In this week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. SonicWall expands its firewall lineup. Scality updates RING8. Alluxio integrates with RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark 3.0. Aerospike announces Kubernetes Operator. Hammerspace 4.6 is available in AWS Marketplace. StarWind launches free NAS and SAN software. Model9 joins AWS Marketplace. OpenDrives containerization marketplace debuts. Samsung develops HKMG-Based DDR5 memory. Pure Storage FlashBlade near $1 Billion in sales.
In this week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. SonicWall expands its firewall lineup. Scality updates RING8. Alluxio integrates with RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark 3.0. Aerospike announces Kubernetes Operator. Hammerspace 4.6 is available in AWS Marketplace. StarWind launches free NAS and SAN software. Model9 joins AWS Marketplace. OpenDrives containerization marketplace debuts. Samsung develops HKMG-Based DDR5 memory. Pure Storage FlashBlade near $1 Billion in sales.
SonicWall Expands Firewall Lineup
SonicWall announced its multi-gigabit security appliance designed to thwart attacks targeting government agencies, retail, K-12, higher education, and enterprises, the NSa 3700. The SonicWall NSa 3700 is powered by SonicOS 7.0 and is said to deliver a modern UX/UI, advanced security controls, plus critical networking and management capabilities to increase visibility and help defend against today’s increasingly targeted attacks. The NSa 3700 offers 22,500 connections per second, supporting up to 750,000 concurrent DPI connections and up to 3,000 site-to-site VPN tunnels.
Scality Updates RING8
Scality has announced updates to RING8 file and object storage system. Benefits include:
- Business continuance and disaster protection: Enterprise customers have large-scale, file-based application workloads for big data analytics, backup/data protection, and healthcare medical imaging (PACS/VNA) that demand maximum system and data availability, thereby requiring geo-distributed solutions. Enhancing its already powerful geo-distributed file system capabilities, RING now gives these customers the high-availability business continuance and disaster protection needed for these massive file workloads.
- Detailed utilization metrics for billing and chargeback: This release offers newly-enhanced utilization monitoring and reporting for performance (ops/sec, bandwidth) and capacity metrics for multi-tenant deployments. Service providers and enterprises that deploy RING to provide cloud services now have access to consumption-based metrics and reporting for detailed billing/chargeback capabilities.
- Improved speed and ease of use: For administrators, this release further simplifies common NFS and SMB volume provisioning, shared ACLs management, and monitoring tasks through automation and UI-driven actions. New support for the popular open-source Prometheus system monitoring tool and API is introduced. These capabilities save time and further reduce operational costs associated with managing large-scale data storage.
Alluxio Integrates With RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark 3.0
Alluxio announced the integration of RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark 3.0 with the Alluxio Data Orchestration Platform. The company states that this will accelerate data access on NVIDIA accelerated computing clusters for computation of both analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) pipelines. Highlights include:
- Data locality for I/O acceleration. Alluxio manages local storage resources on the GPU cluster and provides a high-performance distributed cache to accelerate data access from a remote storage cluster.
- No code changes for ease of use. To use RAPIDS on GPU-enabled clusters and Alluxio for storage access, no code changes are required. This makes the adoption of the solution pain-free for customers looking to migrate from their existing software stack.
- API flexibility. Multiple data access APIs are supported to enable the use of the most appropriate processing framework for each step of the data pipeline. The distributed cache is shared to allow for high performance even when data moves from one framework to another.
Aerospike Announces Kubernetes Operator
Aerospike released its Aerospike Kubernetes Operator and announced advancements in Aerospike Cloud Managed Service. The Kubernetes Operator is said to manage a Custom Resource Definition to extend the Kubernetes API for the Aerospike cluster while automating the configuration, provisioning, scaling, and recovery of Aerospike clusters. On the AWS Marketplace, Aerospike customers can now leverage pre-allocated cloud budgets, consolidate billing with unified billing, and negotiate multi-year discounts.
Hammerspace 4.6 Is Available In AWS Marketplace
Hammerspace announced that its version 4.6 is now generally available in AWS Marketplace. New features and enhancements include:
- Global File System – Customers can now actively deploy a single namespace across different geographical sites and replicate data and metadata across these sites. The data in global shares are available for read-write on multiple sites at the same time.
