The IT Press Tour #32 will be amazing again...

The IT Press Tour, the leading IT event for WW IT press, has recently published participating companies for the 32nd edition planned October 14 to 18th in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

Twelve companies will join the press crew, some of them are well established and we already met them and some participate for the first time:

• Ayehu, player in IT automation based on AI,
• Bouquet.AI, emerging actor in chabot,
• Commerce.AI, builder of a commerce platform fueled by AI,
• Compliance.AI, developer of a regulatory change management platform powered by machine learning,
• Corelight, leader in network traffic insights and security,
• Kinetica, reference in GPU database for advanced analytics,
• Onepanel, creator of a multi-cloud workflow automation for AI,
• Petuum, key vendor of AI-based solution for the industry,
• Promethium, pioneer in automated data governance,
• RapidAPI, fast growing actor in API cataloging and service,
• ShieldIO, key innovator in Real-Time Homomorphic Encryption™,
• and Valohai, emerging developer of a deep learning platform-as-a-service.

Dense and unique week in perspective with several hot players in hot technology sectors and new press members as well, 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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Render object storage fueled by Minio

Render, an emerging devops cloud service and platform, just won, a few minutes ago, the Disrupt Startup Battlefield among 20 companies, thus receiving a new $100k additional cash line. The idea is to shake established positions of AWS, Azure and GCP. Good luck.

We discovered Render just before the event when they announced new and extended features and especially a object storage service. Don't be confused, Render is not a new object storage vendor or neither a player as they're not a storage ISV but rather a devops one. The reality is the necessity to couple objet storage for such development environment. What Render does reminds me a bit what Heroku provided several years ago.

The company is a very young entity launched in April 2019 with $2.3M during a seed round from 4 investors and led by General Catalyst. The service delivered by Render already sustains 100 million HTTP(s) requests per week illustrating an interesting trajectory and strong service and infrastructure.

But the key decision they made is to not reinvent the wheel but focus on their service, it's the reason why they build their object storage service with Minio, the leading object storage on the planet by number of downloads and deployments.

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New financial round for Atempo

Atempo, a leading data protection player, just announced a new financial round with €8M led by IdVector and a pool of banks: LCL, HSBC, SG and BPI. Founded in 1992 with this round, Atempo has raised a total of €43,9M since its inception. It will helps the company to boost its engineering effort around Miria and IA with its dedicated lab NextIno in Orleans in France. The team continues its mission to deliver a leading solution to manage high volume of data in critical environment.

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Active Scale is an orphan

The DDN acquisition of the Western Digital IntelliFlash business illustrates difficulties of storage components manufacturers to morph into system vendors. In fact, they wished to add new growth area but they just realize they don't know how to and hit the wall as they compute against their clients, all the other classic established storage systems vendors.

Now there is an other challenge with Active Scale coming from Amplidata acquisition early 2015 for $310M. Honestly we have expected some better improvements for the object storage solution but we understand this is not enough. The product didn't have a good reputation, it was a surprise that the team finally got an exit and there is a good risk that it will just put on a shelf as a trophy. Who can buy this? and at what price?

It confirms again what I wrote a few months ago that object storage is dead because S3 eats everything. It represents a new bad indicator for other independent players who battle to survive after more than a decade of life.

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Acronis becomes a storage unicorn

Acronis, an alternative data protection and security player, just announced an important new investment round of $147M led by Goldman Sachs. It is a surprise and can be explained by the motivation to acquire companies and strengthens its portfolio and position and finally avoid hostile M&A tentatives as well.

This investment allows the company to join the Storage Unicorn club and the next report I publish twice a year, in June and December, will list Acronis.

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Rubrik launches its first user conference

Rubrik, one of the leader on the next gen data protection, just confirmed the tenure of its first User Conference named Rubrik Forward in May 2020, from 11 to 13th, in Chicago. You can visit the site here. Also you can follow some IT conferences with the ConfDir portal I continue to maintain for a few years now.

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Rubrik adds CDP and data governance with Andes 5.1

Funny, CDP was a hot more than a decade ago and I even started this blog in 2005 almost 15 years ago, to reflect this market trend. We all remember some vendors like Revivio, InMage, Axxana, Asempra, Mendocio, TimeSpring, Kashya, Topio, Constant Data, Storactive, Atempo or Synerway. Except Atempo, they all got swallowed or disappeared.

Next gen players just introduced it like Rubrik with Andes 5.1 for VMware based on vSphere API for I/O filtering. Rubrik already provide journal-based CDP for DB. We understand that the IT environment evolved a lot essentially from bare-metal to virtual environment and on-premise to cloud. CDP helps to reach better RPOs moving near to zero so almost no loss of data.

Polaris GPS is a SaaS data protection platform to protect on-premies and cloud-based applications. It receives a new data classification service named Polaris Sonar, also a SaaS application, that leverages machine learning to better manage data and especially personally identifiable information aka PII and more globally sensitive data. Also Polaris AppFlows is added to orchestrate DR converting backup snapshots into AWS EC2 instances powered by CloudOn technology.

Rubrik introduced as well Smart Data Tiering to move archived data to Azure. WORM capabilities is offered now with the Retention Locked SLA Domains feature.

