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Cloudian goes Splunk and Hitachi buys ML metadata firm

By
Chris Mellor
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This week in storage, we have an acquisition, three momentum releases, Cloudian going Splunk, Emmy awards for Isilon and Quantum, plus some funding news, people moves, two customer wins and books from NetApp and Intel.

Hitachi Vantara buys Waterline

Hitachi Vantara told the market it intends to buy Waterline Data and so gain a data cataloging capability for what it calls its “data ops” product.

Waterline Data’s catalog technology uses machine learning (ML) to automate metadata discovery. The firm calls this “fingerprinting” technology. It uses AI- and rule-based systems to automate the discovery, classification and analysis of distributed and diverse data assets to accurately and efficiently tag large volumes of data based on common characteristics.

Shown an example of a data field containing claim numbers in an insurance data set, the technology can then scan the data set for other examples and tag them. Hitachi V says this enables it to recognise and label all similar fields as “insurance claim numbers” across the entire data lake and beyond with extremely high precision – regardless of file formats, field names or data sources.

Hitachi V is getting technology that has been adopted by customers in the financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals industries to support analytics and data science projects, pinpoint compliance-sensitive data and improve data governance.

It can be applied on-premises or in the cloud to large volumes of data in Hadoop, SQL, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud environments.

Cloudian goes Splunk

Cloudian has said its HyperStore object storage combined with Splunk’s SmartStore feature can provide an exabyte-scalable, on-premises storage pool separate from Splunk indexers.

The firm claims the growth of machine and unstructured data is breaking the distributed scale-out mode that combines compute and storage in the same devices. A Splunk SmartStore and Cloudian HyperStore combo lets you decouple the compute and storage layers, so you can independently scale both.

A SmartStore-enabled index minimizes its use of local storage, with the bulk of its data residing remotely on economic Cloudian HyperStore. As data transitions from hot to warm, the Splunk indexer uploads a copy of the warm bucket to Cloudian Hyperstore and retains the bucket locally on the indexer until it is evicted to make space for active datasets.

HyperStore becomes the location for master copies of warm buckets, while the indexer’s local storage is used for hot buckets and cache copies of warm buckets which contain recently rolled over data, data currently participating in a search or highly likely to participate in a future search. Searching for older datasets that are now remote results in a fetch of the master copy from the HyperStore.

You can download a Cloudian-Splunk briefing doc to find out more.

Scale Computing momentum 

Hyperconverged infrastructure appliance vendor Scale Computing claims to have achieved record sales in Q4, driven by its OEM partnerships and edge-based deal activity, exiting 2019 at a growth rate of over 90 per cent in total software revenue; its best year yet.

Scale says it added hundreds of new customers and announced an OEM partnership with Acronis, offering Acronis Cyber Backup to customers through Scale Computing’s channels. Via its Lenovo partnership, it says customer wins included Delhaize, Coca Cola Beverages Africa, the Zillertaler Gletscherbahn, National Bank of Kenya, beIN Sports, and De Forensische Zorgspecialisten.

Scale CEO Jeff Ready.

In 2019 NEC Corporation of America and NEC Enterprise Solutions (EMEA) announced a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution powered by Scale Computing’s HC3 software. 

Jef Ready, Scale’s CEO and co-founder, said: “In 2020, we anticipate even higher growth for Scale Computing as a leading player in the edge computing and hyper-converged space.”

Scality RINGs in changes

RING object storage software supplier Scality said it experienced record growth in 2019 from both customer expansions and “new logo” customers. Scality was founded 10 years ago and said it has recruited 50 new enterprise customers from around the world, across a broad range of industries and use-cases. 

Scality’s largest customer stores more than 100PB of object data. Scality CEO and co-founder Jerome Lecat said: “Now in our 11th year, we’re really proud to be able to say that eight of our 10 first customer deployments are still in production and continue to invest in the Scality platform.”

He reckons: “It’s clear that Scality RING is a storage solution for the long-term; on a trajectory to average at least a 20-year lifespan after deployment. That’s a solid investment.”

Will Scality have IPO’d or been acquired by 2030 though? That’s an interesting question.

WekaIO we go

Scale-out, high-performance filesystem software startup WekaIO said it grew revenue by 600 per cent in its fiscal 2019 compared to 2018. The firm said its product was adopted by customers in AI, life sciences, and financial analysis. 

WekaIO CEO Liran Zvibel.

Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO at WekaIO, claimed: “We are the only tier-1, enterprise-grade storage solution capable of delivering epic performance at any scale on premises and on the public cloud, and we will continue to fuel our momentum by hiring for key positions and identifying strategic partnerships.”

WekaIO said its WekaIO Innovation Network of channel partners grew to 67 partners in 2019, a 120 per cent growth rate. It is 100 per cent channel-focused and announced technology partnerships with Supermicro, Dell EMC, HPE, and NVIDIA in 2019. It said there was 300 per cent growth in AWS storage, topping 100PB in 2019.

Shorts

Datera has announced that its Datera Data Services Platform is now Veeam Ready in the Repository category. This enables Veeam customers to back up VMware primary data running on Datera primary storage to another Datera cluster, so providing continuous availability.

Dell EMC Isilon has been awarded a Technology & Engineering Emmy by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for early development of hierarchical storage management systems. It will be awarded at the forthcoming NAB show, April 18-22, in Las Vegas.

