Zerto, the disaster recovery startup, laid off a “ton of employees” today, according to a source. We asked Zerto about this, using this exact phrase.
In response Zerto sent us the following statement: “In this new economy, financial viability is key. The winning companies will be the ones who successfully transition and put themselves on a path to profitability.
“Zerto has today committed to streamline its core business and reduce operating expenses. We made this move to ensure that Zerto will weather this storm and will continue to be successful. It was an extremely difficult decision, but we are taking these steps to ensure that Zerto remains financially strong now and in the future.”
Zerto was founded in 2009 and has taken in $129m in funding, with the last round in 2016 totalling $20m. Since then it has been growing while burning cash on the one hand and receiving revenue from sales on the other.
Last week the company announced the release of Zerto 8, which among other things, adds support for backup and disaster to VMware workloads on Google Cloud Platform.
Ambush of Polish partisans during the January Uprising
Starboard Value, the prominent activist investor, has accumulated a 9.3 per cent stake in Commvault, the veteran data management vendor.
Starboard has not yet revealed what it wants Commvault to do but it will want Commvault to do something. On its website, the firm proclaims: “Starboard invests in deeply undervalued companies and actively engages with management teams and boards of directors to identify and execute on opportunities to unlock value for the benefit of all shareholders.”
Commvault gave us a noncommittal response to Starboard’s stake building: “Commvault’s top priorities, at this time, are the health and safety of our employees, taking care of customers, and operating our business. As always, Commvault embraces open dialogue with our shareholder community and will continue to act in their best interest.”
However, it is unlikely to welcome the attention of Starboard, which is currently agitating for changes at eBay and Box Inc. The company is already reorganising sales, marketing and product strategies under the leadership of Sanjay Mirchandani. He was installed as CEO in February last year with the approval of Elliot Management, another activist investor, which ripped into Commvault in March 2018.
The outcomes of Elliot’s intervention included the CEO resigning, board-level changes, a 20-into-four product set simplification, and a stronger focus on partners and the public cloud.
But a revenue upturn has eluded the company so far, with the Q3 fy20 quarter ended December 31, 2019 representing the fourth successive quarter of revenue decline, compared with the previous year.
Discussing those earnings, Mirchandani said: “Our ability to achieve these results is a direct reflection of the progress we are making on the simplification, innovation and execution priorities we established at the start of the fiscal year. These priorities will be the foundation for our return to growth.”
Scientists have discovered a ternary (3-bit) memristor which they say is close to mimicking how the human brain works and which could help solve the world’s data storage problems.
Professor Thirumalai Venky Venkatesan of the National University of Singapore, who led the international team of researchers, said in a statement: “We hear a lot of predictions about AI ushering in the fourth industrial revolution. It is important for us to understand that the computing platforms of today will not be able to sustain at-scale implementations of AI algorithms on massive datasets. It is clear that we will have to rethink our approaches to computation on all levels: materials, devices and architecture. We are proud to present an update on two fronts in this work: materials and devices. Fundamentally, the devices we are demonstrating are a million times more power efficient than what exists today.”
Materials and devices
The researchers have invented a metal-organic complex molecule whose electrons can be in one of three states, in a phenomenon called charge disproportionation or electronic symmetry breaking. One of the states has electrons distributed unequally between different sides of the molecule. Such symmetry breakage normally requires extreme pressure or high or low temperature.
The states are stable over time, and can be manipulated at room temperatures using electric fields (voltage), and the molecules can form a device. This could be a 3-bit memristor or a 2-bit memcapacitor, or both. The device scales down to 60 nm². Its “discrete states are optimal for high-density, ultra-low-energy digital computing”, the researchers write in their paper.
Computer simulation
The concept was proved with computer simulation conducted by Damien Thompson of the University of Limerick, using the Irish Centre for High-End Computing supercomputer.
Damien Thompson , University of Limerick
He said in a press release: “We managed to push way beyond industry roadmaps by finding a ternary resistive memory device with three states that are well-separated from each other in terms of conductance and, just as importantly, stay working away perfectly for weeks on end.”
We can envisage the three states as having two symmetrical and one asymmetrical distribution of electrons. Thompson said: “The third asymmetric state is created simply by allowing current to flow through the device and it persists over a broad temperature range (-100 to +100 °C) so it is suitable for most conventional computing as well as future applications emerging from the symbiosis between physics, computing and biology.
