Digital storage today incorporates management of data both on-premises and in the cloud. In this piece we will look at some recent announcements of storage systems and services that provide fast access to data on solid state storage, while maintaining good TCO with colder storage tiers, universal access to data, where ever it resides as well as improved security and AI enabled data analytics and management.
MapR Technologies announced its MapR Data Platform to speed automated analytics, improve the productivity of developers and data scientists and streamline security and storage across on-premises data centers, clouds and edge data centers. This platform update, available next quarter, extends the data fabric to cloud storage through object tiering; fast ingest erasure coding for more cost-effective, long-term data retention; security innovations to automatically enable security across the environment, a new S3 API supporting next-gen applications and increasing application portability; and an wide array of analytical and real-time streaming enhancements. The image below shows storage tiering in MapR.
The core data service innovations in the updated MapR platform are:
* Policy-Driven automatic data placement across performance-optimized, capacity-optimized and cost-optimized tiers, on-premises or in cloud, with Object Tiering,
* Fast ingest erasure coding that can now be used for capacity-optimized tiers or with high speed SSDs for an optimized analytics tier,
* Native S3 Interface for next-generation applications for direct analytics on operational data and transparent application portability across on-premises and multi-cloud environments,
* Advanced Secure File-based services to ensure corporate security compliance with NFSv4.
Software startup Cloudtenna aims to deal with the sprawl of file on-premises and throughout the cloud with its enterprise file search that works across on-premises repositories, cloud file storage services and hosted and online applications. The company’s DirectSearch uses machine learning intelligence, natural language processing, and automation to search files scattered across email apps, network drives, cloud storage, and hosted collaboration suites. Cloudtenna says that is tool has advantages over consumer cloud search apps and enterprise eDiscovery tools.
The company has about 30 beta customers for DirectSearch from universities, online businesses and large enterprises. The product allows cross-silo file search across products such as Dropbox, Google rive, Box, Slack, ShareFile and Salesforce. AI in the search engine learns from relevance, context and user behavior to continuously improve search results. Users can find files by name, sender, data, file type, keyword, content and other attributes. Search results across all information sources are available in 400-600 ms.
Scality, announced its RING 7.4 Long Term Support (LTS) release. The company says that this release streamlines IT operations with major advancements in ease-of-deployment and operations for scale-out file and object storage and new 3-server configurations for HPE Apollo server platforms for a smaller, more affordable entry-point to scale-out software-defined storage.
The release includes an easy-to-use window into monitoring and management of servers via its new RING Supervisor UI, a comprehensive, unified portal for all aspects of management and monitoring of the RING’s native AWS S3 and file (NFS, SMB) storage interfaces. And, to enhance deployment ease, Scality RING 7.4 introduces the unified Installer, which enables customers to deploy the RING easily in under an hour on any of 45 reference platform architectures, including the new 3-server entry point configurations on HPE Apollo 4200/4510 server platforms.
HPE ‘s StoreFabric M-Series is the hardware platform used for many software storage companies to run their applications. HPE recently announced updates to their M-Series storage systems. The company says that Cohesity, Cloudian, Hedvig, Qumulo, Rubrik, Scality, HP/3PAR, Nimble Storage and Simplivity use the M-Series to minimize latency and ensure end-to-end application of unique differentiation.
HPE announced its StoreFabric Smart Fabric Orchestrator. The company said that the addition of orchestration automation to the M-Series empowers storage admins to zone and provision storage in a few clicks, error-free, and to automatically orchestrate fabric services. This reduces the need for both storage and SAN configuration experts while freeing up resources to focus on business outcomes. They also introduced the HPE SN2010M StoreFabric M-Series switch, in cooperation with Mellanox. The image shows the updated HPE StoreFabric M-Series products.
The SN2010M provides a highly-efficient ½ rack TOR switch with 18 ports of 1/10/25GbE and 4 ports of 40/100GbE in each, enabling full redundancy in 1RU. Breakout cables enable users to expand 1X100GbE port to 4X10GbE or 4X25GbE.
Toshiba Memory America announced a line of SAS SSDs expected to replace SATA SSDs in server applications. The 12 Gbps value SAS series is said to offer capacity, performance, reliability, manageability and data security at a price that obsoletes SATA SSDs. The RM5 uses Toshiba’s BiCS TLC 3D flash memory with storage capacities up to 7.68 TB with a 12 Gb/s SFF-8639 connector in a 2.5” form factor.
Faster switches, faster storage devices, improved search and data analytics enable software defined improved access and management of data across all storage tiers and locations.
