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Kaminario extends pay-as-you-go storage model to array hardware

Kaminario is taking the consumption-based software subscription model and extending this to hardware, offering customers the option to acquire storage arrays on a pay-as-you-go basis as well.

The move is an extension of Kaminario’s partnership with Tech Data, announced last year. This saw the storage firm quit the hardware business and focus on its software platform, with Tech Data providing the hardware.

Available now as Kaminario Storage Utility, the new offering allows customers to operate all-flash storage arrays through a single subscription payment covering software and hardware, thus shifting costs from capex to opex.

The cost of the hardware gets converted to a consumption-based monthly payment determined by the amount of storage used. Hardware usage metering is tied directly to software usage, with billing integrated into Kaminario’s Clarity analytics platform.

When purchased through Tech Data’s Technology as a Service (TaaS) offering, Kaminario Storage Utility will have an all-inclusive baseline price of $100 per usable TB (terabyte) per month.

Kaminario’s software runs on standard X86 server hardware, but customer choice is limited to a range of pre-integrated configurations optimised for performance.

DraaS ticks

Also new from Kaminario is a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offering, and Kaminario for Public Cloud.

The Kaminario DRaaS option provides customers with a fully managed cloud-based disaster recovery service as a monthly expense based on protected capacity.

Subscribers can choose from a list of Tier 4 data centre locations or make use of an existing remote site. Kaminario said that a range of service levels and recovery time objectives are available.

Due to be available in the first half of 2020, Kaminario for Public Cloud will enable customers to deploy storage array instances running VisionOS onto major public cloud platforms. This includes the big three: AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

Kaminario said its platform’s native snapshot and replication support will allow users to move data from on-premises to the cloud to support development, disaster recovery or cloud bursting use cases.

Kaminario’s Clarity analytics Flex orchestration and automation tools will provide customers the ability to manage storage instances across all environments.

What’s up with the data warehouse market?

The market for data warehouse platforms looks set to expand as gleaning insights from data becomes ever more important for businesses. At the same time, established names like Teradata are struggling lately against Amazon and Microsoft and some well-funded newcomers, especially those offering the convenience of a cloud service.

The overall size of the data warehouse market depends upon who you ask, but a recent report published by Allied Market Research pegged it at $18.61bn in 2017 and estimates it will be worth $34.69bn by 2025.

However, the spoils will not be shared equally. Let’s take the example of one big industry Teradata, which has seen revenue fall over the past few years, down from around $2.7bn five years ago to $2.2bn in 2017, as reported in The Register.

The decline can be attributed to several factors, such as customers wanting analytics as well as data warehousing, analytics in the cloud and pay-as-you-go cloud-style pricing models.

Meanwhile, the Hadoop vendors who rode the big data analytics wave at about the same time are also struggling. Two of the biggest players, Cloudera and Hortonworks, announced a merger last year after both recorded losses.

The post-merger Cloudera has also just seen its share price fall as it missed revenue expectations and new CEO Tom Reilly quit after a few months in the post.

Snowflake Computing and Yellowbrick Data seem to be doing better. These privately held startups do not reveal sales figures, but backers are piling megabucks into both companies. Snowflake has raised $923m to date, while YellowBrick Data this week secured $81m in Series C funding that brings its total up to $173m.

It’s the cloud wot done it

If you guessed that cloud had much do with these changes in the data warehouse market, then you would be right.

“It is indeed the cloud. The market as a whole is very aggressively starting to pivot towards the cloud,” said Adam Ronthal, senior director analyst for data management and analytics at Gartner.

He noted that just two vendors – AWS with Redshift and Microsoft with Azure SQL Data Warehouse – accounted for 70 per cent of the revenue growth in the overall DBMS market for 2017 and 2018 .

The usual reasons apply – it is easier to engage with cloud-based technologies, so the barriers to entry are significantly lower. Customers do not have to install or maintain complex and costly infrastructure, and billing is more transparent.

Riding this wave are upstarts like Snowflake that pitch their platform as cloud-native without any legacy baggage.

Traditional vendors have responded to this challenge by either repositioning their platforms, or by trying to adapt them to run in the cloud.

