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.
The only thing holding Dell back is ... er, Mickey D himself
Uncertainty abounds at Dell's Texas HQ as Michael Dell struggles to take the company private. Sources keep whispering that there's a "plan" in the offing – but what is that plan?
My personal prediction – reading the tea leaves at the bottom of the Dell teacup – is that the deeply fractured organisation wants to dance with the …
TDK calls it quits on tape media thanks to 'difficult environment'
Japan's TDK Corporation has seen the writing on the wall and decided to get out of the LTO tape media manufacturing business.
The company's statement says: "In recent years, however, the data storage market has been contracting, creating a difficult business environment … TDK has decided to withdraw from the data tape business …
Microsoft - do you really think you can take on Google with Nokia?
Microsoft's purchase of Nokia's phones business – which outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer has since described as a way for Redmond "to accelerate" – appears to be an attempt to add another weapon to its anti-Google arsenal.
Ballmer is quoted as saying: "By the early part of this year it was clear to me that perhaps acquisition would be …
Storage vendors: You're next over the cliff after the server salesmen
You have storage so your servers can work on the data in them. If servers go to the cloud then storage will go there as well, as sure as eggs is eggs. And what is happening to the server market will happen to the storage market. So if enterprise server sales go down, enterprise storage sales will go down as well.
Or will they? …
Pure Storage hoovers up $150m in funding, hires ex-Data Domain CEO
Flash array upstart Pure Storage aims to emerge from the herd and pull off a Data Domain, having secured $150m in E-round funding and hired former Data Domain head honcho Frank Slootman, who joins its board as "a key strategic advisor."
Pure says the $150m is "the single largest private funding in the history of the enterprise …
Dell to axe 1,000-plus call-centre bods, enterprise staff in prep to go private
Dell is laying off staff in its enterprise division, The Register understands, as company honcho Michael Dell prepares to take his firm private.
El Reg has heard that Dell is steadily ridding itself of enterprise workers, including senior technologists, strategists, developers, and sales employees, as well as a vice-president. …
Oh, a Wyse guy, eh? Why I oughta make you Nexenta's new CEO
ZFS-storage software supplier Nexenta has changed its CEO for the second time in eight months, going for a popular exec from the ranks of IT's great and good: Tarkan Maner.
Nexenta, which provides the Open Solaris and ZFS-based NexentaStor software storage OS, positions itself as the software-only answer to vendors who fear the …
Scale Computing bares teeth at VMware, reveals more SCRIBE details
Scale Computing is going to use its new SCRIBE object store to replace the GPFS element in its HC3 converged server/storage/virtualisation systems.
SCRIBE was announced yesterday by Scale Computing. The Register has today received more information about whether it would be sold as stand-alone software or be integrated into the …
Microsoft's $15m won't last forever: Quantum, CommVault to flog new backup kit
Quantum is still chewing on its $15m royalty payout from Microsoft, but that was a one-off, and it needs to make plans if it doesn't wish to go hungry again. To that end, the storage firm is adding a dash of Simpana software to boost the growth of its Lattus object storage business.
It has also introduced a new virtual …
Storage biz mystery as upstarts Primary Data and Tonian 'merge'
Former Fusion-io CEO David Flynn's new venture, Primary Data, appears to have joined up with Tonian, an enterprise storage startup with expertise in parallel Network File System (pNFS) – but whether the move is formal or not remains a mystery.
Primary Data popped its head briefly out of stealth earlier this month, when we learnt …
Scale Computing's SCRIBE vows to lob virty storage kit into the bin
Start-up storage shindig Scale Computing has crafted SCRIBE, an object store directly accessible by a hypervisor that replaces physical storage arrays and virtual ones (VSAs) like VMware's own vSAN.
SCRIBE, says Scale, is an architecture for expanding hyper-convergence to a complete, distributed software-defined environment. It …
What's that racket? Oh my God, it's VMware's vSAN bull in the disk array shop
VMware has launched its virtual storage area network (vSAN) technology; pretty much unleashing a raging bull into a china virtual storage appliance shop and watching all the crockery racks of electronics go flying.
Available now as a beta, vSAN can create a virtualised storage array that pools the disks and flash drives of a …
Flash-forward for virty desktops... Jeez, why didn't WE think of that?
Fusion-io appears to have noticed that competitors are using flash to accelerate virtual desktops and decided it wants a piece of that action too. It has tweaked its acquired ioTurbine flash caching software to produce ioVDI – and get those virtual desktop doggies rolling.
