This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content not the impact they have. Primary Data unveils DataSphere for SMB. Cisco and NetApp partner with a software-defined CI solution. Veritas announces Hyperscale for Containers. IBM Cloud Object Storage now available on Cisco UCS. DataCore’s Hybrid Cloud Replication now available in Azure. WD Launches new My Passport Ultra. Toshiba announced QLC 3D memory. Excelero adds persistent container storage for Kubernetes Pods. Red Hat releases the latest version of its Cloud Suite. Dell EMC Unity reaches $1B in cumulative bookings. Lenovo Demos ThinkAgile SX for Nutanix. WD announces 96-Layer 3D NAND technology.
This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content not the impact they have. Primary Data unveils DataSphere for SMB. Cisco and NetApp partner with a software-defined CI solution. Veritas announces Hyperscale for Containers. IBM Cloud Object Storage now available on Cisco UCS. DataCore’s Hybrid Cloud Replication now available in Azure. WD Launches new My Passport Ultra. Toshiba announced QLC 3D memory. Excelero adds persistent container storage for Kubernetes Pods. Red Hat releases the latest version of its Cloud Suite. Dell EMC Unity reaches $1B in cumulative bookings. Lenovo Demos ThinkAgile SX for Nutanix. WD announces 96-Layer 3D NAND technology.
Primary Data Unveils DataSphere For SMB
Primary Data has taken all of the benefits and feature of its popular DataSphere and has extended them to the SMB and ROBO markets with DataSphere for Lines of Business. The benefits to the edge include:
- Seamlessly add single or multiple cloud storage tiers
- Move data to the cloud and back without disrupting application access
- Save costs with automatic data deduplication and compression
- Free existing storage capacity by moving cold data to the cloud
- Non-disruptively change, add, upgrade or tier the storage serving your data
- No application impact while migrating data between storage systems
- Gain flexibility and save budget by leasing storage
DataSphere for Lines of Business
Cisco & NetApp Partner With A Software-Defined CI Solution
Cisco and NetApp have partnered to release the software-defined converged infrastructure solution, FlexPod SF. The new solution is a combination of NetApp SolidFire all-flash, scale-out, cloud-connected storage, Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) B-Series servers, and Cisco Nexus switching. Benefits include:
- High-end predictable performance. Reliably run hundreds of applications on a single platform with guaranteed SLAs to independently set capacity and quality of service (QoS) at minimum, maximum, or burst performance levels across the entire infrastructure. FlexPod SF is built on Cisco UCS, which has over 120 world record benchmarks, combined with the dedicated performance of NetApp SolidFire storage. SolidFire offers the ability to remove 93% of storage performance issues and remove “noisy neighbors” with SolidFire QoS.
- Programmable agility. Seamlessly meet business demands with SolidFire software-defined architecture, simplified management, and scale by automating every aspect of provisioning, management, and reporting with 100% programmable SolidFire storage and UCS B-Series servers. Cisco UCS compute offers up to 56% faster time to market and the ability to deliver up to 59% more business applications to end users. NetApp SolidFire storage also enables virtual machine (VM) deployment up to five times faster and provides granular “scale as you grow” capabilities with independent storage nodes.
- Scale-out value. Enable customers to align business expenses with business growth by reducing initial capital expenditures. This highly flexible solution delivers controlled performance at lower operating costs by allowing customers to buy only as much compute and storage as they need, when they need it. The FlexPod family of solutions delivers impactful savings of up to 46% in lower IT infrastructure costs. FlexPod SF also offers cost savings through infrastructure consolidation, automation, and rapid application delivery.
Veritas Announces Hyperscale For Containers
Veritas has announced a software-defined storage management solution for container-based architectures that leverages direct attached storage (DAS), HyperScale for Containers. This new solution gives customers a cost-effective method for adopting containers into their environment. Benefits include:
- Move containers to another host for load balancing or failover as needed
- Provide resilient storage with reliable QoS, intelligent container placement, and clustered container capability
- Support the accepted need for persistent data through local and external array integrations
- Enable the isolation of data from containers to preserve their benefits
- Off-host data protection
IBM Cloud Object Storage Now Available On Cisco UCS
At Cisco Live! this week, IBM announced that its IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) System can now be used on Cisco UCS servers to manage data of intensive workloads. COS (now available as a VersaStack Solution for Cloud Object Storage) is a pre-validated, tested and supported solution is designed to offer modern, flexible storage for unstructured data for use cases such as active archive, backup, content repository, enterprise collaboration and cloud application development.
