Sep 16, 2024

Khara, a motion picture production company based in Japan, most well known for its creation of the popular Evangelion anime series, has selected Wasabi as its cloud storage provider, moving its operations and 500 TB of archival data from on-premises to the cloud. The files in its 500 TB archive make up the intellectual property assets of the company, with every new production adding more data to its archive. In an effort to avoid hardware failures, Khara turned to Wasabi to keep its data secure and control costs. “A major advantage of Wasabi cloud storage is that it frees us from frequent HDD failures and hardware replacements, allowing us to concentrate on system administration work,” said Kazuki Misawa, chief system engineer at Khara. “Repeated failures with our hardware increased the risk of losing irreplaceable data and the fear of this happening kept me awake at night as the large amount of data in each hard disk made replacement a nerve-wracking chore – replacing and rebuilding data on a single disk would often take one or two weeks.” With Wasabi’s cloud storage, the infrastructure cost is “comparable” to the existing system, and the management and operation cost will be reduced by about 80 percent, is the claim. “We’re working with the innovative team at Khara to help keep their data safe and eliminate the headaches associated with replacing and rebuilding their on-premises solutions,” added Aki Wakimoto, Japan country manager at Wasabi. “We will enable Khara’s IT team to work more efficiently and help drive creative ideating without being burdened with worries of data loss.” ———- Data streaming firm player Confluent has acquired WarpStream and its bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) data streaming architecture. With the acquisition, Confluent claims it now has a data streaming offering “for every company” – which includes fully managed with Confluent Cloud, self-managed with Confluent Platform, or BYOC with WarpStream. “Confluent wants to offer data streaming to all customers with all requirements and workloads. I’ve been deeply impressed with WarpStream as it’s BYOC done right,” said Jay Kreps, CEO of Confluent. Richard Artoul, CEO of WarpStream, added: “The leader in the data streaming space has acquired WarpStream to offer next-gen BYOC. Together, we will continue to ensure that Apache Kafka-compatible data streaming is accessible to every organisation.” WarpStream’s BYOC approach is built directly on object storage, just like Confluent’s Kora engine, and brings managed data streaming benefits into the customer’s cloud. “In time,” said Confluent, features like processing and governance will be added to WarpStream BYOC, to provide a “complete” data streaming platform solution for high-volume logging and observability workloads. ———- Privately held cloud computing platform Vultr is working with GPU-accelerated analytics platform provider  HEAVY.AI . Integrating Vultr’s global Nvidia GPU cloud infrastructure into its operations,  HEAVY.AI  says it can interactively query and visualize massive datasets, enabling faster, more efficient decision-making for customers across diverse sectors. “Partnering with Vultr has allowed us to leverage their highly performant, global Nvidia GPU cloud infrastructure to provide our customers with better access to unparalleled speed and efficiency,” said Jon Kondo, CEO of  HEAVY.AI . “This integration ensures that our platform continues to deliver the rapid insights and cost savings that are critical for our customers’ success.” Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips are combined with Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs and Vultr Bare Metal instances to drive faster insights via  HEAVY.AI ’s platform. It says it can deliver “5x or greater” price performance when compared to 8XA100 instances, completing industry-standard analytic SQL benchmarks such as TPC-H100 in less than 4.5 seconds, and executing 11 of the 22 queries in less than 100 milliseconds. “Vultr is one of the first cloud providers to offer the revolutionary GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip,” said Todd Mostak, CTO of  HEAVY.AI . ———- Enterprise storage firm Infinidat says its InfiniBox technology has been tested to work with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. The technical validation opens new possibilities for enterprise customers and channel partners to deploy, migrate, and manage new and existing virtual machine (VM) workloads and virtualized applications using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. Infinidat’s InfiniBox Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver for petabyte-scale Kubernetes deployments was previously certified for Red Hat OpenShift in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, for both high performance enterprise primary storage and data protection/backup needs. “InfiniBox enabled on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is a key step forward for enterprises and service providers to achieve real-world application performance, cyber storage resilience, reduced storage Capex and Opex, and greater simplicity,” said Erik Kaulberg, VP of strategy and alliances at Infinidat. “We support virtualized and containerized applications with an integrated set of trusted tools that maximize the advantages of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on a unified