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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.

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, …
08 Apr 11:24

HDS CTO: Man, I could just throttle our array... er, in a good way

HUS VM in HDS array range
Fat NAS box does dedupe, when it's got a sec
Hitachi Data Systems has bunged primary deduplication into its network-attached storage (HNAS) kit and Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) mid-range array. That's according to the company's chief technology officer Hu Yoshida. HNAS is the hardware-accelerated filer HDS obtained when it bought BlueArc; the system relies on programmable …
08 Apr 09:04

Xyratex tight-lipped over unimpressive first quarter

Xyratex OEMs
Comment Loose lips sink ships, but sometimes they sink anyway
As expected and following on from its board caving in to Baker Street Capital Management and ousting of CEO Steve Barber, Xyratex's quarterly revenues are down 34 per cent year-on-year. Revenues for Q1 2013, ending 28 February 2013, were $195.6m, which contrasts badly with the $295.7m reported a year ago and the $265.4m reported …
05 Apr 11:47

Scality proudly unveils its RING to the world

An illustrative shot of the casino
Should we go Tolkien on the subhead, boss? Or ...
Is it possible? Could a digital media company have a single storage system for rich media libraries that covers linear archiving, non-linear play-out and scales indefinitely? Storage biz Scality says, using its object storage-based RING for Digital Media, it is. Digital media storage can be a heterogeneous nightmare. Take …
05 Apr 07:26

C-round greenbacks for Greenbytes

First in flash-optimised virtual storage appliances
VDI flash array HW and SW supplier Greenbytes has snagged $7 million in C-round funding. The funding comes from existing investors Generation Investment Management and Battery Ventures. It will be used "to continue the expansion and acceleration of global sales, marketing and partner development efforts, and for ongoing research …
05 Apr 06:09

Has Europe finally passed Peak Disk?

The Register breaking news
Tablets, cloud, THAT Thai flood mentioned as platters spin down
Disk drive sales in the EMEA region have showed falls in both units and capacity according to research from Futuresource Consulting. HDD unit sales peaked in 2010 at 28.06 million units, falling to 25.91 million in 2011 and 21.48 million in 2012, a 17 per cent decrease between the latter two years. Mats Larsson, a senior market …
04 Apr 16:27

IBM: We have placed the Big Data moon on this stick

The Register breaking news
Big BLU claims from Big Blue
IBM Research has come up with a new package it calls BLU Acceleration, intended to speed up (big) data analysis and reporting of data held in DB2 and Informix databases, amongst others. The BLU Acceleration package includes these handy features: Data skipping - an ability to skip data that doesn't need analysing, such as …
04 Apr 09:53

Hostile Xyratex investors claim CEO's scalp in aggressive haircut

Steve Barber
Show us the money, says Baker Street
Activist investors have forced out Xyratex CEO Steve Barber in their hunt for a bigger and faster return on their investment. Baker Street Capital Management has amassed a 23 per cent holding in Xyratex comprising 6.2 million shares, and believes that Xyratex's development of its ClusterStor HPC array product, following a …
04 Apr 09:23

NetApp snoozing at the wheel of incumbency juggernaut, says chap

Wake up and sniff those clouds for pity's sake
Equity analyst firm William Blair thinks NetApp is failing to face up to the realities of being an incumbent storage supplier, and could even exit the hardware business. A research note from William Blair, dated March 17th, has fluttered its way to the storage desk at El Reg. It says: "We sense a company grappling with massive …
04 Apr 06:07

STEC - sorry sTec - opens direct and channel sales with name change

The Register breaking news
Sales people who do customer support? Hmm
What the Zeus is going on? STEC has changed to sTec and it's bragging about its new direct and channel sales program. What's happened is that STEC - sorry, sTec - is adding both direct sales and channel sales alongside its mainstream OEM sales organisation. sTec reckons its enterprise customers will buy direct through OEMs, but …
04 Apr 04:33

Flash to the future: Memristors, photonics, MLC-y tsunami

The Register breaking news
Is your mouth watering yet? Huh?
For a non-volatile storage medium flash development sure is volatile, as attendees at a distributor conference found out. Aaron Rakers, managing director of analysts Stifel Nicolaus, attended the conference and sent out a despatch from it that contained a mouth-watering array of tit-bits. The distributor had suppliers of hybrid …
03 Apr 16:04

