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SentinelOne intros protection for containerized workloads on AWS

By
Antony Savvas
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Ephemeral cloud environments such as serverless containers may be short-lived, but they present a real and growing security risk, and attackers can wreak havoc if they are unprotected.

Data security vendor SentinelOne has introduced its Singularity Cloud Workload Security for Serverless Containers, which it says provides real-time, AI-powered protection to secure containerized workloads running on AWS Fargate for Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.

AWS Fargate is designed to let developers focus on building applications without managing servers and get ideas into production more quickly.

The sales pitch is that ephemeral containerized workloads running on AWS Fargate allow rapid scale and deployment to refresh environments, offering businesses technical agility. However, their short-lived nature does not automatically mean they are secure.

While these resources may only live for minutes, SentinelOne reckons attackers can compromise them within seconds and look for opportunities to move to higher-value, longer-living resources ahead of the ephemeral resource being deleted.

Adversaries can also gain an initial foothold elsewhere in a cloud environment and pivot to serverless container resources to conduct attacks.

Singularity Cloud Workload Security for Serverless Containers provides AI-powered runtime protection. It uses five autonomous detection engines to detect runtime threats such as ransomware, zero-days, and file-less exploits in real time, streamlining machine-speed response actions.

“As a strategic Amazon Partner Network member, we are committed to delivering market-leading innovations through simple integrations that enable customers to improve their security outcomes and change the game,” said Brian Lanigan, senior vice president, global ecosystem, SentinelOne.

Cloud Workload Security is part of SentinelOne’s cloud security portfolio, which includes Singularity Cloud Native Security and Singularity Cloud Data Security. The solution sits on top of the Singularity Platform and Singularity Data Lake.

The Singularity Platform is equipped with Purple AI, a generative AI security analyst that provides autonomous SecOps tools intended to accelerate security teams’ threat hunting and investigations, reduce Mean Time to Response, and deliver AI-powered enterprise security to stay ahead of attacks, says SentinelOne.

Hammerspace outlines IPO plans

By
Antony Savvas
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David Flynn, Hammerspace
David Flynn, Hammerspace

Cloud storage firm Hammerspace says it may well launch an initial public offering (IPO) in the “next 18 to 24 months” as it becomes “cashflow positive” this year, a prerequisite for any IPO.

Hammerspace delivers a global data environment which spans across data centres, and the AWS, Azure, and Google public clouds, providing unified file access to end users.

The technology is sold to both enterprises and service providers, with a broad 50/50 split in sales.

It was founded in 2018 by CEO David Flynn, and completed a Series A funding round in July 2023, raising a total of $56.7 million. Flynn co-founded flash hardware pioneer Fusion-io, which was eventually acquired by SanDisk in June 2014 before SanDisk was taken over by Western Digital in 2016.

David Flynn, Hammerspace
David Flynn

During this week’s IT Press Tour of Silicon Valley, Hammerspace made new technology announcements and claimed strong sales growth. On the back of this, Blocks & Files asked Flynn about the potential of an IPO down the line.

He said: “We are making percentage margins in the mid-90s, and Hammerspace is a different business to Fusion-io, which was a hardware business, and hardware businesses cannot be scaled up as quick as software companies.

“We’re not a typical startup waiting to be acquired. We’ve done all the work ourselves and are building something important, and public ownership is important too.”

He added: “I had a phenomenal win with Fusion-io, which made me do some soul-searching, but I went back to technology, instead of lying on an island, or even buying one. This is not a vanity project, it is important to me.”

Before Fusion-io was acquired, it had its own successful IPO. On his time running a public company previously, Flynn said: “We only missed one quarter when I was leading it, and that was because Meta never opened a new datacenter that was planned, and which was going to use our hardware. We did fill that hole, but running a public company does leave some scars.”

That said, Flynn said Hammerspace’s high-margin software was pointing to a smoother future, whatever happens on the ownership front. He said since the firm had recently launched its hyperscale NAS (network attached storage) offering, the overall sales pipeline had mushroomed by a factor of ten, without having to hire any extra salespeople.

