Friday storage congeries, convocation, collection, compilation, cumulation

Did you enjoy the synonyms? Friday’s alphabetically-ordered-by-supplier-name collection of sub-prime storage news starts here:

• BridgeSTOR has announced Native Object Support for Cloud Storage using NAS protocols, with no vendor lock-in, objects in non-proprietary format. It supports a Windows F: Drive to objects/files, uses third-party tools to access objects/files and objects can also be accessed via REST APIs.
• Cisco Stifel analyst and MD Aaron Rakers says The Information is reporting that Cisco is planning to enable the separation of its operating system software from the purchase of the underlying networking hardware – facilitating the usage of merchant silicon (eg, Broadcom, Cavium, etc)-based whitebox / britebox network switch deployments. The standalone version of Cisco’s operating system is reportedly to be called Lindt (vs packaged IOS and NX-OS?).
• CloudBerry Lab, a vendor of a cross-platform cloud backup and disaster recovery service integrated with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, had a World Backup Day comment. In a survey it found 46 per cent of internet users still do not perform any type of data backup.

  Alexander Negrash, director of marketing, said: “In spite of a few bright spots, we have to give enterprises an overall grade of C in the area of backup. In our view, the increasing threat landscape will cause that grade to drop, unless organizations begin reconsidering their strategies.”

• Commvault has a World Backup Day comment. Nigel Tozer, solutions marketing director of EMEA, said, “It may be April Fool’s day tomorrow, but it is very foolish to not place data management at the heart of every business regardless of its size. For a company to grow and succeed in today’s connected world, it must extract as much value as possible from its data, and look for new ways to collect and use data to provide customers with the best service possible.

  “Many organizations are turning to the cloud as the enabler to do this, assuming that their data is protected as part of the service. On World Backup Day this year, I urge every business with data in the cloud to look at their contracts and see exactly what’s in the small print; it normally states ‘your data, your responsibility.’ Resilience isn’t the same as recovery, and without backup tools in the cloud you can easily find yourself less well-protected than you ever were with your on-premises systems.”

• Databricks has hired Rick Schultz as chief marketing officer and Hatim Shafique (ex-AppDynamics) as the chief customer officer.
• Startup Datos IO has hired Peter Smails as its VP of marketing and business development. He comes from being VP of product marketing with Dell EMC. Smails is a storage vet and his experience includes executive sales and marketing roles at Hitachi Data Systems and CA Technologies, and with venture-backed companies including Storwize (acquired by IBM), Smart Storage (acquired by OTG Software), and Datext (acquired by Lotus Development).
• Indefatigable DCIG says its 2017-18 All-flash Array Buyer’s Guide is available, and weights, scores and ranks more than 100 features of 25 products from 12 different storage vendors.
• GridGain Systems, which supplies in-memory computing based on Apache Ignite, has obtained certifications from Hortonworks and Tableau and joined their technology partnership programs. Enterprises can launch high-performance Big Data systems built on Hortonworks that leverage in-memory computing, and will also now be able to visualize in-memory data held in GridGain using Tableau.
• In-memory data grid supplier Hazelcast has joined the Confluent Partner Program as a Technology Partner. Confluent provides a streaming platform based on Apache Kafka.
• Huawei’s FusionStage is a Platform-as-a-Service based on open-source container projects like Kubernetes and Docker. It provides an automatic, streamlined process – consisting of development, testing, and deployment – and a microservice framework with numerous service components. Huawei says that, by the end of 2016, it had used the FusionStage platform to support over 20,000 containers, reducing global deployment from a week to minutes, and improving the efficiency of deployment and release tenfold. For the open-source container community, Huawei says it has multiple seats as maintainers and is in the global top 3 in terms of code contributions.
• Huawei again, with its financial results for 2016. It reported that its Carrier, Enterprise, and Consumer business groups (BG) each achieved solid year-on-year growth. Group annual revenue was CNY521.6bn ($75.1bn), an increase of 32 per cent over 2015. Net profits were CNY37.1bn ($5.3bn), an increase of 0.4 per cent.
• • The Carrier BG generated CNY290.6bn ($41.8bn) in revenue, an increase of 24 per cent year-on-year.
  • The Enterprise BG generated CNY40.7bn ($5.9bn) in annual revenue, an increase of 47 per cent.
  • The Consumer BG shipped 139 million smartphones during 2016, and reported CNY179.8bn ($25.9bn) in annual revenue, up 44 per cent.
  What nice percentage rises. In 2016, Huawei’s annual spending on research and development reached CNY76.4bn ($11bn) – a vast great sum.

