2018 Partner Programs Guide: 5-Star Storage Vendors

@TheChannelCompany Storage Wars The storage system industry has been undergoing some serious consolidation in recent years with @Dell's $67 billion acquisition of storage systems giant @EMC in 2016, @Hewlett Packard Enterprise's $1.09 billion purchase of flash and hybrid storage developer @Nimble Storage last year, and @Western Digital's 2017 acquisition of flash storage maker @Tegile Systems. Meanwhile, all-flash/hybrid storage upstarts like @Pure Storage and @Tintri continue to challenge the established players while hyper-converged system developers like @Nutanix are challenging stand-alone storage system makers. And cloud storage service providers, from @Carbonite to @Amazon Web Services, and developers of #softwaredefined storage technology are challenging the very concept of on-premise data hardware systems. For solution providers, the challenge is deciding which vendors to work with. While a vendor's technology portfolio is a big part of that decision, so is a vendor's partner program and the perks, resources and assistance it offers solution providers to help them navigate the rapidly evolving data storage market. Here we present the 5-Star designees in the storage technology space.

https://www.crn.com/slide-shows/storage/300101511/2018-partner-programs-guide-5-star-storage-vendors.htm

How to transition to NVMe SSDs from SAS/SATA

Getting ahead of the SSD interface performance curve requires foresight and careful planning. As NVMe technology evolves, new adopters are looking for ways to ease the changeover. Nonvolatile memory express has emerged as the open logical device interface specification that future generations

of storage systems will be built upon, promising significant performance acceleration at economics that cannot be equaled by earlier generation SAS/SATA systems. In fact, when compared with NVMe SSDs, SAS and SATA have become legacy design interfaces. And IT experts are taking notice.

A growing number of enterprises are beginning to recognize that, if they truly want to benefit from SSD performance, they need to move toward NVMe technology with a direct attachment to the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) bus.

"This ... gets you as close as possible to the CPU," explained Ian McClarty, president of PhoenixNAP Global IT Services. The approach, he added, dramatically reduces latency and increases speeds through multiple PCIe lanes, thereby relieving the bottlenecks faced by SAS/SATA interface users.

Making the move

The transition to NVMe SSD technology will likely take place gradually over the next several years. Luckily for current SAS/SATA users, they don't have to face the immediate prospect of ripping and replacing their existing storage technology or attempting a forklift upgrade. "Instead, [new adopters] should look to implement future-proof architectures that will allow them to scale with new innovations in flash technology," said Jeff Baxter, chief evangelist of ONTAP at storage and data management software provider NetApp. "Some existing NVMe-ready solutions will allow customers to nondisruptively add new NVMe storage arrays directly into existing scale-out architectures and expand or move workloads as appropriate from current HDD or SAS/SATA-attached SSD arrays to NVMe SSD-based arrays over time," he added.

Before launching an NVMe transition, IT leaders should first determine whether their incumbent storage array is NVMe-capable. "In other words, is the array capable of seamlessly adding #NVMe SSDs without requiring a major reconfiguration or data migration?" asked @NarayanVenkat, @WesternDigital 's vice president of #datacenter systems for @Tegile #flash storage arrays. "If so, then simply replacing a few of the SAS/SATA SSDs with NVMe provides the benefits of instant performance acceleration without any disruption to applications."

Unfortunately, Venkat added, most incumbent storage systems aren't capable of seamless NVMe SSD support, since the products weren't designed from the outset with NVMe SSD compatibility in mind.

Navigating compatibility pitfalls

If an incumbent storage array isn't fully NVMe-compatible, as is typically the case, the only practical solution is to upgrade to an NVMe-based storage system that has been designed from the outset to take advantage of the speed and performance of NVMe SSDs. With this approach, managers can easily migrate applications and data to their new NVMe-based storage systems. "Migration is simple for virtualized environments, like VMware, as administrators can move virtual machines, along with applications and data, with a few clicks," Venkat observed.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/How-to-transition-to-NVMe-SSDs-from-SAS-SATA

