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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.
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 …
Flash upstart: We're doing so well we might even tell you HOW well one day
Hybrid disk and flash startup Tintri has posted yet another quarter of solid results, while murmurings from its CEO suggest that it might be going public by the end of next year.
The purpose-built VM-aware storage platform maker says it had a very successful Q2 of fiscal 2013, just like it did last quarter. Back then it had 53, …
Why you wanna go and put STaaS in their eyes? Toshiba pays $3m for Zadara
Flash foundry operator Toshiba has invested $3m in a startup offering virtual private storage arrays in the cloud, citing a "unique and strong strategic fit" between the two companies.
Storage upstart Zadara offers its Virtual Private Storage Arrays (VPSAs) as storage-as-a-service, offering iSCSI or NFS-based storage. Customers …
Imation posts FOURTEENTH loss-making quarter
Scalable-storage biz Imation's revenue slump continues while management continues to talk the talk about recovery, which – worryingly, for Imation – depends mainly upon storage array product developments in a brutally competitive market.
The firm's revenues – and profitability – crashed as tape and optical disk media sales …
Benchmark bods reckon NetApp storage has the edge over Isilon
Analyst outfit DCIG rates NetApp over Isilon for private cloud storage. Which comes as a bit of a surprise to The Register's storage desk.
DCIG produces buyers' guides and then sells the rights to distribute these guides to vendors. This raises a suspicion that top-ranked vendors have somehow influenced their position in the …
Micron buys Apple supplier Elpida for $2bn, becomes world's No 2 DRAM baker
The chip firm from Boise, Idaho, has done well – Micron has finally closed its deal to buy bankrupt Japanese DRAM-maker Elpida.
This means Micron is now the number two DRAM chip-maker in the world after Samsung.
Elpida's plant in Hiroshima, Japan
For around $2.5bn, Micron gets Elpida's 300mm DRAM fab and has also bought a 24 …
Quizzed Quantum veep quashes hardware quit rumours
Is big data and big storage biz Quantum finally moving away from its hardware business to the cloud?
This question was raised by a statement from Henrik Rosendahl, Quantum's Cloud Solutions SVP:
Quantum is transitioning its business from being a predominantly hardware-based, on-premise data protection provider to turning into a …
Symantec: We've lopped off half our heads, but look how well we're doing now
Storage and security software behemoth Symantec reported increased revenues but profits down in its first fiscal 2014 quarter, as CEO Steve Bennett's companywide reorg made some progress. Symantec's new strategy of focusing the sales firehose on service providers looks like it's beginning to pay off.
First quarter fiscal 2014 …
Upstart chip chef Diablo's DIMM yum dumplings cram NAND in RAM
Canadian storage startup Diablo has pulled out what it hopes will be a PCIe-flash killer: its new tech provides fast flash data access by interfacing a NAND partner's solid-state drives to a host server's memory bus.
Diablo, founded in 2003, has invented what it calls Memory Channel Storage (MCS) in which NAND flash is packaged …
Cisco and NetApp engage in light consensual FlexPoddery
Consensual FlexPoddery is the name of the game as Cisco and NetApp rename Flexpod and FlexPod Express, introduce the new FlexPod Select, and add NetApp's E-Series arrays and Cisco's Nexus 7000 big-ass switch to the FlexPod component mix.
FlexPods are template rules for designing converged server, storage and networking systems …
All-flash Hitachi array grabs silver in benchmark race - by a whisker
An all-flash build of Hitachi's VSP array has claimed the second-highest SPC-1 benchmark, the highest for a traditional storage array.
The SPC-1 benchmark tests the performance of storage arrays doing random read and write I/O operations typical of business-critical applications. An all-flash VSP, using Hitachi's Accelerated …
Emulex rustles up a Mulligan for its hungry network gumble floggers
Emulex has appointed a senior vice-president for operations, signalling new CEO Jeff Benck's intention to have his company survive as a viable business.
Emulex makes Fibre Channel storage host bus adapters (HBAs), Converged Network Adaptors (CNAs) and has recently bought Endace for its Ethernet network monitoring and analysis …
QLogic's save-the-biz pitch: Ditch the switch glitch - get rich
Troubled storage adapter supplier QLogic is getting out of the Fibre Channel switch business to save cash and focus resources on its adapters.