Diagram from ternary memristor paper.
“In this new material, ions pulse back and forth between different binding sites on the molecules, which opens up the third state, making it energetically accessible and technologically exploitable.”
Ternary memristor and TLCNAND
We asked Thompson if having a 3-state memristor is like having 3 -bit (TLC) flash cell – insofar as accessing stored data is concerned.
He in turn forwarded our question to Sreetosh Goswami of the National University of Singapore, who he referred to as “the experimental mastermind behind the work”.
Goswami told us: “First of all, flash cells require very high voltage (~10V) and thus use a lot of energy, their storage lifetime is limited (don’t store your family photos ever on flash drives!), and they have a very limited endurance (less than 10,000 write/rewrite cycles). Memristors, on the other hand, consume ultra-low energy and last for 10^11(/12) cycles.”
“Secondly, three bits is actually eight levels; it’s different from a three-level device. A three-level system is something called ‘trit’ where you can define different states as 0,1,2 or -1,0,+1. There are unique advantages of a trit that enables over 19,000 different logic operations for two input variables. (We are currently pursuing circuit designs that will explore and push these ideas further.)”
This prompted further questions from me. “What this says to me is that the ternary memristor would need to be integrated in a non-binary computing system unless, I suppose, the 3 states were given binary values; 00, 01 and 10 for example. That seems odd to me and unlikely to happen. Would you have any views on the need for a non-binary computer system to use ternary memristors?”
Goswami replied: “There are computing architectures that can deal with binary and ternary systems in tandem though they are right now at a concept level. In principle, use of Sheffer ternary operations enhance the computing density by a significant margin. To test those out, you need a reliable 3 state device which has been missing. You will see few such ideas, hopefully soon!
“Additionally, due to the co-existence of meristance and memcapacitance, this device produces self-spiking and even chaos which we are currently using to perform several operations such as Max-cut computation. So, I think there are several things we can do with these devices.”
The Sheffer operation is an aspect of Boolean logic connected to the NAND operation. Max-cut computation refers to finding a part of a graph with the most edges.
According to Professor Venkatesan, “Dr Sreetosh has discovered that he can drive these devices to self-oscillate or even exhibit purely unstable, chaotic regime. This is very close to replicating how our human brain functions.”
Electrical circuit background
Electrical circuits are built from three basic building blocks; the capacitor, the resistor, and the inductor. A memristor, a resistor that stores information, its resistance, when it loses power, is a fourth building block. It was devised and built by HP Labs Fellow Stan Williams in 2008, based on a prediction made by Leon Chua in the 1960s,
HP Labs spent many years trying to productise the invention but failed in its endeavour. Williams left HPE in 2018 and is now a professor of nanotechnology at Texas A&M University and a co-author of the ternary memristor paper .
A memcapacitor is a nonlinear capacitator with immediate response, and also stores information when no power is flowing to the device.
The molecule
The molecule is one of a family of redox active ligands and has a pincer ligand. A ligand is an ion or molecule that binds to a metal atom, sometimes donating electron pairs, and forming a so-called co-ordination complex. There can be several ligands attached to a central atom. Redox refers to a change in the oxidation state of atoms and this involves the movement of electrons between the atoms involved.
Pincer ligands bind to three adjacent co-planar sites with high thermal stability.
Researcher roll call
Professor Thirumalai Venky Venkatesan, National University of Singapore (NUS), was lead principal investigator of this project.
Professor Sreebrata Goswami of the Indian Association for Cultivation of Science in Kolkata, India, invented the molecule.
Dr Sreetosh Goswami, a research fellow at NUS Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Initiative, is the key architect of this paper and is a former graduate student of Professor Venkatesan.
Associate Professor Damien Thompson at the University of Limerick modelled the interactions between the molecules.
Professor Stan Willams of Texas A&M University, the original HP Memristor builder, is a co-author of the paper.
Komprise today released a file migration utility incorporating parallelisation, which runs 27 times faster than Linux Rsync, according to its internal benchmarks.
Komprise Elastic Data Management (KEDM) takes file data from an NFS or SMB/CIFS source and transfers it across a LAN or WAN to a target NAS system or via S3 or NFS/SMB to object storage systems or the public cloud.
Kumar Goswami, Komprise CEO, provided this quote: “Komprise Elastic Data Migration minimises migration downtime by using analytics to identify the right files to move, maximising data migration efficiency.”
