CTERA has added a decoy file and attack detection facility to its Ransom Protect offering.
The enterprise developer provides geo-distributed global cloud file and object data services, enabling distributed users to access shared and synchronized unstructured data. Its Ransom Protect feature uses machine learning (ML) models to detect anomalous user or app behavior – such as a spike in encrypted writes – and apply preventative measures at once. CTERA has added a decoy files facility to this, so that data exfiltration attempts by insiders or external malware attackers can be detected in real time and thus begin reactive measures.
CTERA CEO Oded Nagel explained: “Data exfiltration poses a severe risk to organizations, as threat actors can leverage stolen sensitive information for extortion, causing immense financial and reputational damage. With our new honeypot functionality as part of CTERA Ransom Protect, we are providing our customers robust active defense against these pernicious attacks, ensuring the protection of their valuable data assets.”
Ransom Protect deploys decoy files within a customer’s file system. A blog by CTERA CTO Aron Brand explains: “Any attempt to access them enables CTERA’s software to identify and stop unauthorized access or attempts at data theft, effectively neutralizing threats before significant damage can occur.”
CTERA presentation slide
This enables Ransom Protect to defend customers against double extortion – an attack combining data exfiltration and encryption which has become a widespread cyber criminal attack method. Attackers first exfiltrate sensitive information from their targets before launching the ransomware encryption routine. They then demand attacked customers make a ransom payment to regain access to their encrypted data, threatening to expose the stolen data if the ransomware demand is not met.
The Ransom Protect product provides:
Data exfiltration prevention Decoy files enabling real-time detection and blocking of data exfiltration attacks;
Real-time AI detection Machine learning algorithms identify behavioral anomalies suggesting fraudulent file activity, and block offending users within seconds;
Zero-day protection Does not rely on traditional signature update services;
Incident management Admin dashboard for real-time attack monitoring, incident evidence logging and post-attack forensics;
Instant recovery Near-instant recovery of any affected files from snapshots that are securely stored in an air-gapped, immutable cloud object storage;
One-Click Deployment Single-click feature activation on CTERA Edge Filers with latest version release.
Commvault added ThreatWise honeypot malware deception and detection technology to its Metallic SaaS product in late 2022. Catalogic also introduced equivalent technology that year, with version 4.9 of its DPX product.
Leil Storage, a startup owned by Estonian storage systems builder DIAWAY, is extending its sustainability credentials in the second half of this year by introducing much lower power backup and archiving systems.
Earlier this year, Leil Storage introduced backup and archiving platforms benefiting from the operational advantages offered by Host-Managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (HM-SMR) drives. A Leil pitch says: “At Leil Storage, we combined development expertise from Google with support from Western Digital and created a platform that allows more people to store more data at a lower cost while using less energy and making the world a greener place.”
Aleksandr Ragel
HM-SMR was previously a format mainly used by hyperscalers. Leil has now developed it to target enterprises and service providers that want to benefit from a lower energy consumption, a lower cost per terabyte, and better performance when compared to traditional legacy storage systems. HM-SMR is better, Leil says, for sequential workloads, not random IO.
On the Leil Backup and Leil Archive systems, CEO Aleksandr Ragel told this week’s IT Press Tour in Rome: “We are bringing hyperscaler data storage to on-premises environments. We focus on data storage that is greener than the competition, and which uses the latest technologies to safeguard the data and protect investments.”
On launch, the systems’ HM-SMR disks were promising 18 percent lower power usage when compared to non-SMR drives. In the second half, 2024, the same systems – which come with Leil’s software – will be equipped with the Power Disable feature, which promises to slash storage power draw by “25 percent or more” in what Leil is calling its Infinite Cold Engine (ICE), a variation of Massive Array of Idle Drives (MAID) technology, and Arctic Forest products. ICE is phased:
Phase 1: HM-SMR support, 18 percent total energy savings
Phase 2: Write-group conception 2024, 43 percent projected total energy savings
Phase 3: Popular Data Concentration (PDC), 2025, 50 percent projected total energy savings
Phase 4: AI-driven background service, 2026, 70 percent projected total energy savings
The Arctic Forest Concepthas an additional immutability layer, built on the foundation of SaunaFS Copy-on-Write snapshots, to enhance the existing immutability features, presenting, Ragel says, a groundbreaking and exclusive market offering.
The AI-driven background service will:
Gather data on power use, user behavior, and system changes for energy savings
Test data classification parameters through simulation and experimenting with combinations
Compare actual versus simulated pre-installation energy use and provide recommendations to align with theoretical outcomes
Leil Storage is a commercial closed source product that extends the open source, POSIX-compliant SaunaFS distributed file system with proprietary green features. Leil storage effectively equals SaunaFS plus ICE plus the Arctic Forest Concept.
Its storage architecture is rack-based with eight nodes (JBODs) providing 15 PB usable capacity in a rack with a 6+2 erasure coding scheme. Total JBOD capacity is 2.6 PB with 102 x 28 TB HM-SMR drives (Western Digital UltraSMR). These have 256 MiB zones mapped into streamed raw data chunks. A node has 4 x NVMe SSDs, each with a 1.6 TB Drive Writes per Day rating.