Teradata is a good example, and is in the midst of repositioning itself at the very high end of the market, where people have the most challenging and complex workloads, according to Ronthal.

This effectively means the company is retreating to a market niche, and the Redshifts and Snowflakes have a good enough proposition for the majority of customers.

Yellowbrick Data is currently an on-premises play, but it came into the market promising higher performance for customers with legacy platforms such as Netezza, and in some cases claims to have replaced multiple racks of older equipment with a single Yellowbrick enclosure.

The company now touts itself as a hybrid cloud play by aiming to get its platform deployed on public clouds, so that Ronthal says that he regards both Yellowbrick and Snowflake as riding the cloud wave.

Hadoop deduped

As for the Hadoop companies, they are suffering a hangover from over-hyping five to six years ago. At the time there were predictions-a-plenty that non-relational databases would become a universal platform to replace everything else. Instead, Hadoop and NoSQL are finding their place alongside the traditional SQL-based platforms.

According to Ronthal, “there has been a rediscovery of the core value of some of the relational technologies which are still best suited for production delivery and high degrees of optimisation, whereas the non-relational technologies have their place but they are not the same value proposition,”

The overall picture is that data warehousing is shifting inexorably to the cloud, but customers still look for platforms that offer the traditional relational database tools at their core. This is good news for Snowflake and Yellowbrick.

Snowflake settles on Google Cloud as it adds data sharing

Snowflake
Snowflake

Snowflake is bringing its cloud-based data warehouse and analytics service to Google’s cloud platform. A new Data Exchange also promises to give users access to data sets from a variety of providers.

The Snowflake data warehouse-as-a-service is already available on Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure clouds, and users will soon be able to access it on the Google Cloud Platform, covering off the three major public cloud providers.

It will be offered as a preview in the autumn (fall) of this year, and general availability is set for early 2020.

Newly appointed Snowflake chief executive Frank Slootman said it is important for businesses to have a unified data source in a multi-cloud world. Naturally, Snowflake aims to fill this role.

Also new today is the Snowflake Data Exchange. This is a marketplace that allows Snowflake customers to connect with data from various providers and generate insights from that data, without having to go through APIs or extract data to cloud storage first.

Customers will be able to connect with Data Exchange from their Snowflake account and browse a data catalogue to access real-time data that they can then join with existing data sets in Snowflake.

Snowflake architecture

Revenue streams

For data providers, this represents an opportunity to create new revenue streams by sharing live data with Snowflake customers. One such provider Snowflake has already signed up is Weather Source, a provider of weather and climate data that can be used to help make crucial business decisions.

Slootman said that many of those data providers will be Snowflake customers that are looking for ways to monetise their own data.

“Snowflake is uniquely positioned to facilitate secure data sharing between all types of organisations because of our built-for-the-cloud architecture,” he said.

Snowflake is a relatively new company that garnered a lot of attention from having former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia in charge until he stood down as CEO last month.

The firm’s business model is based around doing for data warehousing and analytics what Salesforce has done for CRM – turning it into a service that can scale as required thanks to the elasticity of the cloud, with the claim of a lower cost than managing and operating traditional solutions.

Snowflake functions as a fully relational ANSI SQL data warehouse, but also supports semi-structured data such as JSON and Parquet. It is compatible with popular ETL and BI tools, and features separate compute, storage, and cloud services that can scale independently, according to the firm.

WekaIO touts record STAC-M3 benchmark performance

WekaIO is making yet another record-breaking performance claim, this time for the STAC-M3 analytics benchmarks.

The STAC-M3 Antuco and Kanaga benchmark suites are regarded as an industry standard for evaluating the performance of systems performing high-speed analytics on time series data. STAC benchmarks are widely used by banks and other financial services organisations.

According to WekaIO, the test system broke eight of 24 STAC-M3 records for mean query-response times and four out of five records for throughput. The lengthy STAC report, which contains detailed explanations of the benchmark specifications and the results, is available from the STAC website.

The test were run using STAC’s baseline benchmark suite Antuco which uses a dataset comprising a year’s worth of simulated stock market data, and the scaling suite Kanaga, which extends this to five years of simulated stock market data.

