Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Swissbit targets high-end SSDs

Known by its wide product line, Swissbit, the European leader in Flash media and SSD, has accelerated its strategy for enterprises and data centers market segments. In 2021, the company has acquired the German company Hyperstone, a SATA controller player for SSDs, to confirm its move. But SATA is definitely not enough for this demanding area with PCIe 4, 5 and soon 6 and NVMe. NVMe was a big change for storage infrastructure also with its network companion. It helps to fill the gap between the access performance need and the capability provided by internal devices. For our readers, it's worth mentioning that NVMe provides a series of a significant improvements with number of 64k queues and 64k commands per queue which is a big gap with SATA with a single queue and 32 commands and SAS still with a single queue and 256 commands. Coupled with PCIe, the performance delivered its massive with examples like 14,000 MB/s for sequential read, 10,000MB/s for sequential write, 3,200K IOPS in random read from a FADU SSD example.


More recently with the AI pressure but also its opportunity, the firm has chosen to partner with Burlywood Technology, a Colorado-based specialist, founded in 2015 with a minimum of $20 million raised, to enter the enterprise and data center SSD segment. It was announced in September 2022. Since that, it appears that Burlywood disappeared and it seems that Swissbit silently absorbed Burlywood. In fact, Swissbit acquired the asset and some of employees joined the German band like Tod Earhart, the founder, original CEO and later CTO of Burlywood. The company has been shutdown after this move and obviously the web site is not longer accessible.

We expect NVMe SSD for data center and enterprises in the next few quarters, in 2025.
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Friday, October 11, 2024

Hydrolix shakes the data lake landscape

Hydrolix, a fast growing data lake vendor, joined for the first time The IT Press Tour this week in Boston. The company was founded in 2018 by Marty Kagan, CEO, and Hasan Alayli, CTO, and raised so far $65 million with 4 VC rounds. They both worked in the past at Cedexis, later acquired by Citrix.


The company develops an observability platform able to process real-time logs leveraging S3 storage coupled with independent ingest and query service layers. It includes real-time ETL, combination of multiple sources into 1 single table and SQL and Spark to ingest. The solution can store PBs of data with a very efficient compression techniques with 20:1 and even 50:1 ratios.

The architecture shown below shows the scalability of each element independently of others.


Orchestrated by Kubernetes, it is deployable on-premises but also in the cloud with Azure AKS, AWS EKS, Google GKE and also Akamai LKE following their Linode acquisition. Data connectors accepted so far are Splunk, Spark and Kibana.

In terms of use cases, the solution is positioned for platform and network observability, compliance, SIEM, multi-CDN observability and traffic steering, real user monitoring or ML/AI for anomaly detection...

At Paramount for instance, the numbers are impressive illustrating pretty well the scalability of the Hydrolix platform. The Peak ingestion rate if 10.8million rows/sec for a total of 53 billion records collected and 41TiB compressed into 5.76TiB. At peak, across all clients, it delivers 20 million rows/sec for 100 billion log lines.

The product is often compared with Snowflake and Big Query, here is below the comparison against the first one.
We anticipate an acceleration fo the business in the coming quarters as the trajectory is already impressive...
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Thursday, October 10, 2024

Congruity360, a very comprehensive file management solution

Congruity360, an established data management player, joined the 58th edition of The IT Press Tour this week in Boston. We spoke with Mark Ward, COO, about enterprises' pains and how the company solves and addresses these challenges.


Founded in 2016 close to Boston, MA, the firm has raised so far $25 million in 2 rounds. They also acquired 2 companies Seven10 Software and NextGen Storage respectively in 2020 and 2017. Seven10 was absorbed to improve the data migration services offering with StorFirst, a well recognized virtual file system, on top of file servers, object storage instances and CAS solutions. In 2022, Park Place Technologies has purchased the StorFirst software platform from Congruity360.

The product Classify360 targets unstructured data and groups several key functions enterprises must adopt like storage optimization, cloud migration, data protection, DSPM for Data Security Posture Management, AI enablement and GRC for Governance, Risk & Compliance. They compete against several point solutions but also a few integrated ones and the market is rich in this domain as the pain exists for a few decades, being even more critical with a fast growing unstructured data volume for the last 2 decades.

