There's some new wine in Hitachi's Unified Compute Platform of converged and hyperconverged server bottles specifically VMware Cloud Foundation software added to its converged rack-scale (RS) product and Xeon SP processors to its hyperconverged systems.

There is no Xeon SP upgrade news for its CB2500 and CB500 blade chassis systems, with their CB520H (E5-2660 CPU) and CB520X (dual E7-8800 CPUs) blades.

The existing rack-scale system comes with two node types: a 2U single node (1 or 2 Xeon E5-2600 v3 CPUs) and a 2U four-node (dual Xeon E5-2600 v3 CPUs). Hitachi's new turnkey Unified Compute Platform RS (UCP RS) is described as a fully integrated, software-defined data centre (SDDC) rack-scale platform, based on VMware Cloud Foundation with hybrid public/private cloud use in mind.

Gartner describes VMware Cloud Foundation* as "an application-independent, common virtual data center infrastructure that can run atop an existing private data center infrastructure, a public cloud service or a combination of the two."

Customers can deploy the VMware SDDC stack or build their own using the Hitachi vSAN-ready node and VMware software.

The rack features:

Hitachi UCP RS

The V210 is a hybrid disk/flash node and the V210F is an all-flash node. Both can use 1 or 2 E5-2699 22-core or E5-2680 v4 14-core or E5-2650 v4 12-core CPUs. The V210 can also use 1 to 2 E5-2620 v4 8-core processor and the V210F 1 to 2 E5-2650 v3 10-core processors.

Hitachi claims its updated RS uniquely automates provisioning, managing and monitoring for SDDCs.

A fully populated rack can be brought into operation in under five hours.

Find out more about UCP RS here. We expect Xeon SP processor upgrades to ripple through the UCP RS systems in the next few months.

Hitachi UCP RS products are generally available to customers and partners in all regions.

Hitachi's UCP HC embraces, as do the existing HCs, hybrid disk/flash and all-flash systems.

Hitachi UCP HC product

Think of the HC products as being based on or similar to the rack-scale nodes. In the hybrid disk/flash line there are V210 2U 1-node and V240 2U 4-node systems, with the equivalent all-flash versions being the V210-F and V240-F. All of them use Xeon E5-2600 series processors.

The latest HCs feature Xeon SP processors, and support NVMe flash drives. There are five models:

The V120F supports up to 12 2.5-inch drive slots.

Hitachi UCP HC V120F

The all-flash vSAN storage cache can use NVMe, SAS or SATA SSDs with Intel NVMe DC P3700 or P3600 SSD as options.

For all-flash vSAN capacity storage includes Samsung PM863a SATA SSDa (3.8TB, 1.92TB and 960GB respectively) or Intel's S4500 SATA SSD.

VMware integration includes vCenter Server, vRealize Orchestrator, Operations, Log Insight and Automation. Hitachi says these systems feature less than 32 seconds of downtime [a year], multi-site business continuity, local or remote replication, non-disruptive upgrades and maintenance, and per-VM availability policy and change on the fly.

Fault domains can be created to increase availability. To protect against one rack failure you need two replicas and a witness across three failure domains. A stretched active:active vSAN cluster can be split across two data centre sites with automated failover and zero data loss.

There are both deduplication and compression for space efficiency, plus RAID-5 and RAID-6 inline erasure coding.

The UCP HC systems are on VMware's vSAN hardware compatibility list. Hitachi will say that these HC systems are the best choice for VMware shops because of the level of VMware integration high enough for it to win a VMware partner of the year award.

*Market Trends: Software-Defined Infrastructure Who Can Benefit? (Gartner, June 2017)

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PRESS RELEASEDruva, the global leader in cloud data protection and management, today announced $80 million of growth equity funding, bringing the total raised to approximately $200 million. The latest funding investment was led by Riverwood Capital, with strong participation from Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital, and most other existing venture investors. Druva will leverage this late-stage investment to dramatically accelerate research and development, expand go-to-market efforts worldwide, and lead the industry in redefining how enterprises protect, manage, and use their data.

