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You spin me right round, storage, right round – like a ferrous-based...

... platter baby, round round

The spinning rust of storage whirls the players around again and again – even the flashy and cloudy sorts who supply kit with no moving parts. When it comes to some of this industry's variables – supply, demand, partnerships and advances in tech – events dear boy, events happen.

Cloud Daddy

This player has bet on a cloud-native product that joins backup, replication and disaster recovery, security, and infrastructure management into one holistic in-cloud offering for AWS users.

There are five levels of product offerings with a range of backup, disaster recovery and security features:

  • Backup/disaster recovery features
    • application/crash-consistent backups based on native Amazon Snapshot API;
    • flexible backup schedules and recurrent jobs;
    • tag-based backup and restore for easier search and management;
    • cross-region and cross-account backup/restore and disaster recovery;
    • multi-tenant design and access; and
    • email alerts and reports.
  • Security features
    • AWS web application firewall integration;
    • instance firewall and rules;
    • security group management; and
    • detailed firewall logs.

Cloud Daddy claimed its Secure Backup gives users an at-a-glance understanding of their entire AWS infrastructure, navigated by tabs and incorporating a dashboard with an easy to understand visualisation of protected instances and job status.

Users can select backups and replications anywhere – as long as AWS has a presence there. Assets can be backed up, managed and recovered even from one AWS region or account to the other, providing layers of disaster recovery with superior restore speeds using AWS over on-premises solutions.

There's more info here.

Datrium and its big HCI platform

We have been told Datrium's sales head, VP Sales Jim Grua, has left the building just as CEO Tim Page arrives. Page has come in to grow the company amid rumours that fresh funding is in the offing.

We asked Datrium about this and the firm said: "Tim's appointment is a key element in the next stage of company growth. He brings extraordinary go-to-market expertise, particularly as we focus our big-ass HCI platform on large enterprises and an ageing VxBlock base.

"Jim Grua was Datrium's first sales leader, and is credited with launching DVX to the market. He is no longer with Datrium and we wish him well.

"With regard to rumours of funding, there is no news to share at this time."

Datrium last received funding in 2016, to the tune of $55m.

There's a thought that says Datrium = VxBlock Scale + Tier-1 performance whereas standard HCI is more being mid/low market technology.

Ex-Dell EMC data protection business unit boss Guy Churchward tweeted: "There are [HCI] platforms that can go higher up the stack than current incumbents but they are not recognized yet as market players IMO. .. @DateraInc & @Datrium 2 good potential possibilities .."

Elastifile and Google Cloud Filestore

Google has announced a forthcoming beta program for its Filestore product for Google Cloud Platform this week. Elastifile sells its file system software to run on GCP in partnership with Google. What does it think about the Filestore offering?

Elastifile CEO and president Erwan Menard said: "Basically we're glad that Google continues to recognize the need for in-cloud file storage services, as we certainly observe ourselves growing market demand. Indeed enterprises consider not only bursting but lifting & shifting their datacenter workloads to the cloud, and that requires in-cloud enterprise-grade file storage.

The Elastifile offering (btw also available on Google via Launcher or BYOL) is meant to complement Google Filestore by providing:

  • scale-out capabilities without compromising on performance: scaling to 10s of thousands of concurrent NFS connections, 10s of GB/sec thoughput, and file systems with PBs of capacity - compared to the 64TB and 700MB/sec caps communicated about Filestore;
  • enterprise-class storage services such as snapshots, DR, deduplication, compression, quotas, etc;
  • intelligent tiering to colder storage tiers such as Google GCS or AWS S3 while keeping data available in the file system namespace (Elastifile ClearTier);
  • data migration tool to help enterprises shift data to the Cloud (Elastifile CloudConnect); and
  • [is ]available now for deployment on the public cloud of your choice.

"We are excited with our expanding partnership with Google, as attested recently by our eSilicon joint customer testimonial (see here) and upcoming contribution to the Google Cloud NEXT ‘18 event."

Filestore and AWS' EFS

We've done a little research to see how we might compare GCP's forthcoming Filestore with Amazon's Elastic File System (EFS).

This us what we found.