Testing times

The test system was a new integrated solution from Penguin Computing, an addition to its line of FrostByte software-defined storage systems, in this case combining the WekaIO Matrix v3.2.2 file system with its Relion Xeon-based servers.

As tested, the system ran the Kx kdb+ 3.6 database system across seven Penguin Relion XO1132g servers with dual Intel Xeon Gold 6140 processors, while the FrostByte storage system used eight RXE1112 server nodes with nine NVMe SSDs per server.

The test system was capable of delivering a combined performance density of up to 87.5 GB/sec to the client nodes, 40.5 GB/sec of actual throughput, and 2.5M 4K IOPS.

The Matrix file system is designed for high performance and scalability with low latency, using clusters of standard x86 servers, and WekaIO claims this is the fastest POSIX-compliant file system for AI and technical compute workloads.

The storage start-up has certainly been making a lot of noise about its benchmark wins this year, as reported by Blocks & Files previously here and here.

Eighty one million dollars follows the Yellowbrick Data road

Startup Yellowbrick Data has secured $81 million in Series C funding to help speed adoption of its high-performance data warehouse appliance.

Yellowbrick came out of stealth mode in July last year with $44m in Series A funding, and followed up with $48m Series B financing in October. The latest round brings total financing to $173m, led by DFJ Growth with Menlo Ventures, Google Ventures, and new investors IVP and BMW i Ventures.

The company describes the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse as a turnkey appliance for data warehousing and running analytics on that data. It is based on a custom hardware-software combo that is purportedly up to 140 times faster than rivals.

It achieves this performance partly through a technique that Yellowbrick calls native flash queries. Briefly, the data being processed is streamed directly from SSD and into the CPU cache, bypassing main memory entirely in order to take advantage of the massive bandwidth that the flash storage subsystem offers.

Each Data Warehouse is a rack-mount enclosure with a number of compute blade nodes plus two manager nodes, with connectivity via 2x 10GbE or 2x 40GbE network ports per manager node. The Yellowbrick Data Warehouse 2300 Series, introduced in February 2019, can be configured with up to 30 compute nodes and can store up to 2.4 petabytes of customer data.

Yellowbrick Data Warehouse system

Co-founder and chief executive Neil Carson claimed in a statement today that Yellowbrick Data is the fastest SQL analytics platform on the market, combining speed, flexibility, and security with predictable costs.

“This mix is driving growth for our company, and success for our expanding set of new and existing global customers,” he said.

One Yellowbrick customer is behaviour-based fraud detection firm ThreatMetrix. CTO Matthias Baumhof said in a statement today that Yellowbrick Data came out tops when his company tested it against rival data warehouses and Hadoop-based solutions.

“Our user queries are completely ad hoc and the Yellowbrick workload management capabilities allowed us to guarantee interactive response times for our portal users, even under high concurrency,” he said.

VAST Data guarantees no downtime, no data loss

VAST Data is making potential customers an offer it hopes they can’t refuse: guarantees on uptime and data loss, fixed price maintenance for a decade, and free access to future updates.

The startup made a big splash in February 2019 when it came out of stealth mode with its all-flash Universal Storage architecture. This serves all applications from a single storage tier at a cost claimed to be comparable with hard drives.

VAST Data NVMe enclosure

This would allow customers to potentially replace myriad storage systems from various suppliers with a single platform. This promise has apparently seen the company secure a number of big deals already and pick up $80m in two funding rounds.

So confident is VAST Data with the strength of its platform that it is now offering a ‘Zero Compromise Guarantee”.

It said the program demonstrates the company’s commitment to the concept of Universal Storage and safeguards the process of storage acquisition for enterprise customers.

Zero Compromise gives customers some key guarantees and services around reliability and endurance and is intended to eliminate the risks of adopting its new storage architecture.