Excitable backupper Exagrid eyes IPO

@Exagrid says it's steering a methodical path to an eventual IPO unlike reckless cash-burning storage startups that fail or need to be acquired (rescued). It says its final 2017 quarter was a blast with record bookings and revenue, rounding out a record bookings and revenue year. It gained more than 100 new customers in the quarter, a record number with a first purchase order in the six-figure range, and it opened offices in the Czech Republic, Israel and Australia. The competitive landscape has @Dell EMC #DataDomain as the giant in the space. But @Exagrid CEO and president @Bill Andrews claimed: "We are replacing more and more Data Domain installations. We are seeing @HP #StoreOnce less and less..." And @Rubrik? "We see Rubrik when the customer is looking to replace their backup application. We see Rubrik moving away from selling hardware so we hope that one day we can actually work with them." The @Nutanix #AHV base looks like an opportunity. "We see a great opportunity ahead of us working with the @Comtrade Software's HYCU product to penetrate Nutanix environments running the Nutanix AHV hypervisor versus @VMWare." Exagrid is scaling up its in-house sales effort. "We are in the process of doubling our inside sales team that prospects to find new opportunities. We have one calling centre in the US (Westborough, Massachusetts) and just opened up a second (Bedford). We are also opening up a call centre in Dublin, Ireland." A year ago Exagrid also announced a record fourth quarter, and talked about the possibility of an IPO. Andrews now says: "We are methodically building a sustainable company that can go public. We have met with over a dozen investment banking firms and know exactly what we have to do. "We are very different from all the other backup and storage companies that run hard, burn a ton of cash to grow their top line and then hit a wall and have to sell the company or close their doors such as Tintri, Tegile, Violin, Simplivity, Nimble, and many others." ®
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/08/exagrid_ipo_hopes/

iXsystems: 'weird' but profitable NAS vendor

Here’s something you rarely hear from high tech companies today: “We’re a hardware company in our heart and soul.” That is how executive vice president Brett Davis introduced iXsystems during a press tour in early December at the NAS vendor’s San Jose, California headquarters. The company sells open-source based TrueNAS enterprise hardware and FreeNAS desktop systems.

Self-identifying as a hardware company in this software-defined world is only one reason why iXsystems seems out of place in Silicon Valley. The vendor also bootstrapped its financing, turning a profit without accepting outside investment.

“We’re private, profitable and self-funded,” Davis said. “Our heritage goes back to the ‘90s. We’ve just been here. We say we’re unique, but you can say we’re weird.”

But it’s the hardware tag that provides most of the weirdness these days. The iXsystems headquarters includes a manufacturing facility in the back, where Davis said the 130-person company can fulfill 3,000 orders in a day.

The vendor claims more than 4,000 customers, including Sony, NBC, Duke University and NASA.

But the iXsystems strategy of bundling open-source storage software on commodity hardware isn’t that unusual.  Plenty of others do that, and label it software-defined storage. But only iXsytems boasts it’s a hardware company even if its value comes from open-source projects.

The company’s roots date to Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi), which started in 1991. iXsystems founders founders Mike Lauth and Matt Olander acquired the hardware business from BSDi in 2002. Lauth has been the CEO and Olander the CTO since then. From the start, iXsystems was heavily involved in the FreeBSD project and is the project leader for FreeNAS Storage and TrueOS Desktop open-source operating systems.

Davis said 70% of @iXsystems appliances are custom configurations. The vendor uses @Intel, @AMD and #ARM chips inside. The systems support @VMware, @Microsoft #HyperV, #Citrix, @KVM and @OpenStack #virtualization software, #Hadoop, @Docker and #MySQL data and container platforms, and @FreeNAS, @FreeBSD, @CentOS, @RedHat @Linux and  @Ubuntu #opensource software.

“We’ve been doing open source since way before it was cool,” Davis said. “We give away the number one software-defined storage (FreeNAS), but software and hardware are inseparable.”

iXsystems re-sold storage systems from Dot Hill, Infortrend and others in the late 2000s, but had to rely on those vendors for support. Now iXsystems provides end-to-end support for its storage. The company acquired the FreeNAS project in late 2009, and then spent two years re-writing the operating system before making it commercially available. iXsystems ported the OpenZFS open-source enterprise file system to FreeNAS. That gave FreeNAS file, block and object support, triple parity RAID, support for flash and unlimited instant snapshots.

@FreeNAS is file-only storage while @TrueNAS is unified storage with #FibreChannel networking support. TrueNAS competes with the likes of @DellEMC #VNXe and #Unity, @NetApp #FAS, @Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s #MSA2040 and @Nimble arrays, and @Western Digital’s @Tegile platform.

A more souped-up @iXsystems platform is planned for March with #NVMe support, but the vendor is staying quietly publicly about that for now.

Davis said iXsystems is staying out of hyper-convergence, even though it has all the pieces – including FreeBSD’s open-source bhyve hypervisor.

“We can run virtual machines and containers in FreeNAS,” he said. “We have the capabilities to do it, and we have our own hypervisor. But it’s a competitive space, and we have other plans.”