The news came as investors and analysts digested the firm's quarterly results showing its first loss in over two years. A flattish FC host bus adapter (HBA) and converged network adapter …
SolidFire snaps up $31m in funding, brandishes 3.4PB monster
Cloud flash array startup SolidFire has snagged $31 million in C-round funding and revealed a bad-ass flash array delivering up to 7.5 million IOPS - and a claimed 3.4PB capacity.
That capacity in SolidFire's SF9010 is after dedupe, compression and thin provisioning have been applied, and with the maximum of 100 nodes ganged …
WD: Enjoying our $630m, Seagate? Let's ruin your day with our results
It might still be smarting from the $630m it just doled out to Seagate, but WD widened the gap between itself and its arch competitor with its fourth quarter and full year results.
Overall, the world's biggest HDD maker sold more drives more profitably - and coped with the PC downturn better.
Revenues for WD's fourth financial …
Seagate dock hands: Tea, lads? Fewer hard disks than last year, eh...
Seagate's fourth quarter and full year results show a company that's declining in revenues, profits and disk drive units. The hard disk business just isn't spinning as fast as it used to.
The company shipped 53.9 million units in the quarter, down from 65.9 million a year earlier, representing a shipments slip of 18 per cent. …
Dell: New storage dish? Nah - we'll just mash up EqualLogic and Compellent
Steady adaptation, no new products and no super-niche specialisation please: these were the three takeaways El Reg storage desk retrieved from a briefing with Alan Atkinson, vice president and general manager at Dell Storage.
The impression we gained was that Dell is set on expanding its mainstream enterprise storage offering's …
Cloud rains cash for EMC: VMWare win means Tucci's team can take it easy
EMC did the business in its second calendar 2013 quarter, notching up solid gains in revenues and profits. Revenue was propped up by brisk trade in cloud virtualisation services from VMware and sales of scale-out NAS storage from its Isilon unit. The RSA and Information Intelligences groups slowed EMC down a smidge, however. …
Flash slab lab blab: NVMe-friendly PCIe spotted on HGST's cards
Samsung and Micron have announced NVMe-compatible PCIe flash storage cards - and now hardware from WD subsidiary HGST has been certified as conformant to the specification.
The emergence of the three products signals that new tech spec NVMe is becoming the standard way for software to control and efficiently access PCIe- …
EMC's ViPR sinks fangs into LUN aggregation
Can ViPR - EMC's virtual data management package - really aggregate logical storage units across different devices?
EMC's new storage virtualisation and management layer of software, ViPR, is interposed between server applications and arrays like VMAX. If it cannot aggregate LUNS across the drive arrays underneath it then this …
Dear diary, new twirling models, $630m from WD, v. good day - Seagate
Seagate has announced its 2.5-inch enterprise drive with added flash steroids is now available to all. IBM uses this hybrid disk in its System x servers.
Meanwhile, Seagate has also won $630m from rival Western Digital in a battle over allegations WD misused Seagate's trade secrets: an arbitrator awarded Seagate the nine-figure …
SanDisk starts beating path to 3D NAND flash
SanDisk is taking its own technology route to 3D NAND - the stacking of recording layers within a flash chip atop one another to provide more capacity in the same footprint.
SanDisk is currently working on its new BiCS (Bit-Cost Scalable NAND) product and it could be deliverable in the fourth quarter of 2015, or sometime during …
EMC Cloud Czar packs up and goes for a hike
EMC Cloud Czar Mike Feinberg has left the Hopkinton-based storage biz after a rejig of product lines, El Reg can reveal.
His disappearance from EMC's Exec Bios webpage caused some talk among our correspondent's contacts - an older version can be found here.
According to EMC's PR folk, senior veep Feinberg has left to "pursue …
Micron: Our flashy girth leaves the competition cowering in impotence
Micron has bragged it has the broadest SSD range in the industry during a July 18 investor call, claiming it outclasses all its competitors from Fusion-io to Toshiba.