Druvas success is fueled partially by the rapid expansion of the data protection industry, with market size expected to be $28 billion in 2022 for both cloud-based and on-premises servers,[1] in addition to the rapid cloud data protection and management adoption by Global 5000 organizations. In May, the company announced its leadership in the cloud server data protection market, realizing more than 300 percent year-over-year growth in infrastructure data protection revenue. Additionally, Druva Cloud deployments now span more than 4,000 enterprise customers, including 10 percent of the worlds Fortune 500 companies.

Cloud Data Protection and Management solutions are massively disrupting the secondary storage industry, said Jeff Parks, co-founder and general partner at Riverwood Capital. Druva delivers an as-a-service protection and management solution for all enterprise data encompassing infrastructure, endpoints, and cloud applications. We are impressed by Druvas ability to help organizations redefine their data protection and management strategy in a cloud-first world leveraging the performance, scale, ease of use and TCO benefits of the public cloud and SaaS. The effectiveness of Druvas technology has been lauded by a large list of customers. With high customer satisfaction, strong brand loyalty, proven technology innovation and seasoned leadership team, Druva is best positioned to drive the as-a-Service transformation of enterprise data protection and management.

We see todays digital transformation as a data transformation, and protecting data in todays cloud-connected environment requires a fresh approach, said Jaspreet Singh, co-founder and chief executive officer at Druva. Druvas as-a-Service solution eliminates costly and complex infrastructure to quickly and seamlessly protect, govern, and gain intelligence from their data when and where its needed.

Druva Drives High Value With Druva Cloud Platform

Earlier this month, Druva announced the Druva Cloud Platform Tech Preview, which delivers a single-pane-of-glass view for protection and management of endpoints, servers, and cloud applications. The platform converges the award-winning Druva Phoenix and Druva inSync cloud solutions, and offers a unified view into services and data. Simplified global search and centralized visibility and control reduces costs and complexity for managing enterprise data.

With the proliferation of ransomware and the need for governance and compliance around initiatives like GDPR, Druvas innovations are well positioned to serve this growing market. Druva Cloud Platform is the next generation of cloud data protection and management, completely delivered as a service, said Milind Borate, co-founder and chief technology officer at Druva. Druvas unique, patented technology including time-indexed metadata, global scale-out deduplication, instant access, auto-tiering, and advanced search and analytics are critical capabilities that enable

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If youve read any articles about Mac-based local and cloud backup software and services by me or any other long-time tech writers, youll know that, first, we largely recommended Code42s CrashPlan for Home and, second, we have long also had concerns about it. That turned out to be reasonable, given that Code42 has announced the end of its Home product. Now it's time to pursue a CrashPlan alternative, and this article will help get you started.

First off, why did we like CrashPlan for Home so much? It was comprehensive, letting you back up nearly anything to anything: from a computer to external drives; from one computer to another you controlled for networked or remote backup; from one computer to a peer, a computer run by a friend or colleague, with full encryption so that person didnt need to worry about protecting your files; and to CrashPlans central cloud servers. It also had two strong options for user-controlled encryption.

CrashPlans funky old client will be no more soon.

But that was balanced with how ugly, awkward, and slow the Java-based client software was. Yes, Java! Code42 had promised a native Mac client starting years ago, which it deliveredonly to business users. Over the last few years, it got rid of multi-year, highly discounted subscriptions, and a method of seeding a backup by sending a hard drive and the complementary method of restoring by having them send a backup on a drive to you.

On August 22, Code42 announced it will discontinue its home offering, focusing instead on business and enterprise customers. While I long expected it, Code42s reassurances over the years feel a bit like ashes to those that stuck with the software.

Theyre not shutting down their Home servers tomorrow, or even soon, but if youre a user, you could wind up with a decision point to make in as soon as 60 days. I have suggestions for how you can shift your backup strategy and enhance it.