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/blog/Storage-Soup/iXsystems-weird-but-profitable-NAS-vendor

Global Data Center Storage market Impressive CAGR of +16% by 2022 – Industry Trends, Growth, Forecast, Strategic Analysis, Size and Share, Demand & Key Players like Dell EMC, Net APP, HP, IBM, Dell, Hitachi Data System, Huawei, Fujitsu, Data Direct Network, American Megatrends, Lenovo, Nimbus Data, Overland Storage

Data center storage is the collective term used to define the tools, technologies and processes to design, implement, manage and monitor storage infrastructure and resources within a data center. It is part of the data center infrastructure and includes all IT/data center assets that directly or indirectly play a part in storage within a data center. Get Sample Report @ https://www.researchnreports.com/request_sample.php?id=165980 Worldwide Data Center Storage Market is expected to reach approx. US$ +30 billion till 2022. Competition among the existing vendors is very high owing to the increase in data generated and processed by enterprises. Almost all the vendors in the storage market offer SAN, NAS, and DAS storage with few already experiencing increased revenue through the use of flash-based storage systems and others continuing innovations in existing and advanced systems specific to business needs. Key Players Profiled in this Report: @Dell EMC, @NetAPP, @HP, @IBM, @DellTe, @Hitachi Data System, @Huawei, @Fujitsu, Data Direct Network, @AmericanMegatrends, @Lenovo, @Nfina, @Nimbus Data, @Overland Storage, @Oracle, @Pure Storage, @Promise Technology, @Quanta Computer, @Netgear, @Tegile, @Tintri, @Toshiba, @Violin Memory, @X-IO Technologies, @Supermicro. Regions Covered: United States, North America, China, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia, India and RoW. The strong trends shaping the growth pattern of this market are examined in the report in detail, in addition to the numerous marketing channels for the industry and their respective importance. In accordance with this information detailing the various aspects of this market, the report examines the links between the Data Center Storage industry and this market, including an upstream raw materials and downstream demand analysis. Get Reasonable Discount on this Report: https://www.researchnreports.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=165980        The publication has estimated the sales forecast values for the Global Data Center Storage Market for the period 2017–2022. The forecast of the sales growth of the market sales has also been calculated on the basis of type, application, and region. A section on the evaluation of market effect factors has shed light upon some of the most crucial aspects such as an environmental change due to economic or political reasons, change in consumer preference, and technological evolution in associated sectors. The research on the global data center storage market will be useful to investors, regularity authorities, and policy makers, state the analysts. Independent research institutions, commercial entities, and non-profit organization in this sector can also benefit from the report. Key companies operating in the global data center storage market are profiled by considering factors such as capacity production, products/services, applications, cost, gross, and revenue.

http://www.satprnews.com/2017/11/12/global-data-center-storage-market-impressive-cagr-of-16-by-2022-industry-trends-growth-forecast-strategic-analysis-size-and-share-demand-key-players-like-dell-emc-net-app-hp-i/

Lexar And Tegile Acquisitions

Merger and acquisition activity in the digital storage industry continues as buyers jockey to fill holes in their offerings and sellers try to cash in or recapitalize their products or spin out non-core product offerings. This was the case as #WesternDigital acquired acquired flash memory system company #Tegile and Chinese flash company #Longsys acquired the #Lexar brand from #Micron. Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: #WDC) and #Tegile Systems (“Tegile”) announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Tegile, a leading provider of flash and persistent-memory storage solutions for enterprise data center applications, will be acquired by Western Digital. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Advertisement  Tegile has been a pioneer in flash storage systems since 2012. With its IntelliFlash™ architecture, Tegile has pioneered a comprehensive flash storage platform. Tegile will bring to Western Digital over 1,700 new customers, a profitable product portfolio, and an experienced team with a proven ability to deliver value to customers. UNICEF USAVoiceThe Best Way To Help Children Recovering From Hurricane Harvey Now The Tegile acquisition joins several other flash memory acquisitions over the years and represents another effort by the company to move beyond storage components such as hard disk drives, flash memory and solid state drives and into the enterprise storage systems business. WD current storage systems include their active archive solution as well as data center flash products. Micron has been trying to sell its consumer flash memory business under the Lexar brand for many months, and recently Chinese comsumer flash memory company, Longsys, offered to buy the trade mark and branding rights. This acquisition provides assurance to existing Lexar customers that the solutions and support they have come to expect from Lexar branded products will continue to be available. Additionally, the market reach and product breadth provided by Longsys promises to expand the Lexar customer experience into new market segments and geographies.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2017/09/10/lexar-and-tegile-acquisitions/?c=0&s=trending#37df20951365

Tegile set to compete with big six with cheaper arrays, says CEO

#Tegile ’s takeover by #WesternDigital will propel it to competition with the big six storage array makers, as well as bring economies of scale and see #NVMf and #3DXpoint products Tegile is looking forward to #NVMeoverfabrics, storage-class memory and cheaper storage arrays, according to Tegile CEO Rohit Kshetrapal. He believes the purchase of Tegile by Western Digital will bring investment for the all-flash/hybrid flash storage makers next stage of development, as well as put Western Digital on the same terrain as the big six storage makers.

“When Tegile becomes a Western Digital brand it will no longer be a smaller entity and will have access to global markets,” he said.

“It currently isn’t one of the bix six [storage suppliers], but has a definite strategy to go up into the software stack, becoming a vertically integrated company from memory chips to software platforms.”

