iTWire - Storage & Cloud Storage

Hitachi Vantara Secures All Three of the Top Rankings for Best Storage Solutions Available Assessed by ENERGY STAR

2024-09-04T10:23:18+10:00

COMPANY NEWS: Recently launched Virtual Storage Platform One Block storage data platform receives top spot for exceptional energy efficiency and performance, setting an unmatched industry standard

Hitachi Vantara, the data storage, infrastructure, and hybrid cloud management subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501) today announced that its new Virtual Storage Platform One Block storage appliance has earned the ENERGY STAR certification and was recognised as the best storage solutions for performance and energy efficiency in the ENERGY STAR NVSS Disk Online 4 category. Overall, the company holds the top three ranked storage solutions in this category. This recognition not only reinforces Hitachi Vantara’s leadership in energy-efficient technology but also underscores the company’s ongoing efforts to align its products with the global push toward sustainability.

The rigorous ENERGY STAR certification process evaluates storage solutions based on their IOPS (input/output operations per second) per Watt, a key metric for measuring the efficiency of input/output operations relative to energy consumption. The Virtual Storage Platform One Block 28 model ranked highest with 538 IOPS per watt, followed by the Virtual Storage Platform One Block 26 at 409 IOPS per watt, and the Virtual Storage Platform E1090 at 368 IOPS per watt.

This ranking comes at a critical time as businesses grapple with the push to improve the sustainability of their operations without sacrificing performance or reliability. A recent survey found 68% of IT decision makers indicated they were concerned with the impact AI/ML had on their organisation's energy use and carbon footprint, and 77% of respondents said that legacy data architectures negatively impacted their sustainability performance.

“At Hitachi Vantara, we understand the growing importance of energy efficiency in today’s data-driven world, and we are committed to helping our customers meet their performance needs while also reducing their environmental impact,” said Octavian Tanase, chief product officer, Hitachi Vantara. “Our Virtual Storage Platform One Block storage appliance exemplifies our vision for the future, delivering powerful, reliable, and eco-friendly solutions that drive value for our customers and help significantly reduce carbon emissions."

Virtual Storage Platform One is designed to deliver key benefits that make it a standout choice in the storage market. The platform improves performance, enabling organisations to consolidate more workloads onto fewer systems. This consolidation not only enhances operational efficiency but also helps businesses achieve their green data centre goals by minimising their environmental footprint. Additionally, Virtual Storage Platform One Block features Dynamic Carbon Reduction technology, reducing energy consumption by switching CPUs into eco-mode during periods of low activity. “Always on compression” allows the system to switch from inline data reduction to post processing which further reduces energy consumption and contributes to a lower CO2 footprint by as much as 30-40%.

A Commitment to Sustainable Innovation

Key market differentiators highlighting Hitachi Vantara’s dedication to delivering innovative, customer-centric, and sustainable solutions, include:

CO2 Impact Measurement: All Hitachi Vantara storage arrays have obtained CFP (Carbon Footprint of Products) certification under the SuMPO (Sustainable Management Promotion Organization) environmental labeling program and have ensured transparency and environmental accountability by undergoing third-party verification of greenhouse gas emissions per terabyte per year (kg-CO2eq).

ENERGY STAR Certification: All mid-market solutions from Hitachi Vantara are certified by ENERGY STAR for their IOPS per Watt, underscoring the energy efficiency and performance of these products.

Sustainability Leadership: Hitachi Vantara recently received a Gold Medal rating for Sustainability from EcoVadis, a globally recognised leader in assessing corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability practices.

Long-Standing Commitment to Lowering Carbon Footprint: For more than a decade, Hitachi Vantara storage arrays have been committed to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continually throughout the entire system lifecycle from procurement of materials to production, logistics, use, disposal, and recycling. Then as part of this, we have been working to obtain CFP certification under the SuMPO environmental labeling program.

For more information on ENERGY STAR rankings and Hitachi Vantara’s performance, please click here.

Additional Resources

IT leaders under pressure to deliver AI innovation amid infrastructure challenges, cybersecurity, and rising energy costs

2024-09-04T09:00:00+10:00

The modern CIO is under pressure; company executives are looking to them to deliver AI strategies, while their data centre infrastructure lags behind, cybersecurity always looms, and energy costs are rising. New research by Pure Storage highlights the issues, with the company putting forward a blueprint to ensure success.

We're truly in the age of AI. Once purely the domain of academic research or the stuff of science fiction, AI is now a true reality. Today's modern computing infrastructure has caught up. And, we hear regularly from GPU manufacturers, any company that isn't already exploring AI use cases will be left behind.

Yet, it's easier said than done. And while CIO's are being told to execute upon AI strategies, they're most certainly not being told, "AI at any cost." Pressures are mounting on the CIO who must innovate while keeping the lights running, the costs down, and the bad guys out.

New research from Pure Storage puts numbers on the problem, showing 96% of Australian IT leaders recognise the value of AI for transformation, while 84% believe AI-generated data will outgrow their data centre. 92% are concerned their infrastructure won't keep pace. 41% say cyber threats are a major risk. And 91% of CIOs and IT leaders in Australia say their greatest priority - above all else - must be reducing the organisation's risk profile. In fact, this was the highest out of all countries Pure Storage surveyed.