Behold: Ten storage chieftains whose products hold humanity's data

Pinnacle Video Transfer
Biz lords who rule the collective memory of the race
Who are the ten most influential storage bosses? It should be an easy list to make but what do we mean by influential and should they be currently in post? "Influential" means more than that just "our customers have bought boatloads of our kit!" An influential company's competitors have had to react to its products and strategy …
03 Apr 13:58

Tech is the biggest problem facing archiving

The Moon
Blocks and Files Mountains of unreadable obsolete magnetic tapes!
Technology is the biggest problem facing archiving. Archives grow bigger and bigger. The amount of data to be kept grows ever bigger and threatens to overflow an archive installation. So, let's use LTO-6 tapes instead of LTO-5 ones because they hold twice as much data in the same physical space. That's logical but there is an …
03 Apr 11:02

Why do they even call it a backup appliance? Just call it an EMC

Joe Tucci EMC
It's a one horse race in the kingdom of the blind
In the purpose-built backup appliance market, IDC numbers show EMC reigning supreme in revenue share terms while everybody else basically sucks. Only one rival, Symantec, has a greater than 10 per cent share. Here are the bald revenue share per cent numbers for the fourth 2012 quarter as tracked by IDC's number-crunchers: - EMC …
03 Apr 09:06

'Proactive Wellness' rebranded as 'Infosight' by Nimble

InfoSight
So much better than Reactive Sickness, Late and Ill etc
A proposal document we've seen from a Nimble Storage reseller has shown that Nimble is branding its Proactive Wellness feature as Infosight. What it means: Nimble Storage uses its customer array sensor data to predict, amongst others: when a storage array will fill up; when a drive may fail, complete with an automatically-opened …
03 Apr 07:04

Boardroom brouhaha brewing at Emulex after Endace buy

The Register breaking news
Why not buy shares instead, demands share holder
You win some; you lose some. Emulex has completed its acquisition of networking analytics company Endace against the opposition of activist investor Elliott Management, but had to accept the appointment of two Elliott nominees to its board. Emulex mostly sells SAN Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and has a line of Ethernet Converged …
02 Apr 16:04

Boss of Irish-based R&D hub: Man, this place is the back of beyond

No path beaten to our door, regardless of mousetrap quality
EMC Ireland country manager Bob Savage is distinctly underwhelmed by Cork Airport. There are 3,000 EMC staff in its Ballincollig, County Cork operation and they are managed by Savage who has been in the country manager role for five years. In an interview in the Irish Independent, he says Cork airport suffers from not having …
02 Apr 15:43

Sync'n'share specialist Egnyte signs senior staff to spark growth

Egnyte cloud diagram
Spanking fresh executives - that's the route to success
Cloud storage and sync'n'share startup Egnyte is trying to ignite its growth rocket boosters by adding fresh new executives and board directors. Egnyte was founded in 2007 and provides what it calls "enterprise-class file sharing" to around 30,000 customers, storing some 12PB of their data in three data centres, two in the US …
02 Apr 09:03

Just what is Oracle going to plop out as its golden storage egg?

Vulture
Analysis A plan must be hatched, or its hardware biz is fried
What's going on with Oracle storage? Besides tape, which seems to be doing fine, does the IT giant have a long-term, viable external storage array product line at all? Oracle's general hardware business is in decline. Witness the chart below showing quarterly overall sales including hardware product revenues; storage sales …
02 Apr 08:04

Flash man: Headcount at my company is UP not DOWN

The Register breaking news
Also Pure Storage just aren't as good
Nimbus Data CEO Tom Isakovich disagreed with parts of our story about his firm's HALO software upgrade. "Your article today is factually incorrect," he wrote, before bringing up perceived weaknesses in the flash array from rival Pure Storage. Pure's CEO Scott Dietzen, contacted for comment, naturally took issue with much of that …
31 Mar 11:00

Gartner's gurus forecast future tech spending splurge

management strategy
2014 IT dollars in a line would go to the Sun and back. Twice
Gartner's analysts have used their highly-tuned abdominal sensing units and cerebral computing powers to forecast worldwide IT spending will rise to a whopping $3.92 trillion come 2014. During 2012, global IT spend hit $3.62 trillion. This year, it will reach $3.78 trillion, reckon the Gartner market boffins, a rise of 4.1 per …
28 Mar 17:05

