Earlier Storage
Mutant array upstarts feast on EMC, NetApp's leavings
Blocks and Files Mainstream storage vendors have a potentially huge blind spot in their product strategy and hybrid array startups are now eating away at their customer base. Nimble Storage, Tegile and Tintri, specifically, appear to be benefiting at the expense of mainstream storage giants EMC and NetApp.
When the storage array mainstream met …
Damn you, world! WHY can't I have an object store on my desktop?
Storagebod Another year, another conference season sees me stuck on this side of the pond watching the press releases from afar, promising myself that I’ll watch the keynotes online - or "on demand" as people have it these days. I never find the time and have to catch up with the 140 character synopses that regularly appear on Twitter.
I …
Avere releases FXT3800 speed filer
Avere has upped its accelerated edge filer game with the FXT 3800, which is 40 per cent faster on the SPECsfs2008 benchmark than the existing FXT 3500.
FXT products started out as filer accelerators and evolved into small (or edge) filers as well, relegating existing filers to be bulk file stores with hot files served from the …
Quantum spring-cleans StorNext for file-hungry arty small biz
Storage biz Quantum had made its StorNext product suitable for small and medium-sized firms with a new metadata appliance, disk enclosure boxes and a low-end tape library.
StorNext stores files on primary arrays, in slower-access object storage arrays, or even slower access tape vaults. Its users don't need to know exactly where …
Mm.. you like RAID? Ooh, you want flash. Try this super-Hadooper
Intel is integrating an LSI PCIe flash card and RAID adapter into its new RAID SSD Cache Controllers intended for caching data from direct-attached disks on servers.
LSI Nytro MEgaRAID card LSI Nytro MegaRAID card
LSI offers its Nytro PCIe flash technology in its WarpDrive flash cards and MegaRAID adapters, in effect adding …
Fusion slips 1.6TB solid wedge into Hollywood scribblers' slots
Fusion-io has fattened up its ioFX card that plugs flash storage into a workstation's PCIe bus: performance, we're told, is up fourfold and capacity is up from 420GB to 1.6TB.
The technology allows processors to access data at flash speeds, which is very much faster than disk transfer rates. Lower-capacity cards typically act as …
Boffins say flash disk demands new RAID designs
Solid state disks (SSDs) are wonderfully fast, but every time you write to them, the semiconductors involved degrade just a little, a property that means you swap them into established storage rigs at your peril.
That's the conclusion of a new paper, “Stochastic Analysis on RAID Reliability for Solid-State Drives” from a pair of …
What'll we do tonight, Kieran? Same thing we do every night, Tintri....
Hybrid VM-aware array upstart Tintri is adding array-side, per-VM replication in a version 2.0 VMstore product software release, hoping to enjoy the success established storage player NetApp has had in purpose-built storage systems for virtual machines.
CEO Kieran Harty says Tintri has been having phenomenal quarters, replacing …
Everything faster than everything, boast soft flash wizards
Caching software startup VeloBit came to our notice as a provider of server flash caching software that could turn bog-standard commodity SSDs into Fusion-io-class flash caches. Now it's using its software with added tweaks to turn ordinary servers into VDI drag racers with the highest-access VDI data, like master VM images, …
HDS CTO: Man, I could just throttle our array... er, in a good way
Hitachi Data Systems has bunged primary deduplication into its network-attached storage (HNAS) kit and Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) mid-range array. That's according to the company's chief technology officer Hu Yoshida.
HNAS is the hardware-accelerated filer HDS obtained when it bought BlueArc; the system relies on programmable …
Xyratex tight-lipped over unimpressive first quarter
Comment As expected and following on from its board caving in to Baker Street Capital Management and ousting of CEO Steve Barber, Xyratex's quarterly revenues are down 34 per cent year-on-year.
Revenues for Q1 2013, ending 28 February 2013, were $195.6m, which contrasts badly with the $295.7m reported a year ago and the $265.4m reported …
Scality proudly unveils its RING to the world
Is it possible? Could a digital media company have a single storage system for rich media libraries that covers linear archiving, non-linear play-out and scales indefinitely?
Storage biz Scality says, using its object storage-based RING for Digital Media, it is.
Digital media storage can be a heterogeneous nightmare. Take …
C-round greenbacks for Greenbytes
VDI flash array HW and SW supplier Greenbytes has snagged $7 million in C-round funding.
The funding comes from existing investors Generation Investment Management and Battery Ventures. It will be used "to continue the expansion and acceleration of global sales, marketing and partner development efforts, and for ongoing research …
Has Europe finally passed Peak Disk?
Disk drive sales in the EMEA region have showed falls in both units and capacity according to research from Futuresource Consulting.
HDD unit sales peaked in 2010 at 28.06 million units, falling to 25.91 million in 2011 and 21.48 million in 2012, a 17 per cent decrease between the latter two years.
