Recent Blog Posts

This is a guest post by Sunil Chavan, vice-president for FlashBlade at Pure Storage Asia-Pacific & Japan In evolutionary theory, the red queen hypothesis suggests that species must constantly ...

I hate it when you realise that your point of reference has been unduly influenced by what’s currently trending rather than what’s really important. A recent briefing with Jim Liddle of Storage ...

The future of data storage will not be in the binary switching of electrical cells as in flash storage. It may also not be in magnetism-based potential successors to flash such as Racetrack Memory, ...

Written by SpectraLogic CEO Nathan Thompson with product specialist Bob Cone and software developer John Kranz, Society's Genome – Genetic diversity in digital preservation, makes a case for ...

What does the future hold for the new NetApp, now that it has acquired SolidFire? It will still face problems - will its CEO be able to deal with them?

Tips, opinion and advice on data storage strategy.

SanDisk has upgraded its InfiniFlash big data boxes with the addition of the IF150. The new box takes advantage of the SAS (Serial-attached SCSI) 3.0 protocol that was launched last summer and ...

Storage performance monitoring tool supplier Virtual Instruments and storage testing tool maker Load Dynamix had worked together on the same enterprise accounts - and in roughly similar but ...

Druva has added disaster recovery capability to its existing Phoenix product. But its what they don't plan to do with Phoenix that's perhaps more interesting. Phoenix allows globally deduplicated ...

It has been an interesting month in object storage, with developments that push the technology along but also provided an interesting footnote regarding file access that illustrate an interesting ...

In case you missed it, the big storage vendor news during the holiday was NetApp's acquisition of all-flash array maker SolidFire for $870 million. The move brings to a conclusion several years of ...

When Spectra Logic launched its DPE archive-class NAS in September it was a play at a space often targeted now by object storage products. So, I asked whether Spectra Logic had considered object ...

Last week HGST business development manager Manfred Berger told me that the company had not closed a sale on its Active Archive petabyte-scale cold storage arrays since launch in April, but had 160 ...

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has made a bold play to convince EMC VMAX and Oracle users that they should migrate to HPE's 3PAR all-flash arrays. It should be called "Project Cuckoo" as it's a ...

mangstor, all-flash, all-flash array, nvme, pcie

It's not too often you get to hear the exact progress of a new product in the market but this week at Cloud Expo Europe in Frankfurt, HGST senior business development manager for elastic storage ...

I spoke with French startup Rozo this week. It's USP is that it marries the scalability of scale-out NAS - ie virtual unlimited and with potentially billions of file names - with erasure coding and ...

VMware's vision of the near future of IT revolves heavily around the hybrid cloud in which customers run both on-premise and off-premises cloud. Listening to VMware execs at VMworld Europe this ...

On the eve of VMworld Europe it's like witnessing the IT/storage world's equivalent of the Big Splash. Yes, I'm talking about Dell's proposed $67 billion purchase of storage giant EMC. The ...

All-flash array maker SolidFire plans to apply the speed of flash to object storage. So said CEO Dave Wright this week. We were discussing the prospects for the all-flash datacentre, following ...

Software-defined storage products seem to be coming thick and fast at the moment. This week I spoke with another, the Bulgaria-based StorPool, which offers storage software that can be deployed on ...

data storage, 3d xpoint, hdd, tape, nand, flash, flash storage

Enterprises need hyperscale or webscale storage. They look at the likes of Google and Facebook and need to do what they're doing; processing and storing huge amounts of data with transactions and ...

Does the world need another software-defined storage/storage virtualisation product? There are plenty to choose from already, such as DataCore, Nexenta, Open-E as well as software storage products ...

Veeam is a backup software company and pioneer of virtual machine backup. Way back when, while most backup software was firmly rooted in the old world of physical servers and an agent on every box, ...

This week I spoke to EMC marketing VP Josh Goldstein about XtremIO 4.0. EMC's flagship all-flash array has seen it move from third place in the all-flash stakes to first, with Gartner in 2013 ...

EMC's move to make its ViPR software-defined storage platform open source (as Project CoprHD) appears a bold one, but I can't help thinking it looks like the giant from Hopkinton, MA, has been been ...

Separating software from hardware is an emerging trend in data storage. So, it was interesting this week to come across one array maker - hybrid flash specialist Nimble Storage - which said it ...

In the real world we've seen centuries of wars, largely the result of old empires fading and new contenders arising. And the world of IT show similar parallels, albeit on much reduced timescales ...

It's rare that a storage-related technology arises without there being any acquisitions. Look at flash. The startups emerged and pushed the big six to either buy some of them or to develop flash ...

When reflecting on the rise of flash storage over the last couple of years it's easy to come to the conclusion that some storage vendors have been more active, more free-spending, more progressive ...

I've written recently that despite relatively low enterprise take-up of cloud storage - due to concerns over bandwidth, availability, security, compliance, data portability etc - vendors big and ...

Here at Powering the Cloud (formerly Storage Networking World Europe) in Frankfurt, many of the vendors and products actually highlight the current limits of the cloud. One such example is Zadara, ...

