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Fancy a toothpicked-rollmop from our storage smorgasbord?

All the bits and pieces: It's like the three-day weekend has come early

Arcserve UDP Archiver

We were curious where Arcserve bought FastArchiver from, so we asked and were told: "FastArchiver is the name of the technology and company – they're a private company founded by archiving experts. The technology was custom built as an archiving solution. There was no prior affiliation with any company. so nothing published publicly.

"The company developed the solution solely to resell it, and it was acquired by Arcserve while in stealth/pre-market phase as a pure technology acquisition. The solution will be generally available under the Arcserve Unified Date Protection (UDP) brand."

BlueData, Hadoop and containers

BlueData EPIC software can run Hadoop workloads in containers as fast as running them on so-called bare metal servers. A BlueData and Intel benchmark test showed this, using the same Xeon platform for both cases.

BlueData_Hadoop_container_runs

Find out more here.

Data Expedition

Data Expedition Inc (DEI), describing itself as a "quiet software company with more than 200 global customers," announced CloudDat, "high-performance software for data transport to and from the cloud." It moves data faster than traditional transport software – up to 900Mbps per instance – "and more cost effectively than other commercial network acceleration software." CloudDat supports IO to/from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud.

It runs on runs on DEI's patented Multipurpose Transaction Protocol (MTP/IP), which, DEI tells us, is "poised to become the critical transport mechanism behind a vast amount of network data transfer."

Unlike any other data transport technology, including the TCP/IP, it features:

  • Efficient across the full spectrum of network speeds and data sizes with room to grow
  • Automatically adjusts to new and changing environments in milliseconds
  • No end-user setup for easy deployment
  • No IT tuning for low cost of maintenance

Grab a free trial here.

David Trossell of Bridgeworks looked at the DEI FAQ and tells us: "This looks like this uses a underlying UDP protocol with their error handling and flow management on top. This is the same as Aspera, Signiant, etc. Basically they are reinventing TCP/IP.

"If their claim is 900Mbps that's on par with the guys about but that then becomes the limit as you have to manage all the transactions. In fact there is very little difference in the product to the two leaders in this market, Aspera and Signiant.

"Our technology... uses TCP but with the parallelisation we can overcome the traditional limitations of TCP. By using TCP instead of UDP we can make use of the offload engines in the Network cards. This give us a very low CPU and memory overhead compared to the UDP guys which in turn allows us to scale all the way up to 40,000Mbps (with higher bandwidths in the pipeline.)"

Networking is blooming marvellous.

Hitachi is not a SAP

Hitachi is to be a global supplier for the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, building on an existing strategic alliance between the two. Under an agreement Hitachi and Hitachi group company oXya, a SAP-certified provider of cloud services, will deliver their support services to customers via the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.

Hitachi will deliver the service in Japan, while oXya will initially deliver the service in the US, Canada and France, and expand over time to other regions.

IBM is numero uno in software-defined storage

Big Blue is the storage big cheese, according to IDC. IBM tells us that, for the third consecutive year, it has been ranked the number one vendor in software-defined storage controller software according to results from IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Qview tracker for Q4 2016 (March, 2017).

The tracker encompasses file, object, block, and hyperconverged software-defined storage offerings. IBM ranked number one in CY2016 for Software-Defined Storage Controller Software and number one in CY2016 Archiving Software. In addition, IBM has been ranked number two overall when combining external storage systems and storage software global revenue.

So Big Blue is the canine genitalia in software-defined storage. Take that, naysayers!

People

Lenovo has lost David Lincoln, its general manager for converged and software-defined systems, who has moved to Dell to become a VP for worldwide compute and networking strategy.

Lincoln had been at Lenovo since 2012, joining as its Director for w-w enterprise marketing operations. He was deeply involved in Lenovo's move into storage, being general manager for storage systems from 2015 to 2016. The Lenovo-Nimble Storage deal was set up during his time at Lenovo.

