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RackTop pushes NAS with built-in security and compliance

By
Daniel Robinson
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RackTop Systems is looking to grow the market for its line of NAS appliances featuring built-in encryption and compliance controls thanks to $15m in Series A financing.

Founded in 2010 by US intelligence community veterans, RackTop specialises in what it calls CyberConverged arrays that integrate data storage and advanced security and compliance into a single platform.

BrickStor applicances in a 2U form factor

The firm’s BrickStor all-in-one data storage and management appliances come in a 2U rack-mount chassis with redundant power supplies and space for up to 12 3.5in SAS drives. There are two models: BrickStor Iron can be fitted with 12TB up to 168TB of disk capacity, while BrickStor Titanium has a capacity of 4.8TB of all Flash or up to 126TB of flash and disk. Both can be configured for dual 10Gbit Ethernet ports or 4 x 1Gbit Ethernet ports.

Eric Bednash, RackTop’s co-founder and CEO, claimed that BrickStor helps business with the problems of storing and managing large volumes of data, while at the same time protecting that data and addressing compliance requirements.

RackTop’s BrickStor architecture

The built-in encryption appears to come from RackTop using Seagate FIPS certified self-encrypting drives. The advantage here is that there is no impact on performance as there would be if the array controller had to encrypt and decrypt everything writes and reads.

Another feature of BrickStor, Secure Global File Share (SecureGFS), is designed to allow users to collaborate and share files internally and externally without sacrificing security or compliance, thanks to encrypted file sharing over the LAN and WAN.

RackTop will use the new funds on product development and to expand its sales channel. It is targeting customers in industries such as the public sector, financial services, health care and life sciences and claims to have customers worldwide already using its platform to manage upwards of 50 petabytes of data.

Participants in the funding round including Razor’s Edge Ventures, Grotech Ventures and Blu Venture Investors.

Cohesity says: We will bring applications to the data and tackle your infrastructure sprawl

By
Chris Mellor
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Cohesity has launched an applications marketplace that will enable customers to buy third party apps on its Data Platform.

The company says the initiative brings applications to the data and enlists the help of ESG senior analyst Christophe Bertrand to tell us why this is important: “Bringing applications to the data, versus data to the applications, helps enterprises increase data intelligence and reduce infrastructure sprawl that contributes to the problem of data silos and mass data fragmentation.”

At launch four third-party and three in-house applications are available on the Cohesity MarketPlace.

The third-party apps are:

  • Splunk Enterprise – for data set analysis and investigation
  • SentinelOne Anti-Virus – check virus contamination using SentinelOne’s libraries
  • Clam Anti-Virus open-source application – runs directly on file data in the data platform
  • Imanis Data: backup NoSQL workloads into the data platform

The Cohesity applications are:

  • Insight: Search data as it is stored on the data platform for compliance, legal, or day-to-day business needs
  • Spotlight: Monitor modifications to file data to check for a potential internal or external security breach, like a ransomware attack. Search audit logs and obtain alerts on who is creating, modifying, accessing, or deleting files
  • EasyScript: Access to script creation elements, along with Cohesity APIs and sample scripts

Open Sesame!

Cohesity makes master versions of secondary data and provides copies to developers and applications that need them, and converges separate secondary data stores – backups, near line filers, archives, etc. – into a single silo called the Cohesity Data Platform. This saves storage space and eases management.

With the Pegasus v6.3 release, Cohesity has opened its data platform via a software development kit (SDK) that provides APIs, documentation and tools for building a custom Data Platform direct access app.

Cohesity and direct access to its Data Platform.

Direct access apps give customers faster access to stored data as they no longer have to tell the Cohesity software to make a copy of selected stored data and then provide access to this copy for their application. Now the application can work directly on the data, saving time.

Daniel Bernard, SentinelOne CMO, said; “By running the SentinelOne Nexus Application on the Cohesity DataPlatform, customers get next generation AI-powered threat prevention without having to transfer any files or connect their clusters to the internet, ensuring a greater degree of protection across all enterprise data, no matter where it is stored.”

