Tuesday, October 22, 2024

HYCU is ready for DORA and NIS2

HYCU, a reference in next generation data protection integrating SaaS and cloud capabilities, confirms that the last regulation - DORA and NIS2 - from Europe regarding data protection is almost in place. The article 12 of that new rule forces users to keep a local copy and for SaaS applications it could become a nightmare. This is probably why some moves happened recently such as Clumio swallowed by Commvault but above all Own by Salesforce for $1.9 billion.

HYCU will add Nutanix Objects, Dell, Cloudian, OVHcloud in addition to what they have today.

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Thursday, October 17, 2024

Some directions for Wasabi

Wasabi, the alternative champion for cloud storage, shared recently during The IT Press Tour in Boston some directions for its future.

David Friend, CEO, insisted on the next corporate step and it could be a IPO.

On the product side, the team works on an on-premises instance to finally provide a global answer with local and remote storage capability, we could say an hybrid model, to increase data availability, durability and boost RTO. This is also alined with the last European regulation DORA that forces users to keep a local copy especially for online services. This new official rule will be in application in January 2025.



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Tuesday, October 15, 2024

HYCU restores data everywhere

HYCU, the SaaS applications data protection fas growing player, confirms its ability to restore data on any other cloud supporting several combinations such as VMware to AWS to GCP to Nutanix or Azure. It offers the cross-cloud data mobility and allows flexible migration that can be key to sustain SLAs.



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Friday, October 11, 2024

ExaGrid, a leader a bit confidential

Reference in secondary storage dedicated to backup, ExaGrid participated to The IT Press Tour I organized this week in Boston, MA. We met Bill Andrews, CEO, yesterday and it was the right opportunity for a company and product update.


The company continues its independent journey with a pretty unique product approach and business model. The team has reached a new level with its 15th consecutive quarters, almost 4 years, of free cash flow, Ebitda and P&L positive operations. These results demonstrate the right business strategy with a few key numbers:
  • +150 new customers for a total of 4,400+ and 48 of these new ones passing the 6 and 7-figure deals,
  • New major product release with ExaGrid 7.0.0,
  • Support of Commvault Metallic in addition to the top 3 Veeam, Veritas NetBackup and Commvault classic product,
  • 95% net customer retention,
  • NPS score of +81.
We also anticipate that the product will support additional dedicated API and access methods for Rubrik and potentially Cohesity and for sure it will invite the company in a new dimension like Veeam did.


With such confirmed progress and impressive trajectory, I even think that the company has a good chance to join the bi-annual Coldago Research Storage Unicorn Club soon.
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Thursday, October 10, 2024

Wasabi, the cloud storage gem

Wasabi Technologies, the active player in cloud storage who shakes the top 3 for secondary storage needs, joined The IT Press Tour this week in Boston. It was the perfect time to get an update about the company and its offering and the directions they'll take soon.

We had the privilege to be with David Friend, CEO and co-founder, to present and discuss with us. The company, founded in 2015, has raised more then $500 million and is of course included in the Storage Unicorn Club published bi-annually by Coldago Research for several years.

With more 100,000 customers attached to 14 storage regions and 15,000+ partners of all kind, several exabyte are stored with for example more of 1EB of Veeam pushed data. Wasabi is used by various industries with a real partnership effort pushing a channel first approach. All storage sites are co-located with local internet, data centers and cloud service providers.

The Wasabi offering is pretty simple in its concept with of course a real complexity in its deployment but it is completely masked to users and consumers. The idea was to leverage S3 API as the de-facto standard for universal data access to cost effective cloud storage. In other words, build a 100% compatible solution with AWS S3 storage that invites users to select or switch in favor of Wasabi at an attractive cost, 805 less than Amazon. Of course users continue to own their data in a very secure way and can predict cost. With AWS S3 and other similar services, traffic costs increase the final bill and it is very difficult to anticipate the real final cost. With Wasabi this traffic is reduced to zero so users pay only for capacity per month.

Performance is also pretty good and data is immutable, protected by erasure coding in each site and replicated across regions projected 11 9's of durability. Encryption is done in-flight and at-rest with strong identity and access management (IAM), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and multi-user authorization (MUA).


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Tuesday, October 08, 2024

R-Cloud covers the highest number of applications

HYCU, a reference in SaaS applications backup, joined The IT Press Tour this week in Boston for the 10th times. It was a good time to get a company and product update from Simon Taylor, CEO, and his team as they're growing fast. The installed base passed 4,200 for 78 countries illustrating the rapid pace with 440+ partners. But also a good moment because we saw recently several mergers and acquisitions moves and probably $5 billion have been exchanged.