A slide from the event (registration required) backs this up, although Samsung is now represented in the PCIe area with its NVMe XS1715 SSD - co-incidentally …
Laser-wielding boffins develop ETERNAL MEMORY from quartz
Southampton Uni research boffins have demonstrated access to pulsed femtosecond laser-written data bits in fused nano-structured quartz glass, which can store the data for a practically unlimited time.
Jingyu Zhang, a researcher at the uni's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) led the boffins of the Physical Optics Group in a …
Quantum sales boss rocks up at PernixData
Quantum's recently resigned sales supremo Ted Stinson has joined virtualisation startup PernixData to head up its sales operation.
Stinson, who left disk/tape data protection and file management supplier Quantum earlier this month, is excited about PernixData's "A-plus investors, exceptional founding team and very strong beta …
SEC filing spills beans on Falconstor's breakup with ex-main man McNiel
A recent SEC filing has brought to light some of the details of the recent sudden departure of the CEO of standalone storage software shipper FalconStor - including the admonition that if the SEC didn't insist on the publication of the agreement, that neither party would tell all on, er, Twitter...
The storage firm is living on …
Violin: We know VDI scares you, biz boss... But what if it was cheap?
Flash array biz Violin Memory claims it has found the lowest cost virtual desktops in the industry in Atlantis Computing.
It's partnering with Atlantis Computing to deliver its ILIO virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software running on Violin's flash arrays and says this provides the lowest total cost of ownership for virtual …
Samsung lifts lid on 1.6TB flash whopper spaffing data at 3GB/s
Samsung has developed its first NVMe-connected 3,000MB/s solid-state drive (SSD). And it is extending its three-bit-per-cell range of flash storage with a 1TB whopper.
NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express, and is a standardised protocol for applications to access data stored on PCIe-connected SSDs via a software driver. …
SanDisk: 3D flash chips? Sure, buddy, we'll see you in 2016
Electronics giant SanDisk will be deliberately late in building 3D flash dies. It believes current NAND chip technology has two more generations left before going 3D becomes cost-effective.
Like every other NAND fab operator, SanDisk's strategy is to shrink the current 2D NAND dies as small as possible and then start stacking …
Egnyte flips the bird at storage big boys, adds Google Drive access
Egnyte has added Google Drive access to its BYOD file access, sync'n'share mix, further weakening the mainstream storage vendors' hold on file data access.
The startup offers file access, sharing and synchronisation services across end-users' various smart devices, from desktop through laptops and tablets to mobile phones, …
Big boy Fujitsu crushes stroppy upstarts in storage boffins' trials
Fujitsu's Eternus disk array has topped the SPC-2 benchmark charts, with an IBM SVC-Storwize V7000 combination in second place.
The SPC-2 storage benchmark measures how an array performs doing large sequential I/Os and looks at three workloads: large file processing; large database queries; and video-on-demand. The benchmarks …
VCs take a nasty cold bath on Drobo deal, leave Barrall 'delighted'
So here on the El Reg storage desk, people talk of little else but the Drobo-Connected Data merger at the moment. Just what exactly is the story there?
It's interesting stuff. Take a look at our little timeline here:
Drobo timeline
- 2005 - Data Robotics founded
- October 2005 - $6 million A-round funding
- July 2006 - $12 …
Just what is Big Blue now shipping exclusively to the Chinese?
IBM is pushing out another China-only mid-range Storwize array, the V5000.
Judging by previous experience, it might eventually be shipped worldwide, but for the time being, IBM is sticking to PROC and ROC*.
Back in August last year, the V3500 was launched for the Chinese geography, with the V3700 coming in two months later, and …
Emulex execs in boardroom-chair-swap as investors circle
Emulex execs have performed a three-way exec and boardroom chair swap as activist investors look for ways to squeeze the company for a big payday.
Board chairman Paul Folino reverts to being a director, CEO Jim McCluney becomes executive chairman, and president and chief operating officer Jeff Benck becomes CEO and president. …
6Gbps is for FOOLS! Now THIS is what we call a SAS adapter - LSI
LSI has begun shipping its first 12Gbps SAS adapters for storage arrays, servers and workstations, doubling the prevailing 6Gbps SAS data rate.
