Dell EMC Comes Out Swinging Against Cohesity, Rubrik

It’s the battle of the data storage disruptors versus legacy vendors. And @DellEMC is coming out swinging against startups @Cohesity and @Rubrik with a new integrated data appliance that targets mid-size organizations and remote or branch office locations. Dell EMC’s new device provides converged data protection, and comes bundled with software for backup, deduplication, replication and recovery, along with disaster recovery and long-term retention to the cloud. It also hits the market at a time when the two software-defined storage startups aren’t making things any easier for traditional backup and storage giants like Dell EMC.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/dell-emc-comes-out-swinging-against-cohesity-rubrik/2018/07/

Test your Cohesity storage systems knowledge

According to CEO @MohitAron, the goal for #Cohesity storage products right from the beginning was to develop a secondary storage platform that had deduplication built in and that could support unlimited scaling. Aron also wanted it to be easy to deploy and manage.  To that end, when Cohesity launched its DataPlatform in 2015, it was built on hyper-converged infrastructure ( #HCI) principles. That means sets of nodes are installed to form storage clusters, and all the resources are available through a hypervisor, which also provides simplified management. With universal deduplication baked in, Cohesity was one of the first companies to offer global, block-level data reduction that would scale as more nodes were added to scale up a customer's secondary storage. With an innovative snapshot system, Cohesity claims there will be no performance hit, no matter how many snapshots the system takes. One of the ways it does this is by spreading the snapshots across multiple nodes. Cohesity storage even offers a consistency guarantee, in which DataPlatform writes to multiple nodes before it acknowledges a successful write. Test your knowledge of Cohesity's converged secondary storage by taking our quiz.

https://searchconvergedinfrastructure.techtarget.com/quiz/Test-your-Cohesity-storage-systems-knowledge

Cohesity SD-Storage Automates Data Backup in Public Clouds

@Cohesity ’s latest software-defined storage  (SD-storage) updates target cloud-based application testing and development and automated backup for data stored in public clouds. The company today said its on-premises data backup platform, aptly named DataPlatform, now includes a capability called #CloudSpin that allows companies to instantly access their backup data in the cloud for testing and development purposes. It converts backup data stored in the appliance into a new virtual machine (VM) for use in the cloud.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/cohesity-sd-storage-automates-data-backup-public-clouds/2018/04/

6 Software-Defined Storage Companies to Watch

While the traditional storage industry has been largely experiencing anemic growth, at a 2.7 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2021, there are pockets of the market that are seeing high growth and revenue. One such pocket is software-defined storage ( #SDS ). This segment is growing at a 13.5 percent CAGR through 2021, according to IDC. SDS is penetrating IT infrastructures to meet the needs of the next-generation datacenter. As companies transform their businesses and move operations to the cloud, they are adopting SDS for greater agility, reduced costs, and greater operational efficiency.

IDC defines SDS using the following criteria, “storage software that runs on commodity hardware, does not require any proprietary hardware components like custom ASICs [application-specific integrated circuit chips], and is a standalone storage system.”

Companies are abandoning traditional hardware-defined storage designs for software-defined storage models. “The legacy systems have improved their software to make them easier to use, borrowing some of the ideas of SDS,” said Eric Burgener, IDC research vice president of enterprise storage. “But they will generally always be more complex to manage, and certainly more expensive to buy and maintain.”

SDS is a subset of the larger storage market, and it can be split into four segments: block, file, object, and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), according to IDC. It’s worth noting that Gartner segments this differently into two categories: infrastructure (which would include block, file, object, and hyperconverged) and management (which coordinates the delivery of storage services).

VMware was one of the first companies to support this newer storage model with its software-defined data center and vSAN technology. But as the SDS market continues to grow, there are more companies coming forward with SDS innovations. We’ve identified six SDS companies that we believe are worth watching as this market continues to experience growth.

Cloudian

Cloudian set out to bring object storage to the enterprise. The company launched in 2011 with its flagship product, HyperStorage, a hybrid cloud storage platform.

It has recently updated the platform to include on-premises data centers and multiple public clouds, and it acquired SDS file storage company Infinity Storage. The founder of Infinity invented the write-once-read-many (WORM) file system that most SDS platforms use, including Cloudian. Prior to the acquisition, the two companies launched HyperFile, which used Infinity’s file storage software built into Cloudian’s storage platform.

The platform is widely seen as a way to consolidate data storage into a managed environment, while maintaining cloud-like object storage without obstructing the data.

Founders: Hiroshi Ohta and Michael Tso
Total Funding: $104.1 million (Digital Alpha Advisors, Lenovo, Epsilon Venture Partners, Intel Capital, DVP Investment, Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, City National Bank, Eight Roads Ventures, Goldman Sachs)

Cohesity

Cohesity was started in 2013 by Mohit Aron who previously co-founded Nutanix. The hyperconverged secondary storage company has been growing rapidly, and it saw a 600 percent increase in sales revenue over the previous year in 2017.

The company’s data storage platform, Orion, seeks to eliminate secondary storage silos by consolidating an enterprises on-premises and cloud-based secondary storage silos onto a centralized, hyperconverged platform.

