Tuxera creates Alcestor to host MooseFS

MooseFS has a new home. Following Tuxera's move in June 2018, the visibility of MooseFS dropped seriously even if Tuxera is very famous but not in that market segment: enterprise storage and especially enterprise storage software. Tuxera realized that being famous in embedded and cross-platform disk file system is far from the enterprise positioning of MooseFS. So now Alcestor is the new entity, an inc. structure, to host and continue the development and support of MooseFS. And finally Alces means Moose in Latin, funny...

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Hazelcast Cloud, new flavor of IMDG

Hazelcast, an emerging in-memory computing leader, extends its solution coverage with Hazelcast Cloud.

Until now, Hazelcast sells two products: IMDG aka In-Memory DataGrid and Jet to be deployed on-premises.

Designed to deliver very fast performance with very low data access latency, IMDG is now a recognized well adopted product for high demanding applications, we can say business applications with HPC-like constraints. Jet, more recent, targets stream and batch needs.

With its cloud flavor, Hazelcast now offers a real answer to enterprises wishing to run business applications in the cloud. As said by Kelly Herrell, CEO of the company, a few days ago when The IT Press Tour met the team: "latency is the new downtime and microseconds matter".

This new offering is presented in 3 editions: Hazelcast Cloud (FREE), Hazelcast Cloud and Hazelcast Cloud Dedicated. The FREE option is designed for test and development, and the paid option, based on same technology, adds always-on status, higher memory limits and of course customer support. AWS is available now, Azure and GCP will be released before the end of the year. These two editions are operated by Hazelcast as a managed service. The last product iteration - Hazelcast Cloud Dedicated - is a reserved for private cloud deployment but configured and maintained by Hazelcast and should be appear mid-year 2019. The cloud offering leverages 3 components: IMDG, Kubernetes and Docker. Hazelcast seems to engage a direct competition with its close competitor GridGain and this one announced its cloud option last January.

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Redis Labs moves fast

Redis Labs, one of the fastest database on the planet, organized a very good session during the recent IT Press Tour. The press team has the privilege to understand the company strategy, the current offering and the future announcements.

The company has raised recently a new round of $60M for a total of $146M, approaching clearly the highly sought status of unicorn. It invites us to think also about an exit and I won't be surprised to read such information in 2019 or 2020 but Redis has a fast growing valuation.

There is two opposite trends that stress the industry: data volumes explode and business - B2C and B2B - require real-time results so how to deliver the latter within such data climate?

Applications become more complex for several years with of course mobile and IoT fast deployments an adoption. A few directions exist already considered by enterprises such micro-services, distributed infrastructure and of course multi-cloud to deliver an ubiquitous experience. This complexity introduced several performance bottlenecks and a way to solve that is to adapt an in-memory database such Redis Labs.

Two flavors exist, an open source and an enterprise edition, for different use cases starting with simple data model and needs to sophisticated multi-model for high demanding application.

Redis Labs has compiled various statistics to present TAM numbers for each market category. The multi-model is offered by the Enterprise edition associated with a multi-cloud model such on-premises, AWS, GCP and Azure supporting of course hybrid deployments.

In term of performance, Redis Enterprise is one of the worldwide fastest database, no doubt, this is pretty unique in the industry.

The company organizes soon its annual user conference RedisConf in San Francisco and for sure we'll learn from company's leaders new product iterations.

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Data Cataloging for the masses

Alation, leader in data catalog for enterprises, was one of the very good session this week for the 30th edition of The IT Press Tour in California.

The company continues to be listed leader in various analysts reports such Gartner, Forrester, Dresner and Constellation indicating that Alation has a special value proposition with a real market traction. The key element now, introduced lat year with our visit, is the natural integration of machine learning intelligence as a default feature and not as an optional paid one. As data becomes clearly the new oil and currency on the globe, having a tool to extract, pump and inject data is clearly a huge advantage.

To fuel this acceleration, the company just raised a series-C of $50M for a total of $82M. The market is estimated to $5B.

But data is hard as sources vary, volumes explode and velocity grows with more and more applications to integrate and analytics to serve to users. It seems that we live a time like the gold rush but now we can call it the Data Rush.

The Alation solution is very powerful supporting lots of data format - both unstructured like files and structured with databases - with a rapid metadata extraction, data sampling, auto-titling with ML and NLP, query log ingestion and crowd- and expert-sourcing. Alation acts like a data hub coupling with its data layer different applications and tools. But it's all about speed to find data, build dashboard, display trends, reuse models and at the end to take decision, the right one.

