Chris Mellor covers storage and allied technology areas for The Register. After experience working for DEC, Unisys and SCO, he became an IT journalist writing for a variety of print publications. He edited the UK's first storage print magazine and then moved into the online world writing for IDG's Techworld, then started up the Blocks & Files blog, which was bought by El Reg.
He has written many sportscar buying guides, a few mountaineering guides and drives a car that's faster than he is.
Atoms star in ball-bothering boffins' Big Blue movie
Vid Bantam blockbuster boy bewilders Reg bloke
IBM Research has proved its worth by moving atoms across a screen to create the world's smallest movie. Big Blue has gone much better with its atomic animation A Boy and His Atom.
The movie has 242 frames and lasts just under 100 seconds; any more and it would rapidly become turgidly boring, in your humble hack's opinion. Each …
FalconStor on 13th quarterly loss: 'Unpredictable' OEM dragged us down
And the previous 12 quarters?
FalconStor has blamed "unpredictable performance" from one of its biggest Chinese OEM partners for the dent in its first quarter revenues. It has now totted up 13 loss-making quarters - although last quarter saw a boost in revenues - and the storage virtualisation supplier's lot is not a happy one.
The company is trudging uphill …
Leave keys to your data centre to a Grizzly? Brocade thinks: Yes
Also whisks sheet off new software-defined networking toys
Brocade has plunged deeper into the software-defined networks (SDN) pool with a couple of virtual networking products and a switch software revision.
It's presenting this stuff under an "On-Demand Data Center" marketing blanket which, it says "represents another major evolution in networking toward a highly virtualised, open and …
Object Storage: A solution in search of a problem?
Blocks and Files This industry deserves an OSCAR
Generally, it seems to me that object storage is suffering from a failure to launch despite more than a dozen suppliers pushing it.
Many of these same vendors seem to have their heads in the sand with regard to their place in the marketplace - they seem to ignore the fact that end-user buyers are confused about what object- …
Stealthy storage startup PernixData picks up VMware guru
Flying Dutchman weighs anchor for accelerated seas
Early-stage US start-up PernixData has decided it needs a European evangelist and persuaded VMware's Frank Denneman to jump ship.
Denneman is, or rather was, a senior architect in technical marketing at VMware, based in the Amsterdam area. He has co-authored three VMware-focussed technical books, and is widely acclaimed as a …
GreenBytes' data smite knight gets Citrix green light
IO Engine approved for cloudy virtual desktops
GreenBytes' all-flash IO Offload Engine has been certified by Citrix as compatible with XenServer, clearing the way for it to accelerate the cloudy outsourcer's virtual desktops.
The GreenBytes strategy has been to retire from the general-purpose all-flash storage array market - and concentrate on the virtual desktop (VDI) niche …
SMART Storage, Diablo brew a wee DRAM of MYSTERY tonic
All we needed is some flash, some system memory and $36m
SMART Storage and Diablo Technologies have promised to glue SMART's flash drives and Diablo's memory-channel storage (MCS) electronics into a combined product.
Diablo's website says MCS is "where the memory and flash subsystem are fused together". Well, what does that actually mean? It goes on to say: "MCS will ... allow …
Hard drives snatch hold of semi giant LSI, jump right off a cliff
Dying disks weigh down sales
LSI's latest results paint a gloomy picture for the storage giant, revealing both its revenues and profits were down last quarter.
Revenues for LSI's first fiscal 2013 quarter, ended March 31, were down to $569m. They were $600m in the previous quarter, a 5 per cent fall. A year ago revenues were up at the $622m mark, meaning …
Brocade, wake up: Cisco is here, and it ALSO has 16 gig FC
Unstoppable Ethernet proved stoppable
Cisco has waited two years, watching while competitor Brocade launched and sold 16Gbit/s Fibre Channel, before finally doubling the speed of its own Fibre Channel switch products, belatedly announcing 16Gbps MDS switches.
