OwnBackup raised $50M

OwnBackup, the reference in SaaS applications backup, just announced a new round of $50M to accelerate its growth.

This round was led by Insight Partners and Salesforce Ventures is again in the loop. It means that the company reaches $100M and clearly presents itself as the #1 SaaS application backup vendor even if the solution is today limited to Salesforce but it's probably the best one.

Insight Partners owns capital in several data protection companies and we imagine the desire to build a software giant in the domain especially since they acquired Veeam. It could be even bigger...

Other serious players in Salesforce data protection are Kaseya Spanning, Datto Backupify, Asigra or Druva. This backup segment starts to be very hot with approximately today more than 20 players.

I asked the team several times, and especially during the recent the IT Press Tour, to expand to other SaaS applications like Workday, NetSuite... but also they need to address G Suite, Office 365... and it seems that the direction is now taken.

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Kaminario lost its CSO

Kaminario seems to be under some changes wave and one of them is the move of Eyal David, former CTO and more recently chief strategy officer, to Model9 as its new chief strategy officer. Model9 is an ISV dedicated to Cloud Data Management for Mainframe. The company has received a series A funding of $9M.

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New ARM-based server for Bamboo

Bamboo Systems, formerly known as Kaleao, announced recently during the IT Press Tour its new ARM-based server, the model B1000N. Founded in 2015, the company has raised $4.5M in a Seed round.

The new system introduces a new architecture named PANDA for Parallel Arm Node Designed Architecture. PANDA combines multiple benefits for modern software needs and low energy consumption.

Microservices applications have initiated this new design associated with the trend for high density of components.

Bamboo targets specific demanding use cases around AI/ML, analytics, edge computing and Kubernetes environments.

B1000N is a 1U server with 1 or 2 blades and each blade embed 4 compute nodes plus a non-blocking embedded L3 switch exposing dual 40Gb QSFP ports. Usually a node operates Linux meaning 1U you can have 8 Linux servers, perfect density and computing power for lots of applications. But the strategy of Bamboo is multi-servers so a multiple of 8 servers finally.

In 4U, you obtain the power of 48 servers reducing drastically energy and footprint therefore TCO. A node uses NXP 2160A A72 Coretex 16 core processors so per blade it gives 64 cores and on 1U 2 blades server it means 128 cores. RAM is 64GB/node and 8TB PCIe/SSD/node so 64TB per 1U server. It's small for storage but perfect for edge computing.

ARM processors arrive at the right moment as a few key metrics such energy and parallel tasks to tackles big problems. The momentum has already started and shows 38.2% of increase for none x86 while x86 decreased 9.1% during the same Q1/2020 period.

Recently Apple also swapped Intel x86 to ARM CPU illustrating a real trend. Bamboo insists on the new metric introduced as the kilowatt-hours instead of frequency or number of cores for eon for instance.

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Fujifilm announced pricing model for Object Archive

Fujifilm Recording Media, introduced its pricing model for its new object archive product. For more info, I invite you to read the recent post about this new interesting software product.

The pricing philosophy doesn't consider egress cost like AWS S3 Glacier charges users. Capacity and term are the two dimensions of the pricing model, capacity is the total of data managed by the software and term is essentially 3 or 5 years. The model is built for 1PB but Fujifilm allocates 2PB for data stored at S3 level and on tapes. Tapes are included and the volumes is translated in 350 LTO7 and 180 LTO8 tapes.

For a limited period of time, until end of December 2020, Fujifilm offers 500TB for software but tapes have to be purchased or coupled with an installed configuration.

The pricing model gives us multiple informations:

• For 1PB (2PB stored) and 3 years term, the costs is $0.36/month/TB in LTO8 and $0.41 for LTO7
• For similar volume and 5 years term, it costs $0.38/mo./TB for LTO8 and $0.42/mo./TB.

Pretty attractive model with software and tape included in the same bundle.

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Seventh storage unicorn report

Coldago Research, an independent data storage research firm, just released its bi-annual storage unicorn list with three newcomers for its seventh edition.

Datrium, Nasuni and VAST Data join the December list of twelve companies ie.: Acronis, Actifio, Barracuda Networks, Cohesity, DDN, Druva, Infinidat, Kaseya, Qumulo, Rubrik, Veeam Software and Veritas Technologies. More details are given on this page.

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Weebit raised $6.6M

Weebit-Nano, an emerging player in the development of next generation computer memory technology with its ReRAM project, just adds $6.6M placement shares to continue its expansion. The company plans to transfer of technology to production fab with a continued effort for a standalone memory technology. The team is confident to make progress with first commercial agreements in the coming quarters.

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Fujifilm introduces Object Archive

Fujifilm Recording Media, the leader in tape storage manufacturing, recently launched Object Archive, its object storage solution via its Data Management Solutions group. The team refreshed the press team during the recent IT Press Tour.

