Scale Computing says it was proved right on edge over cloud – Data Economy

Data Economy was invited on an exclusive press and analysts tour of Silicon Valley data management companies.

New services andproducts from Valley vendors are promising to aid the bottom lines ofenterprises as they manage hybrid clouds.

Our first round coverage from the IT Press Tour last week covered DDN, StorCentric, Data Dynamics, Komprise and HYCU. The next firm we visited was MinIO in Palo Alto, the open source cloud object storage company that uses containers and Kubernetes orchestration to better support cloud data and management.

MinIO is compatiblewith AWS S3 and S3 Select. The company says more than 750organisations, including Microsoft Azure, use its S3 Gateway. Whilethe open source software for managing data is free, like many opensource vendors MinIO makes its money through support and otherservices.

Basic support is,again, free. But if you want to get an answer to a problem within anhour from MinIOs engineers you pay for one of the companys SUBNETsupport subscriptions. These also include panic buttons thatmake all engineers around the time zones jump to customers urgentproblems to find a collective solution ASAP.

The SUBNET offering isnow being widely pushed globally, with ten SUBNET subscribers inEurope currently on the roster. It is hoped that the largest users ofMinIO, such as Apple located down the road in Cupertino, will paytheir way, considering the large amount of data they are said tohandle via MinIO.

After MinIO we visitedone of the Valleys most famous business hotels, the Rosewood inMenlo Park, where it is often packed out with venture capitalists,expensive cars and their potential clients looking for their earlyfunding.

Indeed, we were introduced to a very well known VC in the form of Peter Levine. He was originally at Veritas, and went on to XenSource, before it was acquired by Citrix. He is now a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, with his company an investor in the company we were there to see, multi-cloud data management firm Actifio.

Levine told us thatwhile software is eating the world, data was eatingsoftware. Actifio has a solution to this latter problem, it says.

It was at the Rosewoodto launch its latest 10c software, that is designed to turn a singledata lake into a source for accessible business insights usingthe cloud, containers and copy data. It boasts support for sevenpublic cloud platforms and 23 new core technologies.

Actifio CEO AshAshutosh said the firms largest contract is worth $35m with afinancial services company in the US, and that typical contractsstart at $250,000. So the solutions it sells certainly arent for theminnows.

The company is nowlooking for more technology partners and consulting channel partnersto build on the relationships it already has with the likes of IBMand Tata Consultancy Services.

As for the establishedheavyweights of cloud data management, the IT Press Tour also metCommvault and VMware.

At Commvault, press and analysts were presented with a pitch to explain what the New Commvault was after a busy year of changes. The company held its first Commvault GO event to get closer to customers and partners in Florida in 2016, when the stirrings of its first serious cloud break broke.

This may or not havebeen appropriate at the time, as the event was somewhat curtailed asa result of an impending hurricane, with this author and many otherdelegates choosing to fly home early to prevent being trapped in theresort.

Since then, the companyhas held three other Commvault GO events in the US that have not beenaffected by stormy weather, and the organisation seems to havecompleted putting its cloud strategy fully together, although itsreach is still limited more of this later.

In February 2019, thecompany appointed a new CEO. In July this year it launched a newpartner programme, and in September it acquired software-definedprimary and secondary storage management company Hedvig, which othervendors had had their eye on too as an acquisition target.

And in October, thefirm put the icing on the cake with the launch of Metallic, aSaaS-based cloud data management service. The company confirmed itwas committed to giving customers choice as to whether they wanted tobuy Commvault products and services via subscription, perpetual, SaaSor through service provider licenses and deals.

It is also determined to kill the notion that Commvault is mainly an expensive, big box data storage solution for only large companies a description that is still doing the rounds in the wider market. It is a description that Commvault probably started to try and seriously shake off back at Commvault GO 2016, but it wasnt shaking it off quick enough, which is probably partly why the previous senior management was changed this year.

With Hedvig andMetallic, Commvault chief marketing officer Chris Powell reckoned thevendors total addressible market had increased 60%.

Metallic provides coreback-up and recovery, Microsoft Office 365 backup and recovery andendpoint backup and recovery through cloud channel service providers.

But after an Octoberlaunch, it is still only available in the US, with the Commvault teamstill not able to say when it will be extended to any otherterritories. This will happen in 2020, but Commvault so far cannotconfirm whether this will be in the first half or the second half.

Ingram Micro and Arroware established Commvault distributors. Maybe there is an impendingannouncement on further Metallic availability outside the US throughdistributors and service providers, but it does seem rather strangethat a seemingly key product is not moving more quickly to market.

Over at VMware, there was a refresh of what had been launched at VMworld, including the Tanzu set of products to build, run and manage apps in a multi-cloud environment. But the firm was more keen to demonstrate the opportunities created from marrying together the cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).

There are two marketsin HCI, the branded systems market and the software supplier one thatsees HCI software used by various brands. On the branded systemsside, Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Cisco, HPE and Lenovo were the topfive in that order in terms of global sales in the third quarter of2019, according to analyst IDC.

But when it comes tothe supply of HCI software, VMware is well ahead of the pack with 38%of the market, according to IDC, with Nutanix on 27.2% and DellTechnologies and Cisco both on under 6%.

Lee Caswell, VP ofmarketing for the VMware HCI business unit, said: Channel partnerswere initially pushing back on the HCI bet as they thought it reducedthe chance to sell more storage. But they are now taking advantage ofusing it to sell more services.

Caswell said that although the mid-range storage market was bigger, it was only expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 3% up to 2023. On the other hand, he said, the HCI market is expected to grow at a 20% CAGR over the same period.

Hot HCI rival Nutanixof course, along with others, is rushing to serve the samemulti-cloud environment that VMware is aiming to address with newproducts, and it is good to see other newer companies entering thespace too.

The IT Press Tour will be taking a visit to Israel next spring to see what start-ups and more established companies there are doing in the data space.

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Scale Computing says it was proved right on edge over cloud - Data Economy

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