HiveIO announced Hive Fabric 9.0 with protection for virtual machines (VMs) and user data with its Disaster Recovery (DR) capability, which integrates with cloud storage, such as Amazon S3 and Azure. Hive Fabric 8.0 also incorporates business intelligence (BI) tools into Hive Sense. This capability proactively notifies HiveIO of an issue within a customer environment.

HPE has added replication over Fibre Channel to its Primera arrays as an alternative to existing Remote Copy support over Internet Protocol (IP). It claims Primera is ready to protect any mission-critical applications, regardless of the existing network infrastructure. Remote Copy is, HPE says, a continuous-availability product and “set it and forget it” technology.

NVMe-Over-Fabrics array startup Pavilion is partnering with Ovation Data Services Inc. (OvationData) to bring Hyperparallel Flash Array (HFA) technology to OvationData’s Seismic Nexus and Technology Centers. OvationData is a data services provider for multiple industries in Europe and the United States, with a concentration on seismic data for oil and gas exploration.

Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4 to deliver an integrated, multi-cloud storage to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform users. It uses the Multi-Cloud Object Gateway from Red Hat’s 2018 acquisition of NooBaa.

Quantum has also won a Technology & Engineering Emmy for its contributions to the development of Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) systems, meaning StorNext, for the media and entertainment industries. This Emmy will also be awarded at the forthcoming NAB show, April 18-22, in Las Vegas. 

SQream announced a new release of its flagship data analytics engine, SQream DB v2020.1. It includes native HDFS support which dramatically improves data offloading and ingest when deployed alongside Hadoop data lakes. SQream DB can now not only read, but also write data and intermediate results back to HDFS for other data consumers, to significantly improve analytics capabilities from a Hadoop data pipeline. It’s also added ORC Columnar Format and S3 support.

Container security startup Sysdig has announced a $70m E-round of VC funding, taking total funding to $206m. The round was led by Insight Partners with participation from previous investors, Bain Capital Ventures and Accel. Glynn Capital also joined this round, along with Goldman Sachs, who joined after being a customer for two years. Sysdig has also set up a Japanese subsidiary; Sysdig Japan GK.

People

Dell Technologies has promoted Adrian McDonald to its EMEA President position. He will continue his role as global lead for the Mosaic Employee Resource Group at Dell Technologies, which represents and promotes cultural inclusion and the benefits of cultural intelligence. In December last year Dell appointed Bill Scannell as its global sales organisation leader, with Aongus Hegarty taking the role of President of International Sales responsible for all markets outside of North America.

Cloud file services supplier Nasuni has appointed Joel Reich, former executive vice president at NetApp, and Peter McKay, CEO of Snyk and former Veeam co-CEO, to its board of directors.

Software-defined storage supplier Softiron announced the appointment of Paul Harris as Regional Director of Sales for the APAC region.

WekaIO has appointed Intekhab Nazeer as Chief Finance Officer (CFO). He comes to WekaIO from Unifi Software (acquired by Dell Boomi), a provider of self-service data discovery and preparation platforms, where he was CFO.

Customer wins

In the UK the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) has chosen Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage to to manage and protect its growing data, Data will be offloaded onto the Cloudian system from what the firm says is an expensive NetApp NAS filer.

HPE has been selected by Zenuity, a developer of software for self-driving and assisted driving cars, to provide artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure to be used for developing autonomous driving (AD) systems.

Books

Intel has published a 400+ page book on (Optane) Persistent Memory programming. The book introduces the persistent memory technology and provides answers to questions software developers an d system and cloud architects may have;

  • What is persistent memory?
  • How do I use it?
  • What APIs and libraries are available?
  • What benefits can it provide for my application?
  • What new programming methods do Ineed to learn?
  • How do I design applications to use persistent memory?
  • Where can I find information, documentation, and help?

It’s available in print and digital (PDF) format.

NetApp has also published a book, an eBook; Migrating Enterprise Workloads to the Cloud. It provides hands-on guidelines, including how Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports enterprise workloads during and after migration. Unlike the Intel Persistent Memory brain dump, this is more of a marketing spiel – and is 16 pages in landscape format.


Newbie container app data wrangling firm Kasten climbs mountain with K10

By
Chris Mellor
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For anyone wanting to code a data protection app for containers, Kubernetes (K8s) is a great big help. Because it orchestrates container instantiation and operations, it knows everything about them that such an app needs to know. 

This theoretically puts three-year-old startup Kasten in a good position, as Kubernetes, a control plane for containers, is its gateway to container data protection. The firm uses Kubernetes to auto-discover containerised apps, and to list their components and their startup processes. K10, Kasten’s application, is a K8s data protection layer, using it and its interfaces to avoid having to have direct storage product system level integrations. 

K10 datasheet diagram.

K10 doesn’t need to understand specific array interfaces, using K8s CSI (Container Storage Interface) abstractions instead, for block interface and object interface storage devices. It works with any CSI-supporting storage system.

Migration and disaster recovery are covered as well because Kubernetes enables K10 to snapshot a container’s entire state, not just the data it needs protecting. That means the K10-protected container can be moved to a different system and instantiated there; migration, and also sent to a disaster recovery site and kept there until needed.

Incremental changes can be snapshotted at intervals and sent to the remote site to keep it up to date. The remote sites can be in public clouds or on-premises, as can the source site. Wherever K8s runs then Kasten’s K10 can run; it is itself a containerised application.

Trad backup apps can’t cut it

Tolia told Blocks & Files in a briefing that in the containerised world, the app is the operational unit for backup and not, for example, the virtual machine. He said that, with K8s and containers: “The software application monolith is blown up.”

