Earlier Storage
Dell kills 3-year-old object storage appliance line
Exclusive Dell is closing down its DX6000 object storage appliance product line just three years after starting it up. Its OEM'd Caringo software will be available through Dell’s Digital Download Store. But there are concerns that this move will tarnish Dell's reputation as an enterprise raised-floor data centre supplier.
Object storage …
DataDirect in job slash bloodbath
Times are tough. HPC and big data storage array supplier DataDirect Networks has laid off 65 people, decimating its workforce, after six months of lousy sales.
This news is not yet public. The lay-offs follow a poor final 2012 quarter.
We asked DDN about this, about morale problems, and also if there were product-quality issues …
Quantum lays off fifty – prepping for a sale?
Fifty people have been let go by Quantum with some insiders thinking the company is being groomed for a sale, either in whole or in parts.
Affected company staff were given the news on Thursday, April 11th.
Christine Bachmayer, Quantum's senior manager for marketing in EMEA, said:
As we begin our new fiscal year (started April …
Building a private cloud? Better sort your storage first
The final HP Regcast of our short series on how to build a private cloud covered the usual afterthought of any IT project: storage migration. Much of the conversation dealt with the problems of translating good intentions into action.
The research conducted by Freeform Dynamics at the end of 2012 showed that those IT departments …
IBM pours $1 BEELLION into flash SSDs
Say goodbye to TMS RamSan and hello to IBM FlashSystem. Back in 2001, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner said IBM would spend a billion dollars to boost its Linux business and that billion paid itself off within two years. In 2002, the firm splurged the same amount on Java tools, and in 2006, pumped $1bn into information management. Fast- …
BizNAS at the front, party at the back: Tandberg adds Dropbox to NAS crate
BizNAS is Tandberg Data's latest offering - a small business NAS box with iSCSI block access and integrated Dropbox support plus backup to removable disk.
The system, available in 1U rackmount and desktop configurations, is powered by Debian Linux running on dual-core Intel Atom processors. It boasts four drive bays and provides …
Sanbolic reveals flashy server goodness with Melio 5
That's right: storage software supplier Sanbolic is shipping server-side scale-out services supporting SSDs. But what does it mean?
Sanbolic's Melio 5 software turns a server's directly-attached flash, SSDs and HDDs into a SAN, combining multiple server's storage resources into a single resource pool.
Sanbolic says it " …
EMC dishes up 8 times more cache to hungry Isilon PAN
EMC is adding more performance grunt to its Isilon scale-out cluster Performance Accelerator Node (PAN) by replacing it with a new box featuring eight times more level 1 cache.
The 256GB of L1 cache in the forthcoming A100 PAN means more data can be held in memory. The aggregate throughput per node is 1,100MB/sec.
It's not a …
HGST unveils 12Gbit/s SAS SSDs for bankers, gamers and cloud-pushers
Western Digital subsidiary HGST has slapped 12Gbit/s SAS interfaces on three solid-state drives - which it claims is a storage industry first - and they fly, with one model boasting prolonged endurance as well.
The SSD800 and SSD1000 drives store up to 800GB and 1TB respectively, using enterprise grade 2-bit multi-layer cell …
US spies' crazytech branch asks chip firm for 8-BIT-PER-CELL memory
The blue-sky researchers who work for the US intelligence branch have handed a contract to magnetic semiconductor firm Crocus Technology to develop memory that stores a whopping 8-bit-per cell memory to help keep the United States' intel secure.
IARPA, the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, has commissioned …
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+ …
