Data centre hardware
Data centre strategy is an increasingly important focus for IT managers, as enterprises look to cut costs and improve energy efficiency. We examine key data centre hardware trends such as virtualisation, consolidation and systems management to help identify the products that are right for your needs.
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Feature
20 Sep 2023
Toyota car plant outage shows database capacity planning is vital
How could database deletes and re-organisation take out car production for 36 hours at 14 plants? We drill down into the details of database capacity planning Continue Reading
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News
20 Sep 2023
How Google is priming its infrastructure for the AI wave
The technology giant is integrating purpose-built hardware with an optimised software stack to meet the heightened computational demands of next-generation AI workloads Continue Reading
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News
16 Feb 2022
Retrospect Backup refines anomaly detection in ransomware battle
StorCentric backup software brand allows customer fine-tuning of anomaly detection in struggle against ransomware, and adds immutable copies via object locking in Azure Continue Reading
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News
15 Feb 2022
Nebulon gets Ansible collection for datacentre deployment
Provider of cloud-managed and hardware-accelerated – formerly ‘cloud-defined’ – storage makes further moves towards its smartInfrastructure vision, with Terraform support coming Continue Reading
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News
14 Feb 2022
India to invest $1bn in quantum computing
India plans to invest $1bn over the next five years to advance its capabilities in quantum technology, but it will need to have a tailored approach and to address the skills gap to succeed Continue Reading
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Feature
09 Feb 2022
Posix vs object storage: How much longer for Posix?
We look at Posix compliance in storage and why it is being challenged by object storage and the need to scale much further than Posix-oriented storage was ever intended to Continue Reading
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Feature
08 Feb 2022
Cloud-era disaster recovery planning: Staff training, incident and media management
In the third in a series on cloud-era disaster recovery, we set out the key components of DR staff awareness and training programmes, as well as incident management and dealing with the media Continue Reading
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News
07 Feb 2022
TV provider MediaHub boots SAN and NAS for Scality object storage
Sydney-based TV content provider MediaHub got tired of performance issues and scaling difficulties with SAN and NAS, so powered its as-a-service offer with Scality object storage Continue Reading
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News
31 Jan 2022
Nebulon SmartInfrastructure brings cloud-defined storage to datacentre
Cloud-defined storage allows customers to build private clouds on-site, with pools of storage built from commodity hardware, Nebulon PCIe cards and its browser-based console Continue Reading
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Feature
27 Jan 2022
Refrigeration firm freezes legacy backup for one Cohesity cluster
France-based Clauger had reached limits of capacity and complexity with multi-supplier legacy backup, so moved to one Cohesity cluster and gained restores that took mere minutes Continue Reading
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Feature
27 Jan 2022
Cloud-era disaster recovery planning: Setting strategy and developing plans
In the second in a series on cloud-era disaster recovery, we look at how to formulate a DR strategy and develop detailed DR plans for your organisation, while taking cloud services into account Continue Reading
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News
26 Jan 2022
Storage tech brief: Look out for PCIe gen 5 drives in 2022
PCIe 5.0 will offer bandwidth up to 128GBps per drive. We look at what’s available and when, including in the new EDSFF form factor, as well as looking forward to PCIe gen 6 Continue Reading
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Feature
24 Jan 2022
EDSFF brings built-for-NVMe connectivity to the datacentre
Aimed at enterprise use cases, EDSFF offers incredible flash density in shared storage and hyperscale deployments, but storage products that use it are still thin on the ground Continue Reading
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Feature
24 Jan 2022
Object storage: How research institute got 850TB for €150,000
French scientific research institute had its budgets cut and to meet the new cost constraints, it settled on Swarm software-defined object storage from DataCore Continue Reading
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News
19 Jan 2022
Gartner: IT spending forecast points to skills rebalance
Latest forecast on IT spending shows that more IT workloads are being deployed in the cloud, and outsourcing is also set for a boost Continue Reading
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Feature
19 Jan 2022
Cloud-era disaster recovery planning: Assessing risk and business impact
In the first in a series on cloud-era disaster recovery, we provide a step-by-step guide to building firm foundations for the disaster recovery plan, with risk assessment and business impact analysis Continue Reading
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Podcast
14 Jan 2022
Podcast: 2022 compliance preview – GDPR goes global
We talk to Mathieu Gorge, CEO of VigiTrust, about what’s looming in compliance, with regulations based on the principles of the General Data Protection Regulation plus the concept of cyber accountability Continue Reading