It's quite possible the networking giant had been hoping that Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) take-up …
Reduxio plots 'revolutionary' hybrid array tech: It will need it
Storage startup has to compete in increasingly crowded space
You've got to be an optimist to found a startup, especially when you come from one that crashed and burned. Three such optimists have risen from the ashes of scale-out filer startup Exanet and started up scale-out hybrid flash firm Reduxio.
As reported by Globes, the CEO, Mark Weiner, and co-founders Nir Peleg and Amnon Strasser …
HP's StoreVirtual gets a bit older, decides it needs some Fibre
LeftHand turn for Palo Alto
HP is adding Fibre Channel connectivity to its previously iSCSI access-only StoreVirtual range of arrays.
These are the re-branded LeftHand Networks iSCSI arrays and HP is introducing a new mid-range product as well as adding Fibre Channel access.
The new StoreVirtual models are:
4630 for the mid-range with 6Gbit/s SAS, a …
Not even Facebook, Apple's millions can halt Fusion-io's bleed
Still, there's always next quarter for flash biz
Storage firm Fusion-io reported ugly results for its third fiscal 2013 quarter, with revenues down - albeit higher than analysts had expected - and a thumping loss.
Flash NAND customers Apple and Facebook made up a whopping 50 per cent of its revenue in the second quarter, but execs said the customers' buying patterns led to an …
Wannabe ZFS rival Exablox decloaks MYSTERY NAS box
It's managed through the cloud. That's what you wanted, right?
Mystery storage startup Exablox has finally uncloaked its secret project - which turned out to be a simple scale-out filer managed through a cloud-based utility.
The product is called OneBlox and is managed through OneSystem, a utility service in the cloud; there is no onboard management software. The OneBlox appliance, or node …
Mutant hybrid upstart joins pushback against storage giants
Array-maker boasts triple-digit growth at expense of HP, NetApp and pals
Three hybrid flash-disk array upstarts are eating away at the incumbents' market share - and El Reg has peeked under the bonnet of one to find out how.
El Reg talked about Nimble Storage and Tintri a couple of weeks ago and that prompted Tegile to pull aside the curtain and show us a few more numerical goodies.
Rob Commins, its …
Fusion-io buys NexGen
Gets hybrid flash/disk array startup
PCIe flash industry leader Fusion-io has bought a startup: hybrid flash/disk array vendor NexGen, paying $114m in cash and $5m in stock.
NexGen, founded in 2010 by its CEO John Spiers and CTO Kelly Long, uses Fusion-io flash cards in its n5 arrays which are sold to small and medium enterprises. It has total funding, that we know …
Western Digital profits down despite revenue rise
Declining drive prices ate into income
Revenues for disk drive industry leader Western Digital's third fiscal 2013 quarter rose 24 per cent to $3.8 billion – compared to $3 billion a year ago – but profits fell 19 per cent. It's a hard life in the disk drive business.
The previous quarter's revenues were $3.8 billion too; no change there, then. Third-quarter profits …
EMC announces record revenues: But hey, Joe, where're the profits?
'Cloud, Big Data, er, I'm incredibly energised'
Hardware, virtualisation and services giant EMC has announced its first-quarter results for 2013 and while its finances are broadly positive, the devil's in the detail.
EMC's revenues for the first quarter of 2013 were a record $5.39 billion - lower than Wall Street's estimates - and its profits were down by a smidge. The mid- …
Reg man crunches IBM's storage hardware revenues
Analysis A tale of two charts
IBM's under-performing storage hardware business can be understood better if we look at the quarterly revenue numbers.
For that to be made possible someone has to dive into IBM's results over the past few quarters and work out the storage hardware revenue numbers, seeing as IBM doesn't present them on a plate. That's what El Reg …
World's first 5mm-thin gyrating models paraded on disk catwalk
Crumbs, someone needs a fat lunch
Western Digital has launched the world's first single-platter 5mm-thick disk drives - including one with a cache of flash memory.
It's also announced an enterprise-class 2.5in drive in a 3.5in frame so as to ease migration from 3.5in performance to the XE, a 2.5in form factor.