Last year, Cohesity updated the platform to combine data protection and scalable file and object storage. The update enabled enterprises to also use Orion as a backup system and a searchable archive for large amounts of structured and unstructured data.

Founder: Mohit Aron
Total Funding: $160 million (Battery Ventures, Foundation Capital, Hewlett Packard Ventures, Accel Partners, Artis Ventures, GV, Cisco Investments, Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Wing Venture Capital, DHVC, Trinity Ventures, InstantScale Capital)

Datrium

Datrium was founded in 2012 by Data Domain and VMware veterans to create a slightly different model for storage than HCI infrastructure players. It provides open converged infrastructure for hybrid clouds in a way that doesn’t require the overhead of HCI. It does, however, integrate some features of HCI such as scale-out backup, cloud-based disaster recovery, and the ability to scale automatically to overcome bottleneck problems.

When Datrium launched, up until last year, it only had support for VMware servers and virtual machines (VMs), but it added storage support for open source platforms and Linux containers and Docker persistent volumes. This update enables enterprises to manage multiple environments from a single source. The company also enhanced its private cloud infrastructure platform with new scaling functions.

Founders: Boris Weissman, Brian Biles, Ganesh Venkitachalam, Hugo Patterson, and Sazzala Reddy
Total Funding: $110 million (New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Ventures)

Portworx

Portworx is a growing container storage company, which is packaged as a container itself. The company, founded in 2014, seeks to provide container-native storage and enable container use for DevOps and production environments.

Its cloud native data management platform provides automated data services, including data persistence and security, and it saves and stores container data. It can run on any infrastructure using a container, including Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS, and Docker Swarm.

Portworx recently launched an open source stateful storage project, STORK, a storage orchestrator runtime for Kubernetes. The project allows DevOps teams to run stateful applications on Kubernetes and offer storage health monitoring.

Mesosphere recently became a reseller of Portworx’s products, combining Mesosphere’s automated compute service with Portworx’ automated storage platform.

Founders: Goutham Rao, Murli Thirumale, and Vinod Jayaraman
Total Funding: $28.5 million (Mayfield Fund, Sapphire Ventures, GE Ventures, Michael Dell)

Rubrik

Rubrik provides automated data backup, recovery, search, cloud, and development services across cloud and on-premises environments. The company launchedthe ninth release of its data management platform, Alta, in June 2017 with additional support for a number of physical and virtual environments.

In February, Rubrik acquired NoSQL data backup company, Datos IO. This acquisition is meant to help its enterprise customers undertake digital transformations and AI initiatives. In April, the company released a software-as-a-service platform, Polaris, for data management applications.

While Rubrik and Cohesity are competitors in this market, Rubrik disagrees on the use of the term “hyperconverged secondary storage,” deeming it a marketing term and preferring “cloud data management.”

Like Cohesity, it has seen enormous growth in the past few years as the market explodes. Rubrik was named as an alternative acquisition target for VMware by a VMware investor.

Founders: Arvind Jain, Arvind Nithrakashyap, Bipul Sinha, and Soham Mazumdar
Total Funding: $292 million (Kevin Durant, Greylock Partners, IVP, Lightspeed Ventures, Khosla Ventures)

SoftNas

SoftNas launched its first product, Cloud NAS, in 2013. Its goal was to fill a gap in terms of cloud native services by giving a native storage experience in a cloud environment, according to Arun Chandrasekaran, VP and distinguished analyst for Data Center and Cloud Infrastructure at Gartner.

Last year, the company released a new version of Cloud NAS and three additional products as it rebranded itself as a hybrid cloud platform provider.

CloudNAS works as an alternative to hardware-based storage, on-premises network attached storage (NAS), storage area networks (SAN), and file servers. It replaces these with cloud object storage, which can be more easily scaled to accommodate enterprise needs.

The three products it launched as part of its makeover are set to make it faster and easier to migrate applications to the cloud while providing backup and recovery.

Founders: Rick Braddy and William Hood
Total Funding: $6.4 million (angel investors)

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/6-software-defined-storage-companies-to-watch/2018/04/

SoftBank is in talks to invest in data storage company Cohesity at a $1 billion valuation

@SoftBank’s Vision Fund is in late talks to fund a hot data-storage company, @Cohesity, in a deal that would value the company at about $1 billion. Investors would place at least $150 million into the company, people familiar with the matter say, in what would be the latest romp on a deal spree by the massive technology investing firm. The Vision Fund-led round is still in the process of closing, the people said, and the numbers could change slightly. Cohesity would be valued in the ballpark of $900 million before the new money. The Vision Fund declined to comment. Cohesity did not respond to requests for comment. The five-year-old company is led by prominent CEO @Mohit Aron, who previously co-founded a different enterprise software company, @Nutanix, that went public in late 2016. Aron has raised about $160 million for his company from investors like @Sequoia Capital, @Wing Ventures and @Google Ventures. It was last valued at $470 million a year ago, before the cash, according to @PitchBook. The funding is a sign of momentum for Cohesity, which is competing against legacy players like @Dell EMC and @CommVault in addition to other startups. Often compared to @Rubrik, another similar-stage, similarly aged venture-backed data company, Cohesity offers “secondary storage” capabilities to its customers, such as Harris Teeter or Tribune Media. Cohesity sells its platform which tries to protect and upload backup data to the cloud. The company said that in 2017 its revenue increased 600 percent over the year before, though it has not released additional figures. It has seen some heightened executive turnover in recent months, with some new hires like a CMO but also the departure in December of its CFO after just five months. Its competitor Rubrik was valued at $1.3 billion in its last financing round, a $180 million batch led in 2017 by IVP. Rubrik said in February that it was close to achieving a $300 million global bookings run rate and it now has 900 employees, more than Cohesity.

