Technology Live! comes to Paris

Today, France is one of the strongest technology markets in Europe, with Paris only second to London as a tech hub. In 2022, when the effects of the pandemic were felt worldwide, France was the only European technology market to have grown, with a total of €11.5 billion raised across nearly 700 financing rounds. A few weeks ago, Paris was the backdrop to Technology Live! Europe’s premier one-day event where up to four vendors showcase their technologies in action to technical journalists, bloggers, and analysts.

Keepit, Scality, StorMagic and Xinnor were on hand at the latest Paris edition of Technology Live! to showcase their newest innovations. The audience was treated to detailed technical deep dives, giving them an exclusive opportunity to ask questions directly to the brains that contributed to the development of these solutions. And, once again, the event did not disappoint. Let’s take a look at what was on show.

Keepit makes its case for SaaS data resilience

Copenhagen-based SaaS backup provider Keepit took the floor with its Chief Information Security Officer, Kim Larsen, a recognised expert on data governance and top-level IT security issues whose credentials include IT and leadership experience with NATO, the EU and the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET).

Larsen was joined by Jakob Ostergaard, CTO, and Sylvain Siou, VP GTM Technology.

With the rapid increase in the adoption of public cloud services, more customer and employee data than ever is being held on servers hosted by big-name providers.

Ostergaard made a strong case about the potential risks this poses if that cloud provider goes offline.

With Keepit’s cloud backup service in place, that data is protected and always available in a separate data centre, thanks to Keepit’s vendor-independent, cloud-native infrastructure.

Ostergaard highlighted the advantages of one of Keepit’s most important features: the ability for users to choose the geographical location where their data will be stored. This helps organisations comply with local legislation on data sovereignty, which compels them to store data in specific jurisdictions.

Scality gives real-time demo of ARTESCA 3.0 deployment at Technology Live!

Jérôme Lecat, CEO of Scality, took the floor to unveil ARTESCA 3.0, the latest version of Scality’s massive-scale object storage cloud platform. He was joined by Erwan Girard, CPO, and Thoman Danan, Product Director, ARTESCA.

Despite ARTESCA now capable of scaling to an impressive 8.7PB, Scality showed how easy it is to set up, with a live platform deployment demonstration for the Technology Live! audience, which took just 15 minutes to get running.

Lecat offered a granular insight into the various enhancements that make up ARTESCA 3.0, including its backup ransomware protection. He explained how ARTESCA offers protection against multiple attack vectors across different levels: API, data, storage, geography, and architecture. Scality calls these five levels of protection CORE5 end-to-end resilience.

Lecat then moved on to the capabilities of RING, Scality’s established public cloud Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) solution. Lecat highlighted RING’s capability for performance scaling across data storage, showing its ability to move from a single bucket to millions, and from single objects to tens of billions. He went further, showing RING’s performance, capacity scaling, data protection and security, along with its ease of integration with S3 and Kubernetes support.

Lastly, Lecat shared details of Scality’s roadmap, including plans for the data handling requirements of tomorrow, and future updates to RING, taking the company and product all the way to the year 2035 and beyond.

StorMagic demonstrates the capabilities of SvHCI

Coming to Technology Live! from Colorado, StorMagic’s CMO and CPO Bruce Kornfield, along with Mark Christie, Director of Technical Services, were on hand to show the influencers around the table how StorMagic solves data storage problems in edge computing.

Showcasing StorMagic’s SvSAN hyper converged storage, designed specifically for edge and SMB, Kornfield demonstrated how the combination of low-costs and lightweight design is perfectly suited for deployment just about anywhere. He made a great case for why lower operating costs and flexible configuration options make life easier for enterprises.

A big unveil of StorMagic’s all-new SvHCI highlighted the option of transitioning to full-stack HCI designed for the edge. The two StorMagic executives outlined the cost and performance advantages the company’s new technology offers over industry standard VMWare, with a complete virtualisation platform. Kornfield showed figures suggesting StorMagic could save customers approximately 62% over VMWare on a 48TB five-year subscription, with a 33% saving on HCI hardware.

With no vendor lock-in, Christie demonstrated the advantages in ease-of-use, with a simple setup process, He made the case for why the combination of an open-source foundation along with the data storage features and performance of SvSAN lead to a solid full-stack HCI, and the advantages this offers customers.

Xinnor reaches new storage performance heights with xiRAID

Pushing storage performance boundaries with xiRAID, Xinnor’s software-defined RAID solution, Davide Villor, the company’s CRO, explained how xiRAID overcomes the bottlenecks of traditional industry RAID configurations to offer better performance.

With much improved flexibility, lower overheads, fewer trade-offs and a wider range of applications than traditional RAID, Villor explained how xiRAID’s newest Opus offers an impressive performance advantage in numerous mission-critical situations and applications over competing RAID solutions.

Villor showed detailed benchmarks, both comparing xiRAID against various traditional RAID levels, as well as showing the performance advantages of xiRAID Opus over xiRAID Classic. This includes both improved IOPS and much faster sequential write speeds compared with RAID 5, with xiRAID offering dramatic improvements to throughput rates.

Performance examples included databases, high-performance cache, and media and entertainment applications. Villor explained some of the secrets behind the technology’s performance boost, with a high-level explanation of the key differences between xiRAID and traditional RAID.

Villor also demonstrated xiSTORE, a software-defined storage solution for the HPC and AI markets, that provides fast, reliable and flexible storage infrastructure.

Based on xiRAID, he explained that xiSTORE combines the fastest drive rebuild time in the industry with outstanding reliability and seamless integration. He explained that xiSTORE is based on the concept of building blocks, with a flexible dual-controller architecture than can include either HDD or Flash drives.

Villor was able to quote some very impressive storage benchmark figures, showing up to 79.2GB/s IOR write performance from a single 24-drive NVMe building block, scaling up to 1.4TB/s in a rack, and 21GB/s IOR read and write performance from a single 168-drive HDD block.