StorCentric expands its empire

StorCentric, an alternative player in primary and secondary storage, continues its acquisition journey with Violin Systems, its 5th one in less than 2 years. Mihir Shah is ambitious and is always looking for bargains, this time Violin was under the radar. And I have a few other names... it's just a question of price.

StorCentric was started in 2005, 15 years ago, with this idea of holdings of companies' assets with historically Nexsan, Drobo, Vexata and Retrospect Software serving SMB and enterprise with various offerings from capacity to high performance products and from hardware to data protection software.

On the Violin Systems side, it represents the end of a pioneer even if it was already the case a few times but finally virtually survived. What a failure, hope it will serve as an example. And even if the company was led by some famous leaders, one success doesn't imply successive ones. A lesson to keep in mind...

Different iterations for Violin as it was seen as a revolution player introducing super fast flash array for tier 1 storage needs for high demanding applications and then move incrementally to a more standard model limiting its market footprint and attraction. But the company still has some interesting IP especially with X-IO acquisition several questers ago.

For StorCentric, it's a very good deal accumulating expertise to unify with Vexata and Nexsan confirming that StorCentric gains a serious alternative vendor status to replace some other classic ones. Well done Mihir and team.

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Coldago Research unveils its 2020 Map for File Storage

Coldago Research, an independent research and analysis firm, releases today the 2020 edition of its Map for File Storage.

This report studied the market and players since the previous edition, twelve months ago, with thirty one players, with a few changes since the 2019 edition.

The Map couples enterprise and/or the HPC file storage vendors with the idea to compare companies and not products and organize in 4 categories: Leaders, Challengers, Specialists and Niches. The 31 players are Atos, CTera Networks, DDN, Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, Hammerspace, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nasuni, NEC, NetApp, Oracle, Panasas, Panzura, Pure Storage, Oracle, Quantum, Qumulo, Quobyte, SoftIron, StorageCraft, SUSE, ThinkParQ, VAST Data, Veritas Technologies and WekaIO.

We elect 7 leaders: Dell, DDN, IBM, NetApp, Pure Storage, Qumulo and VAST Data and detect 4 BlitzScalers: Pure Storage, Qumulo, VAST Data and WekaIO with very interesting trajectories.

In addition, the report also establishes a list of vendors to watch with Cohesity, Hammerspace, Nasuni, Pure Storage, Quantum, Qumulo, Quobyte, VAST Data and WekaIO.

More details are available on the specific report page here. The 36 pages report is available to purchase at $4,490.

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A Free edition from Robin.IO

Robin.IO, one of the Kubernetes storage reference, wish to accelerate its market adoption and for that, the team has made a radical decision: offer a full features FREE edition named Express Edition limited to 5 nodes and 5TB globally without any time limit. It represents the entry level offering before moving to the Enterprise flavor with billing per node-hour, consumption-based approach. So the goal is obvious make noise, invite user to test, try and potentially adopt Robin CNS, one of the richest storage suite for Kubernetes.

Also, the team takes advantage of this announcement to release compute-storage association placement to deliver best performance according to the dynamic cluster configuration and situation with affinity and anti-affinity rules. We'll meet the team again soon during the 37th IT Press Tour in December and we'll learn more about CNS for sure.

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Talk with Henri Richard, Data Dynamics board member

Data Dynamics recruited recently Henri Richard to its board of directors and I thought it would be a good idea to talk with him. Henri is pretty famous in our industry having occupied various executives positions. I did it for our Podcast Français du Stockage and you can listen to it below but our talk was in French.

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Alation strengthens its enterprise search portal

Alation, leader in Data Catalog for Enterprise, continues its data management journey with the announcement of the 2020.3 release of its data intelligence platform.

The company mission is to offer an easy access to enterprise data with 3 main use case: data search and discovery, data literacy and data governance.