The Cohesity deal would be a relatively smaller financing by the Vision Fund, which is gathering $100 billion to invest in what will only be the first of several funds that CEO Masayoshi Son is planning. The Vision Fund only does deals larger than $100 million.

The Vision Fund’s more recently announced investments have been in consumer-facing marketplaces like Uber, DoorDash and Wag. But the fund also has deep technical talent to chase enterprise deals, like its investment into Slack, even if the ones it has done haven’t been as high profile.

https://www.recode.net/2018/4/13/17232660/softbank-vision-fund-mohit-aron-cohesity-deal

Cohesity Hires Enterprise Technology Veteran Matt McSweeney as Vice President of Sales, Americas

SAN JOSE, Calif. , April 05, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --  @Cohesity, the leader of hyperconverged secondary storage, today announced it has hired former @PaloAlto Networks Vice President @MattMcSweeney to lead Cohesity’s go-to-market strategy and execution in the Americas. In the new position of Cohesity vice president of sales, Americas, McSweeney will help accelerate global expansion to meet the surging demand for Cohesity’s radically efficient data protection and secondary storage platform. He will report directly to Mark Parrinello, the vice president of worldwide sales at Cohesity. With a proven track record of driving global growth in enterprise technology markets, McSweeney is tapping into his deep leadership experience and industry knowledge to build on Cohesity’s momentum in the Americas as the company continues to expand overseas. In his previous role as vice president of the eastern region for major and global accounts at Palo Alto Networks, he grew annual revenue and focused on global account penetration and customer satisfaction. He brings a broad range of technology sales experience to the role, having previously served as vice president of worldwide sales for three companies, and oversaw sales teams for more than 15 years. “Matt has a proven track record of building, inspecting, and driving results, and has a true passion for leading people and helping to guide their careers,” Parrinello said. “In our exhaustive search to fill this critical role, we found that absolutely everyone had great things to say about Matt, and we know he will promote the positive culture we are laser-focused on building within Cohesity.” “This new and exciting role at Cohesity provides an unprecedented opportunity to drive widespread global adoption of the platform that is completely transforming the data protection and secondary storage market,” McSweeney said. “It is an honor to join this team, and I’m excited to help drive the next phase of growth for Cohesity."

https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/04/05/1465747/0/en/Cohesity-Hires-Enterprise-Technology-Veteran-Matt-McSweeney-as-Vice-President-of-Sales-Americas.html

Cohesity Expands EMEA Management Team

MUNICH, Germany and SAN JOSE, Calif., April 04, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- @Cohesity, the leader of #hyperconverged #secondarystorage, today announced it has expanded its management team for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and appointed @Johannes Kunz as senior director channel sales EMEA, @Thomas Boele as senior director systems engineering EMEA, and @Claudia Zieschang as head of EMEA field marketing. The company has thus filled three key positions with well-known industry veterans. With this management team, Cohesity wants to increase its market penetration and communicate the benefits of Cohesity’s hyperconverged data platform to even more customers and sales partners. All three come to Cohesity from SimpliVity. Johannes Kunz has more than 25 years of experience in sales, marketing, and management, most of them spent in international positions. As senior director channel sales EMEA at Cohesity, he is responsible for indirect sales, the go-to-market strategy, and channel development in EMEA. Before that, he worked as VP channel sales EMEA for SimpliVity and also held various roles in channel sales, marketing, and product marketing at Hitachi Data Systems. Further companies in his career include NetApp, CA, and Cheyenne Software. With over 20 years of experience in technical presales and marketing position, Thomas Boele brings a vast spectrum of expertise to Cohesity. In his new role as senior director systems engineering EMEA, he focuses on the development and expansion of the presales teams and technical customer service in the region. Before joining Cohesity, he held a variety of positions at SimpliVity, most recently that of vice president solutions architecture EMEA. He has also worked at Riverbed, NetApp, Cisco, and 3Com, amongst others. In the past 15 years, Claudia Zieschang has occupied various positions in marketing at leading US companies. As head of EMEA field marketing for Cohesity, she is responsible for strategic brand development and related activities in EMEA – a role she previously held at SimpliVity. Before joining SimpliVity, she was responsible for marketing in North and Central Europe at F5 Networks and also led strategic enterprise marketing at VMware Germany. “When I joined Cohesity at the end of 2017, I knew that our hyperconverged platform approach and our native integration into the cloud gave us a unique opportunity to start a revolution in the European IT market. However, we can only achieve our ambitious goals with the right people,” said Klaus Seidl, VP sales EMEA at Cohesity. “I am pleased to welcome three experienced colleagues to the team who, together with me and the rest of the team, will turn the EMEA market for data protection and hyperconverged secondary storage upside down and support our growth objectives in the whole region.”