Leil says its systems are already backup and archiving targets with cloud data management players including Veeam, Acronis, Cohesity, Veritas, which is in-progress, and Rubrik, which are all technology partners of the company.
Ragel identifies competing technologies as tape libraries, high-cap HDD arrays, object storage systems (using the high-cap drives), and general software-defined storage when used for nearline, backup target, and archival storage. He says hyperscalers such as Dropbox and Wasabi uses HM-SMR drives. The Ceph and Btrfs storage software products support HM-SMR.
Ragel maintains that HM-SMR was always equipped with the technology to deliver better and greener performance, but, until now, the software wasn’t being developed to deliver it outside of hyperscalers. Now Leil is making the tech available for general enterprise use.
Leil Storage’s pricing scheme is pay upfront for the capacity you need (including hardware, software, and support), with options for a three or five-year term. For SaunaFS, customers choose from monthly, yearly, or one-time payments for the software license and support, based on raw capacity, also available for three or five-year terms. Hardware is an option to be sold separately if needed.
“We are the bread for large-scale data storage, not the butter, not the caviar. We provide simple products, not monstrous ‘everything for everyone’ systems that cost more,” added Ragel. “We may go into butter space at some point.”
Micron has launched a 2500 QLC NAND internal fit client product that’s faster than its 2550 TLC predecessor, despite TLC NAND typically being quicker than QLC NAND.
TLC (triple level cell) NAND has 3 bits per cell while QLC (quad level cell) has 4 bits per cell, meaning the SSD’s controller has to negotiate QLC’s 16 voltage states per cell instead of 8 with TLC. It takes longer to read and write individual cells unless the controller firmware gets clever with such things as a very fast SLC (1 bit/cell) cache, and parallel data plane access.
Micron’s 2500 is claimed to be the first 200-plus layer QLC drive for OEM desktop and notebook (client) computers. It uses 232-layer QLC NAND, and this gives it 30 percent more density, Micron says, than its 2400 176-layer QLC product, and 31 percent more than its 232-layer TLC NAND, as used in the 2550 M.2 format SSD. This was launched in December 2022 so it has taken 16 months to add the extra bit to the 232-layer NAND cells used in the 2500.
The 2500 is also quicker performing than the 2450 176-layer TLC product from 2021, with 24 percent faster reads and 31 percent faster write performance. Overall, Micron claims the 2500 has best-in-class “performance that beats competitive TLC and QLC-based SSDs,” meaning better than its top five client OEM competitor products.
A table compares the performance of Micron’s recent M.2 format SSDs:
Micron’s 2400, 2450, and 3400 products are no longer current. They’re included for reference purposes
This shows that the 2500 effectively replaces the slower 2550, providing higher capacity, more IOPS, and better bandwidth. It’s even nudging up against the high-end 3500, which also uses 232-layer flash, and in fact provides faster sequential reads – 7.1 GBps versus the 3500’s 7 GBps.
Micron says the 2500 has an up to 45 percent better PC Mark10 benchmark score than three competing TLC products.
The 2500 is available in small (22 x 30 mm), medium (22 x 42 mm), and large (22 x 80 mm) M.2 formats. It is a PCIe gen 4 x 4 lane drive, using an NVMe v1.4 interface, like the other Micron M.2 drives mentioned, but the later v1.4c variant. The drive uses host-memory buffer technology, meaning there is no DRAM in the drive itself, like its predecessor.
The drive’s endurance (TBW meaning terabytes written) varies with capacity over the five-year warranty period, with a 2 million hours MTTF rating:
512 GB – 200 TBW
1 TB – 300 TBW
2 TB – 600 TBW
It sips electricity, using less than 2.5 mW in sleep power state, less than 150 mW in active idle power state, and less than 6,300 watts in its active power state.
Micron classifies the 3500 as being a performant drive for data-intensive workloads, the 2550 as a mainstream workload drive, and the 2500 is a “value QLC SSD at TLC performance” levels. We think it could replace the 2550 and overlap with the 3500.
Hammerspace has added erasure coding to its data orchestrating Global Data Environment software, enabling it to use less overhead when storing and protecting data.
The company supplies parallel NFS-based software to manage data in globally distributed and disparate sites, in file (NFS) and object storage using SSDs, disk drives, public cloud services (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Seagate Lyve Cloud), and tape libraries. This enables it to be located, orchestrated, placed, and accessed as if it were local. Hammerspace bought RozoFS, a French startup developing its Mojette Transform erasure coding technology, in May 2023 to protect against data loss with less overhead and faster recovery than RAID.
David Flynn, Hammerspace founder and CEO, said: “We started this year by adding support for data on tape, then pioneered the Hyperscale NAS architecture for AI and GPU computing, and now we are further expanding our data storage services with high-performance erasure coding. This gives customers even more choice and flexibility when it comes to their storage infrastructure.”