Launched with the tour last year, R-Cloud has radically changed how users approach SaaS applications data protection. It was clear yesterday that the product team has significantly increased the number of applications supported with 80+ applications. As the IT companies landscape has been highly modified if you compare with the last 10-20 years, the vast majority of applications used by enterprises are SaaS-based.

It is good for HYCU to be listed in some analysts reports even if Gartner has lost its credibility for several years confirmed by recent crazy MQs. I invite the readers to check my various comments and analysis of these Gartner strange documents.


The recent SaaS survey was an interesting source of informations that illustrate that SaaS service feed a scandal without a real serious protection while users don't really know what they use.

R-Cloud has made real progress while competition still focus on classic SaaS applications with an average of 9 supported. And the idea for HYCU is to cover the entire stack to be really considered as a universal or horizontal solution. The last news shared yesterday is related to new applications. In the domain, HYCU now adds:

  • Protected infrastructure services with AWS S3 Express Zone, Cloud Formation, Lambda and Google Cloud Run,
  • ITSM: ClickUp, Docusign and iManage,
  • DevOps: GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, Terraform, CircleCI, Jira Product Discovery and Google Artifact Registry,
  • IAM: Microsoft Entra ID, Okta Customer Identity Cloud, AWS IAM, VPC, WAF, KMS, Parameter Store and Route 53,
  • Data Management & Analytics: Google Big Table, Cloud Functions, Artifact Registry, Firestore, Redis and Pinecone,
  • Collaborative Work Management: Box, Monday, Podio and Wrike.


All this is a good example of the fact that "The industry creates its own complexity, a sign of maturity probably...".
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Wednesday, October 02, 2024

Boston, The IT Press Tour #58 is coming

The 58th IT Press Tour will land in a few days in Boston, MA.

Topics will be about IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, security, data management and storage with 8 innovative companies, among them:
  • Congruity360, a leader in unstructured data management,
  • HYCU, a reference in SaaS backup,
  • Hydrolix, key player in log-intensive data platform,
  • iRODS, the open source key solution for data management,
  • Swissbit, the European leader in flash media storage,
  • and Wasabi Technologies, the pioneer of hot cloud storage.
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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Tuesday, October 01, 2024

Recap of the 57th IT Press Tour in Istanbul, Turkey

Initially posted on StorageNewsletter 27/9/2024

This 57th edition of The IT Press Tour took place in Istanbul, Turkey, early September and all the press group and organizations had time exchanging about IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, security, data management and storage and of course AI present across all these topics. Six companies have been met, they are Cleondris, Datashelter, EU eArchiving Initiative, Hopsworks, MooseFS and ZeroPoint Technologies.

Cleondris
Second participation for Cleondris who chose to unveil its new cybersecurity software solution dedicated to NetApp filers. The Swiss software company, launched in 2009, develops special add-on software solutions for the NetApp ecosystem and filers. Christian Plattner, founder and CEO, announced Cleondris ONE to improve protection vs. ransomware, before the official public launch in Las Vegas, NV, during the annual NetApp Insight user conference next week.

Often seen as a close environment, NetApp receives Cleondris intelligent software layer that brings new open advanced solutions to augment filers’ services and here especially in the security space.

Cleondris ONE goals are to protect, detect but also prevent cyber threats and therefore disasters with some new resilience models coupling 3 key services – backup, security and compliance – into one unified solution.

The product is delivered as an OVA image and deployed on a dedicated appliance. Integrated via the Fpolicy mechanism running ONTAP 9, 10 and up on-premises, also supporting Amazon FSx for NetApp and Cloud Volumes ONTAP for cloud flavors, Cleondris ONE operates with single node or large clusters. It leverages AI based ONTAP Autonomous Ransomware Protection and adds other methods around filename patterns, behavior analysis and file verification to make frequent audits. These audits are stored as a blockchain displayed on a rich GUI and serve as the base of the solution using immutable backups and air-gapped snapshots. The granularity is the file, all is controlled by the Granular Cyber Restore.

More globally, backup is a serious method to provide data redundancy but alone it doesn’t solve any ransomware specific tasks. It requires additional code to provide pattern detection, potentially prevention and trigger some rapid recovery. Here again the audits allows to detect data divergence and thus start some recovery mechanisms. CDP, near CDP or frequent snapshots are key to align with some compliance needs or just satisfy some RPO goals.


Datashelter
SaaS applications offer opportunities for a variety of projects as the subscription is so easy and rapid. And it also exposes data at risk as many users don’t pay attention on the data protection. This challenge exists for all type of companies.

Very young french backup software company founded in 2023, the entity develops a SaaS backup solution for SMB. With a very small team based in Toulouse, France, the organization has already secured more than 50 customers. The original idea came from the observation of lack of solution for small businesses or solutions with unpredictable pricing and also the need to consider some secondary storage, on-premises or cloud-based, for non technical people. But the real trigger was the scandal happened at OVHcloud in its datacenter in Strasbourg and the impact it had on small web-based businesses.