Cloud chairwoman crashes down through glass ceiling, grabs the CEO helm

Wonder Woman
Needs to be Wonder Woman to beat AWS, Google and MS
Storage-in-the-cloud startup Nirvanix has joined HP and Yahoo! in appointing a female CEO. Debra Chrapaty adds the CEO role to her existing executive chairwoman position, having joined Nirvanix' board in November last year following on from a $25 million C-round of funding led by Khosla Ventures in May 2012. She came to that …
28 Mar 07:04

Flasheteer Nimbus breathes on its HALO, gives it a rub

Nimbus Halo software suite
Rival Pure hits it with double bod nab
Nimbus Data has updated its all-flash array operating system, HALO, adding analytics, a REST API, and mobile phone access with HALO Mobile. HALO is Nimbus' OS that powers its Gemini, E-CLass and S-Class all-flash arrays. The analytics features include: - Real-time and historical monitoring and reporting capabilities with 200+ …
27 Mar 07:36

The battle for control at the firm that brought SSD to the enterprise

Killer whale
Analysis What have you done for us lately, moan hedgies
It's a narrow line to have to tread and STEC chairman Kevin Daly has not kept to it in his response to the nasty letter from hedge fund Balch Hill calling for STEC CEO Mark Moshayedi's head and a new set of directors for mismanagement of STEC since the EMC OEM deal glory years. There is going to be a contested vote with a proxy …
26 Mar 11:31

Brocade's fat pipes a-singin' the Fibre Channel song

And FCoE? Yes, what about it? Exactly
Brocade is singing its Fibre Channel song with renewed vigour - aiming to double speed, get OpenStack support, push on with 16gig products and try to render Virtual Instruments diagnostic gear redundant. It has announced the 6520: a denser Fibre Channel switch with 96 16Gbit/s ports in its 2U enclosure, and it also has Brocade's …
26 Mar 08:32

Join us now for all the storage whispers: Heard about the XtremIO buy?

LA Confidential
Silicon Valley Confidential CEO cheeks positively aflame, they do say
The Vulture has been busy listening on the storage beat to rumour, (s)innuendo, gossip and insider info, taking it from the best of sources and bringing it to you for entertainment, wonder and schadenfreude. None of this is verified or conformed by vendors but it does come from the very best of sources, top table folks. Here is …
26 Mar 07:33

Gartner magicians mumble, fling bones, scrawl new disk pentacle

Shows an enhanced form of Gartner's Magic Quadrant.
None of woman born shall harm EMC, cackle midnight hags
Gartner's magicians have thrown their animal bones and precious relics up in the air and discerned a new pattern in the way they landed; general-purpose disk arrays. The magicians have invented a new Magic Quadrant (MQ) and say: Improvements in scalability, availability, performance and functionality of midrange storage systems …
25 Mar 16:58

Quantum: No! Object storage CANNOT exchange data with tape!

Music stave
Curse you, English language
Quantum introduced object storage to its StorNext data virtualisation product last week, saying data could be automatically moved between primary disk, object storage and tape. But actually there is effectively a wall between tape and object storage. StorNext virtualises the location of data in primary disk arrays, tape storage …
25 Mar 16:27

Indie array-flogger tries to tempt flash mob with COLD HARD CASH

The Register breaking news
Your own, which you get back if their gear doesn't work
According to upstart Pure, other vendors' flash arrays don't deliver the advantages they are supposed to. Standing out from the crowd is what a new flash array start-up has to do, and having a marketing message saying it's a top tier all-flash array (AFA) vendor alongside EMC, NetApp and SolidFire is all very well but Pure doesn …
25 Mar 11:31

It's a BYO-slingshot party in the Silicon Valley of Elah

David and Goliath in the Valley of Elah
Blocks and Files Camel, needle, VC, Kingdom of Heaven
Silicon Valley is the new Valley of Elah, the place where David slew Goliath by using a disruptive innovation. Today's Silicon Elah is the holy ground of Clayton Christensen's venture capitalists' bible, The Innovator's Dilemma, and its incredibly powerful idea of disruptive innovation. Oddly Christensen is giant-like in …
25 Mar 08:58

