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Veeam gets taped up by Quantum in anti-ransomware deal

By
Chris Mellor
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In the storage Game of Thrones a top contender for the modern data protection throne has forged an alliance with one of the oldest data protection technologies of all; tape.

Quantum and Veeam say Veeam’s backup software can send data to tape via a dedicated external physical server, which hosts Veeam’s tape server. This physical server has to be sized, configured, procured and set up.

(Image above: Quantum Scalar library products with Scalar i3 i front.)

What Quantum has done is stick a blade server inside its Scalar i3 tape library and run Veeam’s tape server on that. The resulting box is called a converged tape appliance and is available to Quantum distributors and resellers as a single line item (SKU.)

The i3 has from 25 to 200 tape cartridge slots, scaled in 25-slot increments, and from from 1 to 12 tape drives. It has Capacity-on-Demand (CoD) software licensing, and compressed LTO-8 tape capacity runs from from 750TB up to 6PB.

The control module is a 3U enclosure and there can be up to three expansion modules, each taking up 3U. Get a datasheet here.

Quantum plays the anti-ransomeware card, saying that tape cartridges are stored offline and therefore provide an effective barrier against ransomware and malware.

Veeam users can store backup data on Quantum’s DXi deduplicating backup-to-disk arrays, which is quicker than writing to tape but the arrays are online, unlike stored tape cartridges.

Quantum’s converged tape appliances for Veeam environments are available today, beginning at $17,000 MSRP.

Latticeworks reinvents personal NAS

By
Chris Mellor
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Latticeworks claims to have reinvented personal NAS with its WiFi-connected Amber product.

The company was founded in 2014 by Dr Pantas Sutarjdada, a co-founder of Marvell and an ex-CTO of that company. Co-incidentally Western Digital’s MyCloud product has used Marvell controllers.

Amber is about the size of a smallish home speaker – think Sonos One – and contains (tech specs) an Intel Core Duo Gemini Lake CPU (1.1GHz – 2.6 GHz), a built-in AC2600 Wi-Fi Router, and a pair of 1TB disk drives in a mirrored (RAID 1) configuration. Maximum capacity is 4TB.

It has a WAN and HDMI ports, a pair of LAN ports but no USB connectivity.

Mac and Windows notebooks/desktops and IOS/Android smart phones/tablets run a LiFE app which can automatically send picture images, music, videos and other files to the Amber box. It can stream videos to TVs and be accessed remotely to do things with files, such as stream them to TVs or share them.

Latticeworks says it streams videos with no buffering and photos can be facially-indexed. There is no storage of data in third-party clouds and a proprietary LattisNet cloud service is used only for user ID management and data routing verification.

This reminds us of Connected Data’s Transporter box for businesses, which also provide private cloud file-sharing.

The Amber product costs $399.99 with a time-limited discount from $549.99 and is only available in the USA.

The product is said to perform better if it is installed in front of a home router, rather than behind it. The FAQ says; “Being behind another router could in some cases make for poorer connection when connecting from the outside.”

Its claimed main superiority over a home NAS product is cloud security; “Other solutions rely on public third-party clouds, so you never really know who has control of your data. When you store your digital life in Amber – your data is yours and yours alone.”

Western Digital’s MyCloud personal NAS runs up to 20TB in capacity, five times larger. It has pretty much the same feature set and costs less. A 2TB My Cloud Home has a promo price of $139.99, discounted from $159.99.

Is the Amber product worth $260 more? What do you think?

Overland loan default throws spanner in Sphere 3D spin-out works

By
Chris Mellor
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Overland Storage has missed making an interest payment due on August 1,  which means the creditor could call in  repayment of the entire debt.

Overland’s parent company Sphere 3D said in a statement it is trying to resolve the issue, but “there can be no assurance that the Lenders will ultimately agree to any such resolution.”

How will this affect Sphere 3D’s proposed $45m spin out of Overland Storage and Tandberg Data? This was agreed in July subject to closing conditions and the buyer is Silicon Valley Technology Partners, an entity set up and controlled by Sphere 3D CEO and chairman Eric Kelly. 

Flash price crashing leading to disk drive trashing

By
Chris Mellor
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A flash price crash is coming and should increase disk cannibalisation rates as SSDs become more affordable.

Objective Analysis’ Jim Handy, presenting at last week’s Flash Memory Summit,  thinks flash over-supply will result in  massive price falls – to near the product cost of 64-layer 3D NAND – meaning $0.08/GB in 2019. Handy characterises it as the largest-ever price correction in the history of semi-conductor products.

Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers, using IDC and DRAMeXchange data, currently estimates total NAND Flash pricing at ~$0.30/GB. Rakers notes Objective Analysis’ current expectation is for a 45 per cent per annum growth in NAND flash capacity shipped.

Some 70 per cent of of total industry flash is currently 3D NAND, with the remainder the older 2D or planar NAND. Handy believes this manufacturing capacity could be migrated to making DRAM instead.

Handy thinks this could result in DRAM capacity over-supply in the future.

Deep StorageNet chief scientist Howard Marks, also presenting at FMS 2018, suggested that a 5x differentiation in $/GB between enterprise SSDs and HDDs should be considered the crossover point to move toward SSD cannibalisation. 

Rakers notes enterprise SSDs are currently at a ~3-4x $/GB premium relative to mission-critical HDDs, and enterprise SSDs currently stand at ~15-17x $/GB premium relative to nearline / high-cap enterprise HDDs.

Recently-announced QLC (4bits/cell) SSDS from Intel and Micron are aimed at taking share from nearline disk drives for rad-intensive applications.

If Handy’s  prediction is accurate then SSD pricing will go down too. He sees a trend for NAND prices to fall to roughly 25 per cent of their current prices. If SSD prices go down in lock step then we are looking at a 75 per cent cost reduction.

That means enterprise SSDs, currently at around $0.30/GB compared to $0.92/GB for nearline/high-cap disk drives. Assume a 75 per cent price cut for those SSDs to $0.08/GB and they would then only be 4x more expensive per GB than disk drives; underneath Marks’ xX crossover point.

Logic would then suggest significant cannibalisation of nearline/high-cap disk drive sales by SSDs, at least for read-intensive work.

Handy’s price correction will take several quarters, leading us to suppose there could be a quite severe contraction in nearline/high-cap disk drive sales.

Coincidentally Mark Delaney, a Goldman Sachs analyst, thinks Seagate’s share price – $50.88 at time of writing – will reduce to $44 and has downgraded the stock to sell from neutral.  Delaney’s rationale is that “HDDs [hard disk drives] remain a cyclical industry, and one facing secular challenges in many parts of the market from the growth of SSDs [solid-state drives] … NAND is oversupplied and SSD prices are falling (and in some cases pricing is down by as much as 30-40 per cent from the peak.”

The bulk of Seagate’s revenues come from disk drives, and increasing nearline/high-cap drives,  whereas competitor Western Digital gets more than half of its revenues from flash and is less exposed to a disk downturn.

However, it is more exposed than Seagate to a NAND pricing collapse. Will Seagate’s swing slow more than WD’s roundabout? Who knows? Better call Saul!

Kaminario supports WD’s composable infrastructure gear

By
Chris Mellor
-

All-flash array supplier Kaminario is supporting Western Digital’s composable infrastructure products, announced last week.

These are:

  • NVMe-over-Fabrics-connected OpenFlex hardware:
    • F3000 proprietary flash drives in quasi 3.5-inch form factor.
    • E3000 3U enclosure housing ten F3000s.
    • D3000 1U disk drive enclosure.
  • OpenFlex architecture.
  • Kingfish open APIs to orchestrate and manage SCI systems.
  • OpenFlex ecosystem partners.

Kaminario has its own composable K2 storage array and its collaboration with WD encompasses this product and WD’s OpenFlex and Ultrastar storage platforms. The company will support WD’s Ultrastar NVMe and SAS storage products for its K2 appliance and Cloud Fabric software-defined storage offerings. 

Kaminario’s N software stack is compatible with WD’s OpenFlex series of NVM-oF platforms that provide disaggregated, fabric-connected flash and disk building blocks for scaling at the rack level and beyond.

When combined these products deliver a NVMe/NVM-oF offering with the capability to dynamically compose, control, reconfigure, and manage storage resources at the software layer using Kaminario Flex.

According to the company,  this composable combo enables enterprises to emulate the efficiency and agility of hyperscale providers.

Kaminario is offering the K2 appliance for purchase as a pre-integrated appliance or as a software-only product under its Cloud Fabric program. The appliance will also be available via channel partners. 

NGD computational flash wins best-of-show award at FMS 2018

By
Chris Mellor
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NGD, a maker of computational processing storage drives, has won a best-of-show award at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara.

With its Newport product, the company aims to solve the issues associated with moving petabytes of data from storage devices into server RAM for processing. The movement of a petabyte of data can take significant time, delaying results and solutions. Computational storage can eliminate the need for this data movement by embedding processing capabilities within storage devices such as SSDs. 

