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Data-centre biz Phoenix NAP's storage takes a nap, service goes titsup
Faulty hardware at data-centre operator Phoenix NAP has knackered storage systems for customers' virtual machines.
A message on the cloud-hosting biz's status page blamed the outage on equipment at its data centre in Amsterdam. The service fell over at 5pm MST, or midnight UK time, on Tuesday.
Amsterdam is one of three Phoenix …
In London on 25 Sept? Join us in the pub: It's time for storagebeers
Storagebod So as the evenings draw in, what could be nicer than a decent pint of beer with great company?
Well, this isn’t that. It’s a #storagebeers to be held in London on 25 September. There’s a few storage events around this date and we thought that it would be an ideal opportunity to bring the storage community together.
So if you …
Seagate REJECTED buyout offer for Virident – analyst
Hard drive supremos Seagate had first refusal on buying out enterprise flash startup Virident – and turned it down, leaving WD free to snap it up for $685m.
This little bombshell burst forth from a report on a Seagate Analyst Day by Stifel Nicolaus' chief, Aaron Rakers. A second juicy nugget was that Rakers thinks there were …
Speaking in Tech: 'I'm not a pimp just because I wear a fedora'
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
It's another episode of El Reg's weekly Wednesday tech news cast, giving you the run-down on everything worth knowing about in the enterprise and consumer tech world this week. This week, co-hosts Greg Knieriemen and Sarah Vela are slacking off while Ed Saipetch flies solo …
The numbers are in: EMC still ruling storage LIKE A BOSS
It's that time again: another round of IDC's quarterly storage tracker figures. The total disk storage market has gone down 5 per cent on an annual compare, dragged down by falling server sales.
The external storage (networked disk array) market has gone down just 0.8 per cent, showing the effect of server drag on direct-attach …
Flash floggers whip out flash cards, SSDs, unleash frantic flood of updates
While Pure Storage's $150m funding round and the WD/Virident and Cisco/Whiptail acquisitions take centre stage at the flash fairground thee's lots going on at the side stalls with Fusion-io, Intel, OCZ and sTec.
Fusion-io ioFX cards Fusion-io ioFX workstation flash card
HP customers can optionally use Fusion-io's ioFX flash …
'800lb Fibre Channel gorilla' Brocade axes 300 staffers worldwide
SAN fabric leader and Ethernet networking wannabee Brocade is going to fire 300 people to cut costs as it realigns its resources towards data centres and software-defined networking.
The pink slip news was slipped out in an SEC 8-K filing (PDF) on 10 September. This should take its headcount from 4,180, to 3,880.
Stifel …
EMC pinches top Oracle engineer and Microsoft bod for Isilon
EMC's scale-out filer shipper Isilon is scaling up its organisation; Oracle's top storage SVP, Phil Bullinger, is moving from the Redwood Shores-headquartered firm to EMC subsidiary Isilon, and a Microsoftie is coming aboard as Isilon's COO.
Bullinger is joining EMC's Isilon unit as its senior veep for engineering and operations …
Storage firms, tremble: MASSIVE tech beast Cisco has just spaffed $415m on Whiptail
Cisco intends to buy all-flash array startup Whiptail for the huge cash sum of $415m, catapulting the networking giant full tilt into the storage market and threatening its close relationship with EMC.
John Chambers' networking giant declares: "Whiptail will strengthen Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) strategy and enhance …
WD's billion-dollar flash slurps: All this tech, and STILL no deal with chip-fryers
Analysis WD has splashed or intends to spend a whopping $1.1bn on building its flash technology and products portfolio, in the most aggressive series of moves yet by a hard disk drive vendor into flash, and yet it still hasn't inked a long-term chip supply deal with a flash foundry.
Just yesterday it paid $685m for Virident. So what are …
Shingle me timbers! Seagate brags of 1m SMR drives - where are they?
Seagate has said it's shipped a million shingled disk drives to date.
Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) increases a device's capacity by squeezing more readable tracks of data onto a platter's surface, albeit by hammering rewrite speeds.
When committing bytes to disk, the tiny electromagnet in the disk head that writes the …
Brit and Danish boffins propose NSA-proof crypto for cloud computing
It's more likely that the NSA has devoted its efforts to key capture and side-channel attacks rather than brute-forcing its way through ciphertext en masse - but it's also true that our crypto maths won't last forever.
Which draws attention to projects like this one (PDF), which is looking at protection of multi-party …
Seagate parades spinning skinny model to oust flash from fondleslabs... almost
Would you trust a tablet or a smartphone with a hard disk rather than flash storage? Seagate hopes its Ultra Mobile HDD will persuade you to trade rugged but pricey solid-state memory for 30 times more storage space than your average (16GB) tablet sports.
Seagate claims the skinny, 96g 500GB UM HDD offers the same “power, …
Got the CLOUD FEAR? Connected Data has a black 'n' blue cone to sell you
Connected Data has introduced the second version of its private cloud storage device, Transporter 2, and is hoping to cash in on those users who have been put off by public cloud outages.
