News

Data centre hardware

November 10, 2020 10 Nov'20
Canada ad firm subtracts 44U with HPE and Ctera hyper-converged

Glenn Davis Group slashed its hardware estate from 48U of rack space to 4U when it ditched its SAN and tape legacy kit for flash-based Ctera X Series and cloud backup
November 09, 2020 09 Nov'20
Quantum’s ATFS aims to classify and manage unstructured data

Quantum triumvirate now comprises ATFS for file system classification and management, StorNext for high performance with large files and ActiveScale object storage as a bulk store
November 05, 2020 05 Nov'20
Slot of the Antarctic: Tape the best option for polar survey backup

Tape deemed the best medium for backup on board the Antarctic research vessel RRS Sir David Attenborough, with Quantum’s Scalar i3 chosen in a fully redundant deployment
November 02, 2020 02 Nov'20
HPE to build new Pawsey supercomputers

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has snagged a A$48m deal to deliver a supercomputer for Australia’s Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

October 28, 2020 28 Oct'20
NetApp boosts NVMe, QLC and container hybrid cloud offer

Storage giant NetApp unveils new AFF, FAS and E-series arrays with NVMe and QLC flash capability, plus object storage in Ontap and Spot cloud container resource management in Cloud Manager
October 27, 2020 27 Oct'20
Commvault launches Metallic backup service in Europe

Backup giant adds backup as a service, with cloud-to-cloud backup and e-discovery functionality that can work across on-site datacentres and the AWS and Azure clouds
October 22, 2020 22 Oct'20
SonicWall patches 11 firewall vulnerabilities

SonicWall users are advised to download updates that fix 11 CVEs in the SonicOS operating system, uncovered by Positive Technologies
October 13, 2020 13 Oct'20
DBS to deploy IBM z15 mainframes

Singapore’s DBS Bank has signed a seven-year deal with IBM to run and modernise mission-critical applications on z15 mainframes
October 07, 2020 07 Oct'20
Carhartt shifts old data to the cloud with Komprise

US-based workwear manufacturer cuts storage costs from $1 to $0.25 per gigabyte as it deploys data management software and shifts old files to Microsoft Azure Blob and Cold storage
October 05, 2020 05 Oct'20
Veeam buys Kasten to get a boost in Kubernetes backup

Virtual machine backup pioneer sees $150m purchase of Kasten and the addition of Kubernetes backup to its portfolio as key to becoming a ‘$2bn company’

September 29, 2020 29 Sep'20
Red Hat rivals VMware and Nutanix with hyper-converged OCS 4.5

Red Hat’s OpenShift 4.5 extended container orchestration to virtual machines. The arrival of OCS 4.5 moves the solution into the realm of hyper-converged systems
September 28, 2020 28 Sep'20
Swiss ISP opts for Scality object storage for backup service

Move to object storage allows Lake Solutions to cut customer backup costs by 66% while providing new S3-based bucket storage for customers based on Scality on HPE
September 21, 2020 21 Sep'20
Nutanix boosts storage performance by 50% with BlockStore

Hyper-converged infrastructure pioneer Nutanix boosts access to NVMe and potentially Optane storage with BlockStore, which avoids the need to access the deepest layers of the OS
September 16, 2020 16 Sep'20
Pure flashes the cash, paying $370m for Portworx

Flash storage pioneer believes container storage is the next frontier and pays big money for container persistent storage software provider Portworx in deal set to close this month
September 15, 2020 15 Sep'20
Scality aims at high-performance object with Ring 8 all-flash

Object storage specialist – with file storage capability – aims at tier-1 use cases such as AI/ML, content delivery and some backup tasks with all-flash upgrade to Scality Ring 8
September 10, 2020 10 Sep'20
Broadcom launches Brocade gen7 Fibre Channel switches

New generation Fibre Channel doubles performance to 64Gbps with switches and HBAs now available. But what future for Fibre Channel with NVMe-over-fabrics hitting the datacentre?
September 07, 2020 07 Sep'20
Dutch bank set to save €5m via Veeam backup upgrade

Rabobank ditched legacy backup where patching took months and restores took hours. Those times are now cut down massively and the bank has a readily available test environment
September 02, 2020 02 Sep'20
Nimbus Data launches 64TB of QLC flash in one drive for £8,000

Flash pioneer aims QLC-equipped ExaDrive NL at AI/ML, analytics, media streaming and archiving use cases. Nimbus eschews NVMe for well-established SAS and SATA connectivity
September 02, 2020 02 Sep'20
Guernsey to revamp digital local service delivery following double datacentre build-out

The State of Guernsey’s ongoing push to revamp how it delivers digital services to its citizens continues apace with the completion of two new datacentres on the island
September 01, 2020 01 Sep'20
Pure aims at unified file and object and launches new QLC storage

Flash storage maker says unified storage in file and object is what is needed for contemporary analytics and AI workloads, while it launches a new all-QLC version of FlashArray//C
August 26, 2020 26 Aug'20
HPE sees IT spending increase – expect server prices to rise

Organisations are buying more tech to keep operations running, but DRAM shortages will lead to server price increases
August 25, 2020 25 Aug'20
Intel’s DAOS tops the IO500 speed challenge for HPC storage

Following on from Lustre, Intel’s DAOS is an object storage-based system with that is designed specifically for use with Optane for metadata and SSD for bulk storage in HPC environments
August 19, 2020 19 Aug'20
Veeam to add CDP, plus Google cloud as a target

