Veritas promotes Autonomous Data Management

Veritas Technologies, the enterprise leader in data protection, joined The IT Press Tour yesterday for the very first time. This session at the Santa Clara HQ was the opportunity to understand the strategy around its flagship product. NetBackup, to mention it, represents more than 65% of the company revenue so it perfectly legitimates by itself a strong comprehensive vision.

This last element finally hides other products and InfoScale in particular. We have to recognize that NetBackup plays in a very dense category where the competition is super hot and is clearly the #1 in its category. We heard that Veeam is claiming to be in that position, by the number of installations probably but not by the revenue. On the other hands, with current IT infrastructure and cloud, InfoScale is not so easy to promote event if its components are clearly product leaders on the market. We all remember VxVM and VxFS, the most famous volume manager and file system on the planet. The other argument relises on the fact hat Veritas is one of the pioneers of the Software-Defined Storage market wave.

NetBackup is much more than a product, Veritas has made some serious developments and additions to it and today it represents a real product family.

Data protection with NetBackup is already fully automated for decades, the product works by itself deployed in complex, heterogeneous and large data environments. But the company has identified a new fundamental attribute to it, the need to be autonomous, to fully introduce a new dimension to data management leveraging AI and ML models in a cloud world. And by data management we cover here the secondary storage data management as everything happens as soon as data lands on the secondary storage tier.

The team insisted on 3 key components to be qualified of an autonomous solution:

1. Automated Cyber Resilience with AI, ML, ransomware proof and things like CICD,
2. Multi-Cloud Optimized to run anywhere being multi-tenant, elastic and containerized and
3. Intelligent Protection to meet business goals with auto-healing and As-a-Service capabilities.

This strategy is partially covered today with NetBackup 10 but the full coverage will arrive with 10+ release.

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44th IT Press Tour will be amazing

June is almost here and we're back to California for the 44th edition of The IT Press Tour starting June 6. This tour is a bit exceptional as we'll spend time in California as usual but also 2 days in Colorado. Topics are around IT Infrastructure, Data Management and Storage visiting 9 companies:

• iXsystems, the open source champion promoting storage freedom and democratization,
• Lightbits Labs, the pioneer of NVMe/TCP and ambassador of storage disaggregation,
• Liqid, the leader in IT resources composability,
• Nasuni, the reference of cloud file storage for the distributed enterprise,
• Quantum, the established player in secondary storage,
• Spectra Logic, the hyper-scalable secondary storage vendor,
• VAST Data, the emerging file storage alternative for high demanding file workloads,
• Veritas Technologies, the historical SDS and data protection major player,
• and WEKA, the number parallel file system on the planet.

I invite you to follow us on Twitter with #ITPT and @ITPressTour, my twitter handle @CDP_FST and journalists' respective handle.

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Podcast - Modern Data Protection aka MDP

I run a new episode - #106 - of The French Storage Podcast and we talked with 3 french experts from Atempo, Cohesity and HYCU about a hot topic the famous Modern Data Protection often mentioned as MDP. We invite you to listen to it below, our talk is in French.

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Komodor raised $42 million to sustain its aggressive growth

Komodor, an Israeli company targeting Kubernetes troubleshooting and optimization, just announced its Series B with $42 million for a total of $67 million less than 1 year after it went out of stealth. This is very rapid as we had the opportunity to feel the company atmosphere and ambition during the recent visit in Tel-Aviv for the 43rd IT Press Tour.

The company plays in the new continuous reliability platform dedicated to Kubernetes category, becoming a real need as Kubernetes is still a complex environment to master, optimize and control. We understand that Kubernetes is well adopted with a fast growing community and at the same time it requires stability and enterprise class maturity to be trusted for enterprise deployment at scale. The need of incident resolution becomes a must and Komodor has found a real new huge business opportunity. Good Luck.

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Observe raised $70M

Observe, a company visited by The IT Press Tour in March, just announced a new round of VC funding, raising this time $70 million for its Series A round reaching a total of $114.5 million still with Sutter Hill Ventures and a few others.

The company, led by Jeremy Burton, demonstrated a rapid growth recently confirming users' interest - around 50 paid customers - for a solution that goes beyond classic monitoring and visualization.

To refresh our readers, Observe is a SaaS player developing a new category named Observability that goes beyond classic log analytics, infrastructure monitoring, and application performance management. The global idea is to understand data and extract value from to deliver and expose compelling information not seen before.

Today Observe ingests 40TB of data per day, executes 25M queries per day scanning 1 Trillion rows on over 1 PB of data. Pretty small but it growing and the company the relies today on Snowflake is a perfect candidate to consider data warehouse approach like Ocient dedicated to hyperscale needs.