The main idea is to build a scalable dynamic autonomous index of all data discovered able to be queried very simply. The firm offers various connectors to integrate a large set of data sources to build such meta data repository. This release introduces natural language query, logical domains and end-users tools integrations. We measure lots of progress from the company since last meeting and we even anticipate some acceleration as the solution is becoming more and more comprehensive, generic and universal with tons of usages.

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Edgy controls the business of Panzura

Panzura, one of the leader in cloud file storage, got acquired in May 2020 by Profile Capital Management LLC. In the press release announcing this acquisition, Rich Weber was quoted.

But the chief product officer for more than 10 years at Panzura disappeared from the current firm’s leadership page.

There are several other chief [executive | revenue | innovation | technology | strategy | financial] officers on that page but not longer Weber, even if his LinkedIn page continues to mention his position at the firm.

We also noticed 4 new arrivals:

• Dan Waldschmidt as chief revenue officer,
• Petra Davidson as VP of marketing, both coming from Edgy,
• Edward Peters, chief innovation officer, arrived in June
• and Will Pike, chief strategy officer, landed in September.

With the CEO, Jill Stelfox, also coming from Edgy, none of them has worked in the storage industry in the past.

The interesting piece is that all Edgy people listed above, Stelfox, Waldschmidt and Davidson plus other Edgy people Jessica Sharpe or Julia Cu, continue to mention Edgy as a current job on their LinkedIn profile and on Edgy web site inviting us to think that Profile Capital Management signed a contract with Edgy.

We understand that Profile Capital Management owns the company and Edgy is doing all business related operations. In other words, “boost my [new] business during these X coming months and we’ll prepare an exit…”.

It just confirms that this acquisition has shaken the strategy and the team illustrating some new shift, potential strategy and go-to-market directions.

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Treasure, a new cloud storage aggregator

Anqlave Pte. Ltd., developer of security software and services, has discreetly launched a few weeks ago a new product named Treasure.cloud.

Founded in August 2018 and based in Singapore with an office in London, the company is led by Assaf Cohen, CEO, Ina Miranda, CTO, and Ben Williams, CCO and has 13 employees globally.

Treasure.cloud is a personal cloud storage solution but could be used by anyone finally, even enterprises. It delivers a sort of dream for any user who expects a way to consolidate and synchronize its dispersed and fragmented public cloud storage via a single pane of glass exposing a virtual file space. Many users have created free online space on classic providers and immediately suffer from this space multiplication without any horizontal capability like navigation and search.

This global file view is accessible via a web interface, a tablet and a smartphone application. A desktop application is almost ready and should be ready by Q1/2020.

The product demarks itself from others with three features: a secured cloud storage space with end-to-end encryption provided by the Anqlave Data Vault (ADV), a FIPS 140-2 certified proprietary key management and data encryption solution, coupled with AWS and Azure, a cloud storage aggregation service to unify users’ subscribed online storage services such Dropbox, Box, Google Drive. OneDrive will be next and iCloud is under development. and a search capability across all storage back-ends.

ADV is an enterprise-class dedicated to secure keys at rest, in motion or in use. 

The team builds back-end connectors for each public cloud storage service. An API is also available for specific integration.

Like other similar tool, files can be shared securely from the Treasure.cloud space but the key is associated with the person you share files with. A link expiration date will be added soon as well.

In terms of pricing, four models have been created to address the wide area of needs from single user to enterprises:

This segment is pretty active and we find offerings from CloudFuze, Rethink Files, Koofr, Mega, pCloud, Kazoup or Kloudless.

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Stellus Technologies is dead

Incredible, Stellus Technologies, who made a fanfare for its launch in February 2020 is dead. The Samsung subsidiary finally ceased its activity, we don't know the reasons behind but I anticipate some management and products issues. I wrote a post in August 2019 and Jeff Treuhaft badly reacted with the infos I published as I unveiled Stellus based on public information. He quit Stellus ends of September 2020. The stellus.com domain name is no longer active. It reminds me what happened to MaxiScale or InterModal Data.

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