News

Flash storage and solid-state drives (SSDs)

• December 18, 2017 18 Dec'17

  Top 10 storage and backup stories of 2017

  In Computer Weekly’s top 10 storage stories of 2017, we tracked key trends such as the continued rise of hyper-converged infrastructure, the emergence of NVMe flash and object storage

• November 29, 2017 29 Nov'17

  Datrium’s hybrid Cloud DVX brings off-site mirror of NVMe storage

  Cloud DVX operates in Amazon cloud to provide backup and recovery instance off-site, for use as a mirror site for customers of the NVMe-focused storage maker

• November 08, 2017 08 Nov'17

  Panasas upgrades scale-out NAS to ASD-100 and ASH-100 nodes

  New Panasas appliances upgrade CPU and RAM to double throughput while changing hardware architecture. Clustered NAS specialist says all-flash and tiers of flash are on the roadmap

• August 22, 2017 22 Aug'17

  Flash memory and OLED shortages will hit smartphone sales

  Analysts at Gartner have warned that a components shortage will affect sales of high-end smartphones

• July 19, 2017 19 Jul'17

  Charity swaps SAN for Hypergrid hyper-converged to save £1m

  Tearfund saves £950,000 by deploying Hypergrid hyper-converged in place of HP servers and SAN, cutting costs on space, power, staff and hardware, and avoiding VMware

• July 12, 2017 12 Jul'17

  NVMe flash blocked by array architecture, says Kaminario CTO

  Flash pioneer CTO says array controllers are built for a different era and must scale-out as clusters to provide the CPU power needed to allow NVMe to realise its potential

• July 06, 2017 06 Jul'17

  Tegile launches Intelliflash tiered all-flash arrays with NVMe

  Hybrid flash turned all-flash maker Tegile adds tier of NVMe to SAS-connected flash with all drives encrypted and an all-NVMe array planned for later in 2017

• July 06, 2017 06 Jul'17

  Tape here to stay, says Spectra Logic with LTO-8 2x capacity gain

  LTO-8 tape to boost capacity by leveraging HDD head read technology TMR. Spectra gets in early with offer to customers, “buy LTO-7, get LTO-8 when it ships”

• June 05, 2017 05 Jun'17

  NetApp to launch SolidFire-based HCI hyper-converged appliances

  NetApp HCI will comprise hyper-converged infrastructure appliances based on SolidFire flash storage with QoS and compute from an unnamed supplier later in 2017

• May 23, 2017 23 May'17

  Racetrack Memory products in five years, says IBM fellow

  Millennium Prize winner Stuart Parkin says flash and 2D methods of storage are fatally limited – Racetrack Memory offers 100x the capacity without flash’s wear issues

• May 17, 2017 17 May'17

  Dell EMC all-flash XtremIO X2 gains I/O boost via software upgrade

  Dell EMC’s XtremIO X2 all-flash arrays got a performance jump from ungraded hardware, but the real performance boost comes from changes to the way I/O is dealt with

• May 09, 2017 09 May'17

  Nexsan Unity goes all-flash but leaves NVMe on the back-burner

  Nexsan Unity arrays already have SAN, NAS and file sync and share, and now add all-flash and policy-based archiving, but there’s no NVMe on the roadmap for now

• May 03, 2017 03 May'17

  3D XPoint et al to force architecture and software changes

  New solid state technologies such as 3D XPoint will be a second tier of memory, bringing change to hardware architectures and software to be rewritten, says SNIA solid state group chair

• April 25, 2017 25 Apr'17

  Pivot3 launches Acuity hyper-converged with NVMe flash and QoS

  Acuity operating environment merges features inherited from NexGen acquisition and adds NVMe Accelerator nodes with flash as cache in front of main storage

• April 12, 2017 12 Apr'17

  Pure Storage launches FlashArray//X with NVMe drives

  FlashArray//X has NVMe drives but end-to-end storage-to-host NVMe connectivity will have to wait for an NVMe-over-fabrics (NVMf) version planned for release later this year

• April 04, 2017 04 Apr'17

  Analytics, internet of things to drive data volumes to 163ZB by 2025

  IDC study predicts consumers as creators of data will decline as the enterprise, analytics and “life critical” scenarios push total volumes to a tenfold increase by 2025