The VersaStack Solution for Cloud Object Storage is available now.
DataCore’s Hybrid Cloud Replication Now Available in Azure
DataCore announced that its Hybrid Cloud Replication is now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. This will give customers running SANsymphony software-defined storage and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN on-premises an added replication location.
DataCore Hybrid Cloud Replication on the Azure Marketplace
WD Launches New My Passport Ultra
WD has launched yet another portable storage device in its popular My Passport line, the My Passport Ultra. With an all new design, similar to the My Passport SSD, the My Passport Ultra comes in capacities up to 4TB and also comes with WD Discovery and WD Backup software installed. The Ultra is ideal for general storage backup and especially for social media content backup.
The My Passport Ultra is available now at a MSRP of $79.99/1TB, $99.99/2TB, $129.99/3TB and $139.99/4TB.
Toshiba Announced QLC 3D Memory
Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. announced its latest generation of BiCS Flash 3D memory. The latest version features 4-bits-per-cell or quadruple-level cell (QLC) technology. Toshiba states that this new technology can pack 768Gb on a die, features a 64-layer stacked cell structure, enables a 1.5TB device with a 16-die stacked architecture in a single package.
WD Announces 96-Layer 3D NAND Technology
On a somewhat related note to the above, WD has announced a 96-layer BiCS4 3D NAND technology. I say related as WD worked with Toshiba in the development of the new NAND technology. The new 96-Layer technology will be deployed on the company’s 256Gb chip.
Excelero Adds Persistent Container Storage For Kubernetes Pods
Excelero announced that its NVMesh server SAN now supports persistent container storage for hyperscale architectures utilizing Kubernetes. According to Excelero, this represents the industry's first offering making use of pooled, redundant NVMe storage in container applications requiring persistent volumes, so enterprises can obtain both local flash performance and container mobility at data center scale.
Red Hat Releases The Latest Version Of Its Cloud Suite
Red Hat released the latest version of its Red Hat Cloud Suite. This version enables companies to easily build cloud-native applications, deploy them, and manage these workloads through a single offering. Key and new features include:
- Enterprise-grade Kubernetes – As a component of Red Hat Cloud Suite, the latest version of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform delivers a comprehensive, enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based container application platform. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform supports the creation of next-generation cloud-native applications while simultaneously supporting existing workloads, including those requiring stateful resources.
- Red Hat CloudForms with Ansible automation – Highlighting Red Hat’s automation-based approach to multi-cloud management is the integration of Ansible automation into Red Hat CloudForms. This makes Red Hat CloudForms easier to deploy across an organization and increases the depth and breadth of management automation.
- Composable OpenStack services -For Red Hat Cloud Suite clouds built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, users can now compose precisely where they want each of their services to run, helping to improve operating efficiency by allowing the scaling and management of specific services as needed rather than all services at once.
- Flexible, powerful virtualization capabilities – The latest version of Red Hat Virtualization enables users to deploy a “thin” hypervisor by default or layer on additional software and services as needed to address unique use cases. Virtualization administration has also been improved with the addition of Cockpit for greater insights into virtualized environments and workloads.
Dell EMC Unity Reaches $1B In Cumulative Bookings
In a little less than 420 days, Dell EMC is happy to announce that it has reached over $1 billion in cumulative bookings for its Unity storage array. $1 billion in bookings is equal to 11,500+ units, over 6,000 customers, and over 1 Exabyte of data shipped. And the new all-flash Unity arrays announced at Dell EMC World 2017, will be available next month.
Lenovo Demos ThinkAgile SX For Nutanix
At its Lenovo Transform event in NYC, Lenovo introduced its largest portfolio update in some time, including the software-defined ThinkAgile. This week at the Nutanix .NEXT event, Lenovo demonstrated a ThinkAgile solution specifically for Nutanix, ThinkAgile SX. According to Lenovo, the ThinkAgile SX for Nutanix enables customers with Tier 1 applications, including enterprise workloads, performance-intensive database workloads, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) applications, and cloud deployments, to start small and scale quickly and easily to multiple racks as their business demands increase.
Lenovo ThinkAgile SX for Nutanix