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Feature
07 Jan 2022
New supercomputer opens doors for researchers in Sweden
More than twice as powerful as its predecessor, a new supercomputer ushers in new opportunities for researchers who rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning Continue Reading
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News
06 Jan 2022
Thailand builds new supercomputer to boost research
The National Science and Technology Development Agency’s new supercomputer will boost research in pharmaceuticals, renewable energy and weather forecasting, among other areas Continue Reading
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Feature
22 Dec 2021
Scale-up vs scale-out: Horizontal vs vertical scaling for storage
We look at the differences between scale-up and scale-out in storage – or horizontal vs vertical scaling – and the key ways it can be carried out on-prem and in the cloud Continue Reading
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News
21 Dec 2021
Top 10 ANZ IT stories of 2021
Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 ANZ IT stories of 2021 Continue Reading
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News
21 Dec 2021
Top 10 cloud storage, DR and datacentre storage stories of 2021
Key articles from 2021 that demonstrate the growing importance of cloud storage and disaster recovery, but also the snags that lead to cloud repatriation and difficulties restoring from the cloud Continue Reading
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News
20 Dec 2021
Top 10 ransomware and backup stories of 2021
Key articles from 2021 that highlight the link between ransomware and snapshots and backup and their role in repelling attacks, plus effects of the pandemic on backup and recovery Continue Reading
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News
16 Dec 2021
Barclays selects HPE GreenLake to host 100,000 workloads
Bank sees a need to provide more personalised digital experiences, and GreenLake is providing the IT infrastructure to help it get there Continue Reading
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News
14 Dec 2021
IT priorities 2022: Ransomware and cloud drive storage and backup
The pandemic and the move to the cloud has driven cloud storage as a key priority Continue Reading
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Feature
10 Dec 2021
Edge storage: Four key points
Edge storage is driven by rapidly emerging edge computing and data gathering use cases. We look at why it makes sense to store data at the edge and the key challenges involved Continue Reading
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News
08 Dec 2021
Pure adds flagship FlashArray//XL with doubled throughput
High-end enterprise-targeted FlashArray//XL leverages latest Intel Ice Lake CPU, PCIe 4.0 and distributes SLC flash across drive modules to double throughput over existing arrays Continue Reading
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News
30 Nov 2021
UK MSP set to use Nebulon cloud-defined storage IaaS
UK service provider Inca to use “cloud-defined storage” to support managed service provider offer in move which shunned hyper-converged infrastructure because of cited costly overheads Continue Reading
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E-Zine
25 Nov 2021
CW Nordics: Could Iceland be the best place in the world for HPC?
Most of Iceland’s cheap, sustainable energy is used by aluminium smelters, but the country's Landsvirkjun power company is now promoting other uses for it, including high-performance computing. Also read in this issue how IoT collaboration in Norway is reaching beyond industries such as mining and shipping to include fish farming. Continue Reading
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Feature
17 Nov 2021
Cloud repatriation: Five reasons to repatriate data from cloud
We look at key drivers of cloud repatriation, including cost, compliance, issues around latency and data gravity, reversing poorly planned moves to the cloud, and supplier failure Continue Reading
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News
15 Nov 2021
Video firm gets Qumulo scale-out NAS and super-fine metrics
Cognacq-Jay Image shunned Scality and Isilon to get Qumulo scale-out NAS for extremely elastic video workloads and built fine-grained metrics to troubleshoot complex processes Continue Reading
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News
11 Nov 2021
Post-Covid tech world to see 89% of UK tech operations hosted off-premise
Leading UK ISP releases research showing that emergence of the hybrid era means that dependence on on-premise infrastructure to support a full capacity office is no longer required Continue Reading
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News
10 Nov 2021
Vast Data: Big shifts promised for an AI future
Purveyor of Universal Storage says AI and GPU-based compute will dominate, and is set to benefit with its (relatively) cheap, deep and quick QLC-plus-Optane offer Continue Reading
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News
07 Nov 2021
Belfast City Airport: Most apps in the cloud by 2031
George Best Belfast City Airport has already achieved 50/50 cloud and on-premise working, with 80% of workloads expected to be cloud-based in the next decade. We look at what hybrid cloud means in practice Continue Reading
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Feature
05 Nov 2021
Immutable snapshots aim to neutralise ransomware
Snapshots – usually immutable anyway – get functionality to stop ransomware intruders moving or deleting snapshots, so customers know they have clean copies of data to restore from Continue Reading
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News
02 Nov 2021
iXsystems entry-level NAS goes hyper-converged with TrueNAS Scale