The ioTurbine software provides a cached area of flash …
Array upstart Violin peeks at PCIe cards, goes all in with $172m IPO bid
Storage upstart Violin Memory has publicly filed for an IPO and is seeking $172.5m.
The maker of all-flash arrays has handed in its S-1 homework to financial watchdog the SEC; the document reveals it has consistently made losses while revenues have grown over the past three years.
Violin Memory year on year ... Sales rising (yes …
Ex-Sun Micro CTO reveals Greenbytes 'world-beating' dedupe
El Reg has managed to take a peek at an as-yet-unpublished white paper, written by former Sun Microsystems CTO Randall Chalfant, which claims the storage company's deduplication tech has near-zero latency and possibly offers the world's fastest inline deduplication.
It works with 4K blocks of data. This is the sequence of events …
EMC, you big tease! At last, the specs for million-IOPS VNX2
Getting tired of EMC's teaser campaign for its coming VNX refresh in September? Relief is at hand: slide decks, blogs and PDFs seen by El Reg's storage desk confirm that EMC's VNX2 is a 7-product line-up optimised for multi-core CPUs and flash with new operating software.
VNX arrays were getting slow because the software couldn' …
World's ONLY virtualised snapshot firm refreshes product: Here, take a sniff
The latest version of data storage software house Actifio's Copy Data Storage platform is intended to spread its use more widely – without providing any significant new core functionality.
Actifio's software snapshots data from production IT systems and then presents virtual instances of the copied data to other systems that …
Samsung's amazeballs 3D V-NAND SSD not THAT much better than predecessor
El Reg asked Samsung how the 3D V-NAND SSD's speed compared with the same company's SM843T 960GB SSD, a high-performance SSD used in data centres and servers released just a few months ago. The reply may surprise some hardened storage veterans.
3D V-NAND, announced on 7 August, stacks layers of NAND vertically to increase the …
Flash! Ah-ahh! Saviour of the universe? It'll save every one of us?
You can get a great picture of what's happening in the flash memory storage market by looking at the presentations from the recent Flash Memory summit here (warning, it's swimming in PDFs).
Over 150 documents are listed here, with file names reflecting their date of publication and the last name of their author, but fortunately …
Dell spits up storage revenues after gobbling promising upstarts
Dell's storage revenues are continuing to decline as the company fails to reap the benefits of its acquisitions.
EqualLogic and Compellent were great startups but the stellar growth of those two units has not translated into stellar growth for Dell's storage revenues. In its latest quarter, which finished at the end of June, the …
'Symbolic' Grauniad drive-smash was not just a storage fail
The word "cabinet" can mean a piece of furniture in which you store something and the digital version of this is a disk drive or flash drive. Having said that, the idea that by destroying the drive you destroy the data is so far from reality in today's data centres that anyone professing it is profoundly idiotic.
Which brings us …
Whoosh, whiff, swiffle.. CLINK: Cleversafe chucks $50m in vault
Investors seem sold on the idea of Cleversafe's mad "terabyte-a-second" gobbling kit, so much so that the startup has received an injection of $55m to strengthen its big data and cloud-focused product and sell it more widely.
The company received $31.4m in a C-round of venture capital funding just three years ago. Why does it …
GreenBytes guts its arrays, turns self into chompable doughnut
Once upon a time there were two suppliers with VDI-focussed storage arrays: GreenBytes,with an all-flash array; and Tintri, with a hybrid flash/disk array technology. Now GreenBytes has become a software-only business. Why?
The reasoning, outlined by GreenBytes' CEO and chairman Stephen O'Donnell, is that over time mid-market …
Imation's $120m baby delivers NST6000 hybrid storage mutant
Scalable storage outfit Imation's Nexsan unit has launched an uprated cached hybrid flash/disk drive array with a Gen 3 operating system: NestOS 3.0.
Nexsan, a purveyor of primary and Assureon archival data storage arrays that failed to IPO several times, was bought by Imation on January for $120m.
The NST6000 and older NST5000 …
SimpliVity intros swollen and shrunken rip-'n'-replace boxen
SimpliVity has miniaturised and maximised its all-singing, all-dancing converged OmniCube IT systems with entry-level and high-performance versions as well as strengthening the original, now mid-range box.
SimpliVity ships its 2U OmniCube – which is not a cube but an oblong box if we're going to be pedantic – a converged server …
Samsung's cooking 3D NAND flash chips. WHAT did you say the specs were?
Samsung has launched its first 3D V-NAND SSD but hasn't yet released any real performance data, bringing its new product's status into question.