https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/04/04/1459753/0/en/Cohesity-Expands-EMEA-Management-Team.html

10 hot storage companies to watch

Innovations such as software-defined storage ( #SDS), #hyperconverged infrastructures ( #HCI), and #blockchain have investors flocking to enterprise storage startups, and this market shows no signs of slowing down. Collectively, the 10 startups featured in this roundup have raised more than $736 million in VC funding. This total is even more impressive when you factor in two startups not included in that calculation. One of them is entirely self-funded, while the other has a unique business model and an equally unique source of non-VC funding: an ICO, or Initial Coin Offering. @Dell EMC, @NetApp, @Nimble, @Pure Storage, @Veeam @Cohesity.

According to research firm IDC, the worldwide enterprise storage market expanded by 13.7 percent year over year to just under $13.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017. Other research firms believe the growth rate will accelerate in the near term. Research and Markets, for instance, predicts that one fast-growing segment of the overall enterprise storage market, cloud storage, will expand to become a $92.5 billion market by 2022.

The startups in this roundup are positioning themselves to ride that growth wave, offering everything from hybrid cloud storage with smart-tiered caching to platforms intended to deliver 100 percent uptime with zero data loss after a recovery event to a system designed in a way that could enable it to become the Airbnb of distributed storage.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3265749/storage/10-hot-storage-companies-to-watch.html

Enterprise Data Protection for FlashBlade with Cohesity

@PureStorage #FlashBlade, the industry's first all-flash, #scaleout file storage, purpose-built for high-performance and immediate access to mission critical file and object data. FlashBlade provides unparalleled performance across a broad range of environments. @Cohesity, the leader of hyperconverged secondary storage makes your data work for you by consolidating secondary storage silos onto a web-scale data platform that spans both private and public clouds. Join us on April 19th and learn how FlashBlade accelerates data intelligence across modern analytics, machine learning and rich metadata databases with simplified data protection, high performance, application consistent backups and file level recoverability from Cohesity. We look forward to you joining us for the live event! Sponsor: Cohesity & Pure Storage

https://resources.computerworld.com/ccd/assets/150132/detail

Forrester Research, Google, and Cohesity Discuss How to Leverage the Cloud for Today’s Data Protection and Storage ChallengesLive Webcast Will Discuss How Enterprises Can Use Google Cloud

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 14, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- @Cohesity, the leader of #hyperconverged secondary storage, will host a webcast featuring speakers from @Google Cloud and @ForresterResearch discussing the benefits of #GoogleCloud to enhance data protection and storage strategies today at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET. The interactive presentation addresses the problems facing enterprises as they struggle to keep up with exponential data growth and corresponding data protection and storage needs. Participants will hear how organizations can leverage the public cloud while maintaining consistent infrastructure and operation models with their on-premises data center. Hybrid clouds are the predominant strategy for most enterprises as they look to increase agility and gain the advantage of cloud economics using compute and storage. In this webcast, participants will learn about hybrid cloud trends, how to build an enterprise cloud data fabric for all secondary workloads, and will hear how Cohesity and Google customers are benefiting from the joint solution for backup, archival, and disaster recovery in the cloud. To join the webinar, please register here.

http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/forrester-research-google-and-cohesity-discuss-how-to-leverage-the-cloud-for-today-s-data-protection-and-storage-challengeslive-webcast-will-discuss-how-enterprises-can-use-google-cloud-and-1018695983

SHI International Selects Cohesity as Its ‘Emerging Partner of the Year’ for 2017

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 13, 2018 ( @GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --  @Cohesity, the leader of #hyperconverged #secondarystorage, today announced that it was named the “Emerging Partner of the Year” for 2017 by @SHI International Corp., a global provider of technology products and services with more than $8.5 billion in annual sales. SHI selected Cohesity as the top emerging partner for its high level of engagement with SHI as well as end customers, delivering technology that produces measurable results, growing a healthy business relationship, and overall commitment to excellence. Cohesity sales in 2017 surged more than 500 percent from the previous year at SHI. Cohesity is fully dedicated to partner success with a completely channel-based sales model to deliver its radically efficient secondary storage platform to customers across the globe. To meet the demands of enterprises struggling with the fragmented landscape of legacy solutions for secondary storage workloads, Cohesity provides a unified, scalable platform that seamlessly bridges cloud and on-premises infrastructure. By consolidating all non-primary data use cases in one place – including data protection and backup, file and object shares, analytics, and test/dev – Cohesity DataPlatform delivers simplicity, efficiency, and lower cost of ownership, along with better understanding of data across the organization. SHI has been a leading technology provider for nearly 30 years, and has consistently been on the cutting edge in delivering the latest and greatest IT products to customers, whether they’re created by startups or longtime industry players. With more than 3,700 employees worldwide, including the industry's most experienced and stable sales force backed by software volume licensing experts, hardware procurement specialists, and certified IT services professionals, SHI delivers custom solutions to a range of industry verticals. In 2017, Cohesity partnered with all four SHI domestic sales divisions (commercial enterprise, strategic enterprise, public sector, and corporate/SMB), and its largest deployment provided over 72 terabytes of storage space for a financial services company. “Emerging partners are a major focus for SHI and we value those that deliver cutting-edge technologies while growing and supporting a strong partner channel,” said Josh Greene, general manager, business development, SHI International Corp. “SHI strives to understand and deliver the best available technology to our customers and Cohesity helps us do exactly that. Fostering technological innovation through committed engagements with both our internal teams and customers made Cohesity an outstanding partner to SHI in 2017.” “Being named ‘Emerging Partner of the Year’ by SHI is an incredible validation of the effectiveness of Cohesity’s hyperconverged platform and its ability to deliver game-changing results to the enterprise,” said @ToddPalmer, vice president of worldwide channels, Cohesity. “SHI has been at the forefront in identifying the best IT solutions for decades and we are extremely proud to be recognized for the value this partnership has produced.”

