This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. QNAP launches QuCPE Series. Seagate releases Game Drive for Xbox Halo: Master Chief Limited Edition. Samsung announced PCIe Gen4 drives. Catalogic Software launches CloudCasa. Scale Computing adds NVIDIA GPUs to its HC3. Kasten Introduces K10 v3.0. FUJIFILM Partners with Cloudian providing instantly searchable deep archive storage.
This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. QNAP launches QuCPE Series. Seagate releases Game Drive for Xbox Halo: Master Chief Limited Edition. Samsung announced PCIe Gen4 drives. Catalogic Software launches CloudCasa. Scale Computing adds NVIDIA GPUs to its HC3. Kasten Introduces K10 v3.0. FUJIFILM Partners with Cloudian providing instantly searchable deep archive storage.
QNAP Launches QuCPE Series
QNAP announced the launch of its QuCPE Series of Network Virtualization Premise Equipment that supports Network Function Virtualization (NFV), QuWAN SD-WAN and the AMIZ Cloud VM Orchestrator platform. The new series is said to have Zero Touch Provisioning to greatly simplify large-scale network deployment and reduce IT maintenance requirements. The new series supports Intel Xeon, Intel Core and Intel Pentium processors for high-performance network services ideal for organizations that are expanding into remote working and multi-site operations
Seagate Releases Game Drive for Xbox Halo: Master Chief
Seagate is releasing yet another Game Drive for Xbox this time with a new skin, Halo: Master Chief, in anticipation of the new Halo Infinite for the Xbox Series X. The game, like all things this year, has been delayed. However, the Game Drive is a nice drive, reviewed here, and can be used on both the Xbox One and Xbox X/S series.
Samsung Announced PCIe Gen4 Drives
At the virtual FMS Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., demoed some of its PCIe Gen4 storage solutions. Normally this would garner a bit more attention from us, but the details are sparse. What the company released is as follows:
- PM1733 – A cutting-edge enterprise-storage-class NVMe SSD featuring dual port capabilities and capacities up to 32TB.
- PM9A3 – A single port datacenter drive now offered in the widest range of form factors including M.2, U.2, E1.L and E1.S.
- PM9A1 – A client-class-performance PCIe Gen 4 marvel for the most demanding gaming applications offering reduced load times, massive acceleration of video rendering and 3D modeling, and an end to the bottlenecks of high-performance CPUs.
- SmartSSD – A computational storage drive that enables high-speed computations right where the data lives. Featuring an Integrated SSD and Xilinx FPGA, the Samsung SmartSSD CSD provides a flexible, programmable platform that can be used to design unique and scalable acceleration solutions with parallel computation, as it frees up system CPUs to handle other tasks.
- SZ1735a Z-SSD – A dual-port SCM-class SSD that provides extreme performance and endurance, making it ideal for write-intensive workloads like buffering, logging and metadata.
Catalogic Software Launches CloudCasa
Catalogic Software announced its SaaS platform to deliver Kubernetes data protection, CloudCasa. CloudCasa offers a new take on container backups through the company’s expertise in snapshot and copy data management across multiple storage vendors. Capabilities include the following:
- Cloud Native: Built in the cloud to leverage the elasticity and scale of the cloud.
- Cloud Scale: Horizontal auto-scaling with unlimited cloud storage at the user’s disposal.
- Cloud Secure: Always encrypted, both in transit and at rest.
- Cloud Smart: Learns from its users to deliver insights and service optimization
- Cloud Mobile: Backup from and restore to both on-premises and cloud-deployed clusters. CloudCasa supports all major flavors of Kubernetes.
- Cloud Service: Low touch and zero Infrastructure demand on the user.
Scale Computing Adds NVIDIA GPUs To Its HC3
Scale Computing announced new HC3 infrastructure that comes with the power of NVIDIA GPUs, ideal for the ever expanding remote users market. The two new models are the HC1250DFG and HC5250DFG appliances and can help to deliver increased speed and processing efficiency for power-users on virtual desktops. Benefits include:
- The HC3250DF stands out from other HCI solutions designed for performance computing with its ease of use, and brings a high amount of speed, density, throughput, and power to enable VDI for many more users per node while keeping future growth in focus. Unlike more complex infrastructure solutions that try to emulate classic SAN storage infrastructure, the Scale Computing HC3250DF is easier to deploy, manage, scale out, and its NVMe storage architecture requires no manual configuration and consumes less system RAM, resulting in more RAM being available to virtual machines and their applications.
- The HE150 appliance is a small, all-flash, NVMe storage-based compute appliance that delivers all of the simplicity, efficiency, and enterprise-ready virtualization associated with Scale Computing’s HC3 platform. Built specifically for sites that need highly available infrastructure, the HE150 can be deployed almost anywhere, without requiring a rack or server closet. Taking up only the space needed to stack three smartphones, it also includes high availability clustering, rolling upgrades and integrated data protection.
Kasten Introduces K10 v3.0
Ahead of KubeCon 2020 this week, Kasten by Veeam announced version 3.0 of its K10, its Kubernetes data management platform. Benefits include:
- Multi-cluster dashboard views: When multiple clusters are present, the K10 multi-cluster dashboard provides a simple way to get the aggregate and real-time status of critical parameters including the total number of clusters, policies, applications.
- Kubernetes-native security authentication: K10 supports multiple authentication methods, including Token-based, OIDC, Red Hat OpenShift OAuth Proxy, and others, so that fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC) can be used to ensure appropriate levels of access and action within and across clusters.
- Cross-cluster policy enforcement: K10 provides the ability to define global policies on a primary cluster that can be selectively applied to secondary clusters to simplify the management of backups at scale through automation.
- Custom Cluster Group Definitions: K10 enables users to create their own groupings and individual clusters that can belong to many distributions. This makes it easy to distribute global policies to any logical group of clusters with the click of a button.
- Individual Cluster Shifting: K10 delivers the ability to easily search for an individual cluster and seamlessly switch to it for additional views into cluster related resources and the ability to define and operate on policies specific only to that cluster.
FUJIFILM & Cloudian To Provide Instantly Searchable Deep Archive Storage
FUJIFILM announced a partnership with Cloudian that aims to provide an instantly searchable deep archive storage. Tape is widely used for deep archive storage, but there is a growing need to be able to access that data on tape, the medium major drawback. With a partnership with Cloudian and its fully native, S3-compatible object storage data stored on tape will be in object format and be rapidly-searchable.