This entity develops its own product line such LTO tape and this object storage product and distributes StrongLink from StrongBox Data Solutions and Archive Manager and Network Migrator from QStar Technologies. By the way QStar develops also its own object storage solution named Kaleidos that can be in front of a tape library.

The idea reminds me what the industry developed with the VTL (Virtual Tape Library) even if it was an ephemeral and transient technology. How to put a front-end to the tape library that facilitates data injection, improves quality of service and flexibility. There is no surprise that Fujifilm jumps into that opportunity and we're even surprised they didn't do that move before.

The goal of the solution is to address the deep archive opportunity and swallow even more data to tape as hyperscalers do finally. Object Archive is the name of the product in North America and Japan and Software-Defined Tape elsewhere. It could create confusion but both are pretty good name.

Due to the appearance of HDD down in the data lifecycle with the S3 storage wave, tape vendors missed the business opportunity and let object storage players grow into a market they originally controlled. But the reality is that the TCO of tape is almost unbeatable for deep archive and really depends of the use case. In our current cloud environment, the Air Gap model is fundamental to provide real barrier against attack, ransomware or just failure or bug propagation.

We learned that Fujifilm is the result of a close relationship with Cloudian, one of the leader in Object Storage according to the Coldago Research Map 2019 for Object Storage.

The product is a pure software model and operates as a gateway to tape libraries. As S3 is based on HTTP protocol it means that it is now possible to access the archiving repository from a remote site. A cascading workflow can be built with on-prem S3 to S3 to the tape libraries.

Open Archive introduces a new open source tape format named OTFormat, for Open Tape Format, that is finally the unification of metadata and data on the same support and it works from LTO 7. The importance aspect of this is to be able to read the tape in the future without the S3 gateway. This is why the format is open source and promoted as a standard. In term of tape libraries, everything is supported like Spectra, IBM, Quantum, Oracle, and HPE.

The solution is sold as a combination of tape plus software and offers the double of capacity within the same package. In a few days, pricing will be unveiled publicly. Fujifilm targets vertical sectors like Research, Genomics, Life Sciences, Oil and Gas, Media and Entertainment and HPC, all significant generators of huge volume of data with essentially 2 use cases: active and deep archive for volume above 1PB. In EMEA, a 2 tier distribution model is used with authorized partners and in USA a direct link with VARs.

The S3 gateway here is just a vehicle to ingest data into the library, clever idea, Object Archive is a very compelling concept coupling finally 2 standards used in capacity storage, S3 and tape, and Fujifilm is very well positioned to take a leader position.

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Igneous lost some leaders

Igneous, a growing player in cloud data management, shakes its leadership layer as we just discovered that Kiran Bhageshpur is no longer CEO but a board member and Christian Smith, last VP Products, is now Storage Business Development at Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Igneous leadership page reflects these changes. According to their respective LinkedIn profile, Kiran and Christian moved very recently.

Dean Darwin, previously board member, was appointed CEO keeping his board seat.

What do all these moves mean? The company was founded in October 2013 and raised so far almost $70M.

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HYCU accelerates its market penetration with a CSP program

HYCU, the emerging leader in modern backup, unveils a new partner program dedicated to Cloud Services Providers (CSPs) thus accelerating the visible good traction HYCU Protégé demonstrates in that segment. This announcement was made during the recent IT Press Tour.

CSPs will promote the service as a co-branded solution for data protection, data migration and disaster recovery. It will invite users to consider and adopt a multi-cloud approach without any risk.

It represents a real new approach, more and more comprehensive, designed as a cloud-native model moving away from a point product historical technology sale. HYCU Protégé can be integrated to a more global cloud based solution to manage data and control infrastructure thanks to its flexible API.

Partners can connect to a specific portal to access technical and sales documents to improve their knowledge and services deployment capabilities. And of course, HYCU expands incentive programs and deals registration mechanism. HYCU also promotes a true cloud philosophy with a pay as you go perfectly aligned with the elasticity of the cloud. Very interesting new step for HYCU, we'll see how competition will react...

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Unitrends more integrated with Kaseya

Unitrends, leader in mid-range data protection and member of the Kaseya product family, is now unified in the same backup portal with Spanning. Converging SaaS application backup with on-prem applications data protection means immediate cost saving and complexity reduction.

Unitrends also introduced a new conditional alert mechanism that simplifies actions. The product receives a new integration with Kaseya VSA that help MSP to control the entire backups across their customer base.

Also IT Glue can now produce all documentation related to Unitrend backup policies, status and control.

The company announced recently Helix, a learning and proactive remediation platform running in the cloud as a SaaS service connected to on-prem site to Unitrends backup appliance to check, and take actions on local mistakes and errors for VSS service. Helix is self healing service that manages and controls the data protection service and make sure the SLA about the data protection is executed correctly.

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