LSI's SAS 9300 HBA (Host Bus Adapter) runs at 12Gbit/sec, delivers over 1 million IOPS through a PCIe 3.0 connection to hosts, and comes in four versions:
9300-8e with 8 ports
9300-8i …
Seagate drops new summer spinners, bares 'quiet', 'fast' models
Seagate is slinging two new spinners our way just in time for summer: a large one and a small one.
The larger model is another variation on Seagate's 3.5-in 4TB technology: the Terascale. This is a 4-platter drive with 625Gbit/in2 areal density, spinning at 5,900 rpm, a 6Gbit/s SATA interface, 64MB cache, and a 160MB/sec …
Yes, we ARE gobbling flashy bit-bucket biz ScaleIO, beams EMC
EMC has confirmed that it is buying Israeli virtual storage upstart ScaleIO, following its acquisitive interest in the company becoming known in late June.
To recap, ScaleIO's ECS (Elastic Converged Storage) software turns a server's direct-attached storage (DAS) into a shared SAN (storage area network). ECS is, in effect a …
Web ad giant (Google) makes its own flash? Speak your branes
We wondered last week or so how advertising giant Google could appear in a Gartner chart comparing sales in the enterprise flash drive market.
Apparently the web goliath makes its own solid-state drives for its sprawling customised storage systems, and the amounts are big enough to register on Gartner's market-scanning radar …
Intel waves LONG TENT POLE, pokes Data Domain boxes with it
EMC has boosted the backup performance of its mid-range Data Domain boxes yet again by upgrading to Intel Sandy Bridge processors. Avamar, Mozy and NetWorker have all been revved up too.
The news came at a hyped-up Backup and Recovery Systems launch in New York at which EMC claimed it had the longest pole in the tent for …
Quantum loses senior sales veep to mystery upstart
It never rains but it pours; so it must seem for data protection biz Quantum, which has just lost its worldwide sales veep. Fortunately the previous sales head is stepping up to the plate once more.
Ted Stinson was appointed to head up Quantum's sales function in June 2011, coming in from Symantec where he was VP for sales …
Western Digital gobbles VeloBit in flash cache cash splash dash
Western Digital is buying flash cache software startup VeloBit and its HyperCache product technology.
HyperCache accelerates information access by relying on banks of fast RAM and putting a compressed copy of highly active data stored on disk into SSDs or any other kind of flash. The algorithms for doing this are said to lead …
Backup software bods tempt users with hot new (pricing) model
Canadian backup software provider Asigra has introduced the first backup pricing model with a pay-for-recovery element, effectively - so it says - introducing a price cut.
Asigra says its new pricing model is intended to push customers into paying less for the backup capacity licence and more for the recovery part of the data …
HDS gives HUS a flashy boost, polishes NAS platters too
HDS has bumped up the power of its mid-range HUS VM array with an all-flash box, added new UCP flavours and bumped up the power of its disk-based HUS and Hitachi NAS Platform arrays.
All-flash HUS VM
HDS's HUS VM is the upper-end version of its Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) array with top-end VSP array micro-code added. The HUS …
Quantum: You know how EVERYONE's moved to the cloud? Yep... us too.
Disk and tape data protection provider Quantum is morphing into a cloud-based managed services provider, according to a company executive.
Henrik Rosendahl, Quantum's senior veep for cloud solutions, confirmed the company's move away from hardware and into the cloud in a video interview at the 12th International Cloud Expo …
Staggering disk biz Overland heads for Nasdaq exit …. again
Perennially almost-but-not-quite failing Overland Storage is once again under notice from Nasdaq that it might be booted out of the stock exchange after apparently falling short of the "minimum market value" required.
It's no fun at all for the beleaguered company's management as it has had to file an 8K form with the US …
VCs add Scality to give-'em-cash list: We liked it, put a RING on it
The much-derided venture capitalist can be a useful accelerant for the startup that uses the cash wisely. No matter how good your product, without the right amount of investment you won't be able to scale up product design, research and marketing to the point where you can attract the really big customers, hire the best …
