Key Highlights

• Seagate has enhanced its Exos Application Platform storage arrays with a new ASIC RAID controller that boosts performance.
• The Exos X chassis can carry a mix of traditional hard disks and SSDs.
• It comes with software that moves “hot” data automatically, often accessed, to SSDs, while less “cold” data is transferred to the hard drives.

Three Exos X products are defined by their size and drive-bay count. It has all the standard connections such as SAS, network attached SAS, Fibre Channel up to 32G, iSCSI up to 25G, and a 10GBASE-T option.

What Is Seagate’s ADAPT Technology?

The new systems utilize ADAPT (Autonomic Distributed Allocation Protection Technology) erasure coding technology of Seagate, which minimizes data-redundancy overhead and system rebuilds from data loss or drive failure.

A new self-healing storage technology, Automatic Drive Regeneration (ADR), is paired with ADAPT. If a read/ write head of the hard drive fails, ADR takes the failed charge out of commission but leaves the remaining drive heads operational. ADAPT rebuilds the data from the dead platter elsewhere.

Tom DiMauro Explains About ADR – Self-healing Storage Technology

Tom DiMauro, product manager for storage systems at Seagate, said that if a single head is taken out, one might come back with 90% of that capacity after the ADR action is finished. Then, they add that drive back into the pool seamlessly in the background so the data is rebalanced when the operation is complete.

He agrees that some people will be suspicious of leaving a broken hard disk deployed in a storage array. But, he says this is the first version of this technology and will become a basic TCO value proposition when hard drives reach 30TB and beyond in the next several years. Those drives have up to 10 platters, and nine still in use is room for a lot of data.

He also said that the ability to self-heal a device and keep the vast majority of that capacity in play makes for much more efficient storage systems. Not to mention just the power of administrators not to worry about changing out drives as frequently as they do in their data centers.

Key Highlights

• Cloud storage provider Backblaze has majorly enhanced its channel program with the ability to reserve capacity in advance to ease sales of partners, along with a promise to not charge any fees beyond the capacity cost used by its channel customers.
• Nilay Patel, Vice President of sales and partners of Backblaze, said that the changes to the channel program also include a new partner portal to let partners register deals and better track the results of that registration further.

Backblaze has grown from a focus on offering direct cloud-based data protection for individuals to working with small businesses to enterprises. It made the channel a central part of its strategy during the process.

He said they are backing up over a half-million customers in 70 countries and are managing about three exabytes of capacity. Backblaze is easy to use, affordable, and S3-compatible. Backblaze wants to make it even easier to use and affordable with the changes it makes to its channel program.

The first major change is an update to Backblaze B2 Reserve. The company unveiled a pricing package in April that gives its channel partners the ability to buy storage capacity predictably rather than based on strict consumption.

With Backblaze B2 Reserve, channel partners can commit to capacity purchases up-front with a discount and then offer them to customers as part of a package of services with predictable pricing.

Backblaze B2 Reserve drives cloud storage 100 percent predictable. There are no hidden fees. Usually, the fees for egress, retention, retrieval, or transactions can cost two to eight times what customers anticipate. Now they have eliminated all those fees, so customers pay no more than the storage capacity they buy.

The Backblaze B2 Reserve program permits channel partners to set up a budget for what they pay for cloud storage over time while allowing it to pay for what they require.

Key Highlights

• NetApp, a storage and cloud optimization technology developer, is making a full-court press in the hybrid cloud and multi-cloud market with the introduction of BlueXP.
• BlueXP is a new unified control plane to manage storage and data services across on-premises, private, and public cloud environments.

Ronen Schwartz, senior vice president, and general manager of cloud storage for the San Jose, California-based company, said that BlueXP is the first technology to allow a user to configure storage and data services from on-premises to private and public clouds with a single user interface.

He said that BlueXP makes all data storage available in a single place, and it impacts all users of NetApp, whether on-premises or in the cloud, making them much more efficient. BlueXP is a significant move for NetApp.

Schwartz said that NetApp had done a lot of things first. They have a record of innovation, including being the first to bring on-premises storage to AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It is not just bringing data to the cloud but making it cloud-native.

Now, customers have an evolved cloud stack, which Schwartz said includes an on-premises data estate that is still growing and a cloud-based data estate growing faster.

He said it is not a single cloud but multiple clouds. It gives businesses agility and savings, but it is harder to drive efficiency and scale across multiple systems. With BlueXP, they get a single view across all these systems.

He said that BlueXP would allow various roles to be assigned to separate users so customers can create views by the tenant and set the services by the tenant. It also offers a framework for service providers.

BlueXP addresses many services, including ransomware protection and data security across all NetApp-focused systems.

For NetApp channel partners, BlueXP allows them to help customers take advantage of their broader view of their on-premises and cloud environments and optimize for data protection or cost.

It helps partners evaluate and optimize the value of customer installations8. Partners have the opportunity to make major inputs on customer value with BlueXP.