K10’s application and storage supplier eco system.

Mentioning a Fortune 1000 customer with 106 K8s pods and 538 app components, he said: “Traditional backup software can’t protect this. Recovery is very hard [and] scripting is too complex.”

Kasten backgrounder

The company was started up in the Bay Area in 2017 by CEO Niraj Tolia and Engineering VP Vaibhav Kamra. It raised $17m in a A-round of VC funding from Insight Partners in summer last year and has set up a second office in Salt Lake City.

Kasten co-founders: CEO Niraj Tolia (left) and VP Vaibhav Kamra.

Tolia and Kamra were previously involved with cloud storage gateway business Maginatics which was bought by EMC in 2014. Its IP included a distributed scale-out filesystem.

The CEO was Maginatic’s VP of engineering and Kamra its engineering director. Both stayed with EMC until leaving to found Kasten.

Tolia calls K10 a data management facility for containerised apps; preferring that term to data protection, since it provides migration and DR on top of backup. To find out more detail, check out a K10 data sheet.

B&F view

Kasten is fresh in the market and in a good place, with K8s orchestration set to become a standard feature of enterprise IT.

But two factors make the startup’s mid- and long-term position vulnerable to future attack. One is that it backs up entire containerised apps which can be re-instantiated. In other words it does not write them in a proprietary backup format, making it non-sticky in a backup application sense.

Secondly its gateway to the world of containerised app information is K8s, and that is open source, meaning anybody else can use it too. 

Indeed Cohesity already does, and K8s-orchestrated container apps are just one of its backup source systems, which include multi-hypervisor VMs, physical server apps, such as relational and distributed databases, and the main public clouds, not available to Kasten. Cohesity can provide container app data protection, migration and disaster recovery too, like Kasten, but also file storage services, copy data management, archiving and more. 

Other data protection suppliers could build their own K8s-based on-ramp to container backup as well, or buy the technology by buying a supplier, such as Kasten. It is easier for them to do that than for Kasten, with its limited resources, to expand into generalised backup or data management and take them on in their own product areas. 

In B&F’s view, the ability to protect K8s-orchestrated apps will become table stakes for every data protection supplier in five or so years’ time. It will be a feature and not, as it is now for Kasten, a basis for a product. Time is short and Kasten has to move fast.

Footnote

For mountaineering wonks, K10 is a peak in the Karakoram range, otherwise known as Saltoro Kangri 1. It is the 31st highest mountain in the world.

Back on Nasdaq: Quantum exits de-listed underworld

By
Chris Mellor
-

Quantum is returning to listed public company status, courtesy of the Nasdaq exchange, ending an 18 month period of accounting purgatory following wrongful revenue recognition practises by prior management.

The company revealed these practices in an SEC filing in September 2018 and promptly entered a period of limbo as it struggled to identify what had happened and why, and then fix the problems.

There was a board-level investigation, ejection from the New York stock exchange, investor class actions, and a sequence of five CEO changes helped demonstrate its entire future was at risk. 

These culminated in Jamie Lerner becoming chairman, president and CEO, getting full control, in June 2018 and he has since righted the quaking Quantum ship and put it back on course.

Jamie Lerner: Quantum chairman, president and CEO.

Corrected financial statements were filed in August last year for its fy2015, fy2016 and fy2017 periods, and they revealed losses. A refinancing exercise, hindered by the lack of accredited financial statements, provided capital. 

Much-needed new management came in. Some fresh engineering talent augmented the product team which managed to deliver new products. It returned to positive EBITDA status after 4 years of negativity.

StorNext lifeline

The core StorNext product suite, covering video file storage, management and workflows, is Quantum’s lifeline. Customers have stuck with it, being unable to get similar technology from any other supplier, and the product has been extended.

Lerner told Blocks & Files that it was an 18-month epic trek: “We had to get leaner. We had to show out technical prowess and the ability to invent instead of slopping out the same old products. … Our biggest customers told us what we needed to do.”

That was something in and around video, which is appropriate as video is set to account for more a large proportion of stored data in a few years’ time.

According to Cisco: “Globally, IP video traffic will be 82 per cent of all IP traffic (both business and consumer) by 2022, up from 75 per cent in 2017. Global IP video traffic will grow four-fold from 2017 to 2022, a CAGR of 29 per cent. Internet video traffic will grow fourfold from 2017 to 2022, a CAGR of 33 per cent.”

Concerning the StorNext products, Lerner said: ”There were wonderful tech assets but we had to get the mud off.” 

Getting the mud off

NVMe support was added with the F2000 to give StorNext a high-speed file system. That system went from concept to first customer ship in 6 months; Lerner saying: “When that happened I knew we could do it.”

Video surveillance products were added and the automotive driver assistance (ADAS) market entered. The StorNext user interface was updated with web-serving APIs.

Even the tape products were given an update with stronger anti-ransomware technology.

There’s more to do, with Lerner saying: “I wouldn’t say we’re done. We have another 3 or 4 years work ahead of us. We went after the low-hanging fruit.”

Our view

The company is making its products manageable from the cloud and has a major StorNext release coming, which is being developed to work better in a hybrid on-premises, public cloud world. 

That workflow-integrated video and like-video tiered file storage and management software suite represents Quantum’s crown jewels.

The Nasdaq relisting is a significant stage and Quantum is determined to use it to get growing again.

Upturn eludes Commvault as Q3 revenue drops

By
Chris Mellor
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The long hoped-for upturn at data protector Commvault has been delayed again, as CEO Sanjay Mirchandani announces another loss-making quarter, due to Hedvig acquisition costs.