With this session, we saw great progress and maturity from Alation, really confirming its leader position, meeting the company in 2020 would be good to see directions and how growth is managed as a company with a growing market pressure.

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NGINX enters into a new era

NGINX, the leader in web services optimization, delivered a very good session during The IT Press Tour a few days ago after the F5 Networks acquisition has been announced last week.

NGINX, founded in 2011, has raised so far $103M and its revenue doubles every year during the 5 last consecutive years. This acquisition means a ratio of 6.5 on investment and approx. $2.6M per employee largely above the famous value of $250k.

One of the main reason F5 picks NGINX is the strong open source software built by the original team and the wide worldwide adoption perfectly illustrated by references such Instagram, Pinterest, Netflix, Eventbrite, Box, Dropbox or Airbnb... Today more than 375M web sites operate thanks to NGINX and 67% of the highest traffic sites. In a nutshell it's about technology - performance, scalability, concurrency and API - installed base and finally a leading company.

Launched in August 2013, NGINX Plus is the natural extension of NGINX open source plus specific enterprise features.

Coming from the network infrastructure layers, F5 recognizes its need to add applications infrastructure to become a global end-to-end applications services provider for today and future worlds.

There is a real culture conflict as F5 is a commercial enterprise company and NGINX an open source player but the market opportunity and associated addressable market are greater then the risk according to each executive team. F5 confirms its commitment to NGINX open source projects.

The two companies concentrate their effort towards applications services and infrastructure in a multi-cloud environments. Next steps will be interesting to see and how F5 and NGINX promote this synergy on the market.

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Hazelcast shakes the In-Memory Computing landscape

Hazelcast, an emerging In-Memory Computing leader, founded in 2008, continues its expansion and the recent IT Press Tour had the opportunity to meet Kelly Herrell, CEO, and part of his team.

The explosion of data volume and the growing presence of mobile devices and the boom of IoT require even more real-time interactions for users with their applications and super fast results. It means that in-Memory Computing platforms sees its adoption accelerates with immediate ROI.

The In-Memory Computing model relies most of the time on databases and targets the most demanding part of it. In that approach, databases are used as a standard data store layer and IMDG (In-Memory Data Grid) just extract and copies needed subset of data.

From a legacy model to a new one without replacing the working classic approach and by adopting IMDG, enterprises boost their quality of service with an investment protection.

The company entered recently in a new era with a new senior CEO Kelly Herrell. We anticipate a potential new round as currently the company only raised a total of $13.6M with a last round of $11M in 2014. Hazelcast first customer sale was in 2014, today a few hundreds ones worldwide with a dominance in finance and globally 40% of the business comes from Europe. We'll see but 2019 should be a good year for Hazelcast with some clear new directions...

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Fivetran, an emerging leader in data pipelining

Fivetran, fast growing player in data pipelining for data warehouse, did a superb session yesterday during the IT Press Tour.

Founded in 2012 following a Y-Combinator campaign, Fivetran took several years to build the product with a first customer shipment in 2015. Currently with 110+ employees, the company raised $15M in series A in December 2018 after a seed round of $120K in March 2013.

We have the opportunity to meet the 2 founders, George Fraser, CEO, and Taylor Brown, COO, and they did a brilliant job.

The classic analytics data stack is changing from aa legacy "Sources -> ETL -> DW -> BI Tool" to a new approach more aligned to the new demand based to higher volume and real time requirements. With tons of products in each layers, the combination is high.

ETL or Extract, Transform and Load is a good but old model and had difficulties to follow the cloud adoption, pretty obvious as the data volume for analysis skyrockets. The current trend is a cloud-based DW, columnar, zero infrastructure management and above all a clear separation of compute and storage. Solutions such Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift or Snowflake are the new norm for a few quarters now. As an example of this new need, Google has recently acquired Alooma in that space and continue to build a comprehensive stack with Trifacta an soon others for sure.

The new approach supported by several vendors initiative is ELT for Extract. Load and Transform, this latter task made later in the process.

Fivetran, one of the new players, develops probably one of the most advanced data pipelining, fully managed, zero configuration with a as-a-Service approach. It provides today 100+ connectors.

The company has today 600+ customers and it's growing pretty fast and it should grow even faster soon. Fivetran continues to strengthen its partner ecosystem and especially around Google Cloud, Snowflake and Looker with of course tons of others. In terms of business, it grows fast with triple of the revenue on 2018 globally and even 8 times in EMEA.

IT was a really a good session, something is happening there.

