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A shot of storage sambuca, 5ml of bootable bitters, plus a dash of creme de cloud

It's a storage cocktail and it tastes... well, have a sip

Roundup Have we got a bit of storage news for you. Our expert mixologist has poured all the bits and pieces into his cocktail shaker, added some ice, and poured the resulting storage fluid into a tumbler because all our highball glasses were in the dishwasher.

Take a deep breath and have a sip.

AOMEI Technology Ltd

AOMEI is based in ChengDu, China, and is a software developer that focuses on backup and restore, hard disk and partitions management and cloud file transfer.

It wants you to evaluate its free backup and restore software - AOMEI Backupper Standard, claimed to be the simplest free backup software. It has been upgraded to version 4.0.6 withnew features.

AOMEI says: "Backupper has many other advantages which most of other free backup software lack, such as incremental backup, differential backup, schedule automatic backup, create bootable media and file synchronization etc."

Learn more here. Download the SW here.

Aparavi

Aparavi has a multi-tier and tenant software-as-a-service platform to enable organizations of all sizes to protect data both stored and aggregated on multiple clouds and on-premises.

It's claimed to install quickly and easily, working in conjunction with an organization’s business continuity plan to ease the burden of compliance and data protection while enabling switching between cloud storage vendors.

Cloud-active data pruning automatically removes files that are no longer needed based on policies.

The first terabyte is free in perpetuity with subscription costs of $999 per year for 3 terabytes of usage.

There is a 3-tiered architecture covering local and cloud storage. Point-in-Time recovery protection recovers data from any combination of local or cloud storage based on the date and time the data was protected without having to worry about where the data is. Its open data format enables other tools to read data with or without the Aparavi platform to prevent any complications with long-term recovery.

Aparavi is available on Windows platforms and most major Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and Red Hat. It uses Amazon's Simple storage API and supports AWS services as well as Google Cloud Platform, Wasabi, IBM Bluemix, Scality, and Cloudian.

Interested parties can visit www.aparavi.com.

Datrium

This split storage brain hyper-converged DVX system has 1U scale-out compute nodes with a primary storage tier embodied in flash. There can be from 1 to 128 compute nodes. These talk across 1/10GbitE to between one and ten 2U storage nodes which form a disk-based capacity tier shared by all the compute nodes.

The D12X4B disk storage nodes (12 x 4TB 7,200rpm disk drives) have now been joined by an all-flash storage node, the F12X2, which uses 12 x 1.92TB Samsung PM1633a SSDs - 23TB raw/83TB effective after data reduction.

There are two types of compute node: the CN2000 and CN2100.The CN2000 has 2 x Xeon E5-2620 v4, 8 core or 2 x Xeon E5-2680 v4, 14 core cpus plus SSDs, while the more powerful CN2100 has 2 x Xeon Gold E5-6148 v5 20-core CPUs or 2 x Xeon Gold E5-6134 8-core processors and NVMe flash drives.

Datrium has added 25GbitE support so, with Skylake compute nodes and all-flash storage nodes the thing goes rather quicker than before, scoring 8,000VMs on the IOmark benchmark – it's a Meatloaf system, going like a bat out of hell.

Datrium has also increased high availability. In the case of any SSD failure on a compute node, customer VMs will continue to run with performance similar to that of an all-flash array, with random reads served from the persistent flash data pool.

If there is a complete local flash failure across multiple hosts, VMs continue to run unaffected with the new DVX Peer Cache software which uses a neighbouring compute node’s flash for read speed without restarting VMs using VM HA.

Datrium has certified DVX for use with VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) as a separate vehicle for continuous VM operation in the event of complete host failure.

US list pricing for DVX D12X4B and F12X2 Data Nodes are $94K and $186K, respectively, and are available immediately. The DVX CN2100 pricing starts at $15K US list price and it is available immediately.

Excelero and Micron SolidScale

Micron's SolidScale all-flash array branding has been abandoned.

Eric Endebrock, a Micron storage VP, said: "We had a lot of management changes. ... We had too many brands for storage ... too confusing .. crazy brands. [So we] scaled back to Micron Accelerated Solutions."

Customers who want to buy an Excelerero-powered SolidScale system go to SuperMicro and its resellers and take advantage of a reference architecture specifying the storage server, drive slots, Micron SSDs and Excelero NV Mesh software.

