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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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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New VC round for Tobiko Data

Tobiko Data, a modern data platform player developing a dbt-compatible data pipeline and transformation solution with the popular SQLMesh and SQLGlot open source projects at its core, participated yesterday to The IT Press Tour.

Last week the team raised a series A with $17.3 million in addition the its seed round at $4.5 million for a total of $21.8 million. More info on Tobiko Data in a few days.

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In a few days, the 56th edition of The IT Press Tour will land in California

56, yes 56, incredible... but real. The next IT Press Tour will be the 56th edition continuing to deliver value to vendors and press with a unique model and format.

Organized in Silicon Valley, this edition will be dedicated to IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, security, data management and storage with 9 hot and innovative companies coming from various horizons:

• Arc Compute, a emerging player in GPU-as-a-Service,
• DDN, the obvious leader in HPC and AI storage,
• Hammerspace, a reference in global file services,
• Index Engines, promoting a comprehensive cyber security approach,
• Juicedata, a young company developing a universal file storage,
• MaxLinear, the giant connectivity company,
• Oxide Computer, a emerging datacenter computer vendor,
• Tobiko Data, a recent actor in analytics and data pipeline
• and Viking Enterprise Solutions, a product division of Sanmina, providing leading storage foundation systems.

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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CTERA presents a new service

CTera, a leader in edge-to-cloud file services, has launched during The IT Press Tour in Rome last week its new iteration of its ransomware data protection solution set. The company has clear ambitions in the domain wishing to become #1 in cyber-storage area.

As we already wrote, the first service offered by CTera is Vault with its recent 2.0 version bringing legal hold, object lock and chain of custody in addition of the WORM Cloud Folders and today the granularity has been extended to individual files and objects.

Announced during a past IT Press Tour in Israel in 2023 when we met the team at their HQ in Tel-Aviv, the ransomware protection also has evolved to provide today data exfiltration prevention with the honeypot concept. The team delivered a compelling demo during the session a few days ago with a very easy setup.

The idea is to detect and block in real-time any tentative of data exfiltration based on decoy files that serve as honeypots. So today is not just about ransomware protection with encrypted files but also the export and copy of files being a modern data leak prevention approach. To solve this CTera implements the dynamic creation of decoy files to redirect and identify attacks and then blocked them. CTera leverages some AI to boost analysis when some potential anomalies are detected.

CTera continues to develop its enterprise file services platform as a very rapid pace confirming its place to offer one of the most comprehensive solutions today.

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QStar targets large archiving configurations

Pre-announced during the recent IT Press Tour in Rome, QStar officially unveils its Global ArchiveSpace at NAB yesterday. The product already in demonstration at SuperComputing 2023 at the Hammerspace booth is now ready to flood the market.

The company is a reference in the data archiving space with more than 19,000 installations but suffers from the lack of scalability of the solution for large environments and data sets. At least, the team and its users recognized the need to offer an advanced iteration of Archive Manager able to scale and support large configurations.

QStar Global ArchiveSpace (GAS) is a new design providing a scalable model with a dynamic cluster able to support hundreds of tape drives, thousands of tapes, large data sets with tons of files and big ones and of course a large disk cache to sustain gigantic loads. The multi-node approach is based on a single namespace across nodes, from 3 to 64, with embedded failover in case of nodes failures. GAS brings also tape drive reservation to nodes to avoid conflict but doesn't need any tape partitioning. This solution relies on a mono-site and multi-node model and is ready to scale at a very interesting level. The team has already some ideas to support multi-site configurations. I also learnt during this session that QStar is clearly against RAIT, in other words files belong to only 1 tape and are not striped across drives at the same time. Organization across directories can be done with some of them targeting some drives while other use other drives as well, so some sort of parallelism can be achieved but again a file belongs to only 1 tape written by a single drive.

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Tuxera secured one more partner with Quantum

Tuxera just confirmed today on a blog post and Quantum with an official press release what I wrote March 14th on this blog following what Jamie Lerner, CEO of Quantum, told me a few weeks ago during The IT Press Tour and what I mentioned to Antti Alila, VP Enterprise Solutions at Tuxera, last week. And finally with this blog, things are getting official, good for both companies and Tuxera adds one more key partner. The Tuxera Fusion File Share will be added to StorNext and Myriad and with that the M&E champion will gain and secure a significant position in file sharing both in that vertical market segment but also in more generic workloads. More news of course during the NAB Show next week in Las Vegas, NV.

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In a few days, the 55th edition of The IT Press Tour will take place in Rome

The countdown is set, The IT Press Tour will land soon in Roma, Italy, for its 55th edition. This tour will be dedicated to IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, data management and storage with 6 hot and innovative companies coming from various horizons:

• CTERA, the obvious leader in global file services,
• Fujifilm, the reference in tape manufacturing with new data management solutions,
• Know and Decide, a recent player in IT asset management,
• Leil Storage, a young company dedicated to new generation of MAID solutions,
• QStar Technologies, a pioneer in data management and archiving software,
• and Quickwit, a fast growing actor in log management with a powerful indexing technology.

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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WEKA has made a splash

WEKA, a leader in modern data platform based on its parallel file system, shared some key news during the last IT Press Tour, 2 weeks before their official announcement during the recent Nvidia GTC conference in California. The company who is already a key partner of Nvidia, the GPU champion also invested in WEKA during the Round C in 2019, is validated with GPUDirect for quite a long time.

This time, it's an official certification with WEKA hardware as the firm unveiled its WEKApod, a hardware system ready for Nvidia DGX SuperPOD systems. A minimum of 8 nodes is needed to deliver and sustain impressive I/O performance but 32 nodes are recommended. With a base cluster of 8 nodes with 1PB of usable capacity, 765GB/s and 18.3M IOPS are delivered based on 1 node specification with 95GB/s in read, 23GB/s in write and 2.3M IOPS. 

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ScaleFlux introduces new SSD controller

ScaleFlux, a reference in computational SSD, shakes the market with its new SSD Controller, the SFX 5016. It marks a clear progress made by the company since the previous generation.

It continues to offer transparent block-level compression and delivers a performance boost as it supports PCIe Gen 5 with x4 host interface, 16 channels for NAND and 256TB. It supports TLC and QLC NAND from multiple vendors. I find also NVMe 2.0 specification support with FDP and Thin Provisioned Namespaces.

In terms of performance numbers, the new controller gives, the table below summarize pretty well these preliminary results.

I really hope we'll meet the ScaleFlux team during a future IT Press Tour to get a real company and product update especially on this.

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