Datashelter is a backup automation tool, written in Go, that protect files and databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB. The storage space is included, leveraging the S3 API and today backup images are stored on the OVHcloud infrastructure. In terms of features, it provides encryption, compression, de-dupe and incremental backups and doesn’t rely on any server or external schedule as everything is controlled by client software. In other words, there is no server in the architecture and operates as a push-only model. The solution is multi-tenant by design as each customer owns a dedicated bucket, not accessible or visible by other running clients. There is no need of SSH connection and no firewall authorization is required. It is a very light model and really secured as all data escaping the client is encrypted. It costs €5/TB/month and €2/server/month with 1TB included.

The team plans to add Kubernetes support, Windows compatibility, serverless and will accept also customers’ own S3 storage.

The company belongs to the OVHcloud Startup Program and is looking for reseller and integrators.


EU eArchiving Initiative
The European Union has jumped into the game with an official eArchiving initiative to harmonize practices and recommend standards and processes in the domain. It is also a fundamental project for data sharing capability between countries and associated administration and other entities. It means interoperability is a key aspect of the project. The initiative introduces the notion of Data Spaces to carefully align the need, the recommendation and solutions with each vertical sectors or industries and provide ecosystem and common services layers.

The eArchiving initiative is an official Digital Europe Program supported by DG CNECT and E-ARK Consortium and started almost 2 years ago October 1st, 2022. Each European union member is invited to participate especially in the E-ARK consortium. Again the goal is interoperability, openness and transparency, sustainability and legal compliance to reuse and share information over the long term, what is the essence of data archiving with here a supra country dimension.

E-ARK participates in the specifications across sectors, domains and countries wishing to push it as a de-facto standard. The model relies on the open archival information system reference model or ISO 14721 and targets 5 properties model: content, context, rendering, structure and behavior. This initiative is a must for Europe and at the same time it is very confidential so the need for such project to increase its visibility and participate to this kind of events. The project is well developed and users and other potential participants can navigate from this web page to dig and learn about the initiative.

So far 37 different projects reuse eArchiving components, 6 are committed to reuse them and 21 are committed to analyze them illustrating a real dynamism. Of course, users expect that this independent legal project will find some synergies with vendors’ solutions.


Hopsworks
Data integration appeared to be mandatory especially as AI popup everywhere. Founded in 2018 with €12.25 million in 3 fundings rounds, the Swedish company Hopsworks develops an AI lakehouse to integrate big data, analytics and other ML to boost data integration.

The reality is very different as data sources are disparate, teams are siloed, systems are not unified and frameworks not compatible. Hopsworks goals is to build and offer a unified data layer as query and storage layers are decoupled. Lakehouse and MLOps Platforms are disconnected meaning that data is not able to be transferred, visible from the other part and unable to be queried with consistency.

The product is already adopted by various users of any size in different verticals and industries. It is available in 3 flavors: open source as a self service version, pretty limited without SLA but good enough to assess the solution and wish to extend to other editions, serverless for a version managed by Hopsworks with limited SLA and enterprise, the full edition, delivering high SLAs and integration capabilities.

In terms of partnerships, the firm leverages Intel, AMD, Nvidia and Supermicro plus Confluent, Neo4j and Oracle and OVHcloud for the cloud platform. The solution is promoted as subscription for cloud or on-premises.

In addition to the platform, the team has developed HopsFS, a file system service built to run on S3 distributed across multiple availability regions, that is Posix compliant and compatible with the HDFS API. The result is 100x the performance of S3 for file move/rename operations and 3.4x the read throughput of S3 (EMRFS) for the DFSIO benchmark. It is interesting to see some similarities between file systems and databases technologies impacted and challenged by S3 and more globally object storage.

The firm has lot of ambitions and expect to really take-off within this AI new wave and data integration expertise.


MooseFS
Distributed file system is a hot market segment especially in the open source domain. We easily count 10+ solutions in the last 2 decades. One of the key trigger was the famous Google file system paper published in 2003 that invited several pioneers to initiate some projects. One of these is MooseFS controlled by a polish company.

MooseFS is parallel file system that relies on 3 key elements: clients with a small piece of software that exposes data via a Posix interface or NFS, SMB and even S3. The team also adds a block interface at that level. The second element is represented by metadata servers and one of these is the leader coupled with several followers and the last layer is the data storage entities instantiated by chunk servers.