- Support for data resilience across Availability Zones on AWS – Hammerspace can be deployed across different Availability Zones for full data and access resilience within an AWS Region. This allows customers to control data placement across Availability Zones using objectives, in addition to providing High Availability (HA) failover support across Availability Zones.
- Metering Enabled Consumption – Simplify the licensing of Hammerspace with consumption based on capacity and metered directly through AWS Marketplace AMI subscriptions.
- Backup and Recovery – Maintain data availability across multiple sites in the event of a real disaster with automated and streamlined workflows.
StarWind Launches Free NAS & SAN Software
StarWind announced that it is launching free NAS and SAN software. The software will come as a lightweight ready-to-go Linux-based VM that allows users to repurpose their existing standalone hypervisor servers into HCL-certified high-performing storage appliances. Benefits include:
- Use What You Got – The solution is a fully HCL-certified piece of software that enables users to repurpose their existing server, as long as it can run VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V, into a high-performance storage appliance, network-attached storage, and/or backup target.
- Versatile and Redundant -StarWind Free NAS & SAN works on commodity hardware and supports both hardware- and software-based redundancy configurations which, in essence, allows it to turn existing external and internal storage into redundant storage appliances virtually for free.
- All Bases Covered: Converged and Hyperconverged Free NAS & SAN from StarWind is meant to show that, instead of saving up a fortune and then wasting it on bulky and expensive physical shared storage, ROBO, SMB & Edge deployments can repurpose what they have into HCL-certified high-performing storage appliances for many use cases without actually buying those proprietary components.
Model9 Joins AWS Marketplace
Model9 announced that its solution is now listed in the AWS Marketplace. The company has also achieved AWS Migration Competency. Now customers can take advantage of the technologies offered by both companies.
OpenDrives Containerization Marketplace Debuts
In a partnership with Kazuhm, OpenDrives has debuted its containerization marketplace. Kazuhm will be front and center allowing end-users to activate and integrate compute nodes on their network regardless of operating system or type of device. Additional applications to the marketplace include: DaVinci Resolve Project Server, as well as common agents for services like Grafana Analytics and Splunk.
Samsung Develops HKMG-Based DDR5 Memory
Samsung announced the expansion of its DDR5 DRAM memory portfolio with a 512GB DDR5 module based on High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) process technology. It is said to deliver up to 7,200 Mbps and be aimed at AI, ML, HPC, and data analytics. The new DRAM is currently sampling with select customers for verification.
Pure Storage FlashBlade Near $1 Billion In Sales
Pure Storage announced that its all-flash file and object storage solution, FlashBlade, is nearing $1 billion in sales. An impressive feat considering it was released 5 years ago. FlashBlade is said to deliver:
- Platform evolution to power next-generation workloads: FlashBlade was built with dense scale-out capacity and multi-dimensional performance in mind from day one and has been bolstered by continuous feature upgrades, like native SMB support, SafeMode snapshots for ransomware protection, and software enhancements designed for real-time analytics, for example. In 2020, FlashBlade defined a new category of storage: Unified Fast File and Object (UFFO). By unifying fast file and fast object capabilities on a single platform, FlashBlade empowers customers with future-proofed infrastructure for the rise of unstructured data.
- Stand-out partnerships and integrated solutions: To tackle a diverse set of customer challenges, FlashBlade has brought uniquely differentiated partnerships to bear. With NVIDIA, FlashBlade created the industry’s first integrated AI-Ready Infrastructure (AIRI), a joint solution for deploying deep learning at scale. With Cohesity, FlashBlade created FlashRecover, Powered by Cohesity, the industry’s first jointly-engineered all-flash modern data protection solution for rapid recovery, ransomware protection, and reuse of data. FlashBlade extended its unified fast file and object platform to AWS Outposts, enabling enterprises with a hybrid cloud solution to consolidate current and next-generation workloads.
- Flexible consumption models and non-disruptive upgrades: Pure’s Evergreen subscription to innovation lets FlashBlade customers adopt new features without disruption, downtime, or the requirement to re-buy capacity. With the option of buying FlashBlade’s Unified Fast File and Object Service through Pure as-a-Service, customers can select from Premium and Ultra Performance tiers to support not only traditional file and cloud object workloads, but also a wide variety of AI and Machine Learning, high performance compute, and software development needs, all delivered with pay as you go consumption.