iXsystems TrueNAS can be a fraction of the cost of competitors and with a revamped operating system it can be built into clusters that can run virtual machines and containers Continue Reading
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News
01 Nov 2021
No cloud storage for Belfast City Airport in Nutanix hyper-converged switch
George Best Belfast City Airport ditches ageing Dell iSCSI SAN for Nutanix HCI for half the price of nearest contender, and gets DR site into the bargain. Cloud storage was a no-go for cost reasons Continue Reading
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Feature
29 Oct 2021
Five ways the hyper-converged infrastructure market is changing
We look at changes in the hyper-converged infrastructure market as suppliers go cool, go soft, disaggregate HCI nodes, provide as-a-service options and look to containers Continue Reading
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News
27 Oct 2021
Google’s server life extension delivers $1.7bn revenue boost in nine months
Although its public cloud market share is way behind AWS and Azure, GCP is forging ahead with its industrial cloud strategy Continue Reading
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News
21 Oct 2021
NetApp Insight frames moves to public cloud and cloud native
Storage player highlights partnerships with cloud hyperscalers and development of Spot portfolio aimed at cloud-native applications, DevOps, FinOps and SecOps Continue Reading
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News
20 Oct 2021
Vast boosts QLC flash offer with ransomware-proof snapshots
Vast majors on QLC flash bulk storage with 3D Xpoint cache to smooth out traffic into sequential flows Continue Reading
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News
20 Oct 2021
Spectra Logic unveils Vail hybrid cloud storage virtualisation
Vail provides single pool of storage overlay to on-premise flash, disk and tape, plus cloud via object storage interface with Posix-compliance promised in future releases Continue Reading
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News
20 Oct 2021
Alibaba Cloud to open datacentres in Thailand and South Korea
Chinese cloud supplier is expanding its regional datacentre footprint to Thailand and South Korea in 2022 alongside technology investments that include a custom Arm-based server chip Continue Reading
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E-Zine
19 Oct 2021
Making the case for and against police use of facial recognition technology
In this week’s Computer Weekly, as the Met Police enhances its facial recognition capabilities, we examine the pros and cons of law enforcement use of the technology. Three in five IT professionals want a new job – is there a tech exodus in the industry? And we take an in-depth look at the growth of the Nordic datacentre sector. Read the issue now. Continue Reading
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News
19 Oct 2021
Want to sidestep public cloud? AuriStor offers global file storage
Built to scale hugely, and built for high performance and security, Auristor offers NAS-like Posix-compatible storage to customers that want to avoid public cloud Continue Reading
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News
17 Oct 2021
Graphcore opens Southeast Asia hub in Singapore
The AI chipmaker is looking to expand its sales teams and hire more engineers to support customer deployments in Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia Continue Reading
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Feature
13 Oct 2021
Hybrid cloud: Five key questions in 2021
We look at key need-to-knows about hybrid cloud in 2021, including how it is defined, key use cases, the main pitfalls and where it’s heading Continue Reading
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Feature
07 Oct 2021
French Caisse uses NetApp to move backups to object storage
State financial arm wanted to move backups held on NAS file-based storage to object storage, so stuck with NetApp StorageGRID and achieved near-seamless migration Continue Reading
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News
04 Oct 2021
Nexustorage aims at file and block access to object storage
New Zealand-based startup to release Nexfs, which chops files into sub-file chunks and tiers them off to cheap and deep object stores with NFS and iSCSAI access for Posix applications Continue Reading
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Feature
29 Sep 2021
NVMe-over-fabrics: Five need-to-knows
We look at five need-to-knows about NVMe-over-fabrics, such as its implementations – RDMA, Fibre Channel and TCP – use cases, hardware and operating system support Continue Reading
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E-Zine
28 Sep 2021
Chancellor Rishi Sunak talks tech
In this week’s Computer Weekly, we talk to the Chancellor of the Exchequer about his plans to support innovation and growth in the UK tech sector. Composable IT is the latest trend in building software to support business change. And Halfords built its own service management software – and now is selling it to other retailers. Read the issue now. Continue Reading
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News
20 Sep 2021
Kioxia revisits SLC flash to power FL6 and rival Optane
SLC flash storage – mostly consigned to the ‘where is it now?’ pile – has been given a lease of life by Kioxia as capacity for rapid access storage-class memory applications Continue Reading
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Feature
14 Sep 2021
HDD support and Zoned Namespaces: Key takeaways about NVMe 2.0
We look at new capabilities in the most recent iteration of the NVMe flash storage standard Continue Reading
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E-Zine
14 Sep 2021
Is 3D printing about to hit the mainstream?
