HYCU adds Okta Ventures as strategic investor

HYCU, the emerging leader in Modern Data Protection, joined the recent IT Press Tour in California and it was the right moment to receive fresh informations on its fast growing trajectory.

Beyond the recent identity change following the arriving of its new CMO, Kelly Hopping, the company has changed also its vision being now “Data anywhere, protected everywhere” as HYCU has meant different things since the launch of the company.

The entity clearly moves into a global play with a multicloud go-to-market route far from how is started being a dedicated Nutanix data copy engine. Protégé, launched during the 32st edition of the tour, supports Nutanix, VMware, GCP, Azure, AWS and Office 35, fueled by an agent-less philosophy and an application discovery capabilities.

Clearly the arrival of Okta, the IAM champion, as a strategic investor, invites me to think about all Okta powered accounts and all SaaS services they enabled opening a huge business opportunity for HYCU. In US, we count more than 15,000 SaaS vendors, it seems to be too big for me, but this is the number shared by HYCU probably coming from Okta. Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU, said Okta joined an extended series B, but does it mean they injected money because the number of $53 million was given in June and Okta didn't belong to the investors list at that time. Okta and HYCU have more than 100 common customers.

Today the focus for HYCU is around data mobility and data security and they plan to announce a new product iteration with Okta early December. We’ll see…

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ScaleFlux develops a better SSD

ScaleFlux, an emerging leader in computational storage (CS), joined The IT Press Tour last week. So far the company has raised close to $100 million according to JB Baker, VP marketing, almost the double Crunchbase announced on the company dedicated page. Investments came from essentially china plus Xilinx. Founded in 2014, the company has 260 employees today. But I was surprised to realize that the mission of he company has changed since its inception at least from my point of view. Today ScaleFlux wishes to build a better SSD.

The idea was to address the classic 3 dimensions: increased capacity, higher performance and lower overall cost. To achieve that ScaleFlux embeds some processing unit to offload the CPU, one of the effet is the endurance. Following what I wrote above, ScaleFlux mission has evolved from a CS dedicated to some applications with some offloads techniques to a more generic SSD.

This change reminds me what happened to Swarm64 who developed a card dedicated to PostgreSQL database offload processing. The adoption was very low even of the concept was attractive, probably too specialized. And this model invites to think about a very specialized offer with a narrow market and a more generic one for mainstream. For Swarm64, the story ended with an acquisition by ServiceNow. At the same time, we saw several development around DPU with Fungible or Nvidia for instance or approaches like Pliops.

The magic formula for ScaleFlux is to couple Enterprise NVMe SSD with an intelligent engine to deliver the 3 promises listed above. The company uses pretty small capacity 4 and 8TB with TLC Nand chips. The 16TB is planned for Q1 2023. Today the main feature is to deliver compression to solve the capacity challenge and thus improve the TCO. This compression is executed before writing to the SSD by the processing unit sitting the SSD with a 4k window.

Applications of such approaches are pretty large especially for databases, as table and records can be well compressed and thus projected good reduction ratio with 4:1 for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and 5:1 for Aerospike depending of the DB engine. And transactions per second are greatly boosted as well. This was achieved with the CSD-3000 series. The additional function is the encryption.

So far the company built 3 generations for products and the last generation is the 3000 series with the CSD 3000, capacity oriented, 4x and the NSD 3000, more than 2 times the endurance and the performance.

These products represents a real oem business opportunity and we have to recognize that the market starts to be crowded.

The company has started some tests with GRAID so 2 PCIe slots are occupied by these 2 cards confirming that the industry continues to create its own complexity.

ScaleFlux also signed a deal with Scale Computing who embeds its SSD into their edge HCI appliances.

We understand that the future generation will be Gen5 with some new form factors and more capacity options.

We continue to follow carefully ScaleFlux as some difficulties appeared for its direct competitor NGD Systems.

