Congratulations to all of us for winning Product of the Year Award at the National Association of Broadcasters Show 2019 in Las Vegas. The Award recognizes the most significant and promising new products and technologies being exhibited at the NAB Show. It is an independently judged awards program recognizing product innovation, offered for the first time in 2019.
There were 16 categories in total and Zenko won the Storage category with six other products. With 1,700 vendors and exhibitors at NAB Show, we are among an exclusive group. An open source project at the roots of an enterprise product recognized among well established brands is quite an achievement. We’re in good company with vendors focused only on the media & entertainment space. Zenko being such a general-purpose multi-cloud data management and governance tool, makes the award even more precious.
This is a great, great acknowledgement of everyone’s efforts over the past couple of years. From Engineering to Tech Services to Marketing to Sales to Finance to Zenko’s customers and early adopters – so many people have contributed to the Zenko product and business. Thank you!
Since the first 1.0 release in late 2017, containerd has earned a large list of new adopters, including two major public clouds and recently graduated as a CNCF project. It’s a major milestone for the project that provides a “boring core container runtime,” demonstrating that it has reached a high level of maturity.
Phil Estes, IBM Distinguished Engineer for IBM Cloud division, gave an update on the status of containerd and shared a glimpse to the roadmap. In 2018, containerd and its CRI plugin was marked as general availability for use in Kubernetes, followed by two major public clouds–Google’s GKE and IBM Cloud’s IKS–offering containerd as their managed Kubernetes cluster’s runtime. Containerd continues to be used by all Docker releases, and Docker has plans to remove more code from the Moby project and utilize stable features within containerd instead, furthering adoption of containerd’s codebase.
Additionally, the attractive API and stability of containerd has brought quite a few A-list adopters since last year including AWS Firecracker VMM, Kata Containers, Alibaba PouchContainer; Microsoft is also contributing and hardening the complete Windows container support in the containerd 1.2 release.
The Zenko community has had a fantastic 2018! We’re celebrating by giving out $100 Amazon gift certificates.
We’ll be selecting winners from new users who provide feedback on Zenko Orbit. Since the first release of Orbit a year ago, a lot of new features have been added. Users can now replicate and control data seamlessly in Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, Wasabi, Digital Ocean Spaces and private cloud storage compatible with S3 protocol, like Scality RING.
What are the advantages? Some Zenko users see spreading data across multiple storage systems as a great way to reduce lock-in or gain negotiating power with the cloud providers. Others love how easy it is to put movie files in multiple locations: objects in Azure use Video Indexer machine-learning capabilities to automatically add metadata, which feed into Zenko searchable database and then replicate to Amazon buckets for worldwide distribution.
Lots more capabilities are coming to Zenko in 2019!
Your feedback will help shape its future: Hurry up and try Zenko Orbit (redirects to Google Login). All you have to do is fill out a short survey based on your first experience with it for the chance to win $100.
We talked about QuadIron in more details during our #ZenkoLive chat. In case you missed the talk, here is the recording of the session. The main feature of QuadIron is its speed compared to the other libraries for erasure coding. In the previous blog post we highlighted the math behind it. The ZenkoLive gave a demo of its power. We took a video file of ~90MB, split into 90 fragments of 1MB each. For these fragments we generated 160 parities, totaling 250 pieces and an overhead of 2.77. We then deleted 100 parities to simulate the loss of 100 disks. Using QuadIron we rebuilt the video file in seconds.
Watch the recording below and ask questions on the forum.
Zenko engineering team has been working for almost two years on the open source code that allows developers to keep control of their data while gaining freedom to choose the best storage options. You’re not forced to pick among Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage but you can have them all with Zenko!
ICYMI, watch the recording below to learn why CIOs and data managers love Zenko:
Stores all data unmodified so that it can be accessed and acted on in the cloud directly.
Enables data mobility so that data can be easily placed in the most efficient location.
Provides a single endpoint through which data can be stored, retrieved and searched across any location.
Enables unified data management from anywhere through a secure cloud portal.
Can be deployed using Kubernetes orchestration framework.
Questions from the webinar:
Q. Does Zenko have any plans to integrate with decentralized cloud storage layers?
A. Zenko’s plan is to support as many storage backends as possible and that includes decentralized cloud storage. More specifically, we partnered with Storj and are working to integrate Zenko with their next-generation network.
Q. What is the Orbit website?
A. Orbit is Zenko’s configuration and management interface. Offered as a SaaS graphical interface, it can connect to Zenko instances deployed on-premises or in the cloud. Orbit also offers the possibility to get a free Zenko sandbox to quickly test the capabilities of the system
Q. Does Zenko have its own meta repository to track key/value (metadata) on objects?
A. Object’s metadata are stored in MongoDb inside Zenko cluster and natively stored with the object in each cloud destination.
Q. We’re have a large enterprise class object store with over 10+ PB of data in over 1000 buckets. It’s all internal facing (internal applications/developers/archives, etc). Would Zenko sit in front of this object store (become the primary S3 endpoint) for all apps/consumers using our object store?
A. Zenko can be in front or on the side, depending on the needs of users. Depending on the features of the existing object store, applications can keep on using the existing store while Zenko gets notified out-of-band of updates in the content of buckets, for example.
Q. Can zenko be used to migrate data between clouds?
For existing data, you have to tell Zenko that the data exists. Once the out-of-band updates features is complete, migrations of data can be made automatic.
Q. Does Zenko have its own lifecycle (expiration for example) of objects? Example would be our own back-end object store does not have expiration. Would Zenko be able to delete the object upon expiration?
A. Yes, Zenko can augment the features of an existing object store and we’re seeing requests related to Ceph, which doesn’t have native cloud replication or expiration policies.
Q. Can Zenko keep up with a high request rate s3 customer? (such as 100+ new objects per second)
A. Zenko can handle millions of requests per second, it’s well tested with Cloudserver.
Q. Is there support for IBM Cloud Object Storage (back-end) on prem ; or public?
A. Since IBM Cloud Object Storage is compatible with S3 APIs the integration is quite simple, it requires simple code like we’ve done with Wasabi or Digital Ocean Spaces.
Q. If I connect my instance to Orbit and later disconnect it, what happens to my data and metadata?
A. Orbit is only a configuration and management tool. The metadata is stored inside the Zenko instance in a distributed MongoDB database. Once Orbit is detached, Zenko will continue to operate as usual.