Revenues for its third fiscal 2020 quarter were $176.4m, 4.3 per cent lower than last year’s $184.3m. There was a loss of $650k, which compares – badly – to a $13.4m profit a year ago.

Mirchandani said: “I am pleased to report that we again delivered results above expectations and that we did it while refreshing our data management portfolio, launching our new SaaS offering, Metallic, and integrating Hedvig, our first major acquisition.”

Three months CFO Brian Carolan anticipated that this third fiscal 2020 quarter would show a revenue upturn. It has on a sequential basis, 5 per cent, but not on an annual basis. As its third quarter is seasonally higher than its second, the sequential increase is no surprise.

A chart shows this is the fourth successive quarter of revenue decline;

Mirchandani is still anticipating a recovery: “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.”

In the quarter:

  • Total repeatable revenue was $123.4m, an increase of 2 per cent y/y,
  • Subscription and utility annual contract value (ACV) grew 56 per cent y/y to approximately $140.0m,
  • Software and products revenue was $76.6m, a decrease of 9 per cent y/y,
  • Services revenue was $99.7m, flat year over year,
  • Operating cash flow totalled $0.9m compared to $31.1m a year ago.
  • Total cash, restricted cash, and short-term investments were $345.0m at quarter-end, compared to $458.3m as of March 31, 2019,
  • Operating margin was negative 0.3 per cent.
  • Diluted earnings/share – $0.47.
  • Diluted loss/share was $(0.01).

Operating cash flow in quarter included approximately $5.0m of payments related to Hedvig transaction costs and approximately $8.0m of severance payments related to recent restructuring actions. 

The transition to subscriptions is affecting the revenue number and the Hedvig acquisition affected the profit line. There were $4.4m of transactions expenses, $2.8m of amortization and some additional compensation expenses related to the retained employees of Hedvig. These are not reflected in Commvault’s non-GAAP results which look consequently healthier.

Subscription income grew markedly and appears to have damaged perpetual licence sales, sending overall revenue down. Next quarter the Hedvig costs should be over and done with.

Coronavirus outbreak: Which NAND and disk suppliers are at risk?

By
Chris Mellor
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Coronavirus

NAND and disk drive supplies could be reduced after China put entire cities into lockdown in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

So far some 6,000 people are known to have been infected in China and there have been 132 confirmed deaths. The numbers are expected to rise.

Wuhan, a city of 10 million people in Hubei province, is the epicentre of the outbreak and has been in lockdown since January 23, with public transport effectively suspended, the Lunar New Year holiday extended, and factories and offices closed.

Coronaviruses. Photo Credit: Content Providers(s): CDC/Dr. Fred Murphy – This media comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention‘s Public Health Image Library (PHIL), with identification number #4814.

Fifteen other Chinese cities have put similar restrictions in place, including Chibi, Dangyang, Enshi, Ezhou, Huanggang, Huangshi, Jingmen, Suizhou, Qianjjiang, Xiangyang, Xianning, Xiantao, Xiaogan, Yichang, and Zhijiang.

This extensive set of restrictions will have knock-on effects on storage media supplies from factories in the affected areas.

Storage media suppliers at risk

A list of NAND and disk drive suppliers with operations in China includes;

  • Intel – with its Fab 68 making 3D NAND in Dalian,
  • Micron –  manufacturing facility in Xi’an,
  • Samsung has operations in three Chines locations;
    • Shaanxi Province – Samsung China Semiconductor,
    • Xian – F1x1 NAND wafer fab,
    • Suzhou – Samsung Suzhou Research Center (SSCR),
  • Sk Hynix has facilities in Chongqing and Wuxi, where it has HC1 and HC2 plants,
  • Tsinghua Unigroup has operations in Chengdu and Nanjing,
  • Yangtze Memory Technology Company (YMTC) has a plant in Wuhan,
  • Seagate produces finished disk drives in Wuxi,
  • Western Digital’s HGST unit has disk drive component manufacturing operations in Shenzhen and another facility in Shanghai.

Tsinghua Unigroup and YMTC are focussed on sales inside China. The others have integrated global supply chains whose output will be interrupted to some degree if their Chinese plants are shut down beyond the normal Lunar New Year holiday period

They will be affected by direct plant closures and also by supply chain interruptions due to affected component suppliers in China.

Supply chain choke point risks

The coronavirus outbreak is still developing with the Chinese authorities reacting to its growth.

China’s Lunar New Year break started on January 25 and lasts for a week, with it finishing on Sunday, February 2. Chinese officials have extended it to February 6. The city of Shanghai has gone further, extending it to February 9.

Businesses in Suzhou, a manufacturing hub in eastern China, are closed until at least February 8. Thus could well affect Samsung if its plant is in the close-down area.

Affected storage media suppliers, as well as other technology companies, will be examining their Chinese manufacturing operations and supply chains to work out the effects on their product supply operations. Details of any media shortages will emerge over the next few days.

British Airways has suspended flights to China from the UK. Passengers from China are being screened for the virus at five US airports; New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

Shares in US technology companies on the S&P 500 declined 1.6 per cent on Monday, January 27, but recovered by 1 per cent on January 28. 

The BBC is reporting it could be another 10 days before the outbreak peaks.

Intel flags up delay for Optane 3D, gen 2 delivery slowdown

By
Chris Mellor
-

Intel’s latest annual report signposted a delay in bringing second generation Optane SSD and DIMM products to full availability.