Erasure coding (EC), like RAID, involves the use of mathematically computed codes – parity values in RAID – from source data. If some of the source data is lost then it can be recalculated from its fragments and the codes. The codes represent a storage overhead that is required above that of the raw data storage. In general, if a protection scheme means that this overhead can be reduced and the data recovery process completed in less time then it is to be preferred over less efficient schemes.
Mojette Transform diagram
EC generally requires less overhead than RAID. The Mojette Transform is, Hammerspace says, an “extremely CPU-efficient erasure code” that bypasses the complex mathematical calculations of usual erasure codes, leaving more compute power available to applications. The software’s basic algorithm is described here.
RozoFS’s technology is, Hammerspace claims, “up to 2x faster than traditional erasure coding schemes.” As a result of its simpler mathematical structure, the Mojette Transform needs comparatively less storage space than other EC schemes, such as Reed-Solomon, and is scalable out to billions of files.
Hammerspace says that this provides a new option for building high-performance storage using its technology and commodity hardware. Examples are when building scratch space for HPC and research environments, using Open Compute Project (OCP) hardware in hyperscale environments, or for building all-flash storage environments for AI initiatives to augment or replace legacy storage.
Pierre Evenou, Hammerspace VP of Advanced Technology and founding engineer of Mojette Transform, said: “Our goal in developing the Mojette Transform erasure code was to deliver the highest reliability in data protection, coupled with extreme performance, leveraging commodity hardware. The result is delivering close to native performance of the underlying storage hardware to the application and compute environment without sacrificing data protection.”
It’s time for the National Association of Broadcasters show – NAB 2024 – at the Las Vegas Convention Center, and storage suppliers are vying to see who has the fastest and most efficient storage on offer to store media files and ship them around to apps and users.
The show runs from April 14 to 17 and is the pre-eminent exhibition and conference for the media and entertainment industry, drawing thousands of content professionals from all corners of the broadcast, media and entertainment ecosystem – including storage.
The storage suppliers exhibiting include:
Seagate
Seagate is showing its LaCie range of external storage products, which get its 24TB disk drives – up from the previous 20TB HDDs. They include:
LaCie 1big Dock 24TB – $1.049.00
LaCie 2big Dock 48TB – $1,899.00
LaCie d2 Professional 24TB – $749.99
LaCie 2big RAID 48TB – $1,699.00
Seagate said the LaCie 1big Dock and 2big Dock simplify editing workflows by enabling users to simultaneously store files, connect peripherals, and charge devices in one hub. The 1big Dock 24TB and 2big Dock 48TB deliver 20 percent more capacity than their predecessors. The LaCie d2 Professional 24TB and 2big RAID 48TB also received boosts of 20 percent in capacity.
The company suggests that, for hobbyists or studio experts who are looking at the latest production tools, the 48TB products are suitable for generative AI applications. We understand that to mean Gen AI inferencing, not training.
The 1big Dock, 2big Dock and d2 Professional products are available now, while the 2big RAID 48TB will ship in May.
Storj
Trisha Winter.
Decentralized storage supplier Storj, which says it’s now ten years old, is present and has just appointed its first CMO, Trisha Winter. The startup claims it provides up to 90 percent lower storage costs and significant carbon reduction compared to the public cloud.
CEO Ben Golub’s prepared quote read: “Storj has grown from a ground-breaking Web3 tech innovation to a proven enterprise solution, giving cloud storage hyperscalers a run for their money. Differentiators that make us fast, secure and highly performant also ensure our product is the greenest cloud object storage on the planet. Our organization is stronger than ever in our tenth year and poised for continued rapid growth, especially with the addition of Trisha Winter to our executive team.”
Starting this month, Storj’s user interface and invoices share data on each customer’s carbon emissions as a result of their use of Storj, compared with cloud hyperscalers, such as AWS, Azure and Google. There is a Storj whitepaper looking at emissions and savings, and its methodology.
Tuxera
The Finnish storage and network software developer is exhibiting its Fusion File Share (FFS) product and also has a presentation session with Toast Post Production, and Pixitmedia. FFS replaces the standard or default SMB software stacks, such as Samba, with a much faster one.
It offers up to 60x higher throughput and as much as 500 percent better scalability than Samba SMB. FFS also offers RDMA capability and is compatible with the SMB protocol up to version 3.1.1. Its scale-out feature enables the creation of parallel and scalable multi-SMB cluster service, providing faster throughput with low CPU and memory usage.
Veikko Ruuskanen, CEO of Toast Post Production Oy in Helsinki, Finland, explained: “We always prefer to play back raw material on our workstations in real time, regardless of the resolution or file format. Unfortunately, that was not always doable with equipment running Samba SMB server software. At times, we needed to create local caches which slowed down the workflow, frustrating both our artists and our clients. With the Fusion File Share software, we found that we could instantly manage real-time transfers of the most demanding file types. The change was immediate.”