3D V-NAND, announced on 7 August, stacks layers of NAND vertically to increase the capacity available in a set footprint. It is a way of getting over the progressively shorter working …
Flash cheaper than disk? 'Customers aren't buying that', says NetApp CEO
NetApp's CEO Tom Georgens philosophised about flash storage in the company's latest earnings call with analysts. The top boss said non-volatile NAND memory isn't the be-all and end-all in storage: what matters is where active and inactive, hot and cold, data is stored, and how dear each of those holding pens are.
“Flash, on a …
Brocade boss drops F-bomb: 'Everyone's for 32Gbps Fibre Channel'
Storage networking biz Brocade has pulled a massive profit leap out of declining revenues thanks to a legal win against rival A10 Networks.
Brocade banked a $119m profit on revenues of $536.6m in its latest quarter of 2013, ended 27 July. The year-ago profit was $43m, so that's a 177 per cent jump and a 153 per cent increase …
Is that a flash stick in your pocket, VMware, or are you pleased to see us?
VMware has, in your correspondent's opinion, punched below its weight in data storage. Undue respect for drive arrays has inhibited its ambitions. This is about to change, though, as the company begins to take responsibility for providing primary storage to applications, and also networking.
Let's consider the basic IT trio of …
Emulex to QLogic: Adapter biz is shrinking, but we're still swimming
Emulex's latest results show it overtaking QLogic in the traditional server storage connectivity market – despite the fact that the pie which they're divvying up is becoming increasingly smaller.
The fourth fiscal 2013 Emulex quarter finished at the end of June and saw revenues of $120.4m – showing the usual seasonal fourth …
Data protection bods Bocada list dog on senior management team
Look, first things first, we're not making this up. Enterprise data protection company Bocada has one Tommy, er, Bocada listed as its director of employee well-being. And while Tommy may very well have experience in "enterprise, data storage, software development, sales, and support", he is nevertheless a member of the species …
EMC's million-IOPS VNX2 monster to arrive NEXT MONTH
The Register expects EMC to launch VNX2 very soon, possibly as soon as a few weeks from now.
We caught wind of the changes when we noticed VNX2 was mentioned in forthcoming seminars and where it was described as "delivering the next evolution in disaster recovery technology".
The VNX2 is EMC’s newest hybrid storage platform. …
Do you think spinning rust eats flash's dust? Join the hard drive daddies club
Disk drive makers have joined forces in a desperate bid to keep disk sales up and fend off the flash threat.
Western Digital, HGST, Seagate and Toshiba have formed the Storage Products Association to provide "a forum to educate and advocate about the role of hard disk drives (HDDs) and Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHDs) in …
Nimbus fattens up Gemini twins with smaller flash chips
Nimbus Data has increased the capacity of its Gemini flash arrays by stuffing more smaller flash chips in them; we're talking 48TB in 2U, just pipping Violin's new 6264 array with its 64TiB in 3U.
That 64TiB is equivalent to 70.5TB, meaning that Nimbus's new Gemini averages out at 24T/U versus 23.43TB/U for Violin Memory – …
Fusion-io founder Flynn flies again with new storage upstart
Ousted Fusion-io co-founder David Flynn has a new gig: startup Primary Data.
And the chief marketing officer? Why, none other than Rick White, co-founder of Fusion-io and its chief marketing officer when he resigned along with Flynn earlier this year. He started at Primary Data in June.
The news is reported by the Wall Street …
Skyera unveils rival-crushing 21PB-a-rack flash monster
The ex-SandForce flash controller guys turned all-flash-array-startup guys from Skyera are bringing another flashy product to market. And if the firm's claims are true, skyEagle could be a game-changer in the flash array world.
The upcoming product, due to be unveiled today, will redefine how much flash you can cram on the shelf …
MYSTERY sugar daddies showering flash upstart Tegile in gold named
Western Digital and SanDisk have been named as the two investors that just ploughed millions of dollars into hybrid flash array startup Tegile.
Tegile's Zebi flash-disk array uses WD subsidiary HGST's disks and solid-state drives. With the WD funding, Tegile and HGST have a joint technology development. The companies are chasing …
New 64TiB Violin byte bucket is a load of Tosh: 19nm flash in a 3U box
Violin Memory has unveiled its highest capacity array, the 6264, that packs 64TiB of flash into a 3U box - and it uses 19nm MLC NAND chips from investor and manufacturer Toshiba.
