Earlier Storage
EMC: No need to swallow an array - just breathe in our storage cloud
Storagebod So EMC has finally announced the VMAX Cloud Edition: which according to this blogger is an iteration that has little to do with technology and everything to do with the way that EMC wants us to consume storage.
Firstly, let's discuss the cost model - in many ways the most important part of the announcement. EMC has now moved to …
Violin Memory fires PCIe server card salvoes at rival Fusion-io
Flash storage array shipper Violin Memory is bringing out a Velocity line of PCIe server flash cards and strengthening its relationship with investor Toshiba, which owns NAND chip fabs.
Violin Memory ships 3000 and 6000 models of its networked all-flash array technology. They can have PCIe connections but the array's primary …
NetApp could use Microsoft to beat off VMware's virtual tool
Blocks and Files Let's think about putting some storage Lego bricks together in a new combination. The bricks are labelled NetApp, DataONTAP, ONTAP EDGE, VSA, VMware and Hyper-V.
A VSA is a virtual storage appliance - with storage array controller software running as a virtual machine and turning the host server's local disks into a shared …
Hey, PCIe flash makers. Look behind you - it's Samsung
Samsung is stalking PCIe flash companies and aims to meet them head-to-head. Yes, the South Korean giant is going to enter the PCIe flash card game.
According to Peyman Blumstengel, a strategic business development man at Samsung Electronics, the company has PCIe flash cards on its roadmap and products should appear in the …
HGST: Nano-tech will double hard disk capacity in 10 years
HGST, the Western Digital subsidiary formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, says it has developed a method of manufacturing hard-disk platters using nanotechnology that could double the density of today's hard drives.
The new technique employs a combination of self-assembling molecules and nanoimprinting, …
Zerto unzips to reveal ROBO replicating factory
Zerto (zero RTO, geddit?) produces Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) which is a hypervisor-resident and VM-aware replication facility providing VM-level disaster recovery (DR). Version 3.0 has just come around the block and it produces a set of goodies to make VM DR easier and more certain.
Version 1.0 ZVR was a single site …
Micron whips out new SSD, runs to data centre, yells: I'm GOING IN
Micron is going deeper into enterprise data centre SSD arena with its launch of a SAS version of its P400M SATA interface solid state disk. The mixture is pretty much as before - apart from the 6-gig SAS interface.
The new P410M comes in 100, 200 and 400GB capacity points and uses the same 25nm NAND as the P400. It has the same …
Spectra: Tape is dead? We installed 550PB of the stuff in 6 months
Tape library vendor SpectraLogic says it installed 550PB of tape library capacity in the second half of 2012 and reports that its revenues, led by rising T-Finity library sales, for that six months were up 9 per cent compared to a year ago.
Half an exabyte of tape equates to the installation of roughly a dozen of the vendor's …
Emulex eats 87% of Endace for Ethernet examinations
Emulex has acquired ownership of 89 per cent of New Zealand-based Ethernet network traffic analysis company Endace. One of the 11 per cent holdouts is an Elliott Management subsidiary which also holds Emulex shares. It wants Emulex to stop spending on acquisitions and slip a few greenbacks into shareholders' wallets.
Endace CEO …
NetApp's FlashRay to zap Symmetrix with fibre channel
What if an enterprise storage vendor launched a new array and didn't tell anyone how it would connect to the outside world?
Oddly, this scenario played out earlier this month when NetApp revealed its FlashRay, an all-flash array it intends to start selling in 2014.
Even Val Bercovici, who works in NetApp's office of the chief …
Live from New York, it's Speaking in Tech
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
It's a another piping hot episode of Speaking in Tech, brought to you live from CommVault's Data Management Summit by your host Greg Knieriemen, who is flying solo this week in the Big Apple. The podcast was recorded live in New York City with special guests W Curtis Preston …
Commvault disgorges ginormous flood of biz data-furtling software
One-trick software pony Commvault has finally pushed out a raft of updates with Simpana version 10.0 in the hopes of broadening its user base in the biz data backup, archive and search game.
Simpana 9, the previous generation of the software, came out in October 2010 - so we've had to wait almost two-and-half years for gen 10. …
Xyratex thrusts a Lustre cluster knuckleduster at Intel's bluster
Storage biz Xyratex is polishing its high-performance computing credentials by acquiring the Lustre trademark, logo, website and associated intellectual property from Oracle. Xyratex said it will support Lustre's community-oriented development.
Lustre is an open-source cluster file system popular in supercomputer land. Once upon …
Stealthy upstart PernixData mutters incantation... turns flash into SAN
PernixData has opened its kimono, a little - but really we know little more than that it will provide flash storage facilities to virtual machines.
The now not-so-stealthy startup talks of a flash tier of storage between a network storage array. This is its Flash Virtualisation Platform (FVP), a software-only data storage tier …
Who'll do a Red Hat on open-source storage?