platform.” ———- Object First, which provides “ransomware-proof” backup storage appliances purpose-built for Veeam, has appointed Pete Hannah as vice president of sales, Western Europe. He will focus on channel development, the recruitment of partners, and hiring to grow the sales team. In Q2 2024, Object First says it achieved a 300 percent year-over-year increase in transacting partners, built through the supplier’s channel only model. “Pete’s extensive experience in the IT channel, combined with his proven track record of driving growth and building teams, makes him the perfect fit to lead sales in Western Europe,” said David Bennett, CEO of Object First. “As we continue to expand our partner network with the best storage for Veeam, his leadership will allow us to build on our strong momentum.” Hannah has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry, recruiting and leading teams for growth, through Noima Consultancy, Netgear, TD Synnex, and BT. ———- Ocient, a data analytics biz, has launched its Data Retention and Disclosure System, a “high-performance”, modular solution for telcos and communications service providers (CSPs). The system promises enhanced data ingestion, retention, and analysis capabilities for network analytics and compliance in a more “cost-, storage-, and energy-efficient footprint.” Customers can scale their data collection, retention, and analysis capabilities for a growing network of metadata stores, while enabling “rapid” search and retrieval of records “within seconds,” we are told. “Telcos and CSPs have historically been challenged to effectively retain, search, and analyze their growing and often overwhelming volume of network and communications data,” said Chris Gladwin, CEO of Ocient. “With our Data Retention and Disclosure System we’re equipping customers with the capabilities they need to address the technical burden posed by this data, while helping them avoid fines and penalties associated with not analyzing this data fast enough. We are also enabling them to reduce the cost, size, and energy consumption of these high-volume network data repositories.” ———- Cloud storage firm Qumulo has announced the general availability of Cloud Native Qumulo (CNQ) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The release is an enterprise multi-protocol system designed to manage unstructured data, seeking to address scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency demands. CNQ is designed to cater to various industries, including healthcare and life sciences, media and entertainment, higher education, financial services, and the energy sector. For customers in regulated industries or those supporting federal entities, CNQ can be deployed in AWS GovCloud, offering a secure, compliant option that meets stringent government and regulatory requirements. “For the first time, customers can use CNQ on AWS to elastically burst performance or capacity at will, customizing the storage instance to meet dynamic workload demands,” said Kiran Bhageshpur, chief technology officer at Qumulo. “CNQ can be deployed within minutes and updated within seconds, enabling customers to run enterprise file workloads within their virtual private clouds (VPCs), with optional use of S3 intelligent tiering to reduce infrastructure costs further.” CNQ offers a “transformative” approach to cloud economics, priced “up to 80 percent less” than legacy file offerings. By using AWS S3 for long-term data persistence, CNQ “significantly” reduces costs without sacrificing performance. ———- Data unification and management firm Reltio has introduced its Data Pipeline for Databricks. We’re told users will no longer have to spend time and money creating their own custom integrations between the two products. The Pipeline pushes real-time, “insight-ready” data from Reltio’s offerings – Reltio Customer 360 Data Product, Reltio Multidomain Master Data Management, and Reltio Entity Resolution – to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Powering Reltio’s offerings, the Reltio Connected Data Platform unifies, standardizes, and enriches data continuously as it is ingested from various systems. This data is then made available downstream into Delta Lake tables through the Reltio Data Pipeline for Databricks, enabling various operational and strategic analytics and AI use cases “with minimal effort”, said the firm. Trusted, real-time data from Reltio then provides time-sensitive and strategic insights, while reducing data preparation efforts around the customer’s Databricks environment. “By working closely with Databricks and building a pipeline to its popular Data Intelligence Platform, our customers can more easily support their strategic and operational use cases that require delivery of trusted data in real time,” said Venki Subramanian, senior vice president of product management at Reltio. “This is especially timely as businesses want to easily take their AI/ML, business intelligence, and business analytics initiatives to the next level, and poor data quality would hinder their efforts.” Roger Murff, VP of technology partners at Databricks, added: “The Reltio Data Pipeline for Databricks significantly enhances our customers’ ability to access high-quality, real-time data for their AI/ML initiatives. Together, we are empowering organizations to get more from their data and accelerate their paths toward becoming truly data-driven organizations.” TAGS