Western Digital
WD is showing its SanDisk SD-format flash card products, G-Drive external disk drive models, and Ultrastar Transporter and JBOD offerings. The SD flash cards include the SanDisk SD Express (128GB/256GB) and microSD Express (128GB/256GB) products. But there are new memory cards as well:
2TB SanDisk Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I memory card – World’s first 2TB UHS-I SDXC card
2TB SanDisk Extreme PRO microSDXC UHS-I memory card – Western Digital’s first and world’s fastest 2TB UHS-I microSD card
4TB SanDisk Extreme PRO SDUC UHS-I memory card – the world’s first 4TB UHS-I SD card
Desktop external 7,200rpm Ultrastar disk drives with 24TB capacities:
24TB G-DRIVE ($699.99) – Ultra-reliable storage supporting USB-C (10Gbit/sec) for fast backup
24TB G-DRIVE PROJECT ($929.99) – Backup and save project work. Compatible with Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C (10Gbit/sec). Also features a PRO-BLADE SSD Mag slot for modular SSD performance in sharing and editing across devices
48TB G-RAID MIRROR ($1,599.99) – Ships in RAID 1 (Mirroring) to automatically create a duplicate of your working files for data redundancy. Compatible with Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C (10Gbit/sec). Also features a PRO-BLADE SSD Mag slot for modular SSD performance in sharing and editing across devices
96TB G-RAID SHUTTLE 4 ($4,499.99) – Transportable four-bay hardware RAID solution allows for super-fast access and real-time video editing. This device ships in RAID 5, and supports RAID 0, 1 and 10 configurations
192TB G-RAID SHUTTLE 8 ($7,499.99) – Transportable eight-bay hardware RAID product for consolidated backup, whether on location or in the studio. It supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60 configurations, and provides transfer rates up to 1690MB/sec read and 1490MB/sec write in default RAID 5.
Data transport and JBOD devices:
Ultrastar Transporter – Offers up to 368TB of fast NVMe SSD performance and dual port 200Gb/E connectivity for storing, editing and physically transporting dailies and massive files from one location to the next, including the cloud. Weighs less than 30lb (13.6kg), features a durable chassis design, and includes a transport case. Features added data security with a tamper evident case and is designed for FIPS 140-2 level 2 compliance with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) Version 2
Ultrastar Data102 JBOD Platform – External storage platform for mass storage, backup, online accessible archive and nearline content. Supports up to 24Gb SAS to the host and up to 2.65PB in a 4U enclosure with 24TB Ultrastar HDDs.
Visit the Western Digital booth #SL5041 in South Hall Lower. The 2TB memory cards are expected to be available at authorized retailers, e-tailers and the Western Digital store this summer. The 4TB card its expected to be available in 2025.
Backblaze has added Event Notification data change alerts to its cloud storage so that such events can be dealt with faster by triggering automated workflows.
The fast-growing B2 Cloud Storage provides S3-compliant storage for less money than Amazon S3 and with no egress charges. AWS offers a Simple Queue Service (SQS) designed for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications, enabling customers to connect components together using message queues. An S3 storage bucket can be configured to send notifications for specific events, such as object creation, to SQS and so on to SQS queue-reading services, which in turn can inform upstream applications to trigger processing.
Gleb Budman, Backblaze CEO and chairperson, said: “Companies increasingly want to leverage best-of-breed providers to grow their business, versus being locked into the traditional closed cloud providers. Our new Event Notifications service unlocks the freedom for our customers to build their cloud workflows in whatever way they prefer.”
This statement was a direct shot at AWS, as evidenced by an allied customer quote from Oleh Aleynik, senior software engineer and co-founder at CloudSpot, who said: “With Event Notifications, we can eliminate the final AWS component, Simple Queue Service (SQS), from our infrastructure. This completes our transition to a more streamlined and cost-effective tech stack.”
Event Notifications can be triggered by data upload, update, or deletion, with alerts sent to users or external cloud services. Backblaze says this supports the expanding use of serverless architecture and specialized microservices across clouds, not just its own.
It can trigger services such as provisioning cloud resources or automating transcoding and compute instances in response to data changes. This can accelerate content delivery and responsiveness to customer demand with automated asset tracking and streamlined media production. It also helps IT security teams monitor and respond to changes, with real-time notifications about changes to important data assets.
Event Notifications is now available in private preview with general availability planned later this year. Interested parties can join a private preview waiting list.
Rubrik reportedly plans to sell 23 million shares in its upcoming IPO.
The shares will be priced between $28 and $31 each according to Reuters, with gross proceeds estimated at between $644 million and $713 million. The net proceeds, after banking fees and so forth will be significantly less. Rubrik’s valuation at the top end of the range would be about $5.4 billion.
Rubrik did not respond to a request for comment.
The shares on offer are classified as Class A shares and have 1 voting right per share. There are separate existing Class B shares which are not for sale and these each have voting rights equivalent to 20 Class A shares. Rubrik’s S1 SEC IPO filing statement, documented at the start of this month, said there were: “163,046,971 shares of Class B common stock outstanding as of January 31, 2024.”
