Earlier Data Center
Seagate: Who us... no flash cred? Check out our PCIe card, suckers
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 …
Isilon OneFS snorts dedupe magic
EMC World 2013 EMC is preparing the next version of its Isilon OneFS NAS operating system, and is giving the technology a deduplication capability and support for object storage.
The next version of Isilon will integrate with EMC's ambitious software-defined storage ViPR technology, along with support for APIs from Amazon S3 and Atmos, Hadoop …
'Quantum network? We've had one for years,' says Los Alamos
The boffins at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are known as a secretive lot; a much understated lot, in fact. Rather than cause a fuss, researchers there have quietly published a paper showing they've had a flexible quantum network – something rather a lot of people are interested in – up and running for two and a half years …
Cray descends to midrange HPC shops with baby XC30 supers
Supercomputer maker Cray had been hinting that it would deliver a new cut-down version of its "Cascade" XC30 system, and the machine is being unveiled on Tuesday at the Cray User Group meeting in Napa Valley, California.
The XC30-AC machines go into more standard cabinets like those used with the XE5 and XE6 predecessors to the …
EMC: 'Hardware? We stopped doing that YEARS ago'
EMC World 2013 Storage titan EMC doesn't really believe in hardware any more – the value is in the software.
The company has been on a shift for the past decade to wean itself off of a dependency on proprietary gear, and has instead been pouring resources into developing clever software, EMC head honcho Joe Tucci told The Register at EMC World …
The real reason why Dell wants to go private: To fondle big Boomis
Dell has added an API management tool to its Boomi platform, which connects up clouds and in-house applications.
The new component - which monitors and controls software interfaces used to hook together various services within an enterprise - is included in an upgrade that also adds new integration and process management …
Micron brandishes sharp new flash blade, lunges at Fusion-io
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
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 …
Oracle, SAP under attack: How cloud upstarts steal their lunch
Analysis After more than 20 years coining it, the Goliaths of the lucrative enterprise software world are about to meet their Davids: nimble rivals touting technology at a sensible price.
And as we shall see, with customers jumping on cheaper services, ultimately the giants could be destroyed by their reliance on expensive support …
Cisco borgs VHA packet core
Troubled mobile carrier Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) is pressing ahead with the network upgrade it hopes will rebuild its fortunes in the country, with Cisco to provide the foundation of its 4G network backbone.
The Borg's ASR 5500 is to be rolled out as Voda's multimedia core platform, the companies say. VHA is preparing …
Dell snaps up Enstratius for cloud wrangling
Having bought a slew of management tools for server virtualization and clouds either directly or through its acquisition of Quest Software, the last thing you might think IT giant Dell needs is another cloud management tool. Wrong. Dell has just inhaled Enstratius to give it a SaaSy cloud control freak to complement its existing …
EMC throws ViPR into software-defined party
If you can't beat it, eat it - that seems to be EMC's idea with the launch of ViPR, a scheme by the storage provider to gain a foothold in data centers infected with low-cost IT gear.
ViPR can work as a storage controller for traditional and newer infrastructures, and also talk to older systems, EMC announced on Monday at its …
Platform clouds: The hot battle for developers' hearts and minds
Analysis It has been a decade since Microsoft announced its .NET framework and the Common Language Runtime - where C# and other languages do their frolicking on Windows systems. And thanks to the proliferation of open source programming languages and frameworks, which are the foundations of emerging platform clouds, this could very well …
Juniper betas Contrail control freak for software-defined nets
Interop 2013 Juniper Networks is fast-tracking its Contrail software-defined network control freak to try to blunt the advances of myriad other players that have crashed onto the SDN bandwagon from all angles of attack. The JunosV Contrail Controller, which was not expected to be commercially available until sometime in the first half of …
BlackBerry infrastructure hit by ANOTHER outage
BlackBerry says an outage hit network customers today, but claims that services are getting back to normal.
UK readers told us that BlackBerry network services died at 10am this morning. BlackBerry confirmed the problems via Twitter three hours later and provided us with this statement:
We can confirm that our technical teams …
Google Chrome slips web fix to addicts suffering net withdrawal
A Google engineer has bunged an "offline mode" into the advertising giant's cloud-backed Chrome web browser. It allows users to access previously visited pages if there's suddenly no working internet connection.
Chocolate Factory programmer Randy Smith said he's added an initial implementation of the disconnected mode to the …
'Inconsistent' watchdogs throw cloud biz barons into a tizzy
A lack of consistency over the way Asian regulators approach data privacy issues has led to a slow take-up of cloud services by businesses in the region, an expert has said.
Hong Kong-based outsourcing contracts expert Peter Bullock of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that cloud providers are not offering …
EMC to reveal identity of Bourne-based storage platform
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
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 …
AWS speeds content delivery, Gangnam style
Developers and businesses keen to reach customers in the the most connected country on the planet received a boost this week after Amazon Web Services announced a South Korean edge location in Seoul for its CloudFront and Route 53 platforms.
The cloudy giant’s sixth location in Asia and 40th globally will help accelerate the …
HP revamps FlexFabric fixed and modular switches
The Interop networking extravaganza kicks off next week in Las Vegas, and Hewlett-Packard's Networking division is trying to get a jump on all of the chatter by previewing its latest FlexFabric fixed and modular switches as well as rolling out a new carrier-grade physical router and a virtual one.