It works with 3 simple efficient steps. The 1st obvious step is based on the knowledge of the environment with files, folders and content analysis, then a classification phase leveraging supervised machine learning followed by some actions fueled by a series of policies to delete, tag, move, secure, deduplicate, encrypt, alert or other custom operations.

The product works with several data sources like file servers supporting NFS and SMB but also object storage with S3 and collaboration solutions such as Office365, Google Workspace, Microsoft Exchange, OneDrive & Azure, Box, Slack, NetApp, Dell EMC...


The company plans to announce product iterations to extend data governance based on AI and DSPM. We'll learn more about this very soon now.

In terms of business model, Congruity360 sells only via channel partners.
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Wednesday, October 09, 2024

Swissbit, an European champion

Swissbit, the European leader in flash media and SSD, joined yesterday the 58th edition of The IT Press Tour in Boston. We had the opportunity to meet Matthias Poppel, CSMO, Grady Lambert, GM North America, and Chris Colliers, IAM Technologist.

The company with its headquarter in Bronschhofen, Switzerland, targets data and identities with trusted products to deliver a strong connected world fully digitized.

To cover some key milestones for Swissbit, everything started in 2001 via a MBO from Siemens Memory, then in 2008 with the creation of industrial memory solution activity, 2013 with security solutions, 2014 and 2019 for SSD and production unit in Berlin, Germany, 2020 with a key investment for Ardian, the acquisition of Hyperstone for SATA SSD controller in 2021, and I add 2 key events, the partnership with Burlywood Technology announced in 2022 to enter the data center SSD segment that finally translated into the acquisition of the Colorado entity.

Today with 400 employees, 5,000 customers and a production capacity of 3 million unit per month, the company revenue appears to be in the rand of multiple 100s of millions of euros.


The product team has chosen a strong list of partners for NAND and SSD controllers with Kioxia, Phison, Micron, FADU, Samsung, Silicon Motion and SK Hynix in addition to their Hyperstone and Burlywood assets.

In terms of market segments, Swissbit promotes reliable data storage, data protection and digital identity and secure access to 8 key sectors: industrial automation, enterprise and networking/communications, edge computing, transportation, critical infrastructure (medical, financial, utilities), defense, industrial PC and public sector and governmental agencies.

For data storage, the product line is designed to address industrial, networking and enterprise data storage.

One aspect, strategic for all enterprises being more and more distributed, is their capability to process data where it sis generated i.e at the edge. This is the case with some oems like Lenovo with the ThinkEdge line which embeds the Swissbit 1TB N3000 SSD or Nvidia BlueFiled-3 DPU with the Swissbit 128GB EM-30e.MMC. Same approach for Automotive fleet. This is even more a sensitive aspect with AI present everywhere that requires fast and reliable storage instances.

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Wednesday, October 02, 2024

Boston, The IT Press Tour #58 is coming

The 58th IT Press Tour will land in a few days in Boston, MA.

Topics will be about IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, security, data management and storage with 8 innovative companies, among them:
  • Congruity360, a leader in unstructured data management,
  • HYCU, a reference in SaaS backup,
  • Hydrolix, key player in log-intensive data platform,
  • iRODS, the open source key solution for data management,
  • Swissbit, the European leader in flash media storage,
  • and Wasabi Technologies, the pioneer of hot cloud storage.
I invite you to follow us on Twitter with #ITPT and @ITPressTour, my twitter handle and @CDP_FST and journalists' respective handle.
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Tuesday, September 17, 2024

MooseFS, a confidential pioneer that deserves a try

Distributed file system is a hot topic for many years with many initiatives both commercial and open source. In the open source world, it exists lots of projects but MooseFS has a special identity with this 20 years old, it is one of the pioneers in the domain. We can also listed Gluster, Lustre, Ceph, SaunaFS, RozoFS, BeeGFS, OrangeFS or XtreemFS and some commercial offering from Weka, Quobyte or Panasas to name a few.

Many of these had their roots with the famous Google file system paper published in 2003. The philosophy relies on 2 elements: a backing store fueled by a series of data servers what is called here chunks servers, a directory engine for data placement, locking... controlled by a central servers named here metadata server and one of them is the leader coupled with followers and finally the client layer which represents the access layer, where the file system is exposed. Chunk servers are running Linux and their local disks are formatted with classic disk file systems such as xfs, ext2 or zfs and each chunk is a file within a tree structure, with its name associated with the chunk reference. Clients can run Linux, MacOS or Windows supporting various flavors of FUSE and receive a software agent that exposes a Posix semantic and established communication with metadata and data servers. For Windows for instance, MooseFS leverages Dokany as a FUSE wrapper. As these machines access data directly and they operate as a standard machine, they usually run applications.