Storagebod Are we heading for a Linux moment in the storage world where an open-source "product" truly breaks out and causes the major vendors a headache?
I’ve had this conversation a few times recently with both vendors and end users - and the general feeling is that we are pretty close to it. What is needed is for someone to do a Red Hat …
Dell and pals pop $51m into all-flash array upstart's wallet
While Dell the man is busying himself with taking Dell the company private, Dell Ventures has taken the lead in a $51.6m second funding round for all-flash array startup Skyera.
Dell alone - of the major systems and storage vendors - has no all-flash array strategy, at least not a public one. In November last year its storage …
Happy birthday, LP: Can you believe it's only 65?
This storage medium progressed from spinning disk to flash and then entered the cloud... Sound familiar? It's the long-playing music album and this year marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of its inception.
The 33 1/3rpm vinyl long-playing record was devised in 1948 by Columbia Records and was an upgrade on the prior 78rpm 12-inch …
Virident gives server flash vendors the fear with 'sharing tool'
Virident, the PCIe flash card and software supplier Seagate loves to the extent of a $40m investment and OEM supply deal, says you can share server flash and make it highly available with its Connect software. This will probably give server flash industry leader Fusion-io something to get a little concerned about.
Virident's …
Build your own 180TB NAS for $US1,942.59 (plus disk)
Cloud storage company Backblaze may not quite have the cachet of the folks playing in the Open Compute Project, but that hasn't stopped the company open-sourcing the design it's cooked up for the JBOD-like rigs it uses to power its service.
And after receiving a million page impressions for the release of its first design, the …
Ride Riverbed's Whitewater all the way to Glacier
Use Riverbed's Whitewater gateway product to send your data centre's cold but still wanted data up into Amazon's glacial archive storage vaults where entry is cheap, stays long, and restores cheap as chips unless you get lost in Amazon's pricing jungle.
Riverbed has its Whitewater cloud storage gateway product which squirts data …
Buyer's Guide de-hassling flash array purchase
Storage buying guides publisher DCIG has cast its beady eye across flash arrays and come up with the best of the bunch, not quite so good but still Recommended flashy boxes, and plain old Excellent, less plain Good and then the Basic category of suppliers.
DCIG specialises in publishing storage buyers' guides, using published …
NetApp flashifies ONTAP high-end boxen
While flash arrays were the main focus of yesterday's NetApp announcements the company also uprated its high-end FAS6200 arrays with bigger disks, flash pools, more memory and the latest ONTAP software.
We can update the table we produced when we first wrote about these new FAS arrays and here is our new quick take on the spec …
Seagate joins OpenStack foundation and Open Compute Project
In an effort to stay relevant in the new cloudy world Seagate is loading money into OpenStack and joining the Open Compute Project.
The storage specialist "will help cloud builders to develop more scalable, customizable solutions using open platforms," it said in a statement on Wednesday, announcing its involvement.
"Seagate is …
Forget Dropbox, here's Drobo-box: Small-biz array meets Barracuda cloud
Security appliance maker Barracuda Networks has agreed to marry its online file-sharing service to storage biz Drobo's box of hard drives called 5N.
People can upload and download files to and from Barracuda's Copy cloud, and share their data between desktop computers, iPhones, iPads, iPods, Android devices and Microsoft's …
Speaking in Tech: Tesla's Elon Musk takes on NYT - ballsy move, man
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
Want to hear a quick and funny wrap-up of everything - well, everything important - that happened in tech this week? El Reg's enterprise and consumer kit gurus Greg Knieriemen and Ed Saipetch are here to discuss the business of tech, the tech of storage, and the quality of …
Is it a bird? Is it a cloud? No! It's just a new Seagate biz NAS box
Seagate has added one, two and four-bay desktop filers to its product range, calling it Seagate Business Storage. The boxes also feature an external SATA bus to hook up removable drives. The manufacturer has, unlike its rivals, mercifully resisted the temptation to call the network-attached storage a personal or small-biz "cloud …
FlashRay shines out from Sunnyvale
NetApp has unveiled FlashRay, its all-flash array work-in-progress that is the focus of its Mars project. The product should become available some time in 2014 and will enter beta test in the middle of this year.
The Sunnyvale-headquartered company made three announcements today. It is producing the EF540, an all-flash array in …
GreenBytes rips code from virtual-desktop array's chest, serves to small biz
Thin-client accelerator GreenBytes has separated its software from its virtual desktop appliance hardware so customers can use anybody's flash to store machine images.
The company's IO Offload Engine is a dedicated solid-state disk array that stores virtual desktop images and feeds them to users' computers at blistering speed. …
LogMeIn uncloaks cloud storage bypass
By now you know the prosumer cloud storage schtick: an agent on your device monitors a designated folder and copies everything in it to the cloud, from where any other device running the service's agent and logged in with the same account sucks down that file so it is available locally.