For more information tune in to Cohesity founder and CEO Mohit Aron’s video presentation about direct access – Bringing Smartphone-like Simplicity to Secondary Data and Applications.

NGD Systems heralds in-situ processing for NVMe SSDs

By
Chris Mellor
-

NGD Systems has announced general availability of the first product in the Newport platform of high capacity NVMe SSDs.

The Irvine, Calif. startup makes big claims for the product family which provides computational storage via in-situ processing to alleviate host CPU-memory-storage bottlenecks. Performance scales as more drives are added.

Nader Salessi, CEO of NGD Systems, said the company offers the “industry’s highest capacity NVMe, smallest footprint, and the most power-efficient NVMe SSDs on the market. This makes it possible to perform in-situ processing within the storage device itself without having to trade power, space or cost to do so.”

Don Jeanette, storage research VP at TrendFocus, provided a canned quote: “By eliminating the need to move data before processing, the Newport Platform drastically reduces latency and system level power consumption.”

Let’s run through the spec for the first Newport product, a a 14nm ASIC-based 16TB U.2 NVMe SSD, which makes its debut today. NGD says this is the world’s densest and lowest-powered drive, needing 8w at peak load.

Newport has up to 16 flash channels and supports NVMe v1.3 and PCIe Gen 3.0 x4.

NGD Newport U.2 SSD.

According to NGD, a Hadoop Terasort with 4 Newport drives per node is faster than unassisted Hadoop nodes and needs 8-core hosts, as opposed to 16-core varieties..  A Microsoft image query processing time is up to 4x faster with Newport drives compared to host-only processing.

Microsoft image query processing times with and without NGD SSDs.

Newport breeding programme

Newport products have a quad-core, 64-bit ARM processor running Ubuntu and supporting Docker. 

There is an up to 8TB capacity M.2 “gumstick” card version, an up to 32TB EDSFF (ruler format) variant and the U.2 (2.5-inch) form factor runs up to 32TB of 3D TLC (3bits/cell) NAND. A larger-capacity AIC (add-in Card)  part will store up to 64TB. These additional Newport products will be released later this year and a a 32TB U.2 drive is expected in July 2019.

NGD is targeting Newport devices at hyperscalers and intelligent internet edge application. Computation at the edge limits the data sent to a central location, according to the company, and enables faster processing with a smaller edge device CPU. This saves electricity.  

NGD processor path diagram from an SNIA presentation.

Other drive-level computation work could involve video transcoding, network monitoring stream pre-processing, RAID parity calculations and compression.

Newport can be deployed just as a dense, low-power drive with in-situ processing turned off or as a computational storage drive offloading the host CPU.


What will Dell EMC’s unified mid-range storage box look like? Let’s not find out…

By
Chris Mellor
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Blocks & Files tested out some ideas about Dell EMC’s upcoming unified mid-range storage box, the PowerTo–be-decided, with Dell EMC and got precisely nowhere.

I thought I would be clever and suggest a set of features that Dell EMC could easily sign up to. I was wrong. A Dell EMC spokesperson firmly put me in my place, saying “it’s just too soon to give further details.”

Expect one more product release each for Unity, XtremIO, SC and ScaleIO, to prepare the way for and migration to PowerToBeDecided, followed by PowerToBeDecided sometime in the second half of 2019.

For what it’s worth, my suggested feature set is this:

  • Controllers based on Dell servers
  • A new file system to cope with burgeoning file data growth
  • A new software stack to cope with new storage media
  • SSDs for fast access data
  • Disk drives for bulk capacity data
  • NVMe drive support
  • NVMe-oF support (Ethernet, Fibre Channel and TCP versions)
  • Architecture supporting storage-class (persistent) memory
  • Support for persistent memory NVDIMMs and SSDs
  • AI-driven admin like PowerMax
  • AI-driven migration from Unity + XtremIO + SC + ScaleIO to PowerToBeDecided.

Hammerspace adds Kubernetes support

By
Chris Mellor
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Hammerspace has added data management facilities to deploy stateful apps across multiple Kubernetes clusters, on premises or in the cloud.

