Computer storage hardware

IBM operating income falls by 18% as it offloads semiconductor unit

IBM reported lower-than-expected earnings for the third quarter of 2014, with revenue down by 4% year-on-year Continue Reading

DDN launches scale-out NAS GS7K GPFS product bundle

DataDirect Networks launches the GS7K, a pre-configured GPFS scale-out NAS/parallel file system storage product Continue Reading

A guide to scale-out NAS: The specialists and startups

Specialist suppliers and startups in scale-out NAS, a technology that’s gone mainstream for its superior ability to scale capacity and performance Continue Reading

Virtual backup appliance pros and cons

Computer Weekly examines virtual backup appliances that run backup and restore from a virtual machine Continue Reading

Scale-out NAS product survey: The big six

We survey the big six storage array makers’ scale-out NAS product ranges Continue Reading

Intel unveils first 14nm processor aimed at mobile computing devices

Chipmaker's first processor based on 14nm micro-architecture will be thinner, cooler and aimed at tablet PCs Continue Reading

Key storage performance metrics for virtual environments

We run the rule over storage performance metrics – latency, throughput and IOPS – that are key to optimising virtual machines Continue Reading

Lack of coding skills may lead to skills shortage in Europe

European Commission urges people to learn coding, warning that a lack of coding skills could see Europe facing skills shortage by 2020 Continue Reading

CIPD ditches 20-a-day tape habit for Exagrid data deduplication

HR professionals organisation the CIPD replaces tape backup with disk-based data deduplication backup hardware from Exagrid Continue Reading

EMC XtremIO, VMAX and Isilon get new CPUs and data services

EMC boosts XtremIO, VMAX and Isilon with Ivy Bridge CPUs and advanced data services including flash array snapshots Continue Reading

Big players target object storage at cloud and archive

All but one of the big six storage vendors have object storage products that target public and private cloud environments and/or archiving use cases Continue Reading

Betting on World Cup success

In this week’s Computer Weekly, we talk to gambling site Betfair about the IT challenges of preparing for the football World Cup. We examine the strategy of cloud software pioneer Salesforce.com as it grows its role in the IT department. And we explain erasure coding – an emerging method for protecting storage hardware. Read the issue now. Continue Reading

Voice recording compliance: What it is and how to achieve it

Voice recording compliance is subject to the regulation by the FSA, PCI, and Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts Continue Reading

Backup vs replication, snapshots, CDP in data protection strategy

Best practice data protection strategy combines backup with snapshots, CDP and replication for different levels of recovery Continue Reading

Facebook shares lessons learnt from deploying Raid in HDFS clusters

Facebook deployed Raid in large HDFS clusters to increase capacity and reduce data replication, but it faced many challenges Continue Reading

OpenStack storage: Cinder and Swift explained

is a rising star in private cloud infrastructures. But what about OpenStack storage? We run the rule over OpenStack Cinder and Swift Continue Reading

In-memory databases - what they do and the storage they need

In-memory databases offer high performance data processing, but how do you protect data in volatile DRAM and what kind of storage is needed for longer term retention? Continue Reading

Principles of compliance in the financial services industry

Compliance in financial services can appear a staggeringly complex web of laws and regulations, but some key principles apply, says Mathieu Gorge of Vigitrust Continue Reading

Erasure coding vs Raid as a data protection method

Erasure coding is mooted as a potential successor to Raid and backup software Continue Reading

Write-through, write-around, write-back: cache explained

Cache is vital for application deployment, but which one to choose – write-through, write-around or write-back cache? We examine the options Continue Reading

HDS upgrades its mainframe-friendly VSP G1000 enterprise storage array

Hitachi Data Systems launches the Virtual Storage Platform G1000 enterprise storage array, which boosts capacity, performance and lifespan for the storage virtualisation platform. Continue Reading

Data set to grow 10-fold by 2020 as internet of things takes off

IDC’s Digital Universe study predicts the world's data will amount to 44 zettabytes by 2020, 10% of it from the internet of things Continue Reading

VMware versus Hyper-V storage comparison

VMware versus Hyper-V storage: How do the two leading hypervisors compare when it comes to deploying storage and in terms of their key storage features and functionality? Continue Reading

Would the real flash storage successor please stand up?