“We are building a very financially disciplined company, but we are reaching a point where we have to grow a lot faster to get in front of the opportunities being created by AI,” said Flynn. “It’s a tough market for an IPO right now, with budgets going down in some areas, and Nvidia sucking the air from everybody else at the moment.

“But, for the first half of this year, we have already generated sales that are ten times higher than what we made for the whole of last year. So, in 18 to 24 months, we could go for an IPO.”

This week, Hammerspace continued to add to its technology portfolio by launching advanced GPU data orchestration capabilities to accelerate access to S3 data. S3 applications can now connect to Hammerspace’s Global Data Platform, enabling object data to be automatically orchestrated to GPU resources, along with existing file data.

This expansion enhances accessibility to existing data sets in object storage and optimizes the pipeline across any storage type, “allowing infrastructure teams to focus on deriving insights and driving innovation.”

Molly Presley, SVP of global marketing at Hammerspace, said: “Accessing available GPUs in an organization’s own datacenters or in the cloud is a challenge. Even more difficult can be identifying useful data sets and placing that data local to the available compute resources.

“HPC centers and enterprise infrastructure architects are urgently looking for solutions to organize large data sets and mobilize them to where the GPUs are located. With the addition of the S3 interface, they can now quickly do it.”

Earlier this year, Meta confirmed Hammerspace is its data orchestration software supplier, supporting 49,152 Nvidia H100 GPUs split into two equal clusters.

Data integrity specialist Index Engines to expand channel reach

By
Antony Savvas
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analytics
analytics

Index Engines is an AI-powered analytics engine designed to detect data corruption and ransomware threats. Its CyberSense product is currently deployed at thousands of organizations worldwide, sold through strategic partnerships.

On this week’s IT Press Tour across Silicon Valley, the company said it intends to significantly scale up its channel partner reach, building on its established technology partner relationships with Dell, IBM, and Infinidat.

Dell sells CyberSense along with its PowerProtect Cyber Recovery product, and Cybersense is white-labeled alongside Infinidat Infinisafe with Cyber Detection and IBM Storage Sentinel.

After 20 years in the market, Index Engines has an installed base of 1,400 large organizations. After initially targeting storage companies to reach end customers through strategic partnerships, it is now considering system integrators and managed service providers to help win more business.

That said, five additional partners are imminently expected to join the existing big three, and they include other storage companies.

Jim McGann, VP of strategic partnerships at Index Engines, told the IT Press Tour: “With the increased ransomware threat, managing cyber liability needs to be a priority, and backup is not enough. While you have to have the ability to recover, data integrity is key, and you need to know that your data is reliable, which is what we address with CyberSense.”

McGann said data integrity requires content analysis, involving the continuous inspection of files and databases, the search for data corruption patterns indicative of ransomware, and the utilization of hundreds of data points with AI-based machine learning.

This current quarter, CyberSense was upgraded to v8.6, with an updated alerts page, including all infections found and new threshold alerts. There is also a dashboard to analyze current and previous alerts. In addition, a new hosts page allows users to view status of selected hosts and it indicates daily activity with intuitive graphs.

We were also given a sneak preview of further substantial improvements in the forthcoming v8.7 due later this year, but we can’t make them public at the moment. Future releases will aid the channel expansion, however. Also, there will be an announcement from Index Engines on June 18 designed to further ratchet up its market reach.

As the channel expansion comes to fruition, McGann said the current pricing model would continue, priced per TB of data analyzed, with CyberSense sold over one, three, and five-year terms.

McGann said: “Our model is working, we are privately financed with no debt, and we use everything we have developed ourselves over the last 20 years. Dell and IBM tell us there is no way they could have developed what we have.”

Last September, Geoff Barrall joined the leadership team at Index Engines as chief product officer.

StorMagic seeks to creep in at the HCI edge amid VMware ‘fiasco’

By
Antony Savvas
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edge
edge

As the top three server OEMs – Dell, Lenovo, and HPE – announced extended contracts with VMware to continue selling hyperconverged systems and servers with the VMware stack pre-installed, plucky edge object storage vendor StorMagic launched its alternative and “cheaper” HCI solution for smaller data footprints.

