News

Storage management and strategy

• 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

• 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 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 25, 2020 25 Jun'20

  Nebulon emerges with software-defined storage, but from the cloud

  Startup to offer on-site storage with local I/O and some controller functionality in the cloud, combining software-defined and cloud to bring “fleet management at scale”

• 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 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 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 02, 2020 02 Jun'20

  Digital transformation held back by lack of skilled people

  Veeam survey finds digital transformation a hot topic, but 44% of firms are held back by skills shortages. Meanwhile, the cost of downtime is found to be $67,651 per hour for the most important apps

• 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 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 24, 2020 24 Apr'20

  Dark data is contributing to carbon emissions

  Almost six million tonnes of carbon dioxide will be pumped into the atmosphere this year as a result of dark data, Veritas research finds

• 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 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 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

• 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 20, 2020 20 Jan'20

  Inside NetApp’s transition into a data management firm

  NetApp’s leaders in Asia-Pacific discuss the company’s pivot into data services and its traction in the region

• January 15, 2020 15 Jan'20

  How container applications are shaping storage management

  Persistent storage, backup and recovery were not on the minds of those behind container applications, but that is starting to change

• 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 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 04, 2019 04 Dec'19

  AWS Outposts debuts in Australia

  Amazon Web Services rolls out Outposts in Australia, enabling enterprises to run a consistent version of the AWS platform at locations that require low latency

• 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 28, 2019 28 Nov'19

  Australia’s Fenner Dunlop ditches tape backups for cloud

  Australian manufacturer of conveyor belts Fenner Dunlop has freed up its IT staff to focus on future projects by moving tape backups to the cloud

• 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

• 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 01, 2019 01 Oct'19

  Dutch group works on digitising collaborator archives created in aftermath of World War 2

  Experiments have been carried out to ascertain the best technology to open up the analogue archives of the Central Archive of Special Justice in the Netherlands

• September 30, 2019 30 Sep'19

  Pure Storage APAC CTO talks up storage trends

  Flash-based storage will be around for at least two decades more, while crystal- and DNA-based storage needs a lot more work before becoming mainstream, according to Pure Storage’s CTO for the Asia-Pacific region

• 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

  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

  Pure Storage sees stellar growth in APAC

  Pure Storage is expanding its footprint in key markets such as Australia, Japan and South Korea, even as it proceeds with caution in China

• 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 17, 2019 17 Sep'19

  Pure Storage outlines growth momentum, bolsters cloud play

  Pure Storage CEO talks up the storage supplier’s competitive edge in a largely stagnant market dominated by larger rivals

• 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 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

• August 19, 2019 19 Aug'19

  Virtual Instruments to add cloud monitoring with Metricly

  Storage monitoring specialist Virtual Instruments buys Metricly to add monitoring of AWS compute CPU, memory and resource utilisation to save customer costs

• July 30, 2019 30 Jul'19

  Australia to upgrade supercomputer in HPC boost

  The Gadi supercomputer at the Australian National University will run 10 times faster than its predecessor, giving researchers access to high performance computing resources to solve the toughest research problems

• 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

• 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

• March 19, 2019 19 Mar'19

  Cohesity plans to put backup data to good use

  Cohesity’s DataPlatform now makes use of previously dormant backup data with analytics to provide business value and to tackle threats such as ransomware

• February 13, 2019 13 Feb'19

  Cloud and backup top storage priorities for 2019

  Deploying the cloud for primary and secondary storage and backup and archiving project top project priorities in 2019. SAN, NAS and hyper-convergence also prominent

• February 05, 2019 05 Feb'19

  Payday lender cuts troubleshooting by 30% with Virtual Instruments

  Curo Financial thought storage was slowing down its websites, but found virtual machine and network issues were to blame. To fix this, it’s going proactive on storage performance issues

• January 07, 2019 07 Jan'19

  Huawei debuts Arm-based chip, eyes broader server market

  Huawei’s Kunpeng 920 processor is geared towards big data and infrastructure applications, marking its foray into Arm-based servers that are set to change the dynamics of the datacentre market

• December 28, 2018 28 Dec'18

  Top 10 storage stories of 2018

  Key trends in storage in 2018 included hybrid and multicloud storage, container storage, and hyper-converged infrastructure. Meanwhile, flash storage has evolved with NVMe

• December 20, 2018 20 Dec'18

  CIO interview: Amitabh Apte, global director of digital integration, Mars

  The consumer goods giant’s global director of integration talks about developing an API strategy, consistency and increasing customer focus

• November 27, 2018 27 Nov'18

  Data volumes set to hit 175ZB with a tectonic shift to the cloud

  There will be more data in the public cloud than enterprise datacentres or consumer devices by 2025 as data shifts location, according to a study by IDC and Seagate

• November 20, 2018 20 Nov'18

  Survey: Data very fragmented, and that’s a worry for most

  Cohesity-sponsored survey finds most organisations store multiple copies of secondary data and worry about the cost and the effect on their competitiveness