In this week’s Computer Weekly, we find out about the emerging consumer services using 3D printing and ask if the technology is about to go mainstream. Our latest buyer’s guide looks at the importance of sustainable datacentres. And we analyse the risks of increasing contactless card spending limits and whether tech could help. Read the issue now. Continue Reading
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Feature
09 Sep 2021
Five things you need to know about cloud file services
We look at cloud file services, which provide a file system-like architecture that gives users access to file data wherever they are, just as if it were a local NAS filer Continue Reading
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Feature
08 Sep 2021
Dell, NetApp and Pure: Healthy results on Covid easing
Dell’s still top of the storage supplier pile with midrange arrays doing well, but meanwhile NetApp and Pure are making gains on the rise of public cloud Continue Reading
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News
06 Sep 2021
NetApp and AWS launch fully managed Ontap cloud file storage
But hybrid cloud still limited, according to NetApp. Until containerisation is widespread, applications tend to be built for the cloud or work better in the datacentre Continue Reading
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Feature
02 Sep 2021
Five key questions to ask about storage-as-a-service and consumption models
We look at important questions to ask providers of consumption-based storage procurement services, such as base costs and burst, usage measurement and upgrade paths Continue Reading
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News
31 Aug 2021
More NAND SSD in fewer hands as WD $20m Kioxia bid likely
The NAND flash market could soon go from six major players to four, but the fusion of Kioxia into WD and SK Hynix with Intel’s NAND business will still leave Samsung atop the pile Continue Reading
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News
23 Aug 2021
Veeam survey: Big cloud impact on backup and disaster recovery
Backup specialist finds cloud eclipses on-site compute for all workloads while DR makes big strides in the cloud despite concerns about complexity and security Continue Reading
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Blog Post
11 Aug 2021
The critical importance and utility of the modern mainframe
IT resilience and security is essential to today's businesses, so dependent are they on their IT systems. For some of those who have been around this industry more than a decade or two, this raises ... Continue Reading
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Feature
04 Aug 2021
Disaster recovery for SMEs: Five key areas to consider
We look at key disaster recovery considerations for SMEs, including why backup is not enough, how to create a disaster recovery plan, best-practice DR testing and DR as a service Continue Reading
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News
03 Aug 2021
Panasas’s 10x saving bumps NetApp from HPC storage deployment
University of Wollongong got 1.2PB for the cost of 100TB for HPC storage in its cryo-imaging institute. Scale-out NAS maker Panasas also brought life sciences expertise to bear Continue Reading
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News
23 Jul 2021
Can India become a global manufacturing hub?