The research gives a great insight into the problems; happily, Pure Storage gives practical, actionable guidance to help make it through to the other side.

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Pure Storage released its report this morning, "The Innovation Race: Reducing Risk and Navigating the AI Frontier for Future Success" following a global study involved 1,500 C-level and decision-maker respondents. The company has carved out the local numbers to shine a light on where Australian leaders stand.

The results reflect the grim reality that innovation doesn't simply happen; it balances on a stack of requirements and pre-requisites, while simultaneously holding back attackers. And it falls to the CIO to solve these problems, and make the innovation happen.

In fact, according to Pure Storage, 91% of IT leaders would rather spend the money on innovation that they currently dedicate to cybersecurity.

It's all a good pulse check on what's being discussed at the C-level in Australia, and Pure Storage area vice president - ANZ Amy Rushall noted, "Australian IT leaders are acutely aware of the challenges posed by their current infrastructure's ability to support AI, and many fear falling behind in the Innovation Race. This research is designed to help identify and address a wide range of risks beyond the obvious cyber threats, enabling a strategic balance between security and innovation. By tackling rising energy costs and evaluating AI readiness through a modernized infrastructure approach, Australian organizations can better position themselves to leverage AI for sustained success."

"Everyone is thinking about AI, which is no surprise," Rushall told iTWire, "but what's top of mind continues to be risk management. CIOs are focused on the risk in their business and how they can take care of that, above and beyond AI."

Globally, the report shows 82% of leaders are worried their business will be left behind. 84% believe AI-generated data is likely to outgrow their data centre. Nearly everyone agrees their organisation's infrastructure needs improvement.

Locally, 91% of Australian IT leaders say reducing risk is their top priority, and this was overwhelmingly higher than all other countries.

Rushall explained to iTWire there were several distinctive factors. These included cyberthreat concerns, management of multiple disparate systems, tech debt, rising cloud costs, rising energy costs, and global power shortages. Here too, Australia expressed higher concerns than other nations. "Risking energy costs are affecting all of Australia, not only IT," she said.

Pictured: Pure Storage area vice president - ANZ Amy Rushall

While countries like Singapore have restrictions on data centre construction, "in Australia we have more data centres per capita than any other country," Rushall said.

Ultimately, although every organisation surveyed - 100% - are planning, preparing, or currently adopting AI, it's clear IT leaders lack the time to innovate because they're continuously firefighting. "AI is innovative and they want to get started but have things to address first," Rushall said.

There's a clear consensus AI will be the primary driver of organisational transformation in the coming years, so it's a problem that definitely must be addressed.

Fortunately, Pure Storage has solid recommendations.

Understand all the risks to your business.
Address rising cloud and energy costs now.
Asses, with honesty, your organisation's AI readiness.
Establish a robust recovery plan with multi-tiered resiliency, immutable and indelible snapshots, and ultra-fast data recovery.

These aren't simply throw-away lines. Each recommendation is significant. In fact, much of it comes down to considering just where your data lives. With data growing at explosive rates, pressure continues to increase on cloud costs. If you're not already considering how to balance your data between cloud and on-premises, it's time you did.

In fact, moving some workloads "on-premises can save money and help with risk, and moving forward to having a better platform," Rushall said.

This all goes hand-in-hand with whether your organisation is AI ready, and whether you can recover data if your business goes down. It's a situation Pure Storage is well equipped to help with. "These are key things for us," Rushall said. "All of these things people are concerned by - risk, AI, energy - are addressed by our platform."

You might think of Pure Storage as simply a storage company. After all, why not? It's in the name, and it was the basis of its original product over a decade ago. However, "we evolved our data management to a total platform, a total solution to address the entire enterprise," she said. "We were one of the earliest to the table back in 2016 with a validated design, in conjunction with Cisco and Nvidia."

"We were on the forefront of AI, and it's interesting to see how it has evolved quickly. We've grown our platform to address all aspects of AI and risk management."

In essence, if your business is concerned about rising energy costs, about rising cloud costs, about the risks to your company's data from cyberattack, about your readiness to embrace AI because data is dispersed and ungoverned, about whether your infrastructure can handle the loads that will be demanded of it by AI workloads - then you really must explore a modern platform, one that allows you to manage data in the cloud and on-premises via single management interface, that is energy efficient, and that offers robust, resilient immutable protection against ransomware and other destructive threats.

"Some people interested in adopting Pure Storage get started by a project," Rushall said. "We ask what we can help them with, what's end of life, what's a project like AI that you want to start with and grow in your environment."

Or, sometimes people might start a journey with Pure Storage via its Pure BlockStorage product. "It's cloud block storage that helps with the reduction of costs as it relates to cloud spend," she said. "It can save up to 50% on your current cloud-spend using our data reduction technology and energy efficiency."

"We have a fantastic sales team and a really big team of engineers; they're specialists that can help with any of these challenges," Rushall said.

You can check out Pure Storage online. You can also check it out in person. On 29 October 2024 the company is holding an event, Pure Accelerate, in Melbourne for customers, prospects, and partners. There will be US-based executives flying in to speak about the opportunities of AI and how to execute upon them, and will be an opportunity for the ANZ C-suite to interact with peers.