Backup giant set to add continuous data protection for the most critical workloads, plus Google cloud as a target – all on the back of a storming quarter during the pandemic
August 18, 2020 18 Aug'20
Panasas launches storage tiering by size instead of usage

Dynamic Data Acceleration moves data to media dependent on file size and claims performance advantage over rival as it gets the best out of flash and spinning disk hard drives
August 12, 2020 12 Aug'20
Pure and Cohesity launch FlashRecover for flash-speed restores

Flash market pioneer links up with scale-out backup product maker to provide bundled backup plus super-fast recovery based around Pure FlashBlade storage arrays
August 11, 2020 11 Aug'20
Nutanix launches Clusters in AWS for hybrid cloud hyper-converged infrastructure

HCI pioneers launches Nutanix Clusters, which will provide hyper-converged deployments across customer datacentres and the Amazon cloud, but only in Acropolis and on AWS for now
August 05, 2020 05 Aug'20
Atos signs £5m supercomputing deal to support Oxford University-led AI research push

University-led push to accelerate the pace of machine learning and artificial intelligence research in UK enters new phase with the deployment of a second supercomputer
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
Oracle ups ante in cloud wars with dedicated customer regions

Oracle’s Dedicated Region Cloud at Customer will let enterprises run an entire cloud region in their own datacentres in a potentially game-changing move
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
July 01, 2020 01 Jul'20
Lenovo, top-of-the-world Chinese supercomputer supplier, sweeps all markets

Supercomputers are not just about computing power, they are a symbol of political ambition. Chinese supercomputer supplier Lenovo is now the dominant supplier across the world
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 17, 2020 17 Jun'20
Macquarie eyes government contracts with new Canberra datacentre

New Macquarie datacentre in the Australian capital designed to achieve Tier 4 datacentre standards will deliver 1.5MW of capacity by December 2020
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 03, 2020 03 Jun'20
Lidl Finland speeds up with new local server racks

Lidl brings server racks to its Finnish stores in a bid to improve connectivity and introduce new services to its customers
June 03, 2020 03 Jun'20
How Australia’s Shockbyte scales with cloud

Australian game server provider Shockbyte uses bare metal servers on the cloud to meet the needs of demanding gaming applications and to grow its global footprint
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 11, 2020 11 May'20
Micro Focus sees growth in mainframe migration business

Lifting and shifting Cobol code from mainframes to public cloud has been a growth driver for Micro Focus in the Asia-Pacific region, even as the software supplier continues to diversify its business
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 22, 2020 22 Apr'20
How DBS is reaping the dividends of digital transformation

At DBS Bank, the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak has demonstrated the value of technology and the investments it made over the past decade to modernise its technology stack
April 07, 2020 07 Apr'20
Coronavirus: Microsoft Azure suffers datacentre capacity shortages in Europe

Microsoft is working to “expedite” additional datacentre capacity after reports of users struggling to access resources due to coronavirus demand surge. But how easy will that be amid a global pandemic?
April 03, 2020 03 Apr'20
Singapore researchers get priority access to HPC resources

Singapore’s National Supercomputing Centre is fast-tracking access to its high-performance computing resources for researchers working on Covid-19-related projects
March 27, 2020 27 Mar'20
Huawei to boost Kunpeng ecosystem in cloud play

Chinese tech giant will shell out $200m this year to build an ecosystem around its Arm-based processor to bolster its position in the cloud computing market
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
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 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 17, 2020 17 Feb'20
Met Office gets a decade of funding to update supercomputers

As the UK goes through another storm battering, the Met Office has received a £1.2bn investment to power the next decade of weather forecasts
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
Secure data erasure is needed to ensure more people recycle their tech

A dedicated team of IT recycling experts offers free data erasure to give people confidence that their old tech can be safely disposed of
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 12, 2019 12 Dec'19
Stanford University finds that AI is outpacing Moore’s Law

Every three months, the speed of artificial intelligence computation doubles, according to Stanford University’s 2019 AI Index report
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
December 03, 2019 03 Dec'19
AWS VP of engineering on the cloud giant's first major quantum computing push

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has used the first day of its annual Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to set out its plans to democratise quantum computing, while also firming up the enterprise use cases for the technology
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
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 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 22, 2019 22 Oct'19
NordVPN blames datacentre provider for server breach

VPN provider insists no user data was compromised in a March 2018 server breach, and says its datacentre provider failed to inform it of the issue
October 22, 2019 22 Oct'19
APAC spending on AI systems to hit $6.2bn in 2019

Led by China and organisations in the banking industry, APAC spending on artificial intelligence is set to grow by almost 64% this year, according to IDC
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 15, 2019 15 Oct'19
AI Singapore to set up on-premise HPC infrastructure

Singapore’s national AI programme is getting its own high-performance computing infrastructure to support more compute intensive workloads
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 27, 2019 27 Sep'19
How Graphcore is putting AI on steroids

UK chipmaker Graphcore’s intelligence processing unit may just hold the key to unlocking the full potential of artificial intelligence
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 23, 2019 23 Sep'19
The perfect storm for silicon photonics

By packaging optics with silicon chips, silicon photonics will enable datacentres to keep up with the exponential growth in demand for bandwidth
September 18, 2019 18 Sep'19
IBM opens new centre to house 53-qubit quantum computer

IBM hopes its cloud-connected quantum computer in New York will encourage the development of quantum-optimised software
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