Mats Larsson, a senior market …
IBM: We have placed the Big Data moon on this stick
IBM Research has come up with a new package it calls BLU Acceleration, intended to speed up (big) data analysis and reporting of data held in DB2 and Informix databases, amongst others.
The BLU Acceleration package includes these handy features:
Data skipping - an ability to skip data that doesn't need analysing, such as …
Hostile Xyratex investors claim CEO's scalp in aggressive haircut
Activist investors have forced out Xyratex CEO Steve Barber in their hunt for a bigger and faster return on their investment.
Baker Street Capital Management has amassed a 23 per cent holding in Xyratex comprising 6.2 million shares, and believes that Xyratex's development of its ClusterStor HPC array product, following a …
NetApp snoozing at the wheel of incumbency juggernaut, says chap
Equity analyst firm William Blair thinks NetApp is failing to face up to the realities of being an incumbent storage supplier, and could even exit the hardware business.
A research note from William Blair, dated March 17th, has fluttered its way to the storage desk at El Reg. It says:
"We sense a company grappling with massive …
STEC - sorry sTec - opens direct and channel sales with name change
What the Zeus is going on? STEC has changed to sTec and it's bragging about its new direct and channel sales program.
What's happened is that STEC - sorry, sTec - is adding both direct sales and channel sales alongside its mainstream OEM sales organisation.
sTec reckons its enterprise customers will buy direct through OEMs, but …
Behold: Ten storage chieftains whose products hold humanity's data
Who are the ten most influential storage bosses? It should be an easy list to make but what do we mean by influential and should they be currently in post?
"Influential" means more than that just "our customers have bought boatloads of our kit!" An influential company's competitors have had to react to its products and strategy …
Tech is the biggest problem facing archiving
Blocks and Files Technology is the biggest problem facing archiving. Archives grow bigger and bigger. The amount of data to be kept grows ever bigger and threatens to overflow an archive installation. So, let's use LTO-6 tapes instead of LTO-5 ones because they hold twice as much data in the same physical space.
That's logical but there is an …
Why do they even call it a backup appliance? Just call it an EMC
In the purpose-built backup appliance market, IDC numbers show EMC reigning supreme in revenue share terms while everybody else basically sucks. Only one rival, Symantec, has a greater than 10 per cent share.
Here are the bald revenue share per cent numbers for the fourth 2012 quarter as tracked by IDC's number-crunchers:
- EMC …
'Proactive Wellness' rebranded as 'Infosight' by Nimble
A proposal document we've seen from a Nimble Storage reseller has shown that Nimble is branding its Proactive Wellness feature as Infosight.
What it means: Nimble Storage uses its customer array sensor data to predict, amongst others: when a storage array will fill up; when a drive may fail, complete with an automatically-opened …
Boardroom brouhaha brewing at Emulex after Endace buy
You win some; you lose some. Emulex has completed its acquisition of networking analytics company Endace against the opposition of activist investor Elliott Management, but had to accept the appointment of two Elliott nominees to its board.
Emulex mostly sells SAN Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and has a line of Ethernet Converged …
Boss of Irish-based R&D hub: Man, this place is the back of beyond
EMC Ireland country manager Bob Savage is distinctly underwhelmed by Cork Airport.
There are 3,000 EMC staff in its Ballincollig, County Cork operation and they are managed by Savage who has been in the country manager role for five years.
In an interview in the Irish Independent, he says Cork airport suffers from not having …
Sync'n'share specialist Egnyte signs senior staff to spark growth
Cloud storage and sync'n'share startup Egnyte is trying to ignite its growth rocket boosters by adding fresh new executives and board directors.
Egnyte was founded in 2007 and provides what it calls "enterprise-class file sharing" to around 30,000 customers, storing some 12PB of their data in three data centres, two in the US …
Just what is Oracle going to plop out as its golden storage egg?
Analysis What's going on with Oracle storage? Besides tape, which seems to be doing fine, does the IT giant have a long-term, viable external storage array product line at all?
Oracle's general hardware business is in decline. Witness the chart below showing quarterly overall sales including hardware product revenues; storage sales …
Amazon joins Dropbox clones, hints at cloud storage margins
Amazon.com has become the latest outfit to decide copying Dropbox is a fine idea, further cloudifying its Cloud Drive with a desktop client that does the usual store 'n' synch between multiple devices while also offering some interesting insights into cloud economics.
The nominally-profitable online retailer has operated Cloud …
Flash man: Headcount at my company is UP not DOWN
Nimbus Data CEO Tom Isakovich disagreed with parts of our story about his firm's HALO software upgrade.
"Your article today is factually incorrect," he wrote, before bringing up perceived weaknesses in the flash array from rival Pure Storage. Pure's CEO Scott Dietzen, contacted for comment, naturally took issue with much of that …
Production-ready ZFS offers cosmic-scale storage for Linux
The maintainers of the native Linux port of the ZFS high-reliability filesystem have announced that the most recent release, version 0.6.1, is officially ready for production use.
