee.
“Quantum believes it owes a duty to its American employees who would lose their jobs if Quantum returned its PPP loan to demonstrate why Quantum not only falls within the technical eligibility requirements of the PPP loan program, but also falls squarely within the spirit of what was intended by the Cares Act.
“This PPP loan is saving American jobs at Quantum — without it we would most certainly be forced to reduce headcount. We owe it to our employees – who’ve stuck with us through a long and difficult turnaround – to do everything we can to save their jobs during this crisis.”
In this week’s roundup of storage news, we look at Dremio’s Data Lake Engine on AWS, Rubrik extending its public cloud workload coverage, HPE enlarging GreenLake to cover Cohesity and Qumulo, and more.
Dremio takes data warehousing data lake to AWS
Dremio’s Data Lake Engine, which enables data warehouse queries to run on data lakes, has pushed out a Dremio AWS edition. The new product is Dremio software running in AWS and has elastic engines and parallel instances.
Elastic engines enable data teams to configure any number of compute engines, each sized and tailored to the workload it supports and running inside customers’ own AWS accounts.
Amazon S3 data lakes need data extracting and loaded into data warehouses for fast analysis. Dremio’s chief product officer, Tomer Shiran, told us: “With Dremio AWS Edition, data teams can query the data in place in S3 with lightning-fast interactive performance while reducing their cloud infrastructure costs by over 90% compared to traditional SQL engines.”
The Dremio AWS SW supports multi-tenant instances via parallel projects with lifecycle automation. Each instance contains all associated configuration, metadata, and data reflection details. These Parallel projects provide end-to-end lifecycle automation across deployment, configuration with best practices, and upgrades, all running in customers’ own AWS accounts.
Data manager and protector Rubrik has extended its public cloud coverage to more workloads on AWS, Azure and Google.
It will now protect Google Compute Virtual Machines (VMs) as a service, as it does for AWS and Azure. Policies are set to backup and recover Google VMs for hundreds of GCP projects and regions.
Rubrik’s AWS backup facilities now include Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS). It looks after all instance types and transaction logs across availability zones. There’s a 2-click setup and Rubrik says point-in-time recoveries can be done in minutes.
Microsoft 365 OneDrive can now be protected by Polaris and both file-level and folder-level recoveries are supported.Rubrik says the backup data remains with a customer’s accounts enabling them to “comply with enterprise data control requirements.” This is different from the separate backup account approach taken by Clumio.
HPE Greenlake floods over Cohesity, Qumulo and CyrusOne
GreenLake Central is now generally available with over 250 early adopter customers. Central is HPE’s online operations console for a customer’s Greenlake hybrid cloud IT estate, meaning its HPE software and hardware kit across its data centres, all managed as a service by HPE and used in a self-serve, pay-per-use, scale up-and-down way. Basically customers get a public cloud-like experience on-premises and in the public cloud by sourcing kit from HPE. More than 800 Greenlake customers have done precisely that.
Cohesity data protection and management, and Qumulo’s scale-out file storage are now available through Greenlake.
HPE has also announced an extended co-location deal with Cyrus One with a single contract, invoice, and point of contact. Customers have the option of co-location for any GreenLake-sourced system, hosted in any CyrusOne datacenter globally.
Acronis Cyber Protect bundles backup and cyber security
Backup supplier Acronis, which has a strong security focus, has integrated backup, disaster recovery, next-gen anti-malware, cybersecurity, and endpoint management tools into one Acronis Cyber Protect service for MSPs.
Acronis is positioning the bundle as a single product for MSPs to roll out services to their clients, such as vulnerability assessments, URL filtering, and patch management.
It says AV-Test.org, a German security institute, ran a pre-release version of Acronis Cyber Protect in March 2020 on a computer running Windows 10 Professional.
AV-Test tested both the status and dynamic detection rates of Acronis Cyber Protect, scanning a set of 6,932 malicious Windows executable (PE) files. Acronis had a 100 per cent detection rate and also delivered zero false positives in a separate test. You can check out the test results.
The Acronis Cyber Protect roadmap has an on-premises edition scheduled for release in the second half of 2020. A personal version is also planned for release in Q3 2020.