Western Digital has primarily been a supplier of storage media, such as spinning disk and solid state, but already has its Active Archive object storage. “Tegile will be its performance array product,” said Kshetrapal.

He added that Tegile – which has around 1,750 customers and 3,200 arrays deployed – needs more capital for its next stage of expansion, and that its purchase by Western Digital will provide this.

Roadmap items include NVMe-over-fabrics – it has recently launched NVMe-equipped arrays – and so-called storage-class memory such as 3D Xpoint.

But what of the NVMe-controller bottleneck? While access to storage is potentially orders of magnitude quicker using NVMe, it currently cannot realise that potential in array format because the storage controller is a bottleneck.

Systems mooted centre on the aggregation of CPU resources from clustered or disaggregated controller functionality. “There are many paths in that development process, but we will see products on a six- to nine-month horizon,” said Kshetrapal.

He believes being part of Western Digital would help bring array prices down for Tegile customers. “We will be able to make economies of scale as a result of being part of Western Digital, which will give us advantages over competitors. Arrays will not be as expensive to customers any more,” he added.

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450425726/Tegile-set-to-compete-with-big-six-with-cheaper-arrays-says-CEO

Western Digital Is Buying This Flash Storage Company

#WesternDigital says it is acquiring #Tegile, a specialist in fast "flash" storage systems. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Flash storage systems incorporate solid-state storage, which is faster but can be more delicate than the disk storage that dominated in most companies' data centers up until recently. Flash storage is also more pricey than disk drives although that cost has been falling. Tegile's move comes three months after [f500link] #HewlettPackardEnterprise ( #HPE , +0.73%) paid $1 billion to acquire #NimbleStorage, another flash storage seller and rival to Tegile and #PureStorage (PSTG, +3.02%), among others. Interestingly, HPE's former chief technology officer Martin Fink, who had retired from that company in 2016, came out of retirement early this year to become CTO of Western Digital. SMARTPHONES It’s Google Vs. Apple in the Race for AR Integrated Smartphones San Jose-based Western Digital (WDC, -0.54%) has been a Tegile investor for a few years, and led a Series E funding round of $33 million in April. Overall, Tegile, Newark, Calif., had taken in about $175 million in venture funding since it was founded in 2009.

http://fortune.com/2017/08/29/western-digital-tegile/

How the leading all-flash array vendors meet storage demands

Here, we will examine products from the eight leading all-flash array vendors -- #DellEMC, #Hitachi Data Systems Corp., Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( #HPE ), #IBM, #Kaminario Inc., #NetApp Inc., #PureStorage Inc. and #Tegile Systems Inc. Note that all of the all-flash array vendors offer compression and deduplication. These technologies, when combined, can provide up to a 100 times or greater reduction in data. For instance, a system storing 100 virtual machine virtual drives may have more than 95% of the data from each image duplicated in all 100 images, resulting in a nearly 100 times reduction with deduplication. On the other hand, an encrypted, compressed video file may not benefit from either deduplication or compression. When possible, we have listed the raw capacities of the systems; when those were not available, we noted the claimed effective capacity, which is usually three to five times the raw capacity. Some vendors guarantee the effective capacity.
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/feature/How-the-leading-all-flash-array-vendors-meet-storage-demands

Tegile Releases Its Latest IntelliFlash HD

Today #Tegile Systems released the latest version of its flagship #IntelliFlash HD multi-tiered flash storage platform. This new version enables customers to take advantage of #NVMe technology without the risk or resources that are typically associated with it. According to Tegile, the new IntelliFlash HD contains the highest density flash available on the market, provides full encryption, and can store 30% more petabytes of data for any application use case and every workload, at a fraction of the normal cost.

http://www.storagereview.com/tegile_releases_its_latest_intelliflash_hd

Global Enterprise Flash Storage Market 2017 – Pure Storage Inc., Virident Systems, Inc., Violin Memory Inc., Oracle Corporation, NetApp Inc.

The worldwide Enterprise #FlashStorage Market report launched by Market.biz focuses on a complete and accurate study of Enterprise Flash Storage industry. Global Enterprise Flash Storage Market 2017 report is fundamentally concentrated on current scenario of Enterprise Flash Storage market. This comprehensive research document will improve the efficiency of the Enterprise Flash Storage market during the forecast period from 2017 to 2022. The Enterprise Flash Storage industry report covers different aspects of market such as Enterprise Flash Storage Market Segment, Enterprise Flash Storage categories of the product, market revenue and product cost. The report also shows the Enterprise Flash Storage market volume for every category during the forecast period. Do Inquiry Before Purchasing the Report Here: https://market.biz/report/global-enterprise-flash-storage-market-2017/99239/#inquiry Competitive Research of Global Enterprise #FlashStorage Market 2017 Based on Key Vendors: 1 #Pure Storage Inc. 2 #Virident Systems, Inc. 3 #Violin Memory Inc. 4 #Oracle Corporation 5 #NetApp Inc. 6 #EMC Corporation 7 #Kaminario Inc. 8 #Nimble Storage Inc. 9 #Nimbus Data Systems Inc. 10 #Skyera Inc. 11 #Tegile Systems, Inc. 12 #WesternDigital Corporation 13 #WhipTail Technologies, Inc. 14 #LSI Corporation 15 #FusionIO, Inc.

