News Precis#6 - 10 July 2020

All the news and announcements that are fit to print – or not – in the past few weeks. Some are old, some are new, some are borrowed, some are blue.

Products

Pure Storage kills off ObjectEngine. Chris Mellor reports that ObjectEngine is no more. This is an interesting turn of events and questions what will happen with the StorReduce technology that came from that acquisition. It also asks questions of Pure’s future strategy for all-round data management. Watch this space I say.
NVIDIA bigger than Intel (in market value). Reuters reports that NVIDIA is now approximately $248 billion in value. It’s amazing to think how GPUs and AI have driven this part of the market. Surely it implies good news for all chip manufacturers.

Vendors

SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs. Hot on the heels of that Series D $40 million announcement, we now hear that Rancher is heading to join SUSE. I’ve been using Rancher for a few months (and k3s), so I’m interested as to where this acquisition is headed. I hope Rancher as is now, manages to retain some degree of personality after the assimilation process.
Microsoft & Commvault/Metallic Partner up. Commvault’s SaaS offering, Metallic is getting closer to Microsoft to help drive development in data protection for the cloud. First of all, this is a hot area to be involved in at the moment, but more promising is where the idea of joint engineering could go. We desperately need better APIs and integration for cloud data protection and this partnership can’t do any harm. We’ll revisit this partnership in a more detailed blog post.
Take a HYCU Test Drive. Speaking of backup, you can now take HYCU for a test drive with Nutanix. It’s important to understand the nuances of any data protection solution, so having the ability to “try before you buy” is high up on my list.
Druva on a Roll. Not the type that could be ham or cheese, but solid business growth. It’s more data protection news again, as we see the SaaS market surely taking business from the legacy vendors. If you don’t have a hybrid cloud story for backup, things might not be so rosy in the coming years.
StorONE announces Optane Array. Storage startup StorONE has announced a hybrid Optane/QLC storage array, snappily entitled the S1: All-Flash Array.next (conveniently abbreviated to AFAn). We looked at this technology in a recent podcast. What’s interesting here is the mix of solid-state media in a single platform. Exactly how vendors optimise the use of relatively expensive media like Optane could be crucial to success.