Robert Murphy joins Arcitecta

Arcitecta, a pioneer of unstructured data management, recruited Robert Murphy as VP of Marketing. He joined the ISV for the second time as he was already an employee around 2018-2019 and collaborated in the past with a good list of famous companies such as GigaIO, WEKA, Panasas, General Atomics, IBM, Dell, Sun, Mercury Computer Systems, Verari, SGI, HPE, named HP a that time, and Philips. Robert Murphy has a recognized experience in data management, NAS and parallel file system supporting various leading software like WEKAfs, PanFS, Software Scale or Isilon.

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Tech Talk about some needed clarification about file system

It appears that some vendors create and maintain some confusion for quite some time about file system, the parallel aspect of it and NAS. So I decided to record a new podcast episode to clarify that information and give the real and right definition of parallel file system. You can listen to this 159th episode of the French Storage Podcast here. Enjoy.

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Vawlt seems to hit a wall

Vawlt, the very small data management ISV from Portugal, seems to have some financial difficulties. We tried to reach its founders and meet the team but no answer or explanation from them. I wished to invite them to the recent and coming IT Press Tour but difficulties prevent them to join us. It doesn't give any trust to users and create a real doubt. We'll see how they'll operate in the future.

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Tech Talk about the primary storage confusion from Gartner

Gartner is a recognized and respected analyst form but they continue to deliver strange report and the last one entitled "Voice of the Customer for Primary Storage", published April 26, 2023, is a perfect example of that. Gartner defines primary storage as block storage and it is not so I decided to record this episode to address this big mistake. This is incredible, you can listen to this 158th episode of the French Storage Podcast with this link here. Enjoy.

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50th edition of The IT Press Tour in Colorado and California

The IT Press Tour is back in the USA with the visit of Colorado and California for the 50th edition scheduled the week of June 5th. This tour will be dedicated to IT infrastructure, data management and storage:

• Arcitecta, a leader in cloud file storage,
• DDN, the leader in AI Data company,
• MinIO, the reference in objet storage software,
• Nyriad, the alternative block storage based on GPU controller,
• Phison Electronics, an confidential leader in SSD controller,
• Qumulo, a pioneer in scale-out NAS,
• Spectra Logic, the established secondary storage player,
• Versity, the new generation of data archiving platform,
• and Volumez, a recent startup promoting a new block storage model.

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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Tech Talk with a recap of the European KubeCon conference

KubeCon is the conference dedicated to Kubernetes organized by the Linux Foundation. I attended the European edition in April in Amsterdam and I wished to record an episode about the storage at that conference and in the Kubernetes ecosystem as it seems to be a complete different approach. I invite you to listen to this 157th episode of the French Storage Podcast with this link here. Enjoy.

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StorONE strengthens its positions

StorONE, an innovator in storage software, joined the recent IT Press Tour in Israel. We had the opportunity to meet again the company we met globally 4 times and we realized the road to maturity and profitability made by the team and led by its CEO and founder Gal Naor. Last time we met StorONE was in June 2019 so progress were significants.

The new positioning of the company is around the storage hypervisor strategy what they call Virtual Storage Container (VSC) in fact an advanced universal storage controller based on pure software.

The main idea for the company and Gal Naor since the inception relies on 3 key elements: software only, maximize the performance delivered from the media and especially flash-based units at the right cost. In other words it's all about efficiency with the mission of the company to simplify storage management.

To address this market need and position its storage software, the team has introduced the VSC concept, coupling a scalable resilient service instance, storage volumes and access methods. The image below shows 3 volumes exposed with different protocols running and instantiated on same controller machine. Each VSC is independent providing its own data services with vRAID, vSnap, vReplicate, tiering and also performance requirements and settings. A volume could be full HDD, full flash or hybrid with implicit automatic tiering in that case.

StorONE for several years created and developed its own data services. The key element is the cacheless architecture that avoids any potential data integrity challenge with all write operations stored on persistent media. The engineering group has designed a new RAID and erasure coding technique and also some advanced data placement models. The gain is immediate with very fast rebuilds, for instance a SSD is recovered in less than 5 minutes.

The company leverages its snapshot mechanism to provide a proven ransomware protection with delta time of 60 seconds, incremental mode and very space efficient. But more globally the solution doesn't target any specific use cases as it is positioned as a universal solution replacing specific, dedicated or proprietary approaches. In other words, it works for everything but the config has to be chosen carefully to optimize and maximize the result.

Now as the business in US has really taken off, the company wishes to accelerate in Europe with a strong channel strategy representing a serious competitor against usual storage array suspects.

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