Originally sourced from blocksandfiles.com. Published March 2020.
COVID-19 Drives Cloud Provider Response Efforts
The COVID-19 pandemic dominated storage and cloud industry news in March 2020, with several major vendors committing funding, software, and infrastructure to support pandemic research and remote-work continuity.
Rackspace: $10M in Free OpenStack Cloud Hosting
Rackspace launched a dedicated COVID-19 response page providing access to experts, resources, and services for affected customers. As part of that effort, the company committed $10 million in no-cost OpenStack public cloud hosting resources over six months for organisations participating in COVID-19 response efforts. Additionally, existing customers were offered the ability to add Microsoft Teams to their Office 365 accounts at no charge for six months.
AWS: $20M Diagnostic Development Initiative
Amazon Web Services launched the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, committing $20 million to accelerate COVID-19 research, diagnostics, and testing. The programme targeted accredited research institutions and private entities using AWS to support the development of point-of-care diagnostics — tests that can be performed at home or in a clinic with same-day results. At launch, 35 global research institutions, startups, and businesses were participating in the initiative.
Nvidia: Free Parabricks Genome-Sequencing Software
Nvidia made its Parabricks genome-sequencing software available at no charge to researchers sequencing the coronavirus genome and the genomes of COVID-19 patients. Parabricks is capable of reducing variant calling time for an entire human genome from approximately two days to roughly one hour on a single server — a significant acceleration for time-sensitive pandemic research.
COVID-19 Disrupts HDD Manufacturing in Malaysia and the Philippines
Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers reported that hard disk drive manufacturing faced meaningful risk of disruption due to government-imposed closures in Malaysia and the Philippines. The HDD supply chain has significant manufacturing concentration in both countries, with major players including Seagate, Western Digital, Showa Denko, Furukawa, and Nidec all operating there. Rakers noted that affected companies were likely pursuing provincial government waivers to continue operations.
Huawei Posts Sixth-Best SPC-1 Benchmark Result
Huawei recorded the sixth-best SPC-1 benchmark result at the time, using an OceanStor 5310 V5 array to achieve 1,600,658 SPC-1 IOPS. The SPC-1 benchmark measures storage system responsiveness in terms of IOPS, overall response time, and price-performance (expressed as $/K-IOPS).
The OceanStor 5310 V5 posted a 0.68 millisecond response time. For comparison, the NetApp A800 achieved 0.59ms and a DataCore Parallel Server reached 0.28ms. Huawei published pricing in Chinese currency only; when converted to US dollars, the system’s price-performance came in at approximately $0.44 per IOPS — competitive with the top performers in the category, beaten only by two DataCore systems and a Huawei FusionStorage array.
Acronis Deploys Western Digital JBODs Across 14 Data Centres
Data protection and security company Acronis standardised on Western Digital Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 JBODs (Just a Bunch of Disks) across its 14 global data centres. The choice was driven by high-density capacity requirements and long-term expansion plans.
Both the Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 are 4U, high-density, high-capacity 12Gbit/s SAS enclosures:
- Ultrastar Data60: Supports up to 60 Ă— 3.5-inch HDDs, with up to 900TB raw capacity.
- Ultrastar Data102: Supports up to 102 Ă— 2.5-inch HDDs, with up to 1.5PB raw capacity.
Up to 24 drives in each enclosure can be SSDs. Western Digital highlighted anti-vibration and thermal zone cooling technology designed to improve long-term reliability in dense deployments.
Alex Beyk, Director of Global Technical Operations at Acronis, said: “With Western Digital, we’re getting a storage solution that we can trust, with a total cost of ownership that other storage vendors could not match.”
Code42 Adds Free Remote Worker Data Loss Detection
Insider threat detection vendor Code42 released new capabilities — free for 60 days — designed to help security teams identify suspicious data activity among remote employees. The move addressed a sharp increase in remote work triggered by COVID-19 lockdowns.
