It’s been a hectic couple of weeks, so this will be a shorter one this time around. Plus, WordPress has changed the editor for creating blog posts that I really, really don’t like, so I’m trying to not stay in this editing environment for very long. (I think they are trying to make it more “mobile-friendly,” but are only making it more “creator-hostile.”)
As usual, links were live at the time of publication.
- Storage Media and Technology
- Storage Companies in the News
- Industry Associations and Standards
- Blogs, Webinars and Conferences
- Synology Security News
- Bonus Round
Storage Media and Technology
Finally! A clear explanation on what these things mean
Finally! I can stop having to answer silly Quora questions that conflate M.2 with NVMe! SNIA has updated the Solid State Drive Form Factors page and – get this – it’s actually approachable and easy to understand!
According to backup company Acronis, a recent survey of backup usage indicated that 68% of personal users and 43% of IT professionals experienced data loss. This trend is echoed by Infrascale as well. Do yourself a favor – don’t just back up, get yourself a backup policy.
I’m putting this here under Storage Media, because Pavilion is one of the fastest (if not the fastest) NVMe-oF array on the market today. They’ve just announced they’ve managed to double the speed and capacity, which was already impressive.
SK hynix has announced its first PCIe Gen4 SSDs.
Meanwhile, Micron is going to start volume production of 128-layer 3D NAND.
WD Red Drives take the top spot in Anandtech’s best consumer HDDs. I’m not surprised. I use them predominantly in my home lab.
xNVMe is now out. It’s a “unified API encapsulating low-level APIs,” and works with NVMe-Driver IOCTL, io_uring, and SPDK. From a development point of view, this is actually really cool.
LTO-9 drives look like they’re expected to ship later in 2020.
This is big news. You know a technology is serious when the analyzer and testing companies include it in their kit. SANBlaze adds Zoned Namespaces support to their test platform, for instance.
This is a really good article on why shrinking DRAM sizes is a problem.
Storage Companies in the News
DriveScale announced in a press release that they are supporting Optane (3D Xpoint) SSDs as part of the NVMe-oF. The interesting part is that they “set up the NVMe data fabric… [using] NVMe over multi-path iSCSI.” Since NVMe “over iSCSI,” multi-path or otherwise, doesn’t exist – I really wonder what is going on here.
The Corona issue has postponed the SSD business transfer from Lite-On to Kioxia (ask your doctor!). Joking aside, this isn’t exactly unexpected.
LightBits Labs is taking to the streets to talk about NVMe-oF using TCP for HCI, specifically providing high-speed storage networking connectivity and appliance for VMware’s vSAN technology.
StorageNewsletter has an exclusive interview with WekaIO (ultra-fast parallel file system software) CEO Liran Zvibel. Read it before it goes behind a paywall.
Commvault has a fight on its hands. They’ve received activist investor Starboard Value LP nominations for six candidates to stand for election to the Board.
Cohesity announced $250m in Series E funding, bringing the total up to $650 with a $2.5B valuation.
Industry Associations and Standards
The CXL and Gen-Z consortiums have announced a MOU (Memorandum of Understanding). The two memory fabric initiatives have decided to map out each others’ turf and play nice. Tom Coughlin also has a writeup about it, as does Blocks and Files.
Speaking of collaborations, the NVM Express organization has published a list of their ecosystem as well.
Blogs, Webinars and Conferences
Better get used to the idea that more conference presentations are going to be online for the foreseeable future. Hopefully it will generate some creativity in new ways of consuming these things online.
As of now, though, the Flash Memory Summit is still planning on being run in August, 2020. NVM Express has announced that they are going to be participating.
The SNIA SDC EMEA 2020 presentations are now available online on the SNIAVideo YouTube Channel.
The call for presentations is open for the SNIA Storage Developer Conference (currently still scheduled for September 21-24 in Santa Clara, CA).
The excellent SNIA webinar on Object Storage generated a few questions, and the Q&A Blog is now live.
The next step in the Storage Security Series, Protecting Data At Rest, is going to be held on April 29. It’s part of a general series that goes into a holistic, comprehensive conversation about security from a storage perspective.
Speaking of security, Security-God Eric Hibbard wrote an article on Cloud Security that dives into several of the projects currently under way.
If you’re curious about new phases of networking, have you heard about QUIC? If not, you might be interested to know that it already makes up about 35% of Google traffic (which means about 7% of all Internet!). Check out the webinar “QUIC – Will It Replace TCP/IP” to find out more.
I was interviewed by SearchStorage on the Future of Flash Memory, published this week.
Synology Security News
Synology email screenshot
Synology has made its VPN Plus Client Access and Site-to-Site licenses free until September 30, 2020 as a result of more work-from-home requirements. They state in their email that “all licenses purchased during this time are perpetual.”
Please see earlier Storage Short Takes for additional Synology advisories. Some of those vulnerabilities are still active.
Moderate Severity
Affected: Drupal.
Status: Resolved.
Solution: Upgrade to 8.8.4-0019 or above.
Detail:
A vulnerability allows remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via a susceptible version of Drupal..
Bonus Round
A bit of IT fun today. This is more scarily accurate than people think.
[youtube=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ”]