Flash card latency: Time to get some marks on benches

MLC Only big
Chuck out the slicks and platters, and MLC it
Fusion-io flash cards outperformed a slew of competitors in a Marklogic NoSQL benchmark reported by StorageReview - for which much thanks. The benchmark rig is detailed in the article text and it notes that tested storage configs must have a more-than-650GB usable capacity, meaning individual flash devices can be bunched up. …
25 Mar 08:03

Quantum tries to attract HOT TV stars ... by adding object storage to archive

If that doesn't convince 'em, maybe trip to Vegas will
Quantum is introducing a 2-tier archive inside its StorNext data management product for TV biz types. The new gear has disk-based object storage front-ending a tape library, providing both nearline and long-term archive stores with automated movement between them. Details are sparse, but it will demo the object storage product …
22 Mar 12:45

Swiss boffins unleash power of graphene on flash mem

Molybdenite
Chow down on tasty molybdenite sandwich
A Swiss government research lab has reinvented flash memory using graphene and molybdenite in a way that should be faster, scale smaller, use less energy and yet more flexible than boring old NAND. Molybdenite is MoS2, molybdenum disulfide, which is similar to graphite and also has a lubricating effect. Atomically it is a layer …
22 Mar 08:27

QLogic: 3 words - caching SAN adapter. Just blew your mind, didn't we?

FabricCache from QLogic
FabricCache slots into SAN
QLogic has announced its transparent adapter-based flash caching aimed at accelerating applications that access a SAN for data. FabricCache is the first product implementation of its Mount Rainier technology and, as well as adding a flash cache to QLogic's Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), it shares that cache between clustered servers …
21 Mar 13:32

EMC spits out high-end offsite biz cloud after chugging down Syncplicity

Syncplicity EE
Enterprise edition of swallowed sync 'n' share kit
Dropbox beware: Biz juggernaut EMC has launched an enterprise edition of its file sync 'n' share Syncplicity product. What this does is add an enterprise pricing layer to the acquired Syncplicity product, which provides secured file synchronisation and sharing between users' intelligent devices ranging from smartphones through …
21 Mar 07:04

Bolshy Balch Hill blasts STEC bosses after talks break down

Increase in ops spend = NO profits - activist investor
Activist investor Balch Hill has told STEC's shareholders that they should consider putting up a For Sale sign on the fallen flash leader's lawn and booting out the CEO and former CEO, the Moshayedi brothers. Balch Hill, which holds 9 per cent of shares, and its partner Potomac Capital have issued a letter to STEC shareholders …
20 Mar 08:27

Then there were 3: Micron slowly 'wipes out' NAND flash rivals

Wafer Saw
'We’re probably the largest SSD public company today'
Hands up who thought Samsung was the world's leading flash shipper? Well, according to a Micron VP, it is his company that's the biggest shipper of NAND flash in the business, bigger than both Samsung and Hynix. Micron makes DRAM, NAND and NOR flash chips. Kipp Bedard, Micron's investor relations VP, told the Raymond James 34th …
19 Mar 14:04

Dot Hill in a dot hole: Disk array builder struggles to stem losses

The Register breaking news
What next for the mid-range drive vault biz?
Disk-array constructor Dot Hill's newly released financial figures for last year reveal a falling revenue trend and a struggle to reel in losses. Dot Hill quarterly revenues and profit/loss Dot Hill's quarterly revenues and losses (Click on chart for a larger version) The company, which has offices in Basingstoke, UK, …
19 Mar 10:59

Fusion-io gobbles Brit Linux SCSI gurus ID7

management consumerisation
Seasoned with PCIe cards, flash and cash
Fusion-io flogs software to turn a server fitted with its PCIe flash cards into a shared storage appliance. It turns out that the software is based on UK developer ID7's code and Fusion-io has just bought the company. ID7 was set up in 2006 and produces SCST, an open-source Linux component used by many storage vendors. It is a …
19 Mar 08:33

Seagate's cloud backup baby gets software boost

EVault PnP Appliance
EVault hopes version seven will tempt small biz users
Seagate has given its backup-to-the-cloud EVault sub an appliance software boost, probably in a bid to lure in more of that small and medium biz customer goodness. EVault appliances have now been updated with the latest v7.0 version of its software. according to the firm, this means faster backups, up to 100 per cent faster for …
19 Mar 07:04

SwiftStack sucks up $6.1m, leaps through curtains with 'Amazon S3-in-a-box'

