Roundup This week has been a barrage of storage news: everything from biz results boasts, big firms swallowing upstarts and new deals to product releases and annexation of new territories by a newbie... Now that the dust has settled, let's have a look around and re-assess the landscape.

• Quantum announced a new DXi4701 deduplicating backup to disk appliance with a pay-as-you-grow expansion scheme. Its capacity ranges from 5TB to 135TB from its 4TB self-encrypting disk drives.

  Compared to "the leading competitive offering," (code for Data Domain), the 4701 has 42 per cent lower power consumption and a 192 per cent denser footprint. It ingests data at up to 5TB/hour. The DXi range starts at the DXi V-series of SW-only virtual appliances and then rises up through the DXi4000, 4700, 6700 and 6800 products to the range-topping DXi8500.

• Tape automation specialist SpectraLogic appointed Bruce Kornfeld, the ex-Compellent marketeer, as its interim chief marketing officer to replace the departed Molly Rector who has joined DDN as its CMO. Kornfeld has been consulting for SpectraLogic for some time.
• Filer accelerator Avere said it had a great 2013 with record bookings, 100 per cent year-on-year bookings growth in the second half, 150 per cent plus in the fourth quarter.
• Storage virtualisation software shipper DataCore is expanding its engineering team and European operations with engineering people based in London, headed up by Nick Connolly, senior director and chief architect. Its marketing team in Munich has been increased by two heads.
• Slowly reviving PCIe flash card shipper Fusion-io has an ioControl hybrid flash+disk array product and commissioned/arranged for the Tolly Group to compare its performance against a "Conventional NVRAM+SSD+Disk Array." It found the Fusion-io hybrid system provided up to 700 per cent better performance with random I/O. The other system isn't named but we strongly suspect it's a mainstream array and not a startup hybrid array from Nimble Storage, Tegile or Tintri. Such paid-for comparisons that don't name the competing product are a pain in the ass.
• All-flash array startup Pure Storage is expanding in Europe and increasing its presence in the Netherlands. It now has 40 channel partners in Europe. Pure says it's the fastest-growing storage company in history, based on its average 50 per cent revenue growth per quarter. CEO Scott Dietzen has said he'll shave his head if the company can grow 100 per cent from one quarter to the next. Pure has replication in beta tests and anticipates announcing its availability soon. It is also working on single pane of glass management for multiple arrays.
• Symantec has a new version of NetBackup, v 7.6, which has 400x faster recovery of VMware VMs "by booting directly from backup storage." It's integrated with VMware Changed Block Tracking and can avoid doing full VM backups, with consequent incremental backups being up to "35 times faster than traditional approaches." Symantec says "Customers can protect 300 virtual machines in 300 seconds, pro-actively backing up and recovering data with NetBackup Replication Director for VMware by leveraging NetApp array-based snapshots.
• Storage array enclosure flogger Dot Hill has introduced Ultra48 AssuredSAN arrays with almost 58TB capacity using 2.5-inch disk and/or solid state drives in a 2U box. "Multiple OEM customers are already engaged with active evaluations and all Ultra48 configurations will be generally available this quarter for all OEM and channel partners." This cheap, deep and fast box delivers "up to 6,400 MB/sec sustained reads and 5,300 MB/sec writes.
• Flash card fettler SanDisk's SanDisk Ventures arm has invested in Nexenta, the developer of ZFS-based storage array software. The amount was not revealed. Nexenta now has more than 5,000 customers.
• Hybrid flash+disk array startup Tegile has replaced Dell-supplied SAN storage at the St. Paul Public Housing Agency. The Zebi HA2100 array will support VMware VDI, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008 R2, Exchange 2007 and Citrix XenApp for virtual application delivery. The Tegile announcement said; "The existing tiered solution required a forklift upgrade to add capacity and costly licensing additions to alleviate the need for manual tiering in order to address constant battles between the performance and capacity requirements of applications." Fibre Channel attachment was involved.
• HP has a new StoreVirtual (LeftHand VSA) 4335 hybrid array for small and medium businesses. It uses Adaptive Optimisation to automatically move the most active 256KB chunks of data from disk to SSD. HP says this hybrid SSD/HDD scheme "delivers 59 per cent lower cost than using SSDs alone." It claims that its technology :"maintains nearly 100 per cent utilisation of SSDs [and] increases SSD efficiency by allocating top tier capacity for business critical application data and storing replicated (RAID 10, RAID 10+1) or parity data (RAID 5 and 6) on more economical SAS disks." It costs from $41,000 and you scale out by adding more systems.

There we go. On to the next piece of major news. Cisco is buying EM... - only joking [That's enough - Ed.] ®

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  https://www.theregister.com/2014/02/24/datacore_ceo_software_defined_storage_is_an_accelerator/

• Quantum expects to see Q3 revenue hike, sheds 60 extra bodies (16 January 2014)

  https://www.theregister.com/2014/01/16/quantum_cuts_people_for_hopedfor_profit/

• SpectraLogic asks US patent office to probe Overland patent (30 December 2013)

  https://www.theregister.com/2013/12/30/spectralogic_queries_overland_patent/

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