Talk with Thomas Thalmann, CEO, PoINT Software & Systems
Monday, September 26, 2022
Thursday, September 22, 2022
Recap of the 45th edition of The IT Press Tour
Initially posted on StorageNewsletter 9/20/2022
The recent 45th edition of The IT Press Tour organized for the first time in Paris gave to the press crew the opportunity to meet 6 companies, 5 from Europe and 1 from US - Biomemory Labs from France, DataCore from US, Nodeum from Belgium, PoINT Software & Systems from Germany, Storadera from Estonia and StorPool from Bulgaria - covering data management, cloud, NVMe, block, file and object file storage, primary and secondary storage, tape, open source and DNA data storage.
Biomemory Labs
The French company Biomemory Labs session was amazing. It was about the development of a DNA data storage entity based on synthetic biology to leverage the DNA properties for long term information preservation. The presentation was driven by Pierre Crozet, CTO and co-founder, but also associate professor at Sorbonne Université. The management team is composed of Erfane Arwani, CEO, and Christophe Lemaire, CSO and also research director at CNRS in France in addition of Crozet. The company has the mission to develop a DNA Drive and introduced the concept of WORN - Write Once Read Never - with the goal to be a complement of current technologies and media and potentially replace them when it will be ready. As mentioned, the application is for cold storage. The technology uses a different alphabet with 4 letters A, C, T and G for data encoding with an incredible density of 50 atoms/letter that means that 45ZB can be represented by just a chocolate bar fo 100g. The 2 others phases - synthesis and sequencing - takes times to day especially the "writing" phase. Beyond obvious properties like energy savings as a passive entity, size and density, the number of copies are potentially infinite. One of the key element is that the information and the media are the DNA which is different from a classic storage entity where information and media are two decoupled notions. The industry understand that this development is a serious direction having established the DNS Data Storage Alliance now affiliated to the SNIA with usual software and storage hardware suspects but also several key players in this DNA development. Beyond the DNA Drive demonstration made a few months ago, Biomemory thinks 2030 as a reasonable target with the mission to release a 4U server.
DataCore
Real reference in Software-Defined Storage (SDS), one of the pioneer of storage virtualization at the golden age of SAN, DataCore joined the tour in Paris to share its updated vision named DataCore NEXT, its Edge Computing initiative, the new Swarm version, its Perifery flavor and the partnership with Symply. Dave Zabrowski, CEO, has insisted on the new direction for the company with storage and processing at the edge representing a real new business opportunity for the industry and especially DataCore with Swarm incarnation as Perifery. The company enters into this segment with key selected partners and delivers ready-to-use appliances built by these partners and fed with several software on the platform to address key verticals such healthcare or media and entertainment today. In this M&E domain, DataCore picks Symply to deliver the first appliance dedicated to media archiving. In this new strategy, valid for the next three years, Core to Edge to Cloud is supported by the block SDS SANsymphony, the object storage Swarm and the storage management software dedicated to Kubernetes Bolt. Since Zabrowski joined DataCore almost five years, the trajectory of the company has changed radically from a one product company to a real portfolio addressing block, file, object and cloud-native applications. We anticipate an exit from DataCore, it could be an acquisition with players like HPE or with a private equity firm, with the information that Insight Venture Partners is an investor in DataCore since 2008.
Nodeum
The Belgium company plays in the data management space with some interesting developments. The team leverages its deep users expertise to address new challenges in data migration, data protection and data archiving for unstructured data at scale. Having said that, the heart of Nodeum is a fast scalable data mover to build comprehensive workflows. The solution supports any source and target, source such NAS and S3, private or public object storage, and even Swift and targets like S3, Swift again and tape storage. Nodeum exposes a single namespace across the devices and medias especially on top of objet and tape storage. Nodeum's solution appears to be a universal answer offering an open API to address various use cases in media and entertainment, geospatial, healthcare and especially genomics and also university and research centers. Illustrated with various success stories, we understand that Nodeum is chosen for special workflows with deep data tracking during data movement across multiple divers sources and targets. They partner with two key vendors, Quantum and DataCore, Quantum to provide them the S3 to tape access layer and DataCore as they use Swarm. The team plans to introduce a new architecture in a few months to sustain rapid adoption and new data volumes challenges a large scale in one verticals such banking and HPC.