These commitments include:

  • Guarantee against data loss and guaranteed uptime: The VAST system will never lose data due to system volatility, since it does not write data to volatile DRAM. The system will also never experience downtime due to a combination of controller hardware failures. Even in clusters of hundreds of controllers, as long as there is at least one controller online, a VAST storage cluster will remain online or VAST will provide one year of support at no cost.
  • A decade of operation and fixed maintenance pricing: Customers under an active VAST maintenance agreement benefit from up to ten years of warranty. This is not just for hardware and software issues, but for ten years of QLC flash endurance. VAST also offers a flat, ten-year fixed price model.
  • All-Access feature releases. any customer under an active maintenance agreement will get access to today’s and tomorrow’s Universal Storage cluster software features without having to pay additional licensing or capacity charges.
  • Unconditional right to return. Customers can return their system for any reason at any time up until 60 days after delivery.
  • Guaranteed best-in-class data reduction. If a VAST storage system does not deliver the best storage efficiency the company will provide additional storage to cover the difference at no additional cost.
  • Dedicated resource to ease deployment: For six months, VAST engineers will proactively monitor a customer’s clusters and provide guidance and support.

Leap of faith not required

It is easy to see why customers may be reluctant to invest in novel storage architectures from startups just out of stealth mode, even one founded by a former XTremIO vice president.

Hence Zero Compromise.

“Investing in emerging storage technologies has long been a leap of faith for customers who are willing to assume some amount of risk dealing with new vendors and architectures,” said Jeff Denworth, VAST Data’s vice president of products.

He said VAST Data’s architecture resolves many of the biggest challenges that have plagued storage engineering efforts for decades, eliminating complications around mechanical media, storage controller failures or volatile storage caching.

451 Research analyst Henry Baltazar told Blocks & Files that performance, reliability and storage efficiency guarantees are common in the flash storage space, so it is not too surprising to see VAST Data announcing its Zero Compromise offer.

However, he added that the ten year QLC flash endurance warranty is an important component given the low write endurance capabilities that come with that media.

The Universal Storage architecture (above) sees the compute nodes separated from the boxes operating as storage nodes. The are all interlinked using NVMe over Fabrics to deliver switched everything-to-everything access with DAS latency.

The storage nodes are little more than enclosures full of QLC flash drives, with Intel Optane 3D XPoint non-volatile memory used for buffering and metadata.

Tata adds Actifio to digital transformation arsenal

Actifio has an endorsement of sorts for its data management platform, as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has picked it to help enterprise clients modernise their data management.

Tata’s interest in the Actifio platform appears to be in helping its corporate clients to migrate from legacy data management strategies towards more modern hybrid and multi-cloud approaches.

The two companies claim that the combination of Actifio technology and Tata’s expertise in delivering IT transformation will bring significant benefits to customers in the shape of better data protection and improved security, compliance and governance.

Actifio claims to be a pioneer in copy data virtualisation, whereby its Sky platform creates a single “gold copy” of data that can be accessed from anywhere, and data pipelining that provides data mobility and point-in-time application recovery at any location.

The Sky platform, based on Actifio’s Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology, is available as a virtual appliance that can be deployed at any customer location,.

Actifio’s VDP

Violin asks Phison: can you NVMe?

All-flash array pioneer Violin Systems is teaming up with Phison Electronics to add NVMe support to its storage systems, as it looks to deliver high performance while maintaining continuity with its enterprise data services.

Violin Systems delivered its first new products last year, following its emergence from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

As detailed by Blocks & Files, the company is pinning its hopes on delivering the low latency, high-IOPS performance offered by AFA startups such as E8 and Excelero that use NVMe over fabrics (NVMe-oF) technology. Its pitch is that it also offers enterprise data services found in traditional arrays that the startups currently lack.

Violin today said it is working with Phison Electronics, a Taiwanese developer of NAND Flash silicon, to integrate its NVMe SSD controllerwith Violin’s storage systems to help it realise this goal. Previously, it used proprietary Violin Inline Memory Modules (VIMMS) in its arrays.

Violin’s XVS array

By enhancing the NVMe standard interface with its own technologies, Violin aims to enable consistency as well as high performance for such applications as SQL databases, real-time analytics and OLTP and areas like machine learning where there is zero tolerance for any performance lag.