The single-platter 5mm-thick UltraSlims are …
CFO warns IBM's 'underperforming' storage crew: We'll take 'substantial action'
Analysis Legacy mid-range and entry arrays look unsafe
IBM's first quarter 2013 results were disappointing, and if you're in storage and servers at Big Blue, it appears the numbers guys are focusing on some of your product lines. In the earnings call, CFO Mark Loughridge said: "There are parts of our business that are in transition or have been under-performing like elements of our …
Astute: Hey small biz, you too can afford speedy flashy goodness
Array biz claims 3-5x speed boost from cheap accelerator
Astute has announced a lower-cost MLC flash version of its ViSX flash-based storage accelerator, saying it's good for small and medium enterprises because it costs about the same as the disk drive arrays they're buying on a $/GB basis.
The ViSX Performance Storage Appliance uses hardware TCP/IP and iSCSI acceleration with its …
Big money in Big Data: SGI debuts petabyte-juggling archiving tool
Watch out, Quantum...
The tidal wave that is unstructured file-based data is lumbering towards data centres. SGI is hoping the Big Data trend means that file access storage will become a hot property.
Meanwhile, customers love the idea of all file locations being stored in a single virtual silo, instead of multiple different silos with differing …
Array makers, what's that noise? It's the hungry Amazonian horde
Blocks and Files ...And they're here to swipe you and your lunch
Storage in the cloud is going to start stripping legacy storage suppliers of their value and prompt an era of vertical disintegration in the storage business.
This is assuming storage in the cloud starts savaging storage supplier revenues. Assume away, on the basis that Amazon, Google and Microsoft's storage-in-the-cloud systems …
SanDisk '2-3 years' away from mass-producing 3D flash chips
19nm NAND wafers ready by Q3 2013
Enterprise flash storage is proceeding inexorably down the process-shrinking road. But what happens when the shrinkage stops and flash devices evolve from using 2D to 3D chips? SanDisk thinks it might have the answer.
SanDisk makes consumer and enterprise flash. Its CEO and co-founder, Sanjay Mehrotra, gave a glimpse into …
Kaminario: We've made K2 faster, cheaper - NOW will you buy all-flash arrays?
Tries to tempt nervous execs with flash density increase
The VC-backed storage crew at Kaminario make three types of K2 array: K2-D, which has DRAM modules; K2-H, with both DRAM and flash; and K2-F, which is all-flash and uses Fusion-io flash cards. But despite a market which is somewhat put off by the high cost of all-flash products - and despite a slew of rivals entering the same …
WD glams up SmartWare with Dropbox
Keeping your cat and baby photos FOREVER
WD has glammed up its SmartWare consumer backup software with a Pro version embracing Dropbox.
Smartware presents you with a file-folder view of your, er, files, through its control centre. You can tell it to continuously backups of your files and folders, or scheduled snapshots - hourly, daily, monthly - using the specified …
Gridstore does classic founder-to-CTO jive
New boss has $12.5m to splurge on growth
Scale-out filer storage start-up Gridstore's founder is shuffling sideways to the CTO spot as his firm recruits a new CEO.
Gridstore was founded by its previous CEO, Kelly Murphy, and its chairman is Geoff Barrall of Drobo and BlueArc fame. Now, Murphy has stepped back to the chief technology officer role and brought aboard …
EMC jazzes up its archive offerings
Is your data attic crammed to bursting yet?
EMC's released a spring boost for its Data Domain backup deduping package as well as updating its SourceOne file and email archiver.
Data Domain stores deduplicated backups and archived files. SourceOne software discovers and indexes file and mail content and archives it to a storage setup, such as a Data Domain system.
Data …
'Fastest storage in the WORLD' plugged into mighty boffinry Cray
Phwoar, get a load of these figures
DDN claims it has sold the fastest storage system in the world to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for its Titan superduperwhoopercomputer, shooting data out faster than 1 terabyte a second.
Titan Racks Colourful Titan storage racks
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a US Department of Energy facility managed by UT- …
Dell kills 3-year-old object storage appliance line
Exclusive Moves to software-only model
Dell is closing down its DX6000 object storage appliance product line just three years after starting it up. Its OEM'd Caringo software will be available through Dell’s Digital Download Store. But there are concerns that this move will tarnish Dell's reputation as an enterprise raised-floor data centre supplier.