PoINT Software & Systems
The German company is clearly a pioneer in the open systems space for unstructured data management with almost thirty years of existence. Being a bit confidential, the company is recognized for its expertise in the domain with Storage Manager, a pretty classic but comprehensive file tiering and archiving product capitalizing on the HSM concept but also for its Archival Gateway product being an universal model for data preservation using tape to store data and S3 for the access. Storage Manager has several hundreds installations worldwide and runs already in famous large datacenters. The team has also developed Data Replicator to couple with the latter and provide file to S3 or S3 to S3 copy mechanism. All these products are software only and support a large source and target medias, devices and systems. During the Paris edition, Thomas Thalmann, CEO, announced its unified object storage (UOS), a new extension to the archival gateway. Beyond the S3 to tape, who some people call a modern VTL, UOS adds a disk back-end and a single namespace between the two entities. Disk and tape reside at the same level but data movement between these two is also possible and we can imagine some subtle data lifecycle policies around move/copy or tier operations. This confirms a real market trend with 9 players in that S3 to tape category with Fujifilm, Grau Data, Nodeum, PoINT Software & Systems, Quantum, QStar, Spectra Logic, StrongLink and XenData.
Storadera
The Estonian company is on a mission, they just wish to attack the empire built and controlled by AWS, GCP or Azure i.e the cloud storage landscape. Starting very recently in Talinn, Estonia, with limited funding, Storadera offers online storage space with a fully compatible S3 API, but the key aspect is the pricing model. The service is promoted as a predictable model with a flat fee per capacity per month without any cost for traffic whatever you do, no threshold on that aspect, the price ignores I/O operations. It is charged at 6 euros / TB / month. Date is protected by erasure coding and today only one region and one availability zone (AZ) exist, they plan to add a data center in Netherlands and Germany in the coming months thus growing the region with three AZs. The traffic is encrypted and data at-rest as well to fully prevent any data interpretation. Storadera claims to be the cheapest S3 storage even with Wasabi or Backblaze B2. So far numbers are small in terms of capacity and customers but it is growing, the challenge for Storadera being more to gain visibility than attracting users. Margus Danil, COO, confirmed that they don't rely on open source software or tools and everything was developed in house. In terms of use cases, they started with a pretty classic data protection approach, being a target for some established solutions such Altaro, Comet, Cyberduck, Duplicati, MSP360 aka CloudBerry, Nakivo, Rclone, Synology Hyper Backup or Veeam. But clearly the fact that traffic cost zero also invite them to address other traffic intensive use cases.
StorPool
The Bulgarian company StorPool belongs to the small group of pure SDS players and in their case they offer a block interface. By pure we mean the total absence of special NIC, board, RAID controller, NVDIMM, DPU... And this is what SDS has originally promised, take a set of x86 servers with internal disks, HDD or SSD or both, with a Linux distribution connected to a ethernet network and install StorPool software. Then you just need to configure the cluster to offer pools of storage by logical aggregation fo internal disk across systems. The result is exposed outside via iSCSI or with a driver installed on the application machines. This is what StorPool does for many years as the company was founded in 2011. The firm supports high demanding workloads delivering 1M IOPS per node at 70us latency and performance is very linear. The latency offered by a cluster reaches 1.5x the local NVMe latency. Being profitable with an interesting growth in various industries for this alternative primary storage model, the team has announced recently three new key features: the support of NVMe/TCP, NAS flavor with NFS and AWS support. The NVMe/TCP support is fully software and invites StorPool in the group of NVMe/TCP vendors with Lightbits Labs, Fungible, Pavilion Data, Smart IOPS among others in addition to the big storage irons. The file interface support with first NFS was a surprise but confirms the business opportunity. The first iteration offers 50TB per server working in active/passive mode. StorPool on AWS demonstrates that even against specific AWS AMI and associated storage, this SDS approach makes really sense and delivers impressive results.
Alex Grossman joined DataCore to lead M&E strategy
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
PoINT accelerates on object storage
The company has announced PoINT Archival Gateway - Unified Object Storage to bridge disk and tape and named this model a Software-Defined Secondary and Archive Storage. I invite the team to pay attention to name a category with the danger to be alone in it and never be chosen by users because they're unable to compare you. We have plenty of examples of that with the perpetual quest to reach a blue ocean instead of realizing that it is already a red one.
The good thing is the data mover engine between these 2 levels within the object storage environment and thus behind the exposed interface. It means admins can create some intelligent policies position the right data at the right place and maintain redundancy. The other interesting feature is the single namespace between these 2 levels masking the data location and of course S3 interface for the outside world. PoINT maintains its advantage to access data directly from tape without local caching. This is optional. The team uses the term JBOD and HDD Object Storage which is not clear, does it mean NAS or block storage, and why support only HDD object storage and not flash-based. My understanding is that it could be NAS or block storage where PoINT generates a file system on it connected and mounted directly. For object storage, again S3 is just an interface. These 2 levels can be configured as a hierarchy with automatic tiering but also at the same level.
