Recap of the 43th IT Press Tour

The 43rd edition of The IT Press Tour has visited Israal for the 3rd time a few weeks ago in April and we had the opportunity to visit 6 native Israeli companies – CTera Networks, Infinidat, Komodor, Model9, Pliops and Speedb – plus 2 other who really wish to meet us coming from the US – Data Dynamics and HYCU.

Here is a recap of the 8 sessions we had, glad to travel again there.

CTera Networks, a worldwide leader in cloud file storage, joined us for the 5th time. The company had a stellar 2021 year with various awards and recognitions from press, analysts and partners. The team has spent some time covering an incredible success at US Department of Veterans Affairs with 300 sites and 220PB at AWS GovCloud replacing aging NAS systems unable to sustain this need. In the past, the company has insisted an optimized edge and this year the team promotes a data driven model with its data services platform able to deliver tons of services to all users wherever they reside. Among new services we can list DevOps extension with a SDK cloud data analytics, ransomware protection, virus scanning, auditing and compliance with Varonis and the company plans to introduce a new file server named Edge Filer Container Edition deployable as a Docker container. This file service flavor will use a global deduplication being multi-cluster and multi-region and can be mounted across pods within one node with Posix guarantees. Also the company accelerates on the partner side with Backblaze and Seagate Lyve.

Data Dynamics, a reference in unstructured data management delivered a company and product update confirming the growth of its installed base with 26 Fortune 100 companies as customers. The data management platform developed by Data Dynamics, the famous StorageX with 2 decades of history, plays in the enterprise category with analytics, mobility, security and compliance functions and services. It is extended by 2 product companions Insight AnalytiX and ControlX to deliver a comprehensive set of data services for hybrid cloud environments. This intelligent horizontal layer provides a way to bridge remote and corporate datasets and presents a consistent data management view whatever the nature of file servers and NAS and S3, private or public, is. StorageX is a recognized leading product standard and well deployed with Windows servers and NetApp NAS. It virtualizes the access to any file ans object and creates some data management policies such protection, replication, migration… Beyond this traditional, let’s say pretty classic metadata indexing, Insight AnalytiX provides a deep understanding of data with content indexing based on AI/ML which facilitates classifications and analytics, enables some specific policies and discovers some cyber threats. Then ControlX could be activated for compliance and governance objectives with some advanced data access protection.

HYCU has made great progress since our first meeting in June 2018 and the solution has evolved from a dedicated solution for Nutanix to a universal data protection for hybrid cloud supporting private on-premise environments with VMware but also AWS, Azure and GCP. HYCU is strong for several decades in data protection having developed famous products. And the market adoption of HYCU products confirms a aggressive growth against other next generation players but also taking market share from established vendors. Having addressed the on-premises and cloud, bare metal and VM protection with HYCU Protégé, the team has added Microsoft 365, a must have today, and above all introduced HYCU for Kubernetes. In this category the battle is serious with new dedicated players in the process to disrupt some well known players. On the ransomware side, the company has R-Score developed with Mandiant, Carahsoft, Sada and Boston College. The last release provides Dell PowerScale backup, WORM support, a cloud smart deduplication engine and easy migration towards Azure GovCloud.
We think this company won’t do any IPO but will find a specific exit at a multi-billion valuation. Also, the company plans to announce a big news in the coming weeks.

Infinidat joined us for the 3rd time and this visit helped us to understand all the progress made by the team led by Phil Bullinger since January 2021. All the business indicators show positive number confirmed by the market penetration among global 2000 companies, 13 Fortune 50 with 12PB per customer on average with many deals above $10M+ and finally 40% YoY bookings growth. Definitely Infinidat disrupts the market taking market share at the top of the pyramid. For a long time known for its InfiniBox unified storage array based on DRAM and HDD, the team has finally jumped into the AFA segment with the InfiniBox SSA. Th offering couples DRAM and SSD to deliver consistent low latency for high demanding applications. The other product is InfiniGuard, a secondary storage offering based on InfiniBox 1st generation providing immutable snapshots and logical local and remote air-gaps. All these three products leverage a unique design with 3 controllers coupled with large DRAM operated by an innovative cache management named Neural Cache. We expect NVMe-oF to come, S3 and dual access NAS.