You can find the report, "The Innovation Race: Reducing Risk and Navigating the AI Frontier for Future Success" online now.

Samsung unveils new microSD cards

2024-08-05T08:52:10+10:00

Samsung unveiled a 1-terabyte (TB) high-capacity microSD cards Pro Plus and Evo Plus, ideal for content creators and enthusiasts who need quick file transfers and storage for everyday use.

“Creators and tech enthusiasts are increasingly using portable devices such as smartphones and handheld gaming devices to store data that demand high-performance and high-capacity,” says Samsung Electronics vice president of memory brand product biz teams Hangu Sohn.

With 1TB of storage, users can store more than 400K 4K UHD (2.3MB) images or more than 45 console games (20GB).

The Pro Plus and Evo Plus offer a range of storage options including 128-gigabyte (GB), 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. The Evo Plus also has a 64GB option.

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The Pro Plus offers read speeds of up to 180 (MB/s) coupled with sequential write speeds of up to 130MB/s.

For fast loading and multitasking, the Pro Plus has UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) and Video Speed Class 30 (V30) for 4K UHD Video with A2 App Performance.

For daily use, storing data on devices can be enhanced with the Evo Plus with transfer speeds of up to 160MB/s.

It also boasts a UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) and Video Speed Class 30 (V30) for 4K UHD video with A24 App Performance.

The 64GB Evo Plus model has varying specifications with UHS Speed Class 1 (U1), Video Speed Class 10 (V10), and A1 App Performance.

Samsung’s Pro Plus and Evo Plus 1TB microSD cards show improved power efficiency with their controller based on 28-nanometer (nm) process technology, compared to Samsung’s 55nm.

With an Error Correction Code (ECC) Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) code 2-kilobyte (KB) engine, the Pro Plus and Evo Plus 1TB cards are packed with durability for a higher volume of write-and-erase cycles

Samsung claims the two microSD cards are “ultra-durable” and have undergone testing.

Tested extensively under harsh conditions, the Pro Plus and Evo Plus are designed to withstand challenging environments and can withstand water, high temperatures, X-rays, and magnetic field.

For creators venturing into challenging conditions, the Pro Plus and Evo Plus have demonstrated durability through extensive testing and are drop-proof and resistant to wear-out.

The cards are compatible with Android smartphones, tablets, and gaming consoles. They are also compatible with action cameras and drones for creating, editing, and saving data.

The 1TB models of the Pro Plus and Evo Plus microSD Cards are now available. The Pro Plus has a manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) ranging from US$24.99 for the 128GB model to US$153.99 for the 1TB model. The MSRP for the Evo Plus ranges from US$12.99 for the 64GB model to US$131.99 for the 1TB model.

The Pro Plus and Evo Plus have a 10-year limited warranty.

NetApp expands intelligent data infrastructure capabilities to power strategic cloud workloads

2024-07-16T21:56:04+10:00

New capabilities empower customers to run data-intensive workloads like GenAI and VMware environments more easily

NetApp, the intelligent data infrastructure company, today announced the introduction of new capabilities designed for strategic cloud workloads including GenAI and VMware. These enhancements to NetApp data and storage services reduce the resources and risks for customers to manage these strategic workloads across increasingly complex hybrid multicloud environments.

“Strategic workloads, including GenAI and virtualised environments, are driving business innovation and have increasingly complex and resource-intensive infrastructure requirements that are pushing IT teams to the limit,” said Pravjit Tiwana, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Storage at NetApp. “NetApp is helping customers take back control of their data with intelligent data infrastructure that leverages unified data storage, integrated data services, and automated cloud operations. Even when they are up against specific and nuanced technology requirements for modern workloads, NetApp gives them the tools they need to optimise and simplify their data operations in their environments across the hybrid multicloud.”

To advance intelligent data infrastructure deployments that better support strategic workloads like GenAI and VMware environments, NetApp is announcing new capabilities, including:

NetApp BlueXP Workload Factory – for AWS: This intelligent data infrastructure service uses defined industry best-practices to automate the planning, provisioning, and management of cloud resources and services for key workloads, including GenAI, VMware cloud environments, and enterprise databases. Customers can use BlueXP workload factory to optimise deployment time, cost, performance, and protection of resources for strategic workloads as well as their associated data. To simplify workload migrations to the cloud, BlueXP workload factory allows users to profile infrastructure requirements for target workloads and compare different resource options for cost and performance needs. Then, the service can provision the selected resources, move any existing workload data to these newly provisioned cloud deployments, and continually optimise the entire environment to ensure the required cost and performance targets. AWS users can read guidance on how to deploy this capability on the AWS Solutions Library.
NetApp GenAI Toolkit – Microsoft Azure NetApp Files Version: Customers can now include private enterprise data stored in Azure NetApp Files in their retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows in a secure, programmatic manner. The result is an enhanced ability to generate unique, high-quality, and ultra-relevant results from GenAI projects by combining their proprietary data with pre-trained, foundational models (FMs). The integration of the NetApp GenAI Toolkit with Azure NetApp Files represents a powerful synergy that empowers customers to harness advanced language generation capabilities.
Amazon Bedrock with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Reference Architecture: Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) and NetApp have released a joint reference architecture which provides guidance for customers on implementing RAG-enabled workflows that bring proprietary data stored on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP into their GenAI data pipelines. Amazon FSx makes it easy and cost effective to launch, run, and scale feature-rich, high-performance file systems in the cloud. The reference architecture allows developers to use APIs for Amazon Bedrock to connect with Amazon FSx for ONTAP data stores, enabling the secure use of proprietary data with a choice of high-performing FMs that can be customised to unlock new insights and capabilities.
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Enhancements: AWS announced the next-generation Amazon FSx for ONTAP cloud storage service with enhanced capabilities to boost scalability and flexibility to provide up to 6 GB per second of throughput for a single highly-available (HA) pair from 512 TiB of SSD storage. Next-gen file systems offer virtualised workloads more room to grow with a 300 percent increase in network burst throughput and a 150 percent boost in disk burst throughput. For large-scale, high-performance workloads like GenAI, second-generation Amazon FSx for ONTAP systems support dynamic scalability by adding HA pairs as needed, up to 24 nodes. This delivers up to 72 GB per second of throughput from 1 PiB of SSD storage, providing greater flexibility and performance for evolving business needs.
NetApp BlueXP Disaster Recovery Support for VMFS: The BlueXP disaster recovery service, which provides guided workflows to design and execute automated disaster recovery plans for VMware workloads across both on-premises and cloud environments, has been expanded to support VMFS datastores for on-premises to on-premises disaster recovery.