Kubernetes is the popular orchestration tool for managing containers – application micro-services. These are naturally stateless – any data used dies with the container. Storage – persistent data – has to be added when needed. Several suppliers, such as Datera, IBM, and Pure Storage, have enabled their storage array to be used by containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. This makes the containers stateful – state is saved when they die.

Hammerspace says databases such as MySQL and MongoDB require persistent data to be accessible from any cluster across the hybrid multi-cloud as they burst-to-cloud and back. Hammerspace can provide that accessibility and says it makes file data cloud-native.

It’s Hammerspace time

Hammerspace is a Silicon Valley based startup that came out of stealth in October 2018. The SaaS company unifies distributed file silos into a single network-attached storage (NAS) resource. It can serve applications access to unstructured data in on-premises private, hybrid or public clouds, on demand.

Its software farms existing file storage metadata and provides data management services via a data control plane. Hammerspace supports file and object distribution across multiple clouds and locations, global search, stored item reporting and analytics applications.

Hammerspace conceptual scheme.

Now it can serve data to Kubernetes too, to help DevOps deploy Data-as-a-Microservice and scale stateful containerised apps across Kubernetes clusters.

David Flynn, CEO of Hammerspace, said in a press release announcing Kubernetes support: “Data must be abstracted from the infrastructure and managed at file-level granularity.  With Hammerspace, logic and contextual information can be stored as metadata for each data object, making data programmable and declarative, allowing developers to orchestrate the deployment of data along with their other microservices as they scale-out their apps.”

Western Digital tag teams with WekaIO for HPC+ML workloads

By
Chris Mellor
-

Western Digital Capital has made a strategic investment in WekaIO. The amount is undisclosed.

WD aims to increase penetration of NVMe flash and object storage in enterprises and WekaIO’s Matrix software is a door-opener for high performance computing (HPC) and machine learning (ML) workloads.

WekaIO and HPE have worked together on HPC deals since at least 2017. Phil Bullinger, GM of WD’s data centre systems business unit, gave out a canned quote: “Western Digital and WekaIO have enjoyed significant customer wins in the machine learning and HPC markets over the last year, with our joint solution built on the Matrix software and Western Digital’s ActiveScale object storage system.”

Adding WD’s IntelliFlash to the mix and Western Digital Capital’s cash infusion will encourage more co-development with WekaIO.

Let’s work together

Western Digital supports WekaIO Matrix software running on its NVMe flash arrays with snapshotting to WD’s ActiveScale object storage system as a way of pushing into HPC and machine learning workloads.

WD’s ActiveScale object storage array.

Matrix is WekaIO’s performance benchmark-winning parallel filesystem software. WD’s NVMe arrays are the Tegile-originated IntelliFlash arrays.

IntelliFlash N-Series NVMe-based flash arrays.

WD’s OpenFlex composable systems connect to their components via NVMe over Fabrics, and the company also has an NVMe storage server in the UltraStar range. These could play a part in the WD-WekaIO partnership.

WD uses ActiveScale for big data and IntelliFlash for fast data. WekaIO and WD say some HPC and ML applications involve a concentration of rarely changed data such as image recognition, stock market trades, geospatial imaging and text. ActiveScale can store much of this data, and Matrix on IntelliFlash can serve it up quickly to HPC and ML compute cores.

Names, faces and storage people places

By
Chris Mellor
-

Without further ado…

Kirill Tatarinov has joined the Acronis board. He was most recently the president and CEO at Citrix Systems and is said to know effective product development strategies and possess a deep knowledge of enterprise IT. He also spent 13 years at Microsoft in several exec roles.

David Bennett becomes Axcient CEO this month, replacing Matt Nachtrab who quit in October last year.

Cohesity has hired James Warnette from Veeam to run EMEA communications – the role he had at Veeam.

NVMe over Fabrics startup Excelero has appointed high performance computing pioneer Sven Breuner as field chief technical officer. He joins Excelero from ThinkParQ, the company behind the BeeGFS software-defined parallel cluster file system and software-defined solution for scale-out storage, where he served for five years as CTO and CEO.