  • Google Cloud Filestore supports file systems up to 64 TB, whereas EFS offers elastic capacity of up to 8 Exabytes,
  • GC Filestore provides throughput and IOPS up to 700 MB/sec and 30,000 respectively, whereas AWS EFS provides up to 10 GB/sec and 100,000+ IOPS,
  • EFS supports a broader spectrum of workloads than Goog's Filestore, including scale-out analytics applications, video transcoding workloads, and large-scale content management systems,
  • We're told EFS is priced at $0.30/GB-mo (US-East-1, US-East-2, and US-West-2),
  • EFS automatically replicates data across Availability Zones (AZ) while Filestore doesn't offer multi-AZ replication or multi-AZ backups.

That last point will mean customers need to manually set up and manage asynchronous copies/backups of a file system to a secondary file system in another zone to get that level of protection.

Still Google Cloud Filestore is a raw and fresh product just entering beta. No doubt it will mature.

Komprise

This file virtualisation and data management supplier has said it added NAS Migration this year, along with bulk recall and global currency support. Customers are migrating data to cloud and Komprise provides access to data from the cloud as files and objects.

It provides the ability to bulk recall data from all tiers of storage in the cloud, and has added cost control and throttling when restoring data back to on-premises.

Komprise claimed the NAS migration is automated, simple, reliable, and efficient, and recovers from network failures or storage failures without requiring manual intervention. The offering has linear scalability and customer can control pace of migration and resource consumption.

It is included as a feature in Komprise Intelligent Data Management at no additional cost.

Micron and graphic memory

NAND and DRAM fabber Micron has begun mass production of 8Gb GDDR6 chips, targeting up to 64GB/sec in one package.

The stuff is for applications that require high performance memory, including artificial intelligence (AI), networking, automotive and graphics processing units (GPUs.)

In the automotive market Micron claimed its GDDR6 delivers 448 GB/sec auto qualified memory solutions, more than double the bandwidth of LPDDR5 automotive memory tech.

Micron said it had introduced ecosystem enablement tools with ecosystem partners such as Rambus to ensure optimised performance and reduce time to market for new applications.

Vexata and STAC

STAC recently performed STAC-A3 benchmark tests on a stack consisting of the STAC-A3 Pack for Spark (Rev C) with Apache Spark 2.1 and Levyx Xenon 3.2.1 on 6 Supermicro server nodes attached via Fibre Channel to a Vexata VX-100F array containing a total of 103 TiB of Intel NVME SSD. The STAC report is available here.

STAC-A3 simulates workloads common in the refinement and backtesting of trading strategies. Like other STAC Benchmarks, STAC-A3 is agnostic to architecture.

The Vexata and Levyx system used 6 nodes and exhibited:

  • 69.5 instrument-simulations/second on a basket of ideal size for this solution (STACA3.β1.SWEEP.SPEED2.BEST).
  • The previous record of 51.4 required 20 servers (SUT ID HPAT171029)
  • 24.8 instrument-simulations/second on a basket of 50 instruments (STACA3.β1.SWEEP.SPEED2.BASE)
  • This was 69 per cent faster than the previously published best results on a system with five servers (SUT ID HPAT171028) despite the current solution having only 20 per cent more servers.

People

Cyber-protector Acronis has appointed Dan Havens as its chief growth officer (CGO) to accelerate the adoption of Acronis’ cyber protection solutions across the enterprises in the Global 2000.

He'll be responsible for all strategic and enterprise engagements, including strategic partnerships in motorsport and expanding Acronis footprint in the aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, and datacenter industries. (Chief Growth Officer is an addition as far as The Reg knows, to the CxO title roster. Good titular innovation here from Acronis.)

Havens replaced Laurent Dedenis, who will be leading a blockchain Platform-as-a-Service technology startup Chainstack, a yet another Acronis’ spinoff.

Shorts

Commvault announced a new partnership with IBM, in which IBM Business Resiliency Services will be able to provide a managed service based on the Commvault software portfolio of data management and protection software, including the Commvault Data Platform.

Penguin Computing has announced the availability of the Accelion managed data access platform, giving users the ability to work with remote data at record-setting speeds and mount remote storage even over high latency network connections. Accelion tech gives global, cross-functional teams the ability to work with vast amounts of geographically dispersed data as if it were local. ®

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