"Over two years of use by real users has convinced us ZoL [ZFS on Linux] is ready for wide scale deployment on everything from desktops to super …
EMC, Carbonite fight off patent pursuer
It may be too soon to say that the tide is turning, but EMC and Carbonite have become the latest IT companies to beat off a high-profile patent lawsuit.
Law360 reports that EMC and Carbonite had their win on the basis of the validity of the patents.
The suit started in August 2010 when Oasis Research accused 17 companies of …
I've got a super free multi-petabyte storage box for you: /dev/null
Storage Bod As data volumes increase in all industries and the challenges of information management continue to grow, we look for places to store our hoarded bytes. Inevitably the subject of archiving and tape comes up.
It is the cheapest place to archive data by some way; my calculations give tape a four-year cost of something in the …
Flasheteer Nimbus breathes on its HALO, gives it a rub
Nimbus Data has updated its all-flash array operating system, HALO, adding analytics, a REST API, and mobile phone access with HALO Mobile.
HALO is Nimbus' OS that powers its Gemini, E-CLass and S-Class all-flash arrays. The analytics features include:
- Real-time and historical monitoring and reporting capabilities with 200+ …
The battle for control at the firm that brought SSD to the enterprise
Analysis It's a narrow line to have to tread and STEC chairman Kevin Daly has not kept to it in his response to the nasty letter from hedge fund Balch Hill calling for STEC CEO Mark Moshayedi's head and a new set of directors for mismanagement of STEC since the EMC OEM deal glory years.
There is going to be a contested vote with a proxy …
Brocade's fat pipes a-singin' the Fibre Channel song
Brocade is singing its Fibre Channel song with renewed vigour - aiming to double speed, get OpenStack support, push on with 16gig products and try to render Virtual Instruments diagnostic gear redundant.
It has announced the 6520: a denser Fibre Channel switch with 96 16Gbit/s ports in its 2U enclosure, and it also has Brocade's …
Join us now for all the storage whispers: Heard about the XtremIO buy?
Silicon Valley Confidential The Vulture has been busy listening on the storage beat to rumour, (s)innuendo, gossip and insider info, taking it from the best of sources and bringing it to you for entertainment, wonder and schadenfreude. None of this is verified or conformed by vendors but it does come from the very best of sources, top table folks.
Here is …
Gartner magicians mumble, fling bones, scrawl new disk pentacle
Gartner's magicians have thrown their animal bones and precious relics up in the air and discerned a new pattern in the way they landed; general-purpose disk arrays.
The magicians have invented a new Magic Quadrant (MQ) and say:
Improvements in scalability, availability, performance and functionality of midrange storage systems …
Quantum: No! Object storage CANNOT exchange data with tape!
Quantum introduced object storage to its StorNext data virtualisation product last week, saying data could be automatically moved between primary disk, object storage and tape. But actually there is effectively a wall between tape and object storage.
StorNext virtualises the location of data in primary disk arrays, tape storage …
Indie array-flogger tries to tempt flash mob with COLD HARD CASH
According to upstart Pure, other vendors' flash arrays don't deliver the advantages they are supposed to. Standing out from the crowd is what a new flash array start-up has to do, and having a marketing message saying it's a top tier all-flash array (AFA) vendor alongside EMC, NetApp and SolidFire is all very well but Pure doesn …
It's a BYO-slingshot party in the Silicon Valley of Elah
Blocks and Files Silicon Valley is the new Valley of Elah, the place where David slew Goliath by using a disruptive innovation. Today's Silicon Elah is the holy ground of Clayton Christensen's venture capitalists' bible, The Innovator's Dilemma, and its incredibly powerful idea of disruptive innovation.
Oddly Christensen is giant-like in …
Flash card latency: Time to get some marks on benches
Fusion-io flash cards outperformed a slew of competitors in a Marklogic NoSQL benchmark reported by StorageReview - for which much thanks.
The benchmark rig is detailed in the article text and it notes that tested storage configs must have a more-than-650GB usable capacity, meaning individual flash devices can be bunched up. …
Quantum tries to attract HOT TV stars ... by adding object storage to archive
Quantum is introducing a 2-tier archive inside its StorNext data management product for TV biz types. The new gear has disk-based object storage front-ending a tape library, providing both nearline and long-term archive stores with automated movement between them.
Details are sparse, but it will demo the object storage product …
Swiss boffins unleash power of graphene on flash mem
A Swiss government research lab has reinvented flash memory using graphene and molybdenite in a way that should be faster, scale smaller, use less energy and yet more flexible than boring old NAND.
Molybdenite is MoS2, molybdenum disulfide, which is similar to graphite and also has a lubricating effect. Atomically it is a layer …
