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.
Our new 1.5TB lappie drive isn't thick, it's just the densest - HGST
WD biz stakes claim on highest megabytes per mm cube
Western Digital subsidiary HGST is touting a 1.5TB notebook drive with three platters inside a standard 9.5mm-thick 2.5in form factor.
HGST claims the drive has the highest storage density of any hard disk drive available, in terms of megabytes per cubic millimetre. Generally 9.5mm-tall, 2.5in drives have two platters, not three …
New 4TB drive spaffs half a telly season into your eyes AT ONCE
You like porn Game of Thrones, right? How about 16 eps simultaneously?
Seagate has a new 4TB 3.5in hard disk for digital video recorders, TV set-top boxes and other such entertainment gear.
The Video 3.5 HDD can operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with an initial 0.55 per cent chance of drive failure per year. It has a wide range of capacity points - 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and …
Flailing QLogic's boss gives up CEO, president gigs
That seat on the board? You can have that too...
Simon Biddiscombe, server adapter maker QLogic's CEO and the driver of its Mount Rainier flash-enhanced HBA program, has resigned "to pursue other opportunities," with a search for a new CEO underway.
Biddiscombe's departure comes after two years of falling revenue and a decline in profitability. He has also left his position as …
NetApp boffins first to go in 'WORKFORCE DECIMATION' plan
300 R&D bods out the door in proposed cull of 1,300, say insiders
Storage array biz NetApp has laid off 300 people at a research and development centre in India and “hundreds” more in the US, according to industry sources.
The Times of India reports that anonymous insiders at NetApp's Bangalore operation - which is the company's largest R&D facility outside of the US - have been given their …
Is it time for the great Jihad against networked storage?
Blocks and Files Big boys look wide open with eyes wide shut
Dheeraj Pandy is running Nutanix as if the company is on a crusade against networked storage. Data delivery latency from networked storage is plain unacceptable, it seems, and clustered virtualised servers should run and present their local storage as part of a pool.
There's more of course with big-iron converged systems being …
Look behind you, NetApp: Angry investor is coming for YOU
First Xyratex, then Emulex and Brocade... now Elliot's stalking a storage giant
Activist investor Eliott Management, of Emulex fame, always pushes to have its voice heard - especially when it thinks bosses of its "investment companies" don't put shareholders first. Now the fund has actually taken on storage giant NetApp.
According to a Bloomberg report, Elliott is pushing NetApp to change its board. We can …
Have your users managed to force iOS devices on you?
Check this, it might stop them losing all the data
NetApp has used its acquired IonGrid technology to provide iOS mobile devices with access to file data stored on its FAS arrays, along with browser access to business apps.
Apple iPad and iPhone users will have an App Store app they can use to log into their corporate system, using Active Directory or a multi-factor …
Honey, I BLEW UP the International SPACE STATION - in full 3D
CTO's radical rig blasts Sandra Bullock into Spaaace
A few years ago the idea of accelerating a BlueArc filer would have seemed bizarre; it's got its own hardware acceleration. But now media special effects processing can be so mind-blowingly intensive that the hardware accelerated filer itself needs accelerating.
The case that's illustrating this point is the new George Clooney …
Fusion-io turns up wick on its product development cycle
Something new to drool over every year
Take note competitors; under new management Fusion-io is going to introduce major product developments every 12-14 months with mid-life kickers every 6-7 months.
This is a bit like Intel's tick-tock cadence, with a Fusion tick being a basic product architecture change, and a tock being a mid-life kicker or refresh.
In the …
Quantum lurches Starboard: Vigorous investor comes aboard
Blocks and Files Tape-slinger invites 3 new directors to boardroom table
Struggling storage biz Quantum has been in a quandary about how to react to aggressive shareholder Starboard Value.
Now the tape and disk data protection vendor has decided to play nice and invite three Starboard nominees onto its board.
It works like this: the board goes up from eight seats to nine. Jeffrey Smith, Starboard's …
Analyst warns NetApp is prepping layoffs
1,300 pink slips prepared
According to a private Piper Jaffray note to its clients, NetApp is preparing to announce a 10 per cent work force reduction, about 1,300 people, in under-performing areas of its business such as Engenio, the acquired LSI disk array business.