According to the file data management company, KEDM migrates data six times faster than the status quo and at half the cost. Komprise COO Krishna Subramanian explained that; “Six times faster than status quo is an estimate only as we did not have access to commercial tools to test against them.
“On the cost, we are typically less than a half to a third of commercial solutions like DataDobi or DataDynamics StorageX for the standalone Komprise Elastic Data Migration solution.”
KEDM is an acceleration of Komprise’s transparent move technology. It executes in virtual machines running the Komprise Observer software portion of its Intelligent Data Management suite. Observers are data movers and can be scaled out in a grid to increase the migration resource.
KEDM scans the source file system, extracts the metadata, with its permissions and file attributes, and migrates the filesystem. The software parallelises operations at the share, volume, directory and file level. It uses a specially-written NFS client to minimise the number of NFS protocol interactions. This is helpful when migrating large numbers of small files as the protocol chatter takes up network bandwidth otherwise used for data payload transfer. Obviously this does not work for SMB files.
Komprise Elastic Data Migration diagram.
KEDMe is multi-threaded and uses multi-processing in a multi-core host. Every transferred file or object has an MD5 checksum calculated before and after the transfer. A post-transfer comparison verifies migration accuracy and the software retries operations automatically when a fault is detected.
KEDM provides a dashboard and has API access so it can be programmatically controlled from existing data management software.
Benchmark
Komprise ran a benchmark test against the Rsync utility using a 74GB Android open source project data set with 990,000 files -some large (1.5GB – 10GB) and thousands of small files (500B – 100KB). Source files from a disk system were transferred to an all-flash filer across a LAN and also across a simulated WAN by adding a 30ms delay to each transfer.
KEDM was 27 times faster than Rsync. Komprise didn’t provide raw number but noted KEDM completed the run across the simulated WAN it in minute, whereas Rsync did not complete in 48 hours.
Datadobi, a competitor, also uses parallelisation and checksumming to verify migration integrity. If we assume Datadobi is part of the migration status quo, Komprise is claiming it is six times faster than DobiMigrate.
KEDM can be included in Komprise’s Intelligent Data Management suite or purchased standalone. It is available through Komprise’s channel.
Data growth provides the fuel for our main items in this week’s data storage news digest. Let’s get cracking.
Backblaze cloud storage reaches exabyte milestone
Backblaze, a cloud storage provider, is now storing an exabyte of user data. Not bad for the five founders who started out building their own cloud in a Palo Alto apartment, in 2007. BlackBlaze said its engineers are now looking at how to store one zettabyte.
The growth has looked like this:
2008 – 10TB
2010 – 10PB
2014 – 100PB
2015 – 200PB
2020 – 1000PB
It’s not possible to get a realistic figure of how much data is stored in AWS, Azure and Google. Those vendors don’t reveal that number.
Backblaze has gotten this far with just $3m in venture funding. All marketing to date has been via a blog and until this year word of mouth. There are now 145 employees and customers in more than 160 countries.
Quantum expands video surveillance line
Quantum has expanded its video surveillance line (now called the VS-HCI portfolio), which it introduced a year ago.
Jamie Lerner, Quantum CEO, said: “Video surveillance plays a vital role in securing infrastructure and critical assets, and in protecting citizens. We’ve applied our years of expertise to build a comprehensive portfolio for surveillance, and we are responding quickly to the needs of our customers.”
There are four new servers:
VST mini-tower and VS4160 NVR rack mount network video recording servers
VS2108 – a video analytics server with up to six GPUs inside its 2U enclosure
VS1110 – a highly-available building management server
Quantum has also added secure remote monitoring for VS-HCI, using a web portal.
Could QUIC replace TCP/IP?
Lars Eggert, chair of the QUIC working group within the IEFT, is participating in an SNIA webcast about Google’s QUIC protocol. The webcast poses the question: will this new UDP-based transport protocol for the web replace TCP/IP? It broadcasts live on Thursday, April 2, 2020– 10:00 am PT / 1:00 pm ET and you can register online.
Eggert will discuss the unique design aspects of QUIC, its difference to the conventional HTTP/TLS/TCP web stack, and early performance numbers. He also looks at potential side effects of a broader deployment of QUIC.
QUIC was designed and deployed by Google and accounts for 35 per cent of the company’s egress traffic. This in turn corresponds to about seven per cent of all internet traffic.