CEO and co-founder Bipul Sinha owns 12,342,646 Class B shares, co-founder Arvind Jain has 11,404,364 while co-founder and CTO Arvind Nithrakashyap possesses 10,896,392 Class B shares.
VCs Lightspeed and Greylock own almost 59 million between them.
All this means large buyers of Class A shares will not be able to take control of the company from existing Class B shareholders.
One complicating factor for the IPO could be an ongoing fraud investigation. The US Department of Justice is looking into the siphoning off of an undisclosed amount of funds from 110 US government contracts, worth $46 million, into a separate business entity run by a former Rubrik sales division employee. There is no information available on the US Justice Department website about how this probe is progressing.
Since Rubrik filed its S1 IPO document, arch rival Cohesity, which is buying the bulk of Veritas’ data protection business, has disclosed a $150 million F-round of fundraising. This takes its total raised to $955 million. Both Nvidia and IBM participated in the round as strategic investors. The combined Cohesity-Veritas data protection business has a reported $7 billion valuation.
Quantum, beset by financial accounting issues, has realized $15 million by selling “certain service inventory assets” to an unnamed partner that will now provide third party logistics and asset management for Quantum’s Global Services operation.
Unstructured data manager and protector Quantum is facing difficulties in reporting its second fiscal 2024 quarter’s financial results due to problems reconciling the standalone selling prices for components it sold in bundles of products. These are proving so difficult to work out in a large number of transactions that it has had to ask for a reporting extension to May 7 from the Nasdaq stock exchange, where its shares are listed. Reporting failures could lead to Quantum’s shares being delisted.
The problems are delaying the reporting of Quantum’s third fiscal 2024 quarter’s results too, covering the three months to December 31, and the company admitted it has not completed preparation of financial statements for the fourth quarter and full fiscal 2024 year ended March 31, 2024.
Quantum’s shares could also be delisted from Nasdaq due to the average share value falling below $1 dollar for 30 days. Quantum requested a hearing before delisting takes place and this is scheduled with the Nasdaq Hearings Panel for May 14. The company said in a statement it is “diligently working to comply with all of the applicable Nasdaq listing criteria within the period of time that the Panel may grant.”
It used a reverse stock split transaction in April 2017 to avoid a similar NYSE delisting threat.
The company has been able to issue unaudited cash and long-term debt balances as of March 31:
Cash and cash equivalents were $26.1 million
Outstanding term loan debt was $87.9 million
Outstanding borrowings under a revolving credit facility were $26.6 million
Total interest expense for the three-month period ended March 31 was $4.1 million
The debt situation has improved because the service operation deal means Quantum can use the $15 million to pay down approximately $12.3 million of existing debt.
In related news, Quantum confirmed that after a three-year process it has completed implementation of its new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, and should see “a material reduction in associated capital expenditures in the future” and gain “future operational efficiencies throughout the organization.”
We now wait for Quantum to issue second, third, fourth quarter and full fiscal 2024 year results by May 7, and work out a stock delisting avoidance strategy by May 14.
QStar Technologies, the provider of “active archive” software for tape libraries, is expanding the reach of stored data with the launch of its QStar Global ArchiveSpace offering.
The technology is a multi-node gateway solution that supports the massive archive needs of high performance computing (HPC), AI/ML, hyperscalers, media and entertainment, and video surveillance environments. It creates a multi-node Windows or Linux-based archive using Global Namespaces for SMB shares, NFS mounts or S3 buckets.
Installing on Windows or Linux allows users to take advantage of their preferred security model, using either Active Directory or LDAP. Users can run between three and 64 nodes.
Every node can access any tape media and use any tape drive to read or write data. Global ArchiveSpace can replicate content for data protection to same or different archive technologies, and present a unified view of the archived data through SMB or NFS file systems and/or S3 cloud interfaces.
At the IT Press Tour in Rome last week, Riccardo Finotti, CEO of QStar Technologies, said: “With this solution, you have availability across all locations, automated data orchestration, and a very high capacity archive with reduced running costs.”
ArchiveSpace is an extension of QStar Archive Manager, which is one solution already offered by the likes of Cohesity, Rubrik, HYCU and Hammerspace, to help serve the cloud data management needs of their end customers.
Qstar graphic.
Users can upgrade their existing QStar licenses to take advantage of the “improved resilience and performance” ArchiveSpace promises. It is designed to support all tape libraries from all vendors, but particularly the largest tape libraries available on the market today, using any version of LTO or proprietary tape drive technology.
It can be used with the IBM TS4500, Oracle SL8500, Quantum Scalar i6000 and Spectra Logic TFinity Exascale platforms, supporting hundreds of tape drives and an unlimited media count, allowing hundreds of Petabytes or Exabytes.
A multi-write option groups tape drives together for higher performance by allowing a single stream to be written to multiple tape drives based on policies. In addition, mirroring and replication options protect content by automatically creating copies of data within the library, to another tape library, or to private/public clouds. As tape libraries under management do not need to be partitioned, administration complexity is reduced.