The idea is, according to Piper Jaffray, for NetApp to maintain a solid operating …
Overland Storage may acquire Tandberg
Cripple plus walking wounded equals able-bodied entity
Overland Storage may be about to acquire Tandberg Data.
A crippled tape and disk data protection and NAS storage supplier bleeding cash, Overland Storage is looking for respite from its financial woes by acquiring, on a basis of equals, the newly recovered Tandberg Data.
The news is laid out in an SEC form SC 13D/A filing …
Atlantis raises 20 million greenbacks to flog virty desktop software
D-round takes pot up to $30m total
Privately-owned Atlantis Computing has just raised $20m to flog its Atlantis ILIO desktop virtualisation software around the world.
ILIO – In Line Image Optimisation - has virtual machines running inside a server's RAM and delivers virtual desktops at less than $300 per desktop.
The company's second CEO, Bernard Harguindeguy, …
Skyera hires flashy Western Digital veep as chief architect
WD potentially challenging the big SSD boys
Flash array startup Skyera, which counts Western Digital among its investors, has recruited a WD flash product exec as its new chief architect.
According to a story in the Sacramento Bee, Skyera recruited Andy Tomlin as its chief architect. Tomlin was WD's vice presidnt of SSD Development responsible for all firmware, software …
Virident tempts EMC flash boss over, creeps up on Fusion-io
Intrigues all round in the flash supplier world
Server flash card upstart Virident has recruited Ken Grohe, EMC's flash business general manager, to run its worldwide customer operations, while it strengthens its position against flash supremos Fusion-io
The recruitment is open for anyone to see on Grohe's LinkedIn page.
Concurrent with Grohe's hire, Virident, which used to …
It's all gone to Schmitt: New OCZ boss rips 'n' replaces execs
Tries to prove to $30m backer that the biz can make money
Flash storage biz OCZ's new CEO has replaced almost a dozen executives - and he's banging on about quality as he strives to resuscitate the near-dead OCZ flash business.
OCZ over-extended itself drastically under founder and previous CEO Ryan Petersen, who was ousted last year, leaving the company with far too many under- …
Whiptail CEO: Big Blue's flashy BEELLION doesn't faze us
Interview Cannibalising your own lines? Not for us
Undaunted by IBM's billion dollar investment in flash, all-flash array startup Whiptail is banking on new investor SanDisk, says Whiptail CEO Dan Crain.
Whiptail's plans also include introducing 3D chips into its arraysand developing "revolutionary" array software and management products.
It has no intention of entering the …
EMC hits flash leader Fusion-io where it hurts: Low-cost server cards
Cheapie PCIe flash cards? That's OUR thing
Storage, virtualisation, info and cloud giant EMC is set to widen its attack on server flash card leader Fusion-io by releasing a low-cost flash card for hyper-scale data centres.
Server flash card cache coherency is also set to appear for Oracle RAC environments, according to Stifel Nicolas analyst Aaron Rakers, who was at EMC …
Hm, disk drive maker, what's that smell lingering around you?
It's death and failure, says ex-Sun storage chap
The disk drive vendors have been utterly screwed by mismanaging the disruptive force of solid state drives: that's the view of Mike Shapiro - lately a storage bigshot at Sun and Oracle.
Mike Shapiro was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer, CTO, and VP of Storage for Sun and then Oracle. He is most recently a founder at a …
So you've got a nice virtual desktop stack – wait, here comes DaaS Boot
Duplicated data in GreenBytes-Desktone's torpedo range
Storage supplier GreenBytes has teamed up with desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) provider Desktone to dedupe virtual desktop data and accelerate its delivery to employees' machines.
Desktone provisions and boots virtual desktops from its cloud through partners such as Dell and Fujitsu. Customers can treat their entire virtual desktop …
Xyratex shrinks ClusterStor to prop up sinking revenues
SMEs, please buy it and stop us sinking into the red
Xyratex has downsized its ClusterStor high-performance computing storage array with the scale-out storage 1500, hoping to add much-needed revenue growth by flogging departmental HPC storage.
