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Ahh, long weekend. Refreshed? Great, now purge yourself with all the storage you missed

Inexorable tape density, super-fast NVMe drives, and more backup than you can handle

DDN is chief among this week's round-up of tasty storage nuggets: it has jumped on the GPU bandwagon and fed Nvidia's DGX-1 souped-up server, claiming it's the fastest data source for said super box.

DDN has said its EXAscaler DGX system, based on its ES14KX all-flash array, delivers 33GB/sec throughput to Nvidia's DGX-1 GPU servers. A single container in a DGX01 can receive more than 10GB/sec and in excess of 100,000 random read 4K IOPS.

The EXAscaler DGX can output 250,000 random read 4K IOPS and DDN has ed has more than 12 times the performance of competing NFS products.

Pure Storage's FLashBlade, used in the AIRI system, outputs 17GB/sec.

A DDN spokesperson said: "Generally, we have been comparing to those who have been exporting via NFS via two bonded 10G ports to get 1.5-2 GB/sec. This week, Pure appears to be claiming around 4GB/sec."

DDN has also partnered with SQream (GPU-supporting columnar database supplier), telling us: "The combination of DDN's SFA and IME NVMe SSD storage platforms with SQream DB's GPU-based Big Data SQL database (SQream DB) enables enterprises to effortlessly ingest, compress, store and analyze massive amounts of data."

Presumably the DDN kit also supports Nvidia's spanking new DGX-2 system.

Marketing director Kurt Kuckein said: "DDN's SFA and IME high performance NVMe SSD storage platforms provide business acceleration of more than 1,000 per cent in AI and Deep Learning applications. Our partnership with SQream delivers these capabilities to all GPU-based customer use cases on premise or in the cloud."

Yes, "more than 1,000 per cent" acceleration is the claim.

GridGain and ML

This in-memory computing supplier has updated its Professional Edition product. V2.4 includes a Continuous Learning Framework, which includes machine learning and an Apache Spark multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network that enables companies to run machine and deep learning algorithms against petabyte-scale data sets in real-time.

The update enhances the performance of Apache Spark by introducing an API for DataFrames, which adds to the existing support for Spark RDDs.

Spark can be used to process data in GridGain as DataFrames or RDDs and also save DataFrames or RDDs into GridGain for later use.

HYCU

Comtrade has made its Nutanix-focused product HYCU more prominent by renaming its software unit HYCU, and making Comtrade Software's president Simon Taylor HYCU CEO.

HYCU has hired Scott Henderson away from Egnyte to be its VP sales for the Americas. Junelle Swan has been hired to be VP Channels. She has Dell, Quest and Citrix stints in her CV.

The company has also updated its backup and recovery product for Nutanix. V3.0 includes support for AFS, Oracle, high-availability and VADP integration.

Synology

This vendor has launched its Atom CPU-powered RS2418+/RS2418RP+; a 2U, 12-bay rackmount NAS, designed for small and medium-sized businesses. It comes equipped with:

  • Quad-core CPU and expandable DDR4 memory up to 64GB with ECC
  • Max of 144TB in single chassis and 288TB with RX1217/RX1217RP expansion chassis
  • Max of 24 drives
  • PCIe 3.0 for optional NIC or M.2 SSD cache

Tape gets denser and denser

Current LTO gen-8 tape tech has native capacity of 12TB. The LTO roadmap goes out to gen 11 with an impressive 192TB native capacity. It won't necessarily stop there.

Sony Corporation with IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland, has demonstrated magnetic tape storage recording areal density at 201Gb/in². This is approximately 20x greater than conventional magnetic tape storage media (9.6Gb/in²). It can support native high-capacity storage of approximately 330 TB per cartridge.

Fujifilm has gone further and filed patents for a new magnetic particle for future generations of tape using strontium ferrite (SrFe), which has the potential to store 400TB native per cartridge, or 67 times more than LTO-7.

As long as the read/write speed of these monsters has increased in proportion to capacity, tape's future as the most affordable archive media should be pretty safe.

The Tape Storage Council states: "Future tape transfer rate increases are projected to yield tape data rates 5x faster than HDDs by 2025 with no fundamental technology limitations in sight." Reassuring.

Tintri and Commvault

All-flash array supplier Tintri is partnering with data protector Commvault to support Commvault's IntelliSnap software in its arrays. Tintri's own per-VM snapshots are integrated into IntelliSnap's policy-based snapshot management to produce parallel snapshot and backup operations.