Flash storage will hit a wall in development terms by around the end of the decade. But which successor is best placed to replace it: Memristor, MRAM or phase-change memory? Continue Reading

EMC upgrades Avamar, Networker and Data Domain products

EMC boosts application and hypervisor integration on Avamar, Networker and Data Domain as part of a strategic push to "backup-less backup" and a "data protection continuum" Continue Reading

Cloud archive pros and cons and the questions to ask providers

A cloud archive offers a flexible and cost effective alternative to in-house archiving where maintenance is outsourced, but what are the key questions to ask a potential supplier Continue Reading

Converged stacks: What they are and the benefits they bring

We survey the converged stacks market: Servers, storage and networking in pre-configured product bundles for specific virtualisation and application use cases. Continue Reading

Cloud storage options in Scandinavia

It has never been faster or cheaper to store data in the cloud and Scandinavian businesses have taken up cloud storage with gusto Continue Reading

NetApp slims product family with launch of FAS8000 series

NetApp launches FAS8000 line that will replace FAS3000 and FAS6000 series filers Continue Reading

UK IT spending will outpace rest of Europe in 2014

Computer Weekly research reveals the IT spending priorities for UK and European organisations in 2014. Continue Reading

Flash storage: What it is and where to deploy it

A guide to the key decisions in flash storage: MLC vs SLC, all-flash vs hybrid, whether to add flash to an existing SAN, flash as a tier vs cache, and more Continue Reading

Atlantis joins the software-defined storage fray with USX

Atlantis ILIO USX software-defined storage allows customers to virtualise commodity to create flash, hybrid and hyperscale storage Continue Reading

B&Q owner Kingfisher dumps Raid rebuilds and saves 40% on disk with X-IO

Kingfisher puts X-IO drives behind IBM SVC storage virtualisation to save 40% disk costs and dispenses with Raid rebuilds in £120,000 project Continue Reading

EMC brings Hadoop into ViPR upgrade and unifies SRM modules

EMC launches version 1.1 of its software-defined storage/big data platform ViPR by building in Hadoop analytics capability Continue Reading

VDI storage basics and persistent versus non-persistent desktops

A look at the fundamentals of VDI storage and how to specify storage for likely workloads and persistent versus non-persistent desktops. Continue Reading

Flash storage alternative MRAM takes another step forward

MRAM, a likely successor to flash storage, takes a step toward easier manufacture and longer life with new structures theorised by scientists in Singapore Continue Reading

What’s new in ISO 27001: 2103 for storage and backup?

This year, ISO 27001: 2013 was published, putting more emphasis on mapping risk to an ever-expanding and mobile IT infrastructure. But what is new in ISO 27001: 2013? Continue Reading

SMB 3.0 brings enterprise-class storage to Hyper-V deployments

SMB 3.0 is Microsoft’s replacement for the “chatty” CIFS file access storage protocol that offers enterprise-class storage to Hyper-V deployments Continue Reading

CW Special Report on Dell

This 11 page special report, independently written by Computer Weekly, gives you the facts on Dell, its strategy in 2013, products and services and financial performance. Continue Reading

Technology Industry Survey 2014

From CTOs to software developers, architects to entrepreneurs, this report captures the opinions of people at the forefront of shaping our industry. Continue Reading

School gets Nimble hybrid flash and Barracuda hybrid cloud backup

Berkshire private college has revamped data protection with Nimble hybrid flash storage and Barracuda hybrid cloud backup Continue Reading

Business-defined storage will help reconnect businesses with IT, says Forrester

Business-defined storage and datacentres will make IT more business-centric, according to Forrester Continue Reading

Wellcome Trust maps big data genetics with DDN HPC storage

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has invested in DDN SFA10K HPC storage to support petabytes of big data generated by genetic mapping and research into diseases such as malaria Continue Reading

Emulex ExpressLane and CrossLink boost HBAs for flash and Hadoop

Storage card maker Emulex has added QoS prioritisation for flash storage and leveraged RDMA via Fibre Channel to increase server performance in clustered operations such as Hadoop Continue Reading

NTT Europe saves time with Sepaton data deduplication VTL deployment

NTT Europe was sick of tape libraries “shoeshining” so went for a $2.5m deployment of Sepaton data deduplication virtual tape libraries to slash backup and restore times Continue Reading

Array-based or vSphere Replication for VMware SRM?

What’s the best replication method for VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)? GlassHouse Technologies’ Paul Grimwood runs the rule over array-based replication and vSphere Replication Continue Reading

Fibre Channel vs FCoE. Fibre Channel rules. For now

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and converged network adapters (CNA) offer storage and networking on one infrastructure, but what are the pros and cons of moving to FCoE? Continue Reading

Make a high-performance computing and high-availability datacentre

High performance computing and high availability systems are no longer limited to engineers and scientists. But is your datacentre ready? Continue Reading

Nirvanix failure – a blow to the cloud storage model?