Like the existing 6000 and 3000 models it is a Lustre system with scale-out capability through modular building blocks. Xyratex's idea is …
Storage-slinger: Sales down for 6th year running? Blame TAPE
Disk and software booming ... but not quite fast enough
Storage biz Quantum's position couldn't be further from that of rival CommVault. Revenues down? Yes. Both annually and sequentially? Yep. Losses deeper? Mmhmm. Annually and sequentially? Yes indeed.
It's the same old, same old for Jon Gacek's crew at Quantum, where unreeling tape revenues overtook slowly growing disk revenues. …
Former Fusion-io CEO just wasn't that into operations, says new broom
It's nothing personal, says Shane Robison
Fusion-io CEO and co-founder David Flynn resigned because he realised he didn't have the operational management skills needed to grow Fusion-io into a global business. That, in a nutshell, is what we understand after talking to replacement CEO Shane Robison.
First Robison, who is also Fusion-io's chairman and president, wanted …
Rivals tout antidotes to EMC's ViPR bite
Comment Clowns, beef, ringleaders, fire brigades... PAH! - HDS
How do you avoid a snakebite from the ViPR that EMC has let loose in the storage jungle? El Reg storage desk has spoken to some of its competitors about their "software-defined" antidotes.
ViPR is a layer of storage virtualisation software that separates upper-level storage management functions (which EMC calls the "storage …
Fallen flash flogger sTec says direct sales will save its bacon
Two years of plummeting revenue and a dim light at end of tunnel
Flash disk maker sTec isn't looking healthy. Its revenues have declined by over a third from the last quarter and net losses exceed revenues for this quarter - as they have done for the last 18 months.
Revenues from storage array manufacturers are falling away faster than the company's alternative revenue-generating efforts are …
Bolshy investors launch yet another assault on Emulex board
Ethernet switch-maker now fending off blows from TWO pissed off hedge funds
Angry investor Altai Capital Management has written an open letter to Emulex CEO Jim McCluney demanding the resignation of Emulex's board after it rejected a takeover offer from Broadcom.
That's the view put across by activist investor Altai Capital Management in a public letter to Emulex CEO Jim McCluney.
Background
Emulex …
Seagate CTO hangs up his hard disks
Gorn fishin'
Seagate's chief technology officer Bob Whitmore has retired, at the same times as the company has launched its third generation flash products.
A company statement read:
Bob Whitmore Bob Whitmore
On May 7, 2013 Robert W. Whitmore, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Seagate Technology plc (the "Company") …
IT spending squeeze? Are you joking, cackles cash-flush CommVault
Four years of growth at storage biz? Sure, whatever
Quarterly revenues up? Check. Annually and sequentially? Check. Annual revenues and profits? The same pattern. Any problems? Nope. Just another year at CommVault.
The company, which supplies Simpana backup, archiving and data data management software, operates like a Swiss watch and makes business look like child's play.
For …
Over ONE-THIRD of PCs will have SSDs in 2017 - analyst
Hang on, will people still be buying computers then?
As hard disk drive (HDD) shipments into PCs continue their downwards slide, solid-state drive (SSD) shipments should rise at least 600 per cent between 2012 and 2017, say market researchers.
Of course, solid-state drive sales represent only a small proportion of the market currently, which means that by 2017, vendors will sell …
Symantec: We 'stubbed our toe' on Backup Exec, but we'll be fine
Analysis New CEO plans to dish out dividends to keep shareholders smiling
Symantec's new broom CEO has presided over record final quarter - at least for revenues - and full year 2013 results. This is despite the company being in the middle of a management clear-out, profits droop and wholesale sales operation revamp.
Revenues for the fourth quarter, which finished on 29 March, were $1.75bn, a record …
Fusion-io founders flee, ex-HP hotshot takes the wheel
Shane Robison becomes CEO of Woz flash firm
Right out of the blue, flash memory-maker Fusion-io has lost its CEO co-founder David Flynn, as well as its chief marketing officer, co-founder Rick White.
Board member Shane Robison has been named chairman, president and CEO. Messrs Flynn and White are resigning to pursue other entrepreneurial early-stage investing activities …
Acronis co-founder slips into driving seat after CEO picks up P45
Founding exec Beloussov: 'I'm excited to be back'
Backup and recovery specialists Acronis's latest CEO, Alex Pinchev, has left the firm and has been replaced by one of its founders.