The result can reduce the time to process a petabyte of data to a few seconds for highly parallel, read-intensive analytic applications.  Here’s the rub: it is application-specific and the drive processor software needs producing. But Newport looks a great fit if you have such data.

SSD storage rulers of the world, unite!

By
Chris Mellor
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The EDSFF organisation has standardised short and long and 3-inch ruler form factors for SSDs, with specs available from the Storage Networking Industry Alliance. 

EDSFF stands for Enterprise and Data centre SSD Form Factor and there is an EDSFF working group. The idea is to move away from 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch disk-bay sizes for SSDs, which now come in these sizes as well as M.2 gumstick cards and PCIe add-in card (AIC) formats.  There will be instead longer and thinner devices, the so-called rulers, which can provide 1PB of capacity in a 1U server, using 64-layer, TLC 3D NAND.

This mean more capacity in less space, leading to denser storage and server systems and less wasted space.

Suppliers involved in the EDSFF initiative include SSD makers Intel, Micron, Samsung, Toshiba and Western Digital, and server suppliers Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo, which augurs well for wide industry adoption and the unification of the differing Intel and Samsung ruler formats.

There are short and long ruler standards with 9.5mm and 18mm widths. The short ruler is 5.9mm thick, 111.49mm long and 31.5mm wide. The long ruler can be 9.5mm or 18mm thick, 318.75mm long and 38.4mm wide.

An Intel slide shows its EDSFF plans:

The EDSFF is also working on a 3-inch form factor that is 76mm (3 inches) wide. This format has two thicknesses and two lengths: 7.5mm or 16.8mm thick and either 104.9mm or 142.2mm long. 

Download the format specs here.

Intel changes data centre SSD naming scheme

By
Chris Mellor
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Intel is tidying up its naming scheme for data centre solid state drives, ranging from slow, entry-level drives to high-speed Optane near-memory speed products.

Data Centre drives from Intel are currently branded as SSD DC P4000 and SSD DC P3000 products, with Optane versions called Optane SSD  DC P4000. There are also SSD DC S4000 and SSD DC S3000 products. It’s a bit of a mess.

Anandtech  has published a slide showing the new five-level scheme:

The DC P4000, P3000, S4000 and S3000 scheme is transitioning to a D1, D3, D5, D7 Series and a separate Optane DC SS Series.

The entry level products will use SATA and PCIe interfaces and are renamed SSD D1 Series, or D1 Series for short. 

The D3 Series will be SATA interface products for mixed workloads, and two exist already – the D3-S4610 (240GB to 3.84GB) and D3-S4510 (240GB to 3.84GB.)

The D5 Series products will be capacity-optimised, using QLC (4bits/cell) flash and NVMe interfaces, and are intended for read-intensive workloads. Intel has recently announced the D5-P4320, with 7.68TB of QLC flash capacity, using 64-layer 3D NAND. As 96-layer NAND is in development we can expect a 50 per cent capacity uplift to around 12TB (11.36TB ) in future.

D7 Series products will are designed for mixed workloads and use TLC (3bits/cell) flash with an NVMe interface.

The 3D XPoint-based Optane products are henceforth named the Optane DC SSD Series. This is bound to become the Optane series of products, until some other solid state technology base is used alongside Optane 3D XPoint.

SoftRoCEr Attala provides NVMe over standard Ethernet

By
Chris Mellor
-

NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) provides direct-attach SSD access latencies for external, shared flash storage, side stepping Fibre Channel and iSCSI network delays. RoCE provides remote memory access-like speeds across data centre-class Ethernet for NVMe-oF.

But it has a need for the underlying networks to be lossless. Composable storage infrastructure supplier Attala Systems says this is relatively easy for rack-scale deployments, but is difficult to achieve on conventional layer three (L3) leaf-spine networks. By hardening the open-source SoftRoCE initiator, Attala’s own devices and providing SSDP-based discovery, Attala Systems has enabled its RoCE-based networking capability to operate on standard leaf-spine networks and with ordinary NICs. 

This allows cross-rack and ubiquitous deployment of NVMe-oRoCE’s low latency and high performance on Ethernet networks at speeds from 10GbitE to 100GbitE and beyond.

Taufik Ma, Attala Systems CEO, said: “NVMe over RoCE has always been seen as the lowest latency, highest performance flavor of NVMe protocols. However, NVMe over RoCE’s need for lossless networks and specialized initiators has been somewhat of a limitation to its deployment. Attala Systems’ approach allows their solution to be deployed on standard L3 leaf-spine networks without any special considerations.”

