At the bustling Shift event held in the iconic BAFTA in London, we were fortunate to engage in a profound conversation with Anna Griffin, the Chief Marketing Officer at Commvault. Our discussion shone a light on the exciting transition within IT, moving from traditional data protection methodologies to a comprehensive cyber resiliency strategy. With a palpable enthusiasm, we explored Commvault's proactive response to the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape.

The Heart of Cyber Resiliency

Cyber resiliency has become the cornerstone of contemporary data protection strategies. Anna elaborated on how Commvault is navigating this pivotal shift, with a keen focus on integrating security within the data itself. This strategic move is indicative of Commvault's foresight in tackling the challenges of safeguarding data across the increasingly hybrid environments of today.

A Data-Centric Approach

The conversation highlighted the significance of adopting a data-centric mindset in today's dispersed data realms. Commvault is at the forefront, advocating for a unified protection strategy that alleviates the complexity of managing various security tools across different environments. This integrated approach is crucial in a landscape where data is scattered across multiple platforms, each presenting its own set of vulnerabilities.

Innovating Data Recovery

One of the most captivating aspects of our talk was discovering Commvault's pioneering work in cloud-based clean room recovery. This forward-thinking initiative enables organisations to test and affirm their recovery processes in a cost-effective and manageable way. It marks a significant advancement, empowering businesses to confidently navigate and recover from cyber incidents.

AI: Transforming Data Protection

The discussion wouldn't be complete without touching on the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in data protection. Commvault is leading the charge in embedding AI into their platforms, transforming the way data protection is administered. AI acts as a co-pilot for administrators, offering recommendations, insights, and reducing the likelihood of human error. This integration marks a shift towards smarter, more efficient, and reliable data protection practices.

Conclusion

Our enlightening discussion with Anna Griffin at the Shift event was truly revelatory. Commvault's dedication to steering the data protection discourse towards cyber resiliency, their commitment to a data-centric security philosophy, and their innovative use of AI and cloud technologies underscore their leadership in the data protection realm.

As our conversation drew to a close, it was evident that Commvault is not merely adapting to changes in the IT landscape; they are actively shaping the future of data protection. Their approach to cyber resiliency is a proactive endeavour to ensure that businesses can not only survive but thrive in the digital era. Commvault's vision for a more secure, resilient, and intelligent digital ecosystem is not just aspirational; it's a reality they are diligently creating, making the digital world a safer place for businesses to innovate and expand.

Stepping into the BAFTA HQ for the Commvault SHIFT event felt like entering a nexus where the legacy of storytelling meets the cutting edge of technology. With walls echoing cinematic greatness and rooms sponsored by the Dolby family and Steven Spielberg, the stage was perfectly set for a narrative of transformation and forward-thinking strategy in cyber resilience.

As we've observed Commvault's transition from a data protection platform to a holistic cyber resilience solution, this event painted a vivid picture of that strategic evolution.

The Hybrid IT Landscape and the Commvault Cloud

Today's IT landscape is nothing short of hybrid – offering staggering business advantages but at the same time, bringing forth data fragmentation and complex management challenges. The day was filled with conversations around the ensuing chaos and the pivotal role of a cyber resilience platform like Commvault Cloud.

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NIST Framework in Focus

A significant part of the presentation revolved around the NIST framework, which is fundamentally a blueprint for improving cybersecurity and resilience. The framework lays out five key functions – Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover – that help organisations develop a robust cybersecurity posture. The message was clear: whilst Indentify, Detect and Protect often takes the limelight, respond and recovery is just as crucial. The focus on thorough testing and robust recovery plans is not just recommended; it's essential.

Innovative Recovery with Cleanroom Technology

A standout feature that piqued interest was Commvault's cleanroom recovery functionality. In the event of a breach, the ability to swiftly and safely recover is paramount, and Commvault's solution facilitates this by enabling businesses to recover quickly into Azure. This isn't just about speed; it's about providing a controlled environment for both testing and actual recovery scenarios, automating the setup of the landing zone in the process.