The report states: “With our Intel 3D NAND technology and Intel Optane technology, we are developing products to disrupt the memory and storage hierarchy. The 4th generation of Intel -based SSDs are scheduled to launch in 2020 with 144-layer QLC memory technology.”

It continues: “The 2nd generation Intel Optane SSDs for data centres are scheduled to start shipping samples in 2020, and are designed to deliver three times the throughput while reducing application latency by four times. In addition, the second-generation Intel Optane DC persistent memory is expected to achieve PRQ in 2020, and is designed for use with our future Intel Xeon CPUs.”

Optane SSD

PRQ (Product Qualification Report) is an earlier stage in productisation than sample shipping. Therefore PRQ  for gen 2 Optane DIMMs has not yet occurred and neither has sample shipping.

The QLC (4 bits/cell) SSDs were mentioned back in September and their 2020 ship date has not been altered.

Barlow Pass and Alder Stream

Back in September, Intel said it would release gen 2 Optane SSDs, code-named Alder Stream, and DIMMs, code-named Barlow Pass, in 2020. Now it is saying Alder Stream sample shipping will start in 2020, and Barlow Pass PRQ will take place this year also.

There is no mention of when the Barlow Pass Optane DIMMs will actually start sample shipping, or when full availability will start. That means it could be pushed as far back as 2021, as Tom’s Hardware has noted.

Optane chip manufacture

Intel confirmed it will still buy 3D XPoint chips from Micron, stating: “The next generation of Intel Optane technology and SSDs are being developed in New Mexico following the sale of our non-controlling interest in IMFT to Micron on October 31, 2019. We will continue to purchase product manufactured by Micron at the IMFT facility under established supply agreements.”

In other words there is nothing Intel wishes to say yet about having its own production fab for its Optane chips. Building a new fab would be a costly exercise, to the tune of billions of dollars.

We understand Micron’s X100 Optane product uses second generation XPoint technology. Essentially Intel has become an OEM of Micron, using its IMTF output. Until it builds its own XPoint fab, it will not be independent from Micron.

The 144 layer QLC chips are being manufactured at Intel’s Dalian plant in China. Gen 2 Optane is being developed at Intel’s Fab 11x in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, described as a centre of Optane technology advancement. Gen 3 Optane is also being developed there.

HyperFlex becomes mates with K8s: No need to go through vSphere first

By
Chris Mellor
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Cisco’s hyperconverged HyperFlex system has been re-engineered to support containerisation with native Kubernetes and Intersight cloud-based management.

The rationale is that users need to be able to move apps between on-premises and public cloud environments. Cloud-native apps can do that efficiently and Kubernetes is the way to orchestrate them and their myriad components. Giving HyperFlex native Kubernetes (K8s) support, running on Linux, enables it to operate effectively in the hybrid, multi-cloud world.

Liz Centoni, SVP and GM for Cloud, Compute and IoT at Cisco, issued a quote saying: “With the HyperFlex Application Platform (HX-AP) we are making Kubernetes, the new de facto standard for app developers, much easier to deploy and manage for both app and infrastructure teams.” 

Native HyperFlex Kubernetes

Up until now HyperFlex has supported K8s running in a VMware virtual machine, necessitating an ESXi license. Now customers can go one hundred per cent cloud-native with no intervening vSphere layer.

The Intersight management service has had container support added so it integrates with HX-AP.

With no virtual server layer, there is a common HX-AP environment shared by DevOps app teams and the infrastructure managers. Apps can be developed either in the public cloud or on-premises, with self-service resource provisioning attributes, and deployed anywhere – AWS and Azure for starters. The Google Cloud Platform will surely soon be supported as well.

Cisco says K8s HyperFlex has a curated stack of components above basic K8s, and a turn-key infrastructure, but supplied no component details. It functions as a container-as-a-service platform.

 The cloud, compute and IoT GM blogged about HX-AP obviating customers from paying the V-tax, so to speak: “The HyperFlex Application Platform is designed to take the hard work out of K8s and make it as easy as deploying an appliance. We integrate the Kubernetes components and lifecycle manage the operating system, libraries, packages and patches you need for K8s.

“Plus, we manage the security updates and check for consistency between all components every time you deploy or upgrade a cluster. We then enable IT to deliver a Container-as-a-Service experience to developers – much like they are used to getting in the public cloud.”

Users can run HX-AP and traditional, VMware-based HyperFlex software on the same hardware should they wish. HyperFlex will also support bare metal Linux in the future.

Cloud and competition

Todd Brannon, senior director for Data Centre Marketing at Cisco, told Blocks & Files in a briefing that HX-AP “looks and feels like Kubernetes in the cloud.” He added: “The cloud is not a place but an operating model.”

Google has its Anthos cloud-based container services system, which enables application container movement between on-premises and the AWS, Azure and GCP clouds. How that will interoperate with HX-AP, if it does so, is not clear.

HPE and Google are providing a hybrid cloud for containers, using Anthos. It does yet support HPE’s hyperconverged systems, such as SimpliVity. Nimble storage is supported and HPE has its distributed HCI (dHCI) product using ProLiant servers and Nimble storage.

Cisco says Intersight can understand the resource needs for applications at all layers of the stack, for bare metal apps, ones running in virtual machines and also containerised ones. It integrates with Cisco’s AppDynamics performance monitoring software for this.

Intersight also has a Workload Optimiser function, a real-time decision engine, to help decide where, in the on-premises, multi-cloud environment, it’s bet to run an app. Together, Cisco says, HX-AP, Intersight and AppDynamics provide a closed-loop operating model.

