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The chances of anything really new coming from storage are a million to one, but still they come

Transmission inbound... Argh! It's frying our systems!

El Reg's radio telescopes are trained on the storage galaxy and use super-advanced AI, machine learning and pattern-recognition techniques to tease information out of the noise. [Ed: Bullsh*t, you read the press releases and get sent a few tweets.] Let's see what the industry has to say this week.

Actifio and Google's cloud

Actifio has uncovered some backup and data recovery shenanigans for Google Cloud Platform. It said it could help enterprise customers:

  • Enable disaster recovery of on-premises and cloud workloads on GCP
  • Rewind and recover data sets of 100 or more terabytes in minutes
  • Retain point-in-time data from days to decades
  • Reuse backups to provision thin clones
  • Protect workloads from any cloud or data centre to Google Cloud

It's available for download via Google Cloud Launcher.

Actifio said at its Data Driven 2018 conference that it would be expanding its long-standing alliance with IBM, with a new focus on cyber resiliency.

Dell gets in bed with Sony Pictures

Dell has partnered with Sony Pictures, Deloitte and Intel to form Sony's Innovation Studios. Innovation Studios will work with engineers throughout Sony Corporation and pursue business development opportunities for its proprietary technology in motion pictures, television, music and gaming. It wants to put advanced film-making tools, from VR to customised digital sets, in the hands of emerging content creators.

Also enterprises will be able to use emerging technology such as augmented, virtual and mixed reality to visualise and solve problems within their industries. Dell is providing Precision workstations, PowerEdge servers, Isilon storage, and Alienware to create, edit and store film-making productions.

Druva buys CloudRanger

Data protector and manager Druva has bought a small Irish startup called CloudRanger to get into backup and DR for AWS.

The CloudRanger cloud-native software has positioned Druva to claim it is "the only company that offers cloud native unified coverage for data protection and management spanning enterprise on-premises environments to... AWS and Microsoft Office 365," and possibly other clouds.

CloudRanger has an Irish HQ, more than 300 customers and claimed to have had 300 per cent revenue growth over the past six months. It was founded in 2014 and has taken in $1.1m in seed funding.

By contrast, Druva pulled in $80m in August last year, taking total funding to around $200m.

Egnyte does reduced-click GDPR classification

Sync 'n' sharer Egnyte told us it has a new GDPR policy that gives businesses the power to identify sensitive content in a few minutes.

It is part of Egnyte Protect and is a software-only product, which is claimed to use machine learning to identify storage places where personally identifiable information could be located – credit card numbers, national healthcare identification, phone numbers, etc. The firm said the software would be able to find and classify this information in real time (in stored files).

Customers can enforce protection policies, like this GDPR policy, across Egnyte Connect, SharePoint, Windows File Servers, and OneDrive repositories with a single interface.

Administrators can move or delete files, or revoke access to them from within the Egnyte Protect interface. When moving or deleting files, a stub is left to notify end users of the new location of their file.

Customers can also set up alerts for any activity around sensitive content.

HPE

The enterprise giant told us it has a StoreFabric SN2010M M-series Ethernet switch product powered with Mellanox technology. It is a half-rack TOR switch with 18 ports of 1/10/25GbitE and 4 ports of 40/100GbitE in each, enabling full redundancy in 1RU. Breakout cables enable users to expand 1 x 100GbitE port to 4 x 10GbitE or 4 x 25GbitE.

The switch features zero packet loss, storage-optimised dynamic port buffering and predictable performance, it said.

Storage suppliers supporting the M-series include Cohesity, Cloudian, Hedvig, Qumulo, Rubrik and Scality, plus HPE's 3PAR, Nimble Storage and Simplivity.

StoreFabric Smart Fabric Orchestrator helps admins to zone and provision storage in a few clicks, and automatically orchestrate fabric services.

HPE said its StoreFabric M-series offers appropriate price, ports, and flexibility to start and grow hyperconverged and hyperscale clusters.

Commvault, Nvidia, Mellanox, and Cyberinc have also been added to the HPE Complete channel programme.

Infinidat: We're doubling our sales force

Infinidat is reportedly on a sales hiring spree. It said: "We're on track to almost double our sales workforce this year, and we continue to book exponential growth in sales and profits."

It added: "Terabyte-scale storage is a solved, and frankly boring problem in the industry, whereas multi-petabyte enterprise... is the new frontier where the greatest competition and innovation is happening, and where virtually all the growth will be over the next decade."

Mellanox

Mellanox's EDR InfiniBand has been chosen to accelerate the high-performance computing and artificial intelligence system Summit at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Summit delivers 200 Petaflop performance and leverages a dual-rail EDR 100Gbit/s InfiniBand network to provide overall 200 gigabit per second throughput to each compute server.

It also uses the Spectrum Scale parallel file system, which will grow to 250PB in capacity and 2.5TB/sec sequential bandwidth/2.2TB/sec random bandwidth.

Nexsan

Nexsan has intro'd Assureon Cloud Transfer, part of its on-premises archive system. It said customers could use it to transfer data to or from public cloud platforms. It claimed users could save on public cloud cold storage costs with policy-driven migration of the data to an on-premises Assureon array.

It said this reduces the accumulating premium costs associated with keeping data in the public cloud, providing data portability while reducing risk of cloud vendor lock-in.

Assureon has a file fingerprinting and asset serialization process combined with metadata authenticated by a private blockchain. This enables automated integrity audits, assuring the completeness and authenticity of the data.

Find out more about Assureon Cloud Transfer here.