Tintri says this eliminates manual scripting and management processes involved in data protection. Infinidat also supports Commvault Intellisnap technology.

World Backup Day, 31 March

Vendors lined up to provide quotes for World Backup Day, all saying how important it is to backup your data.

Acronis sets the tone by pointing out that it "expects 2018 to be the worst year for cyber-attacks and data loss incidents due to more sophisticated assaults, growing ransomware families and low awareness of ransomware among users." Great. So? Buy Acronis software.

ArcServe provided a channel partner survey. Here's a taste: When asked whether they would rather partner with a data protection vendor that offers product rebates or have a fully paid, two-week trip to anywhere in the world, the majority chose the rebates. However, over a third (37 per cent) said they'd rather have the trip. Fair enough.

Barracuda plays the ransomware card. Stefan Schachinger, EMEA consulting engineer for data protection, said: "A profound backup and disaster recovery strategy should not be a stepchild in times of global ransomware threats, because this virtually invisible safety net is absolutely critical for business continuity in an emergency." Profound indeed.

Delphix's Iain Chidgey, VP International, asks: "Who protects the backup? There can be tens of thousands of backups – but who manages them and how? The reality is, most of the time, no one does." The answer? Come on, you know this. Buy Delphix virtualisation software.

Quest's Adrian Moir, senior consultant, product management, pretty much said backup or die: "Disruption these days is no longer a matter of 'if', but 'when', and companies who fail to have a backup and recovery plan in place when disaster strikes are quite literally putting their business on the line."

Businesses should "stop and think about their data backup and recovery posture and ensure they're employing the right data protection plan, processes and solutions across the business."

Veritas backup exec Simon Jelley said that, as cybercrime becomes increasingly pervasive, it's more important than ever that organisations properly protect their data and have viable disaster recovery processes in place.

Shorts

Caringo Swarm object storage has been integrated with Pixit Media's PixStor content workflow solution for storing and protecting digital media assets. PixStor HSM can use a Caringo object storage system as a repository for longer term retention.

Compuverde, the storage software supplier behind IBM's Spectrum NAS, has joined the Symantec Technology Integration Partner Program (TIPP), said to be a global ecosystem of more than 100 technology companies collaborating to combat cybercrime and secure the cloud.

Delphix has expanded its Partner First Program. Current partners include Accenture, AWS, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, DXC, IBM, Infosys, Microsoft, Orasi Software, SAP, Trace3 and VMware.

Druva, the end-point backup and data governance outfit, has updated its Druva Cloud Platform, which offers Data Management-as-a-Service.

We're told users can now view and manage their data across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS "to ensure their data is properly managed through its lifecycle, meets enterprise service level agreements, and achieves consistency of service regardless of where their data is ultimately stored."

Druva hasn't revealed any update details. Trawl through this website for more information.

Imagine Products and StorageDNA have collaborated on a myLTOdna product enabling random access to files on an LTO tape. They say it is an LTFS adaptation that was never available before and provides time savings and easier access to media assets in production and post-production workflows.

JMR Electronics has a 2U SiloStor NVMe drive, which scales from 512GB to 16TB with 1 to 4 M.2 cards inside, having up to 6GB/sec bandwidth and 715,000 IOPS. They have a three-year and 800TB-written warranty. JMR points out: "Regular SSDs, such as the Samsung SSD 860 Pro, have sequential write speeds of 530 MB/sec and sequential read speeds of 560 MB/sec."

SolarWinds has introduced its first backup solution targeted for direct use by end users. SolarWinds Backup is a cloud-first backup service developed to protect virtual and physical servers, and built on technology already used by Managed Services Providers (MSPs) to protect thousands of customers worldwide. Its been designed to reduce cost and complexity without sacrificing speed or reliability.

STORServer has released a converged data protection appliance using IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. This is the Tivoli backup software rebranded, upgraded, and focused on virtual machine (VM) backups and administrators. The appliance can be configured with Spectrum Protect only, Spectrum Protect Plus only, Spectrum Protect and Plus, or as a Spectrum Protect vSnap storage server for large environments requiring >500TB of backup storage. More info here.

Western Digital is reselling StorReduce (dedupe software) with its ActiveScale disk-based object storage system. ®

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