https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/03/13/1421385/0/en/SHI-International-Selects-Cohesity-as-Its-Emerging-Partner-of-the-Year-for-2017.html

Cohesity Opens Second Major U.S. Office to Build on Incredible Corporate Momentum

RALEIGH, N.C., March 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- @Cohesity, the leader of hyperconverged secondary storage, today announced the grand opening of its second major U.S. office that will be home to more than 100 employees working across a range of functions in Raleigh, North Carolina. Following quickly on the heels of the December ribbon-cutting for Cohesity’s new headquarters in San Jose, California, the Raleigh office opening backs up Cohesity’s commitment to scale the company sustainably in order to meet the surge in demand for its hyperconverged secondary storage platform. The grand opening ceremony scheduled for 5 p.m. today will feature Cohesity Founder and CEO @MohitAron and Cohesity COO and President @RobSalmon, among others. Building on Cohesity’s incredible momentum in 2017, in which the company doubled its headcount and increased revenue by more than 600 percent, the new East Coast office will primarily focus on support, sales, development, and performance. Currently occupying more than 22,000 square feet of space in Raleigh, Cohesity will join a growing community of high-tech companies with a presence in “Research Triangle Park,” an area that Forbes has ranked sixth in the nation for tech job growth, stemming from its high number of residents with advanced degrees. Along with the office opening, Cohesity announced two new customers in the region – Piedmont Healthcare, a community health provider that operates 10 hospitals with 3,000 physicians and nearly 22,000 employees, and Champion Credit Union, which offers financial services to over 24,000 people in North Carolina. Cohesity’s expanded presence on the East Coast will also support its rapidly growing federal customer base, overseen by its newly announced chief technology officer, Federal and U.S. East, Steve Grewal. “The opening of Cohesity’s second major U.S. office in Raleigh underscores the rapid growth that we have seen in just a few years since we launched, along with our commitment to support that growth with strong organizational infrastructure,” said Rob Salmon, president and COO, Cohesity. “We continue to expand our presence in the U.S. and abroad as more enterprises realize the transformative value of hyperconverged secondary storage.”

https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/03/12/1420599/0/en/Cohesity-Opens-Second-Major-U-S-Office-to-Build-on-Incredible-Corporate-Momentum.html

Google's 72-Qubit Bristlecone Puts 'Quantum Supremacy' Within Reach

Today’s topics include @Google previewing the largest quantum computing processor to date; the #DDoS record broken again as a memcached attack hits 1.7 Tbps; @Microsoft revamping the setup experience for Windows 10; and hyperconverged infrastructure systems as one of the hottest IT markets of 2018. Google this week previewed Bristlecone, a 72-qubit quantum processor that surpasses the previous record 50-qubit system @IBM announced last November. Google's announcement, at the American Physical Society meeting March 5 in Los Angeles, takes the company one step closer to its goal of demonstrating "quantum supremacy," where a quantum computer can perform a task that a classical computer cannot. Google thinks quantum supremacy can be easily demonstrated with a 49-qubit processor so long as certain other technical conditions are also achieved.

Julian Kelly, research scientist at Google's Quantum AI Lab, said, "We believe the experimental demonstration of a quantum processor outperforming a supercomputer would be a watershed moment for our field. [It] remains one of our key objectives.”

Related ReadingGoogle Previews 72-Qubit Quantum ProcessorMemcached DDoS Attack Hits 1.7 TbpsMicrosoft Adds More Privacy Controls to Windows 10HCI Storage: One Hot Market in 2018

Netscout Arbor on March 5 reported the largest ever distributed denial-of-service attack to date at 1.7 terabits per second, just four days after the previous largest DDoS attack at 1.35 Tbps against GitHub was reported. Both attacks involved improperly configured memcached servers that reflected attack traffic, amplifying the total volume.

At this point in time, it's not clear who is behind the memcached DDoS attacks, though indicators show where the traffic is coming from.