The likes of DropBox, Google, Microsoft, …
Hard Man of Facebook: We might just eat those cheap TLC flash chips
Micron has built the world's smallest 3-bits per cell NAND chip, targeting USB stick memory and the like, while Facebook's open source hardware guru has indicated such chips could be used in its cloud's data centres providing ultra-cheap flash storage.
TLC (Triple-Level Cell) NAND Technology has 3 bits per cell, one more than in …
Array-flogger NetApp: Don't worry sir, we'll look after your data
NetApp has recorded recession-proof results with increased revenues and profits, and it sees more coming as it develops a strategy of becoming a data manager for its customers, wherever that data resides.
Revenues for NetApp's third fiscal 2013 quarter, ended 25 January 2013, were $1.63bn, 4 per cent higher than a year ago. Net …
Disk biz Overland bleeds more cash - bah, only a flesh wound!
Another quarter for Overland Storage, and another big loss as revenue slides year-on-year.
The struggling tape and disk array vendor hopes its scale-out clustered NAS, branded the SnapScale, can turn its fortunes around - along with damages it'll possibly get from BDT and other tape biz if it wins a patent-infringement court …
Imation takes $310.2m hit in hellish, wallet-draining 4th quarter
$310.2m: That's Imation's fourth 2012 calendar quarter loss. $299.1m: That's Imation's fourth quarter revenue. It takes some brass to record results like these and talk of the company's strategic transformation but that's what happens when you rightsize over-valued assets.
The chart below shows the scale of the disaster. Third …
Stroppy investor tries to rip 'n' replace STEC's entire board
It's a proxy war: activist investor Balch Hill wants to bounce troubled SSD supplier STEC's board - which includes its CEO and its founder - and populate the boardroom with seven of its own nominees.
STEC is the former leading enterprise SSD supplier which has fallen on hard times and is now partway through a strategic direction …
Micron glues DDR4 RAM to flash, animates the 256GB franken-DIMM
Micron is developing a DDR4-compatible hybrid DRAM-NAND stick to blast data at processors faster than the PCIe bus used by rival flash cache products.
DDR4 is a JEDEC standard and can move at least 2.1 billion blocks per second - the block size is set by the memory chip's word length in bits - and it beats the pants off DDR3. …
Intel serves flashy speed to penguins after eating Nevex's cache
Intel has launched its Cache Acceleration Software (CAS), the renamed Nevex CacheWorks software, integrating it with its DC S3700 SSD and and 910 Series server flash card.
CacheWorks and now CAS provides a policy-based flash cache for application data stored on disk drives, utilising a server's SSD or PCIe flash card, and then …
Hands off my disk! VMware gobbles Virsto for software-ruled arrays
Virtualisation leviathan VMware has bought storage hypervisor maker Virsto. It means VMware can now aggregate servers, networks (thanks to its Nicira acquisition) and now storage into an abstracted pool of resources - providing the three pillars VMware needs to build software-defined data centres that can run themselves.
Virsto' …
Only way to stop the iPad: Flash-disk mutant SPEED FREAKS
With the rise of the iPad and the growing desire among consumers and enterprise for sexy and speedy gadgets, it seemed that flash gits were holding all the cards.
The hard drive industry was holding its breath, wondering how to replicate the expensive experience. But what about hybrid disk drives, the ones that have a lump of …
Seagate: We'll bring down HAMR in 2014 ... this year, you get shingles
Seagate aims to ship enhanced capacity shingled magnetic recording (SMR) disk drives later this year and bring in Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology next year, a full two years earlier than supposed. Possibly this is its riposte to the helium gas attack mounted by WD subsidiary HGST.
Shingled magnetic recording …
Music to investors' ears: Storage upstart Violin to go public?
Blocks and Files Violin Memory, the front runner in the shared all-flash array market, has been heading for an IPO for some time. According to reports, the Mountain View storage firm filed to go public last September, but the timing and price of the offering had not yet been determined.
The valuation being tossed around back then was a pretty …
Virtual sanity: What if GreenBytes just DUMPED its hardware?
Analysis Should GreenBytes separate its hardware and software? The storage firm sells an IO Offload Engine which stores deduplicated virty desktop images in its own flash hardware and ships them out to client devices. It's essentially a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) accelerator for storage arrays that runs alongside them and …
Don't be shy, vendors: Let's see those gorgeous figures
Storagebod One of the frustrations when dealing with vendors is actually getting real availability figures for their kit. You will mostly get generalisations, such as "it is designed to be 99.999 per cent available" or perhaps "99.9999 per cent available". But what do those figures really mean to you and how significant are they?
Well, 99. …