Object storage …
HP: You know what healthy OpenStack bods need? Fibre Channel
Open-source biz types get FC, iSCSI access
Hewlett-Packard says it is enabling OpenStack users to connect to two of its Fibre Channel and iSCSI-access storage arrays.
OpenStack is the NASA and Rackspace-initiated open-source platform for building an infrastructure cloud. The build-yer-own platform has both compute and storage controller components and aims to lower …
DataDirect in job slash bloodbath
'Natural hygiene' washes people away
Times are tough. HPC and big data storage array supplier DataDirect Networks has laid off 65 people, decimating its workforce, after six months of lousy sales.
This news is not yet public. The lay-offs follow a poor final 2012 quarter.
We asked DDN about this, about morale problems, and also if there were product-quality issues …
Quantum lays off fifty – prepping for a sale?
'Excited about increased market opportunities'
Fifty people have been let go by Quantum with some insiders thinking the company is being groomed for a sale, either in whole or in parts.
Affected company staff were given the news on Thursday, April 11th.
Christine Bachmayer, Quantum's senior manager for marketing in EMEA, said:
As we begin our new fiscal year (started April …
IBM pours $1 BEELLION into flash SSDs
Should help IT monolith crush flashy upstarts
Say goodbye to TMS RamSan and hello to IBM FlashSystem. Back in 2001, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner said IBM would spend a billion dollars to boost its Linux business and that billion paid itself off within two years. In 2002, the firm splurged the same amount on Java tools, and in 2006, pumped $1bn into information management. Fast- …
Flash-pusher sTec coughs $36m to settle class action suit
That's a whole quarter's worth of revenue
Flash storage supplier sTec is paying more than its latest quarter's revenue to settle a class action lawsuit.
The settlement fee is $35.8m. sTec earned $35.135m in revenue in its last quarter. The lawsuit concerned allegations that STEC, as it then called itself, had given an "inflated impression" of STEC’s revenue growth and …
Software defined networking works up a head of steam
Automation takes over the data centre
Software-defined networking (SDN) represents a revolutionary tide flowing through the fusty, slow-moving halls of data-centre networking, bringing speed and dynamism to network connectivity management..
The idea that computer data network connectivity can be automatically set up to have its characteristics changed as needs …
BizNAS at the front, party at the back: Tandberg adds Dropbox to NAS crate
Stripped-down Linux storage box for biz types
BizNAS is Tandberg Data's latest offering - a small business NAS box with iSCSI block access and integrated Dropbox support plus backup to removable disk.
The system, available in 1U rackmount and desktop configurations, is powered by Debian Linux running on dual-core Intel Atom processors. It boasts four drive bays and provides …
Sanbolic reveals flashy server goodness with Melio 5
Ships server-side scale-out SSD-supporting services
That's right: storage software supplier Sanbolic is shipping server-side scale-out services supporting SSDs. But what does it mean?
Sanbolic's Melio 5 software turns a server's directly-attached flash, SSDs and HDDs into a SAN, combining multiple server's storage resources into a single resource pool.
Sanbolic says it " …
HGST straps Intel Thunderbolt onto uber-pricey drives, docks
Go-faster interface tech, but it'll cost you...
The first external hard drive with Intel's extremely pricey Thunderbolt fast cabling system has been announced by HGST, along with a Thunderbolt interface 2-drive dock supporting 2.5-inch disks.
G-Technology is HGST's branded line of external drive products and HGST is a WD operating unit. Intel's Thunderbolt runs at 10Gbit/s …
EMC dishes up 8 times more cache to hungry Isilon PAN
Pushing out faster go-faster box
EMC is adding more performance grunt to its Isilon scale-out cluster Performance Accelerator Node (PAN) by replacing it with a new box featuring eight times more level 1 cache.
The 256GB of L1 cache in the forthcoming A100 PAN means more data can be held in memory. The aggregate throughput per node is 1,100MB/sec.
