News

Computer storage hardware

• July 29, 2020 29 Jul'20

  How analogue film will be the future of digital history

  The pandemic meant GitHub had to wait until July to store a 21TB snapshot of its code repositories, on special film that can last a thousand years

• July 28, 2020 28 Jul'20

  Backblaze takes aim at ‘costly and complex’ AWS cloud storage

  Backblaze offers free transfer to its S3-based cloud storage – which it claims costs a fraction of AWS et al – as long as it’s more than 50TB and you commit to at least 12 months

• July 23, 2020 23 Jul'20

  Commvault refreshes HyperScale backup appliances with Hedvig

  Backup player set to replace Fujitsu/Red Hat-based backup appliances with new hardware and storage software from Hedvig, which it bought late last year

• July 22, 2020 22 Jul'20

  Inside Intel’s transition into an enterprise tech company

  Computing giant Intel is pushing deeper into the enterprise with investments in data-centric and emerging technologies along with partnerships with local firms to develop new solutions

• July 15, 2020 15 Jul'20

  University graduates to Nutanix Files hyper-converged NAS

  The University of Reading had already deployed Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure so it made sense to add Nutanix Files when its ageing NAS boxes bit the dust

• July 08, 2020 08 Jul'20

  Pavilion adds object storage to NVMe Hyperparallel Flash Array

  Pavilion responds to customer demand for object storage to support AI/ML, big data analytics workloads with multi-controller NMVe flash storage architecture

• July 07, 2020 07 Jul'20

  Fujifilm software allows S3 access to LTO tape libraries

  Fujifilm Software Defined Tape allows tape libraries to act as an S3-based object storage archive accessible as a tier of storage on-premise or in the cloud

• July 01, 2020 01 Jul'20

  Qumulo hybrid cloud NAS provides special effects for Cinesite

  Hybrid cloud scale-out NAS from Qumulo used to offload Active Directory lookups and other workloads to the AWS cloud that had suffered in peak times when on Isilon

• June 29, 2020 29 Jun'20

  Qumulo Shift opens up scale-out NAS to AWS S3 in the cloud

  Qumulo Shift will automatically convert file data on its NAS arrays to S3 object storage format in the AWS cloud. The functionality will be free to customers from July

• June 23, 2020 23 Jun'20

  SoftIron aims at data too valuable for commodity storage

  UK array maker hopes to be the storage provider of choice for those that really value their data, with highly optimised Ceph-powered hardware aimed at HPC users and enterprises

• June 19, 2020 19 Jun'20

  Inside Lenovo’s transition to a solutions provider

  Lenovo’s long-term transformation from a primarily hardware supplier to an IT solutions provider is progressing, but the journey isn’t over yet

• June 18, 2020 18 Jun'20

  US buildings firm saves big on HDDs with Nasuni cloud NAS

  APi Group dumps first-generation file sharing for Nasuni, which allowed it to save ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ with standard hardware deployments and cutting local storage

• June 16, 2020 16 Jun'20

  QLC + 3D Xpoint = Vast Data’s universal storage

  Vast marries cheap-and-deep QLC flash with super-fast 3D Xpoint to bring flash for all data, with a particular eye on analytics and with NAS and S3 object access for now

• June 09, 2020 09 Jun'20

  Churchill gets Ctera hybrid cloud NAS and dodges 3PAR disk spend

  Potteries-based ceramics maker faced the choice between expanding its HPE SAN at great cost or deploying Ctera hybrid cloud NAS. It saved thousands by heading for hybrid cloud

• June 09, 2020 09 Jun'20

  AS Roma to develop video tracking with Acronis AI expertise

  Italian football club will get variable-price ticketing using artificial intelligence expertise to develop systems. It has also deployed Acronis cloud backup

• June 02, 2020 02 Jun'20

  OneFS for Cloud is a heavyweight entrant in cloud file storage

  Dell EMC’s porting of its Isilon OneFS scale-out file system to cloud and hybrid use cases brings a big player to a market that has had some innovative incumbents for some time

• May 29, 2020 29 May'20

  Kaminario offers cut-price virtual SAN in the cloud

  Flash pioneer Kaminario builds its VisionOS out to the cloud and says its cloud block storage is much cheaper than what is available from the native cloud services of the big three providers