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Clumio is now ready for the battle

Clumio, am emerging data protection player, introduced for the first time ever in July 2018, just exits from stealth with a series B round of $40M. This round follows a series A of $11M in December 2017 just 2 months after tis inception, the total raised now reaches $51M.

The company, based in Santa Clara and founded in October 2017 by Poojan Kumar, Kaustubh Patil and Woon Jung, plays in the SaaS flavor of data protection, a segment that begins to be well populated. I invite the reader to check the table of SaaS backup player I publish regularly on StorageNewsletter.

It's interesting to see that Clumio has JW Thompson on its board like Rubrik, an other DP player, we find also Mark Leslie on the board of Zerto. Bizarre.

The genesis of the solution comes from the fact that data is fragmented - nothing new here - meaning that data is everywhere, on-premies and in the cloud controlled by proprietary, commercial and SaaS applications and services.

Poojan Kumar illustrates the creation of Clumio articulating 4 key points:

1. Business opportunity as applications and data move to the cloud. The question is what can be disrupted in data and storage globally with cloud and SaaS in mid.
2. Cloud-native architecture really means ability to scale and answers users requirements and growth.
3. SaaS first so it's not about a product or a license but a service with a subscription model of course.
4. Cloud agnostic to offer an ubiquitous service.

Some examples are Snowflake for data warehouse and Sumo Logic for log management but also Zuora, Salesforce the model and reference, Box or Dropbox, LinkedIn or Zadara in Cloud Storage.

Clumio is about protecting on-premises and cloud VMs with on-premises agents as virtual appliances offering local data dedupe, compression and encryption, in-transit and at-rest, before touching the public cloud. The control and management is done centrally in the cloud, currently on AWS, with scheduling, cataloging... and obeys to the recent wave of micro-services requirements and multi-tenancy fundamental for modern cloud services. The backup approach is to provide an "incremental for ever" approach by replicating data quickly after the first installation illustrating the rapidness and simplicity to activate the online service. The product offers a file granularity with a file search and restore capability. Clumio develops a special new metadata file system to track all data activities and lifecycle and store data on S3. It illustrates again what I wrote a few months ago about S3 eating the world.

Clumio started to deploy the v1.0 last May and several instances are running and seam to satisfy users.

The pricing model is to charge per VM per year without any links to data volumes and there is no charge for restores. It turns out that Clumio doesn't target SaaS applications as users don't rely on VMs, think about Salesforce or Google Drive and you get the idea. The underlying infrastructure is managed and controlled by Clumio so completely transparent for users. Clumio plans to add a partner program as the strategy targets the channel.

Don't be confused Clumio is not a SaaS backup for SaaS applications such Salesforce or Office365 but a backup as a Service for the enterprise for VM deployed on-premises or in the cloud. Interesting solution and Clumio has to start somewhere so AWS is a good choice of course. We hope the company to add GCP and Azure and support of SaaS applications as well such Office 365, Salesforce and even Google Drive.

A big surprise to read that there was not other solution on the market according to Poojan. I think he forgets a few players like HYCU, Rubrik, Cohesity, Druva or Actifio to name a few and for sure pure SaaS players with SaaS applications protection such OwnBackup, Kaseya Spanning, CloudAlly or Datto Backupify. The battle of next gen data protection will be even more dense and interesting in 2020... Let's meet at VMworld to get more detailed on this attractive data protection approach.

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Datos IO RecoverX morphs into Rubrik Mosaic

Rubrik continues its integration of Datos IO technology and decided now to completely remove the name of the company they acquired early 2018. The product is now named Rubrik Mosaic even if the release number train is maintained, the current version is 3.1.

This new iteration introduces some enhancements for NoSQL database especially for Apache Cassandra, DataStax Enterprise aka DSE and MongoDB. It is also now listed on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace with a BYOL model and supporting last versions of databases.

Mosaic supports DSE 6 and 6.7 and the new index format introduce by DataStax with the 6.0 release. The popular DataStax Enterprise Search, integration of Apache Solr with Cassandra enterprise flavor, is now also backup natively by Mosaic 3.1. MongoDB 4.0 is also now supported with full compatibility wit the multi-document ACID transactions and real improvements in restore process.

The installation process was also improved and is now integrated with Ansible for on-premise or in-cloud deployments. This script is open source available on GitHub.

Monitoring leverages standards tools such Datadog, ServiceNow and Splunk. The product is getting more and more comprehensive and continuing to led this particular data protection segment. Good job.

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HYCU unveiled Protégé

HYCU, the emerging data protection player for hybrid cloud workload, reserved a surprise for The IT Press Tour attendees a few weeks ago as its team unveiled in exclusivity Protégé, its new data management product to solve the multi-cloud data protection challenges.

The reality of IT environments shows that enterprises use private data centers, various public clouds and SaaS applications that finally adds a new cloud flavor. This becoming super complex and the need to protect homogeneously these different workloads is crucial. In fact, the idea is to reduce the complexity and at least not adding a new complexity dimension for data protection, the production environment is already complex by itself. HYCU Protégé has several goals, among them the famous "lift and shift" approach to offer data migration across clouds, on-premise and public, and cross-cloud application recovery and disaster recovery.
 

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