Sysdig signs with IBM

Sysdig, the emerging leader in container and microservices monitoring services, takes advantage of Kubecon conference to announce a strategic partnership with IBM.

As IBM mandatory goal is to join the top Cloud providers club - AWS, Azure and GCP - understanding the mutation and erosion of on-premises environment, the giant must react rapidly. Cloud implicitly means virtualization and especially container-based applications environments.

IBM offers now IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig for IBM Cloud. It means the Sysdig solution is integrated into IBM Cloud as the default and preferred monitoring service. It's interesting to see that IBM has started an aggressive strategy around Cloud with recent Red Hat (pending) and NooBaa acquisitions and Sysdig partnership that invite us to think about 2019 and the approaching Think 2019 conference in San Francisco next February.

When we met Sysdig during the recent IT Press Tour in October, we understood that the company is a on rapid growth curve, accelerating developments and honestly as the team and products are super hot, we even estimate that some M&A approaches could appear in 2019.

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New chapter for Igneous

Same place and same month since 2016 for Igneous as we meet Kiran Bhageshpur, CEO, regularly at NEA in Menlo Park.

Kiran took time to summarize the company evolution with different phases finally pretty aligned with our meetings. It's a good exercice to fix developments and pitch development progresses.

Act 0 was the era of the IP-based disk drives object storage, we all remember the data Box with the Marvell CPU board at the back of each drives in the chassis and managed remotely. I invite the reader to check past articles: . This persistent data layer established, it was time for the company to build data services on top of it.

The second phase i.e Act 1 in 2017 was about the first data services and fundamental ones with backup and archive.

And the last and current initiative - Act 2 - is about UDMaaS i.e Unstructured Data Management as a Service, a comprehensive set of functions to manage enterprise unstructured/file data.

The business opportunity is real and huge as data protection is still for decades a must-have solution especially with the explosion of data volumes with unstructured content such audio/video, IoT, satellite, M2M logs or AI/ML...

The goal is to address the diversity and complexity of these environments with a transversal approach and three core functions beyond backup and archive with data visibility, mobility and protection:

• Visibility is represented by Data Discover with advanced file analysis of multiple files instances with files ages, metadata tagging and classification and chargeback information.
• Mobility is related to Data Flow providing an intelligent automated API-based logic to mov data between computing tiers.
• and Protection is about Data Protect supporting any NAS, file servers and public clouds.

Igneous has developed these services thanks to 3 innovations: InfiniteINDEX, AdaptiveSCAN and IntelliMOVE and doesn't use any resident agent.

The company creates its own quadrant to position its unique approach and lists its own competition - Cohesity, Commvault, Rubrik, Veeam and Veritas - and their relative drawbacks.

In term of business, Igneous targets enterprises customers with a subscription model with a 100% channel mode led Shaun Walsh who joined recently the company.

The product is already a multi-cloud approach and officially supports Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo, NetApp and Dell EMC Isilon plus AWS, GCP and Azure.

The next Act seems to be already scheduled for December 2019 for a new Igneous development iteration.

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Rubrik Andes 5.0

Rubrik is a strong believer in the IT Press Tour with the 5th meeting during the recent edition. The company has announced a new flavor of its Cloud Data Management product with a new major release named Andes 5.0. Rubrik continues to extend horizontally the coverage o fits environments this time with Oracle Live Mount, SAP Hana with Cockpit and Studio, NAS Direct Archive, physical Windows bare metal recovery, Office 365 and NoSQL databases following Datos IO acquisition a few months go.

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SDS and SDN for the IT Press Tour #29

The IT Press Tour, the leading IT event for IT press, has announced participating companies for the 29th edition planned 1st week of December in Silicon Valley.

Eleven companies will participate with famous names, some are new on the market, some are well established, here is the full list:

• CloudGenix, leader in SD-WAN,
• DDN Storage, largest private storage provider,
• Hammerspace, innovator in metadata management,
• Igneous, disruptor in data protection for large unstructured data environment,
• Minio, fstest growing object storage company,
• Panasas, established high performance file storage vendor,
• Pica8, key driver of the SDN segment,
• Quantum, reference in secondary storage,
• RStor, emerging player in enterprise performance computing,
• Rubrik, cloud data management key player,
• and Vexata, fast storage for hogh demanding applications.

Super week in perspective, dense with hot technologies and projects, great leaders and executives, the tour will shake the market again. I invite you to follow us with @ITPressTour, #ITPT, various publications and reporters Twitter handles.

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LogicMonitor now for Kubernetes

LogicMonitor, the SaaS-based performance monitoring leader, just introduced a solution for DevOps named LM Service Insight for Kubernetes. It delivers 3 functions: service health, alerting and SLAs integrated to the LogicMonitor platform. IT includes discovery of nodes, pods, services and containers supporting K8 deployed on-premise or in the cloud.

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Odaseva unveils 3 new services

Odaseva, an emerging leader in Salesforce data protection, continues to maintain a gap with followers and announced 3 new product extensions:

• Vault to save backup images
• Cockpit AI for predictions around data governance and management and
• DailyExport.io to copy out backup images on a daily basis coming from a weekly basis mode.

