Earlier Data Center
GreenBytes' data smite knight gets Citrix green light
GreenBytes' all-flash IO Offload Engine has been certified by Citrix as compatible with XenServer, clearing the way for it to accelerate the cloudy outsourcer's virtual desktops.
The GreenBytes strategy has been to retire from the general-purpose all-flash storage array market - and concentrate on the virtual desktop (VDI) …
SMART Storage, Diablo brew a wee DRAM of MYSTERY tonic
SMART Storage and Diablo Technologies have promised to glue SMART's flash drives and Diablo's memory-channel storage (MCS) electronics into a combined product.
Diablo's website says MCS is "where the memory and flash subsystem are fused together". Well, what does that actually mean? It goes on to say: "MCS will ... allow …
Hard drives snatch hold of semi giant LSI, jump right off a cliff
LSI's latest results paint a gloomy picture for the storage giant, revealing both its revenues and profits were down last quarter.
Revenues for LSI's first fiscal 2013 quarter, ended March 31, were down to $569m. They were $600m in the previous quarter, a 5 per cent fall. A year ago revenues were up at the $622m mark, meaning …
Brocade, wake up: Cisco is here, and it ALSO has 16 gig FC
Cisco has waited two years, watching while competitor Brocade launched and sold 16Gbit/s Fibre Channel, before finally doubling the speed of its own Fibre Channel switch products, belatedly announcing 16Gbps MDS switches.
It's quite possible the networking giant had been hoping that Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) take-up …
Reduxio plots 'revolutionary' hybrid array tech: It will need it
You've got to be an optimist to found a startup, especially when you come from one that crashed and burned. Three such optimists have risen from the ashes of scale-out filer startup Exanet and started up scale-out hybrid flash firm Reduxio.
As reported by Globes, the CEO, Mark Weiner, and co-founders Nir Peleg and Amnon Strasser …
Lenovo deal to buy IBM x86 server biz moving along fast
It is becoming increasingly clear that IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is annoyed with the performance of the company's systems business. Annoyed enough to spin off all or part of its System x server business to China's Lenovo Group, according to rumors that surfaced last week.
The US channel trade rag CRN broke the story of an impending …
HP's StoreVirtual gets a bit older, decides it needs some Fibre
HP is adding Fibre Channel connectivity to its previously iSCSI access-only StoreVirtual range of arrays.
These are the re-branded LeftHand Networks iSCSI arrays and HP is introducing a new mid-range product as well as adding Fibre Channel access.
The new StoreVirtual models are:
4630 for the mid-range with 6Gbit/s SAS, a …
NetApp taps Oz cloud lab for federation exploration
NetApp has approached the University of Melbourne's Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory, seeking collaboration around the Labs' research specialties in federated public clouds.
The Reg has learned that senior NetApp employees from outside Australia visited the Lab last February. Now the Lab's Director, …
Citrix hits turbulence, cuts profit outlook
Citrix Systems is the latest big IT vendor in the Q1 earnings season to report unexpected delays in closing orders, particularly with its key XenDesktop application and desktop virtualization product. The company has cut profit expectations for Q2 and for the full year, sending shares down seven per cent to just under $63 a pop …
Opscode cooks up deals to serve Chef automation from IBM, Joyent clouds
Opscode's Chef configuration, change, and cloud management tool is spreading around the clouds and has been formally adopted on the heavenly infrastructure from IBM and Joyent.
The news comes as Opscode is hosting its ChefConf 2013 user and partner conference in San Francisco this week and is touting the uptake of Chef as a tool …
Not even Facebook, Apple's millions can halt Fusion-io's bleed
Storage firm Fusion-io reported ugly results for its third fiscal 2013 quarter, with revenues down - albeit higher than analysts had expected - and a thumping loss.
Flash NAND customers Apple and Facebook made up a whopping 50 per cent of its revenue in the second quarter, but execs said the customers' buying patterns led to an …
Wannabe ZFS rival Exablox decloaks MYSTERY NAS box
Mystery storage startup Exablox has finally uncloaked its secret project - which turned out to be a simple scale-out filer managed through a cloud-based utility.
The product is called OneBlox and is managed through OneSystem, a utility service in the cloud; there is no onboard management software. The OneBlox appliance, or node …
Mutant hybrid upstart joins pushback against storage giants
Three hybrid flash-disk array upstarts are eating away at the incumbents' market share - and El Reg has peeked under the bonnet of one to find out how.
El Reg talked about Nimble Storage and Tintri a couple of weeks ago and that prompted Tegile to pull aside the curtain and show us a few more numerical goodies.
Rob Commins, its …
Fusion-io buys NexGen
PCIe flash industry leader Fusion-io has bought a startup: hybrid flash/disk array vendor NexGen, paying $114m in cash and $5m in stock.
