Tintri story turns tough

Tintri, the leading NAS platform for VM environment, confirms its financial difficulties started several quarters ago.

Despite strong technology, the company never really took off and even finally made an IPO, delayed one time to finally happened in June 2017, to raise a new round at a lower valuation and lower stock price. It seems that the market didn't positively receive this new round and has marked some difficulties for the company.

Tintri recognized for its VM-aware NAS storage appliance with today an interesting installed base could move to chapter eleven in the next few months and some gorillas could even wait that deadline to make a really good bargain. Among them, HPE also watching good opportunities, or Cisco, IBM, NetApp or even DDN who could be attracted by the VM market segment opportunity. Dell Technologies is out with the ton of things received with the EMC merger. VMware won't be interested as well.

Tintri reminds me what Virsto offered a few years ago with NFS datastore for VM as a pure Software-Defined Storage before the industry introduced the term and later with with Evostor, an Australian company Virsto acquired later, in that case only with VMFS datastore based on iSCSI. Virsto got acquired early 2013 by VMware. Maxta also in the NFS datastore for VM is still alive with less visibility than 1 or 2 years ago, StorMagic also in the VMFS datastore based on iSCSI is even more confidential. I anticipated same difficulties for HyperGrid formerly named Gridstore who finally never took off. Is there a place for a dedicated VM-aware storage solution?

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Penguin Computing develops strong storage partnerships

Penguin Computing, alternative player in HPC based on open source solutions, continues to iterate its storage solutions. The company has introduced it SDS product line named FrostByte storage solutions based on partners' products.

Aligned with different needs and uses cases, FrostByte uses:

• ThinkParQ BeeGFS for HPC,
• Red Hat Ceph Storage for object and block in cloud infrastructure, M&E and data lakes,
• Red Hat Gluster Storage for VM and containers, big data and analytics and
• Lustre for HPC and big data analytics as well.

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New Era for Storj with now a seasoned CEO

Storj Labs, one of the few P2P storage player now promoting Etherum blockchain based storage, expands its team with the recruitment of its new CEO. Ben Golub, former CEO of Docker and in the past CEO of Gluster, just arrived to launch a new era for the company. He is often associated with exit as he did one for Gluster selling the open source storage company to Red Hat for $136M in 2011. We expected the same at Docker but nothing happened, is it because founders are too greedy or other reasons? We saw similar behaviors from other companies led buy french people who finally didn't accept acquisition proposal, missed the window and entered in trouble zone. He also board member of Minio, te leading open source object storage player, revolutionizing that category. So far the company has raised a total of $33M of funding.

Users share their local free storage space with other users in a secure way. Data are sharded or chunked, encrypted and distributed between farmers (people who contribute and share their free space) i.e among storage nodes. Storj now enables 60PB of data across 150,000 storage nodes present in more than 200 countries. The company charges $0.015/GB/month, which 3 times more expensive than Wasabi and Backblaze B2 even if these offering are different and we don't include traffic.

It reminds me several projects: Adanam, KerStor, Wuala, Symform, Blockade, SpaceMonkey, AeroFS, Tudzu, Connected Data, Ugloo, UbiStorage, CloudPlan, AetherSore and SiaTech but only a few of them are still alive. Storj is one of the best solution for sure available probably at the right time.

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Robin Purohit now CEO of Griddable.io

Griddable.io, a SaaS company building a new approach for synchronous data integration, was founded in 2016 by Rajeev Bharadhwaj.

The company has raised a Series A and decided to recruit a full time CEO with Robin Purohit. Rajev and Robin has a story together as Veritas acquired Rajeev's company Ejasent early 2004. This acquisition was one of the key ones for Veritas to sustain the Utility Computing strategy before everyone speak about Cloud Computing. Rajeev was the founder of Aryaka Networks and KiteDance.

The genesis of the solution came from Databus, a LinkedIn originated Apache project. Griddable goal is to offer a global synchronisation service across the enterprise for on-premises and cloud entities.

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NAS Migration added to Komprise Data Management

Komprise, an innovator in data lifecycle across clouds, adds a NAS migration feature in its Intelligent Data Management 2.7 release.

The laborious NAS migration process is very often exposed to errors and is now integrated at free of charge in the Komprise IDM. This is just defined as a NAS migration task like others and avoid to use famous tools such robocopy. And users continue to leverage and use other Komprise functions such analytics, archiving or DR.

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