http://registrardaily.com/2017/06/13/global-enterprise-flash-storage-market-2017/

Tegile’s Kristy Morris Recognized on CRN’s 2017 Women of the Channel List

NEWARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--#Tegile Systems, the leading provider of flash-driven storage arrays for databases, virtualized server and virtual desktop environments, today announced that CRN has named Kristy Morris, vice president of demand generation and channel marketing, to its prestigious 2017 Women of the Channel list. This annual highly-respected list recognizes influential women for their outstanding leadership, vision and unique role in driving channel growth and cinnovation.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170515005364/en/Tegile%E2%80%99s-Kristy-Morris-Recognized-CRN%E2%80%99s-2017-Women

We are deeply troubled by the ... depth of Toshiba’s desperation'

Round-up The week has seen an acceleration of #NVME news - #Aparna, #Intel, #Micron, and #XIO - and cloud-related news as well, with #Rubrik picking up a huge funding round. These were the headline items but there was a whole lot more going on and here's a representative selection. #Code42 Backup provider Code42 is partnering with #Okta, which it calls the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise. Okta's single sign-on authentication works alongside Code42's data security and visibility tools to help protect data shared in the cloud. Through Okta, IT can manage employees access to any application or device, allowing users to sign on across domains with a single online identity. Joe Payne, CEO and president at Code42, issued a canned quote: "Our customers are deploying in the cloud at an increasing rate and to do that effectively they need the world's leading cloud-based identity security technology." The company's CTO, John Durant, said: "This partnership helps organizations strike the balance between data security and user productivity. By running unobtrusively in the background, it allows users to quickly start doing actual work while giving administrators peace of mind." Code42 has a technology integration with Okta and its Identity Cloud. By passing authentication details from the users' organisational credentials to the service provider in a secure and private manner, Code42 customers can sign onto a secure cloud from different organizations and multiple points of entry. The Code42 customers can also sync users and groups with Active Directory for free via Okta Cloud Connect (OCC). The linking of security and backup in the cloud is becoming stronger and stronger. Datrium DVX storage array supplier Datrium, in a move that will baffle and surprise Sphere3D doubters, has partnered with Sphere3D to the extent that the latter's HVE line has obtained "Datrium ready" nodes certification. Sphere 3D is offering Datrium Ready Nodes on its HVE server line. Datrium marketing VP Craig Nunes told us: "We have primarily been working with the HVE guys. They have been doing good business with us in the channel, and was the impetus for them creating the Datrium Ready Node bundles." Datrium's own DVX Compute Nodes are Dell-based. Sphere 3D bought HVE (Hybrid Virtualization Engine) ConneXions in January. Previously it has experienced an angry investor pushing for a major restructuring, and it’s odd microvisor line has puzzled people, along with its consistent multi-quarter, multi-year loss-making. HVE “Datrium ready” node bundles combine Datrium DVX data nodes with HVE servers as compute nodes. The servers are preconfigured with Datrium DVX software and host-local flash, together with the appropriate networking to support a turnkey implementation. There are server bundles available in two distinct sets of configurations for different workloads: Server virtualization bundles are benchmarked to provide 50, 100, and 200+ virtual machines with consistent application performance and scalability, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), bundles are benchmarked to provide 250, 500, or 1000+ virtual desktops with predictable end-user friendly performance and scalability. A customer provided a quote. Eddie Alford, Director of Technology, Azle ISD, said: "“Azle Independent School District (ISD) has been partnering with HVE for more than four years. Their VDI products as well as their server virtualization has been a key part of our operations. This past year, we purchased Datrium. The integration of Datrium into our existing HVE server virtualization has been seamless and connected with our network without issue. We are very pleased with our open convergence solution.” Time to re-evaluate Sphere 3D then. Druva End-point protector and file sharer Druva, calling itself a cloud-first SaaS supplier, has set up new cloud data centre offerings in Canada, the UK and Hong Kong. It says customers there can host their data in locations that best meet their specific requirements around data residency, location and transfer. They can run secure deployments in compliance with local and regional data protection and privacy rules. For example, Canadian customers can store data in accordance with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which sets guidelines on how, and where, Canadian citizen data is stored. In the UK, as it begins the process of leaving the European Union, as part of Brexit, Druva says its data centre "will be critical for meeting data sovereignty regulations." And the new Hong Kong region will give customers there the ability to meet the varying local data protection guidelines of the region. Druva's public cloud is based on the public cloud vendor infrastructure, such as Azure. Check out Druva's public cloud features here. Nexenta Open source storage software supplier Nexenta has upgraded its Edge product, a scale-out block, file, and object storage platform to v2.0, and says it features: Delivery of iSCSI block, NFS file and