• March 20, 2017 20 Mar'17

  Kaminario looks forward to NVMf, but not this year

  All-flash maker Kaminario plans to add NVMe drives, but only when it can replace existing fabric protocols with NVMf and a full stack of advanced storage features

• March 07, 2017 07 Mar'17

  HPE buys Nimble Storage to fill an all-flash and hybrid gap

  Hardware giant buys Nimble Storage for $1.2bn and plugs a gap below its high-end flash retro-fitted 3PAR arrays with ground-up solid state-based hardware

• January 18, 2017 18 Jan'17

  Nutanix, Simplivity and Pivot3 lead hyper-converged pack: Forrester

  Forrester rates 12 hyper-converged infrastructure providers according to products, company strategy and market presence, with Nutanix, Simplivity and Pivot3 coming out on top-line

• January 12, 2017 12 Jan'17

  IBM refreshes all-flash DS8880 series with PCIe 3.0 enclosures

  IBM adds an F to existing DS8884, DS8886 and DS8888 all-flash and hybrid arrays with addition of PCIe 3.0 disk connectivity, but stops short of NVMe capabilities

• December 30, 2016 30 Dec'16

  Top 10 virtualisation and storage stories of 2016

  Flash storage has held onto the headlines in 2016, but hyper-converged infrastructure, containerisation, software-defined storage and VMware’s plans for the hybrid cloud are rising themes

• December 05, 2016 05 Dec'16

  Top 10 ANZ enterprise IT stories of 2016

  Here is a rundown of Computer Weekly’s most popular ANZ enterprise IT articles for 2016

• October 18, 2016 18 Oct'16

  VMware VSAN 6.5 supports containers and physical servers via iSCSI

  VMware Virtual SAN now supports containers with persistent storage and allows physical server storage access to its shared pool of capacity via the iSCSI SAN protocol

• October 04, 2016 04 Oct'16

  Demand rises for low-cost flash storage across Australia

  Flash storage gains popularity in Australia, as smaller organisations are attracted by lower prices and higher capacity

• September 29, 2016 29 Sep'16

  Is it NAS? Is it object storage? It’s both. It’s Avere’s C2N

  Avere launches C2N hybrid NAS/object storage box that uses touted efficiencies of erasure coding to take aim at claimed drawbacks of clustered NAS rivals like Isilon

• September 22, 2016 22 Sep'16

  Hypergrid adds metered usage and networks to hyper-converged kit

  Hyper-converged appliance maker will allow customers to pay for what they use in hardware that will now add networking

• August 30, 2016 30 Aug'16

  Cloud firm Backbone relegates X-IO SAN with Atlantis tiered storage

  London-based Backbone uses Atlantis USX as storage virtualisation layer on top of PCIe flash and X-IO and as a stepping stone to hyper-converged infrastructures

• August 18, 2016 18 Aug'16

  Rubrik backup appliance adds physical platforms to hybrid cloud

  Flash-powered backup appliances add MS SQL and Linux physical server to VMware backup and hybrid cloud archive in Firefly release, with more physical and endpoint support promised

• August 16, 2016 16 Aug'16

  HPE boosts MSA and StoreVirtual with sub-$10,000 flash storage options

  HPE launches new StoreVirtual 3200 entry-level array that can cost as little as $6,000, plus the SME-focused MSA 2042 array which has 800GB of flash embedded

• August 11, 2016 11 Aug'16

  Nimble adds to all-flash arrays with entry-level AF1000

  Nimble made its debut in all-flash in February 2016, but now adds an entry-level array, the AF1000, plus upgrades to its hybrid flash array products that up performance and capacity

• July 07, 2016 07 Jul'16

  Pure Storage drips out more of its all-flash analytics FlashBlade

  Pure lets more customers use its flash-based analytics platform FlashBlade, before the product aimed at high-throughput unstructured data is made generally available later in 2016

• June 22, 2016 22 Jun'16

  Nutanix adds storage for containers, physical servers and all-flash

  Hyper-converged infrastructure maker Nutanix adds container support with persistent storage, offers block iSCSI storage for physical servers and allows all-flash across the product range

• May 12, 2016 12 May'16

  Software-defined storage the power behind Monash University microscopes

  Australian academic institute uses the technology to help it deal with huge – and still growing – storage demands