Meet Arlie: The AI Virtual Assistant

Another highlight for me was the introduction of Arlie, Commvault’s AI virtual assistant. Arlie takes user interaction to a new level, providing insights and support embedded right into the AI. It's not just about delegating tasks; it's about empowering admins with the knowledge to carry out these tasks themselves – a truly educational approach that resonates with our belief in not just delivering solutions but also delivering knowledge.

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Conversations with the Commvault Team

The day culminated with an influencer and analyst session, offering us a golden opportunity to engage with Commvault's key team members. It was more than just a chance to see the technology – it was a window into the minds shaping the technology, understanding the 'whys' and 'hows', and witnessing the solutions in action.

Wrapping Up an Enlightening Day

As the event wrapped up, it was clear that Commvault is not just participating in the cyber resilience conversation; they're actively sculpting it. With the community buzzing, the Cleanroom Technology on the horizon, and the prospect of getting hands-on with Arlie, it’s safe to say we're not just excited – we're looking at the future of cyber resilience with eyes wide open.

We're diving into Commvault’s latest shift with my new video on Commvault's announcements from their Shift event. It's about their new platform, Commvault Cloud, powered by Metallic AI, and it's set to redefine what we expect from cybersecurity and data protection.

For a deeper look at my complete analysis and the implications of Commvault’s innovative direction, check out my full blog post at Tech Doodles. We discuss the looming $30 billion ransomware threat, Commvault's smart use of AI with Arlie, and how this platform is not just about recovery, but a proactive stance against cyber threats.

Get the full story - Commvault's Vision for Cyber Resilience: Introducing Commvault Cloud — Tech Doodles

In an era where digital threats are accelerating, Commvault's recent Shift event laid down the modern-day standard: the introduction of Commvault Cloud, powered by Metallic AI, signals a profound transformation from a data backup company to a cyber resilience authority.

Commvault Cloud emerges as a beacon of adaptability and scalability in cyber resilience. At the heart of this platform is a design that decouples the control and data planes, ensuring data security across many environments and storage platforms. The platform’s architecture embraces a distributed, hybrid world with fragmented workloads, apps, and data.

The crux of the Shift event was not just the unveiling of a platform but the introduction of Metallic AI, a suite of advanced AI capabilities. This sophisticated set of tools is geared towards providing the highest level of cyber resilience, combining the latest in machine learning with risk scanning and threat detection. The capabilities of Metallic AI extend to early identification of security threats and minimisation of their impact, leading to faster recovery times, intelligent quarantining, and the fastest path to a clean recovery.

You cannot overlook the statistics presented during the event: ransomware is anticipated to cost companies an astounding $30 billion by the end of 2023. Moreover, a staggering 99% of ransomware attacks target security and recovery tools. This backdrop makes Commvault’s advancements not only timely but essential.

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Commvault Cloud addresses these concerns head-on with features like Cleanroom Recovery and Cloudburst Recovery. Cleanroom Recovery combines Commvault Cloud’s robust platform architecture with application verification automation and the cloud capabilities of Microsoft Azure to deliver a clean, ransomware-free environment. Meanwhile, Cloudburst Recovery offers rapid restoration using massively parallel recovery techniques, leveraging the cloud's scale and cost efficiencies.

The event also showcased the power of unified management through Commvault Cloud. This global management capability allows for active control and visibility, which is essential for managing SaaS, edge, and on-prem environments. It streamlines compliance and simplifies the complex task of securing live and backed-up sensitive data. With the current climate of sophisticated cyber threats, such as AI-driven ransomware, the platform’s AI-driven threat prediction and anomaly detection position Commvault as a proactive defender.

But the technological prowess of Commvault Cloud goes beyond automated defences. Enter Arlie – the AI-driven resilience co-pilot. Arlie interprets technical complexities into comprehensible advice. Arlie provides context-aware walk-throughs, not only informing but also educating users, ensuring that every level of the organisation can contribute to cyber defence. Arlie aims to turn every Commvault user into a power user.

The Shift event didn't just articulate a product; it was an industry-wide call to recognise the evolution of cyber threats and the need for a resilient response. The message was clear: organisations need to be ready all the time, while bad actors only need to be ready once. This poignant observation underscores the critical need for a platform like Commvault Cloud, which offers quick recovery times and enhanced security, all within an intelligent and simplified management framework.