On the OEMs’ VMware deal, StorMagic chief product officer Bruce Kornfeld said: “Their new agreement is another data point proving that HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) is a highly desired way for end users to deploy IT solutions. The OEMs were desperate to be able to sell VMware because they don’t have hypervisors of their own.”

Bruce Kornfeld, StorMagic
Bruce Kornfeld

Even with these new agreements in place, said Kornfeld, VMware remains “too expensive” for edge and SMB use cases. “Our purpose-built and cost-effective solution for edge deployments and branch offices at large organizations isn’t dependent on VMware.”

Broadcom’s VMware license strategy suggests that only the biggest customers are welcome: it made the operation of 3,500 cores running VMware Foundation Cloud the base requisite for enrolment in the partner programe, effectively shutting out small enterprise customers, resellers and CSPs.

Kornfeld said his company, like other VMware rivals, was looking to take advantage of customer and channel uncertainty around big changes to VMware pricing and contracts following Broadcom’s acquisition of the virtualization market leader, which he described as a “fiasco.”

StorMagic this week unveiled SvHCI, combining a hypervisor and virtual networking with the provider’s SvSAN virtual storage software, which is already used by thousands of customers around the world. The full-stack HCI also includes StorMagic’s in-house 24x7x365 customer support.

According to the recently published “Gartner Market Guide for Full-Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software” report, 30 percent of the non-market leading full-stack HCI installed base in 2024 is projected to increase to 60 percent by 2029.

SvHCI is a software solution that installs directly on new or existing servers. It is designed to simplify operations and deliver high availability for edge and SMB environments with only two servers, while claiming to lower software costs by “up to 62 percent over VMware.”

Generally available later this summer, SvHCI is priced starting at $2,049 for a one-year subscription for a single server and up to 2 TB of storage. StorMagic has launched an SvHCI Global Beta Program to allow customers and partners to get early access to the software and test it on their own servers.

The range of savings StorMagic talks about is 21 percent to 62 percent. Comparisons include SvHCI one, three, and five-year subscription lengths, plus maximum storage capacities of 2 TB, 6 TB, 12 TB, 24 TB, and 48 TB. VMware comparisons are for the same subscription length and storage capacity of VMware vSphere Foundation with VMware vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation with VMware vSAN.

Apica upgrades through integrations to provide better data observability

By
Antony Savvas
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Observability
Observability

Data management and observability vendor Apica has upgraded its Ascent Platform following its recent acquisitions of data fabric firm LOGIQ.AI and telemetry data management specialist Circonus.

Apica has integrated capabilities from both organizations into its platform to provide “deeper insights” into data management, it says. The aim is to simplify how customers gather data and “seamlessly” integrate it into their systems and platforms.

In addition to making two acquisitions over the last ten months, Apica announced $16 million in new capital funding during the period. The extra cash was used to expand the firm’s Office of the CTO, as well as to strengthen its engineering and research and development teams. These actions and the integrations have led to the launch of Apica Ascent 2.0.

“Organizations struggle to manage tool sprawl, so we’ve provided a platform that ensures their legacy and digital transformation strategies work well together,” said Ranjan Parthasarathy, chief technology and product officer at Apica. “Firms don’t have to leave their legacy tools behind while modernizing, Apica can help make everything work together to provide insights needed for the business.”

Parthasarathy maintained that Ascent was “easy” to implement, use, and manage, and that its cost was “low”.

The platform encompasses a wide range of features including network and overall performance, compute metrics, memory and storage, and file systems, among other areas. It gathers and uses application data like logs and metrics, and traces from organizations’ runtime applications.

“We support an approach that does not stick our clients in a walled garden,” added Parthasarathy. “With the onset of generative AI, we now face even more data growth, and customers will need open-source solutions like ours to keep costs down, and avoid a situation where data is closed off.”

Apica says it embraces “anything and everything” to support ecosystem connectors, enabling open protocols and data collectors.

The company is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, and El Segundo in California. It also has offices in London and Bengaluru, India.

Tobiko comes out of stealth mode to tackle data transformation obstacles

By
Antony Savvas
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Platform engineering
Platform engineering

There’s a new data transformation kid on the block in the form of Tobiko Data, which has just raised $21.8 million in funding.