This approach is justified by a market demand with already several offerings, we count 9 on the market: Fujifilm, Grau Data, Nodeum, PoINT, QStar, Quantum, Spectra Logic, StrongLink and XenData with of course some similarities and differences. With all the expertise of PoINT we expect a real take-off of this product, congrats to the team.
Tuesday, September 13, 2022
DataCore unveiled a new Swarm-based product
Essentially it's an extension of DataCore ONE with Edge Computing as a new key strategic component to offer a global model Core to Edge to Cloud.
Back to the announcement, Swarm has been verticalized to address M&E needs and named Perifery to align the solution to the edge. Clearly there is a growing need for storage and compute for data captured at the edge. This is well illustrated by a video shooting workflow operated on site and not in the data center or in the cloud. Data could be too large for migrate, process could not tolerate any delay so the right approach is to consider some intelligence at the edge with some advanced storage element and associated compute. The second vertical use cases targeted by DataCore is healthcare where edge devices exist everywhere. These 2 images below show perfectly this evolution.
As said a new version of Swarm is now available as a pure software model for the core and for the edge and appliance needs, DataCore has chosen a different delivery form with its software packaged and named Perifery.
This is marketed and promoted by Symply as SymplyPerifery to address M&E archiving challenges and needs. Symply has leveraged also some key partners to boost the solution, we find axledit for video editing, StorageDNA for data protection and Tiger Bridge to connect private and cloud entities with intelligent workflows.
DataCore confirms its object storage leadership with Swarm engine and we'l see how competition will react.
Monday, September 12, 2022
Talk with Dave Zabrowski, CEO, DataCore
Thursday, September 08, 2022
PoINT, a leader often forgotten in data management
Historically the company was famous for its optical jukebox supporting a large variety to media and the number of licences passed 2,500 units.
The next product is PoINT Storage Manager, called sometimes PSM, dedicated to File Tiering and Archiving showing a HSM philosophy. PSM has more than 200 installations worldwide. It supports a wide variety of storage media and storage systems as source or target and the engine runs on Windows Server OS. It supports generic file servers and also special NAS and also optical libraries in addition of tape, NAS, object and WORM storage. The product works in 2 modes: active and passive mode. In active mode, original files are replaced by special files after migration processes happened, their file size is truncated to zero to indirectly show their status, this move is controlled by a policy. The product offers multiple access methods such the famous stubbing, web links, symbolic links but also web client browser and application integration. One of the beauty of SPM is that reads are pass-through and thus don't require local copy on primary storage. Of course if the file is changed, the new version is stored locally and becomes a potential candidate for a future migration. In that case, the secondary storage may stored multiple versions of the same file. In the passive mode, PSM exposes the PoINT Archive file system and files are accessible via a classic model. To be portable and used in a variety of systems and over a long period of time, the team has chosen a standard format, UDF (Universal Disk Format), to expose archive data. UDF allows a containerization of archive data and managed as a whole.
But clearly the name of the product doesn't reflect what it does, it's too generic as well, it would have been better to name it with something like PoINT File Migration or PoINT Data Tiering.
The other product is called PoINT Archival Gateway to offer a S3 front-end to a tape library and thus move towards a universal approach of the interface. This product was launched 2018 and really anticipated the market as today we see at least 8 others products: Fujifilm, Grau Data, Nodeum, QStar, Quantum, Spectra Logic, StrongLink and XenData for a total of 9 with PoINT. The product demonstrated some high interesting characteristics with 1PB/day move capabilities and volume superior fo 10PBs. The image below summarizes pretty well what the product can offer. IT implements erasure coding on tape libraries more something similar to RAIT but differently from what Quantum has developed.
And the last is named PoINT Data Replicator and offers a solution to copy files to S3 and even copy S3 data to another S3 destination. S3 could be any entity that respects S3 API, it could be an on-premises object storage or a public cloud service. Thus it could be coupled with the Archival Gateway.
And the company maintains as well so other tools like the File System Analyzer, Jukebox Manager and Publisher for CV/DVD and Blu-ray discs.
Definitely a player that counts in this market segment, a bit too confidential when you see the power of its solutions.
Monday, September 05, 2022
Talk with Sumit Puri, CEO, Liqid
Thursday, September 01, 2022
The IT Press Tour lands in Paris for its 45th edition
We begin with same usual topic IT Infrastructure, Data Management and Storage with 5 European companies and 1 from USA:
- Biomemory Labs, from France, will present state of the art for DNA Data Storage,
- DataCore, from USA, a reference in Software-Defined Storage,
- Nodeum, from Belgium, a rapid growing player in data management,
- Point Software & Systems, from Germany, a pioneer in data management,
- Storadera, from Estonia, a recent alternative to AWS S3,
- and StorPool, from Bulgaria, one of the most comprehensive Block SDS on the market.
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