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N-able shows strong adoption for Cove Data Protection

N-able, a reference in IT solutions for MSPs around security, remote monitoring and management and data protection, joined the 46th IT Press Tour to update the group on the company strategy and Cove Data Protection. Just a few days following its Empover conference in Las Vegas, we had the opportunity to get a private update on company and products. And for some of you who wish to get a recent live update from N-able CEO, John Pagliuca, I invite you to listen to it here.

To give you an idea of the size of the company, N-able, traded on NYSE under the NABL ticket, generates $360 million annual revenue with 45% coming from outside the US covering more than 25,000 MSPs globally. We understand 20-25% of the revenue comes from Cove Data Protection which translates into 72 to 90 million which is significant for more than 12,000 MSPs just for this backup service. Today 150PB is the total of data stored in the N-able cloud with more than 1 million Microsoft 365 uses and more than 145000 businesses.

Renamed a few months ago Cove Data Protection is a cloud-first data protection solution supported by 30 data centers worldwide. The philosophy of the product is interesting, it is an agent-based solution serving a file/data selector and also responsible for the source dedup and encryption. The dedup, named TrueDelta , is by machine only at the byte level providing a fine granularity with very low network traffic, only efficient data, I mean new data, are copied to the cloud location. Thus no global dedup is offered, as all signatures are stored on each local system in a SQLite database. These signatures are not globalized on a central database, at least they’re not computed to offer this global reduction. But again as it worked at the byte level, the result is pretty good. But let’s consider 100 Windows laptops, the first copy consumed network and storage space and will copy 100 times the OS. Then the transfer is reduced but that first full copy for 99 machines could be avoided if the very first machine serves as a reference. 99 copies occupy some space.

The interesting feature is the Local Speed Vault aka LSV to offer a short RTO with bootable images. As the terms says it is a local copy of the cloud data and avoid to address the cloud for te recovery. In that case the agent writes to the 2 targets - local and remote - at the same time.

As Chis Groot, GM, and Stefaan Voss, VP Product Management, have shared during the tour session, they have a clear strategy around the core platform with simplicity as a mantra, then DRaaS capabilities illustrated by LSV and workloads expansion with things like M365, Teams, G-Suite…

The roadmap is ambitious with Azure Public Cloud support for Standby Image in H1 2023 but also Azure AD and other key workloads and applications.

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Talk with John Pagliuca, CEO, N-able

Recorded during the Empower N-able conference in Las Vegas a few days ago, this episode is a new interview with a CEO, this time John Pagliuca, CEO of N-able, the former SolarWinds MSP division who already delivers $360 million of revenue. We spoke about he company of course, its strategy, the market especially around Kaseya big move with Datto acquisition, the Cove Data Protection product and the go-to-market around it plus the pricing model ad of course a bit of future. This interview is the 61st in the interview series and globally 126th episode of the French Storage Podcast. We invite you to listen to it below, enjoy.

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Nodeum thinks about a next gen architecture

Nodeum, the Belgium champion of data management, prepares a new architecture for its product. We had deep understanding of Nodeum solutions during the recent 45th edition of The IT Press Tour in Paris and Valéry Guilleaume, CEO and founder of the company, told us that he prepares a new design soon to play at the required exascale computing level. Targeting Q1 2023, Nodeum plans to address high throughput with 5,000 requests per second and 10 millions of simultaneous transfer requests and will embed advanced scheduler and dispatcher, IAM, a bash client with REST API capabilities and of course the data mover. The team will support first native and classic file systems and S3/Swift based file systems and will add tape storage in a second phase.

The team leverages external tools, libraries and services such Nginx, gRPC, etcd, MongoDB, Redis and MariaDB to build a container oriented highly scalable new data management generation service. We'll speak with Valéry in Q1 2023 for more details.