Blocks & Files met Tobiko Data co-founder and CTO Toby Mao this week in Santa Clara, California, to discuss the firm’s position in the market.

Tobiko, named for the flying fish roe popularly used in sushi, develops SQLMesh, an open source data transformation platform. With SQLMesh, data scientists and analysts can build “correct and efficient data pipelines,” promises the firm.

Development environments can take too long to spin up and are costly, says Tobiko, and when things go wrong, it’s “painful” to undo changes. Also, there is a lack of visibility into data pipeline performance, and managing large datasets have their own complexities.

Fundamentally, says Tobiko, DBT projects “don’t scale up”. DBT (data build tool) automatically generates documentation around descriptions, models dependencies, model SQL, sources, and tests. DBT creates lineage graphs of the data pipeline, and aims to provide transparency and visibility into what the data is describing, how it was produced, as well as how it maps to business logic, but some tools are better than others.

Tobiko claims it can save customers time and money in the whole process by only having to build tables once, reducing warehouse costs, and helping to get more work done.

Formed around 18 months ago, with the founders having helped lead the development of data performance metrics at the likes of Apple, Netflix, Airbnb, and Google, Tobiko competes against more established data transformation companies like DBT Labs.

On this week’s IT Press Tour across Silicon Valley, Mao told press and analysts: “With Snowflake [the cloud data platform], if you use it inefficiently, it can cost you a lot of money. With our SQLMesh, you only have to produce tables once, while other technologies make you do them time and again.

“A single change in a query can affect billions of rows of data, and companies spend millions every year on unnecessary rebuilds of the warehouse when only a small precise change is needed.”

SQLMesh can be used for free, but the firm has just launched SQLMesh Enterprise, a paid-for product which is a full observability platform. It not only tells users something went wrong with their data, but it also tells users why.

Mao says: “We are talking to Snowflake, for instance, about the value of our technology, but the software is not currently integrated into their ecosystem. But it can save users thousands of dollars off their Snowflake bill.”

He added: “Your developers can do things quicker and be more productive. They don’t have to go and get a coffee every time they change something in the data, they just run things with us and carry on with what they’re doing, they don’t have to wait around.

“This is all down to our SQL expertise, including our own SQLGlot framework that supports SQLMesh.” SQLGlot has been made open source too. It is a SQL parser, transpiler, and translator that currently supports 24 different SQL dialects.

Tobiko’s advantage is its fundamental semantic understanding of SQL, meaning it only executes necessary downstream changes instead of completely rebuilding the warehouse. It also holds state, allowing for first-class incremental refreshes, because it knows where users left off, and powers virtual data environments. The system understands and remembers every version of every model, avoiding duplicative computation.

Automated data movement provider Fivetran is a fan and user of Tobiko technology, with founder George Fraser being part of the latest funding round.

Mao says Tobiko will remain focused on data transformation. “We are a dev tool, we are not a data warehouse, we do metadata and support the tooling to move the data between any platform, whether it be Snowflake, Databricks or anywhere else, without being locked in.”

On the potential of being acquired by a larger data management player, Mao said: “At the moment we’re having fun, I’m doing software with my friends. We’ll see where we are in the future.”

Informatica expands Databricks partnership to tackle expanding AI workloads

By
Antony Savvas
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Informatica has sealed a wider agreement with Databricks, combining the full range of its AI-powered Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) within the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.

The expanded union is designed to let customers deploy enterprise-grade generative AI applications at scale based on high-quality, trusted data and metadata, the companies said.

The deal includes four new capabilities. Firstly, GenAI Solution Blueprint for Databricks DBRX from Informatica provides a roadmap for customers to develop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) GenAI applications using Databricks DBRX.

DBRX is an open, general-purpose large language model (LLM) designed to enable users to develop enterprise-grade GenAI applications. The Blueprint allows customers to build RAG-based GenAI solutions, using Informatica’s IDMC no-code/low-code interface and metadata-driven intelligence, and Databricks Vector Database, for embedding data, enabling access to data insights.