• May 21, 2020 21 May'20

  Infinidat sees containers and S3 as key to join storage big guns

  But that’s not all. The array maker – that brings flash performance with massive amounts of HDD plus cache – plans for NVMe-over-fabric and use of 20TB hard drives too

• May 19, 2020 19 May'20

  Portworx to add application profiles to persistent container storage

  Kubernetes persistent container storage that runs from inside the cluster will add application storage profiles for applications such as Apache Kafka, Elasticsearch and Postgres

• May 19, 2020 19 May'20

  Storj app builds QNAP NAS into its Uber-like cloud storage network

  QNAP NAS users can use the Storj app to configure spare capacity as part of the Tardigrade S3 cloud, which offers storage at half the cost of the main providers

• May 11, 2020 11 May'20

  Dell EMC launches PowerStore NVMe container-based storage array

  PowerStore controller software is based on container modules for SAN and NAS storage, while the mid-range array is all-NVMe and aimed at performance-hungry use cases such as Splunk

• May 06, 2020 06 May'20

  Pure Storage FlashBlade OS v3.0 brings protected snapshots

  Pure also adds remote replication and aims at storage use cases for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads in its all-flash NAS and object nodes

• May 04, 2020 04 May'20

  StorageOS v2 puts ‘mini brains’ in Kubernetes storage volumes

  StorageOS persistent software-defined storage for Kubernetes distributes control plane decisions to volumes in a cluster and takes away the impact on centralised scheduler

• April 23, 2020 23 Apr'20

  What comes after flash? Weebit Nano hopes its ReRAM will

  Weebit Nano’s ReRAM stores bits by building resistive filaments and promises a 1,000x speed boost over flash in chips that can store data for years and is well-suited to edge uses

• April 21, 2020 21 Apr'20

  Data excess linked to climate change

  IT departments are unwittingly contributing to climate change by storing too much data, much of which will never be used

• March 25, 2020 25 Mar'20

  Smartbox move to Nutanix HCI a catalyst for IT team revamp

  Gift supplier reorganises IT team structures as Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure helps sweep away legacy architecture for hybrid cloud and containerised operations

• March 20, 2020 20 Mar'20

  Unpatched Zyxel storage devices co-opted into IoT botnet

  Owners of Zyxel network-attached storage devices are in danger of being hijacked by Mukashi, a descendant of the infamous Mirai botnet, if they don’t patch a critical vulnerability

• March 06, 2020 06 Mar'20

  IT Priorities 2020: AI, cloud to dominate IT spending in India

  Indian organisations are expected to spend more on artificial intelligence and cloud this year in a bid gain an edge over rivals through key technology investments

• February 25, 2020 25 Feb'20

  IT Priorities 2020: Cloud storage key but SAN/NAS alive and well

  In the Computer Weekly/TechTarget IT Priorities survey cloud dominates storage spending priorities for 2020, but on-premise technologies such as SAN and NAS are still key to IT

• February 18, 2020 18 Feb'20

  Veeam Availability Suite v10 adds NAS backup and cloud tiering

  Availability Suite is mostly about consolidating the company’s data management platform idea, but it has added incremental forever NAS backup, cloud tiering and recovery to vSphere

• February 18, 2020 18 Feb'20

  China’s tech sector to shrink by 10% in Q1 amid virus outbreak

  Hardware makers will be hit more badly than software houses, but the decline in China’s ICT market will be limited to the first quarter

• February 17, 2020 17 Feb'20

  Isilon’s multi-dot upgrade to OneFS 8.2.2 masks big changes

  The latest quarterly update to OneFS sees maximum file size grow to 16TB, brings in data deduplication in real time for HDDs, better load balancing and a new Kubernetes CSI

• February 12, 2020 12 Feb'20

  IBM unifies storage arrays under FlashSystem brand

  IBM to bring together all non-mainframe storage arrays as FlashSystem product, with options from entry-level to petabyte-scale with NVMe flash and storage class memory

• February 10, 2020 10 Feb'20

  US hotel group ditches datacentre for Nasuni cloud NAS

  Wyndham Hotels & Resorts got rid of its datacentre and put everything in the cloud, with Nasuni cloud NAS providing storage from which any user can restore files