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Lightbits Labs is now ready

Lightbits Labs, a key contributor to NVMe/TCP, lands on the market with $50M in funding from Micron, Dell Technologies Capital and Cisco to accelerate the data center and cloud environments transformation into NVMe-based storage. I'm not surprised to see Cisco here looking for some storage opportunities linked to high speed networking.

The company is a champion of NVMe/TCP being one of the key contributors to the standard, I wrote a very short post when we discovered the company in 2017 following their presentation at FMS and an other one after FMS 2018. The idea is pretty obvious and straight forward with the same logic that iSCSI in the past, the enterprise transport chosen by enterprises is Ethernet with high-speed, low-latency equipments deployed and available on the market. It should be even more easy to use TCP today than it was at the time of iSCSI. Both approaches share the same model having to transport storage command set - SCSI and now NVMe - over a transport layer such TCP on top of Ethernet to expose a block storage interface. So the team has extended current NVMe over Fabrics based on FC and RDMA with IB, RoCE and iWARP with now TCP. The NVM Express standard body ratified the TCP extension in November 2018.

Lightbits Labs product, named LightOS, is a software-defined storage solution breaking the compute + storage or DAS model limitation with a disaggregated approach splitting the compute on one side and the storage on the other end with a new storage network logic running on TCP in the middle. Obviously why do we need to limit ourselves to the storage inside the box, same remark we had with SAN around 1995 for ones who were already in the industry at that time. FC was a big help for that but required a dedicated expensive networks with specific equipments.

LightOS invite IT architects to decouple compute and storage and scale independently both entities. The beauty of NVMe/TCP is that the driver is included in Linux kernel 5.0 and above and you can use as well the Intel SDPK toolkit introduced here. It means that there is no need to install any agent or driver in each server connected to the storage, it's only target approach. It probably explains why E8, Apeiron, Excelero and Mangstor have and had limited adoption on that market but it was also in a recent past...

The key element of LightOS is the Global Flash Translation Layer aka FTL, providing several key features such thin provisioning, data reduction, data striping across SSD, erasure coding, QoS per volume and auto-scaling. LightOS offers 200Gbps bandwidth, up to 5M IOPS with 4K random I/O with a dual socket 2U x86 server running Intel or AMD cpus. Of course a CLI is available and a RESTful API for management and monitoring.

The picture below show an exploded model that illustrates the parallelism of the architecture and the alignment of NVMe queues with TCP channels.
At the same time, the company announced LightField, a PCIe Gen3 acceleration card as an option for LightOS, to boost throughput, erasure coding processing, provide compression and improve SSD endurance. For more demanding applications, the company recommends to associate LightField to LightOS.

The only missing features in the Lightbits Labs offering as of today are encryption, snapshot and replication and I'm pretty sure some of them will appear in the future in LightField.

We invite the reader to spend some time studying the presentation below, it was delivered during FMS 2018 and it's a very good content and update. We even see on page 24 a device with Lightbits logo, does it mean the company plan to release a storage array like E8, Apeiron, Mangstor or even Vexata or Pavilion and Toshiba with Kumoscale? We'll see... More recently Sagi Grimberg, chief software architect and co-founder at Lighbits and key contributor to the NVMe/TCP standard presented a webcast with Microsemi, you can find this online presentation here.

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IT Press Tour #30 will rock again

The IT Press Tour, the leading IT event for IT press, has recently unveiled participating companies for the 30th edition planned the week of 18th of March in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

Ten companies will participate, some are new on the market and for the crew, some are well established, here is the full list:

• Alation, leader in Data Cataloging,
• Anaplan, reference in Corporate Planning,
• DataGrail, fast growing player in Data Privacy,
• Fivetran, innovator in Data Pipelining,
• GridGain, disruptor in In-Memory Computing,
• Hazelcast, other key player in In-Memory Computing,
• Kaseya, fast growing IT Infrastructure Management Solutions provider,
• NGINX, top vendor in application infrastructure,
• Promethium, emerging player in Data Governance,
• and Redis Labs, one of the world’s most popular in-memory database.

Super week in perspective again with hot technologies, great leaders and executives, the tour will shake the market again. I invite you to follow us with @ITPressTour, #ITPT, various publications and reporters Twitter handles.

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New CMO for Hitachi Vantara

Hitachi Vantara just named Jonathan Martin its new CMO. He came from Pure Storage, left 2 years ago, where he stayed 2 years, before spent a bit more than 4 years at EMC, HP following the acquisition of Mercury, Salesforce, Portwise, Veritas Software and OpenVision Technologies.

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