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The 46th IT Press Tour will land in San Francisco next week

One month after the Paris edition, The IT Press Tour will be in Silicon Valley the week of October 10th. This 46th edition will be dedicated to  IT Infrastructure, Data Management and Storage with 10 companies:

• AuriStor, a key player in distributed file storage,
• Data Dynamics, a reference in file virtualization,
• GRAID Technology, an innovator in online data protection with advanced RAID techniques,
• HYCU, a emerging leader in SaaS backup,
• N-able, a leader in IT solutions for MSPs,
• Panzura, a pioneer in cloud file storage,
• Pavilion Data, a rapid growing vendor in unified storage,
• Protocol Labs, a key player in decentralized storage,
• ScaleFlux, a recent player in computational storage,
• and SmartIOPS, a emerging player in NVMe-based storage

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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Recap of the 45th IT Press Tour

The 45th edition of The IT Press Tour early September in Paris, France was the first European one in a new series. This edition was very interesting with 6 hot companies Biomemory Labs, DataCore, Nodeum, PoINT Software & Systems, Storadera and StorPool. This is the podcast episode about that edition, it was the 25th tech talk and globally 125th episode of The French Storage Podcast. I invite you to listen to it below, enjoy.

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Talk with Valery Guillaume, CEO, Nodeum

Nodeum participated to the recent 45th IT Press Tour in Paris, France, for the first time. Valery Guilleaume, CEO, introduced the company, its mission and its data management solutions around data migration, data protection and data archiving. We spoke about all these with Valery in this episode recorded during the event, the data mover, its success stories, the go-to-market, the pricing model and a bit of future. This interview is the 59th in the interview series and globally 123th episode of the French Storage Podcast. We invite you to listen to it below, enjoy.

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Storadera, the cheapest S3 compatible public cloud storage

Storadera, an Estonian cloud storage provider, joined the 45th IT Press Tour in Paris and we all discovered a very interesting public cloud storage offering. In fact I have discovered the company early this year and decided to invite them in Paris and introduced them to the press community. I even wrote a startup profile for StorageNewsletter in April.

What they do is pretty simple, imagine a AWS S3 public cloud storage who charges only by the capacity - 6 euros / TB / month - and nothing regarding the traffic. S3 API calls are ignored.

The company was launched in 2019 by Tommi Kannisto as CEO and today the team is pretty small, 5 people in total. The company has raided so far 370.000 euros, per haps we can invest, I'm ready. Beta service started in 2021 with services started in an Greenergy data center in Estonian.

Storadera targets B2B and as said the storage service is a fully compatible S3 without any surprise as the price is flat per capacity so very predictable. There is no hidden fee without any penalty when you remove files and also no minimum object size.

Pods are based on WDC Data102 JBODs coupled with Dell 1U servers and Mellanox 25G switches. Everything is coded in Go, used React and relies on MongoDB. The team claims to have 99.9 SLA and 9x durability even if today there is only one availability zone (AZ) in one region. Storadera plan sot add presence in Netherlands and UK before the end of 2022, it means they will be ready to offer 3 AZ in one region and thus improve SLA and durability levels.

For security, the service relies on S3 v4, they also implements erasure coding and adds strong integrity checks with also advanced encryption for transfert and at-rest respectively based on HTTPS and AES-XTC.

They already partnered and validated several data protection solutions and tools such Altaro, Comet, Cyberduck, Duplicati, MSP360 aka CloudBerry, Nakivo, Rclone, Synology Hyper Backup, Veeam or just S3cmd. Globally they address the following use cases: Backup, Archive, MSP extension, Replication, Media, Data Lake, Logs, CCTV and Persistent Data Store for cloud-native applications.

For the future they plan to add some additional security features, storage gateway, file syncing and specific partnerships. Definitely an online storage service to test and adopt.

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Where is Object Matrix?

Object Matrix, an interesting European software company, in fact a welsh company, dedicated to store media assets with its advanced object storage solutions MatrixStore, is absent of IBC. The company was already absent of the NAB show last April in Las Vegas and won't be at the NAB New-York in October. Does it confirm the rumors related to difficulties the company may hit, we'll see. In that case, the solution will continue in others hands for sure.

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