• February 05, 2020 05 Feb'20

  Veeam pushes subscription licensing in cloud-centric ‘Act II’

  Backup specialist wants to “win the cloud” as it pushes towards a cloud-focused vision that includes pay-for-what-you-use and multicloud after its acquisition last month

• February 04, 2020 04 Feb'20

  Acronis CEO bullish as specialist goes beyond backup

  Acronis is set to launch Cyber Protect as it rides a wave of confidence based on increasing revenues and investor funding. Will the backup-plus-cyber protection calculation pay off?

• January 29, 2020 29 Jan'20

  Formulus Black Forsa turns memory into block storage

  Forsa allows customers to bring application data into memory, by provisioning DRAM or persistent memory as block access storage with latency several times better than NVMe flash

• January 24, 2020 24 Jan'20

  Disaster recovery failover choices: Synchronous mirrors, P2V and the cloud

  We survey the key options in disaster recovery: whether to failover to an on-site location or off-site facility. We also look at the cloud as an option in disaster recovery

• January 13, 2020 13 Jan'20

  $5bn buy-out set to make backup giant Veeam a US company

  Veeam’s founders are out as investment fund gets its hands on a pioneer of virtual machine backup. Now it will be a US company and eligible to target US government customers

• January 07, 2020 07 Jan'20

  Scale’s HE150 the first of a big push to small edge HCI hardware

  Scale Computing aims to scale to micro-sized hyper-converged with a lightweight operating system it claims its competitors can’t match for edge and remote location deployments

• December 19, 2019 19 Dec'19

  Top 10 storage stories of 2019

  Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 storage stories for 2019, with the latest trends in enterprise storage arrays, hyper-converged, object storage, scale-out NAS, and more

• December 09, 2019 09 Dec'19

  Public sector still losing user devices in high numbers

  The Ministry of Justice has lost 354 smartphones, PCs, laptops and tablets in the past 12 months, according to a Freedom of Information request, and other government departments are in the same boat

• December 09, 2019 09 Dec'19

  China bans foreign computing kit from government contracts

  All government offices and public institutions must eliminate foreign hardware and software within three years, according to a leaked directive dubbed 3-5-2

• December 05, 2019 05 Dec'19

  NetApp’s Keystone hybrid cloud storage ‘try-before-you-buy’ for on-prem

  Keystone on-premise and cloud subscription model will cost more than buying hardware so will be best suited to customers that want to try NetApp on-site before committing to purchase

• December 03, 2019 03 Dec'19

  Survey finds most firms don’t respond to GDPR requests in time

  Most organisations do not respond to requests for GDPR data in the one month allowed, while many return incorrect data. The education sector does best, but the public sector lags behind

• November 25, 2019 25 Nov'19

  University of Leicester dumps SANs and LUNs for Cloudian object storage

  One-to-one mapping between Dell SANs and media servers had passed their sell-by date and caused vulnerabilities for the University of Leicester, which fixed the problems by a move to “stateless” object storage on Cloudian

• November 20, 2019 20 Nov'19

  Swedish hospitals suffer IT crashes

  Hospitals in Sweden’s West Götaland region have suffered computer problems because of as-yet unexplained hard drive crashes

• November 20, 2019 20 Nov'19

  Datrium boosts VMware protection but won’t add more hypervisors

  NVMe flash pioneer turned DR-as-a-service-focused data platform provider Datrium says VMware and Kubernetes have “won the market” and it won’t extend support beyond those two

• November 19, 2019 19 Nov'19

  Businesses failing to wipe data from old endpoints

  Organisations are not taking adequate precautions to sanitise data held on endpoints when refreshing their PC or mobile device estates

• November 18, 2019 18 Nov'19

  DataCore adds file and S3 object storage with vFilO

  Software-defined storage specialist DataCore has added file storage and S3 object storage access with vFilO, which lets customers create virtual pools from on-site and remote datastores

• November 06, 2019 06 Nov'19

  Scality APIs connect Azure Stack to Ring object storage on-site

  Object storage specialist continues its cloud integration journey by adding Microsoft Azure Blob API connectors to allow use of Ring as bulk storage for Azure edge data

