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

By
Chris Mellor
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

Samsung launches gen 2 PC disk replacement SSD

By
Chris Mellor
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Samsung has formally announced the 870 QVO SSD – after details were leaked in Tom’s Hardware. This is intended as a workhorse unit to replace disk drives in PCs, and is priced accordingly.

Dr. Mike Mang, memory brand product biz team VP at Samsung Electronics, said: “We are releasing our second-generation QVO SSD which offers doubled capacity of 8TB as well as enhanced performance and reliability.”

The 870 QVO has a 6Gbit/s SATA interface and uses QLC flash, bolstered with a variably-sized SLC cache to speed IO. The drive comes in a 2-5-inch form factor and has 1, 2, 4 and 8TB capacity points.

Prices start at $129.99 for the 1TB model, which is certainly affordable for an SSD. For comparison, 1TB WD Blue 6Gbit/s 7,200rpm disk drive costs $44.99 on Amazon.

860 QVO republished with permission from Storage Review
[Credit: Storage Review]

The 870 QVO succeeds Samsung’s 860 QVO drive, which topped out at 4TB and used 64-layer V-NAND technology organised into QLC cells. The 870 QVO uses newer 100+layer V-NAND. Samsung has not confirmed layer count but industry sources suggest it is 128.

Samsung’s ‘TurboWrite’ technology adjusts the 870’s SLC cache to 42GB for the 1TB model and up to 78GB for the 2TB, 4TB and 8TB drives.

The performance is up 98,000/88,000 random read/write IOPS. Samsung said the read IOPS number is 13 per cent higher than the 860 QVO, but our records show the 860 has a 97,000 maximum (queue depth of 32), making the 870 a mere one per cent faster. And the 870 QVO is one per cent slower at random writes, as the 860 QVO reached 89,000 (queue depth of 32 again).

In sequential bandwidth the 870 provides up to 560MB/sec reads and 530MB/sec writes, while the 860 delivered up to 550MB/sec reads and 520MB/sec writes. 

So, the IO differences between the 860 and 870 are minuscule. How about endurance? The 860 offered 1.44PB at the 4TB capacity level – as does the 870. 

Endurance numbers for the other capacity levels are 1TB – 360 TB written, 2TB – 720TBW, 8TB – 2.88PBW, and there is a three-year limited warranty.

The 1TB and 4TB drives are available now and the 8TB version is expected in August.

Micron Q3 revs are in a good solid state

By
Chris Mellor
-

Micron has posted a 13.6 per cent uplift in revenues to $5.44bn for the third fiscal 2020 quarter ended 28 May. Net income eased 4.4 per cent to $804m.

Outlook for the next quarter is $6bn at the mid-point, which is 23.2 per cent more than last year. The US memory chip maker forecasts $21.4bn revenues for fiscal 2020 – 8.6 per cent lower than fiscal 2019.

Sanjay Mehrotra, president and CEO, said in a canned quote: “Micron’s exceptional execution in the fiscal third quarter drove strong sequential revenue and EPS growth, despite challenges in the macro environment.”

Pandemic impact

The company noted a limited Covid-19 impact on production in Malaysia early in the quarter, but was able to offset this with adjustments elsewhere. Mehrotra said: “The pandemic has impacted the cyclical recovery in DRAM and NAND, causing stronger demand in some segments and weaker demand in others.”

“Market segments driven primarily by consumer demand have seen a negative impact. Calendar 2020 analyst estimates for end-unit sales of autos, smartphones and PCs are meaningfully lower than pre-Covid-19 levels, even though estimates for enterprise laptops and Chromebooks have increased. The reduced level of global economic activity has also curtailed near-term demand.”

The general situation is that the pandemic is encouraging enterprises and the public sector to store and process more data at endpoints, and this needs DRAM and NAND. The next two quarters should see a healthy data centre outlook, improving smartphone and consumer end-unit sales, and new gaming consoles. Micron said these trends will drive DRAM and NAND demand upwards.