Code42 will stop operating its CrashPlan for Home cloud services on October 22, 2018. As of August 22, it no longer offers renewals or new subscriptions. All customers received a two-month extension on their expiration date to make sure nobody was canceled immediately. (There are no refunds, which seems unfair to recent subscribers. Without offering legal advice, you can check with your states consumer-protection agency about whether this violates regulations in your state.)

But heres the problem. If youre using CrashPlan in any reasonable way, youre not just cloning your current set of files, youre archiving older versions. The value of continuous cloud-based backup is having access to often many previous versions of the same file, including deleted files. You can configure CrashPlan and many other cloud services to control the depth of archives, when theyre culled, and how long and whether to retain deleted files.

Because Code42 will be shutting down its Home servers, unless youve maintained a separate local, networked, or peer-to-peer backup over the same period of time with the same settings, youll lose your archivesunless you migrate to another one of its services.

Code42 is offering a highly discounted migration option to its Small Business service that retains all your files (up to 5TB per computer) and gives you access to the native CrashPlan client that was once promised for Home users. Code42 will charge you nothing for the remainder of your Home subscription, 75 percent off the rack rate for 12 months, and then the full price. (If your Home subscription expires after the October 22, 2018, cutoff date, Code42 will migrate your files automatically to keep the paid-for service in operation.)

This flavor is $10 per month per computer, twice that of the Home services individual rate (if paid annually). But if you were using CrashPlans family offering, you paid as little as $12.50 a month on an annual basis for up to 10 computers. The Small Business software doesnt support peer-to-peer backups, but I suspect that feature was most important years ago before cloud storage was abundant and inexpensive. CrashPlan is also offering a discount on one-time rival Carbonites backup offerings, which I dont recommend for Mac users, for reasons described in the next section.

Given theres no penalty as long as your subscription is active, the path of least resistance would be migration to the Small Business offering if you have more than a few months left. This lets you evaluate other options and get the benefit of the better software without having to make a quick decision.

Id also suggest migration within Code42s systems if its critical to you to not lose any of these past archives. CrashPlan offers no tools to download or extract entire archives.

A separate strategy to retain archives and abandon Code42 would be to use CrashPlans restore feature to find a snapshot or snapshots of particular folders and retrieve those and keep those stored locally with carefully chosen names so you can walk backward in time to find those files.

While your account remains active, you can also use CrashPlans Web app to retrieve files. Youre limited to 500MB in a given restore set at a time.

If your archives arent important to you in the long run, or youre using Dropbox or other sync services to handle archives of files you create and modify, then youre not tied down. Lets look at how to cut the cord.

Because CrashPlan comprises local computer, networked, peer-to-peer, and cloud-based backup software and services, its possible you will need multiple methods to replace it. I recommend for most people that you have a clone of your system, an offsite clone or archive, and a cloud-based archive. (The clone allows a quick recovery from a failed or corrupted drive; the offsite clone can offer a similar benefit for a stolen computer or one destroyed in a disaster. If you encrypt your backup drive, you dont have to worry as much about it being stolen from an offsite location, too.)

Some people use very few applications, and rely on cloud-based photo, email, contacts, and calendars, in which case the most critical part is being able to have two backups beyond those synced documents and other files. Syncing services arent perfect, though its been a long time since I last heard of any major service having any data loss for customers.

Backblaze offers streamlined, speedy cloud backups.

Switch your cloud backup. The cloud part of CrashPlan is easiest. I recommend Backblaze hands down. Its affordable relative to CrashPlan for Small Business at $5 a month, $50 a year, or $95 for two years. It has a native and exceedingly fast backup client, recently upgraded to be even faster. Its been reliable in my usage of nearly two years, and its highly recommended by a number of long-time Mac pundits, writers, and tech heads who I know and trust. With a gigabit Internet connection, my backups can pass hundreds of megabits a second upstream.

