Egnyte hits a wall

Egnyte, an active file collaboration cloud player, hits a wall confirming its difficulties to validate a next phase such as an IPO. The company who is very confidential never succeeded to gain visibility and this fact illustrates its niche player status for a long time. And the trajectory is obvious, the company finally found a financial exit with a strategic investment with GI Partners and TA Associates. They will try to monetize their investment with an IPO or a sale to a bigger company but $1.5 billion is very high, too high.

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iXsystems sold its server business to Amaara Networks

iXsystems, a reference in Open Enterprise Storage, has decided to stop one of its business, its server activity, by selling it to its historical partner Amaara Networks. It confirms the wish to iXsystems to be seen as TrueNAS as the public has difficulties to connect the dots between the 2 names. This corporate event justifies this and starting from now you can check truenas.com. It also means that the firm will accelerate on storage delivering more margin than the server business with tough market and clear margin erosion.

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DataCore made a big mistake acquiring ridiculous assets

DataCore, a recognized software-defined storage player, just announced a crazy news with the acquisition of Arcastream from Kalray, the file storage business, acquired in 2022 by the french company from the UK Arcapix entity. The news was postponed 2 times and the call I had with Dave Zabrowski, CEO, and Abhijit Dey, CPO, confirmed that they live in a different world and are disconnected from the reality and file storage forces, presence, trends and drivers on the market. The image below illustrates the trajectory of the company, they made 2 good acquisitions, MayaData and Caringo, others are just gadgets. They had an agreement with Hammerspace for the product vFilO, probably too early, but it was a good choice, of course they didn't own it.

Regarding Arcastream, the IP is ridiculously weak adding light software and service on top IBM Storage Scale. They have Ngenea, an old HSM model using stubs that can generate traffic to Swarm, yes potentially, but for how many accounts.

Don't be abuse by this, DataCore doesn't acquire or owns any file system with this move. The transaction is between $15 and $20 million according to the details which represents a third of what DataCore raised a few months ago.

The race to grow the valuation to sell the company is a fair mission but picking this one is just incredible. What a big mistake.

As I wrote on StorageNewsletter, DataCore management would have been better inspired to target players, even very different from their offerings, such as Egnyte, JuiceFS, LucidLink, MooseFS, Peer Software, Quobyte, Resilio, StorONE, ThinkParQ, Tiger Technology or Tuxera... Rozo Systems has been acquired by Hammerspace in 2022, Compuverde by Pure Storage in 2019 or Elastifile by Google also in 2019 and DataCore missed these 3 interesting solutions. And we don't mention Sanbolic bought by Citrix in 2015 before Zabrowski's era. But none of them would have been cost less than $20 million, sorry, I should only 2, one already gone but one still available at that price in my above list. What a brilliant due diligence they did...

We'll see and we'll speak again about that move, I will follow carefully that new solution within DataCore.

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Panzura unveils CloudFS 8.5 Adapt

Panzura, a leading global file services player, has announced several key features with its 8.5 Adapt release of its CloudFS product, what they call an hybrid cloud file platform. Panzura has been recognized again in 2024 as a leader in the Coldago Research Map 2024 for Cloud File Storage. We invite our readers to check this report page.

We met last week the company in San Jose for a company and product update during The IT Press Tour and the team took advantage of this meeting to unveil this 8.5 major evolution targeting business continuity, performance and security.

The first main feature is Instant Node, a new capability to migrate a Panzura node from on-premises to cloud or vice-versa, refresh hardware or just reinstall and repair a failed node. In all these cases, the service is restarting very fast proving service to users in a very rapid way. To facilitate integration and control, the engineering team had exposed a REST API to ease the coupling with IT management solutions.

The second one is Regional Store to offer a more data propagation mechanism associated with a quality of service. Instead of having only one source of truth in the cloud with all edge Panzura instances connected to it wherever they run, the 8.5 release allows connection of these edge machines to multiple back-end object stores, in fac tup to 4 buckets. In that case, Panzura is not responsible of the data propagation across clouds, this task is made by clouds service themselves within same vendor entities or between various clouds. This design reduces drastically latency and we can reasonably think that until today when this configuration exists, users suffers from that deployment model. It is the case when data is not yet in the cache. 

Additionally, this release introduces some security things like the SSO support via OKTA service integration.

Also Azure Storage Tier has been added like the AWS one, already available, to address files migrated to a different class of storage within the cloud service provider environment. This capability contributes to a better control of TCO globally.

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