The new functionality included:
- Pinpointing remote employees whose file activity represents the greatest data risk.
- Detecting unauthorised use of cloud sync services including Dropbox, iCloud, Box, OneDrive, and Google Drive.
- Providing an organisation-wide view of browser upload activity, including personal email attachments and uploads to personal cloud services.
- Alerting security teams to risky file activity based on file type, count, and size.
- Offering historical user activity profiles to accelerate insider threat investigations.
Code42 CEO Joe Payne noted: “Suddenly security teams are on the hook to manage a spike in data activity that now lives outside their typical network infrastructure. What they had visibility into last week is invisible this week.”
Industry Shorts
ATTO FastFrame 3 NICs and 360 Software
ATTO claimed that Ethernet storage networks can be fully optimised within minutes when built with its FastFrame 3 Ethernet NICs and managed by its 360 Tuning, Monitoring and Analytics Software.
CTERA Reports 60% ARR Growth in 2019
Cloud file storage gateway and security supplier CTERA reported a 60% year-over-year annual recurring revenue increase for 2019. The company said its product is deployed in more than 50,000 enterprise locations across 110 countries.
iXsystems Unifies FreeNAS and TrueNAS
iXsystems announced a unification of its FreeNAS (open-source) and TrueNAS (enterprise) storage products. The two already shared the vast majority of their codebase. With the 11.3 release, TrueNAS gained feature parity with FreeNAS including VM and Plugin support. The planned 12.0 release (scheduled for the latter half of 2020) would merge both into a single software image under the TrueNAS name:
- TrueNAS CORE: The free, open-source version.
- TrueNAS Enterprise: The paid, commercially supported version.
Snowflake Integrates with Adobe Campaign
Cloud data warehouse provider Snowflake released a Federated Data Access (FDA) connector for Adobe Campaign, part of Adobe Experience Cloud. The integration enables Adobe Campaign users to extend marketing data into Snowflake for real-time campaign analytics without additional management overhead.
Yellowbrick Data Partners with Digital Outcomes Now
On-premises and cloud data warehouse vendor Yellowbrick Data signed a partnership with telco systems house Digital Outcomes Now. The partnership targets the emerging 5G analytics opportunity. Digital Outcomes Now CEO John Gillespie described Yellowbrick as able to process complex analytic queries at more than 100× the performance of traditional systems in approximately 1/20th the rack space — though these figures are vendor-supplied and have not been independently verified.
Netlist Files New Patent Infringement Proceedings Against SK Hynix
Netlist filed new legal proceedings for patent infringement against SK Hynix RDIMM and LRDIMM memory products in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. The action followed an October 2019 International Trade Commission (ITC) Initial Determination finding that SK Hynix infringed Netlist’s standard-essential ‘907 patent. The ITC had set a target date of April 7, 2020 for its Final Initial Determination.
Quantum Spatial Standardises on Igneous for Petabyte-Scale File Management
US geospatial data mapping firm Quantum Spatial selected hyperscale file data management supplier Igneous as its standard platform. Carl Lucas, VP of Information Technology at Quantum Spatial, cited the need to move petabytes of data monthly as a primary driver, noting that Igneous’s SaaS-based monitoring provided real-time alerts for data pipeline issues.
StorONE and SQream Partner on GPU-Accelerated Analytics
Software-defined storage vendor StorONE partnered with GPU-accelerated analytics provider SQream to deliver a high-performance analytics offering. The integration allows SQream DB to saturate a multi-node parallel file system over 100GbE using StorONE’s S1 Enterprise Storage Platform, ensuring that the Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs used by SQream are fully utilised.
Zadara and Veeam Deliver Backup-as-a-Service
Virtual storage array provider Zadara partnered with backup vendor Veeam to deliver a fully OpEx-based backup-as-a-service model. The joint offering targets organisations seeking to improve ransomware defences and data availability without disruptive infrastructure changes.