IT Europa has been attending the IT Press Tour in Paris this week to listen to how a mixture of data storage vendors are developing their go-to-market strategies.
We’ve already reported on developments at both StorPool and Storadera, and here’s a round-up from some other companies.
Nodeum
Belgium’s Nodeum provides data management software for hybrid storage at petabyte scale – it’s already used for high data workloads across universities, research bodies and media production, for instance, and the firm is also now targeting financial services.
It plans to upgrade its offering in January 2023 with new features and greater data security, and has just expanded its channel in both the UK and the DACH region. The product upgrade to Nodeum version 2.0 will also be accompanied by further channel expansion elsewhere.
At the moment, around 60% of sales are direct, with 40% through the channel, but the indirect sales are set to expand as Nodeum says it is looking for more VARs and MSPs to sell its technology.
It says it will continue to talk to end customers to evangelise its product, but expects more partners to actually deploy its software on its behalf and support it on an ongoing basis.
PoINT Software & Systems
Germany’s PoINT Software & Systems provides a file tiering and archiving software solution with its PoINT Storage Manager offering.
Among other things, the company helps to address the problem of “cold” data that isn’t used or accessed much, and which is currently sat on more expensive storage systems such as flash.
Storage Manager helps organisations to move large amounts of cold data using UDF (Universal Disk Format) containers to cheaper storage formats and systems. It can also be used to efficiently manage a company’s primary operational data too.
Next month, the firm is also updating its PoINT Archival Gateway product, which up to now has been a system to support tape-based object storage for backup and archiving of cold data. The upgrade will allow customers to send data to disks and between tapes and disks, using a single access/management point to accommodate “warmer” data via a “unified object storage” solution.
The firm says it is now looking for more OEMs, system integrators and VARs to help extend its footprint in the market. Existing partners already include Computacenter, Atos, IBM, Spectra, NetApp and SVA, among others.
Biomemory
France’s Biomemory is a company that is one for the future, it is working on a technology that puts data in a DNA-based system, that can potentially replace tape, including those tape-based systems that are used by the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Google to store “cold” data in their hyperscale data centres – yes, those companies really do use tape for the coldest of data in the cloud.
Pierre Crozet, CTO at Biomemory, says: “What we have now is like computer science in the US in the 1960s – it is moving fast in terms of development.”
Biologists are very much part of the DNA storage systems that Biomemory is developing, as a more sustainable way to store secondary data, with France’s national archive already a proof of concept customer.
The movement towards using DNA systems is illustrated by the evolving DNA Data Storage Alliance backed by the Storage Network Industry Alliance (SNIA), which is supported by the likes of Microsoft, Western Digital, Seagate, IBM, Fujifilm and Dell Technologies, along with Biomemory and others.
Like I say, one for the future, and a warning to incumbent tape and disk storage providers in the channel. The vision is in the picture above.
