Primary Data Nets $40M, Launches DataSphere 2.0

Primary Data announced a $40 million funding round and released version 2.0 of its DataSphere software platform.

After receiving an initial $50 million in 2013 the company will use the new funds to continue build out its sales team and business. The $40 million funding was split between $20 million led by Pelion Ventures and a $20 million line of credit.

DataSphere is the company's enterprise metadata engine for bringing machine learning into data management by sitting in between enterprise applications and on-premise storage and cloud storage, providing metadata driven data placement, tiering and protection service.

"Automating data management through an intelligent data fabric that spans different types of storage is critical to enabling enterprises to fully leverage their data while finally solving storage complexity,” said Blake Modersitzki, Managing Director at Pelion Venture Partners. “With DataSphere, Primary Data is leading the industry in bringing intelligence to data management across the enterprise and into the cloud, and we are proud to invest in the transformation Primary Data is delivering for its innovative customers.” 

The version 2.0 release of DataSphere brings many new features for bringing intelligence into data management. With the selection of data objectives the new release now provides deep control capabilities with Objective Expressions. DataSphere says version 2 enables parallel performance and support for multiple clouds, and adds support for SMB 2.1 and 3.1, as well as Active Directory. 

Chief Scientist for Primary Data Steve Wozniak said, “DataSphere 2.0 makes it simple for enterprises to finally automate how data is managed by using the intelligence that has been sitting right there in your metadata all along.”

Primary Data also noted that it continues to expand its partnerships with Amazon AWS, Cloudian, Google, Scality, NetApp and VMware to help joint customers get the right data to the right place at the right time.

Primary Data was recently listed in the Gartner 2017 Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies. 

Data Center Links: April 12, 2017

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

• Megaport launches Exchange. Elastic interconnectivity and global SDN company Megaport launched its Megaport Exchange, a marketplace "designed to connect our rich Ecosystem of providers to our global network of customers." The relatively young Australian company has built a network of 150 global locations, and the marketplace connects customers to cloud service providers, data center operators and Network and Managed Service Providers.
• DataStation - intersection on the power grid.  My interest in the modular data center concept and application is refreshed. BaseLayer + Phoenix Salt River Project = DataStation and a new approach to delivering compute power right next to the power grid.
• Synack nets $21.25M investment. Hacker-powered security platform provider Synack announced it has raised $21.25 million in a series C round of funding led by Microsoft Ventures. HPE and Singtel Innov8 also participated in the round. The funding will allow the company to further develop its platform and scale adoption globally.
• Pure Storage launches FlashArray//X.  All-flash data platform vendor PureStorage announced its first all-NVMe enterprise-class all-flash array, the Flash Array//X. The new array features DirectFlash Software, DirectFlash modules for communication and //X70 Controllers. The company says the end-to-end "software-to-raw flash optimization reduces latency by up to 50 percent, and increase write bandwidth by up to 2x and performance density by up to 4x."
• Tegile closes $33M funding. Flash storage provider Tegile announced it has closed on $33 million in additional funding. Led by Western Digital and other current investors, the company will use the funds to further invest in technology development and product innovation, as well as expand worldwide market reach. 
• Cisco launches next gen storage networking innovations. Cisco  launched a number of new storage networking offerings Tuesday - ranging from Fibre Channel Switching Modules to new HBA support on cisco UCS and NVMe support over fibre channel on UCS C-Series and MDS storage directors.

Green Storage, Smart Grids, and Wireless Spectrum for Utility Providers

Earth2tech has an excellent article on smarter storage -- how data storage can account for up to 40 percent of the energy consumed by a data center. GigaOm's Tom Trainer offered data de-duplication and thin provisioning as technologies that were helping the greening efforts. 3Par is a leader in thin provisioning, which is a "mechanism that applies to large-scale centralized computer disk storage systems, SAN's and storage virtualization systems". 3Par recently helped Mary Kay save 50% in storage capacity and 60% administration time with 3PAR Utility Storage and six InServ storage servers.

Last week Vint Cerf had a Google Public Policy blog post titled Where the smart grid meets the Internet. Vint has some awesome insight (as always) into building the smart grid and how it is essentially a nascent energy Internet. He stresses open protocols, open standards and free access to all of the energy information generated.