Secondly, Native Databricks SQL ELT will enable joint customers to perform in-database transformations with full push-down capabilities on Databricks SQL, the intelligent data warehouse. They will be able to use native Databricks functions such as the AI-powered Assistant and serverless compute, letting customers develop ETL pipelines to run on Databricks compute for AI-optimized performance, scalable data transformations, and integrations.

Thirdly, there is Cloud Data Integration-Free Service (CDI-Free) on Databricks Partner Connect. Informatica’s CDI-Free offering is gives customers access to Informatica’s cloud data ingestion and transformation capabilities. CDI-Free via Partner Connect offers users ELT processing of up to 20 million rows of data or ten ELT compute hours per month for free.

Lastly, there is full IDMC Support via Unity Catalog. The Informatica IDMC platform is now fully validated with Databricks Unity Catalog, a unified governance layer for data and AI within the Databricks platform.

The integration includes all critical IDMC services and “greatly enhances” Informatica’s ability to manage data lineage and governance on the IDMC Platform, said Informatica.

“We are expanding our innovation and collaboration with Databricks with complete support for Unity Catalog and our enhanced comprehensive GenAI solution blueprint,” said Amit Walia, chief executive officer at Informatica. “Together, we can deliver an AI-powered foundation for data management and data intelligence in the cloud to accelerate our joint customers into the era of GenAI with truly transformative applications.”

“This partnership enables us to leverage cutting-edge technologies from both market leaders to drive innovation and deliver tangible business value, not only to our internal IT, but also to the solutions offered to our clients,” said Dennis Tally, managing director at global consultancy KPMG, in a supporting quote.

Adam Conway, SVP of products at Databricks, added: “In the era of GenAI, access to trusted, high-quality data is becoming more essential than ever, especially for RAG implementations.”

Earlier this month, Cirata released Data Migrator 2.5, which also includes native integration with the Databricks Unity Catalog, centralizing data governance and access control capabilities to enable “faster data operations” and “accelerated” time-to-business-value for enterprises, said Cirata.

OpenDrives replaces CEO to refocus on core M&E business

By
Antony Savvas
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Media and entertainment software-defined storage specialist OpenDrives has appointed Sean Lee as its new chief executive officer. He replaces Izhar Sharon, who was originally appointed CEO in December 2022 to help break OpenDrives out of its M&E business niche, a strategy that now seems to have been reversed.

Los Angeles-headquartered OpenDrives provides media workflow solutions and storage management services. Founded in 2011 by M&E post-production professionals and technologists, OpenDrives is powered by its core Atlas software, which is deployed on-premises and into the cloud.

Sean Lee

Lee most recently served as the company’s chief strategy and operations officer, and has held leadership positions with OpenDrives since 2015. Lee was also once an OpenDrives customer, having served 15 years at Universal Studios, where he implemented efficient processes and improved workflows – something OpenDrives aims to deliver with its solutions.

As CEO of OpenDrives, Lee will “continue to leverage his experience as a customer to develop and deliver solutions that empower content creators and drive the future of M&E,” said the company.

Of Sharon’s departure, OpenDrives told Blocks & Files: “Izhar joined OpenDrives to lead the technical strategy and help move us outside of the M&E space. What’s become clear to the board is that OpenDrives’ origins is its path forward – it was founded by technologists like Sean from the industry, and innovates solutions FOR the industry.

“With Sean’s deep understanding of the M&E space, and his customer-centric approach, he’s the right individual to drive OpenDrives’ next phase.”

OpenDrives’ investors obviously want the company to re-focus on M&E. Joel Whitley, partner at IAG Capital Partners, said in a prepared statement: “Sean’s deep industry experience and charismatic outlook make him precisely what OpenDrives needs to remain focused on the M&E sector, as well as any business with content workflows.

“We are confident that he will build on this strong foundation to propel the business forward to break new ground in empowering storytellers and creatives worldwide.”

On his departure, in a LinkedIn post, Sharon said: “After a couple of great years at OpenDrives, building a foundation for the future, I am working on my next adventure. Best of luck to Sean Lee and team!”

OpenDrives recently unveiled its updated Atlas storage platform, built around a composable software architecture, which is complemented with an unlimited capacity business model.

Lee said: “We are committed to driving innovation and challenging the status quo, so that the M&E industry can continue to push boundaries and tell immersive stories that engage, inform and delight audiences everywhere on any platform.”