These updates build on NetApp’s existing offerings that support storage and data operations for customers that need to implement and manage high-powered, strategic workloads such as GenAI and VMware environments. For example, NetApp recently announced that its unique BlueXP data classification capability, which automatically classifies and categorises data for enhanced governance and secure ingest into GenAI and RAG data pipelines, has become a core control plane capability now available free of charge to all NetApp customers.

“Enterprises in Asia Pacific are eager to tap the innovative power of GenAI and virtualised environments. Yet they are often held back by complexity, security and cost constraints,” said Matthew Swinbourne, CTO Cloud Architecture at NetApp Asia Pacific. “The range of enhancements announced by NetApp today aims to address challenges like these. With a robust, intelligent data infrastructure, APAC organisations will be able to harness their entire data estate, maximise their GenAI investments, and usher in a new era of innovation.”

“When it comes to GenAI, the prime focus for organisations is to adapt their data strategies to ensure they can balance data security, cost efficiency and innovation as they leverage pre-built LLMs to surface relevant, useful insights from their proprietary, business-relevant data,” said Archana Venkatraman, Senior Research Director, Cloud Data Management at IDC. “NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure capabilities can help customers overcome the data challenges and offer specific guidance to automate workflows that can securely feed private data directly into public cloud providers’ LLMs. In addition, NetApp’s BlueXP data classification capability has the potential to mitigate the risks in data operations for AI because it allows users to discover and categorise data so that the right data is fed into the right model without exposing confidential, personal or restricted information.”

“Organisations are now facing different economic realities with regards to virtualised environments, and we all need to move quickly to address recent industry shifts,” said Derek Elbert, Solutions Architect at WWT. “Optimising the cost versus performance equation of VMware workloads has become a primary initiative for us, with the objective of continuing to provide scalability and performance while reducing unnecessary system and software resources. NetApp’s offerings, such as the BlueXP disaster recovery service and the optimisation metrics from Cloud Insights, help us better ensure the right levels of resource allocation and protection schemes for virtual environments, allowing us to focus on putting our infrastructure to work without killing the FinOps metrics.”

Additional Resources

About NetApp

NetApp is the intelligent data infrastructure company, combining unified data storage, integrated data services, and CloudOps solutions to turn a world of disruption into opportunity for every customer. NetApp creates silo-free infrastructure, harnessing observability and AI to enable the industry’s best data management. As the only enterprise-grade storage service natively embedded in the world’s biggest clouds, our data storage delivers seamless flexibility. In addition, our data services create a data advantage through superior cyber resilience, governance, and application agility. Our CloudOps solutions provide continuous optimisation of performance and efficiency through observability and AI. No matter the data type, workload, or environment, with NetApp you can transform your data infrastructure to realise your business possibilities. Learn more at www.netapp.com or follow us on X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

NETAPP, the NETAPP logo, and the marks listed at www.netapp.com/TM are trademarks of NetApp, Inc. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Pure Storage announces new major AI and cybersecurity advancements

2024-06-20T13:17:15+10:00

All-flash data storage hardware and software company Pure Storage has announced a new, comprehensive strategy and range of product announcements that address customer's most pressing concerns and bring industry-first innovations.

Pure Storage APJ CTO Mark Jobbins explained to iTWire that the two big trends he was seeing are the increased and ongoing concerns around cyber attacks, as well as the noise around generative AI. Cyber attacks are always a concern, but especially so when it comes to storage. Your last defence against ransomware is trustworthy, secure storage - without that, you're only one attack away from disaster. And, meanwhile, generative AI is clearly the big topic of the day. In Jobbins' experience, it's begun to settle down and mature as people begin exploring solidly-reasoned proof of concept projects.

Pure Storage has put a lot of thought into how it is best positioned to serve organisations of all sizes and all types in advancing their AI aspirations and continually protecting their investments.