Carlos Morales, vice president of Arbor's Security Engineering and Response Team, noted, "The top source country was the United States at nearly 50 percent of the traffic at peak. The other sources in the top 5 included France, Netherlands, UK and Australia."

Microsoft on March 6 released Windows 10 test build 17115 for PC members of the Windows Insider early-access program. The new build features a revamped set of controls that greet users when they first run the operating system. Included is a new setup experience offering users control over how their data is shared with the company.

Marisa Rogers, Windows and Devices Group Privacy Officer at Microsoft, said, "This new design conveys focused information to help our customers make focused choices about their privacy and offers two new settings for Inking & Typing and Find my device.”

Those new settings may show up in a single-screen layout or as separate screens for some users so that the company's developers can gauge which approach is most effective. On separate screens, Microsoft will highlight its privacy recommendation by framing it with a dotted line. Some users may be presented with up to seven individual screens.

Hyperconverged infrastructure systems are all the rage, with @HP, @DellEMC, @Cisco Systems, @Lenovo, @Nutanix, @Pivot3, @Cohesity, @HyperGrid, @Maxta and others all crowding the space. " #Hyperconverged " refers to platform offerings that share computing and storage resources, based on #softwaredefined storage, software-defined computing, commodity hardware and a unified management interface.

Hyperconverged systems deliver their main value through software tools, commoditizing the underlying hardware. The market surpassed $2.2 billion in global revenue in 2016, up 110 percent compared to 2015, and was at $2.9 billion after three quarters in 2017.

Pivot3 CEO Ron Nash said, "Hyperconverged is in a 'crossing-the-chasm' situation right now. ... Once [everybody] bought the hyperconverged system for one purpose, they started to run other things on it. They saw that it stayed up, did not lose data, was easy to operate and was less expensive than buying traditional legacy gear.”

http://www.eweek.com/servers/google-s-72-qubit-bristlecone-puts-quantum-supremacy-within-reach

Enterprises Simplify and Save Resources by Consolidating Files and Object Storage on Cohesity DataPlatform

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 14, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- @Cohesity, the leader of #hyperconverged #secondarystorage, today announced that customers are expanding the use of its scale-out platform to handle file and #objectstorage along with data protection on the same platform, achieving dramatically lower infrastructure costs and simpler data management. Cohesity DataPlatform's radically simple and efficient approach to data protection has gained popularity as enterprises grow out of legacy backup solutions that are costly and don’t scale. Now these companies are extending the value of their Cohesity deployment by using it to consolidate their unstructured data across the organization. A growing share of Cohesity customers, such as Manhattan Associates, which started with Cohesity backup capabilities, are now adding file and object storage to seamlessly read and write to the same data volume, eliminating unnecessary data copies and hardware siloes for maximum efficiency and simpler management. Both the volume and variety of enterprise data continues to grow exponentially. Along with the cost and complexity of traditional enterprise storage, it is putting enormous pressure on businesses to find a better way to manage their exploding data assets. Until recently, enterprise IT handled different use cases with separate storage solutions, each built with its own proprietary hardware, user interface, and licensing model, leading to fragmented data siloes that become operationally inefficient and complex to manage. Cohesity DataPlatform consolidates all secondary storage - that is, any workload that doesn’t require strict service level agreements (SLAs) - including file shares, backups and archiving, logs, media, test/dev and analytics. This enables companies to dramatically simplify their data center and save resources by bringing everything together on a single platform.

https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/02/14/1348140/0/en/Enterprises-Simplify-and-Save-Resources-by-Consolidating-Files-and-Object-Storage-on-Cohesity-DataPlatform.html

Cohesity Executives Recognized as 2018 CRN® Channel Chiefs

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 13, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- @Cohesity, the leader of hyperconverged secondary storage, announced today that @CRN®, a brand of @The Channel Company, has named @ToddPalmer, VP of worldwide channels, and @JoeBarnes, head of Americas channels, to its prestigious list of 2018 #ChannelChiefs. The executives on this annual list represent top leaders in the IT channel who excel at driving growth and revenue in their organization through channel partners. Channel Chief honorees are selected by CRN’s editorial staff on the basis of their professional achievements, standing in the industry, dedication to the channel partner community, and strategies for driving future growth and innovation. Each of the 2018 Channel Chiefs has demonstrated loyalty and ongoing support for the IT channel by consistently promoting, defending, and executing outstanding channel partner programs. Barnes and Palmer have been instrumental in expanding Cohesity’s global channel presence by developing a predictable and profitable program for their partners while selectively expanding the partner base to address new and targeted markets. In addition, they implemented a comprehensive partner and technical sales curriculum that has enabled partners to pitch, demo, and implement Cohesity’s solution and is available through web-based and in-person workshops at no cost to our partners. With a sales strategy focused entirely on the channel, Cohesity has experienced exponential growth, recording a 350 percent partner revenue increase in 2017.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/hpe-leads-data-center-server-market-ihs-says/2018/02/

Cohesity DataPlatform 4

@Cohesity #DataPlatform 4 is a #converged #dataprotection product that integrates software on disk appliances to consolidate #backup, #archiving, file and #objectstorage, testing and development copies, and #analytics data. DataPlatform's global deduplication software reduces the data footprint for secondary storage.