• November 05, 2019 05 Nov'19

  Qumulo gets HPE upgrade as customers ‘come back from object’

  Distributed file system maker Qumulo benefits from HPE Apollo hardware upgrade in a market where Qumulo exec says customers are coming back from object storage for unstructured data

• October 29, 2019 29 Oct'19

  NordVPN enlists ethical hackers, launches bug bounty programme

  Breached consumer VPN supplier details steps it is taking to shore up its cyber security posture after an unknown actor gained access to one of its servers

• October 24, 2019 24 Oct'19

  Total saves £95,000 a year with Nutanix hyper-converged

  Gas and electricity supplier struggled with ageing traditional infrastructure, but moved to hyper-converged for projects that include containers and DevOps deployments

• October 21, 2019 21 Oct'19

  Virtual Instruments is now Virtana and aims at cloud, containers

  Searches for “Virtual Instruments” returned too many synthesizers, so storage monitoring pioneer went through a blue sky ordeal. It has new plans for cloud and container capability, too

• October 16, 2019 16 Oct'19

  Commvault adds Metallic SaaS backup and Hedvig features

  Backup software maker adds software-as-a-service Metallic, which can protect on-premise, cloud and hybrid platforms. Meanwhile, Hedvig gets datacentre features and erasure coding

• October 07, 2019 07 Oct'19

  PLC flash: A solid state candidate for analytics and archives?

  We thought flash would end at QLC, but storage media makers are working on penta-level cell, which could push capacity to double figures, but at a further performance cost

• October 01, 2019 01 Oct'19

  Intel previews Optane persistent memory, QLC SSD and even PLC

  Intel sets out roadmap for second-generation Optane persistent memory – between SSD and DRAM – as well as QLC SSD, with talk of PLC (penta-level cell) after that

• September 30, 2019 30 Sep'19

  HPE refurbishes legacy IT assets to make money for users

  HPE Financial Services is giving old IT assets a new lease of life at its tech renewal site in Erskine, near Glasgow, as part of a promotion of the circular economy

• September 25, 2019 25 Sep'19

  National Library of Scotland says aye to Scality object storage

  National digitised archives move off Hitachi SANs and Qualstar tape, object storage is embraced and a “no backup” strategy put in place with petabyte-scale Scality S3/file deployment

• September 24, 2019 24 Sep'19

  Pure adds Optane and QLC flash to boost performance and capacity

  Flash storage player adds Intel Optane modules performance, a capacity flash range based on QLC drives, plus rebranding and GA of its on-premise/cloud leasing service

• September 24, 2019 24 Sep'19

  Cloud provider sweeps away legacy storage for 1PB of Infinidat

  Core DataCloud decommissions storage from several vendors to consolidate to 1PB on Infinidat Infinibox, with DRAM and flash to accelerate hot data in front of disk back end

• September 17, 2019 17 Sep'19

  Northwestern cuts storage costs in half with Komprise

  Komprise’s Deep Analytics helps university classify and migrate research data to cheaper disk and cloud as it cuts storage costs from $1.1m to $680,000 per annum

• September 10, 2019 10 Sep'19

  Spectra tilts at HSM with StorCycle storage management software

  Spectra Logic unveils newly-developed storage management platform and two-tier file access and object storage with all data visible to all users for restore

• September 10, 2019 10 Sep'19

  Ctera launches hybrid cloud HC2400M at media use cases

  Edge filer specialist hits up the media and entertainment market with its NAS-like hardware that caches data locally, syncs with other nodes and stages data to the cloud

• September 09, 2019 09 Sep'19

  Commvault buys Hedvig in push for global storage player status

  Backup player Commvault aims to bring together datacentre and multi-cloud operations with software-defined storage that can unify access to almost any storage medium, anywhere

• September 04, 2019 04 Sep'19

  Virtual Instruments brings automated VM right-sizing in v6.2

  Storage and app performance specialist can now change virtual machine compute and network resources according to workload, with increased shift to analytics and proactive monitoring

• July 31, 2019 31 Jul'19

  Cisco pays $8.6m after whistleblower discloses security flaws in video surveillance system