Hammerspace added archival tape system support to its Global Data Environment (GDE) earlier this year []. Its parallel file system covers data in globally distributed and disparate sites, and enables it to be located, orchestrated, and accessed as if it were local.
Hammerspace is working with three active archive suppliers as part of its tape effort, including Grau Data, PoINT Software & Systems and QStar Technologies.
Dave Thomson, SVP of sales and marketing at QStar Technologies, said at the time: “QStar software makes archived data on tape quickly and easily accessible through an S3 interface/bucket. Together with Hammerspace, we can help our current and future customers manage their data across multiple storage platforms, including tape as an active archive.”
QStar Technologies was founded in 1987, and has main offices in Denver, Colorado and Milan, Italy. Its customers include the University of Cambridge, Raytheon, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Turner, Fox, Walmart, and Deutsche Bank.
Interview: With Cohesity acquiring much of the Veritas data protection business, the residual company will already be highly profitable, taking half a billion dollars a year, employing more than 1,500 people, and determined to grow.
Cohesity is buying Veritas’s NetBackup business but not its Backup Exec (BE), data compliance, and InfoScale storage management operations. These will be combined in a spun-off corporation, code named DataCo, to be led by Lawrence Wong, Veritas chief strategy officer and SVP for Products and Strategy.
B&F talked with CEO in waiting Lawrence Wong, and heard about DataCo’s organization and plans. The interview has been lightly edited for brevity.
Lawrence Wong
B&F: Give me the headline overview of DataCo.
Lawrence Wong: It’s a supercharged startup with around $500 million in revenues and 1,500 employees. It is certainly a good cohort to be in. There’s many, many, many companies of similar size and scope in the software industry. Certainly as we embark on our life as a standalone company, you would imagine that we would intend to pursue growth. And we will do that through continued investment. We believe that there’s a tremendous amount of potential for us to thrive as an independent company.
B&F: Are you profitable at the moment?
Lawrence Wong: Yes, we are actually very profitable. That is one of the advantages that we have that, let’s say, perhaps a traditional startup would not have.
We’re starting off essentially with three businesses with a significant set of blue chip customers. These are the Fortune 500, Fortune 100 customers. In fact, for both InfoScale, and for Data Compliance, we have over 21 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers. These are the largest of the largest banks, largest financial institutions; the most enviable and difficult and most demanding customers, as you would imagine. We’re very lucky and fortunate to have them as customers.
And similarly, with BE, we’ve got thousands of customers already established. So it’s not a issue of whether these products are relevant in the market, or whether there’s a product market fit that you would normally be going through as a traditional startup.
The analogy I actually use internally with our people is that we’re sort of adult children who have left the parents’ house, and now we’re going to stick out on our own. And while normally, you might have a little bit of trepidation doing that, going off to college or something like that, as a young adult, there’s nothing for us to worry about here.
Because we’re established adults with essentially solid credit profiles and solid financial profiles. And what we really have is an opportunity to build, rebuild the company, and do everything the way that we believe it should be done. With every company there’s opportunity to improve, right? So there’s an opportunity for us to use this as a catalyst to actually do that. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.
B&F: Take me through how you describe the three separate business units that you’re going to be setting up.
Lawrence Wong: First the businesses themselves will all have their own customer-facing teams, they will have their own product teams. And what they will share across all three is traditional head office functions. So they’ll share executive management, they’ll share finance; that gives them the ability to thrive, because they will be moving at their pace for their market. Each one of these businesses solve different problems for the enterprise customer; they have different buyers. And they also also have different stages of where they are in the industry. So I’ll go through each one of these.
With InfoScale, this has been a business that’s been part of Veritas from the beginning. It’s actually one of their core offerings. It continues to be very relevant, very sticky with our customers.
I was just on a call with one of the largest financial institutions in the world, inquiring about what we plan to do. I was unequivocal about sharing with him that we are going to be continuing to invest. We’re going to be continuing to maintain the relevancy of this product, we’re actually going to be investing and taking it to the future.
A product like InfoScale, allows them actually to very easily come into and out of the public clouds. So there’s a forward gear and a reverse gear, like I always like to describe it, and gives them a reverse gear. And they’re very pleased with that.
And of course, the next generation of architectures, when you talk about disaggregated architectures, as well as traditional architectures; that’s where InfoScale was. It’s evolving to being able to support that resiliency across both disaggregated architectures and traditional architecture. We’re working with our customers to think through what that intended future state looks like as they evolve. We will evolve with them. So we’re very relevant, and they’re very excited to hear that we’re going to continue to invest. So that’s the first product. It’s about $3 billion TAM (total addressable market) with very steady 5-6 percent growth.
B&F: And the second business unit?
Lawrence Wong: The second business is our Data Compliance business. That sits in a $10 billion TAM, which is actually growing quite significantly at over 11 percent.