This is a real architecture. For MooseFS everything has started in 2005 when Gemius initiated an internal file system project. Some clusters deployed at the time continue to run and deliver services today without interruption. Being fully hardware agnostic, MooseFS is a perfect example of a Software-Defined Storage.


The other important to consider is that MooseFS is not a NAS even if clients can expose NFS and SMB via respectively Ganesha and Samba extensions and even S3 with MinIO to continue on the full open source dynamism. The product is able to expose a block interface and I have to say my surprise even if I understand the desire for the team to address a vast variety of needs. For sizing information, MooseFS supports cluster up to 16EB for 2 billion files.


The team had 4 main goals that are well illustrated by core features in the product:

  1. Scalability by multiplying servers, capacity is delivered,
  2. Performance by adding and processing I/O in parallel between clients and chunk servers,
  3. Reliability by utilizing replication then erasure coding
  4. and TCO via the support of any commodity hardware.
To give details on how data is access from the client machine, it's important to understand that below 64MB, a client sends data to only one server and above that level, data is chunked and distributes to different data servers. All this operates in parallel and we can qualify MooseFS as a parallel file system as well beyond to be a distributed one. In other words a distributed file system can be parallel or not but a parallel file system is for sure distributed.

For erasure coding based on Reed Solomon, the mechanism is controlled by chunk servers and works in the background. First, data is written to chunk servers as fast as possible without any protection. These servers then trigger replication across severs to provide a minimal protection and later they initiate the erasure coding phase wish the split of data, parities calculation, and redistribution of the data with all placement information sent to the meta data server for future access by clients. The stripe unit size seems to be 256kB.

Two editions exist for the product, a community edition with everything available on GitHub, full open source and free of charge, and a pro edition that is sold based on raw capacity, presenting some unique enterprise features like advanced tiering or snapshots. The cluster is managed via a CLI, a web Gui and presents an API.

The company behind MooseFS is based in Warsaw, Poland, and is privately held and profitable. Its revenue comes from selling pro licenses sold as a lifetime license, no subscription exists so far, and support and many users started by using the community edition and then expanded ot the pro one. In terms of use cases or vertical industries, the team is very open and doesn't really target some specific domains as they promote an universal approach, they more rely on the partner to "verticalize" the offering.

During the recent meeting during The IT Press Tour in Istanbul, Turkey, the team has launched the Community Edition 4.0, several years after the pro. This version shared 97% of the code of the pro version, offers manual failover, limited but good enough for many configuration erasure coding with a 8+1 model, tiering.

The MooseFS team will be at SuperComputing in Atlanta mid-November, perfect place to continue to talk, discover the solution and start to evaluate the solution.
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Wednesday, August 28, 2024

The 57th IT Press Tour in Istanbul is around the corner


Back to the old continent with the 57th edition of The IT Press Tour in Istanbul, Turkey, next week.

Sessions will be about IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, security, data management and storage with 6 innovative Europeans organizations:
I invite you to follow us on Twitter with #ITPT and @ITPressTour, my twitter handle and @CDP_FST and journalists' respective handle.
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Wednesday, July 03, 2024

Recap of the 56th IT Press Tour in Silicon Valley, California

Initially posted on StorageNewsletter 28/6/2024

This 56th edition of The IT Press Tour took place in Silicon Valley a few weeks ago and it has been, once again, a good tour and a great opportunity to meet and visit 9 companies all playing in IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, security, data management and storage plus AI. Executives, leaders, innovators and disruptors met shared company and products strategies and futures directions. These 9 companies are by alpha order Arc Compute, DDN, Hammerspace, Index Engines, Juicedata, MaxLinear, Oxide, Tobiko Data and Viking Enterprise Solutions.

Arc Compute
Beyond HPC, AI is hot, no surprise here, and finally helps high performance related technology to penetrate even more enterprises. Arc Compute, founded in 2020 in Toronto, Canada, with a few million dollars raised for its series A, targets GPU usages and consumption optimization. The small team has developed ArcHPC, a software suite to drastically maximize performance and reduce energy, a key dimension in such deployments.

