Recap of DataCore Days

DataCore Software Corp. ran its annual DataCore Days France, Belgium, last week at le Puy-du-Fou in France, one of the famous entertainment parks in the world.

It also organized other European editions. It was the right opportunity to meet their channel force, selling SANsymphony, Swarm and more recently Bolt, Perifery and Object Matrix.

The first feeling we got there was the loyalty of these partners who collaborate with the company for more than 2 decades. Globally the event had approximately 250 people and was supported by Miel, OpenText, Release Capital, Seagate and Western Digital.

Dave Zabrowski, CEO, took advantage of his presence to share some key information and also new things.

First, France is a top region for his company contributing significantly to the global revenue thanks to efficient business teams led by Pierre Aguerreberry. The current ARR is around 30% with a record of 14 consecutive profitable years.

Zabrowski also insisted on its strategy wishing to expand the product portfolio with the desire to continue to invest in new technology with key partnerships and acquisitions thus growing the company valuation.

He confirmed the AI direction with an acquisition made recently but still not yet announced. It should be the case before the end of October.

Two important dimensions exist here, how AI feeds the storage globally, what we call AI in or for storage and how storage is aligned with AI, this is AI storage or storage for AI. In the DataCore case, this is really the first approach to extend and improve the current software line with an AIOps philosophy.

On the current product line, SANsymphony and Swarm continue their respective market penetration in a cross/up-sell model promoted by firm’s well established channel presence.

For it SDS, the vendor announced a few key elements such the NVMe-oF support with TCP and FC, compressed snapshots and rollbacks, adaptive data placement as a dynamic method for LUNs plus the certification of VMware with vCenter integration improvements, VASA Provider 3.1 and AIOps extension in 2024.

For Swarm, DataCore picks a different path with the multiplication of small-mid capacity configs and deals. This solution already is validated with several backup software for object lock, Filefly is extended, a new flavor with containerization in a single server model is in the pipe, later multi server and then federation especially when Swarm is deployed at the edge or remote/branch offices. AIOps will appear in Swarm also in 2024 following the soon announced acquisition.

The media and edge focus is key for the company confirmed by the push and adoption of Perifery solutions such as Transporter, obviously Object Matrix and the coming AI engine.

The other news is the name change for Bolt as OpenEBS Pro, its storage containerization solution coming from the MayaData acquisition. The company is very active in that domain and the product received tons of downloads but stateful deployments take time to reach a maturity level on a global basis with many companies exploring and doing POCs. We’ll see if VMware acquisition by Broadcom will fuel this move to Kubernetes.

File storage services are still missing even if Object Matrix and Swarm can offer it or SANsymphony with the controller exposing files with OS-based functions. Lots of workloads use file interfaces especially with commercial applications. This need was recognized by the management team and tactically signed a partnership with Hammerspace under the vFilO name, no longer available. This should be considered by the engineering team again with some partnerships or even an acquisition.

DataCore continues its journey with new features, new product iterations, acquisition improving its bottomline. The new DataCore is definitely different from the old one existing 2 or even just 1 decade ago.