InifiniteIO has appointed Chris Galvin as chairman of its board. Galvin was chairman of object storage supplier Cleversafe which was bought by IBM. He previously served as the chairman and CEO of Motorola and chairman of NAVTEQ.

Chris Galvin.

Scale-out filer developer Qumulo has hired Mercer Rowe as VP of business development and Josh Harbert as VP of demand generation. Rowe, previously SVP and GM of Avaya’s cloud business,  will drum up partnerships with software application vendors, hardware vendors and public cloud companies. Harbert was with enterprise software company Apptio, where he was VP of marketing.

Scale Computing has appointed Dan Pierce as VP of strategic sales. He will run Scale’s OEM business in licensing its IP to strategic partners, and lead sales in APAC and LATAM.  Existing OEM deals include Lenovo, BCDVideo, Ingram Micro and APC by Schneider Electric.

As flagged in January, Scale has hired Marlena Fernandez as VP of marketing, running content marketing, demand generation, brand management and the go-to-market strategy. Pierce and Fernandez will work with Lenovo on worldwide go-to-market strategies and sales and partner enablement.

Marlena Fernandez

WD and Toshiba get ready for highest capacity 3D NAND

By
Chris Mellor
-

Western Digital and Toshiba have developed a 128-layer 3D NAND die with TLC (3bits/cell) cell formatting and 512Gbit capacity. 

A 128-layer die will be BiCS-5 in Toshiba flash generation naming terminology – BiCS-4 is 96-layer and BiCS-3 is 64-layer.

Adding 32 more layers should add a third more capacity – assuming the same process technology is used as in the two companies’ 96-layer 3D NAND. Accordingly, flash drives built with 128-layer dies could have a third more capacity than 96-layer drives. Alternatively they could be built to the same capacity at reduced cost. Product might appear in late 2020, with production ramping in 2021.

Wafer-thick

Senior Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers has built a production model that assumes 66mm2 die size and a 7.8Gb/mm2 bit density rating. He thinks WD-Toshiba has the industry’s highest NAND density and models the suppliers at an 85 per cent wafer yield:

The die uses a Circuit-under-Array (CuA) design in which the logic circuits are built at the bottom of the chip with the data layers stacked above. Rakers says “his enables a 15 per cent smaller die size vs. non-CuA technology; we estimate a 23 per cent total die shrink vs. 96-layer.”

Partly through this freed-up space W. Digital was able to utilise four planes (vs. traditionally 2 planes) to increase performance by 2x. The die is divided into four planes or sections which be accessed independently and in parallel. Because of this it can reach a 132MB/sec program throughput level.

BL is bitline; a line of bits in a die. RC is Resistance-Capacitance.

The chart refers to bitlines and their place in the NAND world is explained here.

How 3D NAND is made conceptually by starting with 2D or planar NAND.

The 132MB/sec speed exceeds the 83MB/sec program throughput of a 110+ layer chip from Samsung which can operate at 1.2Gbit/s IO bandwidth and has a 45 microsecond read time.

WD is accessing data on the 128-layer die using 4KB pages and not the industry standard 16KB pages which limits electricity usage.

Lastly, this is a TLC die. A QLC (4bits/cell) version would have a third more capacity again – 682Gbit.

WD presented this technology last month at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

Mid-range confusion crimps Dell EMC storage revenues

By
Chris Mellor
-

Dell EMC this week posted its fourth consecutive quarter of storage growth and anticipates a revenue boost from the upcoming unified mid-range array.

Revenues for Dell Technologies in the fourth fiscal 2019 quarter, ended February 1, were $23.84bn, up nine per cent y-o-y, with a loss of $287m (-$133m)

Two years of Dell Technologies revenues and profit/loss.