The idea is to limit the hardware, GPU and associated resources purchases and therefore environmental impacts and increased costs while optimizing these scarce resources are used. Other alternatives rely on ineffective software or manual special routine and so far didn’t bring any significant value and appear to be transient methods.

To deliver its mission, the firm has developed ArcHPC, a software suite composed of 3 components: Nexus, Oracle and Mercury.

First, Nexus is a management solution for advanced GPU and other accelerated hardware. The goal is to maximize user/task density and GPU performance. It comes with GUI and CLI to allow integration with job schedulers like SLURM. Its flexibility offers real choices for users to select various accelerators. Nexus intercepts machine code in the loading phase dedicated to the GPU portion. Today is under version 3.

Second, Oracle provides task matching and deployment, a process that is time consuming and often done manually. It represents a real paramount for dynamic environments and brings governance. It is centered on the heat of GPUs and energy alignment and offers task distribution among clusters.

Third, Mercury, still on task matching, selects hardware for maximum throughput. Arc Compute was selected by several users and LAMMPS is a good example. The company leverages a direct sales model targeting large AI/ML companies and super computers but the sales team has started some talks with key oems and channel players. Partners are AMD, Dell, HPE, Nvidia and Supermicro.

ArcHPC is charged per GPU/year for on-premises and per hour for cloud instances.


DDN
Established leader in HPC storage and obvious reference in AI storage, the session covered the company strategy with solutions to new challenges in these domains with ExaScaler evolution and Infinia but was also extended with Tintri.

ExaScaler, a flagship product for DDN for years and recognized parallel file storage, continues its domination in the HPC storage with new features beyond what its foundation, Lustre, offers. It is also widely used for AI storage and supports some of the most demanding training environments with a very deep Nvidia partnership and integration. Among other things we noticed an optimized I/O stack delivering real high bandwidth and IOPS numbers, advanced data integrity, encryption and reduction with sophisticated compression, Nvidia Bluefield-3 acceleration, obviously checkpoints and genuine scalability. It can be adopted for small super fast configurations but also for very large capacity.

The second product released a few months ago is Infinia, a high performance object storage software, we should say distributed data platform, that is the result of 8 years of R&D effort from DDN, designed to address modern data challenges at scale. It is a pure SDS available as a cluster of 1U appliances, a union of 6 is required to deliver performance and resiliency. It implements a transactional key/value store as the data plane covered by an access layer exposing S3, CSI and soon industry standard file sharing protocols and even probably a Posix client plus some vertical integrated methods such as a SQL engine for native and deeply connected analytics. Each appliance supports 12 U.2 NVMe SSDs and protects data with an advanced dynamic erasure coding mechanism. The goal of this platform is to be configurable for a various list of use cases associated with different workloads patterns. It is multi-tenant by design, inspired by the cloud model, as the key itself includes a field for each tenant. The keyspace is therefore global and shared across all tenants, filtered by it, leveraging all the storage layer. This is better than storage shards difficult to size correctly. And it is fast thanks to a parallel S3 implementation coupled with Nvidia Bluefield DPUs.


Hammerspace
Highly visible data management Hammerspace continues to occupy the space with several announcements during the last few months and participation at key shows. They promoted GDE, their global data orchestration service, and more recently Hyperscale NAS architecture leveraging pNFS, the industry standard parallel file system as an extension of NFS. The team also added data management with secondary storage considerations with data archived and migrated on tape. Following Rozo Systems acquisition and its innovative erasure coding technique named Mojette Transform, their solutions have been extended with this advanced data protection mechanism. The company is moving fast, recruiting lots of new talent and penetrating significant accounts. The last product iteration is the S3 client that finally gives GDE the capability to be exposed as a S3 access layer whatever is the back-end. This move confirms users’ and market’s interest for a U3Universal, Unified and Ubiquitous – storage solution we introduced more than 10 years ago.

The company, like several others, recognized the need to promote a data platform and not a tool, product, solution or even an orchestrator as it is finally just a function, a key one but a function. A platform is different for enterprises; it represents an entity where many, not to say all, data flow is moving through to offer services for the business and potentially for the IT itself. This platform plays a central role, both physically and logically, with addition of various services that enrich data and associated usages of them.