With this announcement, Observe also new features such

• Data Universe Maps providing rich visualization of observability data and relationships,
• Context-Sensitive Dashboards which enable users to drill down into related content and begin investigations,
• "Out-Of-The-Box" Apps for Kubernetes, AWS, Jenkins & more so users can get started & enjoy pre-build content in minutes,
• In-Product Dashboards providing full transparency into Observe credit usage

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N-able unveiled Cove Data Protection

N-able, a leader in IT services for MSPs, just announced a new major iteration for their data protection model with Cove Data Protection. The N-able CDP offers Backup of course but also Archiving and Disaster Recovery in a cloud-first protection-as-a-service what the industry calls DPaaS.

• Pure software approach without any appliance or system to deploy on-premises,
• A direct copy to cloud without any first local copy,
• Comprehensive coverage with servers, workstations and Microsoft 365,
• A single GUI to manage a dispersed environment,
• A near-CDP model with 15 minutes minimum,
• A copy ready to use of servers image to boost RTO,
• Data stored among 30 data centers to align with compliance rules and regulations.

This replaces the previous portfolio as nothing is mentioned about that on the company's site and Chris Groot, changed its title to GM Cove Data Protection. It marks a real ambition for the company to confirm its leadership in the growing DPaaS segment.

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Talk with Gil Peleg, CEO, Model9

Withe 43rd edition of The IT Press Tour in Israel, we finally met Model9, an interesting data management company dedicated to connect the close mainframe world to the cloud. And of course it was obviously  a good period to record a new episode with Gil Peleg, CEO and co-founder. We spoke about the initial idea and how the company started, the pain and need addressed by Model9, the product itself of course, GTM, partnerships, use cases, pricing model and next steps for the company. This interview is the 45th in the interview series and globally 102th episode of the French Storage Podcast. We invite you to listen to it below, enjoy.

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Talk with Michael Ferrec, Founder and CEO, Inspeere

Recently I discovered a new french storage company I should a data management company named Inspeere that delivers a very compelling data protection solution. The product leverages p2p and blockchain ideas to provide a very resilient data protection model without any need to cloud services providers as it relies on dispersed Inspeere Datis servers. We spoke with Michael Ferrec, CEO and founder of the company, about the background of the project, how the product works and its differentiators, their go-to-market and pricing model. This interview is the 44th in the interview series and globally 101th episode of the French Storage Podcast. We invite you to listen to it below, enjoy.

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Komodor tries to address the Kubernetes deployment complexity at scale

Komodor, a young Israeli software company developing a platform to manage Kubernetes, was a good surprise of the recent IT Press Tour in Tel-Aviv. We met the management team at their HQ in Israel and learn the mission of the company around the difficulty to optimize and troubleshoot Kubernetes at scale.

The microservices and container approaches have marked a fundamental shift in IT infrastructure but also introduce some challenges and complex management and control tasks for enterprise especially when the environment operates thousands of services. Kubernetes, invented at Google as Borg and released in 2014, is the orchestrator of such distributed computing environments, but mastering it is not a panacea. It is very adopted, in 2021 we count 5.6M developers on the project and several large corporations use Kubernetes in production as they already adopted container such Docker or others. K8s is the new IT and data center operating system with a fast growing ecosystem.

Komodor, expert in Kubernetes, has identified the Kubernetes pain at scale and develops a troubleshooting model and solution for developers. Collecting all changes, info... Komodor exposes a single source of truth to point to the root cause, easy to use for developers to go faster in the environment mastering. As K8s is distributed by nature, this model creates inherently some difficulties with tons of events created and sent by various tools with very limited skilled people. Tools change everyday and many solutions are created very frequently adding some complexity.

Komodor is connected to all components and collects all events, merging them, correlate them, digest them... to offer a map that facilitate trouble resolution. The solution relies as essentially 2 components: Komodor Brain and Komodor UI. The Brain is composed by 3 engines: collector, automation and correlation, K8s insights, plus alerts. The result is exposed via a very intuitive GUI that facilitates developers, admins or users to fix issues.

We'll monitor carefully Komodor during the next quarters as the trajectory is already very compelling and the team has shared that a big news is coming in the coming weeks.

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Talk with Simon Taylor, Founder and CEO, HYCU

New episode and new interview this time with Simon Taylor, founder and CTO of HYCU, a member of the Modern Data Protection wave with a new Data Protection-as-a-Service model supporting AWS< GCP and Azure in addition to Nutanix and VMware. We spoke about the genesis of the company, its different eras, the product differentiators and a bit of the future. This interview is the 43rd in the interview series and globally 99th episode of the French Storage Podcast. We invite you to listen to it below, enjoy.

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