Symbolic IO has announced that storage industry veteran Stephen Sicola has joined its Board of Directors.

Thoroughly nice guy Sicola "has over 40 years of storage expertise and experience. He has held several positions including technical advisor to CEO at Seagate Technology, CTO of X-IO Technologies, the VP and GM of Seagate's Advanced Storage Architecture group, CTO of Compaq StorageWorks, and a Corporate Consulting Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation."

Alliances, deals, wins, etc.

MRG Effitas, a UK-based independent IT security research company, has rated Acronis True Image 2017 New Generation, CrashPlan Home 4.8.0, EaseUS TODO Backup Home 10.0, Genie Timeline Home 2016, IDrive 6.5.1.23, Macrium Reflect Home 6.3.1655, NovaBACKUP 18.5 Build 926, and Paragon Backup and Recovery 16 on their ransomware protection, performance, usability, and feature set.

Its report [PDF] says: "Only Acronis True Image 2017 New Generation was able to protect the backups from every ransomware family tested."

Also the product "came first in 18 of 24 performance test and when it didn't win, it finished second."

SMB and MSP-focussed backup software vendor BackupAssist has expanded into its 165th country. It says it had quarter-on-quarter growth of 34 per cent, driven by managed service providers (MSPs) who deliver BackupAssist-powered cloud backup to SMBs.

Secondary storage consolidating software startup Hedvig has expanded its CloudScale Partner Program. The updated scheme is designed with the flexibility for a single partner to engage in multiple ways, including referring deals, integrating bundled solutions, and offering managed services. Partners also will have the option to develop, market, and sell their own branded solutions powered by Hedvig software.

Hedvig recently received a $21.5m funding round.

In-memory grid supplier Hazelcast says that, in its latest benchmark against Redis, when comparing get performance, Hazelcast IMDG was up to 56 per cent faster. The Hazelcast IMDG was up to 44 per cent faster. Read more about it here.

Huawei has entered a collaboration with enterprise Linux OEM (original equipment manufacturer) Red Hat. Red Hat plans to offer solutions backed by technical service for Huawei servers, including Huawei's rack, blade, and high-density servers, as well as the KunLun Mission Critical Servers.

Huawei says it has over 5,000 server customers worldwide and, according to Gartner stats for the server market of Q4 2016, its servers have ranked globally number three by shipment and number one by growth rate.

Lenovo announced its Distributed Storage Solution for IBM Spectrum Scale (DSS-G). It's designed to provide dense scalable file and object storage suitable for high-performance and data-intensive needs, such as are found in Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics and many cloud environments. There will be additional offerings for customers deploying Ceph or Lustre.

DSS-G is a follow-on to the existing GPFS Storage Server (GSS), and uses Lenovo's System x3650 M5 server with Xeon processors in a pre-integrated, easy-to-deploy rack-level offering with Lenovo D1224 and D3284 12Gbps SAS storage enclosures and drives as well as software and networking components, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's focussed on customers running data intensive HPC, big data or cloud workloads.

Quantum showcased Veritone's multi-engine AI platform in a StorNext-managed environment at the 2017 NAB Show. The two companies have a strategic relationship under which a hybrid on-premises and public cloud version of Veritone's AI platform will be offered as an integrated system with StorNext workflow storage. That's an interesting expansion of the StorNext use case collection.

SpectraLogic says that 14 clients designed for media and entertainment organisations are now available for its BlackPearl Converged Storage System, storing unstructured data on disk or a tape backend archive, with more in the pipeline. They have been developed by Avid, CatDV, eMAM, IPV, Imagen, Levels Beyond, Marquis and Vizrt, among others.

UK-based replication sofrware biz WANdisco has just announced its largest ever contract win valued at approximately $4.1 million. It's also at cash breakeven for the first time.

Western Digital has begun shipping its 8-platter Ultrastar He12 12TB disk drive, claiming it's the world's highest capacity drive for active random workloads – meaning it's not shingled, we suppose.

Enjoy your weekend. ®

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