Finally -- Earth2tech also has an article today about American Electric Power (AEP) telling the FCC that a dedicated licensed spectrum is sorely needed by utilities. AEP is saying that as more smart grid services are rolled out, more and more network bandwidth is needed.

Busy day for EMC

EMC had a busy day in press releases today. They announced the acquisition of Australia based ITSM software company Infra. Infra compliments EMC's data center operations family of software and gives them an ITIL solution that automates IT Service Management.

EMC also announced that 2007 was the 8th consecutive year that they were named the market share leader in storage software. This was according to the latest IDC worldwide quarterly storage software tracker.

Now -- if we only knew what to do with all of this data on EMC storage! :) Last week the press release was about the new AIIM survey revealing that organizations continue to struggle with unstructured information.

Finally -- Today Iomega "received an unsolicited and non-binding proposed offer" from EMC. EMC's $178.1 Million bid represents a 22% premium over the stock's closing price on Friday. Check out the Iomega press release here.

Iomega stock closed up 20.3% and EMC closed down 2.2%

Netapp DoD Data Migration

Enterprise Storage Forum has a pretty interesting story on the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) going from 18 data centers to 2. They virtualized the middleware and consolidated data with Network Appliance's Virtual File Manager (VFM).

In addition to consolidating the servers, DCMA also needed to set up a common file system that would work across the enterprise. For this it created a File Area Network (FAN) using software and storage appliances from Network Appliance. DCMA has more than 300TB of storage.

I think we will continue to see stories like this as large projects are under way to consolidate, virtualize and setup common file systems and platforms across the enterprise.

Check out the article here

Storage Service Provider (SSP)

A post from the Burton Group made me nostalgic tonight. They brought up the idea of a potential revival in Storage Service Providers. InfoWorld also writes about the new storage cloud and how it will undercut the market dominance from EMC, HP and IBM. I think Nik Simpson states it pretty well: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I immediately went to check blogs from Chuck Hollis and Dave Hitz to see if they had anything to say on the topic. They didn't. Why? Because it is silly. First of all it's a term....nothing more. Journalists and marketing geeks like nothing more than to coin a term to spin the hype machine and see who will pay attention. Storage Service Provider (SSP), SAAS (Storage as a Service), storage cloud, Managed Storage Service....whatever. It is all just 1's and 0's on platters.

Reading the article took me back a bit, as a number of years ago I was a part of a dot-com company that offered online storage. We were like the rest of the dot-coms and offered 1gb, 5gb and 10gb plans, and then had a backup tool that would take your data directly to your online account. We ran the site for many years, and I always remember looking to one company as 'the' big dog of the industry. Storage Networks was the SSP of the time and (I think) had grown quite a large business. They took the enterprise side of the market, while sites like idrive, xdrive, swapdrive and others took the consumer side. Take a look to see what Storage Networks site looked like in 2000.

Today, we have Amazon's S3. I'm still amazed at this offering and almost equally amazed that it hasn't caught on more than it has. I was trying to think if S3 had any real competition and the only thing I could come up with is an equally intriguing offering from Cleversafe. It is fun to see how people are using S3 though. Check out this article about Stardust@home:

The Stardust@home project uses the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store and deliver the tens of million of images that represent the data collected from the dust particle aerogel experiment.

Anyway....back to the SSP model. The model is an enterprise one. I really believe that S3 and other online storage services that have survived can only truly cater to home/office users, small companies and some aspects of the hosting world. Enterprise customers want their data close to them and want to know it is managed, protected and monitored at all times. Regulations and data leakage incidents have ensured that enterprise storage is on a short leash at all times.

I do believe that managed storage services (see - even I can't stop from using IT lingo) have a place for some. Inside the data center, or between trusted parties and elaborate SLA and other agreements, it would potentially be beneficial to let someone else manage the scalability, reliability and a few other 'ilities of your storage. If nothing else, perhaps the consumer side of the market will help to push down some of the insane prices that the enterprise players push. Maybe a colo or integrator could offer a pay-for-what-you-use model to the SMB market and see if it flies.