Micron’s DRAM business accounted for 66 per cent of revenues in Q3, up six per cent y/y, and NAND provided 31 per cent, up 50 per cent. This was a record quarter for NAND.

The DRAM and NAND chips are used in four business units:

  • Compute and Networking – $2.22bn revenues, up 7 per cent y/y
  • Mobile – $1.53bn revenues, up 30 per cent
  • Storage – $1.01bn, up 25 per cent
  • Embedded – $675m revenues, down four per cent – there was a slump in the auto market due to the pandemic

The earnings call revealed that Micron expects to gain a larger share of the SSD market over the next few quarters, with NVMe SSDs and QLC drives providing an opportunity.

The company has started customer shipments of 128-layer NAND chips and QLC NAND has grown to represent 10 per cent of its overall NAND production.

Huawei

Mehrotra said shipments to Huawei are affected by US government entity list stipulations, but Huawei accounts for less than 10 per cent of Micron’s revenues so the impact is not substantial. The US government wants to encourage more semiconductor manufacturing in the USA, but Micron will need solid financial reasons to transfer more production to its home country. At the moment this is lacking.

A chart of quarterly revenues and profits since 2016 shows Micron pulling out of a slump that started at the end of fy18. A couple more quarters under its belt will confirm if this is sustained.

Commvault integrates Metallic backup with Microsoft Azure Blob Storage

By
Chris Mellor
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Microsoft and Commvault are to integrate Commvault’s Metallic SaaS data protection with Azure Blob Storage and will develop other product integrations with native Azure services.

In a multi-year agreement between the two companies, Metallic will be a featured app for SaaS data protection in the Azure Marketplace. Metallic Backup & Recovery for Office 365 is already available on the site.

Sanjay Mirchandani, Commvault CEO, said today in a press announcement: “This is a new era for Commvault and our direction is clear – help our joint channel partners and customers simplify IT with enterprise-class, proven data protection solutions delivered through SaaS and protected in the cloud.”

Metallic Office 365 data flow diagram.

Metallic is a cloud-native backup and recovery service that uses AWS and Azure to store data.

With the Microsoft announcement, we envisage Metallic will be a data onramp for customer data to Azure. This data can be processed with Azure and also Commvault applications. There may be a Hedvig angle too; Commvault bought the startup last year to give it a software-defined storage capability.

Commvault said it will continue to support Metallic customers who want to continue using other clouds – i.e. AWS – for backend storage. It did not reveal if it plans to integrate Metallic with more cloud storage providers.

Fujitsu OEMs NetApp flash and hybrid arrays

By
Chris Mellor
-

Update: Fujitsu questions answers added 3 July 2020.

Fujitsu has switched up from reselling NetApp arrays to OEMing them. The ETERNUS AF all flash and DX hybrid arrays now get NetApp-based entry and mid-rage models.

In a terse press release, Fujitsu provides few details about its four new entry and mid-range ETERNUS systems – AB, AX, HB and HX beyond saying they are “ideal for use in mission-critical systems, HPC, virtualised systems and file servers”.

Kenichi Sakai, head of Fujitsu’s infrastructure system business unit, provided a canned quote: “We see this enhanced strategic partnership with NetApp as a critical step in supporting digital transformation by enabling customers to effectively manage and leverage their data.”

The AX and HX are intended for virtualized systems and file servers, while the AB and HB systems are for mission-critical databases and HPC. They scale to 24 storage nodes and 26PB of capacity, with data stored in on-premises or sent to the public cloud.

Fujitsu intends to introduce combined Fujitsu and NetApp solutions for AI, hybrid cloud and HPC by the end of 2020. For example Fujitsu servers and NetApp arrays will be used for an AI system and Fujitsu high performance scalable file systems and servers will combine with NetApp storage for HPC installations.

The company is also developing a hybrid cloud system using NetApp Cloud Data Services that manages private and public cloud environments in the data centre with a single storage operating system.

ETERNUS

ETERNUS is Fujitsu’s storage brand and covers five product lines.