• November 01, 2018 01 Nov'18

  Nutanix extends its Beam to private cloud deployments

  Hyper-converged infrastructure maker Nutanix pushes its Beam cloud monitoring and management platform into customers’ datacentres, but only for Nutanix deployments, for now

• October 18, 2018 18 Oct'18

  Internet of things challenges in storage and data

  The internet of things (IoT) brings challenges, with a host of new edge devices and data. We look at edge and core processing, compliance and information lifecycle management in IoT

• October 16, 2018 16 Oct'18

  Hammerspace launches with hybrid cloud-era NAS virtualisation

  Startup Hammerspace launches from five-year stealth to make NAS files available anywhere, on-prem and in cloud, with technology that splits metadata and payload for lightweight virtualisation

• September 10, 2018 10 Sep'18

  Enterprise demand drives hike in storage sales, says IDC

  Healthy jump in all-flash and SAN/NAS sales is being driven by enterprise storage modernisation, but also by component price rises. Dell EMC and NetApp top the supplier sales charts

• September 09, 2018 09 Sep'18

  Taming the data beast with software-defined storage

  Australian enterprises are turning to software-defined storage to improve data management and speed up testing and development

• August 29, 2018 29 Aug'18

  HPE pins hopes on intelligent edge as hybrid strategy flattens

  HPE sees hybrid as the future of enterprise IT, but revenue has been affected by currency fluctuations and its intelligent edge business is growing quickly

• August 15, 2018 15 Aug'18

  Quest goes software-only with QoreStor. Next stop, the cloud

  Quest makes backup product software-defined with QoreStor, with dedupe functionality that can be added to other backup products, and plans cloud backup with native storage next

• June 19, 2018 19 Jun'18

  NHS trust dumps creaking EMC SAN for Nutanix hyper-converged

  Derbyshire-based NHS trust had reached end-of-life with Dell servers and EMC SAN, so it took the plunge with Nutanix hyper-converged to reap space, power and reliability gains

• June 06, 2018 06 Jun'18

  GDPR and backup: A potential minefield easily avoided

  The right to be forgotten will be impossible in backups and snapshots, but systems can be built that automate for compliance, says Andy Barratt of security consultancy Coalfire

• May 24, 2018 24 May'18

  England and Wales Cricket Board to improve players’ medical data

  Cricketers’ medical images will be stored securely in an independent clinical archive, enabling clinicians to access medical data and make treatment decisions more quickly

• May 23, 2018 23 May'18

  Compliance in the cloud: Avoiding the cloud compliance trap

  When you hand over data to a cloud provider, you don’t hand over responsibility for legal and regulatory compliance. Beware of falling into a cloud compliance trap

• May 07, 2018 07 May'18

  ASEAN seeks to tame data deluge with object storage

  Led by Singapore and Thailand, the object storage market in Southeast Asia is expected to grow at a double-digit rate in the next few years

• April 18, 2018 18 Apr'18

  Backup 101: Incremental vs differential backup

  In this Backup 101 article, we look at incremental versus differential backup and walk through the advantages and disadvantages of these two key backup strategies

• March 29, 2018 29 Mar'18

  Western Digital adds StorReduce deduplication to object storage

  US hardware giant Western Digital links up with StorReduce to provide data deduplication for object storage that combines WD ActiveScale scale-out appliances with the startup’s dedupe software

• March 27, 2018 27 Mar'18

  Pivot3 Cloud Edition adds backup from hyper-converged to AWS

  Hyper-converged infrastructure node maker dips its toes into hybrid cloud operations with Pivot3 Cloud Edition on Amazon Web Services to add cloud backup to HCI

• March 19, 2018 19 Mar'18

  Hybrid cloud mainstream, but seamless operations hard to achieve

  Survey by 451 Research finds most organisations use a mix of on-premise and cloud locations, but truly seamless hybrid cloud operations are very difficult to achieve

• March 14, 2018 14 Mar'18

  All-flash rules while Brexit slows UK storage spend, says IDC

  IDC quarterly storage shipments tracker shows all-flash storage on top of the pile while Brexit slows UK spending and Huawei knocks Hitachi Data Systems out of top five

• March 06, 2018 06 Mar'18

  Druva maintains cloud course with AWS cloud-to-cloud backup plans

  Backup product supplier Druva plans cloud-to-cloud backup to Amazon Web Services and other public cloud services as demand arises, in a future firmly fixed on hybrid operations

• March 02, 2018 02 Mar'18

  Scality Zenko 'multi-cloud controller' offers hybrid cloud boost

  S3-based software control layer will support Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds to bring hybrid cloud operations, with object storage across private and public clouds

• February 20, 2018 20 Feb'18

  Load Dynamix is now WorkloadWisdom and adds more NAS support

  Virtual Instruments enhances NAS testing and monitoring capabilities with SMB and 25GbE support in WorkloadWisdom but hybrid cloud monitoring will remain off limits for now

• February 19, 2018 19 Feb'18

  Rackspace upgrade to save $12m with Scality object storage

  Cloud services giant Rackspace brings in Scality object storage in a move that slashes 4,000 boxes from its server count as it separates compute and storage