Ransomware attack on Synnovis paralyzes UK hospitals

By
Chris Mellor
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Operations at seven UK hospitals have been delayed after a ransomware attack on pathology lab services provider Synnovis.

The attack by the Russian Qilin group took place on June 2, knocking out server systems at the UK operations of SYNLAB, which forms part of the Synnovis partnership with the Guy’s and St Thomas’ and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trusts. Synnovis went live with a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) in October 2023 that combined multiple separate IT systems at the trusts into a single logical system.

A new LIMS powered by Epic software went live across the two hospital trusts that month. It locked the trusts into a single system dependent upon SYNLAB operations for pathology test results. When the server system of Synnovis, the NHS-SYNLAB partnership, went down, the trusts’ patient treatment operations were devastated.

Guy’s and St Thomas’ CEO Ian Abbs sent out a mail on June 3, saying: “I can confirm that our pathology partner Synnovis experienced a major IT incident earlier today, which is ongoing and means that we are not currently connected to the Synnovis IT servers. This is having a major impact on the delivery of our services, with blood transfusions being particularly affected. Some activity has already been cancelled or redirected to other providers at short notice as we prioritise the clinical work that we are able to carry out.”

As for SYNLAB, it described the attack as “an isolated incident to Synnovis with no connection to the cyber-attack on SYNLAB Italy on 18 April 2024.” It added: “The rest of the SYNLAB Group including the other SYNLAB facilities in the UK are not impacted.”

SYNLAB is an international medical diagnostics provider headquartered in Munich, Germany. It is the leading provider of diagnostic services and specialty testing in Europe. It employs around 27,000 people across its operations. SYNLAB is publicly listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and had revenues of €3.25 billion in 2022. Major shareholders include private equity firms Cinven and Novo Holdings among others.

In its 2020 ESG Report, SYNLAB said: “We take our responsibility towards storing and processing data on our IT systems very seriously. Potential data breaches or system failures can have real life impacts for the patients who rely on our diagnosis. We are introducing policies to ensure that the data is encrypted and secure, and we work closely with a network of external partners to neutralise any potential cybersecurity risks.”

Valerio Sorrentino
Valerio Sorrentino

It established a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) position that “focuses on identifying cybersecurity and IT compliance risks as they may impact our strategic, operational, and financial performance.” Valerio Sorrentino is SYNLAB’s Group ISO and has posted about the dangers of phishing attacks on LinkedIn. He says he was “recognized by Lacework as one of the 50 CISOs in the world to watch in 2024.”

Sorrentino knows about the targeting of healthcare providers by malware attackers, posting on LinkedIn eight months ago: ”l want to inform you that the North Korean state-sponsored actor, called the Lazarus Group, is targeting healthcare entities in Europe and the United States as reported by Cisco Talos.”

IT Services supplier CSI previously supplied a Security Operations Centre to SYNLAB in the UK and has published a case study about this contract, saying readers can “learn how SYNLAB, one of Europe’s largest medical testing companies, stays one step ahead of cyberattacks including WannaCry and Petya.”

CSI’s case study says: “CSI’s Security Operations Centre (SOC) deployed AI-driven threat protection to neutralise advanced threats and continuously protect the endpoints without disrupting users. Now its SOC experts can react immediately to alerts and work with Synlab to resolve cyber security-related incidents.”

Mark Dollar
Mark Dollar

CSI has not responded to an inquiry about its current involvement with SYNLAB and whether it was part of efforts to fend off the Synnovis attack.

SYNLAB ops fell prey to two previous attacks, one of which being the unconnected attack on its Italy offshoot described earlier. A SYNLAB operation in France was attacked by Clop group ransomware in June 2023. Then, in April 2024, SC Media reported that SYNLAB Italia had been hit by a cyberattack that disrupted its laboratories, medical centers, and sampling points, compromising 1.5 TB of data, including personal and medical details of patients and employees. The Black Basta ransomware group infiltrated its networked system, causing the shutdown of IT systems in 380 labs and medical centers in Italy. SYNLAB has emphasized that the Synnovis attack is not related.