The result of this thought is a carefully-crafted strategy with four pillars. And, these new services will be rolled out as part of existing licensing, along with two additional add-on services for EverGreen//One, the Pure Storage storage-as-a-service platform.

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These four pillars include expanding innovations in the Pure Storage platform, accelerating AI success in the enterprise, arming enterprises with new cyber resiliency services and capabilities, and delivering plartform flexibility with storage-as-a-service.

These are driven by Pure Storage's own thinking and strategising, as well as customer feedback, and most definitely from observing how the world hs changed. Long gone are the days when data solely resided on disks in an office; today it can be anywhere in the world, literally. A modern storage platform needs to ensure platforms and endpoints can grow and develop over time, seamlessly blending data between on-premises and cloud.

There's a lot to tackle here, so let's go through it:

Copilot

A brand-new AI-driven Copilot will be available within the Pure Storage platform itself, aiding administrators in managing and protecting data using natural language. This has been trained on insights and telemetry from tens of thousands of customers, along with Pure's FAQs and documentation, and can deliver actionable steps to address concerns or improve benchmark rankings. It is available to enterprise customers via the PureOne platform and Pure says its training model will get stronger over time.

Example questions might be, "Can you give me a security update over my flash arrays?" or "Can you confirm my billing?"

Administrators will be able to ask all kinds of questions, giving fast access to usage and billing, surfacing security issues, and much more. The Copilot will give responses and recommendations, and, importantly, link those recommendations to action. It will aid Pure Storage customers by giving them a greater view, and make the platform simpler to manage, Jobbins said to iTWire.

"We're the first storage vendor to provide a GenAI copilot environment," he said.

Next-gen Fusion storage automation

Meanwhile, many organisations have made huge investments on GPU compute layers. "It's huge what you can do with GenAI, but it takes a huge investment too," Jobbins said.

And, while GenAI brings great promise, it's a hungry beast that needs data - and fast. This costs money. "People are nervous about how much to invest in the storage layer from day one, and whether it will still be relevant in six, twelve, even 18 months when profiles may have changed," he said.

Imagine being the person who has to explain to the CFO why the "$ X million" investment provided is only running at, say, 20% utilised. "It plays on people's minds how to drive maximum efficiency."

However, being able to have multiple workloads on the same or similar platforms, with the right performance levels, and to be future proof means you need the right investments, the right security, and the right throughput for training to drive it all and shortern your time to go-live.

"The Pure platform can address all these," Jobbins said, "wrapped around with the new first-of-its-kind Fusion storage automation."

This next-gen Fusion improves and simplifies provisioning from one array to thousands. It's protocol agnostic - no matter if you use FC, iSCSI, VNMe, file/object, or other.

It will be embedded into Purity for all its arrays, available with a simple update. It's not a seperate license, or an external control plane. It's fully backwards compatible and does not break existing intgrations.

A major key to the new capabilities is its strong policy-driven nature: specify service levels and requirements, and Fusion will automatically move workloads seamlessly and non-destructively as appropriate. This includes taking snapshots, performing replications, and all kinds of other autonomous actions to comply with the policies you set. It brings you a much more cloud-like experience to managing your storage.

Throughput subscription in Evergreen//One

Traditionally, people choose storage options based on structured block+file data or unstructured data. Both options serve specific needs, but Pure Storage recognises when it comes to AI, capacity is not often the driver; instead it's throughput - how fast can you supply data to the compute layer?

In comes Evergreen//One for AI - this is a new subscription type that "flips the model", Jobbins said. "Customers can subscribe to guaranteed performance based on bandwidth. The storage capacity piece will be a nominal fee against it."

This helps give organisations choice and comfort; it removes the risk of over-committing huge resources into a technology. "You can start at an entry point then scale up," he said. "Once you understand your long-term profile you can change it over time."

NVIDIA SuperPOD certification

Pure Storage is extending its relationship with NVIDIA to move into its SuperPOD certification, an accelerated AI data centre infrastructure platform for delivering agile and scalable performance for the most challenging AI and HPC workloads.

This is driven by NVIDIA's timelines, but Pure Storage expects the process will work its way through before the end of the calendar year.

This will extend Pure Storage's existing NVIDIA DGX and OGX certifications.

AI clusters for mission-critical data

Pure Storage will provide new Application Workspaces that bring fine-grained access controls, giving security, independence, and control. It means companies can be confident their mission-critical data can be leveraged for AI applications but without risk of misuse or leak.

Enhanced cyber resiliency

Sadly, today's reality is it's not if a company will be impacted by cyber criminals, but when. And, exasperatingly, as much as AI is helping companies innovate and deliver new services, it's also being leveraged by criminals to increase the sophistication of their attacks.

Pure Storage has announced an extension of its cybersecurity offerings. Last year, the company announced anomaly detection. Now it is introducing greater support and services for cyber resiliency, helping customers hone right in on events, and notifications, along with providing a clean storage environment for recovering into.

Pure Storage says this will not be limited to ransomware, but will be open to all disaster recovery situations. Further, it will tie into the Fusion enhancements above with new policy upgrades so you can further define policies around data protection. Customers will be able to tailor policies to their own individual environments.

These new capabilities bring a holistic approach to protecting your environment.

Cyber resiliency advisory services

Meanwhile, new services will see Pure Storage work proactively with you to determine how to best protect against, and recover from, an incident.