This is a file sync 'n' share product with a difference; instead of files being copied from your computer to a public cloud service (Box, …
Can't get enough of flashy upstarts, can you, WD? Firm pays $685m for Virident
Western Digital has bought PCIe flash array supplier and startup Virident for $685m in cash and given it to its HGST subsidiary to add to its stable of flash businesses.
Virident got itself a new CEO, Mike Gustafson, on 19 September last year. From hire to sale in 12 months is pretty damn good. Virident's board and backers will …
Enterprise storage: A history of paper, rust and flash silicon
The story of data storage is one of ever decreasing circles. What started as holes punched into cards, then into tape, became hard disks, floppy disks, then hard shiny disks, until eventually circles are no longer involved at all.
It is also the story of transitions from one medium to another as the IT industry searched for …
Don't bother competing with ViPR, NetApp - it's not actually that relevant
Blocks and Files NetApp doesn't need to compete with EMC's all-singing all-dancing ViPR product. Why not? NetApp only has one storage array product – ONTAP – whereas EMC has an entire family of arrays, which ViPR virtualises into a single resource and delivers to server apps needing storage.
Look at it like this: the EMC storage array product …
Cash-bleeding Overland: A healthy BYOD brings a sound mind
Overland Storage announced its usual loss-making quarterly results but said it was going full tilt into giving BYOD and smart mobile device owners full access to enterprise apps no matter their size. CEO Eric Kelly has now become chairman of its Canadian partner, Sphere 3D, which provides the virtualisation wizardry needed for …
Hey, EMC. You and I are seriously falling out over this marketing crap
Storagebod Word has reached me that EMC's marketing dept may not be reacting quite so well to my previous post; yet if truth be known, I actually toned down what I really wanted to write because I wanted to ensure that people who I like and have time for didn’t catch too much flak.
Although I speak only for myself, I know that I am not the …
Snide hashtags, F1 cars, death by PowerPoint: I'm sick of EMC hypegasms
Storagebod EMC has done it again and managed to turn what could have been an interesting product refresh into something that just irritates me and many others.
It's ongoing teaser campaign started off badly when the storage giant's marketing types put up a "sneak preview" video and decided to have a dig at their lead competitor – then the …
TDK calls it quits on tape media thanks to 'difficult environment'
Japan's TDK Corporation has seen the writing on the wall and decided to get out of the LTO tape media manufacturing business.
The company's statement says: "In recent years, however, the data storage market has been contracting, creating a difficult business environment … TDK has decided to withdraw from the data tape business …
Returning Acronis CEO plans Parallels universe
Returned Acronis CEO Serguei Beloussov has extended his planned tenure at the company, in part to ensure it melds technologies from virtualisation player Parallels to create a backup-as-a-service product.
Beloussov founded both Acronis and Parallels, left both to pursue other interests including a pair of venture capital funds, …
Tencent offers 10TB of free cloud storage for all
Given the recent revelations about mass data slurping by the NSA, we were relieved to hear that a Chinese company has begun offering a whopping 10TB of free hosting to privacy-conscious punters.
After Chinese rivals Baidu and Qihoo 360 served up a terabyte of free cloud storage to punters, rival Tencent this week floated a 10TB …
Pure Storage hoovers up $150m in funding, hires ex-Data Domain CEO
Flash array upstart Pure Storage aims to emerge from the herd and pull off a Data Domain, having secured $150m in E-round funding and hired former Data Domain head honcho Frank Slootman, who joins its board as "a key strategic advisor."
Pure says the $150m is "the single largest private funding in the history of the enterprise …
Oh, a Wyse guy, eh? Why I oughta make you Nexenta's new CEO
ZFS-storage software supplier Nexenta has changed its CEO for the second time in eight months, going for a popular exec from the ranks of IT's great and good: Tarkan Maner.
Nexenta, which provides the Open Solaris and ZFS-based NexentaStor software storage OS, positions itself as the software-only answer to vendors who fear the …
What's that racket? Oh my God, it's VMware's vSAN bull in the disk array shop
VMware has launched its virtual storage area network (vSAN) technology; pretty much unleashing a raging bull into a china virtual storage appliance shop and watching all the crockery racks of electronics go flying.
Available now as a beta, vSAN can create a virtualised storage array that pools the disks and flash drives of a …
Flash-forward for virty desktops... Jeez, why didn't WE think of that?
Fusion-io appears to have noticed that competitors are using flash to accelerate virtual desktops and decided it wants a piece of that action too. It has tweaked its acquired ioTurbine flash caching software to produce ioVDI – and get those virtual desktop doggies rolling.
The ioTurbine software provides a cached area of flash …
Google adds 'Differential Snapshots' to cloud storage
There are only so many ways you can build a gigantic infrastructure cloud, so it is with little surprise that Google has introduced a snapshot feature already found in Amazon Web Services.