Phison describes the E12DC controller as its second generation of high performance PCIe NVMe SSD controller. It supports storage capacities up to 8TB and sustained performance in sequential reads and sequential writes of 3,200MB per second.

“This joint development with Phison allows both companies to push the boundaries of enterprise SSDs and bring true innovation to the market through standards-based technology vs proprietary technology,” Violin Chairman and CEO Mark Lewis said in a statement.

However, as previously noted by Blocks & Files, the mainstream AFA suppliers will soon catch up on the NVMe performance gap, while the start-ups plan to add enterprise services to their platforms.

Violin may only have a limited time to convince enterprise buyers it can offer top-level performance with the traditional data services they have come to expect.

Seagate ships 16TB Exos X16 enterprise hard drive

Seagate is now shipping a 16TB version of its helium-based Exos enterprise hard drives, billed as the industry’s first to deliver this level of capacity.

The Exos X16 16TB joins Seagate’s existing family of Exos X12 and Exos X10 3.5in 7,200RPM enterprise hard drives and is available from today at a suggested price of $629 (£497).

Not surprisingly, Seagate touts the drive as ideal for customers such as hyperscale data centres, simply because it holds out the promise of 33 per cent more storage capacity per rack compared to 12TB drives, while maintaining the same standard 3.5in form factor for a reduced overall total cost of ownership.

As well as boasting that the new drive delivers the highest storage density available, Seagate said it has the field-proven reliability and continuous high performance to support a broad range of workload requirements and high-availability use cases.

Full specifications for the Exos X16 have yet to be made available, but the other drives in the range come in versions with either a 6Gbit/s SATA or 12Gbit/s SAS host interface and an MTBF rating of 2.5 million hours.

Self-encrypting drive (SED) versions are also available, and Seagate said that Exos X16 offers built-in data protection, including Seagate‘s Instant Secure Erase technology designed to simplify decommissioning of drives at the end of their lifecycle.

Seagate has also yet to offer performance figures, but one customer – Inspur – has already had a chance to test out the 16TB unit.

“For Seagate’s 16TB helium-based Exos X16 enterprise drive, we have completed a series of joint tests, which indicate it delivers high performance with support for varying workloads, allowing us to increase system capacity and reduce deployment complexity, whilst considerably lowering total cost of ownership,” Inspur vice president Peng Zhen said in a canned statement.

It isn’t just the Exos line getting the 16TB treatment – Seagate has also extended its IronWolf and IronWolf Pro lines with 16TB versions. These hard drives are optimised for multi-user NAS environments, capable of supporting workloads up to 300TB/year.

Arcserve gains high availability for Linux and Azure

Data protection specialist Arcserve has updated its Arcserve Replication and High Availability platform with full high availability support for Linux, plus protection of Windows and Linux workloads on Microsoft’s Azure public cloud.

Arcserve RHA was developed to provide organisations with true continuous application and system availability, according to the firm, and uses a journal-based replication method that operates at the level of files and folders, rather than relying on snapshot-based backups. A heartbeat monitors the server or application, with every change asynchronously duplicated to the replica.

With Arcserve RHA 18.0, the platform gains full system high availability for Linux as well as Windows, so that it provides automatic failover for systems running both platforms. This ensures workloads remain operational with minimal interruption if a vital server goes down.

This release also extends full system support for these platforms to Azure, which means that Windows systems can replicate to XenServer, VMware, Hyper-V, Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure, while Linux systems can replicate to VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure.

Arcserve RHA: how it works

At the application level, organisations can now manage data replication for Exchange, SQL, IIS, SharePoint, Oracle, Hyper-V and custom applications.

This release of Arcserve RHA also offers the ability to rollback applications to a point in time before a system crash, data corruption, or ransomware event.

Also new is Hyper-V Cluster Share Volumes (CSV) support for Microsoft Hyper-V scenarios, Windows Server 2019 support, plus enhanced monitoring and alerting capabilities.

Arcserve AHA is used by customers in industries such as manufacturing, banking and finance, for whom the issue is not just about recovery but the delivery of always available systems, according to Arcserve. Manufacturing especially cannot afford to have onsite systems down due to application availability issues.