Comes out of stealth with OpenStack-based object storage system
Software-defined storage upstart Swiftstack has been given a fresh cash injection of $6.1m and has spoken out on its software-as-a-service offering, Swift. Software defined storage (SDN) is akin to the fabless semiconductor firm concept, except that in this case the firms provide software instead of chip designs. With software …
18 Mar 14:17

STEC CEO on crappy Q4: 'Obviously, we’re kind of bottoming out'

Fallen flash star seeks hope in channel, OEM upswing
STEC must be glad to say farewell to a year of poor results, which is what 2012 represented, but 2013's first quarter is going to slump further, according to the firm's projections at a recent earnings call. STEC's OEM business is not doing so well, and its replacement direct sales biz is off to a slow start. Negotiations with …
18 Mar 13:23

SanDisk cops to malfunctioning Micro SDs in Galaxy S3s

SanDisk 8GB Micro SDHC memory card
Offers fix for fandroids' fried flash cards
Certain Samsung Galaxy S3 users will barely have noticed the rollout of the S4 uberphone, they've been too busy concentrating on the flash card problems in their current smartmobes. Flash-card shuffler SanDisk, meanwhile, has told El Reg that it has issued a fix. User paulnptld talked about this on the Android Central Samsung …
18 Mar 11:23

How Fusion-io redlined its PCIe flash motor to hit 9.6 MEEELION IOPS

ioDrive 2 Duo
64-byte writes ought to be enough for anybody
In its latest party trick, Fusion-io ramps up its ioDrive2 server card - a slab of 365GB MLC flash storage on a PCIe board - to gobble 9.6 million writes a second. The feat works by mapping the PCIe card's NAND capacity into an application's memory space and writing 64 bytes - quite likely the PCI backbone's cache line size - at …
18 Mar 11:03

Cloudfather Tucci meets with EMC clan, analysts to talk strategy

Road to SW-defined storage
Storage control, SDN, flash and cloud editions
EMC and VMware held their so-called Strategic Forum - aka analysts' day - in New York yesterday with capo di Famiglia Joe Tucci setting out the overall stall and his lieutenants setting out their own strategic imperatives. We saw David Goulden for EMC - now called EMC II - and Pat Gelsinger for the cloud and software-defined- …
18 Mar 09:32

Private billion buck HPC player? You're going to have to go public - and SOON

Comment Hey, DataDirect: You can only hold off for so long...
We heard a whisper that Big Data player DataDirect Networks (DDN) was thinking of going public, although marketing CEO and co-founder [Alex Bouzari recently batted the suggestion away, saying merely that it would "probably make sense at some point in the future". But regardless of the company's intentions, the question remains …
15 Mar 09:06

Oracle pinches Nirvanix's marketing VP

The Register breaking news
Joins ex-boss Scott at San Fran hangout
Oracle has lured Steve Zivanic away from his marketing VP position at enterprise cloud startup Nirvanix. He joins the technology juggernaut as a VP in its Storage Hardware Systems Business Group - home to the Exastuff stuff and storage arrays. Oracle Redwood Shores Nice digs: Oracle HQ at Redwood Shores Zivanic started work …
14 Mar 12:14

Scality commits to Big Data, puts a RING on Hadoop elephant

The Register breaking news
Also adds plug-in for OpenStack's Cinder
Object storage start-up Scality has added its storage to Hadoop so users can avoid loading data through Hadoop's own file system. It has also unveiled a plug-in for Cinder, the block storage layer within the OpenStack project. The RING is an object storage infrastructure based on a set of X86 server nodes that store objects, not …
14 Mar 11:04

Foundering OCZ snatches megabuck lifeline in white-knuckled grip

lifebelt
Can the money tugboat tow this leaky ship off the reef?
OCZ, drowning in a sea of cancelled products, its banker missing overboard, revenues leaking from its deflating financial rubber ring and burdened by an inability to understand its own condition has been hurled a last minute $30 million cash and credit lifeline. The SSD startup company almost submerged under previous CEO and …
13 Mar 15:03

Every SECOND there are EIGHT more Seagate drives in the world

Disk Drives
There's now one for every four humans alive today
Seagate boasts that it has shipped a billion drives in just four years after taking nearly three decades to build its previous billion. The company shipped its first billionth disk in 2008; its inaugural product, the 5MB ST-506, hit the market in 1980. Now Seagate's factories - busy spewing drives to a world enthusiastically …
13 Mar 12:04

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