  • DX Series – hybrid – high-end (DX60, DX100, DX200, DX500, DX600, DX900, DXB900)
  • AF Series – all-flash – high-end (AF150, AF250, AF650)
  • CD10000 Reference Architecture
  • CELVIN NAS 
  • DSP – OEM’d Datera product

Until now Fujitsu also resold NetApp FAS, SolidFire, and AFF Series (hybrid/all-flash) arrays. It has been reselling NetApp AFF and FAS series systems for quite a while.

New products

An ETERNUS product table includes the four new systems;

Our understanding, based on the capacity levels, is that the incoming AB and AX replace entry and midrange AF models, and the HB and HX replace DX entry and mid-range models.

in its announcement Fujitsu says the AB and HB systems use NVMe and InfiniBand – but their spec sheets say different. The AB2100 is a SAS SSD system classed as NVMe-ready but InfiniBand is not mentioned. Fujitsu’s table says the AB supports 120 drives but the AB2100 spec sheet says 96 are supported.

Also the HB1100 is a hybrid flash/disk system with no NVMe and no InfiniBand. Something got lost in translation or maybe more systems are in the offing.

A Fujitsu statement said: “These are general statements on the press release for the product line of AB and HB. It applies though not to all single systems. Also, the correct number of drives supported by AB2100 is 96, which is officially stated in the press release.”

There are AX100 and AX2100 products and an HX2100 system.

Fujitsu does not say if it is possible to upgrade from AB to AX to AF, or from HB to HX to DX. We suspect any upgrades would be disruptive and involve forklift trucks.

A Fujitsu statement said: “Depending on regional and local requirements, Fujitsu will closely collaborate with its customers defining the ideal way forward. This can include a transition from several system families to another … As such, Fujitsu will follow a very customer-centric case-by-case determination what’s the best way forward. Supportive programs will be launched depending on local requirements in the coming future.”

Fujitsu has been asked to clarify these various points and we’ll update his article when we hear back.

ETERNUS AB/HB will rollout worldwide, starting in Japan and Europe. ETERNUS AX/HX is available in Japan, with future availability pencilled for regions outside of Europe, curiously.

Fujitsu said: “Our new FUJITSU Storage ETERNUS AX / FUJITSU Storage ETERNUS HX systems and will be available in Japan only. These systems will be sold in Europe (including UK, Germany and all other regions/countries of operation) under the NetApp brand, known as NetApp AFF and NetApp FAS system families.”

So ETERNUS AX is NetApp’s AFF product and ETERNUS HX is NetApp’s FAS product.

No pricing information was supplied at time of publication.

Kioxia demos speedy NVMe E3.S SSD

By
Chris Mellor
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Kioxia is shipping engineering samples of a new short ruler SSD format that delivers 35 per cent better performance than the company’s coming PCIe 4.0 SSD.

The upcoming E3.S variant of the EDSFF (enterprise and data center SSD form factor), is an enterprise NVMe SSD developed for PCIe 5.0, according to Kioxia, and is intended for public cloud, hyperconverged and general purpose servers and all-flash arrays. The E3.S format has a higher power budget than today’s 2.5-inch SSDs and PCIe 3.0.

Kioxia’s sample E3.S system, based on its 2.5-inch CM6 Series PCIe 4.0 NVMe 1.4 SSD, exhibited 35 per cent more performance with the same controller, 4 PCIe lanes, 3D TLC flash memory and 28W (+40 per cent) of power.

The image shows SSDs mounted on a 2U-size rack mounted server prototype that can house 48 such SSDs

The E3.S format is being standardised by a SNIA working group. E3.S SSDs should deliver more flash capacity in less space for more efficient use of power, rack space and storage footprint. They will feature:

  • Support for PCIe 5.0 and beyond through improved signal integrity
  • Better cooling, thermal characteristics and performance than 2.5-inch SSDs
  • Drive status LED indicators
  • Support for x8 PCIe lane configurations

There are short and long ruler standards with varying length, depth and width measurements; E1.L long ruler,  E1.S (1-inch) short ruler and E3.S (3-inch) format, for example.