HyperFlex Application Platform for Kubernetes will be available for early access in the second quarter of calendar 2020.

Come to MAMR! Western Digital unfurls HDD tech roadmap

By
Chris Mellor
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Western Digital clarified its hard disk drive (HDD) technology road map at a Storage Tech Field Day session on January 22, 2020, but managed to avoid revealing how its latest ePMR technology works.

At the moment HDDs are in a perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) era, with longitudinal bits set upright – perpendicularly – in the platter recording medium. The two great HDD manufacturers, Seagate and Western Digital, are both espousing energy-assisted technologies to get past approaching areal density limits with PMR. Essentially, due to growing thermal instability, PMR bit values become less and less reliable as 3.5-inch disk platters move into the 2TB/platter areal density level and beyond.

Energetic assistance

To move past that, some form of  more stable recording media will be needed, with bit values written while the bit location in the media is either heated (HAMR or heat-assisted magnetic recording) or excited by microwaves (MAMR or microwave-assisted magnetic recording.) The heat or microwaves lower the medium’s coercivity (resistance to magnetic polarity change) which returns to a higher value at room temperature. This makes the bit value stable.

Seagate is working on developing HAMR as its next main recording technology while Western Digital has settled on a 3-phase approach. This was outlined by WD’s Carl Che, VP HDD Technology at the session:

  1. Energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), as used in its 18TB DC HC550 drives,
  2. MAMR,
  3. HAMR. 

Che did not say how energy-assistance worked with ePMR. He did say: “When we worked on MAMR we found there is a new physical phenomenon we can utilise. And by combining this phenomena we created a new recording scheme called ePMR; standing for energy-assist PMR.”

Coming drives will use this technology, which is a stepping stone or building block based on MAMR technology, enabling full MAMR in the future. Che wouldn’t say more about it but: “We will have a product coming very soon and I’m definitely looking forward to having conversations on that.”

MAMR may give way to HAMR in WD’s roadmap; that decision has not been made yet.

ePMR roadmap

With the 9-platter, 18TB HC550, the energy assist is not about areal density, but rather reliability. Che said the HC550 will come this year and WD is simultaneously working on the next generation – 20TB and beyond – to exploit the ePMR gains and drive areal density upwards. He mentioned that the surface width of an ePMR track is in the 50nm area. These drives do not need very much extra electricity to operate at all.

The application of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), with partially overlapping write tracks, will add a 20 per cent capacity uplift (24TB). After that the roadmap shows a progression with ePMR to about 24TB in 2023 and 30TB with shingling. 

Then there’s a jump to 30TB with non-shingled full energy assist – MAMR or HAMR – and 34TB with shingled MAMR or HAMR.  From this point the roadmap progresses to 50TB (non-shingled) and 60TB shingled in 2026.

WD outlook on SMR penetration of data centre disk drives; 40%+ in 2024.

Read/Write heads

Such a progression needs read/write head developments as well as media technology progression. The 2cm long head has to stay on track with plus/minus 1nm positioning accuracy. 

TMR stands for Tunnelling Magneto-Resistance and PZT for Piezoelectric actuator. PZT also indicates the Lead zirconium titanate compound; PbZrTi; a thin film piezoelectric material. VCM is Voice Coil Motor.

These heads need to be able to position themselves precisely over a track density of up to 500 tracks per inch (TPI) and beyond.

WD has a dual-stage micro actuator diagram (WDMA) showing dual piezoelectric strips. When differential voltage is applied to the WDMA, one piezo element expands as the other contracts. This action causes a slight rotational motion of the read-write head. 

Western Digital is currently shipping dual stage micro actuators with triple stage ones due in the Spring/second half of 2020 (HC550), with the required 500 TPI positioning accuracy and beyond. These move in three places along the head assembly; where it is mounted (as in single stage actuator), along the loadbeam (as in dual-stage actuator), and at the tip of the actuator (slider/gimbal).

The optimised use of these three controls should reduce the seek time and, Che said, “help our overall (IOPS) performance).”

Track-based writes for SMR 

Che said areal density in shingled drives was improved by using on-the-fly track-based ECC. There is ECC on the data blocks and ECC on a whole track. 

This enables improved track read and write accuracy. WD predicts it will get a 20 per cent capacity gain by shingling ePMR out to 2023, with 30TB SMR drives. The chart shows four generations of ePMR drives, starting with the 18TB HC550 this year, and followed by 20TB, 22TB and the 24TB product. The commensurate SMR product stages are 20TB ( HC650), 24TB, 26TB and 30TB.

Reducing IO Density

The increased number of tracks and bits/track, meaning overall increased areal density, reduces the number of IOPS/TB. Che said: “When we drive the capacity bigger you will see the unit of IO will reduce; that’s given.” He said WD’s hypercloud customers know this.

He said Intelligent IO queue management by the drive can be used to reach a target IOPS performance while maintaining latency at higher queue depths (4, 16, etc.)

Che didn’t mention multi- or dual-actuator drives which Seagate is developing to increase IO density. WD did discuss dual actuators last year for example, and Blocks & Files think it will use them eventually.

He said WD has a clear vision of how to get to 50TB and beyond – except that the decision about whether to use MAMR or HAMR post-2023 hasn’t yet been made. And we still don’t know how ePMR works.