S3 and Swift object services Web-based GUI for management and service provisioning Patent-pending Quick Erasure Coding (Quick EC) technology for both active and cold object archives Cluster-wide inline deduplication, compression and unlimited snapshots/clones Strengthened support for Docker Container-Converged infrastructure with seamless integration with Docker Universal Control Plane for single pane of glass management of containerized applications All-flash deployment profiles with support for SSD SATA, SAS and NVMe-based storage SSDs Shared namespace between file and object storage Nexenta's director of product management Oscar Wahlberg gave out a canned quote: "With the introduction of NexentaEdge 2.0, features like Quick EC allow customers to build multi-petabyte, capacity-optimized object archives without sacrificing performance and use the same solution to create a container-converged storage infrastructure with tight integration and seamless management.” The company stresses that Edge object storage is fast, claiming that its Quick EC technology works without affecting read or write performance. It "eliminates the performance penalty usually associated with accessing objects in traditional erasure coded solutions and is especially beneficial, for large capacity S3 object clusters." Carrying on the Edge product's container focus, the Docker Engine plug-ins enable integration into any Docker Enterprise Edition deployment and users can deploy storage and application services as containers, across servers that provide both storage and compute in a container-converged model. The Edge product seems to us to be instrumental in moving Nexenta into non-ZFS (NexentaStor) environment, and its sales should rise as users adopt Docker containers Toshiba Toshiba says that NetApp SolidFire SF4805, SF9605 and SF19210 all-flash arrays are using its non-encrypted HK4 SATA SSDs. Daniel Berg, VP SolidFire production operations at NetApp, said: “With the addition of Toshiba’s non-encrypted SSDs, NetApp SolidFire products can now address markets where non-encrypted drives are required.” This news snippet is another pointer to the worth of Toshiba's memory business. That memory business sale saga is ongoing. A JP Morgan analyst, Rod Hall, thinks that if WDC were to buy the thing it could see its earnings go up 30 per cent. An $18bn deal to buy the memory business could be entirely debt-funded. This Barron's blog has more on the topic. WD CFO Mark Long said: "We are deeply troubled by the tension between the depth of Toshiba’s desperation and their willingness to do things that we didn’t think they would do in other situations. A lot of this, in the initial phases, is going to be overshadowed by the desperation of Toshiba to deal with their crisis as it has grown from a problem to an all-consuming disaster." WDC reckons it has veto rights over any sale, apparently disputed by Toshiba, which could get cash for its recapitalisation from higher bids than WDC's. Bits and pieces DCIG says its 2017-18 Small/Midsize Enterprise All-flash Array Buyer’s Guide id available. It says the guide weights, scores and ranks more than 100 features of twenty-four (24) small/midsize enterprise-class all-flash arrays that achieved rankings of Recommended or Excellent. These products come from eleven (11) vendors including Dell EMC, Fujitsu, iXsystems, Kaminario, NEC, NetApp, Nimble Storage, Pivot3, Pure Storage, Tegile, and Tintri. More info here. E8 Storage says a major but unnamed financial institution in New York City has deployed its high-availability, shared NVMe flash storage E8-D24 appliance, using dual-port Intel data centre SSDs. The E8-D24 shared storage replaces local SSD storage in servers because the NVMe speed network access is effectively as fast as local SSD access and provides a larger and shared flash store than a individual server or workstation's direct-attach SSDs. NetApp is closing down separate SolidFire.com, with marketeer James Whitemore saying: "Today (Friday), everything gets fully Intergrated into NetApp.com.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/05/week_storage_news/

Enterprises Look to the Data Center to Fuel Business Innovation, Says New Report from Tegile

NEWARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Organizations are adopting more virtualized workloads and #flashstorage in hybrid data center environments, according to the 2017 State of Storage in Virtualization report released today by ActualTech Media and #Tegile Systems. This and other findings from the survey suggest the increase in popularity of both virtualization and hybrid storage are inspired by a need for greater automation, reliability and faster access when it comes to business data and applications

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170418005584/en/Enterprises-Data-Center-Fuel-Business-Innovation-Report

Tegile Systems sees opportunities in NVMe, HPE-Nimble buy

The #Tegile CEO talks about how the #allflash market is shaping up with the advent of NVM express, and how his company is battling against the major data storage vendors.

Like most flash array vendors, Tegile Systems Inc. is waiting for advances such as nonvolatile memory express, or #NVMe, and #3DXPoint to become market reality. The vendor is banking on its flash design to maximize those technologies, compared to legacy systems originally built for HDDs. #HPE #Nimble

Unlike established vendors who come from the hard-disk world and newcomers who built all-flash arrays from the start, Tegile started in hybrids. It had flash in all of its arrays from the start in 2012, but added all-flash a few years later. Now, it has two flash platforms: The Tegile IntelliFlash T Series is based on the vendor's own technology, and the Tegile IntelliFlash HD(high density) incorporates chassis from partner SanDisk -- now Western Digital -- for higher-capacity loads.