Commvault's Shift event was not just about a product launch but about setting a new standard for cyber resilience. Integrating Commvault Cloud with Metallic AI underlines a steadfast commitment to evolving cybersecurity measures. It’s a forward-thinking approach that recognises the dynamic nature of threats and the importance of agile recovery and robust defence mechanisms.

I look forward to being able to look further at the Commvault Cloud and particularly the capabilities of Arlie in the future. Check out more information about Commvault Cloud at the link below.

I recently had the opportunity to attend Tech Field Day 27, where industry leaders in the CXL space, Memverge, AsteraLabs, and the CXL Consortium, presented their latest developments in high-speed interconnect technology. These presentations highlighted how Compute Express Link (CXL) is poised to revolutionise server architecture and transform memory utilisation in data centres.

CXL provides a unified, high-performance interface for memory, storage, and computational resources, enabling efficient processing of large amounts of data with reduced latency. With CXL, data centre operators can build more scalable, efficient, and versatile systems, allowing for better energy efficiency and reduced costs.

One of the key advantages of CXL is its ability to provide a high-speed interface between CPUs and other accelerators. This can significantly reduce latency and improve performance in data centre applications such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics. CXL also provides a unified interface for memory, and computational resources, simplifying system design and management and improving resource utilisation.

CXL is highly scalable and efficient, allowing data centre operators to build systems that can scale up or down as needed without sacrificing performance or efficiency. By reducing the complexity and cost of memory management, CXL promises to improve the overall performance of data centre applications.

Just as Storage Area Networks (SANs) revolutionised how storage is managed in data centres, CXL is poised to transform how memory is utilised in server architectures. Like SANs, CXL offers a scalable and efficient solution to a critical problem in data centre architecture. As data centre applications have grown in complexity and demand, the need for faster and more efficient memory utilisation has become increasingly important. CXL provides the necessary bandwidth and performance to keep up with these demands, allowing companies to build systems that can scale up or down as needed without sacrificing performance or efficiency.

CXL is a game-changing technology that promises to transform memory utilisation in data centres. With its scalability, versatility, and energy efficiency, CXL will play a critical role in the future of server architecture. The developments presented at Tech Field Day 27 highlight the exciting advancements and demonstrate the potential for CXL to revolutionise the data centre industry, just as SANs did for storage.

If, like me, you are new to the concepts of CXL, I highly recommend you watch the presentation by the CXL Consortium below. Also, be sure to check out the websites of the CXL presenters for more information, the links are below.

Astera Labs

CXL

MemVerge

Data management just got better with Commvault's latest semi-annual platform release. This new release brings advanced capabilities for organisations seeking comprehensive data management capabilities across hybrid cloud environments.

The three key focus areas in Commvault's latest platform release are data protection, data security, and data transformation. These are all crucial aspects of data management, and I’m impressed to see how Commvault is bringing these focus areas together in this release.

Commvault has also focused on two key trends in the industry - the movement to a multi-cloud strategy and the increasing risk of cyber threats. With more organisations moving to the cloud, it is essential to have a platform that can manage data across different cloud environments. At the same time, the threat of cyber attacks is ever-increasing, and it is essential to have a comprehensive data management solution that includes data protection and security.

Check out my video below for my thoughts and more information about this release.

In conclusion, Commvault's latest platform release is a significant step forward in data management. With its focus on data protection, data security, and data transformation, Commvault is providing organisations with a comprehensive solution to manage their data effectively. The increasing risk of cyber threats and the move to multi-cloud strategies make this release even more relevant and timely. I am excited to see how Commvault's latest platform will help organisations optimise their data management strategies and unlock more value from their data.

For more information check out Commvault’s blog and take a look at my doodle.

Commvault has recently released its semi-annual platform release introducing new capabilities across the hybrid cloud. Check out my video and doodle below for more information regarding what you can expect in this release.