There is strong interest in QUIC from other large internet players and the ongoing IETF standardisation of QUIC is likely to lead to an even greater deployment in the near future, according to the SNIA.
Tardigrade decentralised cloud storage service
Storj Labs has launched the S3-compatible decentralised Tardigrade cloud storage service, and is offering service-level agreements at 99.9999999 per cent durability. The company claims end-to-end prices are a fraction of the traditional cloud providers.
Customers will receive 5GB of storage and bandwidth free for the first 30 days. After that, they move to Tardigrade’s storage tariffs, which are about half of cloud storage providers’ list prices, according to Storj. They can also earn additional credits via Tardigrade’s referral program. The platform currently has more than 19PB of available capacity, which is hosted by individuals and partners.
With the Tardigrade Open Source Partner Program (OSPP), any open source project with a Tardigrade connector will receive a portion of the revenue generated by those users for their cloud storage bills. This helps address the challenges open source software companies have faced when trying to monetize workloads in the cloud, Storj said.
John Gleeson, Storj vice president of operations, provided a quote: “Over 80 per cent of cloud workloads run on top of open source software, however these companies only receive a small percentage of the revenue. We’re pleased to launch Tardigrade into production so our open source partner program members can start generating revenue when their users store data in the cloud.”
Amazon S3-compatible applications can use the service by changing a few simple parameters. There is also a library of bindings for some of the most popular coding languages, including Go, Android, C, .NET/Xamarin, Node.js, Swift, and Python.
Commvault is offering a customer care programme available at no charge through September 1st. The no-strings attached offers include.
Metallic End Point Backup and Recovery SaaS-based software with Microsoft (in the US and Canada only) to help organisations with remote workforces.
For organisations worldwide, Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery software will enable protection and management of data in cloud environments or on-premises. Details are on their way.
Creation of a critical alert program to monitor customer systems and provide alerts on unusual changes in their data protection environment.
Training and e-learning videos, virtual and self-paced courses – to learn ways to optimise data management.
Online live, weekly sessions with Commvault data experts.
Blog series addressing relevant topics.
Druva is offering a 6-month free trial of protection for Office 365 and endpoint protection for up to 300 seats.
HYCU is offering unlimited backup to all new Italian customers, free of charge for three months, valid until June 30, 2020. Simon Taylor, HYCU’s CEO, issued a quote: “At this point in time, any company that is dealing with the unexpected rise of self-quarantining and moving critical workers to a remote or at home situation is disruption enough. The least we can do is to offer our support as businesses try to deal with unanticipated costs and significant transition in supporting their workers.”
LucidLink said it has been inundated with requests from companies that use a NAS and/or fileserver in their office and need to ensure their employees can effectively work at home. They all need to move their files and data to the cloud where they can be universally accessible, create as little disruption to current workflows as possible and not sacrifice the user experience. The company has cut the capacity fee in half from $20/TiB to $10/TiB per month, and has eliminated the connected device / per user fee.
SpectraLogic will produce a virtual conference to enable interaction, education and engagement between customers, partners and Spectra executives. It will take place on Tuesday, May 12, 2020, and will enable attendees to ‘walk the floor’ by hearing about the latest market trends, learning about Spectra products, asking questions, sharing feedback, watching product demonstrations, and meeting with Spectra executives.
Data protector Unitrends is offering:
Free backup hardware
50 per cent off direct to cloud backup to protect remote workers even via Wi-Fi
50 per cent off O365 backup, along with its recently released built-in dark web monitoring
US-based support is here for customers 24x7x365
Shorts
Hitachi Vantara has completed the acquisition of the assets of Waterline Data, a developer of intelligent data cataloging products. HV has announced the Lumada Data Catalog which incorporates Waterline technology and expands DataOps solutions across edge-to-core-to-cloud environments.
Micron uMCP.
Micron has begun sampling a multichip package (uMCP) for 5G smartphones which combines 12GB of DRAM with 256GB of NAND. This uses a 512Gbit of 96-layer 3D NAND die with 2-channel LPDDR5 DRAM. The DRAM uses 10nm-class technology and reaches up to 6,400 Mbit/sec. The idea is that 5G phones will do more multi-tasking and a multi-chip package uses up to 40 per cent less space than a 2-chip combination.
NAKIVO Backup and Replication v9.3 peta testing continues. Its new functionality allows you to manage backup and recovery of Oracle databases from the NAKIVO Backup & Replication console.
