Earlier Storage
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 …
EMC rakes in more of the world's storage, others struggle
EMC is controlling more and more of the world's disk storage and Oracle is controlling less and less, according to trackers at Gartner.
In a report on the worldwide external controller-based disk storage market released on Thursday, EMC had 34.2 per cent of the market in the quarter and recorded revenues of $2.067bn – a 6.7 per …
QLogic: 3 words - caching SAN adapter. Just blew your mind, didn't we?
QLogic has announced its transparent adapter-based flash caching aimed at accelerating applications that access a SAN for data.
FabricCache is the first product implementation of its Mount Rainier technology and, as well as adding a flash cache to QLogic's Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), it shares that cache between clustered servers …
EMC spits out high-end offsite biz cloud after chugging down Syncplicity
Dropbox beware: Biz juggernaut EMC has launched an enterprise edition of its file sync 'n' share Syncplicity product.
What this does is add an enterprise pricing layer to the acquired Syncplicity product, which provides secured file synchronisation and sharing between users' intelligent devices ranging from smartphones through …
Bolshy Balch Hill blasts STEC bosses after talks break down
Activist investor Balch Hill has told STEC's shareholders that they should consider putting up a For Sale sign on the fallen flash leader's lawn and booting out the CEO and former CEO, the Moshayedi brothers.
Balch Hill, which holds 9 per cent of shares, and its partner Potomac Capital have issued a letter to STEC shareholders …
EMC2 is now EMC II, too
EMC has made a telling change to its brand.The company's full name, “EMC2”, is now the master brand for Pivotal, VMware and EMC II. Here's a slide that shows the distinction.
New EMC branding
The new scheme seemingly means EMC, the purveyor of storage hardware and associated software, is now called “EMC Information …
Then there were 3: Micron slowly 'wipes out' NAND flash rivals
Hands up who thought Samsung was the world's leading flash shipper? Well, according to a Micron VP, it is his company that's the biggest shipper of NAND flash in the business, bigger than both Samsung and Hynix.
Micron makes DRAM, NAND and NOR flash chips. Kipp Bedard, Micron's investor relations VP, told the Raymond James 34th …
Dot Hill in a dot hole: Disk array builder struggles to stem losses
Disk-array constructor Dot Hill's newly released financial figures for last year reveal a falling revenue trend and a struggle to reel in losses.
Dot Hill quarterly revenues and profit/loss
Dot Hill's quarterly revenues and losses (Click on chart for a larger version)
The company, which has offices in Basingstoke, UK, …
Fusion-io gobbles Brit Linux SCSI gurus ID7
Fusion-io flogs software to turn a server fitted with its PCIe flash cards into a shared storage appliance. It turns out that the software is based on UK developer ID7's code and Fusion-io has just bought the company.
ID7 was set up in 2006 and produces SCST, an open-source Linux component used by many storage vendors. It is a …
Storage startups sensible silo sources, says scrutiniser
Orthodoxy declares complexity the enemy of an easy-to-manage and effective data centre.
But Gartner's research vice president Roger Cox thinks there's now a reason to use diverse storage systems from diverse vendors, even startups.
Cox's thinking is that different applications need different storage appliances. Big Data, he …
Seagate's cloud backup baby gets software boost
Seagate has given its backup-to-the-cloud EVault sub an appliance software boost, probably in a bid to lure in more of that small and medium biz customer goodness.
EVault appliances have now been updated with the latest v7.0 version of its software. according to the firm, this means faster backups, up to 100 per cent faster for …
SwiftStack sucks up $6.1m, leaps through curtains with 'Amazon S3-in-a-box'
Software-defined storage upstart Swiftstack has been given a fresh cash injection of $6.1m and has spoken out on its software-as-a-service offering, Swift. Software defined storage (SDN) is akin to the fabless semiconductor firm concept, except that in this case the firms provide software instead of chip designs. With software …
SanDisk cops to malfunctioning Micro SDs in Galaxy S3s
Certain Samsung Galaxy S3 users will barely have noticed the rollout of the S4 uberphone, they've been too busy concentrating on the flash card problems in their current smartmobes. Flash-card shuffler SanDisk, meanwhile, has told El Reg that it has issued a fix.
User paulnptld talked about this on the Android Central Samsung …
How Fusion-io redlined its PCIe flash motor to hit 9.6 MEEELION IOPS
In its latest party trick, Fusion-io ramps up its ioDrive2 server card - a slab of 365GB MLC flash storage on a PCIe board - to gobble 9.6 million writes a second.