Features within this release include

• Google Cloud Regional Snapshot support

• New Data Protection support for DevOps Protection

• Oracle Compute Infrastructure (OCI) Storage Tiering

• Improved backup times for Hadoop File Systems (HDFS)

• Enhanced security integrations with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms

• Compliance Lock – Protect critical data with immutable storage

• Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

• New security enhancements & certifications help improve security posture and compliance.

In my doodle below, you can see my thoughts and further information about this release.

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Further to this, Commvault has released a blog post drilling into these features
Commvault Platform Release 2023

You can now watch the Commvault webinar covering this release on demand using the button below.

The roadmap session was the third session I created a doodle for at Commvault Connections 2022. Be sure to check out the other blog posts and doodles at the links below.

1. Commvault Connections Keynote

2. Customer Panel

3. Roadmap

The roadmap session built upon the fundamental principles of the Commvault strategy with further insight into the direction and products that are coming. It is clear that Commvault takes a high level of pride in its ability to connect with its users, their community and listen to what is needed. One of the statistics that was shared was the fact that four hundred product enhancements in the last year have come from direct customer feedback.

Key to the Commvault strategy are the following three principles

1. End-to-end data visibility

2. Broadest Workload Protection

3. Faster Business Response

You can see further detail regarding the announcements and planned focus areas in the doodle below.

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Commvault Connections was a great opportunity not only to hear an update from Commvault on their strategy but also to get insight into wider technology trends and real-life insights from customers. Across the conference, I created doodles for three of the sessions. You can find the links to the other sessions below.

1. Commvault Connections Keynote

2. Customer Panel

3. Roadmap

Keynote Thoughts

The keynote was led by Commvault’s fantastic CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani. Sanjay is a great keynote speaker, always giving great clarity and getting through the fluff to the points that matter.

There was a theme across the conference about innovating with confidence. The keynote set about explaining what this means and the backstory behind how we got to where we are today.

Ultimately IT professionals are now responsible for delivering the dreams of the organisation and its leaders. But delivering the dreams isn’t enough on its own it needs to be done in a managed and secure way.

To deliver these dreams, IT and business professionals have turned to SaaS applications and multiple cloud resources to achieve what is needed. Whilst these disparate resources have allowed for an increase in innovation and a reduction in time to value, it has led to massive complexity around security and data protection.

Mirchandani explained that your data has a higher value to not only you but also attackers, which has led to an increased need to protect and secure.

He explained that IT professionals need the right tools to gain control of these disparate workloads, offering the confidence to the business that they can innovate with confidence whilst IT ensures that everything is professionally managed, protected, and secure. These tools are exactly what Commvault sets to deliver.

Several technologies were discussed to help with this overall goal. This included Metallic Threatwise, an early warning system that proactively baits, deceives, and surfaces bad actors. Threatwise makes it harder for hackers to find your organisation’s valuable data, reducing their dwell time to help ensure you aren’t compromised. This was a completely different approach from those I have heard of before, especially for it to be included as part of a data management platform. I look forward to digging more into this in the future.

Also discussed was Commvault’s breadth of portfolio, offering protection across not only a wide range of solutions but also across on-premises and cloud technology with a unified management solution in their Command Center product.

It was clear that Commvault’s approach focuses on simplicity and flexibility across its portfolio.

You can see my doodle from the keynote below, covering the key elements that stood out to me.

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Dell Tech World 2022 was important for two reasons. First, this was the first Dell Tech World since the spin-off of VMware. Second this was one of the first major in person tech conferences since the start of the COVID pandemic.  

I didn’t make it out to Vegas this year but tuned in online, after all we are now in the era of flexibility and freedom. Attend any major conference, from anywhere and on any device or something like that.  

As a long time, VMware vExpert, Dell Partner and Technologist, keeping up to date with what is going on in the world of infrastructure is of high importance to me.  

There were several themes covering Dell Tech World 2022, these being flexible and hybrid working, multi-cloud, cyber protection or resilience and the power of data.  

During Michael Dell’s Monday keynote, he spoke about the on-prem / off-prem debate being over. He said that the future is in multi-cloud with data flowing seamlessly across.   