• April 27, 2016 27 Apr'16

  IBM all-flash family gets cloud and enterprise A9000 and A9000R

  IBM announces two all-flash arrays – the modular A9000 and rack A9000R, aimed at service providers and enterprises – and the mainframe-connected DS8888

• April 26, 2016 26 Apr'16

  HDS G series arrays get native NAS and cloud as a storage tier

  VSP G series enterprise hybrid flash arrays see addition of native NAS functionality on a controller card plus cloud as a storage tier via Hitachi Content Platform

• April 05, 2016 05 Apr'16

  SimpliVity adds Hyper-V support to hyper-converged products

  Hyper-converged appliance maker adds Hyper-V support to VMware ESXi capabilities and upgrades OmniStack software to support workload optimisation on SimpliVity clusters

• March 29, 2016 29 Mar'16

  OSNexus unlocks Ceph object storage in QuantaStor v4

  Software-defined storage maker OSNexus adds Ceph-based object storage to its QuantaStor product, adding it to block and file storage from ZFS, Gluster and Ceph

• December 24, 2015 24 Dec'15

  Top 10 storage stories of 2015

  The year 2015 in storage was dominated by the continued rise of flash and Dell’s purchase of EMC, but there were steady upticks in trends such as hyper-converged and software-defined storage

• November 16, 2015 16 Nov'15

  DDN revamp adds SFA14K plus hyper-converged and all-flash options

  DataDirect Networks upgrades core HPC storage arrays to create SFA14K, and adds hyper-converged SFA14KE plus all-flash IME14K front end to smooth I/O bottlenecks

• November 02, 2015 02 Nov'15

  Hewlett Packard Enterprise: think of us as a startup

  As Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc finally part ways, UK managing director Andy Isherwood shares some insight on what the future holds for the newly minted enterprise business

• September 03, 2015 03 Sep'15

  SanDisk InfiniFlash flash arrays get Nexenta software-defined storage

  SanDisk offers its all-flash array InfiniFlash IF100 with Nexenta's storage software on-board in another move in the trend towards choice in storage hardware and software deployments

• July 22, 2015 22 Jul'15

  TLC flash storage: What it is and what it's good for

  We run the rule over triple-level cell (TLC) flash: What it is, how it performs, what it's good for, why it's a competitor to disk, and how it's all been made possible

• July 06, 2015 06 Jul'15

  Genomics England rejects open source to deploy EMC Isilon HPC storage

  100,000 Genomes Project rejects building open-source parallel file system on x86 servers and opts for EMC Isilon clustered NAS deployed by Capita S3

• June 24, 2015 24 Jun'15

  NetApp adds AFF All-Flash FAS 8000 series storage arrays

  NetApp boosts its SSD array portfolio with the addition of AFF All-Flash FAS 8000 series storage arrays built on Data ONTAP, but still no sign of FlashRay general availability

• June 15, 2015 15 Jun'15

  Council dodges £300,000 NetApp outlay with Atlantis flash caching

  Somerset local authority avoids spending £300,000 on extra hard drives for its NetApp arrays and pays half that for Atlantis ILIO flash caching software that runs VDI from RAM

• June 01, 2015 01 Jun'15

  Pure Storage replaces FA series all-flash arrays with FlashArray//m

  Pure Storage upgrades FA series all-flash arrays with FlashArray//m series devices

• May 08, 2015 08 May'15

  EMC predicts return to double-digit sales growth

  Storage giant's EMEA chief claims downbeat first quarter results are as bad as things will get for EMC, and that normal service will soon resume

• March 06, 2015 06 Mar'15

  How to ensure your hot-desking colleagues keep their data secure

  Once hot-desking is implemented, data security suddenly demands greater attention

• February 25, 2015 25 Feb'15

  Dell adds Nutanix-powered XC630 and XC730 hyperconverged systems

  Dell targets range of use cases with XC630 and XC730 Nutanix-powered server/storage nodes

• February 24, 2015 24 Feb'15

  PernixData FVP boosts RAM as host storage with up to 4x compression

  Flash caching firm PernixData adds compression to FVP 2.5 for more scope to use RAM as host-based storage for high-performance datasets