Scality RING

Object storage supplier Scality has updated its RING software with the v7.4 Long Term Support release.

It is focused on ease-of-deployment and operations for scale-out file and object storage. There are three-server configurations for HPE Apollo server 4200 and 4510 platforms for a smaller entry-point to scale-out software-defined storage.

The RING Supervisor UI is said to provide an easy-to-use window into monitoring and management of RING servers. There is also a new unified Installer, which it said enables customers to deploy the RING in under an hour on any of 45 reference platform architectures. This is not a doddle but it is much easier than before.

There is a new "at-a-glance" dashboard with REST API, unified trending and forecasting metrics and KPIs, monitoring, alerts, server and disk monitoring for HPE Apollo server platforms.

Scality has added point-and-click provisioning of S3 and file system services.

Cloud providers will get a new Service Provider portal for secure management of the RING's integrated AWS-compatible Identity and Access Management (IAM) multi-tenancy services, including provisioning of new Accounts, Users, Groups and Policies, plus an S3 browser that provides integrated management of S3 Buckets and Object data.

A RING v7.4 technical white paper can be found here (PDF).

Zerto

Zerto has released an IT Resilience Platform, with continuous data protection technology, that converges backup, disaster recovery and cloud mobility solutions into a single product.

Orchestration and automation are built in, and there are analytics and control to provide visibility across multi-site and multi-cloud environments.

We're told customers no longer need separate backup, replication, orchestration and migration tools, with their associated complexities and costs.

Zerto wants to develop backup to use continuous journal-based protection and will add an Elastic Journal and other features to its forthcoming Zerto v7 product in support of that. The Elastic Journal merges granular journal technology with long-term repositories allowing for a continuous stream of recovery points with search and recovery across data, files or VMs from any point in time.

It should deliver recovery point objectives (RPOs) of seconds at scale for short and long-term data retention, eliminating the need for periodic backups.

There will be data protection workflows to automate recovery from any point in time across on-premises and cloud repositories. It will feature Intelligent indexing and search across on-premises and the cloud.

Zerto 7 will also introduce incremental, synthetic and full copies to increase efficiency and reduce storage needs, enhancements to its scale out architecture and new on-premise and cloud repository targets.

Customers

Excelero NVMe-oF NVMesh server SAN storage has been bought by teuto.net, a service provider offering public and private OpenStack clouds. The system uses Mellanox SN1200 switches, and ConnectX-4 and ConnectX-5 NICs running 2x25Gb Ethernet to each client node. It has been installed to augment a previous Ceph-based public cloud implementation, which wasn't suitable for databases; they needed lower latency.

It checked out iSCSI NVMe storage but decided against because of limited seamless growth and cost. Dell EMC ScaleIO was rejected because of cost and non-NVMe support. The Ceph-system delivered 400 IOPS while Excelero's software, running on Supermicro servers, pumped out 8,000 IOPS, 20 times faster.

People

Datrium has hired Tim Page as its CEO, coming from being COO at Sprinklr and, before that, VCE. Co-founder and CEO Brian Biles has stepped down to chief product officer.

Ricardo Di Blasio is now an advisor to Rstor.

Shay Mowlem has joined Rubrik as SVP for Product and Strategy.

Eyal Traitel, who left Reduxio in May, has joined Excelero as its VP for product management. Josh Goldenhar, the previous incumbent, has moved to a VP customer success position.

Shorts

The BlueData EPIC platform has been certified to run Hortonworks Data Platform in a containerized environment.

Catalogic Software has entered into an exclusive distribution agreement with Storware, a Polish provider of simplified data protection systems. Catalogic will be offering Storware data protection products in the North American market and will also be taking an equity stake in Storware.

Object storage provider Cloudian has doubled its EMEA sales and marketing team, added new reseller partners, opening a new EMEA headquarters, and gained 28 new customers, all during the last six months.

Fujitsu has announced the ETERNUS CS800 S7 data protection appliance with integrated deduplication foir SME customers. Read about it here.

Intel's 380GB PCIe gen 3 x4 Optane SSD 905P M.2 drive for mobile and desktop platforms will be available later this summer.

Marvell announced Gen 3x4 PCIe SSD controllers; the 4-channel 88SS1084 and 8-channel 88SS1100, for mainstream and high-performance PC client and edge computing SSDs. They use Marvell's fourth-generation NANDEdge technology, offering the advanced error correction capabilities to address the increasing demands required to enable future SSD solutions with emerging 96-layer triple level-cell (TLC) and quad level-cell (QLC) NAND architectures.

Paragon Software Group has released APFS for Windows by Paragon Software, a driver which enables Windows users to access Apple File System (APFS) volumes on PCs.

Quantum Corp has joined the iRODS Consortium, which leads development and support of the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS). Testing for StorNext-powered Xcellis Scale-out NAS with iRODS is complete.

Snowflake Computing has announced its availability on AWS marketplace, allowing for an automated and faster purchasing process for AWS customers.

Snowflake and Talend announced the availability of new, high-performance bulk loading and native, Extract, Load, Transform (ELT) push-down capabilities to move massive data volumes and varieties from on-premises to Snowflake for cost-effective and scalable analytics.

Storage Made Easy has released a Slack Application for integration with the File Fabric Slack. This new integration allows users to set security controls on how long a file can be shared for, the number of times the file can be accessed, and adds encryption and/or password protection to access the file.

WhereScape announced the availability of its Migration Express for Snowflake which enables organizations to migrate existing data warehouses, data vaults and data marts from legacy data platforms to Snowflake's data warehouse in the cloud. ®

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