The first new box that HP is …
Dell tweaks Foglight virty management to control freak VDI, storage
Quest Software ate Vizioncore and VKernel, and Dell bought Quest. Now their products have to be rationalized, so in conjunction with the launch of what would have been a rev of the VKernel Operations Suite, Dell has decided to put the Foglight brand on its server, storage, and network monitoring and management tools, and thus …
Stackdriver fluffs up cloudy management tool
Stackdriver, yet another entrant into the increasingly crowded cloud-monitoring racket, has uncloaked from stealth mode and fired off its Intelligent Monitoring tool to babysit applications running on the Rackspace Cloud and Amazon Web Services heavenly infrastructure.
Dan Belcher and Izzy Azeri formed Stackdriver in June 2012, …
Reg boffins: Help us answer this Big Blue RAID data recovery poser
IBM's research department haz 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
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
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 …
IBM considers System X surgery: Will it ruin its sexy HPC figure?
HPC blog The increasing amount of speculation over IBM's potential unloading of all or part of its System x (x86-based servers) business onto Lenovo has high performance computing (HPC) players wondering about the implications for the sector. What would be the eventual impact on IBM, and the HPC market in general, if Big Blue were to …
EMC offers 'continuous protection' to hot 'n' heavy VMAX users
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, …
NetApp's Tour de France quest falls flat
When big vendors take on major sporting sponsorships, the first thing that usually happens is lots of shiny happy marketing material about just how the vendor's technology will propel athletes to success.
So when NetApp in 2012 threw its name, technology and cash behind German cycling team Endura the group at the centre of the …
A10 ships new iron, OS
A10 Networks has announced new gateway devices and a revision to its ACOS operating system.
The three new chunks of metal are the 6430 / 6430S (same unit, with and without SSL support) and the half-the-power, half-the-price 5430S.
A10's director of product marketing Paul Nicholson introduced El Reg to yet another measure of …
Report: IBM, Lenovo x86 server deal hits the skids
Only late last week, the scuttlebutt was that IBM and Lenovo Group were moving along at a rapid pace so Big Blue could offload all or part of its System x x86 server business to the Chinese builder. Now, the latest word is that the deal has stalled as the two companies are haggling about the price.
The first rumors about a …
MapR revs up HBase queries with M7 Hadoop distro
You are not just imagining it. Every commercial distributor of the Hadoop system for storing and chewing through unstructured data has come up with its own a different way to deliver something akin to SQL query functionality while at the same time boosting the speed of ad hoc queries.
MapR Technologies is one of the earlier …
Arista monster switches fluff up cloud with 1 million virty machines
Data center switch vendor Arista Networks is giving the incumbent peddlers of switchery heartburn again with the launch of its 7500 E Series modular switches.
The upstart company, which has Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim as its chairman and chief development officer, is taking switching up another notch on a few …
VMTurbo trousers $7.5m to bring Adam Smith's hand to more clouds
Adam Smith-loving cloud biz VMTurbo has secured $7.5m in C-round funding from venture capitalists Globespan Capital Partners.
That makes for $25m in funding in three rounds, with the second round hitting in November 2011 when Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners kicked in $10m. The company did not announce details …
FalconStor on 13th quarterly loss: 'Unpredictable' OEM dragged us down
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
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 …
Oracle reveals secret recipe for free DIY storage cloud
World+dog may be busy preparing Dropbox clones, but Oracle seems to think a better idea is to build your own domestic cloud storage rig and has therefore published a recipe for doing so.
Naturally the recipe includes lots of Oracle products – VirtualBox, Solaris 11.1 and ZFS are all required - but non-Oracle open source kit also …
SGI tax bennies push bigger profit in Q1
Jorge Titinger, the CEO who was brought into Silicon Graphics last year to clean up the mess made by $87m in low-margin deals that wrecked the company's bottom line for a few quarters, is probably breathing a little easier now that the most recent quarter has ended. Not just because revenues were up, but because the remaining $ …
Cray peddles more iron than expected in Q1
It is tough to find a choppier business than the supercomputer market, and Cray CEO Peter Ungaro had to remind Wall Street once again to not judge the company on a single quarter, and particularly on the first quarter that it has just turned in.
While the company's top line was a little better than expected, issues with the …
Cloudera revs up Impala SQL for Hadoop
Commercial Hadoop distributor Cloudera is first out of the gate with a true SQL layer that sits atop Hadoop.
It lets normal people – if you can call people who've mastered SQL normal – perform ad hoc queries in real time against information crammed into the Hadoop Distributed File System or the HBase database that rides atop it …
IBM storage crew: Why bury your BEST kit at the back of the larder?
Storagebod El Reg storage man Chris Mellor’s pieces on IBM’s storage revenues here and here make for some interesting reading. Things are not looking great with the exception of XIV and Storwize products.
I am not sure whether Mellor’s analysis is entirely correct as it is hard to get any granularity from IBM. But his take on Big Blue …
Object Storage: A solution in search of a problem?
Blocks and Files 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- …
