Top vendors for Object Storage

I continue to share the recent Coldago Research rankings presented in its annual end-users survey. You can access the full report here, it's completely free. 

Today it is about Object Storage and users perceptions, and opinions and the result will sure surprised what many vendors try to promote. The top 3 are NetApp with StorageGRID, IBM with COS and Pure Storage with FlashBlade. The first two are acquisitions respectively of Bycast and Cleversafe and the last is a pure development from the Mountain View giant. Hitachi Vantara arrives #4, MinIO #5 and 1st open source product and #6 is VAST Data growing super fast with a brilliant image and quality of product that have an impact on users. Some products really disappoint by their position probably because there is some disconnect between vendors messaging, the business climate and the product reality.

As a reminder this study asked 712 European users from UK, Germany and France and 1347 US users working on enterprise and SMB segments.

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Quantum acquires Pivot3 video surveillance business

Quantum, a leader in secondary storage, continues its recovery and its momentum fueled by Jamie Lerner, the new CEO.

This time the storage reference acquired the Pivot3 video surveillance business for just $8.9 million in cash and stock capitalizing on its past efforts to build a comprehensive product line around this hot topic. This also brings to Quantum 500 customers in this segment able to cross- and up-sell the rest of the product line. The company will also welcome engineering, support and other sales and products folks that solidify Quantum position in that market.

Acquirer's teams receive also key software IP around distributed storage, data placement, erasure coding and storage quality of service that an be used in future and the rest of the product line.

And of course appliances and network video recorders and management solutions are in the basket that will be offered under the Quantum VS-Series. Again it makes really sense to aggregate such solutions and couple these with StorNext, ATFS and ActiveScale.

We'll learn more about this strategy when we'll meet Quantum during the 40th edition of The IT Press Tour in October.

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Top vendors for secondary storage

Coldago Research unveiled a few weeks ago its part 1 of its new end-users survey, the full report is available for download here. One section of the study is dedicated to the opinion of vendors by these users. This study asked 712 European users from UK, Germany and France and 1347 US users working on enterprise and SMB segments. I have chosen to publish here the question bout Secondary Storage players and Quantum, Spectra Logic and Dell arrived top 3 of this list very close to each other. Cohesity, IBM and HPE follow them, again this report is not about market share, sales revenue... but more about the users' perceptions, opinions and how they like some brands.

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A summary of the vast backup offering for SaaS applications

It's hot and represents a huge business opportunity, it also becomes a key topic within the Modern Data Protection. I wish to share with you an updated list of the vendors who cover Salesforce, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace and potentially other applications.

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Model9 available on Azure marketplace

Model9, a reference in data management for mainframe, continues to add cloud service providers to its partners list and this time its Cloud Data Manager product is available on the Azure Marketplace. The company becomes also a "Microsoft Preferred Solutions" under the Azure IP Co-sell program with Microsoft sales team able to sell the product and address needs in this environment. For sure it helps Model9 accelerates its revenue curve and Microsoft penetrates the mainframe business indirectly with its cloud services platform. Good synergy that should invite several potential acquirers to watch carefully what Model9 is doing with its pretty unique solution. Congrats.

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Filebase confirms its takeoff

Filebase, one of the active decentralized storage players, continues to develop its partnerships and more globally its got-to-market strategy. The company raised $2M a few months ago confirming the market interest for such models.

Filebase represents an interesting approach supporting multiple decentralized storage back-end, each of them being a solution by itself. This reinforces even further the dispersed nature of such storage philosophy.

As Filebase offers a S3 compatible API, all backup, archiving... let's say data management product can work with Filebase. It's finally just a question of validation and verification but it simply works. And it's not a surprise to see the recent announcement with Comet to offer a global integrated solution. For more information please see https://filebase.com/comet/.

The company also announced a partnership with Akash Network, a open source decentralized cloud provider, who leverages Filebase for highly resilient data storage services based on the dispersed property of the solution. For more information, please check https://filebase.com/akash/.

