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New disk drive maker? No such luck

The giddy storage news whirl whirls on and on and on

The cloud and Big Data and Hadoop feature strongly in this week’s round-up of storage news, along with channel news. And, just for a moment, we thought we’d found a new disk drive manufacturer. But no, it was all tosh.

  • Barracuda is offering a Web Security Service using Zscaler’s cloud security service. Zscaler can use Barracuda’s go-to-market channels for the SME/midmarket. Barracuda's Web Security Service is available as a standalone cloud service or with a Barracuda NextGen Firewall.

    Punit Minocha, Zscaler VP for business development, said: “This joint effort brings together Zscaler’s ability to provide high-performance, cloud-delivered internet security with Barracuda’s experience in the small and midsize market to provide comprehensive security that is easy to deploy at an affordable price.”

  • Cisco spokesperson Robyn Blum said this about San Jose layoffs: “In August 2016, we announced a restructuring that would eliminate approximately 7 per cent of our global workforce. These actions, which are part of that restructuring, enable us to optimise our cost base in lower growth areas of our portfolio and further invest in key priority areas such as security, IoT, collaboration, next generation data centre and cloud.”
  • CloudByte has updated its software and changed its ElastiStor SSD supplier. We covered CloudByte’s revamping into an open source containerised storage supplier in January.

    ElastiStor is a ZFS-based storage appliance. CloudByte has released ElastiStor v2.0 software after having launched its open source OpenEBS software. V2.0 features:

    • Full-fledged support for backup and archival,
    • Better hardware support,
    • More reliability,
    • Improved performance,
    • New admin GUI,
    • Machine learning module.

    The product has a constant rebuild time when a disk fails and this blog explains how.

    V 2.0 now supports installing the ElastiStor OS on ZFS itself, known as root-on-zfs, removing a need for hardware RAID cards.

    The ElastiStor ESA-A100 and above flash appliances now come with Micron S600DC SAS SSDs; they did use Western Digital’s SSDs. The FX4 appliance carries 4TB SAS drives and is expandable up to 1 petabyte of usable flash storage within a single cluster. With de-duplication and compression it can go beyond 2 PB.

  • Commvault has hired Ed Baker as its Director of Alliances for EMEA. He comes from Cisco.
  • Third-party maintenance company Curvature says it is launching itself into the hard disk drive market. What? Is there a new manufacturer?

    Curvature says it has a new line of 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch 12 Gbit/s SAS drives, ranging from 300GB to 4TB in capacity, suited for server systems in professional environments and data centres. These drives are fully compatible with traditional OEM offerings, but offer savings up to 70 per cent off their list price, claims the firm.

    Curvature claims it pre-tests each drive before dispatch and offers shorter delivery cycles and is hoping to become an alternate supplier of choice for OEM-branded (HP, Dell, Cisco and others) hard drives.

    We asked where Curvature disk drives came from and the answer was Toshiba. Duh! Curvature is OEM’ing/re-branding/reselling Tosh HDDs and aiming to undercut storage array and server OEM disk drive prices.

  • DataStax, a noSQL business, claims its latest DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 5.1 delivers 3x faster operational analytics performance over the Apache Cassandra and Spark combination, provides simplified management for multi­-tenant SaaS applications, as well as administration and monitoring. It also has a unified development environment for DataStax Enterprise Graph and Apache Cassandra.

    DataStax bought DataScale, with its Cassandra-focused cloud-based management services on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, in November.

  • HDS said this about its layoffs in Santa Clara: “As we continue to transform our business to be more globally competitive for the long term, we must shift certain resources to support strategic growth areas, including IoT, Cloud, software, services, flash and analytics. Our organisation is, in fact, growing significantly.”

    It added: “We are investing in our people, and have in the past year hired about 1,200 employees to support those high-growth segments of our business, with nearly 300 additional openings.”

  • HPE has added CTERA to its HPE Complete programme so customers can buy CTERA’s enterprise file services through it. The two say CTERA's software is validated to work with 3PAR flash storage, Helion, and Scality products running on HPE servers and to support data offload to multiple public clouds.

    Customers can immediately buy an HPE and CTERA system directly from HPE or HPE resellers with a single purchase order.

  • HPC and scale-out NAS supplier Panasas has a distribution agreement with Ingram Micro’s value-added distribution Promark Technology business. The two “will develop a solutions-based go-to-market strategy to deliver high-performance storage technology to customers across the United States.”

    Promark will promote Panasas’ ActiveStor product line to its network of value-added resellers and Panasas will award a 5 per cent rebate to all value-added resellers for new end-user account deals they close.

  • Big Data analytics startup Iguazio demonstrated the industry’s first continuous analytics product at Strata + Hadoop World. Iguazio says its product ingests, enriches, analyzes and serves data in a unified platform and integrates with Spark and Kubernetes.

    Its software secures ingested data and allows accessing the same records simultaneously through streaming, object and database APIs.

  • It’s getting boring: Infinidat has issued another "we’re growing gangbusters" quarterly statement. The company, which sells high-end storage arrays, says it finished its fiscal 2016 with 144 per cent year-over-year revenue growth. Some 42 per cent of total bookings came from new customers, it said. The UK closed 2016 with 374 per cent year-over-year growth - small starting base syndrome detected.

    Head cheese and storage guru Moshe Yanai said: “Our [product] provides the industry’s highest performance, reliability, scalability, and reduced total cost of ownership needed to fully exploit data in a way that enables organisations to better position themselves for the next evolution of business.”

  • Hadoop-based data warehousing startup Infoworks has raised $15m in a B-round. The company was founded in 2014 and raised $5m in an 2015 A-round plus $4.7m venture funding in the same year. Infoworks provides, it claims, the first and only fully automated, end-to-end data warehousing product on Hadoop.

    It will use the cash scale on go-to-market and customer success programs.

  • Zadara, which supplies virtual storage arrays in Storage-as-a-Service model in private or public clouds, has a distribution agreement with Tech Data Corporation. Zadara products will be accessible to channel partners worldwide through Tech Data’s Avnet Cloud Marketplace.

+Comment

What the above items show is the steady waterfall of storage supplier developments as they duck, dive and develop to respond to cloud, Big Data/Hadoop and flash changes. We see the power of the channel and the strength of incumbent vendors like Cisco and HPE and their channel to customers and need for tuck-in deals to improve offers to customers.

All this is the backdrop to front and centre developments around storage-class memory, bringing storage and compute closer together, and making storage bother more powerful and easier to use. Enjoy your weekend away from the coalface. ®

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