  James Glenn, a video surveillance expert working for a Cisco reseller in Denmark, alerted Cisco to security faults and stands to gain a share of a multimillion-dollar settlement with the US government

• July 24, 2019 24 Jul'19

  HPE reiterates focus on edge computing

  Enterprise technology bigwig HPE is trumpeting its ability to help companies better manage edge workloads, claiming that its purchase of Aruba has been its most successful acquisition

• July 15, 2019 15 Jul'19

  Smartodds bets on Rubrik backup appliance with cloud archive

  Betting intelligence analytics firm Smartodds replaced its old tape backup infrastructure with Rubrik appliances to cut management time and database restores from hours to minutes

• July 11, 2019 11 Jul'19

  University of Bristol upgrades to Nimble as it takes IT off-site

  Higher education institution gets trouble-free hybrid flash performance from Nimble and stores 600TB of data at two colocation sites to which it is transitioning from on-campus

• July 09, 2019 09 Jul'19

  StorOne brings leasing for high-performance multiprotocol flash storage

  To make a name for itself in the SME storage market, startup StorOne intends to innovate in technology and its economic approach, with a subscription model for storage

• June 24, 2019 24 Jun'19

  Steel firm adds steel to resilience with Scale hyper-converged

  Carrs Tool Steels had to move on from legacy servers and found hyper-converged infrastructure from Scale Computing the ideal fit for a small business that couldn’t afford downtime

• June 19, 2019 19 Jun'19

  NetApp ports services to NetApp HCI for multi-cloud storage

  NetApp will debut multi-cloud services on its NetApp HCI hyper-converged platform, with the first being its Kubernetes orchestrator service and Cloud Volumes

• June 19, 2019 19 Jun'19

  University graduates to Rubrik backup appliance with Azure cloud

  University of Reading could only back up 20% of its data on an ageing tape library, so it modernised with a Rubrik appliance and Azure cloud storage in a cost-neutral project

• June 17, 2019 17 Jun'19

  WekaIO adds enterprise features to scale-out NAS file system

  WekaIO has Dell EMC’s Isilon, NetApp, GPFS and Lustre in its sights with its massively scalable hybrid-cloud NAS file system that also runs in the Amazon cloud

• June 11, 2019 11 Jun'19

  Scale targets edge workloads with HE500 hyper-converged nodes

  Scale Computing adds hyper-converged infrastructure nodes to provide edge compute and storage that is fully compatible with its datacentre-scale HCI appliances

• June 10, 2019 10 Jun'19

  Western Digital aims to help rethink unstructured data storage

  Zonedstorage.io is Western Digital-backed idea to re-architect unstructured data storage with sequential writes to high-capacity media such as SMR HDDs and ZNS NVMe flash

• June 05, 2019 05 Jun'19

  Komprise to add Deep Analytics to unstructured data management

  New functionality will allow customers to create and interrogate virtual data set from potentially petabytes of unstructured data across multiple shares and physical storage

• May 29, 2019 29 May'19

  Blockchain and deep neural networks show digital archive promise

  Every event, past and present, is in the digital archive, but there is growing concern that this data can be easily manipulated to change historical facts

• May 28, 2019 28 May'19

  Excelero and BeeGFS offer next-gen HPC based on NVMe flash

  Super-fast solid-state storage in commodity servers ties up with recently-developed parallel file system BeeGFS to target high-performance computing use cases

• May 22, 2019 22 May'19

  V.Pharma swaps Data Domain for Quantum and cuts backup costs

  Belgian pharmacy’s Data Domains had reached end-of-life and it wanted to remain in-budget. Quantum DXi worked out a lot cheaper and easy to manage, with good support

• May 20, 2019 20 May'19

  Reduxio’s Magellan charts course to storage in containers

  Reduxio makes its storage product functionality available via microservices in containers aimed at container-native deployments, in an initial closed customer beta

• May 16, 2019 16 May'19

  Datrium rebrands hybrid cloud data platform as Automatrix

  NVMe pioneer Datrium announces ControlShift disaster recovery automation as a service, while bundling its data platform offerings as Automatrix, and lauds the benefits compared to siloed IT