Excelero CEO and co-founder Lior Gal says that when he gets served lemons he tries to make lemonade.

He thought that, when the Excelero-Micron deal started, Micron wanted to sell storage appliances – something it had not done before. That's difficult when starting from scratch. Micron found itself with 50 SolidScale customers in a pipeline and little ability to develop and fulfil their likely orders.

So it gave SuperMicro a kind of push and now SuperMicro is a reseller of its and Excelero's technology. Its channel partners like Boston Limited are interested and things are looking good.

Gal was full of suppressed excitement about news that's coming - so watch this space.

Kaminario

This all-flash array supplier is enhancing its Clarity array management facility with a single dashboard to monitor all deployed Kaminario K2 arrays by customers, partners or support. It's adding:

  • Single dashboard to manage all Kaminario K2 systems deployed across any number of sites using fine-grained access controls,
  • Ability to predict future capacity and performance utilization based on machine learning algorithms analysing usage patterns,
  • Intelligent Service Groups allow customers to define and analyse groups of workloads belonging to a specific customer, application or business unit, and align storage resources to business or application SLAs,
  • Combination of real-time events collected from call-home data and an always-evolving rules engine help generate predictive alerts across a wide range of business-critical functions, providing a more automated service experience,
  • Kaminario’s Support Portal (now called Clarity Support) features single sign-on integration with the Clarity Analytics environment, and users can seamlessly move from the analytics environment to the support portal for easier case management.

Panasas

This HPS, scale-out parallel file system software supplier was apparently ejected from Gartner’s distributed file systems and object storage MQ. Hold your horses. That’s not what happened.

What we understand, from a source apparently familiar with the events, is that 2016 was the first year that Gartner decided to combine both file and object storage offerings in to a single MQ, based on its notion that all scale-out solutions are competitive.

Companies who delivered both objects and files as part of a portfolio of products were given the highest positions, along with object storage companies delivering minimal file support. Companies delivering unique capabilities or those targeting specific market segments and workloads (object or file) were considered niche players, but there was no clear distinction between the companies.

Panasas told Gartner it thought the structure of the MQ report could be confusing, as it doesn't highlight any company’s unique advantages, and specifically compared Panasas and companies whose offerings were not remotely similar.

Panasas believes file and object products co-exist, but do not compete for the same workloads. A head-to-head comparison is not useful, and could be misleading. It unsuccessfully requested to be removed from the 2016 MQ but was excluded from the 2017 MQ.

Pivot3

Hyper-converged infrastructure system supplier Pivot3 has announced a distribution deal with Arrow Electronics.

Arrow will bring Pivot3’s HCI systems to its United States reseller base "and play a key role in Pivot3’s OEM relationship with Lenovo." It will provide configuration services for Pivot3’s platform on Lenovo servers.

Synology

Synology has launched the DS218play, DS218j, and DS118 NAS servers with media streaming, file sharing, and data backup features aimed at small and home offices:

  • DS218play is equipped with a 64-bit quad-core 1.4 GHz processor with a hardware encryption engine and 1 GB RAM, delivering encrypted sequential reading/writing throughput at over 110 MB/sec. With a hardware transcoding engine, it supports real-time single channel 10-bit H.265 4K Ultra HD or single channel full HD video transcoding.
  • DS218j has a dual-core 1.3 GHz processor with a hardware encryption engine and 512 MB RAM, delivering sequential reading throughput at over 113 MB/sec and writing throughput at over 112 MB/sec. It has an eco-friendly design, consuming only 17.48 W during peak usage and 7.03 W under HDD hibernation.
  • DS118 is a new 1-bay tower NAS, equipped with a 64-bit quad-core 1.4 GHz processor and 1GB RAM. With its hardware encryption engine, it offers encrypted sequential reading/writing throughput at over 110 MB/sec. The DS118 comes with data backup and QuickConnect features so users can access data from any location. It also supports 10-bit H.265 4K video transcoding on the fly to enrich multimedia entertainment.

DS218play, DS218j, and DS118 are available worldwide immediately and priced at:

  • DS118 - £158.18 (inc. VAT), €145 (exc taxes),
  • DS218j - £168 (inc. VAT), €154 (exc taxes),
  • DS218play - £217.09 (inc. VAT), €1190 (exc taxes).

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