David Akinpitansoye
David Akinpitansoye

SYNLAB Italia reportedly did not pay the demanded ransom and took almost a month to get its systems back online.

After the latest attack took place, SYNLAB UK CEO Mark Dollar put out a statement saying: “We take cybersecurity very seriously at Synnovis and have invested heavily in ensuring our IT arrangements are as safe as they possibly can be.”

Neither Dollar nor his Data Protection Officer, David Akinpitansoye, have responded to our inquiries about the incident, which is ongoing with weeks of disruption likely.

Rubrik and Commvault bat for US cricket teams

By
Chris Mellor
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Two enterprise data protection companies, one old, one new – both public – are sponsoring two US cricket teams.

Update. Veeam tells us it “has sponsored the Seattle Orcas cricket team for over a year now – the first in our market to sponsor a major cricket team.” 11 June 2024.

Newly public Rubrik is the official cybersecurity sponsor for the San Francisco Unicorns’ Major League Cricket (MLC) season starting July 5 this year. The Unicorns’ roster features World Cup winners and global talents from international teams including Australia, Pakistan, and New Zealand. Long-time public company Commvault is an associate sponsor of the defending champions of Major League Cricket, MI New York, where Accenture is the principal sponsor. MI (Mumbai Indians) New York is a T20 cricket team established in 2023. The T20 format is shorter and, hopefully, faster paced than world test cricket games, entailing just 20 overs per innings.

Rubrik CMO Andres Botero said: “Unicorns are unique, special – a phenomenon. This notable Bay Area team brings innovation, excellence, and resilience to the cricket pitch, making this partnership a perfect match.”

Rubrik said it shares a common philosophy with the SF Unicorns built around a commitment to recruiting exceptional talent, delivering innovation, and relentlessness. Rubrik’s brand will be prominently displayed on the Unicorns’ team assets and uniforms throughout the season. 

SF Unicorns co-owner Anand Rajaraman said: “Rubrik is exactly the kind of game-changing Unicorn the team is named for. This agreement is a testament to our shared commitment to excellence through talent, innovation and teamwork.”

Commvault CMO Anna Griffin also said in a statement: “Sponsoring the MI New York cricket team is Commvault’s opportunity to support one of the most dynamic and fast-growing sports in the world. It’s a no-brainer.”

Commvault’s sponsorship will feature opportunities to engage with fans including exclusive watch parties, contests, and cricket clinics with professional players. Fans, partners, and customers will also have the chance to join these events in the Dallas and Morrisville stadiums.

Griffin said: “This partnership not only allows us to engage with cricket fans but also reinforces our dedication to fostering community and resilience. We’re excited to share the Commvault spirit and support the MI New York team on their journey. We’re thrilled to connect with cricket fans and bring the Commvault spirit to the pitch.” 

Commvault said cricket is the second most watched sport globally, with more than 2.5 billion fans. As cricket’s popularity surges in the United States, Commvault’s collaboration with MI New York aims to bring the thrill of the game to a broader, more diverse audience. In Commvault’s view, it serves as an opportunity to educate an untapped global fan base about the importance of resilience – critical knowledge that is applicable to both personal and professional life, whether on the pitch or in a Commvault Cleanroom defending against cyberattacks. 

Mumbai Indians play in the Indian Premier League and is owned by Indiawin Sports Pvt. Ltd, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, one of India’s largest conglomerates. MI is a global cricketing force, with five T20 teams spanning three continents, and four countries including both men and women.

The San Francisco Unicorns, in partnership with MLC, plan to build a world-class home for the team in the Bay Area, which will seat up to 15,000 people and be capable of hosting major international cricket events. The team’s primary investors are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, who are founding partners of data-driven venture firm rocketship.vc, and previously founded US-focused database technology provider Junglee, which was sold to Amazon in 1998 for $250 million. 

For more details on the MI New York schedule and how to watch, visit Commvault’s official blog. Commvault is also associated with India’s Hyderabad Cricket League. Check out SFUnicorns.com and Rubrik.com to find out more about their partnership.

