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Calm down, everyone – it's only a Monday storage news blitz

Another weekly roundup of everything happening, from cloud to tape

Tape Storage Council

The Tape Storage Council issued an annual report (PDF) looking at the tape market. It says tape se is expanding with demand fueled by data growth, technological advancements, tape’s highly favourable economics, low energy requirements, and the growing regulatory and business requirements to maintain “access to data forever.”

In 2016’s fourth quarter LTO capacity shipments totalled nearly 27 exabytes (compressed), making it the highest capacity shipped quarter in LTO history. Here’s a chart;

TSC_tape_EB_shipped

Click chart for bigger version

The council report says offers the following observations about the tape market:

  • Tape drives have a BER (Bit Error Rate) of 1x1019 bits read, the highest reliability level of any storage device surpassing HDDs at 1x1016 by three orders of magnitude.
  • Tape cartridge capacity is on an unprecedented trajectory with areal density projected to grow twice as fast as HDDs for the foreseeable future.
  • Tape data rates are expected to be as much as five times faster than HDDs by 2025.
  • Tape has a media life exceeding 30 years, longer than any other data center digital storage solution.
  • Energy consumption for tape is significantly less than HDDs with some studies showing tape energy consumption less than two percent of HDDs for the equivalent amount of storage.
  • For archiving, TCO studies indicate today’s disk based storage solutions are at least six times more costly per terabyte stored than solutions based on tape libraries.
  • Tape’s functionality and ease of use is enhanced with LTFS software and widespread HSM support.

XenData

XenData has launched a Cloud File Gateway and its software can manage a single scalable file system across two storage tiers: on-premises RAID and Microsoft Azure blob storage. It says existing file-based applications can use cloud storage without the need for modification, and its tiering policies keep frequently accessed files on local storage, which minimizes cloud access costs and Internet bandwidth usage.

The Cloud File Gateway, which runs on a Microsoft Windows Server or client computer, is optimized for video files, and includes certified integration options for video surveillance and a range of media and entertainment applications. It supports partial file restore, which allows clip creation from large video files without downloading the full file, and is scalable out to petabyte levels.

This video focus will help separate it from other cloud storage gateways such as those from Nasuni and Panzura.

It will be shown at the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas on the XenData booth, SL14213, from 24-27 April 2017.

Other news

Hybrid data management, analytics and integration Actian says its Actian X offering is a native, hybrid database that combines the Actian Ingres OLTP database with Actian’s Vector analytics query engine. It says it can process transactional, analytical and hybrid workloads from a single database running on a single compute node, and with query times up to 10x faster than the competition.

It also has an Actian DataConnect 11 product with support for the Eclipse open source framework, and claims it brings new levels of integration and ease of use across enterprise data centres and public cloud environments.

Filer accelerator and cloud NAS access supplier Avere says Sony Pictures Imageworks has deployed its FXT Edge filer 5600 clusters to support the studio’s ongoing render farm expansion and to ensure non-disruptive scalability. SPI bought its first Avere edge filer in 2010.

Cloud storage service provider Backblaze has dropped download pricing from $0.05/GB to $0.02/GB. The first gigabyte of data downloaded each day is still free. It says this price cut makes not only its storage about 1/4th of AWS/Azure/Google, but its download pricing as well. Read more in Backblaze’s blog.

Copy data manager Catalogic says its latest ECX 2.6 “dramatically reduces the time and effort required to deliver secure copies of data to IT and business users.” It adds application-aware support for InterSystems Caché database and Epic Electronic Health Record software on Linux and AIX (IBM Power Systems), supports SAP HANA on Linux (Intel based x86 and IBM Power Systems), and extends Microsoft SQL Server 2012, 2014 and 2016 support to physical hosts.

iStorage has introduced, it says, one of the most secure hard drives ever made, the diskAshur range; a USB 3.1, PIN authenticated, hardware-encrypted, set of portable disk and solid state drives. The set includes the diskAshur, diskAshur SSD, diskAshur PRO, diskAshur PRO SSD and the diskAshur DT, all of which are designed, developed and assembled in the UK.

These drives have a dedicated hardware based secure microprocessor (Common Criteria EAL4+ ready), which employs built-in physical protection mechanisms designed to defend against external tamper, bypass laser attacks and fault injections. All the drives react to automated hacking attempts by entering the deadlock frozen state, which renders all such attacks useless. If you don’t have the PIN then there is no way in.

Seagate’s LaCie has a new 2big professional 2-bay RAID storage Dock product supporting Thunderbolt 3. Its capacity rise 20 per cent to 20TB (2 x 10TB Seagate IronWolf 3.5-inch disk drives) and its IO speed goes up to 440MB/sec. Users can transfer one hour of 4K footage in one minute and get almost zero lag time when browsing photo libraries in Adobe Lightroom. Front-facing SD and CF Card slots allow direct ingestion of files off memory cards from a drone, DSLR, GoPro and other devices into Adobe Lightroom or Premiere Pro.

Rubrik said its data protection offering for Pure Storage FlashBlade, along with new integration between Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management Products and Pure’s FlashArray//M. It said its support for FlashBlade, Pure’s unstructured data offering, has been designed to cater to companies running complex, data-intensive workloads between private and public clouds.

Object storage software provider Scality announced availability of an open-source Scality S3 Server release, under the Apache 2.0 license, with support for high availability and multiple cloud data backends. The Server software support includes AWS S3, In-memory, Scality RING, and Docker Volume. An extended set of storage services are available with Docker Volume, including Google Cloud, NetApp, HPE 3PAR, Azure File Storage, and more. It’s based on a pluggable cloud repository module and can be enhanced to support any private or public cloud data service and allows the same S3 API interface to be used with any data backend.

People moves

Sphere 3D has appointed ex-IBM VP and storage systems executive Dr. Cheemin Bo-Linn to its board. She seems to specialise in distressed or near-distressed companies, having previously been on crashed Violin Memory’s board.

Sphere 3D Chairman and CEO Eric Kelly said; “Her knowledge in strategic growth transformations and proven technology expertise in cloud, software and enterprise storage, combined with her vast corporate leadership experience, will strengthen our Board." We don’t think Violin enjoyed its ‘strategic growth transformation.’

DataDirect Networks has hired Jessica Popp to be general manager of its newly created Infinite Memory Engine (IME) business unit. She comes from being Intel’s software Engineering Director at its High Performance Data Division, where she managed the development and support of the Lustre parallel file system and related products. Popp was at Lustre developer Whamcloud from 2010 to 2012, which Intel acquired in 2012. It has recently turned its acquired Lustre into an Open Source offering and, possibly as a consequence, Popp pops off to DDN.

Her job is “to build a world-class development organisation for DDN’s IME business [and] oversee the growth of the IME development and quality assurance teams, advance the IME feature set, and accelerate customer acquisition and revenue growth.”

That’s it for this week’s storage roundup. Enjoy your (hopefully now well-informed) week! ®

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