These services will allow you to assess and score your risk, and can be supplemented by advice from the new Copilot feature detailed above.

When a customer subscribes to the Pure Storage cyber resilience service, the company will proactively work with the customer to determine recovery procedures and processes so these are all planned and ready before an incident occurs. These will be reviewed quarterly.

Rebalance

It's always difficult to predict the future. Imagine if we could trade hindsight for foresight? Happily, we live in a world of possibilities. "What if we could use AI to proactively tell customers when we think there will be a change to reserved capacity, and thus avoid on-demand charges?" Jobbins asked. And, sure enough, Pure Storage has delivered more new ways to get insights to make informed decisions.

This can be asked through the Copilot capability above to ask "what if" questions - "what if I change the environment this way ..."

In addition, Pure Storage will now offer rebalancing storage among sites. For example, Jobbins explained, "if you have multiple sites you allocate reserved capacity with good intentions, but in time might need to move data from site A to B. You have a reserved commitment of 200TB with 100TB in two sites but now want, say, 150TB in site A and 50TB in site B."

With the new rebalance option, customers can rebalance their storage once per year, and Pure Storage will move the infrastructure appropriately at no additional charge. Currently, the company believes 12 months is a good logical amount of time but Jobbins says the SLA will evolve over time based on customer feedback.

New SLAs

Pure Storage has announced a comprehensive expansion to its SLAs for Evergreen//One and says customers will experience a 50% bump in performance in their new high-performance SLA enhancement.

It's a lot of news out of Pure Storage, but they all come down to a single, unified strategy around helping customers accelerate their AI journey while protecting their environments.

"All the way from Fusion to providing self-managed storage environments, a generative AI copilot to ensure best practices, flipping storage-as-a-service to mover from capacity and performance profile to throughput model allowing customers to start at whatever they want, building our relationship with NVIDIA, providing greater insights, delivering security and resilience ...," Jobbins said.

"It's hitting all the areas customers are talking to me about," he said.

Western Digital announces 6TB 2.5" portable HDDs bringing a new world-first for capacity

2024-05-26T13:39:17+10:00

Digital creators need more and more space - and importantly, robust, reliable storage space - to manage and preserve it. Western Digital has announced it's pushed physics to create an incredible 6TB capacity across its WD, WD_Black, and SanDisk Professional products, giving the world's highest storage capacity in a 2.5" portable HDD format.

Graphic design, multimedia, generative AI - you name it, it needs data. Western Digital's announcement means the whole range of WD My Passport portable HDD line, WD_BLACK P10 Game Drive and SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE ArmorATD will all now be available in cavernous 6TB capacities.

“Expanding our portfolio with the world’s first 2.5” 6TB* portable hard drive is an incredible technological achievement, and it enables us to continue pushing the boundaries of what's possible,” said Western Digital director of product management Nitin Kachhwaha. “Offering up to 6TB* in such a small form factor and accessible price point gives everyone—from students, gamers, professional videographers, and more—greater flexibility to create and keep even more of their essential content in one portable drive.”

The new, record-breaking 6TB* capacity point is now available across Western Digital's premier brands, offering a more robust, purpose-built solution for consumers, gamers and professionals.

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With up to 6TB capacities now available for the WD My Passport hard drive line, adventurers can store more and effortlessly back up their digital memories with peace of mind. The My Passport Ultra drive is a trusted, portable storage solution that is equipped with USB-C technology and a modern metal design. It is ready right out of the box and features a convenient, slim form factor that is easily transportable. Its password protection with 256-bit AES hardware encryption helps keep precious content safe and secure. The My Passport hard drives are available in different colours to suit any style.

The 6TB WD My Passport retails for $299.00 MSRP and the WD My Passport for Mac retails for $309.00 MSRP. All products will be available in Australia from October 2024 at select Western Digital retailers, e-tailers and on the Western Digital Store.

Meanwhile, the WD_BLACK P10 Game Drive allows gamers to furnish their console or PC with performance-enhancing tools to keep up with the pace of today’s complex AAA titles. With the 6TB capacities now available that can store up to 150 games, the drive is built for players looking to upgrade the storage of their console or PC and enjoy gaming without having to compromise which games to delete or updates to forgo to make room for new titles. Availability for the 6TB WD_BLACK P10 Game Drive will be confirmed later this year.

And, with SanDisk Professional’s G-DRIVE ArmorATD drive, consumers get an all-terrain drive with shock, IP54 rain and dust, and crush resistance to help protect valuable footage from out in the wild to back in the studio. The 6TB SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE ArmorATD provides a trusted and portable way to back up photos, video footage and files wherever adventure leads. Availability of the 6TB SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE ArmorATD will also be confirmed later this year.

Wasabi launches Wasabi AiR, AI-enabled intelligent media storage for the sports, media and entertainment industries

2024-04-11T12:08:25+10:00

Cloud storage company Wasabi Technologies has introduced Wasabi AiR the ‘industry's first' AI-enabled intelligent media storage.

Wasabi says Wasabi AiR AiR combines its high-performance low-cost object storage with advanced AI metadata auto-tagging and multilingual searchable speech-to-text transcription.