Komodor, very young company dedicated to Kubernetes troubleshooting, surfs on the Kubernetes wave as well. With tons of players in the Kubernetes ecosystem, finding its niche is a mission and Komodor addresses particular challenges with this environments. And like many companies, a company name starting with a K letter means dedication. With the accelerated adoption of Kubernetes, end-users face difficulties with the optimization of the infrastructure. Kubernetes is young, the ecosystem rapidly grows but not everything is dry and solid. This Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is new for people and expertise is pretty rare and as Komodor says really hard to master. The beauty of this model is its scalability aspect coming from the distribution model across nodes and its abstraction encapsulation cluster – node – pod – container plus agility reacting to business peaks or workload reduction. Kubernetes is complete and therefore complex due to the distribution model and architecture. This implicitly generates the need to track every changes and events. The company solution exists for developers and made by developers and this is a key point, Komodor feels the pain and the need for themselves. Komodor builds a referential, a single source of trust, to maintain K8s up and running, collecting all data from various tools, logs, alerts, events, databases and config files, to reach the root cause and then suggest fixes. And Komodor should have a big news in the near future.

Model9, an innovative data management software company for mainframes, delivered a compelling session in Herzlyia. The company was selected by Coldago for its Gems 2022. Founded in 2016 with investors like Intel Capital, StageOne, North First Ventures and Glenrock Israel, Model9 is ready to shake established positions. The revenue has tripled since our last session with 7 figures deals. Even with VM waves and te current container/Kubenetes tsunami, 80% of the world business data are processes by mainframes. But this conservative world is far behind when you speak about cloud adoption requiring a radical new approach Model9 is ready to offer. Model9 idea is to bring to mainframe users a modern way to boost business applications without changing them leveraging cloud capabilities in a very secure way. It relies on a Model9 agent running on free CPU on the mainframe coupled with the cloud engine. The team has developed a suite of 3 products: Manager, Shield and Gravity. Gravity is dedicated to AI/ML and anlaytics with ELT method transforming data in the cloud to any format required by applications like Looker, SAP, Tableau, Kafka… Mainframe resources are not consumed therefore cost is minimal. Shield targets cyber attacks and protects data by copying immutable datasets to the cloud providing air-gap, compression and encryption. Finally, Manager, the historical product, controls the protection of data with backup, archive and DR with object storage such MinIO or public S3 storage. Definitely a company yo watch in the coming quarters.

Pliops, an emerging player in storage infrastructure with a DPU approach to address new datacenter challenges. Founded in 2017 in Tel-Aviv with $105 million as the total raised so far from Intel Capital, Nvidia, Xilinx now AMD, WDC and SoftBank Ventures among others. With NVMe, the bottleneck in the datacenter, with fast growing volume of data, is the computing with CPUs even with plenty of cores and other innovation so the rising of GPUs. It explains why so many companies invest in data processing in various aspects in a supply chain difficulty. The company has understood this market demand and designed a new way to tackle these challenges with an offload data processing engine. The team produces the eXtreme Data Processor (XDP), a dedicated DPU with advanced data protection, endurance algorithm exposing a block or a native KV interface. This can be used with any storage, SQL or NoSQL databases, analytics within any cloud instances. With embedded core storage functions, XDP boosts and replaces CPU-based storage and data management functions and even extends this with databases storage engines such InnoDB, WiredTiger or RocksDB. Some users can named this model a modern storage controller, going well beyond a RAID card with data processing capacity leveraging NVMe.

Speedb, a young player in the database segment, gave a very interesting session during this tour overing a very specific technical aspect. The company, founded in November 2020 by 3 ex Infinidat veterans, has raised a small amount, $4 million to kick off their story. The team targets aged key-value databases that rely on RocksDB storage engine. They noticed that this very used service layer has some hard limitations today that prevent users to really scale in capacity and performance at a reasonable cost. We live in the era of NVMe and this connectivity associated with flash delivers some benefits. Instead of adding more CPUS, cores and DRAM and even shard the configuration, Speedb develops a new compatible engine that can replace RocksDB in a fraction of minutes without changing the application code.The team introduces a new compaction method that reduces write amplification associated with a new indexing technique. Write performance receives a boost for a B-tree like read performance. The company has signed a partnership with Redis and illustrated gains with Redis Enterprise able to extend the in-memory and flash (Redis on flash) database behavior with an optimized engine. Playing in open source world for a commercial software is not an easy mission but the performance gain is impressive and immediately gives a ROI. For users, the price model is per node and for partners, the philosophy is about sharing revenue. The business opportunity is huge and the potential exit as well like Innobase or WiredTiger and it will make sense seriously at Redis.