The feat works by mapping the PCIe card's NAND capacity into an application's memory space and writing 64 bytes - quite likely the PCI backbone's cache line size - at …
Cloudfather Tucci meets with EMC clan, analysts to talk strategy
EMC and VMware held their so-called Strategic Forum - aka analysts' day - in New York yesterday with capo di Famiglia Joe Tucci setting out the overall stall and his lieutenants setting out their own strategic imperatives. We saw David Goulden for EMC - now called EMC II - and Pat Gelsinger for the cloud and software-defined- …
Private billion buck HPC player? You're going to have to go public - and SOON
Comment We heard a whisper that Big Data player DataDirect Networks (DDN) was thinking of going public, although marketing CEO and co-founder [Alex Bouzari recently batted the suggestion away, saying merely that it would "probably make sense at some point in the future". But regardless of the company's intentions, the question remains …
Oracle pinches Nirvanix's marketing VP
Oracle has lured Steve Zivanic away from his marketing VP position at enterprise cloud startup Nirvanix. He joins the technology juggernaut as a VP in its Storage Hardware Systems Business Group - home to the Exastuff stuff and storage arrays.
Oracle Redwood Shores Nice digs: Oracle HQ at Redwood Shores
Zivanic started work …
Scality commits to Big Data, puts a RING on Hadoop elephant
Object storage start-up Scality has added its storage to Hadoop so users can avoid loading data through Hadoop's own file system. It has also unveiled a plug-in for Cinder, the block storage layer within the OpenStack project.
The RING is an object storage infrastructure based on a set of X86 server nodes that store objects, not …
Flashman and the Mountain of Disk
Musings Flash, flash and more flash seems to be the order of the day from all vendors; whether that is flash today or flash tomorrow; whether it’s half-baked, yesterday’s left-overs rehashed or an amuse-bouche; 2013 is all about the flash.
Flashman
Large and small, the vendors all have a story to tell but flash still makes up a tiny …
Foundering OCZ snatches megabuck lifeline in white-knuckled grip
OCZ, drowning in a sea of cancelled products, its banker missing overboard, revenues leaking from its deflating financial rubber ring and burdened by an inability to understand its own condition has been hurled a last minute $30 million cash and credit lifeline.
The SSD startup company almost submerged under previous CEO and …
Every SECOND there are EIGHT more Seagate drives in the world
Seagate boasts that it has shipped a billion drives in just four years after taking nearly three decades to build its previous billion.
The company shipped its first billionth disk in 2008; its inaugural product, the 5MB ST-506, hit the market in 1980. Now Seagate's factories - busy spewing drives to a world enthusiastically …
Perish the fault! Can your storage array take a bullet AND LIVE?
Feature Storage doesn't have to be hard. It isn't really all that hard. If you ask yourself "can my storage setup lead to data loss" then you have already begun your journey. As a primer, I will attempt to demystify the major technologies in use today to solve that very problem.
Certain types of storage technologies (rsync, DFSR) are …
Disk drive kingpin WD whips out wallet for upstart Skyera
Who'd have thought it? When flash array startup Skyera announced its $51m second round funding we knew Dell was leading it but what we didn't know was that disk drive bigwig Western Dig was in there too.
WD appears to be lagging behind Seagate in adding a solid state drive dimension to its disk drive business. Seagate is …
Sepaton lures Feds with TOP SECRET backup BEAST
Sepaton has brought out a new deduping backup storage array that it claims inflicts 80TB an hour on a floating lump of backup data. It's the S2100-ES3 2925 and it has near doubled its data ingestion rate over the -ES2 model, says the firm. It has also added an encryption feature that it says makes it the "safe choice" for mega …
NetApp modifies benchmark system and - shock - comes out TOP
NetApp's number crunchers at Sunnyvale have sweetened the firm's SPC-2 benchmark results in an attempt to help NetApp stand out from the crowd, emphasising the price/performance bennies of its latest E5500 disk array.
The Storage Performance Council (SPC) is a storage industry benchmark body that helps the industry provide …
Rise Of The Machines: What will become of box-watchers, delivery drivers?
Blocks and Files In the world of storage tech, progress is a holy grail, never questioned, never doubted. Anything that adds data access capacity, data access speed and data access security is a good thing. Who can doubt it? The world has a seemingly insatiable appetite for storing and accessing data and as we feed the ravening beast, so our …
EMC rakes in more and more storage biz, followers fiddle feebly
EMC continues its seemingly inexorable raking in of more and more storage business, according to the trackers at IDC, which also places most other mainstream players far behind the global juggernaut.
IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, to honor it with its full name, lists mainstream suppliers' revenue market …
Backup upstart Actifio flicks the safety off in storage standoff
Funding for data-battling upstart Actifio is mushrooming: it's just scooped another $50m from investors eager to take part in what looks likely to be a lucrative stock-market debut in a year or two.
The company's technology, embodied in its PAS (Production and Availability System) appliance, takes a snapshot of your production …
Dell's having a fiddle with Violin Memory - but will it flash the cash?
Blocks and Files Last week was all about the flash - with Plextor, Violin Memory, EMC, Samsung and Seagate all involved in the action. But what do you think about Dell making its dalliance with Violin Memory into something a little more permanent?
Cello Bow
Let's construct a staircase and see where it takes us.
Step 1: In November 2012, Dell' …
Storage fan seeks 'mature' cash cow for 'something more'
Storagebod blog It may come as a surprise to some people, especially reading this, but I quite like the Symmetrix (VMAX) as a platform. Sure, it's a bit long in the tooth - in marketing speak, "a mature platform". It's also a bit arcane at times - Symmetrix administrators sometimes speak a different language and use acronyms when a simple word …
Cloud storage matters. Really matters...
On demand We've come to the end of our HP webcast series on building the right private cloud, so we've looped right back to look at why storage should be the beginning of your private cloud story.
Previously we explored the vital role that your infrastructure, servers and network play in planning a successful private cloud deployment.
In …
Feeling lucky, punk? Storage biz crams virty PCs into RAM
Software house Atlantis has updated its ILIO product, which juggles the storage of virtual desktops in data centres, so that virtualised machines run entirely in a server's memory - sans a SAN or local drives.
Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0 lets Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View customers run persistent virtual desktops in- …
Dot Hill: Performance isn't everything... check out our, er, cheap capacity
Mid-range storage array vendor Dot Hill has presented its SPC-1 performance benchmark results in a left-field way to make it stand-out from the crowd, saying it leads as the best performer on a $/GB (capacity) measure.
It's announced "exceptional value for mid-range customers," with its AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series storage array …
Holy crap! EMC gives Vatican Library 2.8PB to store manuscripts
The Vatican Library is losing its walls. Its 89,000 historic manuscripts are being made available online for access by scholars world-wide courtesy of EMC.
The library, properly known as the Vatican Apostolic Library, is located in the Vatican City and is one of the oldest libraries in the world, established formally in 1475 but …
Biz data botherer CommVault hangs on to virtual crown
It looks like one-trick pony CommVault is top of the heap again with its virtualised server backup product, Simpana, at least according to DCIG's latest buyer's guide.
The guide is an update on a 2010 version and ranks 22 virtual server backup products.*
DCIG says its guide "provides a powerful yet concise method to evaluate …
Flash, bang, wallop: LSI stumbles in quest for PCIe card crown
Analysis LSI claimed at the end of August that it was going to be number two in the PCIe server flash business - then its revenues declined in the final three months of 2012. What's going on?
The semiconductor biz's sales from the fourth quarter of 2012 were $600m, down four per cent on Q3 that year. Net income fell 27 per cent on Q3 to …
Storage upstart tells El Reg: Our software's NOT a VSA
Brouhaha Satyam Vaghani, the co-founder and chief technology officer of PernixData took exception to El Reg's characterisation of the startup's FVP software, which virtualises flash storage attached to virtualised servers and creates a single pool of block-addressable flash capacity across those servers.
From the small amount of …
SGI gooses InfiniteStorage arrays with new NetApp controllers
Supercomputer and high-density server maker Silicon Graphics shipped over 600PB of disk capacity last year across its InfiniteStorage product line, and it is revving up its entry InfiniteStorage 5000 series to get a bigger bite of storage attachments for HPC and big data workloads that want cheap, fat, and fast disk arrays.
SGI …
New IBM storage chief Ambuj Goyal: I like all-flash and I cannot lie
Just two months into the job and IBM's newest storage general manager Ambuj Goyal is putting his stamp on the business.
He told El Reg that Big Blue plans to move all transaction data away from disk to all-flash arrays; that he's not that keen on object storage; and that he envisages an IBM that sells "less storage".
He gave …
Penguins, only YOU can turn desktop disk IO into legacy tech
Blocks and Files With the advent of flash-based storage memory, the prospect of banishing disk IO waits forever from transaction-based or other IO-bound server applications is close to becoming a reality. But what about desktops?
We have a pretty weak example with Apple's MacBook Air ultrathin laptops, but these are underpowered little lovelies …