“Video files uploaded to Wasabi AiR are immediately analysed and a second-by-second metadata index is created, enabling users to quickly find what they are looking for. Wasabi AiR greatly reduces the cost of metadata creation: with Wasabi AiR, customers pay only for the storage. There is no additional charge for use of the AI,” notes Wasabi.

In January, Wasabi announced its acquisition of Curio AI, a state-of-the-art AI platform designed specifically to analyse and index large video archives.

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“Now users simply upload their video files to Wasabi AiR storage and the AI automatically goes to work generating a rich second-by-second metadata index. Wasabi AiR uses facial recognition, searchable speech-to-text, multi-lingual translation, speaker recognition, optical text recognition, logo identification, and sounds recognition with unparalleled accuracy,” comments Wasabi.

Wasabi says video archives currently stored on tape can be uploaded to AiR storage and formerly “dead” content can become a new source of revenue and user engagement. Wasabi AiR is purpose-built for use cases including:

Post-production: Quickly find and assemble video for news packages, highlight reels, social media content and more in real time to enable production teams to focus on creativity without being bogged down searching for content
Sponsorship and marketing ROI: Find logos for sponsorship attribution with ease for ROI analysis
Geo-diversity: Tailor content to specifically meet the requirements of geo-diverse audiences

"Wasabi AiR introduces a groundbreaking solution to a persistent 25-year-old challenge, combining AI-driven search capabilities with high-performance cloud storage. This marks a transformative shift in media management, offering efficiency and accessibility for businesses dealing with massive unstructured data,” according to Dave McCarthy, Research Vice President at IDC.

“Wasabi AiR represents a significant advancement in tackling the longstanding issue of managing extensive data archives, within a substantial market for intelligent media storage solutions."

“Why move to the cloud if you still can’t find anything?” said David Friend, co-founder and chief executive officer, Wasabi Technologies. “Object storage without metadata is like a library without a catalogue. Wasabi AiR works right out of the box and it’s as simple to use as popular search engines. For example, if it finds a face that it doesn’t recognise, it asks ‘Who is this?’ Using a simple UI, the user can train their own models. You can have tens of thousands of hours of video, and Wasabi AiR will take you right to the moment you are looking for. And you can search as much as you want – we only charge for the storage.”

Rubrik Helps Customers Further Protect Amazon S3 Data

2023-11-28T15:28:06+11:00

COMPANY NEWS: Rubrik now provides additional data protection for Amazon S3, providing companies the ability to secure mission-critical data

Rubrik, the Zero Trust Data Security Company, today announced its ability to further protect Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data. As organisations face increased pressure to protect their data against accidental deletion, ransomware, and cyberattacks, Rubrik has expanded its portfolio to allow customers further visibility into where sensitive Amazon S3 data lives and who has access to it, while also creating effective recovery plans.

Amazon S3 is an object storage service from Amazon Web Services (AWS) offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Amazon S3 is built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. Millions of customers of all sizes and industries can store and protect any amount of data for virtually any use case, such aa data lakes, cloud-native applications, and mobile applications.

“Organisations recognise the imperative to protect their corporate data, particularly as unstructured data expands due to new innovations in AI and increasingly connected devices,” said Anneka Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Rubrik. “Together, Rubrik and AWS are working to help customers protect their data on premises and in the cloud while reducing operational costs, so that organisations can achieve true cyber resilience. We’re proud to continue working with AWS on our mission to secure the world’s data.”

Rubrik’s new cyber resilience capabilities include air-gapped, immutable, access-controlled backups and rapid recovery at scale for organisations that have hundreds of petabytes of Amazon S3 data. The cyber posture features, which will help organisations understand where their data is stored and how it is secured, draw upon capabilities from Rubrik’s recent acquisition of Laminar, a leading data security posture management (DSPM) company.

The complexity of protecting data grows exponentially: the most recent Rubrik Zero Labs State of Data Security report found that a typical organisation's data has grown 73% in the cloud over the last 18 months. Key benefits of the new services for Amazon S3 and Rubrik customers will include:

Autonomously discover, classify, and provide context on all known and shadow Amazon S3 data, without that data leaving the customer’s environment.
Assess the security posture of sensitive data against security policies and data compliance requirements.
Continuously monitor sensitive data within Amazon S3 for risky user activity or leakage and provide early warning of emerging threats.
Identify and remediate redundant Amazon S3 data to help reduce cloud costs.
Rapidly recover the most recent clean copy using a range of recovery patterns, including object-level and whole bucket.

Rubrik also announced today new data protection features for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), expanding its commitment to offering complete cyber resilience for data in AWS. Additionally, Rubrik’s NAS Cloud Direct is now available in AWS Marketplace, expanding access to Rubrik’s solution that automates data protection and simplifies archival of NAS file data at petabyte scale.

Rubrik has been on-site at AWS re:Invent 2023 (booth #1352), details of events and what happended this week in Las Vegas. To learn more, visit https://www.rubrik.com/company/events/aws-re-invent-2023.

Rubrik’s new data protection capabilities for Amazon S3 will be generally available in early 2024.

Pure makes storage even more as a service, and adds data resilience as a service

2023-10-11T00:01:00+11:00

All-flash storage specialist Pure Storage will pay power and rack space costs for Evergreen//One storage as a service (STaaS) and Evergreen//Flex subscribers, has added new service level commitments to Evergreen customers, and introduced Pure Protect disaster recovery as a service.