90% of customers already have workloads on-premises and in public clouds and 75% are using three or more clouds 

Michael Dell – Dell Tech World 2022 Keynote 

Dell wants to be the leader in multi-cloud and at the edge. He spoke about the rise in use cases such as IoT and highly automated environments requiring new edge computing solutions near the source of the data. This is an area Dell will be able to excel in due to their hardware offerings and close relationship with VMware despite the spin-off.  

10% of data today is processed outside of datacentres, but by 2025 75% of enterprise data will be processed at the edge.  

Michael Dell – Dell Tech World 2022 Keynote 

However due to this growth in data, Michael Dell explained that the attack surface will also be bigger for cyberattacks.  

Ransomware attacks are the #1 threat for most organisations and are occurring every 11 seconds. With an average cost of $13m per occurrence.   

Michael Dell – Dell Tech World 2022 Keynote 

Dell have been innovating in these spaces and desire to create an end-to-end integrated path. What really stood out for me at Dell Tech World was many of the big announcements were all about services or software. Dell, a well-known hardware giant is certainly investing a lot in these areas to be relevant in this multi-cloud as-a-service world.  

Central to this is Dell APEX, Dell’s as-a-Service portfolio. Michael Dell spoke about APEX being focused on business outcomes and being accessible to developers. APEX was announced last year at Dell Tech World as a companywide transformation to as-a-Service. Chuck Whitten spoke of the principles of APEX being simplicity, agility and control in the multi-cloud world.   

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Previously announced within the APEX portfolio was APEX Cloud Service with VMware Cloud and APEX Backup Services.  

At Dell Tech World ‘22 we saw the announcement of APEX Cyber Recovery Services with the promise of further APEX services to come including high-performance computing, machine learning operations, VDI and more.  

APEX Cyber Recovery Services is run and managed by Dell, offering a secure immutable cyber recovery vault for workload replication. Customers should be able to be reassured of their ability to recover from a cyberattack whilst benefiting from being able to offload the day-to-day tasks to Dell.  

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But the innovation towards multi-cloud didn’t end there. There were announcements from both the data protection and storage divisions further embracing integration with the public cloud.   

CyberSense for AWS – Uses adaptive analytics, machine learning and forensic tools to detect, diagnose and help with cyber recovery operations. Dell say this will allow you to diagnose and recover quickly within AWS.  

PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Azure – Available from the Azure marketplace next month, this will allow you to isolate and protect workloads from ransomware attacks. You will get an isolated data centre environment via an isolated recovery vault. Data is replicated from production with minimal access for data protection. When it comes to recovery you can recover on-premises or within Azure.  

Also demonstrated at the conference was Project Alpine. Project Alpine offers Software Defined Storage capabilities to expand Dell’s storage portfolio to the cloud. Demonstrated was the ability to connect storage from a PowerStore device to the public cloud. Google Cloud, Azure and AWS were shown on screen during the demo.  

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The final big announcement was regarding a partnership with Snowflake, a cloud data platform vendor. With this partnership users of Dell’s object storage will be able to move data to Snowflake’s cloud platform for analytics and warehouse capabilities. Secondly, you will be able to leverage snowflakes capabilities on-premises without the need to move the data. 

For me, Dell Tech World is a positive step in the right direction for Dell. They are wanting to maximise their capabilities and reach with their hardware solutions by embracing the public cloud with their software solutions and services capabilities. For me it now all comes down to the execution and how we see these solutions being delivered and utilised by the customers. I look forward to seeing the Project Alpine and the APEX solutions in action.  

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Today Pure Storage have announced three new offerings during their #PureLaunch event. Above you can see my doodle covering these announcements.

Announced was

• Pure Fusion

  • A SaaS Management layer that pools storage arrays into availability zones and automates complex tasks such as

    • Workload placements

    • Workload mobility

    • Fleet rebalancing

Find our more about Pure Fusion

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Portworx Data Services

• The first database as a service platform for kubernetes

• Allow developers to easily rollout stateful managed services such as DBs without vendor lock-in whilst ensuring all day two operations are taken care of including

  • Monitoring

  • Backups

  • HA

  • Disaster Recovery

  • Migration

  • Auto-scaling

  • Security

Find our more about Portworx Data Services

Pure1

• A cloud based data-management platform

• A single hub that is automated by the AI driven Pure1 virtual assistant

• Allowing you to optimise, streamline, analyse and empower your data services quickly and easily

Find out more about Pure1

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Directly following the launch of Scality ARTESCA the Tech Field Day delegates were asked to share their thoughts and opinions on the product.