The new array can apparently hit 750,000 mixed read/write 4096-byte IOPS; the earlier 6232 (which stores 32TiB) does 500,000. In other respects the …
FalconStor struggles on as antsy backers whine 'C'mon, let's sell'
After losing its CEO a few weeks ago, standalone storage software shipper FalconStor has duly reported poor results. Since then it has got into bed with a new VC to shore up its balance sheet, ended an investment banking deal with Wells Fargo, and teamed up with Violin Memory to develop new products.
The interim president and …
Flash angel Fusion-io flies too close to Facebook, Apple, plummets to Earth
Flash memory biz Fusion-io's latest results show ever-deepening losses, with management talking of OEM channel conflict to be sorted out. Can this once high-flying server flash supplier take off and fly again?
When low-hanging fruit pickers come down to Earth they rarely fly so high again. Look at sTec, OCZ and Nexsan. Their …
SMART Storage: Super DIMM sum adds up to tasty flash soup
Devilishly fast flash data access is on its way, courtesy of SMART Storage interfacing a DIMM-like flash product to a host's memory bus using Diablo Technologies' MCS TeraDIMM technology
SMART's ULLtraDIMM product has what it says is ultra low latency compared to existing SSDs and PCIe flash cards. It inherits all of the MCS …
Future of storage: Micron bets chips on 3D NAND flash – but NOT YET
As far as the world's number two DRAM chip-maker is concerned, 2D or planar NAND can go through another lithography cycle before 3D techniques may become necessary because a two-year-old NAND design change has enabled Micron to scale its lithography down to 16nm and maybe beyond.
El Reg interviewed Glen Hawk, Micron's VP for its …
They do it with mirrors: Nasuni reveals new cloudy protection plan
Enterprise storage upstart Nasuni claims that customers who store their data in Nasuni front-ended clouds have never lost any of their data. Nevertheless, the company is adding mirroring to its service to guard against cloud data loss.
Nasuni - whose C-round funding El Reg covered last year - says its customers, who have Service …
Seagate's shingle bathers stalked by HGST's helium HAMR-head sharks
A performance-versus-capacity war is brewing in the hard drive industry with Seagate leading on disk-flash hybrids and WD-HGST on helium-filled devices.
At a briefing session for tech journos yesterday, Seagate dropped hints of new solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs) - which combine a non-volatile NAND cache with spinning platters …
Seagate goes back to ASICs, slurps upstart's brains in return for cash
Seagate has invested in a bespoke chip designer that can whack new interfaces to the hard disk giant's products.
The silicon slinger is privately-held eASIC, which was tapped up for its "expertise in fast time-to-market, low-cost and low-power" custom chip knowhow, we're told.
The draw for Seagate seems to be the ability to add …
Backers fatten up flash-disk mutant array, sic it on storage giants
Bulk up and get ready to take on the storage giants - that's what hybrid array startup Tegile's backers are telling it, and here's $32m to do just that.
Tegile was founded in late 2009 to devise a hybrid flash/disk storage array, and its Zebi product was launched in February last year - background here. Together with fellow …
Veeam chases $1bn revenue dream as VC joins board
Veeam is looking more and more like the Data Domain of virtual server backup suppliers, announcing 100 per cent annual growth in second quarter bookings, boasting more than 73,000 customers and securing a new VC partnership to take it to the $1bn annual revenue level.
That would mean, El Reg's storage desk thinks, passing …
Pernixdata: Psst, sysadmins – wanna virtualise that server-side flash?
Flash upstart PernixData is hoping to become the best friend of VMware sysadmins everywhere tomorrow when it launches its Flash Virtualisation Platform (FVP).
The product promises to expand the number of VMs that a single hypervisor can support by turning individual servers' flash storage into a cluster-wide resource.
FVP …
Trouble closing the wallet, Joe? EMC boss Tucci's cloudy shares rain $10m
EMC CEO and chairman Joe Tucci has earned himself a cool $10.5m after selling hundreds of thousands of shares in the storage biz.
Tucci made $10,583,406.96 from selling 400,000 EMC shares on 30 July and 1 August, according to the SEC Form 4 website, which links to this SEC filing.
Tucci's transaction consisted of selling 192, …
Multimillion-dollar sack of Microsoft cash soaks up Quantum's bloodbath
Two charts show the essence of storage biz Quantum's problems: declining revenues are converting profits into deepening losses. But could 2014 be a breakout year?
First, here are the quarterly revenues for fiscal years 2011 to 2013:
Quantum Quarterly Revenues What happened? Quantum quarterly sales reducing over the years
We …