Iguazio emits storage-integrated parallelised, real-time AI/machine learning workflows

By
Chris Mellor
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face popping out of computer chip

Workflow-integrated storage supplier Iguazio has received $24m in C-round funding and announced its Data Science Platform. This is deeply integrated into AI and machine learning processes, and accelerates them to real-time speeds through parallel access to multi-protocol views of a single storage silo using data container tech.

The firm said digital payment platform provider Payoneer is using it for proactive fraud prevention with real-time machine learning and predictive analytics.

Real-time fraud detection

Yaron Weiss, VP Corporate Security and Global IT Operations (CISO) at Payoneer, said of Iguazio’s Data Science Platform: “We’ve tackled one of our most elusive challenges with real-time predictive models, making fraud attacks almost impossible on Payoneer.”

He said Payoneer had built a system which adapts to new threats and enables is to prevent fraud with minimum false positives.  The system’s predictive machine learning models identify suspicious  fraud and money laundering patterns continuously.

Weiss said fraud was detected retroactively with offline machine learning models; customers could only block users after damage had already been done. Now it can take the same models and serve them in real time against fresh data.

The Iguazio system uses a low latency serverless framework, a real-time multi-model data engine and a Python eco-system running over Kubernetes. Iguazio claims an estimated 87 per cent of data science models which have shown promise in the lab never make it to production because of difficulties in making them operational and able to scale.

Data containers

It is based on so-called data containers that store normalised data from multiple sources; incoming stream records, files, binary objects, and table items. The data is indexed,  and encoded by a parallel processing engine. It’s stored in the most efficient way to reduce data footprint while maximising search and scan performance for each data type.

Data containers are accessed through a V310 API and can be read as any type regardless of how it was ingested. Applications can read, update, search, and manipulate data objects, while the data service ensures data consistency, durability, and availability.

Customers can submit SQL or API queries for file metadata, to identify or manipulate specific objects without long and resource-consuming directory traversals, eliminating any need for separate and non-synchronised file-metadata databases.

So-called API engines engine uses offload techniques for common transactions, analytics queries, real-time streaming, time-series, and machine-learning logic. They accept data and metadata queries, distribute them across all CPUs, and leverage data encoding and indexing schemes to eliminate I/O operations. Iguazio claims this provides magnitudes faster analytics and eliminates network chatter.

The Iguazio software is claimed to be able to accelerate the performance of tools such as Apache Hadoop and Spark by up to 100 times without requiring any software changes.

This DataScience Platform can run on-premises or in the public cloud. The Iguazio website contains much detail about its components and organisation.

Iguazio will use the $24m to fund product innovation and support global expansion into new and existing markets. The round was led by INCapital Ventures, with participation from existing and new investors, including Samsung SDS, Kensington Capital Partners, Plaza Ventures and Silverton Capital Ventures.

Tabletop storage: Georgia Tech looks to SMASH an exabyte into DNA ‘sugar cube’

By
Chris Mellor
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Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is looking into ways to speed up DNA-based cold storage in a $25m Scalable Molecular Archival Software and Hardware (SMASH) project.

DNA is a biopolymer molecule composed from two chains in a double helix formation, and carrying genetic information. The chains are made up from nucleotides containing one of four nucleobases; cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A) and thymine (T). Both chains carry the same data, which is encoded into sequences of the four nucleobases.

DNA double helix concept.

GTRI senior research scientist Nicholas Guise said in a quote that DNA storage is “so compact that a practical DNA archive could store an exabyte of data, equivalent to a million terabyte hard drives, in a volume about the size of a sugar cube.” 

Put another way, Alexa Harter, director of GTRI’s Cybersecurity, Information Protection, and Hardware Evaluation Research (CIPHER) Laboratory, said: “What would take acres in a data farm today could be kept in a device the size of the tabletop.”

The intent is to encode and decode terabytes of data in a day at costs and rates more than 100 times better than current technologies. 

This is still slow by HDD and SSD standards. The intent is to use DNA storage for data that must be kept indefinitely, but accessed infrequently; backup/archive-type data in other words. 

Guise said: “Scientists have been able to read DNA from animals that died centuries ago, so the data lasts essentially forever under the right conditions.”

The grant has been awarded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s (IARPA) Molecular Information Storage (MIST) program and is for a multi-phase project involving;

  • Georgia Tech’s Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology – will provide fabrication facilities,
  • Twist Bioscience – will engineer a DNA synthesis platform on silicon that “writes” the DNA strands which code the stored data,
  • Roswell Biotechnologies – will provide molecular electronic DNA reader chips which are under development,
  • The University of Washington, collaborating with Microsoft – will provide system architecture, data analysis and coding expertise. 

GTRI envisages a hybrid chip with DNA grown above standard CMOS layers containing the electronics. Current technology uses modified inkjet printing to produce DNA strands. The SMASH project plans to grow the biopolymer more rapidly and in larger quantities using parallelized synthesis on these hybrid chips.

GTRI researchers Brooke Beckert, Nicholas Guise, Alexa Harter and Adam Meier are shown outside the cleanroom of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Device fabrication for the DNA data storage project will be done in the facility behind them. (Credit: Branden Camp, Georgia Tech)

Data will be read from DNA strands using a molecular electronic sensor array chip, on which single molecules are drawn through nanoscale current meters that measure the electrical signatures of each letter, C, G, A and T, in the nucleotide sequence.  

GTRI research engineer Brooke Becker said: “We’ll be working with commercial foundries, so when we get the processing right, it should be much easier to transition the technology over to them. Connecting to the existing technology infrastructure is a critical part of this project, but we’ll have to custom-make most of the components in the first stage.”