• May 14, 2019 14 May'19

  Gorilla bets on Object Matrix for £1m-plus-per-episode TV shows

  Customers such as Netflix, Amazon and the BBC need to be sure their content is stored safely. Gorilla Post Production chose object storage from Wales-based Object Matrix

• May 14, 2019 14 May'19

  Email firm runs millions of mailboxes with Scality object storage

  Open Xchange switches from OpenStack Swift to Scality to run 13PB of storage for millions of mailboxes across two continents for telco, mobile and TV providers

• May 08, 2019 08 May'19

  Nasuni aims at analytics and fast migration to the cloud

  Cloud NAS and object storage specialist says customers want “Lego blocks” that allow them to build for cloud workloads, and plans cloud migration tools for massive datasets

• May 01, 2019 01 May'19

  Scality object storage scales to 400k mailboxes for NZ provider

  New Zealand-based email hosting provider SMX needed to scale up its infrastructure to be able to handle 400,000 mailboxes, and found object storage from Scality fitted the bill

• April 30, 2019 30 Apr'19

  HPE to launch Cloud Volumes in UK and Ireland

  HPE Cloud Volumes will offer enterprise-class block storage for use with AWS and Azure compute plus a replication store for backup and disaster recovery from the end of May

• April 29, 2019 29 Apr'19

  LightBits Super SSD brings NVMe on vanilla Ethernet

  Israeli startup LightBits offers super-fast NVMe flash storage over plain Ethernet networks in a move that some think will bring “iSCSI for the NVMe generation”

• April 26, 2019 26 Apr'19

  NVMe is ‘ready’, say Dell EMC, Virtual Instruments and Cisco

  Storage and networks big guns say super-fast NVMe flash is ready for enterprise users, with performance 10x over existing Fibre Channel and ecosystem in place

• April 24, 2019 24 Apr'19

  Pure Storage buys Compuverde to put object storage on steroids

  Fast flash storage specialist Pure Storage adds object storage to FlashArray and aims to compete with NetApp on NAS while bringing flash performance to web applications

• April 17, 2019 17 Apr'19

  Qumulo upgrades hybrid-flash hybrid cloud C-series with C-72T

  Hybrid cloud-focused clustered NAS provider Qumulo’s C-72T takes advantage of cheaper and better components to start at 72TB and scale to petabytes from a 1U node

• April 10, 2019 10 Apr'19

  JetStream DR cloud replication aims to make backup redundant

  JetStream’s IO Filter allows for continuous replication to the cloud of VMware virtual machines and virtual disks instead of scheduled snapshots or backups, and with a near-zero RPO

• April 09, 2019 09 Apr'19

  IBM sees NVMe gains in V5100F, but more to come with better apps

  As IBM launches first midrange NVMe box, execs say applications need to have the SCSI designed out of them to gain the full potential of NVMe flash-equipped arrays

• April 03, 2019 03 Apr'19

  Datrium makes European push as it targets storage ‘big guys’

  NVMe pioneer turned hybrid cloud and “data platform” provider makes a push for the enterprise and wants to take scalps from those selling “1990s SAN technology”

• April 02, 2019 02 Apr'19

  Cranfield gets Rubrik backup plus Nutanix in drive to the cloud

  Research-led university goes hyper-converged across the board with Rubrik backup appliances and Nutanix in a move to rationalise on-site physical needs and drive to the cloud

• April 01, 2019 01 Apr'19

  Azure Stack HCI: Hyper-converged, but not as Azure as you’d think

  Microsoft has re-branded Windows Server Software Defined to put hyper-converged to the fore, but Azure Stack HCI isn’t totally in sync with the Azure Stack on-premise cloud platform

• March 29, 2019 29 Mar'19

  Commvault adds “tape killer” AWS Glacier Deep Archive cold storage

  Backup provider to offer 1-cent-a-gigabyte AWS Glacier Deep Archive as a target in a move that mirrors a trend towards the cloud and away from tape among Commvault customers

• March 20, 2019 20 Mar'19

  Pivot3 to target Azure, Google clouds and enhance AI/ML

  Hyper-converged infrastructure maker Pivot3 plans to extend backup for its appliance clusters to additional public clouds and optimise service levels across storage tiers and cache