Backblaze wont archive system files; thats the right behavior for a clone, and not for archiving software, anyway. What makes it stand out over Carbonite, which I dont recommend, is its encryption implementation. Lets be fair: CrashPlan does it best, if you use either of two strong options they offer. Using CrashPlans crummy Home or newer native clients, all encryption and decryption can happen using a key only you possess and know and entirely in the client.

Backblaze has the right set up for encryption, allowing you to choose a private key only you know and can access. Data is encrypted in its client and sent to its servers. Carbonite lacks this option on its Mac clients. Backblaze falls down only in restoring files: it only restores via a Web app, which requires its servers to temporarily possess your key. That opens a place of risk if its server software were compromised or it faced secret government orders, which are unfortunately a real thing in the U.S. and other countries. Id like them to evolve past this, and offer native on-computer decryption, which removes the risk nearly entirely of third-party access.

(You can read more details about CrashPlan, Backblaze, Carbonite, and other cloud-based backup services encryption implementations in a feature I wrote last year.)

Time Machine lets you pick any drive as a backup destination.

Switch your local and networked backup. If you were using CrashPlan for local or networked backup, the easiest swap is to Time Machine. Time Machine has a primary problem of being a black box, and when something goes wrong with an archive, you cant repair it. This is especially true with Time Capsule, which has an internal drive on which you cant run Disk Utilitys First Aid. Since I recommend rotating your clones offsite, Time Capsule also requires owning two Time Capsules to accomplish that, or using an attached external drive, which is very slow. I do recommend Time Machine for local and networked backup via a drive attached to one of your Macs as a combination of clone and archive. Just own two similar capacity drives, keep one offsite securely, and rotate them occasionally.

Time Machine has deep archives accessed via an outdated graphical interface.

You should also enable encryption on any drive you use with Time Machine. Then if someone were to obtain your Time Machine drive when your computer was powered down or grab one of your offsite drives, your data remains effectively impregnable. (See these instructions for turning encryption on with an external drive.)

Ive also experimented with using the Arq archiving software as a Time Machine and cloud service alternative. Arq archives files in human-readable format, not a proprietary one. It can archive them remotely to a variety of consumer-level and enterprise-class cloud account and usage-based storage systems. I reviewed Arq a few months ago. Its not terribly complicated and lets you set your own encryption for each archived destination. Depending on your needs, Econ Technologies ChronoSync might be the better option, even though its deeply complicated and better suited for sync or for very fiddly archiving plans; it has archive features and works with local and networked drives, and various cloud services, too.

Switch your cloning. If you were using CrashPlan to clone your systemCode42 didnt recommend that! But you could do it, anyway. Switch instead to Time Machine, which creates an effective clone as part of its basic operations; or pick SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, software dedicated to creating scheduled clones on local drives or to disk images.

Switch your peer-to-peer backup. If youve been using CrashPlan to swap files with someone you know elsewhere also running the software, theres no direct replacement, and it may be time to start rotating backups offsite to a safe-deposit box or other secure location. More advanced users could look into using SFTP (Secure FTP), which uses a secure connection to access files, and will work over the Internet if your computer has a publicly routable IP address. It can be enabled as easily as checking the Remote Access box in the Sharing system preference pane, and it allows logins via macOS accounts. Pair this with Arq or ChronoSync.

If you want to continue to be able to restore files from your CrashPlan archives for as long as your subscription is active using the Mac client, you have to leave the software installed. You also cannot delete a backup set or change the contents of the set. If you do so, CrashPlan deletes the files that you removed or the entire backup set from your archives.

Instead, use Settings > Backup to change the frequency from Always to run in the least frequent amount of time, like 6:00 am to 6:01 am on Mondays.

However, if youre ready to remove the application entirely and never retrieve archives or use the Web site for restoring (limited to 500MB of restoration at a time), follow Code42s instructions on using its uninstall app. This allows directs you to find additional folders to delete that may have temporary or cached data.

Code42s decision reminds us how much other peoples business plans can affect our need for the persistence of data. Because Code42 uses a proprietary format and youre just effectively renting space on its servers, you cant retrieve your raw archives and move them. Its not like shifting from one email program to another.