Storage is part of Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) and brought in $4.6bn, up seven per cent y-o-y. That paled against the 14 per cent increase to $5.3bn for servers and networking. Two storage highlights: the hyperconverged VxRail appliance business has a $2bn annualised run rate and licensed bookings for VMware’s vSAN, which includes vSAN within VxRail, were up over 60 per cent y-o-y.

The storage line on the chart above shows a dip in revenues starting a year ago. There was growth using an annual compare but absolute numbers dipped overall from Q4 fy18 to Q3 fy18. Now they have accelerated.

The revenue decline shows that Dell EMC lost storage ground its multiple, overlapping products from the EMC and Dell sides of the house competed with each other and confused customers. The company is now sorting this out.

Earnings call

In the earnings call Vice Chairman Jeff Clarke said: “In storage we have now gained [market] share for three straight quarters and over 300 basis points more than anyone else in the marketplace through the first three quarters of 2018 according to IDC.”

He thinks Dell has gained share in the fourth quarter too and expects confirmation when IDC when brings out its storage supplier numbers later this month.

Clarke added: “We have plenty of work to do, but clearly we’ve stabilised the business. The investments that we’ve made in sales, capacity and coverage are yielding net new buyers, which is good to see. We continue to tune the sales compensation focus on storage, which is very important to us.”

He said Dell EMC has a leadership product in high-end storage [PowerMax] and is in good shape with unstructured data storage [Isilon.] But mid-range is a work-in-progress.

PowerTBD in mid-range

He declared: “While you’ve heard me talk about the need to simplify and consolidate the mid range, the products that we have in the mid-range today are more competitive than they were a year ago.” 

Dell EMC has settled on PowerXxx as its storage array branding scheme, with PowerMax at the top, PowerVault at the low-end and Power-name-to-be-decided (PowerTBD?) in the mid-range. Currently the Unity, XtremIO, SC and ScaleIO products occupy that mid-range

The company is to merge these products into a single platform and aims to provide upgrade and /or migration paths for all legacy lines.

In November 2018, it revealed its plan to add storage class memory to this new mid-range product, which is expected before the end of this year.

The unified mid-range product is Dell’s “plenty of work to do”. When completed, the company will give its salesforce a simplified, better positioned mid-range product set to sell to less-confused customers. The result? Profit! If all goes to plan…

Storage industry darlings Nutanix and Pure score revenue own goals

By
Chris Mellor
-

Nutanix and Pure Storage both identified revenue target issues in their most recent fiscal quarters; Pure with actual revenues and Nutanix with forecast revenues – and they have no-one to blame but themselves.

Nutanix revenues in Q2 fy2019 ended Jan 31 were $335.4m, up 17 per cent year-on-year, with a loss of $122.8m, near double the $62.6m loss a year ago. Next quarter’s revenue guidance is $290m -$300m.

This represents 1.9 per cent growth at the $295m mid-point – far less than Nutanix’s usual growth rate.

The main reason for the forecast shortfall is that Nutanix switched spending from lead generation to engineering and product development a couple of quarters ago. It thought it would enjoy continued lead-generation efficiencies. 

Nutanix quarterly revenues and profit/loss. The Q3 fy2019 number is Nutanix’ outlook

CEO Dheeraj Pandey said in the earnings call: “We recently identified some imbalances in our lead generation spending that were beginning to impact our sales pipeline. We recognised these imbalances in Q2 and have adjusted our lead generation spend accordingly. Despite these, these actions will take some time to take effect and therefore our Q3 guidance reflects the short-term impact of these imbalances.”

Nutanix co-founder, Chairman and CEO Dheeraj Pandey.

That was compounded by a shortage of sales reps in the first half of the fiscal year, CFO Duston Williams said.

A third problem was sales execution in the USA. The company aims to address this by promoting Chris Kaddaras, current head of EMEA sales, to lead both the Americas and EMEA sales organisations, Pandey said. Kaddaras has led Nutanix’s “EMEA sales engine to tremendous growth over the past 2.5 years turning around the business that was initially challenged and we expect that he will bring the same execution excellence to North America.”