Cloud storage firm Nirvanix has given customers a deadline to retrieve their data. Are the reasons for its failure specific to Nirvanix or a real blow to cloud storage overall? Continue Reading

Disaster recovery planning: Don’t be fooled by suppliers

Disaster recovery planning is all about good preparation and not falling for supplier hype. Build appropriate systems, test them and train people well Continue Reading

Software licences drive Oracle revenue, but hardware takes a hit

A drop in hardware sales dragged down Oracle’s revenue in its Q1 financial results, but software revenue increased Continue Reading

Quantum upgrades big data storage to StorNext 5

Quantum’s StorNext big data tiered architecture operating software gets a boost to five billion files and a claimed 10x performance jump via multi-threaded CPU ops Continue Reading

Cloud file-sharing for enterprise users

Cloud file-sharing services have become near-ubiquitous among enterprise users. We survey the risks, benefits and alternatives to Dropbox Continue Reading

iSCSI switch selection and configuration

iSCSI switch selection means looking out for the type of features that matter to iSCSI SAN traffic. We run the rule over the iSCSI switch market to see what’s available Continue Reading

When to use flash SSD instead of SAS or SATA?

When to use flash SSDs instead of SAS or SATA spinning disk is all down to application requirements, says David Boyle, senior consultant at GlassHouse Technologies (UK) Continue Reading

British Airways unveils its new Airbus A380

The new addition to the BA fleet - the Airbus A380 Continue Reading

The Future Is Here: A New Industrial Revolution

London’s Design Museum is housing an exhibition on the future of manufacturing Continue Reading

LUN storage management for vSphere and Hyper-V

LUN storage partitioning has been transformed with the advent of virtualisation. Find out how it differs between VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V implementations Continue Reading

Avamar and NetWorker to merge for 'backup-less backup'

EMC looks forward to backup as an embedded process, with apps and hypervisors copying versioned replicas in native format Continue Reading

What’s wrong with flash storage: And what will come after?

Flash storage has taken the enterprise by storm, but its days are numbered due to an unfavourable combination of technological obstacles and manufacturing economics Continue Reading

Virtualisation and the LUN: Storage configuration for VMs

Virtualisation and the LUN: Storage admins used to match LUNs to physical servers, but that’s all changed. Find out how in this guide to the basics of VM storage Continue Reading

Can Dell survive in the cloud era despite killing its public cloud offering?

Dell has ditched its public cloud IaaS in favour of partner cloud programme. But will the strategy help secure its future in the cloud era? Continue Reading

CW Buyer's Guide: Client Computing

Computer Weekly looks at Windows 8 and the complexities of mobile working, the benefits to the business of an enhanced user experience and the shift from the 9-to-5 office desk to IT delivered over a variety of devices, anytime, anywhere. Continue Reading

Sweating your datacentre’s IT assets - is it a good idea?

Amid economic uncertainties, businesses want to get more from existing IT assets. But does it make sense from an IT point of view? Continue Reading

VMware storage: SAN configuration basics

For VMware storage basics start here – the fundamentals of configuring SAN storage for VMware, such as VMFS, VMDKs, connectivity options and VMware storage features Continue Reading

AMD launches low-power server processors to rival Intel's Atom

AMD has launched Opteron X-Series low-power server processors that it claims “beat the top-performing Intel Atom processor” Continue Reading

Rare Apple 1 computer goes under the hammer

A rare and original Apple 1 Computer from 1976 will be auctioned off this month. Less than 50 are estimated to still be in circulation, with only six fully functional. The first computer to offer a complete motherboard was a revolution to home computing and changed the way people interacted with the technology forever. Continue Reading

World’s fastest supercomputer gets 40PB of DDN storage

The US Oak Ridge lab builds home-grown HPC NAS for 40PB DataDirect Networks with 1TBps of throughput as a SAN to back-end Spider II file system on Titan supercomputer Continue Reading

Real-life disaster recovery boost at video firm with HDS clustered NAS

Special effects video firm The Mill boosts HDS/BlueArc clustered NAS capacity to cope with HD movies and build disaster recovery site at London’s Docklands Continue Reading

Big data storage: Defining big data and the type of storage it needs

Big data storage: What is big data, what compute/storage system configurations are used for big data analytics, and what type of storage infrastructure does it require? Continue Reading

DDN launches hScaler Hadoop appliance for enterprises

HPC and clustered NAS supplier Data Direct Networks aims at enterprise customers with Hadoop appliance comprising its SFA12K storage and commodity compute components Continue Reading

In-house tape vs cloud archiving: What are the pros and cons?