Pinchev became Acronis's CEO with much fanfare in November 2011, replacing Jason Donahue. Pinchev, an ex-Red Hat sales leader, was described as a visionary CEO, and became an Acronis board member in …
Seagate: Who us... no flash cred? Check out our PCIe card, suckers
Joins flash mob in earnest, pushes out SATA and SAS SSDs too
Seagate has opened up fresh fronts in its assault on the flash market and announced SATA and SAS SSDs as well as a PCIe flash card, signalling for the first time in a product sense just how serious it is about becoming a major league flash product supplier.
There are basically four products: the 600, 600 Pro and 1200 SSDs and X8 …
Micron brandishes sharp new flash blade, lunges at Fusion-io
'Our card is the best out of all our unnamed rivals'
Micron is touting a new server flash drive that's apparently significantly faster than Fusion-io's market-leading ioDrive 2.
Micron is believed to be supplying its PCIe-format drives to EMC for the storage giant's XtremSF flash cards. (EMC's other supplier is Virident.)
Micron's P420m flash drive comes in both PCIe and 2.5in …
EMC, VMware dangle axe over 1,804 workers around the planet
Tech CEO 101: Sales up, profits down, time to sharpen blade
In the week of EMC's self-congratulatory EMC World extravaganza in Las Vegas, the storage giant revealed it will slash 1,004 jobs.
The cuts will be felt worldwide in the company's Information Storage, RSA Information Security and Information Intelligence divisions, according to EMC. The redundancies will cost the biz $80m. This …
EMC to reveal identity of Bourne-based storage platform
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's...
EMC is set to announce a software-defined storage product known as a Sea of Storage (SOS) as a new product category, alongside its Centera and Atmos object storage-based systems.
Vulture Central's storage desk has deduced this from tips, rumours and rumblings around the storage jungle, and we're told a mid-May announcement date …
Brocade's fat pipes shrink: Fibre Channel revenue dip ahead
Estimates up to 6pc drop from last quarter
Brocade has cut its current quarter's estimated revenue by between $19m and $34m, implying there may be trouble afoot in the Fibre Channel world.
Brocade makes Fibre Channel equipment for use linking networked storage arrays to servers, plus a line of Ethernet switch gear. Recently the company reduced its revenue expectations …
Reg boffins: Help us answer this Big Blue RAID data recovery poser
It's not just the disks that have failed
IBM's research department have released a research paper on RAID 5 that has intrigued and baffled our correspondent in equal measure.
The paper, by IBM Almaden researcher Mario Blaum, professes to solve a problem where RAID 5 is insufficient to recover data when two disks fail. Blaum's solution claims to do so better than a RAID …
Seagate's bottom line smacked as users bin desktops for tablets
Drive-maker looks to cloud, 5mm slab product for succour
Hard drive-maker Seagate's third quarter profits slipped by a whopping 64 per cent year-on-year as the company's bottom line was hit by users deserting desktops for tablets.
Revenues for its third fiscal 2013 quarter were $3.53bn, 20 per cent down on an annual basis when revenues were pumped up through Thai flood drive shortages …
SMART brings out 2.5-in, 2 terabyte block-o-Flash to rival sTec
You can't smoke enterprise SSD, but get your pipe out
SMART Storage has joined sTec in bringing out a 2TB capacity enterprise SSD using 19nm NAND. But SMART's goes faster, it says.
It's an extension of its 2.5in Optimus SSD line, called the Optimus Echo. Unlike the Optimus Ultra and Ultra Plus SSDs which use Toshiba 24nm MLD (2-bit) NAND the Echo uses smaller cells built using 19nm …
EMC offers 'continuous protection' to hot 'n' heavy VMAX users
Plus: VNX gets software-only RecoverPoint
EMC has boosted the continuous data protection capability of VMAX, meaning that every change made to the data held in the arrays be recorded and replicated to a remote system. The storage giant's unified file-and-block storage platform VNX will get a software-only version of RecoverPoint, and its data mobility product, VPLEX, …
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) …
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 …