This initiative reminds me my project I initiated in 2009 under the name KerStor as a P2P storage environment able to be deployed on-premise or in the cloud and of course in a hybrid way. KerStor was acquired by a storage software player who continues to leverage several of our ideas. As said the P2P and decentralized storage is not new but the business climate, the cloud maturity and adoption level are very different today. We count at least 20 projects during the last 15 years with different trajectories due to the maturity of the solution, the target market and the business climate. Among them we can list projects that still exist like 0Chain, Aetherstore, Arweave, BlockShare from Adanam Technology, Cloudplan, Cubbit, Filebase, Filecoin, KnoxFS, Memento Cloud, Sia.tech, Storj Labs, Ugloo (new iteration of UbiStorage), of course IPFS as many product rely on it and also acquired or stopped ones like Aerofs (acquired by Redbooth), Kerstor (acquired), Symform (acquired by Quantum then stopped), Space monkey (acquired by Vivint), Ubistorage (stopped), Tudzu (stopped), Wuala (acquired by LaCie then Seagate then stopped), Transporter (owned by Drobo acquired by Nexsan then StorCentric now stopped), Blockade Technologies (stopped), Ubbey Tech. / Universal Labs (stopped) or Kopit (stopped).

We'll know more about Filebase during the IT Press Tour #42 we organize in January 2022.

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Memento Cloud, new cloud backup leveraging P2P

Memento Cloud, a young french data protection company, unveiled recently its backup product capitalizing on P2P technologies. The project was started in 2018 by Nathan Richard in Nîmes in the south of France and the legal entity was founded in 2019. It is supported by BPI, CCI Gard and personal money for the moment.

As other similar model did, Memento Cloud unifies and aggregate free - or unused - space from different machines to store back up images. This allows to avoid or delay storage investment and capitalize on the current hardware deployed maximizing the used space ratio. This virtual target for the backup process provides redundancy and all data escaping the client machine are fully encrypted. Even if all storage machines belong to a P2P network established for a specific customer, each one can build its one secured private cloud finally and can be deployed within a corporation or on Internet.

The solution couples a software and a SaaS offering to offer a flexible model for individual, SMB and  even large companies.

The solution is sold via 2 models: Individuals and Teams for €99/year up to 10 machines and Enterprises for €239/year every 10 machines. There is still a mystery about the data volume they're able to protect but as they consider machines like workstations we can consider just a few TB per backuped machine in the group of 10.

The idea is not new as we count at least 20 P2P storage projects during the last 15 years with different trajectories due to the maturity of the solution, the target market and the business climate. Among them we can list projects that still exist like 0Chain, Aetherstore, Arweave, BlockShare from Adanam Technology, Cloudplan, Cubbit, Filebase, Filecoin, KnoxFS, Memento Cloud, Sia.tech, Storj Labs, Ugloo (new iteration of UbiStorage), of course IPFS as many product rely on it and also acquired or stopped ones like Aerofs (acquired by Redbooth), Kerstor (acquired), Symform (acquired by Quantum then stopped), Space monkey (acquired by Vivint), Ubistorage (stopped), Tudzu (stopped), Wuala (acquired by LaCie then Seagate then stopped), Transporter (owned by Drobo acquired by Nexsan then StorCentric now stopped), Blockade Technologies (stopped), Ubbey Tech. / Universal Labs (stopped) or Kopit (stopped).

Even if the solution is recent from a very young french company, it deserves a try.

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Coldago unveils its new Storage Unicorn report

Coldago Research, an independent research and analysis firm dedicated to data storage and management, just released its bi-annual storage unicorn list with a few newcomers. This ninth edition lists 15 private companies: Acronis, Barracuda Networks, Cohesity, DDN, Druva, Infinidat, Kaseya, Nasuni, OwnBackup, Qumulo, Rubrik, VAST Data, Veeam Software, Veritas Technologies and Wasabi Technologies.

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Talk with Bernard Peultier, Managing Director, NextIno

I had the privilege to interview recently Bernard Peultier, Managing Director at NextIno, for the 22nd interview series and globally 67th episode of our Podcast Français du Stockage. We invite you to listen to it below but our talk is in French.

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Quantum signs with Supermicro for object storage distribution

Quantum, the champion of secondary storage, announced recently a new distribution channel with Supermicro. The storage vendor continues to push its ActiveScale product aka AS in this 6.0 release in an independent hardware approach promoting a clear SDS model. Quantum continues to suffer from the delicate image of the Amplidata product AmpliStor and the lack of development during the Western Digital period. Hopefully the company has decided to acquire the technology they already distributed many years ago under the brand Lattus and now accelerates new development, better image and precise positioning. We'll learn more soon during deep IT Press Tour session. It means that AS 6.0 is coupled with Supermicro high-density servers and storage. You can check the solution with the data sheet here. Supermicro web site is a bit bizarre as the product is listed on the Cloud-Defined Storage Solutions page and we find other object storage on the Software Defined Storage Solutions page. Some cleaning exercice is needed.

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