Data compliance used to be about back room, regulatory things. Those guys over there in the closet who were risk managers have now moved to the forefront of board level conversations around data, provenance, regulatory compliance, and data privacy. And that has thrust this space now into our minds as the next big potential growth area for DataCo, principally because the environment around us, particularly with the rise of generative AI.
The hype cycle that we’re in with generative AI has really thrust all of these issues to the forefront.
The European Union and the United States are thinking about what sort of governmental regulations need to be there. How do we think about privacy? What sort of liability is there, particularly if you’ve got a machines making decisions? How do you test and ensure the provenance of the data that goes into that GenAI model.
That’s exactly what our software does. Our software allows you to track provenance, allows you to understand what sort of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) you have in your data, where that PII is located. It is all of a sudden, just like how cybersecurity has made backup software exciting and sexy.
I’m thrilled that the rise of AI has brought sexy back to data compliance. We intend that to be a growth vector for DataCo.
It is a highly profitable business today; roughly several $100 million ARR a year and we’ve got over 20 customers today that pay us over a million dollars in ARR. We’ve grown that, by the way, from a handful of customers, less than ten, to over 20 in the last 18 months. We see that potential, and we’re going to continue to invest here. We’re assured that this would be one of the areas in which we see tremendous progress.
B&F: And the third business unit?
Lawrence Wong: BE is one of the original data protection products that were out there for Veritas¹. And then Veritas acquired NetBackup, many, many years ago. BE continues to be a very relevant product for our SMB base now, where we see a huge opportunity today, going forward. It’s roughly a $50 million ARR year business. It is highly profitable. We’ve continued to invest in its roadmap and evolve it. We have a very loyal and enthusiastic customer base.
BE is focused on the SMB; it does not compete in the enterprise space. But we believe very strongly that the SMBs are the backbones of every major economy out there, right from the emerging market to the to the mature markets. They deserve phenomenal data resilience and backup capabilities the same way that a large enterprise would.
Large enterprises experience cyberattacks. They’ve got IT practitioners and CISOs and security experts to help mitigate all this. But I always go back to the SMB; what do they have? We have a mission to help them essentially get that same cyber-resilience that these large enterprise companies have, because they are also going to experience the same attacks.
I think there is a tremendous opportunity to provide something that’s easy, simple to use, and consume and purchase, and bring these folks the same degree, if not better, protection for their data and their systems that we historically provided … to the enterprise. Of course, there’s many folks in this space, but I think it’s a big ocean. And there’s lots of opportunity out there.
And I would say, message to Veeam, is that we are back. We know Veeam has grown off the back of BE. There’s no secret. The industry knows that Veeam had always attacked our base. We’re going to be fighting back now, we’re going to be attacking back.
B&F: You’re stable, you’re well funded, you have an existing experienced team, you have a loyal customer base. It’s not like you’re in trouble, far from it.
Lawrence Wong: In fact, I always say it’s our opportunity to really build on all of this firm, great foundation that we have to thrive as DataCo because all three of these businesses; they’re all data businesses in the sense that they all sit within the secular trends that will only continue to grow and become more important.
We all talk about data as the new oil. Well, all three of these businesses sit right in that secular tailwind. So I think having that wind in our back, having the established capabilities that we have, having the stability that we have, as an established player in the space, I think those are a lot of wonderful attributes to start off with, as this new-age startup. Because a traditional startup would never have that. We have that advantage. And we should be using that. And building off of that.
B&F: Do you have a date for when you achieve independence?
Lawrence Wong: Right now, we are in the throes of our separation activities. And as you would imagine, there are some other activities around getting our financing and regulatory pieces in order. Right now the thinking is the end of the year is when we would close the transaction.
Upon transaction closed, that’s when we would be independent as DataCo. We’re working on our name as well. We’ve engaged an agency to help us think of a new name.
Coming back to the transaction, as part of the transaction, the NetBackup data protection business, the appliances business, and everything associated with that, as well as the Veritas name goes to Cohesity. That’s why we lose our name.
It’s a bit disconcerting to lose your name, but I think we’ll deal with it. I also see it as an opportunity again. Since we are leaving our parents’ house, if you will, we have an opportunity to forge a new identity for ourselves.
And that’s exactly what we’re in right now; an opportunity to look at what a new name could be to help recognize all the goodness of our history, but also with a nod to the future of where we intend to go. And why we believe that we are going to thrive in the future. So those are all sort of the pieces that we’re trying to pull together right now.
Comment
DataCo, whatever its name will be by the end of the year, looks set to hit the ground running as an established business with three profitable operating units marketing their wares in markets with growth TAM characteristics. There is a high energy level in DataCo and a determination to claim what it sees as its rightful place in the world, out from under, if we could put it like this, Veritas and NetBackup’s shadow.
It’s not a left behind, unwanted remnant, but a thriving and profitable trio of businesses that are benefiting from a secular rise in the importance and safeguarding of data for businesses large and small.