• February 12, 2018 12 Feb'18

  Dell EMC: Time for hyper-converged, but not for mission critical

  Hyper-converged vs converged infrastructure: Dell EMC says hyper-converged isn’t ready for mission-critical applications, but may be by the end of the year

• January 31, 2018 31 Jan'18

  GDPR requests to take thousands of hours a month, says survey

  A recent survey predicts organisations will potentially face thousands of customer requests about their personal information every month, with many unprepared for GDPR compliance

• January 30, 2018 30 Jan'18

  ESG survey: Storage spending habits become ‘hybrid-cloud-defined’

  Analyst survey finds cloud is used as a way to make storage more efficient, but organisations are also bringing cloud apps back into the datacentre and spending on in-house capacity

• January 24, 2018 24 Jan'18

  GDPR worries hit cloud storage investments, says survey

  NetApp-sponsored survey finds lack of customer confidence in cloud service providers’ retention of GDPR-affected data has led organisations to rethink and scale back cloud investments

• January 23, 2018 23 Jan'18

  Hyper-convergence and containers key storage-related deployments in 2018

  Hyper-converged infrastructure and containers are key deployments planned by UK customers in 2018, with flash storage, virtual machine storage and disk backup also prominent

• January 16, 2018 16 Jan'18

  Laing O’Rourke unifies on-site and cloud backup on Commvault

  Construction firm sweeps away tape and multiple backup products for single Commvault environment to cut admin time, slash backup windows and boost legal and regulatory compliance

• January 09, 2018 09 Jan'18

  Cloud firm scales Cloudian object storage to 2.5PB for GDPR

  Calligo expands Cloudian Hyperstore from three nodes to 30 at worldwide datacentres, with object storage deployed for file-level and metadata capabilities suited to GDPR

• 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

• December 06, 2017 06 Dec'17

  Space organisation dumps NAS for object storage to gain space

  Satellite Applications Catapult upgrade to 2PB of Cloudian object storage pays for itself in power and cooling savings as numerous legacy NAS boxes are replaced

• December 04, 2017 04 Dec'17

  Cambridge University deploys Dropbox for file sync-and-share

  Dropbox replaces numerous consumer file share products and bespoke connections as Cambridge audits 6,500 academics to roll out invisible collaboration for hundreds of use cases

• November 30, 2017 30 Nov'17

  Transport researchers get 2PB of Scality object storage

  Transport Systems Catapult retires ageing NetApp filers with 2PB of Scality object storage in a £1.5m project that future proofs the organisation with built-in DR

• November 20, 2017 20 Nov'17

  Australian broadcaster hit by data breach

  The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is the latest organisation to fall prey to misconfigured Amazon S3 storage buckets, exposing database backups and sensitive data such as login credentials

• November 03, 2017 03 Nov'17

  UK supercomputer is now world’s biggest Panasas scale-out NAS cluster

  Jasmin network supercomputer storage expands to 20PB of Panasas scale-out NAS, which has helped to cut analysis times for environmental data from days to hours

• October 25, 2017 25 Oct'17

  Containers will oust VMs and storage arrays, says Red Hat

  Red Hat launches storage delivered via containers and predicts a future in which costly and inflexible storage hardware and pricey hypervisors will be a thing of the past

• October 17, 2017 17 Oct'17

  Colliers dumps Flexpods for Nutanix and Cohesity hyper-converged

  Property firm Colliers replaces NetApp converged stacks with hyper-converged infrastructure. Secondary storage and backup from Cohesity replaces tape and supports Nutanix performance tier

• October 16, 2017 16 Oct'17

  Law firm speeds search and saves TB with Mimecast email archive

  Cloud email archiving turbo-charges search, while email security is locked down and terabytes of storage use on-premise avoided with email stub on local servers

• September 26, 2017 26 Sep'17

  Tegile says NVMe bottleneck is in the network

  Tegile's chief technology officer says the NVMe roadmap is all in place, but the key bottleneck is in the network and the applications, not its controllers. They’re ready to scale out into clusters for NVMe

• September 25, 2017 25 Sep'17

  Veritas to invest more in APAC

  Software company Veritas is upping its investments in India and Japan, and partnering with more local and specialised cloud providers in the region

• September 22, 2017 22 Sep'17

  Movie maker shuns cloud, gets Spectra Logic Black Pearl tape NAS

  Hat Trick ditches industry-specific hardware and deploys Black Pearl, which gives NAS-like file access from tape

• September 12, 2017 12 Sep'17

  University gets Nutanix for self-serve cloud to replace Red Hat

  The University of Reading replaces ageing and difficult-to-manage Red Hat storage with half a petabyte of Nutanix hyper-converged and dodges £1/2 million of VMware costs

• September 07, 2017 07 Sep'17

  The storage controller has to go, says Scale Computing CEO

  Hyper-converged appliance maker Scale Computing says it achieved near bare metal performance from NVMe by doing away with controller functionality. Is this the end of the SAN?