It also confirms the take-off of edge computing with the necessity to have some sort of bridge to access data wherever they reside, locally to this edge zone, but also potentially coupled with other zones, data centers sites or even the cloud itself.

This new S3 service is offered free of charge for Hammerspace client as it is part of the standard license and it should be GA in Q4 2024 with some demonstrations at SC24 in Atlanta.


Index Engines
Founded by senior executives with a strong expertise in disk file systems and associated file storage technologies having initiated Programmed Logic Corp. morphed into CrosStor with their innovative HTFS and StackFS, later acquired by EMC, Index Engines was born around the idea of a deep content indexing technology. They first applied their solution to backup images on tape with the capability to reindex the content of backup images leveraging their expertise in backup catalogs and tape format. Rapidly the team has extended their use cases to cyber security ones recognizing the growing pressure from ransomware.

The result is CyberSense, a software deployed at more than 1,400 sites in various verticals from 1TB to 40+PB scanning every day more than 5EB. We all know the impact of ransomware on the business and obviously backup is not enough even if it is one of the key components of a comprehensive solution to protect and prevent data manipulation. CyberSense works as an extension to backup software exploring deeply backup images to detect some pattern, divergence and other traces of changes and therefore potential attacks. Index Engines is proud to say that CyberSense reaches 99.99% of confidence in detecting corruption, again it doesn’t prevent but really help to detect the on-going process and even the sad result. This impressive number was obtained based on 125,000 data samples with 94,100 of them infected by ransomware, CyberSense has detected 94,097 infected with 3 false negatives.

Leveraging its strong content indexing engine coupled with some AI-based models, CyberSense offers a very high level of SLA in that domain, and has proved his results against famous ransomware variants like AlphaLocker, WhiteRose, Xorist, Chaos, LockFile or BianLian. It is one of the reasons, Dell with PowerProtect, IBM with its Safeguarded FlashSystem and Infinidat with its InfiniSafe cyber storage approach picked the solution to bundle with their own solution.

And the result is there as Index Engines Tim Williams mentioned a 8 digits revenue range, hoping to pass 9 soon.


Juicedata
Juicedata develops JuiceFS under an Apache 2.0 license model, the team founded the entity in 2017 following some experiences at giant internet companies that addressed and solved some scalability challenges. They spent time to solidify the code and iterate 2 flavors, a community and an enterprise edition that offer the same experience from a client perspective but at different scale, performance and pricing. They recognize to be very confidential having chosen the product versus the visibility until now.

They address the challenge of an universal datastore with wide and flexible access methods such S3, NFS, SMB and even CSI for Kubernetes deployments. In fact they recognized that S3 is widely used and appreciated with some limitations especially for security aspects and data intensive workloads. At the same time, cloud took off without any real dedicated or well designed file system. What do users need in terms of gateway? The presence of tons of small files also introduces a problem with the real need to be cloud agnostic.

The developed JuiceFS is aligned with Posix requirements, delivering high performance, being elastic and is multi-cloud. On the paper it is an animal lots of users dream about.

The product segments metadata and data as these 2 entities require different data repositories and are processed differently being super small for first ones and potentially very large for the second especially in big data, AI and other analytics. Metadata uses various databases and models and data is stored on any back-end such as S3, Ceph, MinIO, cloud service providers… To reach desired performance levels, clients cache metadata and data at different tiers with a strong consistency model. These performance numbers are pretty impressive illustrated by several key references. JuiceFS supports any client, we mean, Linux, MacOS or Windows able to be deployed on-premises or in the cloud.

JuiceFS is another good example of the U3 Storage approach.


MaxLinear
Launched more than two decades ago, MaxLinear is a reference in the semiconductor market segment with recognized leadership positions in infrastructure networks and connectivity. The company, who made its IPO in 2010, with more than 1,300 employees today, generated almost $700 million in annual revenue in 2023.

The firm grew also by acquisitions, they made 6 of them, and one made in 2017 with Exar for $687 million gave them the off load data processing capabilities delivered today under the name Panther III Storage Accelerator. This technology came from Hifn and probably even before from Siafu, a company founded by John Matze, who designed and built compression and encryption appliances.