Cohesity launched DataPlatform in 2015 and has been building out enterprise features for converged data protection ever since.

The Cohesity DataPlatform version 4 was upgraded to support Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) object storage with deduplication across an entire cluster. Cohesity enhanced DataPlatform with erasure coding for stronger data recovery and resiliency between nodes compared with DataPlatform's previous replication capability.

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/feature/Cohesity-DataPlatform-4

12 New Dell EMC Rebates, Programs And Partner Strategies Just Unveiled

The New @DellEMC #PartnerProgram Dell EMC is doubling down on its one-year-old unified Partner Program with new services rebates, storage incentives and revamping its MDF strategy as its fiscal year 2019 gets underway. "We are in excellent shape as we begin 2018. Together, we'll continue to be unstoppable," said @JoyceMullen (pictured), Dell EMC's new channel leader during the company's quarterly Partner Broadcast on Wednesday. "We're a $43 billion channel business in a $3 trillion industry … We know exactly what it takes to get to $50 billion." Mullen, as well as several other Dell EMC executives, unveiled a slew of new channel incentives today that partners can take advantage of. CRN breaks down the 12 biggest incentives and announcements revealed during the broadcast.

New $20,000, $40,000 And $60,000 Rebates

Scott Millard, vice president of global channels specialty sales at Dell EMC, said he is "fired up" to announce new partner sales reps and sales engineers (SE) incentives in the Partner Program.

Partner sales reps and SE's can now can earn 3-percent of the deal size, up to $30,000 each, for any competitive swap or net new account, with a total potential payout of $60,000 per deal.

Additionally, a partner sales rep and SE can earn 2-percent of deal size, up to $20,000, for cross-selling any storage deal with data protection, with a total payout of up to $40,000 per deal. Sales reps and SE's can also earn 1-percent of the deal size, up to $10,000 each, for "selling modern architectures," said Millard, with a total payout of up to $20,000 per deal. A sales rep and SE can also each earn $250 for completing a proposal in Dell EMC's Quick Proposal tool with a valid deal registration.

New Storage Services Rebates

For storage deals, partners can now earn 3.5-percent on attached deployment, consulting, and education services starting at $1. "We've removed the services gates, so you will be paid on every single eligible dollar and earn you money faster," said Kimberly DeLeon, vice president of Global Channel Programs at Dell EMC.

New Services Rebates

For client, servers and networking, partners can now earn up to 1-percent when Dell EMC ProSupport is attached or 1.5 percent for attaching ProSupport Plus. The rebates are based on the total revenue of the deal. Also, partners will earn 3.5 percent of all other services that are included.

"You earn services rebates now starting from dollar-one," said Erica Lambert, vice president of Global Channel and Alliances Services Sales at Dell EMC. "We are dedicated to making services more profitable and predictable for you."

8 New Solution Competencies

Dell EMC will roll out a total of eight Solution Competencies throughout 2018. On Wednesday, the company launched a software-defined infrastructure, hybrid cloud, and connect workforce competencies which are now available.

"For these solution competencies, much of the content is foundational, and will count towards multiple other competencies, optimizing your time and investment," said Mullen.

MDF Revamp

In 2018 Dell's MDF philosophy is to deliver competitive rates while taking cost and friction out of the MDF management process, according to Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of Global Channel Marketing for Dell EMC. The company made changes to further simplify the program such as providing the ability to track future activity or planning requests and decreasing MDF administration. Dell EMC also removed front-end documentation and proof of execution requirements and granted the ability to upload multiple activities at once.

"We're significantly looking to decrease the overall administration burden that you've experience with MDF," said Cook.

$4.5 Billion In R&D

Millard said @DellEMC would spend $4.5 billion in research and development in its current fiscal year 2019.

"That's more than @Pure, @Veeam, @Nutanix, @Rubrik and @Cohesity's total annual revenue combined. We spend more on R&D than those five competitors combined revenue," said Millard.

READ more here :http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/channel-programs/300098986/12-new-dell-emc-rebates-programs-and-partner-strategies-just-unveiled.htm/pgno/0/6?itc=most_pop

Dell EMC unveils latest Data Domain appliance

@DellEMC 's latest addition to the @DataDomain line targets SMBs and enterprises with remote offices. The system includes #DataDomainBoost technology and #cloud #tiering #software.

Despite the trend swinging toward integrated data protection appliances, Dell EMC today expanded the line of Data Domain appliances that helped make disk-based backup popular.

Dell EMC launched the DD3300 appliance, the new entry-level version of its platform that does inline deduplication for disk backup, archiving and disaster recovery. The Data Domain appliance targets small to midsize organizations and large companies with remote and branch offices. The new system will replace the Dell EMC Data Domain 2200.

The DD3300 provides a maximum throughput of up to 4.2 TB per hour and 7 TB per hour with the Data Domain Boost technology. The Data Domain appliance can hold between 200 TB and 1.6 PB of logical capacity and up to 32 TB of usable capacity. Those numbers compare to the DD2200 appliance that protects up to 860 TB of user data and supports 4.7 TB an hour throughput.