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DataFlow, a collaboration between DDN Storage and Atempo

DDN Storage has presented DDN DataFlow at SC18 this week. The storage leader picked a recognized proven data mover product Atempo Digital Archive aka ADA, and partner Atempo, and confirms its leadership in end-to-end data management solutions.

The two companies signed an oem partnership agreement, no press release or other announcements were made and nothing is present on DDN nor Atempo website. There is no any mention of Atempo anywhere on DDN booth. Except a few Atempo people, ADA "father" Bernard Peultier and Ferhat Kaddour, Alliances boss, to support if needed DDN team, no indicator of that partnership was displayed.

DataFlow is a pure software solution supporting multi-source and targets such file, object, cloud and tape providing backup, archive and migration services perfectly aligned with high demanding environments needs.

This deal for Atempo follows a few weeks ago the one announced with Huawei at the Connect 2018 conference in Shanghai to offer a joint solution.

We'll have soon a very good opportunity in December IT Press Tour to meet and visit DDN and learn more about all their recent announcements especially around Whamcloud and Tintri acquisitions, AI strategy and data management approach.

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Probably the best Salesforce data protection solution

Odaseva, founded in 2012 by Sovan Bin, today CEO, is one of the emerging players in SaaS applications data protection with its Salesforce solution. Start to use Salesforce without a proven data protection solution like Odaseva is a risk, exposing critical data to a loss and impacting the day-to-day business of any enterprise. Even Salesforce recognizes its limitations and recommends an AppExchange third-party partner to protect data. Odaseva is one of them.

We have met the team during the recent IT Press Tour to learn more about their compelling Salesforce solution.

The team has demonstrated a real deep expertise of the Salesforce environment having developed probably one of the most advanced product to solve this data protection challenge. It runs as an redundant instance on Force.com taken data and metadata from the Salesforce cloud to store them on AWS. The RPO offered by the solution is reduced to 1 hour which is pretty good for this kind of application. We hope the team thinks about a CDP mode to track all changes in real-time and trigger a copy a bit like a copy-on-write mode.

Several enterprise key characteristics summarize Odaseva product philosophy:

1. Security at every level of the product with the 2-factors authentication single sign-on, data encryption in-transit with HTTPS/TLS 1.2, at-rest with AES-256 bits and for column, field and file.
2. Granularity for tasks, views, users, roles...
3. Performance with parallel streaming and full, incremental and partial manual or automatic backups.
4. Replication of backup images via SFTP or Azure Blob, AWS S3 and even in Salesforce Einstein Analytics.

The company has secured lots of famous customers such Toyota, GE, Orange Bank, Robert Half, Heineken or Schneider Electric who rely on Odaseva unique solution.

Odaseva provides also an archiving mode and can be considered today as a leader in GDPR for Salesforce with its capability to offer a right-to-access, right-to-portability and right-to-be-forgotten.

Surprisingly, the company didn't raise any [significant] financial round or very little amount by angels and founders but they don't communicate at all about that. We hope Odaseva will enter into a new phase soon as the company was founded 6 years ago and still seen as a small confidential but specialist gem. It means a new level of finance to boost their development is needed now. We expect also a horizontal product expansion to support other famous SaaS applications to increase their customer footprint, grow significantly their revenue and address competitive challenges.

Of course, at the same time, this SaaS data protection category receives more and more interest by usual backup suspects such Veritas, Druva, Asigra, Acronis and even recently by Commvault and NetApp so Odaseva must maintain its unique technology approach and again expand SaaS coverage. 2019 will be for sure an interesting year for SaaS application data protection.

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Follow the exit sign

We learn lessons from the past and build future on it: let's do once more what worked in the past, it should work again. In France we say "Jamais 2 sans 3", I'm pretty sure you'll get it or as George Santayana said "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

First, Reduxio Systems just appointed Mike Wall as chairman. We understand the influence of his recent track record having sold Atempo to ASG in 2011 when he was CEO and Amplidata to HGST in 2015 when he was executive Chairman. We also notice that the HQ in South San Francisco is now a city office under remodeled and the company HQ has moved to Palo Alto.

Second, Scality also announced Jason Donahue as the new chairman. He sold Ejasent to Veritas in 2004 for less then $60M - I was at Veritas at that time -, Meiosys to IBM in 2005, ClearApp to Oracle in 2008 or more recently Cloudmark to Proofpoint in 2017, here is the connection. He did the IPO for Apptix and led Acronis for more than 3 years as well, so a professional of exits.

It seems clearly that Reduxio, founded in 2006, and Scality, founded in 2009, are looking for an exit soon pushed by a board that starts to be a bit anxious.

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Quantum wags again its leadership team

Just a few months after Jamie Lerner arrived as CEO and Chairman of Quantum, the leadership team is shaked again. We don't see any more Molly Presley and Bill Britts on the executive page. We hope to learn more in December when we'll meet and visit the "new" Quantum with the IT Press Tour team...

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