Arcserve RHA is licensed per server, per virtual machine or per host. Pricing remains the same as it was for RHA 16.5.

However, Arcserve told Blocks & Files that some licensing changes have been made in this version: it now requires minimum of two licenses (source and target) for initial purchase, per socket and per TB options are longer available, license keys for RHA 16.5 will not work with RHA 18.0, and operating a trial version will now require a license key.

Baffled by block storage choices? Read this!

A new report from research outfit Gigaom aims to help enterprises focus on the key factors in order to make the right decision when investing in storage systems.

Prospective buyers might be forgiven for being confused. Enterprise storage has changed radically in recent years thanks to developments such as flash memory, software-defined storage and new high-speed connectivity options.

The Gigaom report “Key Criteria for Evaluating Enterprise Block Storage” focuses on the vital metrics that should be considered for a modern block storage system aimed at serving primary workloads.

Technologies like flash memory and high-speed Ethernet networks have commoditised performance and reduced costs. Other needs such as better agility of the infrastructure and integration with cloud-based storage systems now play a bigger role, Enrico Signoretti, the report author, writes.

Many of the metrics familiar to storage managers still play an important part. They include performance, TCO, cost per IOPs and cost per GB.

What does the roadmap say?

However, Signoretti notes that many innovative technologies quickly become standard capabilities that are taken for granted, and so it is important to consider the features that vendors offer today and what they plan to release in the near future.

The meat of the report is the key criteria, including such capabilities as NVMe and NVMe-oF and analytics and notable vendor implementations.

There is also a lengthy discussion on how each feature might affect the metrics identified earlier in the report, plus a handy table that offers an at-glance guide with rough weightings.

Signoretti makes it clear that the impact of such features differs for every organisation, and so his goal is to enable end users to better understand the value of each feature or storage capability presented by vendors when making their own purchase decisions.

Gigaom’s report can be downloaded from the firm’s site here.

SSD revenue down but shipments up for the first quarter

The latest SSD market figures from IDC show that Samsung continues to be the leading supplier, but that revenue is down sharply against last year while shipments have increased, showing that the market is still suffering from oversupply in the short term.

According to IDC, total SSD market revenue in 1Q19 hit $4.924bn, which is 30 per cent down o this time last year. It estimates that a total of 60.2m SSDs were shipped in the quarter, representing a 21 per cent increase on last year.

In terms of SSD capacity sold, IDC’s figures show 25.3 exabytes (EB) was shipped in 1Q19, which is a 33 per cent increase on last year.

Looking at the enterprise sector, SSD revenue (the black line in the chart) was $2.494bn in 1Q19, which is 35 per cent down on the same quarter last year.

Enterprise SSD revenue and capacity shipped

However, a total of 9.72EB of enterprise SSD capacity shipped in the quarter (the blue bars), an increase of 11 per cent year-on-year, which indicates that the price in terms of $/TB has fallen 41 per cent. IDC estimates this was made up by unit shipments of 6.8m SSDs, which is just 1 per cent up on this period last year.

For client SSDs going into laptops and the like there is a similar picture, with revenue hitting $2.371bn for this quarter, 25 per cent down year-on-year.

Client SSD revenue and millions of SSDs shipped

This revenue was made up through the delivery of 15.6EB of SSD capacity, up 51 per cent year-on-year, and implies a fall in price per TB of 50 per cent. In terms of actual unit shipments, IDC estimates this represents 50.4m drives, an increase on this time last year of 26 per cent.

So what is causing this decline in revenue? Well, The Register reported last week that oversupply in the Nand flash component market has seen revenues slump there, which is good news for buyers, but not so good for the manufacturers.

Weakening demand in 4Q18 has pushed OEMs to begin adjusting their inventories, meaning that the system builders are likely to be buying in fewer SSDs while they use up supplies they have already ordered. Demand is expected to pick up again, however.

Enterprise SSD revenue by vendor

Meanwhile, IDC’s figures show that Samsung keeps its position as the top SSD vendor, followed by Intel and Western Digital, although Samsung’s share of the enterprise SSD market appears to be declining while Intel’s has held relatively steady over the past year.