NexGen, founded in 2010 by its CEO John Spiers and CTO Kelly Long, uses Fusion-io flash cards in its n5 arrays which are sold to small and medium enterprises. It has total funding, that we know …
Mellanox boffins concoct chips for 100Gb/sec InfiniBand
Mellanox Technologies reported its first quarter financial results today, and Eyal Waldman, chairman and CEO at the networking chip and switch maker, said in a conference call that the company had taped out its first experimental chip that would run at 100Gb/sec and support the future Enhanced Data Rate (or EDR) version of …
Juniper pushes up sales and profits in Q1
The top brass at Juniper Networks are breathing a little bit easier as the company turned in numbers that show it is growing despite taking a big hit in sales of gear, software, and services to the US government in the first quarter.
In the quarter ended in March, Juniper nudged up revenues by 2.6 per cent to $1.03bn, and net …
Reg man crunches IBM's storage hardware revenues
Analysis IBM's under-performing storage hardware business can be understood better if we look at the quarterly revenue numbers.
For that to be made possible someone has to dive into IBM's results over the past few quarters and work out the storage hardware revenue numbers, seeing as IBM doesn't present them on a plate. That's what El Reg …
Appliances are the new data centre onesie
It has been a fun and very profitable couple of decades for upstart IT server and systems software makers.
They have thrown new server technologies at venerable mainframe and minicomputer systems and blasted the data centre into a thousand shiny metal bits. Then they lashed it all together with networks running distributed …
Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement
You often ask us to show you how to use the abilities that our experts describe. On the 17th May, join us for an hour that will change broadcasting for ever: for 60 minutes we will show you how to take advantage of the improvements and new features of virtual machine migration with Hyper-V 3.0 and Windows Server 2012.
Our award- …
World's first 5mm-thin gyrating models paraded on disk catwalk
Western Digital has launched the world's first single-platter 5mm-thick disk drives - including one with a cache of flash memory.
It's also announced an enterprise-class 2.5in drive in a 3.5in frame so as to ease migration from 3.5in performance to the XE, a 2.5in form factor.
The single-platter 5mm-thick UltraSlims are …
BitTorrent offers file sync tool for PCs and NAS
BitTorrent has opened the Alpha testing program for its new BitTorrent Sync tool to all.
Announced last January but only available to a select few, BitTorrent Sync looks a bit like the numerous DropBox-without-the-cloud-in-the-middle contenders inasmuch as it lets you set up a source of data, then involve trusted third parties …
AWS says private clouds are vaporware
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Adam Selipsky has told an event in Sydney, Australia, that private clouds aren't really clouds.
There's an element of “of course he would say that, wouldn't he” about Selipsky's remarks, which were made at an AWS Summit at which he preached to the choir by reciting AWS' well-worn mantra about low …
Facebook plans vast data center in Iowa
Facebook's fourth gigantic data center will be in Iowa, a state already favored by major infrastructure operators due to its renewable utility options.
The new data center in Altoona, Iowa, will be the company's fourth dedicated bit barn, along with facilities in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden …
Huawei: 'We're not interested in US market'
Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei has revised its enterprise sales projections downward after admitting that it has given up on plans to expand into the US market.
"We are not interested in the U.S. market anymore," Huawei executive vice president Eric Xu told Reuters. "Generally speaking, it's not a market that we pay …
Mellanox adds VM-flitting to ConnectX-3 server adapters
Switch and adapter maker Mellanox Technologies added support for virtual LAN overlays to its Ethernet switches late last year and now it is building in support for the two primary overlays into its ConnectX-3 server adapters to match.
Virtual LAN overlays make Layer 3 routing between networks invisible to those networks and look …
Nvidia Tesla bigwig: Why you REALLY won't need x86 chips soon
Interview Life is what happens when you are trying to do other things, as the old saying goes.
Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia has been perfectly honest about the fact that the graphics chip maker didn't intend to get into the supercomputing business. Rather, it was founded by a bunch of gamers who wanted better graphics …
Data centre networks are getting flatter and fitter
We have all come across the traditional corporate network with three distinct layers: the core layer dealing with heavy-duty switching and routing, which runs on socking big switches and routers; the distribution layer dealing with lighter (but still intelligent) tasks such as packet filtering and some routing; and the access …
CFO warns IBM's 'underperforming' storage crew: We'll take 'substantial action'
Analysis IBM's first quarter 2013 results were disappointing, and if you're in storage and servers at Big Blue, it appears the numbers guys are focusing on some of your product lines. In the earnings call, CFO Mark Loughridge said: "There are parts of our business that are in transition or have been under-performing like elements of our …
Astute: Hey small biz, you too can afford speedy flashy goodness
Astute has announced a lower-cost MLC flash version of its ViSX flash-based storage accelerator, saying it's good for small and medium enterprises because it costs about the same as the disk drive arrays they're buying on a $/GB basis.
