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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Nodeum develops advanced data management tools

Nodeum, a Belgium software company dedicated to unstructured data management, has participated to the recent 45th IT Press Tour in Paris and it was a confirmation of its strong expertise.

The company develops a real line of advanced data management solutions to solve real life unstructured data challenges and pains. 

The first key point is the targeted environment as Nodeum plays in the hybrid storage, coupling various distinct technologies, with a desire to deliver a highly scalable product. The second point is related to the search of data and the third about a universal data access whatever is the storage connected.

Valéry Guilleaume, CEO and co-founder, explained us the 3 pillars of Nodeum: Data Migration, Data Archiving and Data Protection, 3 key components of Data Management, to address use cases in Healthcare, Geospatial, University/Education and Media and Entertainment.

Data Migration is essentially file migration with what we know such tiering or HSM in mind but with a modern approach. Data Archiving is pretty classic but here it means active archiving with ease of search and access and finally Data Protection with advanced file system protection with granular file-level restore and search.

At the heart of these solutions, Nodeum team has developed a powerful data mover that delivers high performance throughput, strong integrity controls and guarantees and advanced monitoring.

In details, any NFS, SMB or S3 storage is supported as source, S3 being exposed from a private object storage cluster or a public cloud storage instance and considered as well as a target, plus pure secondary storage entities such tape libraries with any SCSI or ACSLS tape libraries and of course LTFS as an open format.

Nodeum goal is to become the central data movements engine across any type of storage for file data promoting open formats and commodity hardware.

Even if the company is a bit confidential, the team has successfully signed some very significant deals confirming that Nodeum develops some pretty unique software.

In terms of partnerships, Valéry Guilleaume insisted on 2 key collaborations: Quantum and DataCore.  For Quantum they developed their universal S3 to tape used by hyerscalers and for DataCore, Swarm represents a key product in the data chain for Nodeum.

And we got confirmation from Nodeum CEO that the company prepares something, more details soon.

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The IT Press Tour lands in Paris for its 45th edition

Summer holidays just finished and we are in the starting blocks for the 45th edition of The IT Press Tour for the first in Paris, France. It marks the start of European editions in addition to American and Israeli ones.

We begin with same usual topic IT Infrastructure, Data Management and Storage with 5 European companies and 1 from USA:

• Biomemory Labs, from France, will present state of the art for DNA Data Storage,
• DataCore, from USA, a reference in Software-Defined Storage,
• Nodeum, from Belgium, a rapid growing player in data management,
• Point Software & Systems, from Germany, a pioneer in data management,
• Storadera, from Estonia, a recent alternative to AWS S3,
• and StorPool, from Bulgaria, one of the most comprehensive Block SDS on the market.
  

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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Difficulties at Clumio?

Clumio, a young backup-as-a-service company, seems to have some difficulties and strange business behaviors. The company has raised $189 million and was founded in 2017. We'll see if this story will continue under the pressure from several players such HYCU, another hot SaaS backup company.

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Podcast about Secondary Storage, Tape and Hyperscalers

With the different efforts in secondary storage with several initiatives and innovations, many of them were presented at the Fujifilm Summit last June in San Diego, the recent episode with Fred Moore and of course the June IT Press Tour, I decided to record a dedicated episode on this covering long-term  data preservation, tape, hyperscalers, Quantum, Spectra Logic and other things like DNA data storage. This talk is the episode 120 of the French Storage Podcast. We invite you to listen to it below, enjoy.

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The Object First toy has 2 models

Object First, the builder of an object storage toy for Veeam, announced at VeeamON last May, shared some details a few days before VMworld I should VMware Explore now. We understand that 2 models exist in 2 sizes: 96TB (8 x 12TB) and 128TB (8 x 16TB) SAS 3,5" HDD usable protected in RAID 6 mode plus one parity drive. 2 x 10Gbits ports expose the chassis to the network accepting write to 1.6TB NVMe SSD coupled with dual Intel Xeon Scalable associated with 12 DIMM slots operating a Linux distribution. No surprise, vey common BOM. For long-term retention or let's say for long retention, backup images can be exported or migrated to public clouds such AWS, Azure, Backblaze and Wasabi. We dont know if images can be restored directly from public clouds when they migrated or if users must copy back the images to the appliance and then trigger the restore operation. Object First insists that they wrote the object software, I don't know why as MinIO would be a perfect fit here once again. Up fo 4 nodes can be clustered together. I don't understand why the team limits the usage of the product to Veeam only, perhaps because this is very entry level system... the joke continues.

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Talk with Fred Moore, President, Horison

Following the 12th Fujifilm Summit end of June in San Diego where Fred Moore and I delivered a keynote, I realized that doing a podcast episode with him would an excellent idea. So we did a few days ago and we covered lots of things around the business climates and trends, storage technologies with HDD, Flash, SSD, Tape and cloud, the disastrous LTO roadmap, the hyperscalers needs and pressure on tape vendors, the 580TB tape cartridge project from Fujifilm and IBM, data management with active and instant archiving but also future technologies like holographic, new "optical", glass and DNA data storage. A really good episode that I encourage all of you to listen and share, I really enjoyed the recording and talk with Fred. This interview is the 55th in the interview series and globally 118th episode of the French Storage Podcast.

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Podcast - Data Protection in Kubernetes

Kubernetes is hot with several end-users surveys confirming its take off. Being adopted more and more frequently in production, the protection of data within the environment is of course critical. We did an interesting round-table with Commvault represented by Xavier Bourdelois and Nicolas Streng from Atheo Ingenierie. Veritas declined to participate arguing they don't wish to join competitors on this topic. This episode is the number 116 of The French Storage Podcast. We invite you to listen to it below, our talk is in French.

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