  Sabrina Meng, Huawei’s CFO, said: “Huawei was operationally healthy in 2016, with ample cash reserves, a solid and sustainable capital structure, and high resilience against risk. In 2017, we will continue to boost the efficiency and quality of our operations to ensure solid growth.” Be afraid.

• IBM has a Spectrum Scale setup [PDF] certified with Cisco UCS S3220 storage servers.
• Limelight Networks, active in digital content delivery, has announced Intelligent Ingest, for its Origin Storage that helps customers upload and deliver content better, faster, and more cost-effectively. It also introduced a permanent no-cost access offering for usage up to 25GB of storage capacity.
• Nakivo’s Backup & Replication v7 adds support for Hyper-V 2016 and 2012 (R2). Hyper-V VM support also inherits features previously available for VMware and AWS EC2, such as backup copy offsite and to Azure/AWS clouds, LAN-free data transfer, network acceleration, global data deduplication and compression, instant recovery for files, Exchange objects and Active Directory objects.
• UK TV broadcaster ITN has implemented a nearline storage cache from Object Matrix. The cache can be integrated with ITN’s Media Asset Management system, delivering fast access to recently archived items.
• Long & McQuade, the largest chain of musical instrument retailers in Canada, has deployed a Scale Computing HC3 Virtualization Platform to replace ageing equipment, reduce data center footprint and minimize operating expenses.
• Scality says its RING object storage software is now validated by Cisco for its UCS S3260 storage server.
• Sphere3D reported 4th quarter and full fiscal 2016 year results.
  • Net revenue for the fourth quarter of 2016 was $18.7m, compared to $18.9m for the fourth quarter of 2015.
  • Product revenue for Q4 2016 was $16.8m, compared to $16.6m for Q4 2015.
  • Disk systems revenue was $11.6m, compared to $11.2m for the year-ago quarter. Disk systems is defined as RDX, SnapServer family, V3 virtual desktop infrastructure, and Glassware-derived products.
  • Tape archive product revenue was $5.2m compared to $5.4m year-on-year.
  • Service revenue was $1.9m, compared to $2.3m year-on-year.
  • Net loss for the fourth quarter of 2016 was $7.5m, compared to an $18.6m net loss in the fourth quarter of 2015.

  Fiscal year results:

  • Net revenue for 2016 was $76.4m, compared to net revenue of $76.2m for the full year of 2015.
  • Product revenue for 2016 was $68.1m, compared to $65.5m for the full year of 2015.
  • Disk Systems revenue was $46.8m, compared to $39.8m for the year.
  • Tape archive revenue was $21.3m, compared to $25.7m for the year.
  • Service revenue was $8.3m, compared to $10.7m in 2015.
  • Net loss for 2016 was $68.5m, which included $34.4m in impairment of goodwill and acquired intangible assets, compared to a net loss of $47.2m for 2015, which included $10.7m in impairment of acquired intangible assets.
• Tintri has a Cloud Certification Program to help partners offer cloud services to their customers. Its Tintri Certified Cloud Expert complements Tintri’s other certification programs: Tintri Certified Sales Professional, Tintri Certified Solution Engineer and Tintri Certified Solution Expert.
• Veritas has a product for the forthcoming  General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which gives enterprises around the world the ability to understand what personally identifiable information they hold on European Union residents and access that information quickly when requested by employees or consumers. Veritas points out the GDPR infringements can result in maximum fines set at the greater amount of €20m or 4 per cent of annual turnover.

Have a great weekend storage followers. ®