The 2U appliance also has the DD Cloud Tier technology that does native tiering of long-term retention data to the public, private and hybrid cloud. With cloud tiering, the system can handle up to 4.8 PB of logical capacity and up to 32 TB of usable storage. It uses SAS drives and the system uses intelligent, variable-level deduplication.

"This enables smaller IT environments to extend to the cloud for long-term data retention," said Richa Dhanda, Dell EMC's director of product marketing for data protection. "The cloud tiering is offered on all our models, [but] this is the first time we are offering cloud tiering on our entry-level model."

Data Domain appliance gives deduplication a boost

The new Data Domain appliance supports dual-disk parity RAID 6, Data Domain encryption, Data Domain Extended Retention Lock software and Data Domain Virtual Tape Library over Fibre Channel. It supports NFS v3 over TCP and CIFS and Data Domain Boost over 1 GbE or 10 GbE or Fibre Channel, as well as NDMP Tape Server.

DD Boost software is designed to offload part of the Data Domain deduplication process to a backup server or application client. That prevents the Data Domain disk array from having to carry the full burden of the dedupe workload. The software is designed to increase the backup speed while decreasing the network bandwidth needs. This is particularly advantageous when backups are being written to an off-site Data Domain system over a wide-area network.

The new Data Domain appliance supports Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, the IBM Cloud and the Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage.

The new Data Domain appliance supports Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, the IBM Cloud and the Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage.

Data Domain was a data deduplication pioneer that helped popularize the move from tape to disk for backup. EMC acquired Data Domain for $2.1 billion in 2009, and the platform has helped EMC -- and now Dell EMC -- hold the disk backup market share lead for years, although its share is shrinking as integrated appliances start to take hold.

@Dell EMC in 2017 launched the @DataDomain Integrated Data Protection Appliance ( #IDPA ) with Data Domain and other Dell EMC #backup software integrated. The IDPA is more in line with integrated appliances from rivals @Veritas, @Commvault and newcomers @Cohesity and @Rubrik, while the standard Data Domain appliance requires customers to use separate backup software. But despite the move into integrated appliances, the traditional DD appliances remain Dell EMC's flagship backup target products.

Along with the new DD3300, the Data Domain platform includes the midsize DD6300 and DD6800, and the DD9300 and DD9800 for large enterprises.

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/news/252434461/Dell-EMC-unveils-latest-Data-Domain-appliance

Cohesity CEO and Founder Mohit Aron to Host CEO Roundtable on the “Path of an Entrepreneur”

VANCOUVER, B.C., Jan. 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --  @Cohesity, the leader of #hyperconverged #secondarystorage, announced that its CEO and founder, @MohitAron, will be hosting an exclusive CEO roundtable breakfast on the “Path of an Entrepreneur” on Tuesday, Feb. 6, starting at 9:30 a.m. in Vancouver, Canada. Designed for IT decision makers, Aron will review the “Path of an Entrepreneur,” from his education and background to the creation of a disruptive technology, and the future of the secondary storage market. The talk will cover the most important lessons he has learned in his over 15 years of experience in building scalable, high-performance distributed systems. Many know him as the “father of hyperconvergence.” His career began at Google, where he was the lead developer on the Google File System. Later he went on to co-found Nutanix in 2009 and in 2013 founded his current company, Cohesity. What: CEO Roundtable on the “Path of an Entrepreneur” Who: Mohit Aron, CEO and Founder, Cohesity When: Tuesday, February 6, 9:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. Where: Vancouver Marriott Pinnacle Downtown Hotel 1128 West Hastings St. Vancouver, British Columbia Space is limited. Please RSVP here to join the roundtable.

https://americaclosed.com/vmware-layoffs-update-march-2018-warn-notice-159-job-cuts-even-dell-reverse-merger-rumors-spread/

Cohesity Presents Joint Solution With Cisco at Cisco Live 2018 Barcelona Conference

BARCELONA, Spain, Jan. 29, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- @Cohesity, the leader of #hyperconverged #secondarystorage, announced that it will reveal how leading enterprises are simplifying and consolidating their secondary storage infrastructures using a joint solution with @Cisco during two sessions at the Cisco Live 2018 conference in Barcelona. Cohesity Principal Solutions Architect Damien Philip will lead the presentation, “Hyperconverged secondary storage, data protection and much more,” scheduled to take place on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 1:50 - 2:05 p.m. local time (CET) and Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2:10 p.m. - 2:25 p.m. CET. Cohesity and Cisco partnered to simplify secondary storage infrastructure and put an enterprise’s data to use. Whether data resides on primary or secondary storage, Cisco and Cohesity can put all data to good use, which maximizes the return on any storage investment. Along with seeing how enterprises leverage the joint secondary storage solution from Cohesity and Cisco, attendees will learn how hyperconverged secondary storage is eliminating complexities of a siloed environment. Cohesity enables customers to increase efficiency and reduce total cost of ownership as well as leverage the economics of cloud services for secondary storage.

http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Cohesity-Presents-Joint-Solution-With-Cisco-at-Cisco-Live-2018-Barcelona-Conference-1014417775