DDN catches Tintri customers, Seagate beancounter goes to Tesla, NGD powers up

Another truckload of storage news delivered to your face

The inexorable storage travelator this week brought us news that Seagate's CFO jumped ship for Tesla, Nutanix lost its president, NGD made its computational storage system more powerful, and DDN came to the rescue of abandoned Tintri storage customers to provide service and support.

Kaminario widens hardware component base

All-flash array software vendor Kaminario has enlarged its certified hardware stack for the NVMe-based K2.N storage platform. This product is made by Tech Data, and the arrangement was made when Kaminario exited the hardware business in January this year.

It will be demonstrating Kaminario K2.N implementations, leveraging hardware from partners including AIC, Celestica, Mellanox, Seagate and Supermicro at The Flash Memory Summit, booth 655, 7-9 August in Santa Clara, CA.

Nakivo boosts backup product support

NAKIVO Backup & Replication v7.5 supports vSphere 6.7 and has added integration with storage vendors such as Dell EMC Data Domain, adding Boost support, and Netgear ReadyNAS.

It has Bandwidth Throttling to enable speed limits to be set for data protection processes to avoid network overload during business hours or chosen periods of time.

The software has added functionality for VM data recovery across platforms. Users can export VM data from VMware and Hyper-V backups into VMDK, VHD, or VHDX format. The exported files can then be used for recovery across different hypervisors, cross-platform VM data migration, long-term archival, or sandbox testing.

Nakivo said its software can be installed directly on Netgear's ReadyNAS devices, creating a VM backup appliance. It is then 5-in-1 – featuring backup hardware, software, storage, built-in global data deduplication, and backup-to-cloud functionality.

A free trial of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v7.5 can be downloaded here.

The US business was founded in 2012 and has more than 10,000 deployments worldwide. Customers include Honda, Coca Cola, China Airlines, Microsemi, and others. Nakivo has over 3,000 channel partners in 137 countries.

NGD

Compute-in-storage supplier NGD has announced a Newport platform for computational storage, built on the Catalina-2 product base.

It is a 16 flash channel ASIC-based product, running 64-bit Linux, in a variety of form factors including U.2, M.2 and EDSFF (ruler) with NVMe SSDs and an NVMe 1.3 PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 link to hosts.

The software supports container virtualization and all Catalina-2 applications are supported.

NGD claimed Newport allows computational storage to "cross the chasm" and enter mainstream market use cases.

The firm's CEO, Nader Salessi, said: "The Newport platform further enables near-data processing for real-time analytics on large-scale data sets with improved power and density, both in watts per terabyte and terabytes per cubic inch."

We have no information about capacity levels, pricing, on-board CPU power and customers.

The Newport platform and computational storage products will be showcased at The Flash Memory Summit mentioned above.

From Seagate to Tesla

Enterprise disk-maker Seagate's chief beancounter Dave Morton's surprise resignation was due to a move to Elon Musk's electric car outfit Tesla, an SEC filing revealed.

Seagate had been Morton's career home for 23 years. He will become the chief accounting officer at Tesla, reporting to CFO Deepak Ahuja.

It's an interesting move, and one thing is certain: Tesla will be a more exciting and dramatic employer than Seagate.

Tesla's previous CAO, Eric Branderiz, left Tesla on 7 March.

An SEC filing said Morton, 46, would have an annual base salary of $350,000 and will receive a $10m new hire equity grant (stock options effectively), which will vest over four years. No doubt the company car scheme at Tesla will be good.

Morton will be responsible for Tesla's corporate financial reporting and global accounting, payroll, tax, and trade activities.

He resigned from Seagate on 25 July and officially left on 3 August.

Tintri customers to get support from DDN

Tintri collapsed into Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 10 July, leaving its customers without service and support. The firm couldn't afford to pay parts and system supplier Flextronics, which meant faulty parts in its customers' arrays couldn't be replaced.

This would result, over time, in every Tintri customer moving to some other supplier's storage arrays. DDN has put in a bid to buy Tintri's assets and run it as a subsidiary, rehiring some of the laid-off employees.

But it faced Tintri's customer base deserting the product while this bid was being evaluated and compared to any competing ones that might emerge. So it put in an application to become an authorised Tintri reseller so it could provide service and support to its customers, helping to reassure them that their Tintri products have a future.

This has now been agreed with the bankruptcy trustee and the flow of parts can resume with staff at DDN offices providing the support services.

People

Nutanix president Sudheesh Nair has resigned to become CEO at Thoughtspot, replacing Ajeet Singh, a co-founder at Nutanix. He moves up to exec chairman. More in this release.

Shorts

Archive360 will run a live webinar entitled "Understanding the California Privacy Act" on 9 August 9, 11am ET/8am PT. Find out more and register here.

Commvault's board has voted to immediately end its poison pill shareholder rights agreement, originally scheduled to expire on November 14, 2018.

EXTEN Technologies announced its HyperDynamic NVMe-over-Fabrics high-performance storage software, claiming it's the first to incorporate the NVMe-oF, Redfish, and Swordfish standards to support unlimited scaling of public cloud and other data centres for data and performance-intensive workloads.

Data protector HYCU has developed purpose-built data protection for Google Cloud platform users. This is a near-term new technology that runs separately from HYCU's Nutanix product, but will help in supporting Google Xi from Nutanix when it's scheduled for availability.

Mimecast has acquired security software developer Solebit, in a boost to its technology capabilities, for $88m. It will offer customers a fast, accurate and computationally efficient approach to identifying and isolating advanced cyberattacks, zero-day threats and malware.

The latest version of Object Matrix's Vision object storage includes Process in Place IMF integration to enable users to ingest files in IMF (Interoperable Master Format) and automatically extract the associated IMF metadata. Vision has been fully integrated with move2, an HSM application from Object Matrix. There are also a number of search improvements to find archived files.

MediaCloud Networks, an Object Matrix reseller, has purchased MatrixStore to offer a cloud-based object storage platform across South Africa and beyond.

Hyperconverged infrastructure system vendor Pivot3 said had signed up new customers including Caesars Entertainment EMEA and multiple US government, military and intelligence agencies. It saw a 40 per cent increase in deal registrations from the channel in Q2 2018 over Q2 2017.

Scality RING v 7.4.1 has implemented comprehensive utilisation reporting to streamline storage capacity planning, billing and chargeback. There is UI-based access to full utilisation metrics including bandwidth, operations and capacity at multiple usage levels.

Scality also said ownCloud has tested and certified Scality's Zenko CloudServer for use with ownCloud.

The SNIA's Cloud Storage Initiative has expanded its mission and charter and changed its name to the Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI). Its mission is to support and promote the adoption, growth and standardisation of storage in cloud infrastructures, including data services, orchestration and management, and the promotion of portability of data in multi-cloud environments.

Data warehouse in the cloud supplier Snowflake Computing announced Partner Connect, a new feature that has pre-built integrations with existing data integration (ETL and ELT) partners, including Fivetran, Alooma and Stitch. With this customers can start loading data into Snowflake in minutes for immediate analysis.

SQream, developer of the GPU database SQream DB, has a strategic partnership with Moyo Business Advisory, a South African system architecture and analytics company. Moyo develops big data business solutions, in particular for the mining industry. The SQream-Moyo combo could help discover new deposits and provide safer mining operations. ®