Cost second and third most important thing about HPC storage
HPC storage supplier Panasas has commissioned an analysis by Hyperion Research that shows TCO and purchase price both outstrip scalability, resilience and even network connectivity and floorspace in a survey of verndors buying HPC storage. The commissioned survey drew on data centre planners and managers, storage system managers, purchasing decision-makers and key influencers, as well as users of HPC storage systems. Hyperion surveyed organizations with annual revenues from under $5m to more than $10bn.
The UK’s Crown Commercial Services office has selected Bridgeworks to offer the NHS and qualifying medical research organisations data management services over the next 12 months, at no cost. Bridgeworks is making available its PORTrockIT IP network acceleration products free of charge for one year, to any Health Organisation or Medical Research Establishment engaged in COVID-19 vaccine research work.
NetApp FlexPods, converged infrastructure validated designs integrating Cisco servers and switches with NetApp storage, are available on a subscription basis in EMEA: FlexPod as a Service (FPaaS) – storage, compute, network and hypervisor – delivered as a managed, cloud-based service. This will be made similarly available in the USA.
Tributary Systems, which sells its Storage Director enterprise backup product, has signed a deal with Hitachi Vantara to have its VSP G Series arrays and HCP object storage be backup target storage for Storage Director. Storage Director said it offers an ultra-high performance data path to HCP cloud object storage enabling HCP to be deployed as both a near-line active backup/restore as well as an archive solution.
Hybrid cloud data warehouser Yellowbrick has made a deal with Next Pathway Inc. to have its SHIFT Migration Suite convert legacy and other supplier’s data warehouse code to run on Yellowbrick. This includes the capability to automate the conversion of database objects such as SQL and complex types including Stored Procedures, orchestration logic, ETL pipelines, Dynamic SQL, and others from legacy technologies such as Teradata and Netezza.
Seventy-year-old Infinidat founder and CEO Moshe Yanai is stepping aside to become Chief Technology Evangelist, and has appointed a pair of co-CEOs to run the business.
Yanai founded Infinidat in 2010 with help from Dr Alex Winokur on the patent front. Winokur was the founder and CEO of data centre black box recorder company Axxana, which Infinidat acquired in 2018.
Moshe Yanai
The news was announced in a blog in which Yanai wrote: “As I celebrate my 70th birthday, I can’t help but be amazed looking back at the extraordinary progress of technology, and its profound influence on humanity.
“My life’s work is, and continues to be, focused on a small but delightfully complex piece of that puzzle–inventing new technologies for storing the vast amount of information created by humankind, and then working with customers to imagine the next generation of use cases, applications, and platforms made possible by these new technologies.”
He says “Infinidat is the culmination of this journey.”
The company has developed its InfiniBox array as a high-end block and file storage device utilising disk drives for bulk storage and a large amount of DRAM caching to provide access speeds faster than all-flash arrays. The use of disk drives is diametrically opposed to other mainstream storage array suppliers who have all transitioned from disk to SSDs to ramp up data access speed.
After three rounds of funding, totalling $325m, customers of the firm – now a mature startup – have installed more than 6EB of array capacity since 2014, “with over an exabyte of sales in the past six months alone.”
Co-CEOs
The co-CEOs are COO Kariel Sandler and CFO Nir Simon. Sandler has been with Yanai for 16 years and currently looks after Infinidat’s R&D and Operations divisions; the majority of Infinidat’s workforce. Simon has been with Yanai for 13 years. Yanai says he is ”supremely confident in their ability to lead Infinidat’s business.”
Another famous founding CEO, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, stepped sideways into a CTO role in September 2014, appointing both CFO Safra Katz and President Mark Hurd as CEOs. This co-CEO-dom lasted until Hurd’s death in 2019.
Veeam also tried a co-CEO ploy in May 2017 when CEO Bill Largent became board chairman. Co-founder and CTO Andrei Baronov and President and COO Peter McKay were the two CEOs. It didn’t last as McKay left for new endeavours in October 2018. He’s now running computer security company Snyk.
Yanai will focus on Infinidat’s strategic vision and the present and future needs of its customers to develop a roadmap. He is closely collaborating with Infinidat investors TPG and Goldman Sachs, “to drive towards our next phases of growth.”