As part of any change you make, if you need deep archives that you own for a long time or forever, Id urge that you look into software that lets you retain those and in a format you can read without requiring third-party software.

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As the server market stalls, processor makers continue to search for greener pastures. Among the most promising is the booming Chinese datacenter market, where processor maker Advanced Micro Devices announced expanded partnerships this week with a trio of hyperscale providers along with Lenovo, which has vowed to cultivate the Asian server market since acquiring IBM's server business in 2014.

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced deployments of its EPYC server processor during an event in Beijing, including new customer JD.com. The Chinese e-commerce giant along with Internet search giant Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) said they would deploy the AMD server processor during the second half of this year while media and web services provider Tencent (HKG: 0700) rolls out the AMD platforms in its datacenters by year's end.

Meanwhile, AMD said partner Lenovo (HKG: 0992) would introduce EPYC-based ThinkSystem servers early next year.

Lenovo and other AMD server partners that include Chinese HPC vendor Sugon also cited the new processor's balance of high-speed I/O (the AMD processor includes 128 lanes of PCI Express 3), memory bandwidth and cores. New customer JD.com (NASDAQ: JD) said it would deploy a 32-core version of the EPYC in its datacenters with eight memory channels as it collaborates with the chipmaker on cloud, big data and artificial intelligence deployments.

Lenovo said it expects to deploy single- and dual-socket servers based on the AMD processor as part of its expansion throughout Asia.

Tencent Cloud will roll out AMD-based cloud servers with up to 64 process cores by the end of the year as it expands its cloud services.

The EPYC processor scales from eight to 32 "Zen" processor cores with each core supporting two high-end threads. Each processor comes with eight channels of memory. The two-socket version of the server processor can support up to 32 DDR4 modules on 16 memory channels, which works out to about 4 Tb of total memory capacity.

AMD along with server makers such as Lenovo are targeting the booming Chinese IT market as the server sales plateau elsewhere. The partners also stressed they are targeting emerging enterprise workloads such as e-commerce and big data. In so doing, the chip maker is gaining a foothold in "one of the fastest growing technology markets in the world," noted Forrest Norrod, AMD's general manager for enterprise, embedded and semicustom products.

AMD's server processor design is built around its high-end x86 core "with server features" dubbed "Zen." The new processor microarchitecture includes high-bandwidth and low-latency features that target emerging "mega" datacenters. AMD claimed at a recent chip industry conference that Zen delivers a 52 percent performance increase as measured in instructions per cycle compared to earlier AMD processors.

The new 14-nanometer core is based on an emerging chip processing technology called FinFET. According to reports, a 7-nanometer version of Zen is expected by 2020.

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About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 25 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as Executive Editor for Electronic Engineering Times.

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AMD Lines Up New China Datacenter Partners - EnterpriseTech

We've got a few storage news sushi snacks to start off your week. Get your chopsticks out and lift up each of these little beauties to get a taste of who's doing what in the land of the data-baiters, virtualizer commercializers and the cloud crowd.

Data protection supplier Code42 has partnered with cloud-based e-discovery software Zapproved LLC to produce CloudPreserve for Code42 and Legal Hold Pro.

Legal Hold Pro is Zapproveds product which automates legal holds and data preservation requests. Customers use Code42s endpoint data protection software to back up employee data to a secure on-premises or cloud location and then Legal Hold Pro can be used to wall off part of it behind a legal hold barrier. That data is preserved for litigation and e-discovery purposes.

Corporate legal departments can select computers protected by Code42 as an additional preservation source within the Legal Hold Pro interface. Businesses have the ability to apply in-place preservation holds on custodian computer data directly from Legal Hold Pro.

The two say identified files on those computers can be collected every minute without any manual collection processes and without disrupting the custodian. Legal teams will have faster access to files for litigation and compliance purposes, point-in-time historical visibility to the documents, and protection from device tampering and ransomware-related file loss. Unlimited cloud storage ensures that the protected data is continually maintained and accessible.