Said to be an industry first, the paid power and rack commitment comes in the form of a one-time, upfront payment as cash or via service credits, and is calculated on fixed kilowatt per hour (kWh) and Rack Unit rates according to the customer's geographic location and contract size.

It is available to net new subscriptions on or after 10 October 2023, with a minimum of 500TiB of //Block capacity or 300TiB of //UFFO, //Block Performance, Premium or Ultra capacity.

"So you're getting a true cloud experience there, where you're just paying for the storage at the end of the day," Pure Storage APJ vice president and CTO Mark Jobbins told iTWire.

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"We think that's pretty unique in the market."

The new guarantees apply across the Evergreen portfolio and provide for no data migration, zero data loss, and power and space efficiency.

Pure Protect//DRaaS is a consumption-based disaster recovery service for moving workloads between on-premises vSphere and customer-provided AWS EC2 resources.

It is said to drastically reduce complexity, cost, recovery time, and business disruption in the wake of disasters and cyber disruptions.

To help customers improve their resilience and protection maturity, Pure now presents a data resiliency score based on the use of basic features such as snapshots and advanced features such as ActiveDR. It can also take into consideration data from third-party protection plugins such as those from Commvault and Veeam.

Pure offers its customers several new guarantees.

The Power and Space Efficiency Guarantee for Evergreen//Forever customers means that if the guaranteed Watts/TiB or TiB/Rack is not met, Pure Storage will cover the extra cost. (The Energy Efficiency guarantee is already available as an Evergreen//One SLA.)

When it comes to sustainability, "I think this is important to lead the industry to to give that visibility and choice for for customers," Jobbins told iTWire.

The No Data Migration and Zero Data Loss guarantees for Evergreen//One, Evergreen//Flex, and Evergreen//Forever mitigate unplanned costs due to data loss incidents or interruptions due to upgrades. If necessary, advanced data recovery services for any hardware or software product-related incidents are provided at no cost. The No Data Migration guarantee means seamless technology upgrades with no data migrations, reducing risk, cost of ownership, and e-waste.

Pure's Ever Agile program now includes a capacity plus controller trade-in for up to 20% lower cost than a new controller, while the Capacity Consolidation program now includes expanded capacity trade-in credits valued at up to 50%.

New service features include asset management and genealogy (helping customers and Pure Storage to jointly optimise labor costs to run and operate storage), a subscription viewer to understand when subscriptions require attention and renewal (with predictive tracking of capacity utilisation, alerts to optimise reserve commit vs on-demand consumption, and new SLA indicators), the ability to benchmark direct carbon usage against that of peer organisations, policy-driven upgrades (to help customers balance maintaining a secure and supported storage environment against upgrade frequency), and the Pure1 mobile app to deliver insights and alerts, and to manage cases.

By further extending the simplicity of managing Pure products, "I honestly believe that customers can focus getting on with their business rather than having to dive in and divert resources to operational activities," said Jobbins. "This just makes it easy."

Pure Storage digital experience business unit vice president and general manager Prakash Darji said "With the expansion of Pure's Evergreen portfolio, we continue to challenge the status quo of enterprise Storage as-a-Service, yet again delivering industry-first guarantees and AI-powered services to solve problems for our customers.

"As enterprises feel increased pressures to maximise resource and energy efficiency and to safeguard their data from disaster, we are providing them with unparalleled levels of resiliency and efficiency all through a simple and smart services platform."

Synology adds DS224+ and DS124 to DiskStation family

2023-07-24T14:36:22+10:00

Synology has introduced the DiskStation DS224+ and DS124 NAS devices.

The new NAS models use Synology's DiskStation Manager operating system and support Synology Drive private cloud storage.

The devices can be used to back up workstations, laptops, and mobile devices, and folders, system settings, and software packages stored on the Synology NAS can be backed up to the cloud, to secondary Synology systems, and to external devices.

Point-in-time snapshots of the NAS's data can be stored locally or remotely to allow for rapid restoration.

The Synology Surveillance Station video management system allows the DS224+ and DS124 to be used as a surveillance management and recording system that supports more than 8,300 validated IP cameras and ONVIF devices

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Optional dual recording to Synology C2 Surveillance provides improved remote access as well as serving as a backup. End-to-end encryption guards against unauthorised access and low-latency recording ensures footage is recorded up to the last seconds before a camera stream becomes unavailable, perhaps because the DiskStation has been stolen or destroyed by intruders..

The single-bay DS124 provides backup for PCs (file and folder), mobile devices (photos, videos and music), and for the NAS itself (folders and configuration).

It can be used to offload currently locally-stored data, minimising the need for storage upgrades for laptops and workstations.

Synology product manager Julien Chen, said "The DS124's small desktop form factor and low power consumption make it especially well-suited for entrepreneurs, business owners, and freelance creative professionals, who can get more done with less overhead after streamlining their workflows with the DS124."

The DS224+ is a dual-bay model, and also supports backup of servers, VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, and bare-metal recovery of the NAS itself.

"The DS224+ is ideal for teams and branch offices looking to sync up with their central office," said Synology product manager Michael Wang. "The range of synchronisation features it supports right out of the box makes it ready to slot in to just about any existing deployment."