Pure Storage

Pure’s Q4 fy2019 revenues were $422.2m, up 24 per  cent y-o-y, which looks heathy enough but undershoots revenues expectations of$442m. There was a loss of $25.7m. Full year revenues were $1.36bn, up 33 per cent y-o-y. 

Unfortunately Pure had guided analysts to expect $1.376bn- $1.384bn so that overshadowed the 33 per cent growth.

The inability of a contract manufacturer to build enough product was the main reason for the shortfall. Also, more customers than expected took out ES2 subscription deals instead of buying perpetual licenses. Pure wants them to do that but miscalculated the adoption rate.

Nutanix and Pure say their problems are short-term and will resume growth at historical rates. Nutanix’s sales pipeline will take two quarters to fix. Pure should resolve its product ship issues more quickly.



Western Digital wants to be the Everything Storage Company. How does its ambition stack up?

By
Chris Mellor
-

Western Digital is undertaking a huge project – to own and integrate the entire stack from silicon, glass and sand to arrays and composable systems software.

Originally a disk drive manufacturer, the company has made at least 14 acquisitions in recent years. These include the purchase of HGST in 2012, which helped consolidate the hard drive industry and took WD in to archiving. In 2015 the company got into object storage by buying Amplidata and in 2016 it bought its way into NAND manufacture and SSDs with the SanDisk takeover. In 2017 WD entered the drive array market by buying Tegile.

Let’s graphically relate the biggest enterprise storage players to each other:

WD covers more of the computing system stack than any other supplier.

In comparison to legacy disk drive competitor Seagate, WD’s business stretches further down the stack, into media and drive controller CPUs – RISC-V, and up the stack through drive arrays into system software.

WD now sells disk drives and SSDs to storage array and server-based hyperconverged infrastructure companies. It also competes with these companies.

This is a much more determined attempt to move up-stack than Seagate, which has also tried to build drive array revenues. For example, it bought Dot Hill in 2015, but that business has languished, and in 2017 it offloaded ClusterStor to Cray.

As well as competing with storage array customers WD has to manage sales at drive and systems levels. Drives mainly go to OEMs – storage array and server vendors – and to consumers. Storage systems go to enterprises and also hyperscale customers.

WD can, and does, use channels to sell to consumers, OEMs and enterprises. But hyperscalers need direct sales and custom products and the different sets of channel customers need different handling, marketing, product offers and so forth.

Channel flannel

OEMs could prefer to deal with Seagate and Toshiba for disk drives, which don’t compete with their customers for storage array systems business.

WD’s channel may also find selling storage systems to enterprises is an uphill struggle against established suppliers. WD is a relative newbie trying to enter an external drive array market with entrenched major players and facing competition from HCI suppliers and the public cloud.

Can WD win its great game? No-one else has done such a thing since IBM in its mainframe heyday. It’s a big ask – and probably no other company could do such a thing. It will be fascinating to see how Western Digital fares.

The irresistible rise of NVMe means SATA SSD days are numbered

By
Chris Mellor
-

SATA interfaces for SSDS are on their way out and the NVMe SSD interface will take over in 2020, according to Eyal Shani, Western Digital’s director, technical product marketing. Speaking at the A3 TechLive conference in London last week, he presented a chart showing price trends for 15K, 10K and 7.2K rpm disk drives

According to Shani, the 15K disk drive is already dead – that’s why the price is unchanging on the chart after 2020 – because of SSD cannibalisation.

Eyal Shani

Death-by-SSD is also affecting 10K drives and WD has withdrawn from their manufacture.

The disk drive future in enterprises and hyperscale data centres is 7.2k capacity-optimised drives. They have a substantial price advantage over SSDs and will maintain this differential through increased density.

Asked about the SAS SSD interface, Shani said it was “still here, not going overnight, but most of our effort is in NVMe.”

In other words SAS declining in popularity as well. Shani showed another chart showing data centre SSD revenues by interface from 2017 to 2022:

NVMe grows to domination, with SATA almost disappearing and SAS declining albeit more slowly. WD has even introduced a disk drive box with an NVMe interface – the D3000 in its OpenFlex composable systems line.

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