Bootnote
¹Veritas acquired the small and medium business-focused Backup Exec, first developed by Maynard Electronics in 1982, when it bought Seagate’s Network and Storage Management Group in 1999. Veritas bought OpenVision Technologies in 1997 and so obtained the enterprise-focused NetBackup product.
Quantum is using SMB IP from Finnish outfit Tuxera to boost its StorNext file management and Myriad operating system software products.
Tuxera produces embedded file systems and data networking software. Its customers include Kioxia, Fujitsu, Lenovo, and now Quantum. It has an SMB partner agreement with Microsoft enabling it to provide SMB technology and an SMB patent license.
StorNext, a hierarchical file manager spanning flash, disk, and tape stores, is popular in the entertainment and media market. Myriad is a new all-flash file and object storage OS based on a core key/value store. Tuxera’s Fusion File Share SMB technology is being added to both StorNext and Myriad, which furthers Quantum’s vision of offering an end-to-end unstructured data and AI platform, available in both software-only and appliance options.
Nick Elvester, product operations VP at Quantum, said: “Our StorNext and Myriad customers are building ever larger teams of connected users, investing more in Ethernet infrastructure, and facing challenging requirements such as 8K, high frame rates, and HDR, which are pushing the limits of client connectivity. Adding Fusion File Share technology helps them effortlessly serve Windows, macOS, and Linux client systems with incredible performance and efficiency at scale.”
Tuxera says it’s the only company to offer fully licensed, high-availability, cloud-scale SMB software for enterprise storage requirements, as well as SMB for embedded devices.
According to Quantum, Tuxera’s patented Fusion File Share (FFS) software dramatically boosts file service performance and delivers enterprise-grade stability with features like SMB Direct RDMA, SMB scale-out, SMB Multichannel, SMB witness protocol, and persistent file handles.
It will offer FFS as an installation upgrade option for new and existing StorNext customers, boosting SMB file service performance to meet the demands of large teams of macOS, Windows, and Linux clients, serve larger files more efficiently, and deliver higher performance to their applications.
Customers deploying FFS on StorNext v7.2 volumes built with Quantum F-Series NVMe storage appliances will see the fastest SMB performance on StorNext. A single Windows client, using SMB Direct RDMA, can read SMB share data in excess of 10 GBps using 100 Gb Ethernet. Quantum claims this is extreme performance for ingest or streaming workflows, which is just not possible when using systems without SMB Direct.
Heather Goring, Tuxera director of sales for the Americas, said: “We’re especially excited to see Quantum integrate StorNext with NVMe-oF features to deliver extraordinary performance and make full use of our advanced features such as SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel, and as a core client service integration within Myriad.”
The SMB capabilities will be available for early access customers for both StorNext and Myriad in Q2. StorNext customers can then purchase the solution in Q3 as a turnkey Quantum Professional Services bundle that includes full-service installation, configuration, and management. The feature will be generally available for all Myriad customers in Q3.
Quantum will be demonstrating Fusion File Share on StorNext 7.2 and on Myriad at the NAB 2024 show April 13-17 in booth SL5083.
Cloud file storage vendor CTERA has made a number of enhancements to its offering as it reports consistent growth for the year.
At this week’s IT Press Tour in Rome, CEO Oded Nagel said CTERA “doubled” new business in 2023, and saw a 30 percent increase in its annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Oded Nagel
The firm also launched a new partner program last year to improve benefits for partners, and in June signed a go-to-market alliance with Hitachi Vantara for cloud file services.
Nagel said: “The biggest sales growth has been seen in North America, although with the help of the Hitachi Vantara alliance, we expect to see higher growth in Asia too.”
Product improvements also helped growth, not least the commercial introduction of the company’s integrated ransomware protection, and version 1 of its WORM Vault secured data technology.
CTERA execs at the presentation then outlined what else the company was rolling out and about to announce, as part of the effort to grow the company further, and win a larger share of the very crowded cloud data storage and management market.
The overarching theme was moving from “passive” protection of data to “active” protection of data, and “offense rather than defense.”
Saimon Michelson, VP of alliances, said: “If you have backup, that’s not the end of the story, although some organizations think that.
“If you have 1 billion files, it can take a lot of work to restore your systems after a ransomware attack, although it’s best not to be infected in the first place.”
To help prevent the infection or distortion of a company’s main business data, an updated version of WORM Vault is being introduced this second quarter to bring “immutability.”
New features include Legal Hold, Object Lock, and Chain of Custody. Legal Hold, for instance, means no one can change accounts according to policies, which can come in handy when considering legal/litigation files.
With Object Lock, there is immutability all the way to a data bucket end-to-end, and Chain of Custody retains all metadata end-to-end. All the new features were developed in partnership with Hitachi Vantara, said CTERA.
The firm’s ransomware protection is already being used by “top banks,” Fortune 500 companies, and health and federal bodies.
We were briefed on a major enhancement to this protection, which will be officially announced later this month, and it is focused on detecting attempted hacks on the network, and preventing exfiltration of data in the first place.