Have cloud archiving services reached a tipping point that makes them cheaper and easier to manage than in-house tape archives? Continue Reading

Whiptail tops the class with flash array plus SAN two-tier strategy

School slashes virtual desktop login times with two-tier Whiptail flash array plus budget Huawei SAN Continue Reading

EMC seals deal with Chinese server giant Lenovo for desktop NAS

Storage giant EMC completes joint venture that will see it provide desktop NAS and SME rackmount storage hardware to Lenovo Continue Reading

Deduplication and single instance storage cut primary data storage costs

Data deduplication and single instance storage can cut costs in primary data environments, but implementations vary between suppliers. Continue Reading

Whiptail promises four million IOPS all-flash array performance

All-flash array maker Whiptail has upgraded its Racerunner operating system so Invicta arrays can scale to four million IOPS and 360TB of capacity Continue Reading

World’s oldest digital computer is back in action

Built in 1951 the WITCH computer has been brought back to life thanks to The National Museum of Computing. Continue Reading

DataDirect Networks takes aim at clustered NAS with SFA7700

DataDirect Networks (DDN) makes a play for clustered NAS customers with big data needs on its journey from HPC to scale-out supplier Continue Reading

The future of computing at IBM Zurich research labs

Chips powered by the sun and cooled by water are just some of the long-term research projects at IBM's Zurich labs Continue Reading

Tune Raid performance to get the most from your HDDs

Tune Raid performance at the storage controller to match application I/O demands to optimal hard drive (HDD) performance Continue Reading

Tesco signs £65m datacentre deal to drive online expansion

Tesco expects to cut several millions each year from its IT bill following a 15-year £65m datacentre deal with Sentrum Continue Reading

How to get the most from storage within budget

In this buyer’s guide, we assess the changing storage landscape and how the various technologies can be implemented to maximum effect Continue Reading

Dell expects tough next quarter

Dell expects third-quarter revenue to be down between 2% and 5% on second-quarter levels due to the “uncertain economic environment” Continue Reading

IBM acquires Texas Memory Systems

IBM buys flash storage specialist Texas Memory Systems for an undisclosed sum and promises to invest in further product development Continue Reading

Tiers for Fears: an holistic approach to managing datacentres

Analyst group, Quocirca, explains the importance of a holistic approach between a data centre facility and datacentre equipment and assesses the benefits of external data centre services. Continue Reading

Making Sense of Big Data in the Petabyte Age

This report from Cognizant offers advice on the roadmap organisations should follow to survive the Petabyte Age. Continue Reading

KPMG 2012 Global Technology Innovation Survey

China and the US are most likely to come up with disruptive technology breakthroughs over the next four years, but Europe lags behind Continue Reading

Asian scientists call for government action on supercomputers

Scientists in India, China, Japan, Korea and India have called on their governments to collaborate on supercomputer technology Continue Reading

Cisco UCS blade servers integrate Fusion-io PCIe flash cards

Cisco UCS signs an OEM deal with Fusion-io to incorporate PCIe flash cards directly into Cisco servers Continue Reading

HP eyes EMC’s storage market

HP has released a StoreOnce data deduplication back-up system, which it claims can ingest data at 100TB per hour – three times faster than EMC’s recently launched Data Domain 990 Continue Reading

EMC World 2012 conference coverage

Keep up to date with all the news from EMC World 2012 in Las Vegas, and see the latest industry tips. Continue Reading

Vblocks revenues on track to hit $3bn in 2013

The tie-up between Cisco, EMC and VMware is ramping up revenues from its datacentre-in-a-box product Continue Reading

Tucci: FusionIO ‘darn right foolish’ for Flash attitude

EMC’s CEO hits back at FusionIO as the war of words continues between the two companies Continue Reading

Supercomputers: prestige objects or crucial tools for science and industry ?

Professor Hans Werner Meuer, co-founder of the Top500 supercomputer list, presents a critical assessment of high performance computing technology and applications. Continue Reading

STFC ploughs £30m into high performance computing centre with IBM

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has signed a £30m deal with IBM to develop high performance computing (HPC) Continue Reading

Gartner: Reducing storage costs

Gartner research director, Valdis Filks, offers tips to help businesses get to grips with escalating storage costs. Continue Reading

BMC Mainframe Survey 2011

Over a thousand large mainfram users took part in this survey and it reveals some telling plans across the IT sector for the coming year. Continue Reading

Buyer's Guide: Server Virtualisation

This Computer Weekly buyer’s guide looks at the potential barriers to successful virtualisation and how they can be overcome. Continue Reading

CW500: Getting to grips with big data

Experts from Standard Life, Deloitte and Intelligent Business Strategies share some useful tips for CIOs on understanding big data Continue Reading

CIO priorities 2012: Ali Jaffri, ICT manager, Gallions Housing

Ali Jaffri, ICT manager at Gallions Housing, talks about the challenges of 2012. Continue Reading