XenData Multi-Site Sync
XenData has launched the Multi-Site Sync service for cloud object storage which creates a global file system accessible worldwide via XenData Cloud File Gateways. They work with Amazon Web Services S3, hot and cool tiers of Azure Blob Storage and Wasabi S3. XenData gateways are optimised for video files, supporting partial file restore and streaming. This makes the solution a good fit for media applications, according to the company.
NetApp is ranked the top supplier for block and file storage by end users in a survey of European and US companies.
Coldago, a small data storage research firm, surveyed end users in 1,123 US companies and 560 European companies, in the UK, Germany and France, in January 2020. Half the users worked at enterprise-sized companies and half worked at SMEs.
The survey participants answered 20 questions about their preference for storage technologies such as data protection choices, software-defined storage adoption, virtual SAN adoption by supplier, file, block and object storage supplier preferences and others.
The answers are filtered by US or European respondents and charted in order of US respondent rankings.
We have picked out the file and block charts to provide a sample of what you can find in the report. Here is the block storage array supplier choices chart.
Dark grey bars – US. Light grey bars – Europe.
NetApp, Dell EMC and Hitachi Vantara are the highlighted top three. The dark grey bars indicate US respondents and the lighter grey bars indicate European respondents. Pure ranks fourth and Infinidat fifth, ahead of IBM and HPE. US respondents rate Pavilion Data Systems higher than DDN while European respondents flip the positions.
A file supplier chart is next;
NetApp is top, again, with Qumulo in second place, ahead of Dell EMC with its long-established Isilon product. Pure is fourth and DDN is fifth, and newcomer VAST Data is in sixth place, ahead of Hitachi Vantara. VAST would be in twelfth place based on European preferences alone.
The final question asked users about their persistent memory plans.
Forty-five per cent of USA respondents and 39 per cent of their European counterpart plan to adopt the technology, which is also known as storage-class memory. It is already used and deployed by nine per cent of US respondents and four per cent of European respondents.
Coldago’s report is free to access, requiring only the input of an email address to receive the 23-page document.
Covid-19 has depressed demand for servers and data storage from transportation, hospitality and physical retail operation. At the same the pandemic has increased demand for video streaming, web conferencing and online retail, according to the tech analyst firm IDC.
Server and external storage sales will fall in the first half of the year, but shipments should grow again, fuelled by cloud provider demand, IDC said.
Kuba Stolarski, research director, IT infrastructure at IDC, said in a statement: “The impact of covid-19 will certainly dampen overall spending on IT infrastructure as companies temporarily shut down and employees are laid off or furloughed.
“While IDC believes that the short-term impact will be significant, unless the crisis spirals further out of control, it is likely that this will not impact the markets past 2021, at which point we will see a robust recovery with cloud platforms very much leading the way.”
A tale of two sub-markets
IDC has modelled pessimistic, optimistic and middle ground scenarios for the server and storage markets.
The middle-ground, more likely option is based on a depressed Chinese market spreading to other regions before abating towards the end of 2020.
This scenario sees server sales dropping 11 per cent y-on-y this quarter and 8.9 per cent in Q2. But then sales will rise again as cloud service providers buy more servers to meet rising demand for their services. Overall, IDC’s analysts see server sales in 2020 declining 3.4 per cent from 2019 to $88.6bn.
External storage sales, such as SANs, filers and object stores, will slump 7.3 per cent this quarter and 12.4 per cent in Q2. There will be slight growth by the end of 2020, giving an overall decline of 5.5 per cent to $28.7bn compared to 2019.
According to IDC the IT Infrastructure market has two sub-markets moving in different directions: decreasing demand from enterprise buyers and increasing demand from cloud service providers. The external storage systems market, with a higher share of enterprise buyers, will experience a deeper decline than the server market in 2020
Cloud service providers do not buy external storage systems, but they do buy SSDs and disk drives. IDC doesn’t predict how this might affect overall SSD and disk drive sales. It does predict that the storage market will return to growth in 2021.
Pivot3, the hyperconverged startup, said the covid-19 pandemic has affected business and is axing staff in a cost-cutting drive.
There are no details of the job losses but one report talks of mass layoffs. LinkedIn lists around 250 Pivot3 employees at time of publication.
