This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. Backblaze hard drive stats For Q3 2020 are out. Commvault HyperScale X Reference Architectures and Remote Office Appliance launched. Robin.io Express Edition launched. Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise announced. Ivanti adds innovations to Ivanti Neurons. Canonical announced Ubuntu 20.10 on Raspberry Pi. Eaton launches TANlock.
This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. Backblaze hard drive stats For Q3 2020 are out. Commvault HyperScale X Reference Architectures and Remote Office Appliance launched. Robin.io Express Edition launched. Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise announced. Ivanti adds innovations to Ivanti Neurons. Canonical announced Ubuntu 20.10 on Raspberry Pi. Eaton launches TANlock.
Backblaze HDD Stats For Q3 2020
Backblaze has released its Q3 2020 HDD reliability results. It has been a minute since we have covered these here at StorageReview. The company is now testing over 150K HDD in groups of 60 for each drive. The above image gives a good idea of failure rates. Backblaze also observed the following:
- The 18TB Seagate model (ST18000NM000J) has 300 drive days and they’ve been in service for about 12 days. There were no out of the box failures.
- The 16TB Seagate model (ST16000NM001G) has 5,428 drive days which is low, but they’ve been around for nearly 10 months on average.
- The 4TB Toshiba model (MD04ABA400V) has only 9,108 drive days, but they have been putting up zeros for seven quarters straight.
- The 14TB Seagate model (ST14000NM001G) has 21,120 drive days with 2,400 drives, but they have only been operational for less than one month. Next quarter will give a better picture.
- The 4TB HGST (model: HMS5C4040ALE640) has 274,923 drive days with no failures this quarter.
Commvault HyperScale X Reference Architectures and Remote Office Appliance Launched
Commvault launched its HyperScale X appliances in July and is now extending that technology to its reference design program. The company also announced the addition of a HyperSacle X Remote Appliance to its portfolio to manage and protect data at the edge. Benefits include:
- Protect all remote data using a single interface (Commvault Command Center)
- Write data to multiple clouds natively
- Create local backups and restore local for better performance
- Replicate back to corporate or the cloud for improved DR
- Mitigate ransomware impacts with intelligent monitoring and alerting
Robin.io Express Edition Launched
Robin.io launched Robin Express its full-featured Robin Cloud Native Storage for Kubernetes. The express version is said to be free-for-life. Features include:
- Bare-metal storage performance with high availability
- Application-consistent snapshots to recover easily from user errors
- Application-consistent backups to recover easily from system failures
- Thin clones to collaborate faster across teams
- Multicloud portability to easily migrate entire applications across clouds
- Data management for Helm Charts: Helm is the most popular package manager and deployment mechanism on Kubernetes. With Robin, you can now easily snapshot, backup, and migrate an entire Helm release as a single entity
- Data locality (compute-storage affinity) for performance-sensitive workloads
- Affinity and Anti-affinity policies to support the availability needs of stateful applications that rely on distributed databases and big data platforms
- Consumption based pricing for Robin Enterprise: Pay only for what you use
Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise
Parallels announced what it is calling the world’s first software that runs Windows directly on enterprise Chromebooks. Benefits include:
- Run multiple full-featured Windows apps and Chrome OS apps simultaneously: Run Microsoft Office and other full-featured Windows apps directly on an enterprise Chromebook. Easily add chart trendlines in Excel, captions and citations in Word, and custom fonts or headers and footers in PowerPoint—capabilities that are not available in other versions of Microsoft Office—while simultaneously working with Chrome OS apps. No need to reboot or to use unstable emulators.
- Install and run any business-approved full-featured Windows application on your Chromebook: Be fully productive using all the features and tools of your Windows applications—including proprietary business apps—so you can easily collaborate with anyone who needs you to work with full-featured Windows apps.
- No Internet, no problem! Run Windows apps on your Chromebook—even without an Internet connection or when you have a low-bandwidth connection—so you can work and be productive whether you are in the wilderness, on a plane, or experiencing Internet hiccups.
Ivanti Adds Innovations To Ivanti Neurons
Ivanti announced the release of Patch Intelligence and Spend Intelligence both powered by machine learning. The new capabilities include:
- Ivanti Neurons for Patch Intelligence helps enable organizations to achieve faster SLAs for their vulnerability remediation efforts via supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms. Drawing on the Ivanti patch management expertise, which deploys over 1.2 billion patch updates annually, Ivanti Neurons for Patch Intelligence helps users easily research, prioritize and receive better insights for patch management processes in one central location. Patch reliability data is automatically delivered with actionable intelligence pulled from thousands of public and crowdsourced sentiment data. This information provides improved patch reliability so security teams can act on threats faster and reduce their time-to-patch. A precise picture of the organization’s threat landscape is provided through prioritized, risk-based metrics and feature-rich compliance dashboards. Ivanti Neurons for Patch Intelligence delivers highly accurate data that reduces the time it takes to respond to threats.
- Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence which provides insights into an organization’s software landscape and application spend for on-premises, cloud and edge environments to help improve operational speed and asset visibility, improve utilization and manage costs. Unlike complex software licensing tools, Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence is easy and intuitive to use, with faster time-to-value. Within minutes, a detailed analysis of usage, licenses types, purchases, subscriptions, renewals and instances are presented in engaging dashboards to help users more effectively track usage, purchase history, upcoming renewals, contract expirations, and ongoing overall spend. Potential under and overspend issues and opportunities for automated reclamation are also highlighted, managing cost and reducing risk.
Canonical Announced Ubuntu 20.10 On Raspberry Pi
Canonical released Ubuntu 20.10 with optimized Raspberry Pi images for desktop and server, in support of learners, inventors, educators and entrepreneurs. Raspberry Pi 2, 3, and 4 supports Ubuntu 20.10. Ubuntu 20.10 is said to also includes LXD 4.6 and MicroK8s 1.19 for resilient micro clouds, small clusters of servers providing VMs and Kubernetes on demand at the edge, for remote office, branch office, warehouse and distribution oriented infrastructure.
Eaton Launches TANlock
Eaton announced the launch of its intelligent, modular access control system for information technology (IT) rack enclosures with the North American launch of TANlock by Eaton. As server racks move farther away from the data center, the chance of unauthorized access grows. To combat this Eaton has launched TANlock giving customers more control over who has access to the inside or racks regardless of where they reside.