Clients play a key role as they’re responsible to stripe data and send the stream to one or several chunk servers following the exchange about location with the metadata server leader. Below 64MB, only data chunk is sent to one server and above, each 64MB is sent to a different chunk server, all operating in parallel. The idea is to send and write client data to servers the most rapidly. As soon as the data is received, a replication task is started across data servers to provide the first minimal protection. As erasure coding is available in 8+1 in the community edition and 8+2 in the pro edition, this schema is launched in the background after the full replication is finished. Other features are given such as snapshots, tiering and such client models offer the capability to run jobs directly on clients.

The product is hardware agnostic and is a good example of a SDS approach. Clients can run Linux, MacOS and Windows, servers in their metadata and data flavors, run Linux.

The MooseFS team picked the tour to launch v4.0 open source release available on GitHub.

The company is profitable and generates revenue with support of course and pro licenses that extend the community edition. The pricing relies on total raw disk space and the management team has chosen to not offer subscription for the pro version.


ZeroPoint Technologies
Founded in 2016 as a spinout from Chalmers University, the Swedish company raised so far $16.3 million in 10 rounds. The entity was founded by Dr Angelos Arelakis, CTO, and professor Per Stenstrom, CSO, after a natural incubation period at the university.

The team targets the 3 famous pains regarding memory performance: it has become a real performance bottleneck, size and management is inefficient and finally it continues to be very expensive. And AI has accelerated the first challenge as the domain requires much memory than other domains.

ZeroPoint has developed a pretty unique memory compression technology that boosts performance as the memory utilization increases, keeps only relevant data in place and finally optimizes the TCO and its associated TCCO – total cost of carbon ownership.

The development relies on advanced algorithms and delivers inline compression at 2-4x ratio with cache line granularity coupled with a specific OS agnostic memory management driver. But one of the beauty of this solution is the almost absence of latency with a factor of 1000 between approaches. The other gain is on the performance per watt with 50% higher ratio. It was demonstrated on 5nm TSMC foundation, adopted by 1 CXL vendor and listed on 1 ARM partner catalog.

ZeroPoint has developed a real product line addressing these challenges at different places: on-chip memory, off-chip memory and storage.

This is recognized as a must by hyperscalers and even OCP has published a paper about this challenge and how to address it.

In terms of business it appears to be a long run with a 24-36 months sales cycle that requires other funding rounds to boost valuation, delay acquisition and for sure accelerate barriers to entry for others. 

With 70 patents filled, I’m afraid that this technology will be so attractive for processors and memory maker but also CXL developers and for sure hyperscalers that ZeroPoint will probably land somewhere…



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Friday, September 20, 2024

Advanced ransomware protection for NetApp by Cleondris

Cleondris, a software solution provider from Switzerland launched in 2009, continues to deliver unique add-on software solutions for the NetApp ecosystem and filers. As a key partner for the filer reference, Christian Plattner, founder and CEO, joined for the second time The IT Press Tour early September in Istanbul, Turkey, to announce its new data security solution he planned to unveil in a few days in Las Vegas during the annual NetApp Insight user conference.

The company's mission is to offer advanced solutions to complement NetApp installed base and prevent cyber attacks to impact seriously business operations. The idea is not only to protect, detect but also prevent cyber threats with some new resilience models. 

The product named Cleondris ONE couples 3 key services into one unified solution, it is about backup + security and compliance. It works in 3 phases with some proactive detection, rapid recovery when a attack is real and stay aligned with some compliance rules.


The control server leverages NetApp's Fpolicy, from ONTAP 9, 10 and up, to control behavior of the Filer and other scale-out servers can be added to control large configurations. It supports on-premises systems but also Amazon FSx for NetApp and Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Beyond AI based ONTAP Autonomous Ransomware Protection, the Cleondris solution adds some other methods around filename patterns, behavior analysis and file verification. Clearly backup is not enough as the threat can be also included in the backup image and therefore will infect again the system. Cleondris ONE is doing this with considering clean and safe images restoring only good data. The granularity is the file with a very simple status, good or bad, clean or infected I mean safe or encrypted. All is controlled by the Granular Cyber Restore.


The audit of filers made by Cleondris ONE via Fpolicy is secured with a blockchain model being protected by design. The solution analyzes behavior patterns and brand new attacks .

Obviously, the product leverages immutable backups and air-gapped snapshots. It is deployed as an OVA image on a dedicated appliance and offers a rich GUI to monitor all filers audits.

Cleondris ONE complements NetApp solution and provides advanced techniques, able to be sold by selected partners.

I will meet again Christian in a few days in Las Vegas and plan to record a specific episode for The French Storage Podcast to learn more about Cleondris ONE.

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Wednesday, August 28, 2024

The 57th IT Press Tour in Istanbul is around the corner


Back to the old continent with the 57th edition of The IT Press Tour in Istanbul, Turkey, next week.

Sessions will be about IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, security, data management and storage with 6 innovative Europeans organizations:
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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