CMO Bruce Milne told Blocks & Files: “This market environment has put some extraordinary strains on the economy and on businesses of all sizes. Pivot3 is no exception; we’re seeing our customers’ timelines slip and decisions get suspended as everyone evaluates the impact of this slowdown on their own businesses. We also don’t have any clear insight as to how long this will last; while we can be hopeful that it’s short lived, we don’t have that certainty.
“In a situation like this, the responsible approach is to make some strategic and structural changes to our business to preserve resources and to ensure our continued ability to support our customers, who in many cases depend on us for mission-critical deployments.
“We are adjusting the size of our team and staying focused on our core mission. We have preserved all key operational aspects of our business so that we can continue to market, sell, service and support customer solutions. As this situation develops and we explore options, we remain committed to timely delivery and exceptional support of our customers and partners.
“This health crisis has created some uncharted waters for us all to navigate; we’re confident that the changes we’ve made will allow us to weather the storm and emerge stronger on the other side.”
Background
Pivot3 is a hyperconverged pioneer but has failed to gain traction as a generic HCI vendor as VMware’s vSAN gained mainstream popularity. Nutanix, which IPOed in 2016, is the sole HCI startup to progress that far.
Pivot3 was founded in 2003 and has taken in $247m venture funding across seven VC and other funding events. The founders are CTO Bill Galloway, and Lee Caswell, who is now works for VMware as marketing VP for the HCI business unit.
Pivot 3 edge HCI system
Pivot3’s funding and CEO history has been eventful.
2002 – founded by Lee Caswell and CTO Bob Galloway to build converged server, storage and network system
2005 – $9m B-round; Caswell becomes CEO
2006 – $1.1m venture funding
2007 – $7.34m in B-round; Caswell exits CEO role to be CMO
2007 – May – Bob Fernander becomes CEO
2008 – $24m C-round
2009 – $2m top up
2010 – $4m and $25m 2-part D-round; Caswell leaves
2011 – November – Rich Bravman appointed CEO, replacing Fernander
2012 – $23m funding
2013 – $14m funding; Bravman leaves CEO slot in April
2013 – November – Ex-Perot exec and Pivot3 chairman Ron Nash becomes CEO
2014 – $2m and $12m in 2-part E-round
2015 – $45m F-round from Argonaut Private Equity and some existing investors
2016 – buys/merges with NexGen for all-flash arrays
2016 – $54.6m G-round and bank funding
Ron Nash has brought some stability. Pivot3 began a focus on the video surveillance market and reported good growth in 2017. Last year it sealed a partnership with Lenovo and wrapped its video surveillance systems inside a smart cities marketing theme.
Hyperconverged market consolidation
HCI startup GridStore bought DCHQ in July 2016, renamed itself HyperGrid and pivoted to hybrid cloud management. Other HCI startups were acquired, notably Springpath going into the hands of Cisco in late 2017 for $320m, and SimpliVity, which was bought by HPE in January 2017 for $650m. Maxta collapsed in January 2019. Atlantis also crashed, with assets bought by HiveIO in August 2018.
The HCI market has consolidated with two leaders, Dell EMC/VMware and Nutanix, leaving Pivot3 and Scale Computing as the remaining startups in the trailing group fighting for the rest of the market. Datrium has stepped smartly sideways into disaster recovery, though it still supplies its disaggregated HCI storage kit.
AWS has introduced a cheaper – and slower – disk storage option for Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, which previously used flash memory only.
Single-Availability Zone HDD storage is priced at $0.013 per GB-month and Multi-AZ HDD storage is priced at $0.025 per GB-month. AWS claims this makes Amazon FSx for Windows File Server the lowest cost file storage for Windows applications and workloads in the public cloud.
The effective cost is reduced to $0.0065 per GB-month for a single-AZ file system and $0.0125 per GB-month for a multi-AZ file system if customers use the service in conjunction with data deduplication and achieve 50 per cent space savings, according to Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist.
AWS FSx for Windows File Server diagram
AWS DataSync or robocopy can move files from faster FSx SSDs to FSx HDDs.
Amazon FSx’s HDD option provides up to 12MB/sec of throughput per TiB of capacity, with bursts up to 80MB/sec per TiB. FSx for Windows File Server is provisioned on file system throughput as well as capacity, from 8MB/sec up to 2,048MB/sec. There can be up to 3,135MB/sec of network throughput capacity. AWS uses SMB Multichannel – multiple network connections – to achieve this.