Panther III is pretty unique as it provides all its services – advanced data security, reduction, protection and integrity – in one single pass. The level of performance is very high and linear as soon as you add several cards in the same server. Up to 26 of them can be coupled to deliver a total of 3.2Tbps as one card offers 200Gbps. Latency is very low, 40us for encoding and 25us for decoding, the reduction ratio is also significant and much higher than “classic” approaches. The solution arrives with source code software, for Linux and FreeBSD, optimized for Intel and AMD, delivering the exact same result if for any reason the server with the board is not available. Beyond performance, the card is also very energy frugal. Dell for its PowerMAX embeds Panther III to maximize storage capacity and high PB per Watt. This is today a PCIe GEn 4 card and we expect a Gen 5 in the coming months that will also deliver a new level of performance in a consolidated way.

With Panther III, one 1U storage server with 8 1TB NVMe SSDs appears as a 96TB storage server with 2 cents per GB instead of 25 cents per GB. It is a 12x data reduction ratio.

This approach is different from a DPU model with clearly data passing the card to land on other devices, this is especially the case with networking implementations.


Oxide Computer
Founded by a few alternatives IT infrastructure believers, the company, started in 2019 with, so far almost $100 million raised, is on a mission. They try to define and build a new computing model for modern data centers. At the opposite of what cloud service providers have used for a few decades now, always evolving, Oxide thinks that it starts at the data center level and not with a computer with integration and product accumulation.

The team has a strong bet on open source, promoting a single point of purchase and support, with a very comprehensive API. And this is what they define as a cloud computer with compute provisioning services, a virtual block storage service, integrated network services, holistic security and high efficient power model. The rack offers an integrated DC bus bar that makes electricity distribution efficient and well consumed, same approach for the airflow.

For the storage part, they develop a distributed block storage based on Open ZFS with high performance NVMe SSDs leveraging also some other advanced ZFS features. One question is how they rely on a distributed erasure coding mode with a flexible dynamic parity model as ZFS was really a server centric model that couples file system and volume management. Internally ZFS file system is available, exposed potentially with NFS, SMB and S3 and as said a block layer as well. Everything is managed via a high level console with all the internals masked and provides a full abstraction for administrators and users. Obviously the approach is multi-tenant, ready to be deployed on-premises and in the cloud. Deployments leverage Terraform, a well adopted tool, to ease configuration management. The configuration is monitored with a fine granular telemetry model to check the convergence with SLAs.

The difficulty would be to sell to companies, mostly large, with strict SLAs running their IT based on a small company that still represents a risk. And if there is a risk, a doubt and danger may arise that impacts this IT foundation and therefore the activity of the client company.

We’ll see if this approach will really take off, so far it seems to be more anecdotic or for satisfied happy few, but it’s probably enough to stay motivated trying to convince “classic” users.


Tobiko Data
Young company launched in 2022 by the Mao brothers, Tyson and Toby, Tobiko Data recently raised approximately $18 million for a total of 21. Leveraging its experience at Airbnb, Apple, Google and Netflix, the team develops SQLMesh, an open source data transformation platform, a well adopted tool for companies wishing to build efficient data pipelines.

At these companies, the team and in particular the 2 brothers have encountered a series of challenges in the application development phase, with real difficulties to obtain deep visibility for data pipeline and their optimization and large datasets format. At the same time, they realized that the reference in the domain, dbt, doesn’t scale so it validates the need for a serious alternative and the Tobiko Data project got started.

The Tobiko approach works in 3 phases with the goal to reduce time, storage space and associated cost thus complexity globally. It starts by the creation of a virtual data environment being a copy of the production, then this copy becomes the development area where all changes are made producing different versions the production can point to. Database table spaces are built only once, and it is key in the Tobiko model, then semantic is integrated and column-level DAG resolution and conclude with any simple SQL commands. It is coupled with CI/CD logic with automation at different levels, automatic rollbacks are also possible, tests and audits as well with a control of the potential data divergence with the production.

To deliver this promise, Tobiko Data has also developed SQLGlot and as the readme says on GitHub, SQLGlot is a no-dependency SQL parser, transpiler, optimizer, and engine. It can be used to format SQL or translate between 21 different dialects like DuckDB, Presto / Trino, Spark / Databricks, Snowflake, and BigQuery. It aims to read a wide variety of SQL inputs and output syntactically and semantically correct SQL in the targeted dialects.