Delegates Reflect: Tech Field Day Presents Scality and HPE - Gestalt IT

In the video below the delegates reflect on the following points

• What is ARTESCA?

• What is it about ARTESCA that Scality is doing right?

• What does ARTESCA do to appeal to developers?

• ARTESCA is built on a number of open-source tools, which should make it developer-friendly as well, right?

• ARTESCA isn’t just about storing and retrieving data thought, its about data management as well.

• What is our reaction to the launch of ARTESCA alongside HPE?

• Reflecting on the launch itself.

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Following the recent launch of Scality ARTESCA with Tech Field Day I have been investigating the architecture behind ARTESCA a little bit more.

If you would like to read more about the architecture behind Scality ARTESCA check out this whitepaper > https://go.scality.com/l/893901/2021-05-11/3zjqn/893901/1621255966fkouGUtc/artesca_wp_v4.pdf

Depicted within this doodle is the ARTESCA architecture which is able to be deployed in a single node configuration prior to scaling via multiple nodes to petabyte scale. ARTESCA runs within containers on Kubernetes (MetalK8’s today) and is accessed using the standard S3 protocol which makes it easy for developers to quickly and easily develop against whilst the UI, replication features and more will give IT operations confidence to manage through into production.

Initially, ARTESCA is exclusive with HPE for 6 months and is available with a wide variety of configurations, these include all-flash, hybrid and hard disk-based configurations to meet the needs of the individual workloads. There is also a 50TB starter licence available free of charge for you to try prior to scaling further. It is not yet known what will happen after the first 6 months but I assume it will be available as a software-only solution as well as continuing to be made available by HPE and maybe others.

Within ARTESCA there has been a lot of consideration made into the availability of data with local codes to protect against data loss from disk failure as well as parity stripes to protect against simultaneous disk failures, network repair codes for multi-node solutions and of course multiple replication options not only to ARTESCA but also to their RING product and cloud-based S3 storage.

ARTESCA is a really interesting solution for object storage requirements, it is software-based, leverages Kubernetes, has multiple configuration options to meet edge and core use cases and unites developers and operations by offering ease of adoption for developers via the use of the S3 protocol, Kubernetes architecture and full API and for operations, it is easy to manage and monitor, has full monitoring capabilities and is backed by HPE! What’s not to like!

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You are able to see my first doodle and blog post containing information about the launch of Scality ARTESCA here.

During the second half of the Scality ARTESCA launch we switched from the ActualTechMedia webcast and came over the the Tech Field Day portion. You are able to watch the videos once available here.

The Tech Field Day session started with a discussion led by James Governor and Joey D’Antoni focusing on dev-ops and the edge. There was much discussion around kubernetes and the need for object storage as well as the need to automate processes at the edge. We then saw a demonstration by Scality of the new ARTESCA UI. The UI seemed very mature offering you the ability to not only manage ARTESCA platforms but also Scality RING and other S3 compatible repositories such as AWS and Azure Blob.

Whilst in many cases theses systems will be managed and accessed via API’s by developers and then via DevOps automations I believe certainly at the edge there is a need for a fully featured UI to allow operational troubleshooting and maintenance.

One of the elements that was pleasing to see is that the ARTESCA UI allowed for visibility and reporting of the underlying infrastructure layers including Kubernetes and the HPE hardware status. I was also very impressed by the including analytics, including predicted analytics as well as the integrated object browser where you couldn’t only browse objects but add and edit meta data.

Please see above my doodle from the second part of the Scality ARTESCA launch and below some of the UI screenshots.

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You can learn more about Scality ARTESCA here >> SCALITY ARTESCA | scality

and you can see more from HPE on Scality here >> HPE Object Based Storage for Scality Solutions | HPE

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Yesterday Scality in collaboration with HPE launched their new ARTESCA Lightweight, cloud-native object storage product. The launch took place online with a collaboration between ActualTechMedia and Tech Field Day.