SearchSolidStateStorage talked to Tegile Systems' CEO, Rohit Kshetrapal, about the latest developments in the flash storage market. We discussed Tegile Systems' NVMe plans, how customers are using flash and the cloud, the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) acquisition of Nimble Storage and why an initial public offering (IPO) is not in the near-term future.

What is the mix among your customers between all-flash and hybrid arrays?

Kshetrapal: I would say in excess of 60% of our business has become all-flash. As we see the economics changing and larger-sized flash drives coming in, we hear less discussion around hybrids. The exception is when people may want a disaster recovery box.

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/news/450415202/Tegile-Systems-sees-opportunities-in-NVMe-HPE-Nimble-buy

Microsoft, AWS, IBM, HPE Join Growing Hybrid Cloud Alliance

Some of the world’s main cloud and storage leaders have become the first members of the latest industry alliance that seeks to bring together complementary technology companies to deliver hybrid cloud and business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) solutions to market. The Zerto Alliance Partner (ZAP) Program for Technical Alliances has been launched by cloud solutions provider Zerto and was put in place to be used by infrastructure and software companies with the tools to deliver enterprises solutions for application protection and mobility for enterprises’ public, private and hybrid cloud environments. The Technical Alliance builds on Zerto’s existing alliance partner program. Some of the first members to enter the program include #Microsoft, #AWS, #IBM, #HPE, #Nutanix, #PureStorage, #Quantum Corporation, #Nimble Storage, #ExaGrid, #Infinidat, #Kaminario, #Pivot3, #Tegile, #Embotics and #Turbonomics. Feliz Montpellier, Worldwide Leader, Global ISV Alliances, Microsoft, said: “As more and more organisations move to Microsoft #Azure, our relationship with Zerto continues to build and adds tremendous value to our customer base. “Zerto’s solution for Microsoft Azure not only provides our customers with the BC/DR and hybrid cloud capabilities they need, but the coordinated go-to-market activities will help bring innovative products to market to help enterprises garner more value from their IT investments.” Venugopal Pai, Vice President of Alliance and Business Development at Nutanix, said: “Nutanix has been leading the charge to help organisations worldwide make the transition to Enterprise Clouds that have the agility and scalability of public clouds with predictability and control of on premise infrastructure.” Peter Kerr, Director of Technical Alliances, Zerto, said: “This program expansion serves to formalise a platform that provides more joint value between Zerto and our alliance partners to mutually grow our businesses, while helping to better serve customers.”

https://data-economy.com/microsoft-aws-ibm-hpe-join-growing-hybrid-cloud-alliance/

Flash or SDS? Finding the Right Path for your Infrastructure

#Softwaredefinedstorage has tremendous potential. The ability to decouple storage from the applications and systems that use those resources can yield huge benefits for businesses, allowing them to quickly scale capacity when it’s needed and maximise the utilization of infrastructure. That’s the theory, at least. But while #SDS has taken off quickly in test and dev environments, its adoption for production use hasn’t been as swift. According to Gartner, last year just 14% of enterprises were using SDS broadly in production. As it turns out, software defined storage is hard to do right. Deploying any new stack can be a long, complex journey, and decoupling software from hardware introduces complexities that are hard to manage, particularly in a DIY deployment. It’s easy to get tripped up by driver and software compatibility issues, and the architecture needs to be just right to guarantee performance. Integrating flash in a way that maximises its benefits is even harder. In short, customers are having a hard time identifying the unique pain point that makes overcoming these challenges worthwhile. The “Apple” Infrastructure Model This difficulty leaves a lot of what software defined storage has to offer on the table. But there’s another route that allows customers to leverage the benefits of both virtualized storage and flash without the heavy investment in man hours required to build out a DIY SDS architecture. A converged appliance that integrates software and hardware in a single, pre-configured system removes a lot of the uncertainty from virtualizing storage, while still leveraging the plugins and APIs that automate many of the traditionally cumbersome provisioning tasks - one of the key tenets of SDS. Tightly coupling hardware and software yields greater efficiencies, such as being able to aggregate storage resources into a pool that can be scaled and allocated virtually to applications (think of of the efficiencies with Apple’s hardware-software coupling approach to their consumer electronics). And an appliance can be designed and configured to specifically support the evolving needs of the business Moreover, the best appliances offer software tools for intelligent management of the storage architecture, including cloud-based analytics that provide visibility across the entire IT stack and at the virtual-machine level. The Hype of Hyper-converged Systems There’s another path to storage virtualization in the form of a hyper-converged system, where storage, network and compute are tightly woven together. These systems are easy to set-up, which helps to explain why some analysts see hyper-converged as the fastest-growing sector of the software-defined storage market. But anyone who’s gone this route can tell you that demand for compute and storage rarely scale linearly. If your compute needs outstrip the capacity of the system, you need to buy a new box and existing storage is left stranded. Hyper-converged systems also tend to rely on proprietary protocols and interfaces, which makes them hard to integrate with existing infrastructure. On top of that, servers refresh every two to three years, storage refreshes every three to five years and networking gear refreshes every five to seven years. With hyper-converged systems, it can be possible that technologies can quickly become out of sync with best of breed products. This can be a problem given that IT is now leveraged as a competitive differentiator. Conversely, a good storage appliance can integrate with your existing infrastructure. So while the ease-of-use gains from a hyper-converged solution can be significant, the trade-offs mean it won’t be a good fit for everyone. You Can’t Do It Alone As storage needs evolve further, particularly with the growth of real-time analytics for marketing and other needs, flash becomes a greater necessity. But most customers simply can’t expect to build flash arrays in house and expect the type of efficiency achieved by specialist vendors. Managing the various storage tiers and moving data around based on performance needs is another task highly suited to converged systems. Before you set out on any new storage project, get a clear sense of the pain points in your organization now. Look at the applications coming over the horizon and determine which might be suitable candidates for virtualized storage. Then determine which solution is right for you, based on what you’re trying to achieve. (About the author: Rajesh Nair is co-founder and chief technology officer of Tegile Systems, where he leads technology and product development of Tegile's flash storage portfolio. He brings over 19 years of engineering and product development experience.)