End-point protector, file sharer and governancer (Is that a word? Ed) announced Druva Cloud Platform to provide a unified control plane for data management services across endpoint, server, and cloud application data.

This Druva Cloud Platform features time-indexed metadata, global scale-out de-duplication, auto-tiering, RESTful APIs for access and ecosystem integration, and highly elastic search and analytics capabilities.

Jaspreet Singh, co-founder and CEO of Druva, said the Druva Cloud Platform is designed to provide data protection, governance, and intelligence across the full data footprint of the enterprise all delivered as a service. Search, deletion, recovery, compliance monitoring and more functions are applicable across the full data set.

There is no dedicated hardware and storage infrastructure to drive up total cost of ownership, and the associated software that must replicate data between systems to address discrete data challenges (eg, backup, disaster recovery, compliance, eDiscovery, analytics).

Druva says server, endpoint, cloud workload, and application data are optimised as a single, globally de-duplicated data set, and natively managed in the cloud. Companies can achieve global visibility and policy management across all their data from a single control plane.

It claims the product's storage uses heuristics and machine learning to optimize and auto-tune data protection policies, resulting in significantly shorter backup windows.

Find out more here. Druva Cloud Platform is available in Tech Preview, shipping GA in calendar Q4 in 2017.

Findings of the Druva 2017 VMware Cloud Migration Survey are:

Panzura announced its Mobile Client which enables organizations to natively share files from the cloud to any device at any location.

It provides Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) functionality so users can give employees access to the data via all iOS, Android, PC, and Mac devices.

Features include:

Hyper-converged virtual SAN storage software supplier StorMagic says its SvSAN product will form an integral part of Ciscos Secure Ops managed cybersecurity offering for OT (Operational Technology) networks, targeted to medium sized and large enterprises.

Ciscos Secure Ops Solution offering helps businesses manage cybersecurity risk and compliance requirements in industrial automation environments. Example customers include Diamond Offshore, active in, unsurprisingly, in offshore drilling and a provider of contract drilling services to the global energy industry. It is also used by a major oil and gas company to protect its ICS Network.

StorMagic says SvSAN forms one of several tightly integrated products and services brought together to form a single product that offers network monitoring and data flow.

Secure Ops original architecture ran in its data centre and was dependent on non-HA local storage to provide the required performance and uptime. Cisco revised the architecture to include a client-side compute infrastructure. This enabled Secure Ops to provide security protection at the client site in combination with a data centre component that collects and analyses critical information.

The updated design uses SvSAN for clusters of dense rack servers for high-availability. At each client site there is a cluster of two Cisco UCS C220 M4 rack servers that communicate back to another cluster of two Cisco UCS C240 M4 rack servers in a Secure Ops data centre. The servers are virtualized using VMware and the storage is virtualized by StorMagic using internal server disks. There is no need for external storage arrays at any of the sites. SvSAN mirrors data between servers to provide the required high availability at each location.

Enterprise backup and business continuity supplier Unitrends says its Recovery Series backup appliances and Unitrends Backup virtual appliances have hypervisor integration for Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV).

It helps to eliminate the VMware tax as Unitrends' CEO Paul Brady explained in a canned quote: "Our joint customers running 3rd party hypervisors on Nutanix are looking for new ways to increase the ROI of their infrastructure, and have told us Acropolis is a great way to do that by eliminating the high cost of VMware licensing. Without proper backup, data management, and enterprise cloud continuity in place, customers could never make that ROI a reality."

Unitrends will extend its core data centre backup and recovery capabilities for Nutanix to the purpose-built Unitrends Cloud which provides continuity services that fill gaps enterprises face with hyperscale clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), such as recovery Service Level Agreements (SLAs), failover scalability, and cost-effective compliance for DR testing and long-term retention.

We've reached the end of the sushi buffet. We hope your storage news hunger has been sated.

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