In storage one of the key fault lines we see is between vendors keen to ensure it's their product that builds in the intelligence needed for storage or storage-related operations to take place. I ...

"NO LIMITS" shout the 10ft high ad boards around the vast conference centre. At VMworld Europe in Barcelona the virtualisation giant is keen to stress how rapidly moving and changeable is the world ...

One of the big surprises of the recent TechTarget European Purchasing Intentions survey was the appearance of Veeam as number two customer choice of backup software product. In the survey Symantec ...

The all-flash array has been the flavour of recent times in storageland. But, has the hype exceeded the reality? It may well have done. Or maybe it's just its timing is off. If we look at our ...

Has the LUN had its day? It has been the de facto method of creating logical volumes on physical storage for decades, but in this era of virtualisation that may be becoming a thing of the past. In ...

It's always interesting when a new storage technology comes along, not least because we have to figure out what exactly we're looking at. Under the microscope this time is the fruit of EMC's ...

Actifio this week announced it had gained another $100m in funding, adding to a previous round of $107m, and according to Ash Ashutosh, founder and chief executive of Actifio, that pushes its ...

Recently I blogged my thoughts on why mainstream backup products don't protect BYOD devices - laptops, tablets, smartphones etc - and came to the conclusions a) BYOD backup is a different beast to ...

While super-fast flash storage has hogged the headlines, recent months have seen the available capacity of spinning disk HDDs increase to 6TB with the shipping since last September of HGST's ...

It's a contemporary mystery. Why, when the trend towards ever-greater mobile device use is such a prominent one, do the mainstream backup software suppliers almost all fail to provide for such use ...

This week I spoke to Gridstore, a startup that offers storage arrays that integrate with the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualisation environment and with on-board smarts it claims boosts I/O for Hyper-V ...

It's not often you get the CEO of a tech startup tell you his company is going to be a market leader, in the tens of $billions of revenue category. That's what flash array maker Pure Storage CEO ...

We live in the Information Age, apparently, but sometimes it's far too easy to form the impression that decent information is at best hard to come by and at worst purposely withheld. This week I ...

IT trade events like SNW Europe this week are a great opportunity to study the techniques employed in IT suppliers' marketing messages. Some use out-and-out distortions of commonly-understood ...

Here at Storage Networking World (SNW) Europe in Frankfurt tape library maker Spectra Logic is taking the opportunity to showcase its Black Pearl "deep storage" in Europe. The concept is an ...

Here at VMworld Europe in Barcelona the term ecosystem is being thrown around with gay abandon. It's a lovely-sounding word. It evokes life, the planet, lush green rainforests, myriad plants and ...

If you could build a datacentre - and more importantly its contents - from scratch chances are it wouldn't look much like many of them do now. Technologies have come along, have served their ...

EMC's refresh of its VNX line of unified storage arrays is largely based on an almost complete re-write of its near 20-year-old Flare operating system. Flare was on its 32nd release and has been ...

The aim of this blog post is to try to iron out some misunderstandings in two common terms in storage. Two terms that are actually really rather connected; storage virtualisation and ...

A rather tiny bit of storage news this week illustrates the changes taking place as part of the flash revolution, and also where its leading edge lies. The news is that Fusion-io has submitted ...

Two years ago I wrote that the storage industry was apparently ripe for huge change. The nub of my argument was that storage is a sector of the IT supplier world in which customers are forced to ...

The NAND flash memory scene is already an alphabet soup, with SLC, MLC, eMLC and now TLC to contend with. Flash is flavour of the month/year in enterprise storage, because of its ability to rapidly ...

What are the limits of cloud storage right now? We've examined it elsewhere. And you wouldn't necessarily ask the CEO of a cloud storage service provider that question. They have too many reasons ...

It's been an interesting week for NetApp-watchers. On Tuesday we learned of the company's latest moves in the flash array space; the EF540 flash array and FlashRay, a new operating system (OS) ...

I caught up with flash array maker Solidfire this week, whose CEO Dave Wright was attending Cloud Expo Europe in London. What struck me was Solidfire's targeting of the cloud provider market and ...

If I were a betting man when it came to the prospects of storage businesses I might be tempted to put some money on the mid-long term prospects of X-IO. X-IO - which revealed an addition to its ...

The subject of this blog is a briefing this week with Scale Computing. And a major factor in why it's getting written about here is the laughable levels of chutzpah involved on Scale's part. The ...

Almost exactly a year ago I spoke to Overland Storage about their then-new DX1 and DX2 traditional NAS boxes. At the time I questioned why clustered NAS capability had been omitted. After all, it's ...

I met with Violin Memory at VMworld Europe last week in Barcelona. It's always good to spend a bit of time talking with vendors and get to see under the skin of the company a bit. Chief impression ...

Whiptail, MLC, SSD, Intel, commodity, RAID level

On the streets around VMware's VMworld Europe 2012 event this week you could see a mobile advertising vehicle bearing a hoarding that declares: "NetApp Data ONTAP is the world's #1 storage OS? ...