The company is very young with brilliant engineers, we’ll see how things will go and where they will land…


Viking Enterprise Solutions
Viking Enterprise Solutions aka VES, a division of Sanmina, partners with other vendors to design, build and develop their compute and storage systems. Sanmina was founded in 1980 with 34,000 employees today generating close to $9 billion in 2023. The firm launched 3,000 products per year illustrating its production capacity and wide list of clients and partners. To summarize, they are the manufacturer behind the brand. The product team focused on data center solutions with Software Defined Storage, racks and enclosures, compute and AI/ML solutions, liquid cooling, server and storage systems and also associated services.

VES came from the acquisition of Newisys in 2003 and a division of Adaptec in 2006. VES partners with a wide list of technology and product leaders for CPUs, GPUs, networking and connectivity and storage.

On the hardware side, the performance and resiliency are 2 fundamental elements of the company. The products are famous for high density, high capacity, very good performance level and low power in 1 or 2U sizes. This is the case in Media and Entertainment, enterprise AI or on-premise cloud storage. Among the vast line of storage server products, we noticed the NSS2562R with a HA design in A/P, dual port PCIe Gen 3.4 for NVMe SSDs offering 56 U.2 drives. Also the VSS1240P, a 1U storage server with 24 EDSFF E1.S drive in dual node and full PCIe Gen 4. On this we found also the NDS41020 with 102 SATA/SAS HDDs among a long list.

On the AI/ML side, VES offers the VSS3041 with up to 3 or 5 GPUs, 240TB of storage with PCIe Gen 5 and AMD Genoa CPUs. The company selects GPUs from Nvidia and AMD and develops an edge oriented AI framework named Kirana. It is illustrated by the CNO3120 AMD based appliance.

On the software aspect with CNO for Cloud Native Orchestrator, VES is very active in the open source domain with deep expertise in Ceph and other OSS. The idea here is to build global solutions that couple OSS and their own hardware platforms. Global means here also a multi-site dimension with geo-redundancy, high availability, data durability and security.

Companies like VAST Data, DDN, Infinidat, Wasabi and others have selected VES for years and rely on this partnership to deliver leading solutions.

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Tuesday, June 25, 2024

MaxLinear leads the pack with Panther III

MaxLinear, a leader in infrastructure network and connectivity, joined the recent IT Press Tour in California and it was the perfect opportunity to get an update about the company and its product line especially its storage product.

The company was founded in 2003 and got its IPO in 2010, today representing 1300+ employees for an annual revenue of almost $700 million.

MaxLinear grew fast with 6 acquisitions and everything seemed to accelerate in 2015 with almost 1 acquisition per year outside of the Covid period. And it appears that the management team has strong ambition as the firm almost absorbed Silicon Motion last year but they finally decide to give up. In fact it seemed that the revenue from the prey dropped significantly that impacted the deal. Per haps other reasons exist but they're outside of our scope.

Among these acquisitions, MaxLinear acquired Exar in May 2017 for approximately $687 million. The technology we're speaking about here came from Hifn acquired itself by Exar in 2009 for $59 million. And we all remember that Hifn absorbed Siafu in 2007, Siafu was a developer of components and appliances for data encryption and compression.

Targeting the data center with demanding workloads, MaxLinear storage product is centered today around the Panther III storage accelerator that delivers advanced data security, reduction, protection and integrity, all running in one single pass.


The performance levels offered by the board are just impressive with 200Gbps throughput linearly scalable with 16 boards to 3.2Tbps. When comparing with competition it appears that the board delivers up to 2.5x better compression ratio and up to 3x better reduction ratio. That associated latency is also super low with 40us for encode and 25us for decode. By reduction here, we mean compression and deduplication.

This data processing CPU offload approach has demonstrated its value in multiple dimensions: throughput, latency, energy and CPU utilization.


The product arrives also with a software suite, and source code, to run all this in software. It helps compare things but also to run data encoding and decoding when the board is not available for any reasons.

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Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Hammerspace finally adds S3 client to GDE

Hammerspace, the highly visible data management company, just announced during the recent IT Press Tour a new front-end access method with the support of the S3 API. In fact, it i the capability for GDE to support S3 client and expose the global namespace also with this technique. With that, Hammerspace makes a new key iteration towards an universal data platform and the concept of U3 - Unified, Universal and Ubiquitous - Storage I introduced several years ago.



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