ARTESCA is designed for the core to the edge and offers a central point of management not just for your ARTESCA deployments but also for Scality RING and other compatible S3 storage technologies from the likes of AWS and Microsoft Azure.

ARTESCA is software built upon Kubernetes to modern cloud-native design principles allowing ease of scale from initial deployments during development through to moving into production. ARTESCA offers dual-level data protection and disaster recovery with distributed erasure codes and local repair codes for durability and fast disk rebuilds alongside integrated geo-replication for DR. .

You can see my tech doodle covering the ActualTechMedia presentation above and watch this space for some more thoughts and doodles from the event.

You can learn more about Scality ARTESCA here >> SCALITY ARTESCA | scality

and you can see more from HPE on Scality here >> HPE Object Based Storage for Scality Solutions | HPE

Following #SFD21 I met with David Ranson Soulition Architect at Nasuni to get a deeper understanding of the Nasuni Architecture, migration path and use cases.

My doodles below depict my study notes from the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals training delivered remotely to customers and partners by Matt Hester and Garrett Bundy.

Below are my notes covering Modules 1 through 4

Further resources can be found at the links below

• Use the Azure portal

• Customize the dashboard

• Estimate costs with Azure pricing calculator

• Predict and optimize with Cost Management and Azure Advisor

• Estimate the Total Cost of Ownership with the Azure TCO calculator

• Take the Role Based Assessments at Pluralsight

• Sign up for the AZ900 certification exam

• Visit Microsoft Learn for more free education about Azure

• Create an Azure account

• Create a website hosted in Azure

• Configure an App Service

• Overview of Azure Cloud Shell

• Work with Panes

I found the above video by the fantastic John Savill really informative. Make sure to check out his YouTube channel for more fantastic Azure content (1) John Savill - YouTube.

Core Cloud Concepts and Core Azure Services

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Core Azure Services

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Security, Privacy and Compliance

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Pricing and Support

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Here is my doodle for the @PliopsLtd session at #sfd21 they offer a key-value (KV) based storage processor that accelerates, improve reliability and capacity of SSD storage for data persistence and indexing tasks for transactional DB’s, real-time analytics, edge applications and software-defined storage.. This allows their customers to use more affordable QLC SSD’s, whilst outperforming more expensive alternatives as well as helping overcome the processor bottleneck that you will see in most modern solutions with the workloads mentioned.

Unlock the Full Potential of SSDs – Pliops

Their solution is currently (Jan 2021) around two months away from being mass-produced and whilst theoretically could be used in shared storage solutions or delivered as part of a cloud service will initially focus on directly attached storage workloads.

The Pliops storage processors is a half-height, half-length PCIe card that sits in the storage path between your workload and the onboard SSD storage. You reference the storage using a standard NVMe block interface or via a KV (key-value) library API.

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The Pliops card takes your in-efficient dataset, applies data protection, thin provisioning and then compression prior to it being written to the SSD’s. The Pliops processor results in 90% less writes and 77% less reads to your SSD’s.

Today the Pliops card has to be used with Linux based workloads and has a starting point of 3 SSDs within a solution supporting up to a maximum of 64TB per processor, you can scale out with multiple cards. They have future plans to support other platforms including VMware.

Their data protection allows for multiple single drive failures, with rapid recovery whilst delivering performance that is faster than RAID 0 with the SSDs alone.

Pliops is typically utilised with a wide variety of database and analytics workloads, including but not limited to MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra and SAP Hana.

Pliops-Storage-Processor-–-Solution-Brief.pdf

Conclusion

It was good to hear from the Pliops team especially so early in their journey, they have an innovative solution and if you are looking to reduce costs and increase performance for your highly critical database and analytical workloads you will want to be considering Pliops.

Hammerspace presented on Day 3 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. See my doodle above covering their presentation. I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

Intel presented on Day 3 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Please see my doodle above covering their presentation . I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

Be sure to check out my previous doodles covering the Intel Storage Moment event late last year.