Guise cast more light on the difficulties: “The basic synthesis is proven at a scale of hundreds of microns. We want to shrink that by a factor of 100, which leads us to worry about such issues as crosstalk between different DNA strands in adjacent locations on the chips.”

Current human genome sequencing in biomedicine hopes to achieve a $1,000/genome cost. The SMASH project is looking for a $10/data genome cost. This is a huge difference; a hundredth less.

Blocks & Files thinks we’re looking at two to three year project here.

GTRI senior research scientist Adam Meier said: “We don’t see any killers ahead for this technology. There is a lot of emerging technology and doing this commercially will require many orders of magnitude improvement. Magnetic tape for archival storage has been improving steadily for 60 years, and this investment from IARPA will power the advancements needed to make DNA storage competitive with that.”

We could image a DNA helix as a kind of ribbon or tape, only at a molecular level. Storing an exabyte in a sugar cube-sized chip containing it would certainly make tape density look pretty shabby.

Mind the air gap: Quantum reinforces tape defences against ransomware

By
Chris Mellor
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LTO tape
LTO tape

Quantum has added a software lock mechanism to prevent backup tapes being accessed in its Scalar i3, i6 and i6000 libraries as a further barrier against ransomware.

Tape cartridges stored in tape libraries are placed in shelves. They are offline in the shelves, and hence air-gapped from any network access. If users need to instantiate a tape backup or restore, then the library gets sent commands, selects and moves a tape cartridge to a drive, and carries out the directed operation.

Eric Bassier of Quantum’s product marketing team said: “Tape’s inherent offline attribute makes it the most secure place to keep a copy of data, and with Quantum’s Active Vault intelligent tape software customers can now store their content in an ultra-secure offline repository without any human intervention.”

Quantum Scalar library administrators can now set policies for tapes to be placed in a so-called logical Active Vault partition. This means a logical state as the tapes are not physically moved inside the library as a result. The firm said that, normally, the backup tapes are in a Backup Application Partition, which is “backup application-connected.”

These Active Vault status tapes are now actually inactive, ironically, until returned to their normal state, in the logical Backup Application Partition, via an administrator-directed command.

Existing i3, i6 and i6000 Scalar library users can get Active Vault software upgrades.

The company is making three Ransomware Protection Packs available. These are three Scalar library configurations bundled in with the Active Vault software:

  • Small – i3 to 600TB in 3U
  • Medium – i6 to 1.2PB in 6U
  • Large – i6 to 2.4PB in 12U.

The i6000 library supports ActiveVault but there are no pre-configured systems available. A Quantum spokesperson said: “We are deploying more Scalar i6000’s than ever before – for archive and cold storage of exabyte-scale unstructured data.” 

Universal memory candidate technology

By
Chris Mellor
-

University of Lancaster researchers have devised a universal memory candidate technology.

By using a structure based on members of the III-V chemical compounds family, it’s possible to build a memory cell with the switching speed of DRAM, data retention that’s better than NAND, and a far lower voltage needed for switching than NAND.

It is called an UltraRAM cell and uses an Indium arsenide (InAs) floating gate to store the memory state (bit value). This gate is isolated by a layered barrier built from Indium arsenide and Aluminium antimonide as this diagram illustrates;

Device structure. (a) Schematic of the processed device with control gate (CG), source (S) and drain (D) contacts (gold). The red spheres represent stored charge in the floating gate (FG). (b) Details of the layer structure within the device. In both (a,b) InAs is coloured blue, AlSb grey and GaSb dark red. (c) Cross-sectional scanning transmission electron microscopy image showing the high quality of the epitaxial material, the individual layers and their heterointerfaces.

A schematic diagram expands on this;

See list of the III-V compounds used below.

Interactions between the layers traps the memory state charge in the floating gate. The isolation of the floating gate is such that the cell holds data for an extremely long time. In fact a retention period of an extraordinary 100 trillion years has been predicted through a simulation exercise.

The cell’s state can be altered by a slightly larger than 2 volt current, taking advantage of a dual quantum well resonant tunnelling junction through the isolating barrier. This is said by the researchers to be 0.1 per cent of the energy needed to switch NAND and 1 per cent of that needed to switch DRAM. 

Writing logic state 1, adding charge, takes just over 5ns, while writing logic state 0, emptying charge, takes 3ns.

The UltraRAM cell is described in pay-to-download paper; Simulations of Ultralow-Power Nonvolatile Cells for Random-Access Memory. But the initial research is in a free-to-download report; Room-temperature Operation of Low-voltage, Non-volatile, Compound-semiconductor Memory Cells.

These papers have been authored by Professor Manus Hayne  and PhD student Dominic Lane, both in the university’s Physics research facility.

They say the cells can be built into bit-addressable arrays and so used for computing stage /memory devices. Watch this space to see if the research technology can be productised.

II-V Compounds

The III-V compounds or alloys are composed of particular elements in the table of elements, in the boron (III) and orogen (V) groups. The ones used by the researchers are:

  • InGaAs – Indium gallium arsenide – a room-temperature semiconductor,
  • GaSb – Gallium antimonide – a semiconducting compound,
  • AlGaAs – Aluminium gallium arsenide – a non-conductor and used as a barrier material in GaAs-based heterostructure devices,
  • GaAs – Gallium arsenide – a compound semiconductor,
  • AlSb – Aluminium antimonide – another compound semiconductor, 
  • InAs – Indium arsenide – another semiconductor.
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