The ViSX Performance Storage Appliance uses hardware TCP/IP and iSCSI acceleration with its …
You got your Tintri hat, beermat and cat: But what does it all mean?
Hands-on Virtual storage upstart Tintri is a great example of a company I would never normally care about: when it comes to storage area networks (SANs) these folks are building the data vault equivalent of Falcon 9 rockets while I'm scraping together spare change for a Vespa.
If you have an astounding offering that is aimed at a …
Big money in Big Data: SGI debuts petabyte-juggling archiving tool
The tidal wave that is unstructured file-based data is lumbering towards data centres. SGI is hoping the Big Data trend means that file access storage will become a hot property.
Meanwhile, customers love the idea of all file locations being stored in a single virtual silo, instead of multiple different silos with differing …
Diagnostics tools ARE useful, but more for the vendor than me
Storagebod It never ceases to amaze me that vendors believe that they can charge an additional fee for something which makes their product work properly, as it should have done in the first place.
I believe certain products should be free and I struggle in many ways to understand why they're not.
I can’t imagine they are sold an awful lot …
Cloudmeter pulls big data from the network, not the servers
Last year, Atomic Labs, the creator of the Pion web analytics tool, changed its name to Cloudmeter, raised some money, and set above to make its analytics tool more broadly useful for enterprises. Pion has been transformed into a broader tool called Stream, which runs on premises, and Cloudmeter has cooked up an adjunct …
SanDisk '2-3 years' away from mass-producing 3D flash chips
Enterprise flash storage is proceeding inexorably down the process-shrinking road. But what happens when the shrinkage stops and flash devices evolve from using 2D to 3D chips? SanDisk thinks it might have the answer.
SanDisk makes consumer and enterprise flash. Its CEO and co-founder, Sanjay Mehrotra, gave a glimpse into …
Are you being robbed of sleep by badly designed servers?
Sysadmin Blog How should we design the servers and end-user computers of the future?
The construction of my testlab has given me the opportunity to play with technologies I normally wouldn't be able to get my hands on. The "advanced" features in them – standard fare by now for large enterprises – have caused a measure of introspection …
Kaminario: We've made K2 faster, cheaper - NOW will you buy all-flash arrays?
The VC-backed storage crew at Kaminario make three types of K2 array: K2-D, which has DRAM modules; K2-H, with both DRAM and flash; and K2-F, which is all-flash and uses Fusion-io flash cards. But despite a market which is somewhat put off by the high cost of all-flash products - and despite a slew of rivals entering the same …
It's a CLUSTER-OFF: Asian students prep for tense, live HPC smackdown
HPC blog The first annual Asia Student Cluster Challenge (ASCC) culminates this week with a final round of competition that brings 10 university teams to Shanghai for a live cluster-off. The teams traveling to Shanghai made it past 32 other universities vying to compete in the live finale.
Teams will compete for top benchmark scores on …
WD glams up SmartWare with Dropbox
WD has glammed up its SmartWare consumer backup software with a Pro version embracing Dropbox.
Smartware presents you with a file-folder view of your, er, files, through its control centre. You can tell it to continuously backups of your files and folders, or scheduled snapshots - hourly, daily, monthly - using the specified …
IBM selling x86 server business to Lenovo?
There are rumors swirling around, again, that IBM is looking to sell off all or a portion of its x86 server business to Chinese PC maker and server partner Lenovo Group.
US channel mag CRN caught wind of something going down between IBM and Lenovo on Thursday and referenced an anonymous source with knowledge of the talks now …
Big Blue misses Q1 targets big-time thanks to systems shortfall
Big Blue did not turn in the numbers that it expected in the first quarter thanks to more than $400m in mainframe systems, related software, and intellectual property licensing deals that rolled over into the second quarter. In the quarter ended in March, revenues were off 5.1 per cent, to $23.41bn, and net income fell by 1.1 …
Facebook launches data center ticker tape
Facebook has heaped pressure on major data center operators to be more transparent, publishing a dashboard that gives up-to-the-minute figures on the efficiency of the social network's gigantic bit barns.
The dashboards for the company's Prineville, Oregon, and Forest City, North Carolina, datacenters were made available on …
Gridstore does classic founder-to-CTO jive
Scale-out filer storage start-up Gridstore's founder is shuffling sideways to the CTO spot as his firm recruits a new CEO.
Gridstore was founded by its previous CEO, Kelly Murphy, and its chairman is Geoff Barrall of Drobo and BlueArc fame. Now, Murphy has stepped back to the chief technology officer role and brought aboard …