http://www.information-management.com/news/infrastructure/flash-or-sds-finding-the-right-path-for-your-infrastructure-10030467-1.html

Tegile Launches T4000 Series to Power Enterprises With Persistent Memory

NEWARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- #Tegile Systems, the leading provider of flash-driven storage arrays for databases, virtualized server and virtual desktop environments, today announced its new T4000 Series of all-flash and hybrid arrays. The new arrays feature multiple classes of persistent memory, greater processing power and industry leading density. With these advancements, Tegile arrays fully support large and midsized organizations seeking faster, more efficient storage to fuel their enterprise applications. New and existing customers that deploy the T4000 Series will also gain access to the IntelliCare™ Operations Center, a cloud-based management portal.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161117005387/en/Tegile-Launches-T4000-Series-Power-Enterprises-Persistent

Tegile and Splunk Unleash the Power of IoT Data With Scalable Storage Performance and Capacity

NEWARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- #Tegile Systems, the leading provider of flash-driven storage arrays for databases, virtualized server and virtual desktop environments, today announced a partnership to run #Splunk analytics on Tegile #IntelliFlash. Through the integration, businesses of all sizes are able to capture insights from the explosion of machine-generated data (MGD) and Internet of Things ( #IoT ) data by combining Splunk’s operational intelligence platform with Tegile’s unique storage infrastructure, which scales both storage performance and capacity without disruption

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160929005305/en/Tegile-Splunk-Unleash-Power-IoT-Data-Scalable

Tegile Launches IntelliFlash Cloud Platform at VMworld 2016

#VMworld, Booth #2057 – #Tegile Systems, the leading provider of multi-tiered flash storage arrays that enable enterprises to transition to an all-flash data center, today announced its #IntelliFlash Cloud Platform (CP) at VMworld 2016. This rack scale all-flash platform is designed for Fortune 1000 enterprise companies looking to achieve both the cost benefits of cloud architectures and the reliability and control of on-premises storage solutions. IntelliFlash CP touts scale-out functionality through multi-controller clusters and Non-Volatile Memory Express ( #NVMe ) to equip enterprises with the optimal storage performance to cost-effectively build a private cloud.
“High-density flash combined with a very fast storage access layer will be paramount to data center transformation,” said Tim Stammers, senior analyst at 451 Research. “We expect architectures like IntelliFlash CP to deliver a strong combination of performance, capacity and economics.”

IntelliFlash CP will stitch together multiple controllers to provide the ability to scale out horizontally and vertically across protocols. Controllers will be shared across a global namespace and have shared access to multiple grades of media that data is intelligently placed upon. As a result, enterprises will be able to build massively scalable infrastructure with up to tens of petabytes of flash storage. Enterprises will experience the resulting performance gains and benefit from pricing that is better than public cloud offerings.

IntelliFlash CP lays the foundation for an integrated system that will use NVMe to massively reduce network latency to meet the enterprise need for real-time access to data. By leveraging NVMe to connect SSDs to the controller plane, IntelliFlash CP will be able to provide memory-to-memory transfers nearly as fast as accessing local file storage at sub-millisecond latencies. This is unprecedented latency in the storage industry.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tegile-launches-intelliflash-cloud-platform-150000476.html