CTERA presents a new service

CTera, a leader in edge-to-cloud file services, has launched during The IT Press Tour in Rome last week its new iteration of its ransomware data protection solution set. The company has clear ambitions in the domain wishing to become #1 in cyber-storage area.

As we already wrote, the first service offered by CTera is Vault with its recent 2.0 version brining legal hold, object lock and chain of custody in addition of the WORM Cloud Folders and today the granularity has been extended to individual files and objects.

Announced during a past IT Press Tour in Israel in 2023 when we met the team at their HQ in Tel-Aviv, the ransomware protection also has evolved to provide today data exfiltration prevention with the honeypot concept. The team delivered a compelling demo during the session a few days ago with a very easy setup.

The idea is to detect and block in real-time any tentative of data exfiltration based on decoy files that serve as honeypots. So today is not just about ransomware protection with encrypted files but also the export and copy of files being a modern data leak prevention approach. To solve this CTera implements the dynamic creation of decoy files to redirect and identify attacks and then blocked them. CTera leverages some AI to boost analysis when some potential anomalies are detected.

CTera continues to develop its enterprise file services platform as a very rapid pace confirming its place to offer one of the most comprehensive solution today.

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QStar targets large archiving configurations

Pre-announced during the recent IT Press Tour in Rome, QStar officially unveils its Global ArchiveSpace at NAB yesterday. The product already in demonstration at SuperComputing 2023 at the Hammerspace booth is now ready to flood the market.

The company is a reference in the data archiving space with more than 19,000 installations but suffers from the lack of scalability of the solution for large environments and data sets. At least, the team and its users recognized the need to offer an advanced iteration of Archive Manager able to scale and support large configurations.

QStar Global ArchiveSpace (GAS) is a new design providing a scalable model with a dynamic cluster able to support hundreds of tape drives, thousands of tapes, large data sets with tons of files and big ones and of course a large disk cache to sustain gigantic loads. The multi-node approach is based on a single namespace across nodes, from 3 to 64, with embedded failover in case of nodes failures. GAS brings also tape drive reservation to nodes to avoid conflict but doesn't need any tape partitioning. This solution relies on a mono-site and multi-node model and is ready to scale at a very interesting level. The team has already some ideas to support multi-site configurations. I also learnt during this session that QStar is clearly against RAIT, in other words files belong to only 1 tape and are not striped across drives at the same time. Organization across directories can be done with some of them targeting some drives while other use other drives as well, so some sort of parallelism can be achieved but again a file belongs to only 1 tape written by a single drive.

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Tuxera secured one more partner with Quantum

Tuxera just confirmed today on a blog post and Quantum with an official press release what I wrote March 14th on this blog following what Jamie Lerner, CEO of Quantum, told me a few weeks ago during The IT Press Tour and what I mentioned to Antti Alila, VP Enterprise Solutions at Tuxera, last week. And finally with this blog, things are getting official, good for both companies and Tuxera adds one more key partner. The Tuxera Fusion File Share will be added to StorNext and Myriad and with that the M&E champion will gain and secure a significant position in file sharing both in that vertical market segment but also in more generic workloads. More news of course during the NAB Show next week in Las Vegas, NV.

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In a few days, the 55th edition of The IT Press Tour will take place in Rome

The countdown is set, The IT Press Tour will land soon in Roma, Italy, for its 55th edition. This tour will be dedicated to IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, data management and storage with 6 hot and innovative companies coming from various horizons:

• CTERA, the obvious leader in global file services,
• Fujifilm, the reference in tape manufacturing with new data management solutions,
• Know and Decide, a recent player in IT asset management,
• Leil Storage, a young company dedicated to new generation of MAID solutions,
• QStar Technologies, a pioneer in data management and archiving software,
• and Quickwit, a fast growing actor in log management with a powerful indexing technology.

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

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WEKA has made a splash

WEKA, a leader in modern data platform based on its parallel file system, shared some key news during the last IT Press Tour, 2 weeks before their official announcement during the recent Nvidia GTC conference in California. The company who is already a key partner of Nvidia, the GPU champion also invested in WEKA during the Round C in 2019, is validated with GPUDirect for quite a long time.

This time, it's an official certification with WEKA hardware as the firm unveiled its WEKApod, a hardware system ready for Nvidia DGX SuperPOD systems. A minimum of 8 nodes is needed to deliver and sustain impressive I/O performance but 32 nodes are recommended. With a base cluster of 8 nodes with 1PB of usable capacity, 765GB/s and 18.3M IOPS are delivered based on 1 node specification with 95GB/s in read, 23GB/s in write and 2.3M IOPS. 

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WEKA has pushed performance limits

WEKA, a leader in high file storage performance, has shared during the recent IT Press Tour in California exclusive news related to new public benchmarks numbers. The company has made a campaign to officially deliver a suite of public results running SPEC storage benchmarks with SPEC_ai_image, SPEC_eda_blended, SPEC_vda, SPEC_genomics, SPEC_swbuild. All these results are of course publicly available on the SPEC web site.

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Quantum picked Tuxera to boost its SMB file service

Quantum, the leader in secondary storage and key player in M&E, finally recognized the domination of Tuxera in SMB with its Fusion File Share product. Jamie Lerner, CEO of Quantum, confirmed to me during a private talk in the data center of their EBC in Centennial, Colorado, a few weeks ago during the 54th IT Press Tour. And honeslty, I wrote this for many quarters now, there is no similar SMB stack available on te market able to deliver that level of performance supporting SMB Direct, Multichannel... Other companies already adopted the same choice, among them Croit, IBM Storage Scale, Lenovo, StorONE or WEKA and there is more.

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Qumulo confirms it strong partnership with Azure

Qumulo, a leader in scale-out NAS, added a cold data tier for its Azure Native Qumulo (ANQ) offering. The company claims to be a new generation of NAS but clearly they appeared before VAST Data and the fact that is runs anywhere doesn't change the product itself. It is just the same software and cluster and for Qumulo it relies on a shared-nothing model developed with flash in mind and high demanding IO bandwidth requirement. It gives some value to users as they're able to support various workloads wherever they run, on-premises or in the cloud.

The adoption is interesting with more than 1000 customers across various industries and use cases for 4+ ExaBytes under management over 20+ countries.

Qumulo was selected as a leader in the high performance file storage category and as a challenger in the enterprise file storage one in the last Coldago Map 2023 for File Storage. What is sure is that users don't want to swap their software when they have to change their infrastructure or move workloads. In other words, they wish to find a solution able to run anywhere and be considered as a foundation layer and capitalize on the platform.

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U2 at Sphere Las Vegas powered by WEKAfs

The Vegas was impressive and I'm sure you heard about it. The concert place is unique and never seen before. Therefore it requires a specific IT configuration with a special approach for storage to sustain all constraints and specifications.

Hitachi Vantara has won the deal to provide some IT infrastructure and clearly the fact that they oem WEKA's Data Platform has made this show possible. Numbers are impressive and again I didn't see something similar in the domain, look at them below.

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Quantum shares its file data access direction for Myriad

We were surprised to learn during the IT Press Tour session with Quantum yesterday in Denver that the team has chosen to develop and implement a client like DLC for StorNext. It breaks the NFS capability as it won't be based on pNFS but more on a proprietary approach. It makes sense as they know how to do it and they also recognize that, at scale, parallelism and asymmetric model at the client level is the way to go.

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