AWS FSx HDD performance table
The amount of provisioned bandwidth controls the size of a fast in-memory cache for the file share. This enables HDD-based FSx to deliver hundreds of thousands of network IOPS and its high throughput capability, AWS said.
The performance capabilities for Amazon FSx for Windows File Server are somewhat complex. You can find out more by delving into Amazon documentation here.
Dremio, a data analytics storage startup, has raised $70m in a C series round, to fund growth. Total funding stands at $115m.
In a post discussing the new investment, CEO Billy Bosworth wrote: “Dremio’s Data Lake Engine makes analytics directly on data lake storage fast, efficient, and secure, which drives down cloud infrastructure costs while giving data consumers what they need, when they need it.”
Dremio dubs itself a cloud data lake storage company and it aims to replace the traditional extract, transform and load (ETL) method of populating data warehouses. The Santa Clara-based company has built a data lake engine running on AWS and Azure and claims it is more efficient to run the analytics directly on source data in the data lake. (Read our January 2020 profile of Dremio for more technology details.)
Dremio CEO Billy Bosworth
According to Bosworth, Dremio has grown annual recurring revenue (ARR) more than 3.5x over the past year. “For startups, fundraises are typically meaningful events; this one will always be special due to the global situation that surrounds us,” he wrote.
The C-round was led by new investor Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Cisco Investments, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures.
Micron sold at least $118.8m worth of 3D XPoint media and drives in its second fy2020 quarter, ended February 27. This is the first time the US chipmaker has given us a glimpse into revenues for the storage class memory technology, which include Optane products made for Intel.
We can derive this figure of $118.8m from CFO Dave Zisner’s prepared remarks discussing the earnings, made earlier this week. (Our sister publication The Register has written up Micron’s Q2 fy2020 results.)
Micron includes XPoint revenues in its compute and networking business unit (CNBU). Revenues for the second quarter decreased one per cent sequentially to $1.97bn and 17 per cent y/y. Zisner revealed that, “excluding XPoint”, revenues would have fallen seven per cent sequentially.
This gives us the reference point that XPoint accounted for a minimum of six per cent of revenues in the quarter i.e. $118.8m. But is that also a total revenue figure for XPoint?
Assessing this hangs on the meaning of the word “excluding”, as used by Zisner. He may have excluded all XPoint revenues from the rest-of-CNBU’s seven per cent sequential fall. Or he may simply have been referring only to XPoint sales growth. We are unable to determine either way without knowledge of XPoint sales figures in Q1.
Micron X100 3D XPoint SSD
Micron’s XPoint line includes chips, some of which go to Intel for its Optane-brand products, and the rest are used in Micron’s own X100 drives. We infer that Micron currently derives most of its XPoint revenue from OEM work for Intel. But the company aims to grow its own X100 3D XPoint SSD business and expand the product portfolio for data centre customers.
DDR5 DRAM
Other Micron technology matters revealed in the Q2 earning statement include sampling 1z DDR5 DRAM chips, its smallest 10nm-class node, and being on track to introduce HBM chips this year. HBM tech involves stacking memory die one above the other and giving them a special link to a CPU. Micron is also developing a 1a (alpha) DRAM node, smaller than 1z but still a 10nm-class product.
On the NAND front, Micron should ship 128-layer chips this quarter and it expects revenue in Q4. Currently it ships 96-layer NAND.
So how to give a sense of scale or indeed liven up a boring product shot? Simple, use the human touch – as is literally the case in the picture below. You can see a disk drive being extracted from a Western Digital Ultrastar Data102 enclosure. (We used the picture in a Acronis uses WD JBODs story).
But who is the hand model?
Read the email I received to find out.
Hi Chris,
Thanks to Blocks and Files, I can now check being “famous” off my bucket list. Imagine my surprise to see my photo on your website. (Or at least my hand is famous. That’s me pulling a disk cartridge out of a WD Ultrastar Data102.)
Thanks for making my week a bit more interesting. I’ve now shared this with all my friends and will arrange autograph sessions once the shelter-in-place order is lifted. 😉
Candace
Candace Doyle
Candace is Candace Doyle, senior director of sales and marketing at the Linley Group. Before that she was a senior marketing manager at Western Digital, where she was pressed into service for as a hand model for the pic above.
If there are any more storage people lending anonymised arm or limbs to product shots, do let me know and I’ll add you to our wall of unsung storage heroes.