Attala hardens the  open-source SoftRoCE initiator driver and its own devices to gracefully handle packet-drops in a L3 leaf-spine networks – even those which do not support priority flow control (PFC) for achieve losslessness. 

It says this unshackles NVMe-over-RoCE solutions from the confines of a single rack and specific servers. Attala’s system also includes an autonomous Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) based discovery mechanism for newly added end-points, solving a common issue experienced by IP networks being utilized for scale-out infrastructure deployments. 

The community-hardened open-source SoftRoCE initiator driver runs on any ordinary NIC, enabling 100 per cent compatibility with any Linux-based host server across the data centre.

This looks good. We look forward to hearing what customers say.

“Attala” by the way is the Sanskrit word for “watchtower” and you can check out Attala’s offerings here.

DDN sets up Server Virtualization division

By
Chris Mellor
-

Data Direct Networks (DDN) has set up  a Server Virtualization, Analytics, VDI, Container and DevOps Division (SVAVCDOD?) and plans to staff it with 100 new hires by the end of September. It says dozens of enterprise storage experts from companies such as Tintri, Pure Storage, IBM and Intel have joined already.

The services arm will advise clients on how to get the most value out of  flash, virtualized and containerized hybrid cloud installations, and  it represents a breakout beyond  DDN’s traditional HPC and big data analytics base.

DDN says its recent acquisition of Intel’s Lustre file system business added the world’s most advanced file system technology to DDN’s already substantial flash, analytics and cloud product portfolio. DDN also entered into an Asset Purchase Agreement with Tintri on July 18, 2018, whereby DDN has offered to acquire substantially all the assets of  the stricken company offering enterprise cloud infrastructure built on a public-cloud like web services architecture and RESTful APIs.

+Comment

This is a multi-million dollar initiative by DDN, which will bring it into competition with general enterprise server system vendors such as Dell, HPE, IBM, NetApp and Nutanix. If the Tintri acquisition goes through it has a shared external array product supply and customer base to build on. What it will do with that product technology, in this developing era of QLC flash, NVMe-oF, containerisation, storage-class memory, AI and data management is an intriguing question.

A bigger splash: Attala dives into hot data lake

By
Chris Mellor
-

Attala has announced Attala Data Lake (ADL) multi-tenant software, designed to pour a massive pool of data in a tailored shared hot shared cache box.

Attala produces FGPA-driven SSDs for direct NVMe-oF access to targeted drives and a composable NVMe storage resource. The concept for its new product is store a data lake on NVMe flash for faster-than-disk and SAS/SATA SSD access by multiple real-time applications. A shared flash cache as it were.

Deep Storage founder and chief scientist Howard Marks has provided a prepared quote for Attala: “Users can, and have, installed NVMe SSDs directly into their compute nodes, but that increases costs and complexity. Attala Systems’ new multi-tenant hot data lake capability provides shared high-performance NVMe storage to real-time analytics applications, simplifying deployment and reducing costs.”

The ADL software module provides centralised management and provisioning of the hot data lake. Attala says the result is ” low-cost, high-performance solution for real-time analytic applications.” 

Yes, but not exactly low-cost; SSDs in sufficient capacity have to be bought and that won’t be cheap, unless we are talking about data puddles and not data lakes.

The ADL module is available for evaluation by select customers and partners, and will be generally available in the fourth 2018 quarter.

You can use cheaper ethernet components for NVMe-oF – and here’s how, says Toshiba

By
Chris Mellor
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There’s no need to use expensive RoCE-class Ethernet for NVMe-over Fabrics, according to Toshiba.

Toshiba’s Kumoscale software delivers an aggregated multi-SSD block storage pool across an NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) connection and it works with the NVMe over TCP protocol. Toshiba has tested this using Marvell FastLinQ 100GbitE network interface cards (NICs), which employ a TCPOffload engine.

The company says NVMe-oF on TCP enables a good price/performance balance because standard Ethernet components can be used instead of  data centre class versions required by, for example, RoCE-based NVMe-oF, as well as existing Ethernets.

Tosh has roped in IDC’s research VP Eric Burgener to provide a supporting quote: “Solutions like Toshiba’s KumoScale which use TCP as a transport give customers an NVMe over Fabric option that requires no custom hardware or software on the server side, making this higher performance host connection available to any and all servers without additional cost.”

So there is, Tosh implies, no need to go down the RoCE road. It says the NVMe organisation is actively working on a binding specification for NVMe-oF over TCP, and it is ready for the upcoming certification process.

Tosh and Marvell will jointly demonstrate KumoScale with TCP acceleration at Flash Memory Summit booth #307 (Hall A) in the Santa Clara Convention Centre from August 7-9.

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