IT pros rush to cloud-native Kubernetes platforms to speed app development

By
Antony Savvas
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Kubernetes logo
Kubernetes logo

More than half of IT professionals plan to migrate or modernize some of their VM workloads to Kubernetes, according to research looking at cloud-native platforms and how they can speed application delivery.

The Pure Storage and Dimensional Research survey, “The Voice of Kubernetes Experts Report 2024: The Data Trends Driving the Future of the Enterprise,” explores the top priorities and trends in the cloud-native landscape, including modern virtualization, cloud-native database and AI/ML adoption using Kubernetes, and the rise of platform engineering.

The report questioned 530 “mature and advanced” platform leaders with more than four years of experience directly managing data services in a Kubernetes environment.

Over the next five years, 80 percent of respondents expect all or most of their new applications would be built with cloud-native platforms. For their cloud-native technology, they prefer the flexibility of deploying in hybrid cloud environments, with 86 percent confirming they run their technology across both public and private clouds.

Traditional VM infrastructure is said to be at an “inflection point” with more than half (58 percent) of organizations planning to migrate some of their VM workloads to Kubernetes, and 65 percent planning to migrate VM workloads within the next two years.

Nearly all (98 percent) of respondents run data-intensive workloads on cloud-native platforms with critical apps like databases (72 percent), analytics (67 percent), and AI/ML workloads (54 percent) being built on Kubernetes. And 96 percent said they already have platform engineering teams to increase the scalability and flexibility of their apps. Executives have shown willingness to invest in training (63 percent), consultants (60 percent), and hiring skilled engineers (52 percent) to support this function.

“The rise of cloud-native platforms marks a fundamental shift in how businesses conceptualize, develop, and deploy applications at scale,” says the report. “Recognizing the benefits, organizations are migrating their VMs to cloud-native platforms to drive enhanced scalability, flexibility, and operational simplicity – all while reducing overall costs.”

“While migrating VM-based applications to Kubernetes remains challenging, robust data services and container platforms are making it possible, enabling accelerated development, seamless management, automation, and optimized IT infrastructure,” added Archana Venkatraman, senior research director, cloud data management, at analyst house IDC.

Cirata pushes path to migrate data in Databricks

By
Antony Savvas
-
Lego bricks
Lego bricks

Cirata has released Data Migrator 2.5, which now includes native integration with the Databricks Unity Catalog. Expanding the Cirata and Databricks partnership, the new integration centralizes data governance and access control capabilities to “enable faster data operations” and “accelerated” time-to-business-value for enterprises.

Databricks Unity Catalog provides a unified governance layer for data and AI within the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Using Unity Catalog enables organizations to govern their structured and unstructured data, machine learning modules, notebooks, dashboards, and files on any cloud or platform.

By integrating with Unity Catalog, Cirata Data Migrator helps run analytics jobs as soon as possible or to modernize data in the cloud. It supports Unity Catalog’s functionality for stronger data operations, access control, accessibility, and search. It automates large-scale transfer of data and metadata from existing data lakes to cloud storage and database targets, even while changes are being made by the application at the source.

With Data Migrator 2.5, users can now select the Databricks agent and define the use of Unity Catalog with Databricks SQL Warehouse. This helps data science and engineering teams maximize the value of their entire data estate while benefiting from their choice of metadata technology in Databricks, said the pair.

“As a long-standing partner, Cirata has helped many customers in their legacy Hadoop to Databricks migrations,” said Siva Abbaraju, go-to-market leader, migrations, Databricks. “Now, the seamless integration of Cirata Data Migrator with Unity Catalog enables enterprises to capitalize on our data and AI capabilities to drive productivity and accelerate their business value.”

Paul Scott-Murphy, chief technology officer at Cirata, added: “By unlocking a critical benefit for our customers, we are furthering the adoption of data analytics, AI and ML, and empowering data teams to drive more meaningful data insights and outcomes.”

Cirata Data Migrator 2.5 with native integration with Databricks Unity Catalog is available now.

Cirata, the successor to crashed WANdisco, reported decreased revenues and increased losses for 2023. Sales fell 30 percent year-on-year to $6.7 million, and the pre-tax loss increased to $36.5 million, from the $29.6 million seen 2022.

Last week, Databricks moved to acquire data management software player Tabular for over $1 billion.

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