The "Differential Snapshots" feature was announced by Google in a post to the Google Compute Engine Google group on Monday, and the Chocolate …
Array upstart Violin peeks at PCIe cards, goes all in with $172m IPO bid
Storage upstart Violin Memory has publicly filed for an IPO and is seeking $172.5m.
The maker of all-flash arrays has handed in its S-1 homework to financial watchdog the SEC; the document reveals it has consistently made losses while revenues have grown over the past three years.
Violin Memory year on year ... Sales rising (yes …
Ex-Sun Micro CTO reveals Greenbytes 'world-beating' dedupe
El Reg has managed to take a peek at an as-yet-unpublished white paper, written by former Sun Microsystems CTO Randall Chalfant, which claims the storage company's deduplication tech has near-zero latency and possibly offers the world's fastest inline deduplication.
It works with 4K blocks of data. This is the sequence of events …
'Silent' staff stood by as £100m BBC IT project tanked – DG
The BBC's new director general Tony Hall says staff should have spoken up about the catastrophic Digital Media Initiative (DMI).
The utopian media storage project cost the BBC almost £100m since 2010 (and some £81m before then) before it was formally abandoned in May, with the corporation opting to use off-the-shelf software …
EMC, you big tease! At last, the specs for million-IOPS VNX2
Getting tired of EMC's teaser campaign for its coming VNX refresh in September? Relief is at hand: slide decks, blogs and PDFs seen by El Reg's storage desk confirm that EMC's VNX2 is a 7-product line-up optimised for multi-core CPUs and flash with new operating software.
VNX arrays were getting slow because the software couldn' …
World's ONLY virtualised snapshot firm refreshes product: Here, take a sniff
The latest version of data storage software house Actifio's Copy Data Storage platform is intended to spread its use more widely – without providing any significant new core functionality.
Actifio's software snapshots data from production IT systems and then presents virtual instances of the copied data to other systems that …
Samsung's amazeballs 3D V-NAND SSD not THAT much better than predecessor
El Reg asked Samsung how the 3D V-NAND SSD's speed compared with the same company's SM843T 960GB SSD, a high-performance SSD used in data centres and servers released just a few months ago. The reply may surprise some hardened storage veterans.
3D V-NAND, announced on 7 August, stacks layers of NAND vertically to increase the …
Why all the fuss about flash? Pin your ears back and find out
Just to be clear, we're talking about flash of the hardware variety, not the software behind those annoying animated ads. This is one of those topics that everyone has heard about, most people have opinions on, but where myths and misunderstandings are rife.
In our next live Regcast on September 17 at 11:00 BST, we're going to …
Dell spits up storage revenues after gobbling promising upstarts
Dell's storage revenues are continuing to decline as the company fails to reap the benefits of its acquisitions.
EqualLogic and Compellent were great startups but the stellar growth of those two units has not translated into stellar growth for Dell's storage revenues. In its latest quarter, which finished at the end of June, the …
'Symbolic' Grauniad drive-smash was not just a storage fail
Blocks and Files The word "cabinet" can mean a piece of furniture in which you store something and the digital version of this is a disk drive or flash drive. Having said that, the idea that by destroying the drive you destroy the data is so far from reality in today's data centres that anyone professing it is profoundly idiotic.
Which brings us …
GreenBytes guts its arrays, turns self into chompable doughnut
Once upon a time there were two suppliers with VDI-focussed storage arrays: GreenBytes,with an all-flash array; and Tintri, with a hybrid flash/disk array technology. Now GreenBytes has become a software-only business. Why?
The reasoning, outlined by GreenBytes' CEO and chairman Stephen O'Donnell, is that over time mid-market …
Imation's $120m baby delivers NST6000 hybrid storage mutant
Scalable storage outfit Imation's Nexsan unit has launched an uprated cached hybrid flash/disk drive array with a Gen 3 operating system: NestOS 3.0.
Nexsan, a purveyor of primary and Assureon archival data storage arrays that failed to IPO several times, was bought by Imation on January for $120m.
The NST6000 and older NST5000 …
SimpliVity intros swollen and shrunken rip-'n'-replace boxen
SimpliVity has miniaturised and maximised its all-singing, all-dancing converged OmniCube IT systems with entry-level and high-performance versions as well as strengthening the original, now mid-range box.
SimpliVity ships its 2U OmniCube – which is not a cube but an oblong box if we're going to be pedantic – a converged server …
Samsung's cooking 3D NAND flash chips. WHAT did you say the specs were?
Samsung has launched its first 3D V-NAND SSD but hasn't yet released any real performance data, bringing its new product's status into question.
3D V-NAND, announced on 7 August, stacks layers of NAND vertically to increase the capacity available in a set footprint. It is a way of getting over the progressively shorter working …
Flash cheaper than disk? 'Customers aren't buying that', says NetApp CEO
NetApp's CEO Tom Georgens philosophised about flash storage in the company's latest earnings call with analysts. The top boss said non-volatile NAND memory isn't the be-all and end-all in storage: what matters is where active and inactive, hot and cold, data is stored, and how dear each of those holding pens are.
“Flash, on a …