It's not a …
HGST unveils 12Gbit/s SAS SSDs for bankers, gamers and cloud-pushers
Subsidiary of mega-corp punts twice-as-fast kit
Western Digital subsidiary HGST has slapped 12Gbit/s SAS interfaces on three solid-state drives - which it claims is a storage industry first - and they fly, with one model boasting prolonged endurance as well.
The SSD800 and SSD1000 drives store up to 800GB and 1TB respectively, using enterprise grade 2-bit multi-layer cell …
US spies' crazytech branch asks chip firm for 8-BIT-PER-CELL memory
Triple level cell? Pah! So yesterday
The blue-sky researchers who work for the US intelligence branch have handed a contract to magnetic semiconductor firm Crocus Technology to develop memory that stores a whopping 8-bit-per cell memory to help keep the United States' intel secure.
IARPA, the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, has commissioned …
Mutant array upstarts feast on EMC, NetApp's leavings
Blocks and Files Should've rewritten the software lads...
Mainstream storage vendors have a potentially huge blind spot in their product strategy and hybrid array startups are now eating away at their customer base. Nimble Storage, Tegile and Tintri, specifically, appear to be benefiting at the expense of mainstream storage giants EMC and NetApp.
When the storage array mainstream met …
Avere releases FXT3800 speed filer
Rival still some Huawei in front
Avere has upped its accelerated edge filer game with the FXT 3800, which is 40 per cent faster on the SPECsfs2008 benchmark than the existing FXT 3500.
FXT products started out as filer accelerators and evolved into small (or edge) filers as well, relegating existing filers to be bulk file stores with hot files served from the …
Quantum spring-cleans StorNext for file-hungry arty small biz
When you need to juggle 500 million docs on a modest budget
Storage biz Quantum had made its StorNext product suitable for small and medium-sized firms with a new metadata appliance, disk enclosure boxes and a low-end tape library.
StorNext stores files on primary arrays, in slower-access object storage arrays, or even slower access tape vaults. Its users don't need to know exactly where …
Mm.. you like RAID? Ooh, you want flash. Try this super-Hadooper
Intel touts Nytro booster with cache controller
Intel is integrating an LSI PCIe flash card and RAID adapter into its new RAID SSD Cache Controllers intended for caching data from direct-attached disks on servers.
LSI Nytro MEgaRAID card LSI Nytro MegaRAID card
LSI offers its Nytro PCIe flash technology in its WarpDrive flash cards and MegaRAID adapters, in effect adding …
Fusion slips 1.6TB solid wedge into Hollywood scribblers' slots
And that's the way HP likes it
Fusion-io has fattened up its ioFX card that plugs flash storage into a workstation's PCIe bus: performance, we're told, is up fourfold and capacity is up from 420GB to 1.6TB.
The technology allows processors to access data at flash speeds, which is very much faster than disk transfer rates. Lower-capacity cards typically act as …
Cloud disaster-recovery startup gets pre-IPO VC cash slurp
Need a catcher in the cloudy rye?
Ziv and Oded Kedem's latest venture, Zerto, provides hypervisor-based replication for VMware. Thanks to lashings of venture capital dollars it has been growing steadily since its stealth beginnings in 2009. The company emerged from stealth in July 2011, having started with $6 million of seed and A-round funding.
A $15 million …
What'll we do tonight, Kieran? Same thing we do every night, Tintri....
... try to take over the VM storage world
Hybrid VM-aware array upstart Tintri is adding array-side, per-VM replication in a version 2.0 VMstore product software release, hoping to enjoy the success established storage player NetApp has had in purpose-built storage systems for virtual machines.
CEO Kieran Harty says Tintri has been having phenomenal quarters, replacing …
Everything faster than everything, boast soft flash wizards
Your boots may be made for walkin' – ours are faster
Caching software startup VeloBit came to our notice as a provider of server flash caching software that could turn bog-standard commodity SSDs into Fusion-io-class flash caches. Now it's using its software with added tweaks to turn ordinary servers into VDI drag racers with the highest-access VDI data, like master VM images, …