Intel is shipping the DC P4510 E1.l ruler format SSD and says it’s the only supplier shipping PCIe 4.0 drives currently.

Fujifilm points to 400TB tape cartridge on the horizon

By
Chris Mellor
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Fujifilm reckons it can build a 400TB tape cartridge using Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) media. This is 33 times larger than the current LTO-8 cartridge and takes us out four more LTO generations to 2028 and beyond

We were briefed by Fujifilm on a recent IT Press Tour. Fujifilm is one of just two manufacturers of tape media – Sony is the other – and LTO is the dominant magnetic tape format. Tape is the preferred medium for archive storage – disk costs too much. But data keeps growing. Hence the need for capacity increases.

In 2017, IBM and Sony demoed areal density of 201Gb/in² and 246,200 tracks per inch. This means 330TB tape cartridges are theoretically possible – today’s LTO-8 tapes hold 12TB.

Current magnetic tapes are coated with Barium Ferrite (BaFe) and each LTO generation uses smaller particles formed into narrower data tracks. That results in more capacity per tape reel inside the cartridge. But if BaFe particles get too small a tape drive’s read/write head can no longer reliably read the bit values [magnetic polarity] on the tape. The signal to noise ratio is insufficient.

Step forward, Fujifilm which sees Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) media achieving around 224Gbit/in² area density and 400TB capacity. It says “the majority of the magnetic properties of SrFe are superior to those of BaFe, which will enable us to reach a higher level of performance whilst further reducing the size of the particles.”

If we look at a table of LTO tape generations we see we’re currently on gen 8 (LTO-8) with 96TB raw capacity cartridges. Successive LTO generations  generally double capacity. Stream forward to LTO-12 and we have 192TB cartridges.

LTO tape generations to LTO-12. Blocks & Files has envisaged possible LTO-13 and LTO-14 generations.

Fujifilm expects SrFe media to be used in LTO-11 and LTO-12 tape.

The LTO generation gap

Every so often the LTO consortium announces a roadmap extension. The LTO-7 and LTO-8 formats were announced in 2010. In 2014, when LTO-6 was shipping, the consortium announced LTO generations 9 and 10. The Register envisaged an LTO-11 in 2015 and the actual LTO-11 and LTO-12 generations were announced in October 2017.

Blocks & Files expects the LTO consortium, by the end of 2021, to extend its roadmap beyond LTO-12, based on this roadmap extension history. Continuing the capacity doubling per generation progression we have seen so far, so a potential LTO-13 would have 384TB capacity.

A suggested LTO-14 would have 768TB capacity, beyond Fujifilm’s 400TB SrFE media cartridge. If we care to project further, an LTO-15 would have a 1.53PB capacity.

Blocks & Files thinks Fujifilm may need a post-Strontium Ferrite technology one generation past LTO-13.

When will that be? Assume two years to three years; say 2.5 years between LTO generations with LTO-8 shipping in 2019. We’ll see LTO-12 in 2030 and LTO-13, if it happens, in 2032/33.

Areal density headroom

How far can tape areal density improvements go?

We will use HDDs as a reference point, since that technology also stores magnetised bits in a recording medium layer deposited on a substrate; a platter in contrast to a tape ribbon.

Maximum HDD areal density is in the 700 Gbits/in² or greater area, with some drives having far higher areal density. A Seagate Skyhawk AI disk achieving 867 Gbits/in². Toshiba’s 2.5-inch MQ01 stores data at a higher density still; 1.787 Tbits/in². Put another way, HDD bits are a lot smaller than tape bits.

This implies tape media areal density improvements have a lot of headroom before they reach the current state of play in disk recording media material. 

The actual read-write head technology is roughly equivalent between disk and tape. Since disk read/write heads can read and write such small bits then, in theory, tape read and write heads could do the same. So, we can keep on throwing more and more old data at tape archives and the technology will keep up.

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