India can be a major player in the global manufacturing supply chain by shoring up IP protection and tapping opportunities in contract manufacturing and firmware design Continue Reading
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News
20 Jul 2021
Purported Intel-GlobalFoundries deal targets chip shortage
Hoping to build its chip production to better compete with TSCM and Samsung, Intel is rumored to be making a bid to acquire GlobalFoundries for $30 billion, among other moves. Continue Reading
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Feature
19 Jul 2021
Storage-as-a-service: Consumption models from the big six
We look at the big six storage makers’ consumption model offers, which allow customers to pay for on-prem hardware and cloud storage capacity on a pay-per-use basis, within limits Continue Reading
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Feature
16 Jul 2021
Briefing: Cloud storage performance metrics
We look at some of the key storage performance metrics that determine what your applications will get from cloud storage, plus cloud essentials that are beyond simple measurement Continue Reading
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News
07 Jul 2021
Flexify brings virtualisation layer to multi-cloud storage
Cloud storage virtualisation provider allows application access via S3 API calls to a single destination while capacity can be in numerous clouds with migration between them Continue Reading
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Feature
07 Jul 2021
Five things you need to know about NVMe over Fabrics
We look at NVMe-oF, which extends fast flash across the network – what it is, how it works, use cases, benefits and limitations, and the suppliers of NVMe-oF products Continue Reading
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News
07 Jul 2021
Forrester finds companies confounded by data deluge
A Dell-commissioned study by analyst firm Forrester finds organisations overwhelmed by mounds of data Continue Reading
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News
06 Jul 2021
Manutan claws back 25% of storage admin time in switch to Pure
Industrial and office supply giant needed to replace 3Par arrays then made a rapid switch to Pure Storage FlashArray flash storage when the ageing HPE hardware crashed during POC Continue Reading
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News
25 Jun 2021
France TV repatriates backup and archive from public cloud
France Télévisions Publicité couldn’t always get to critical data, so decided to repatriate backup and archiving from the cloud to on-site locations, with help from a managed service Continue Reading
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News
24 Jun 2021
Vodafone confirms European datacentres will be powered by 100% green energy by July 2021
Telco giant claims it is on course to hit an important milestone in its latest sustainability push, with its entire European operations set to be 100% renewably powered by 1 July Continue Reading
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Feature
23 Jun 2021
Cloud storage APIs: What are they and what can be done with them?
We look at the kinds of application programming interfaces (APIs) available to expose cloud storage to applications, from SME-targeted solutions to higher-end hooks Continue Reading
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News
22 Jun 2021
GlobalFoundries to open new fab in Singapore
US chip foundry GlobalFoundries is building a $4bn semiconductor fabrication plant in Singapore to expand its manufacturing capacity as chip demand surges worldwide Continue Reading
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News
21 Jun 2021
Opera house shuns cloud for Nutanix and Rubrik hyper-converged infrastructure
The Royal Opera House considered moving all its infrastructure to the cloud, but a hybrid setup with Nutanix and Rubrik hyper-converged infrastructure came in 35% cheaper Continue Reading
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News
18 Jun 2021
Vast Data will offer containerised storage software, but not yet
Vast Data sticking to its plan to provide no-tier “universal storage” via QLC flash and a 3D Xpoint read/write buffer that uses a containerised control plane Continue Reading
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Feature
16 Jun 2021
Storage performance metrics: Five key areas to look at
We look at the essentials in storage performance metrics: capacity, throughput and read/write capability, IOPS and latency, and hardware longevity measured by failure rates Continue Reading
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Feature
10 Jun 2021
How the pandemic changed backup
The Covid-19 pandemic forced big changes in how people work – we look at impacts on backup, including increased reliance on the cloud, plus security and compliance vulnerabilities and ransomware Continue Reading
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E-Zine
10 Jun 2021
CW Europe: Amsterdam reins back datacentre developments over environmental concern
The construction of datacentres in the Netherlands’ Amsterdam region has accelerated at such a pace that their demands for electricity are causing concern, prompting city authorities and datacentre operators to open a dialogue about sustainable datacentre industry expansion. Also in this issue, find out the state of play in the adoption of open banking across Europe. Continue Reading
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News
09 Jun 2021
Cohesity brings DataProtect backup-as-a-service to Europe via AWS
Scale-out backup appliance pioneer adds backup-as-a-service from a virtual machine on customer premises Continue Reading
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News
02 Jun 2021
Oracle debuts low-cost Arm compute instances
Oracle is offering Arm instances powered by Ampere’s Altra processors at one cent per core hour as enterprises look to deploy more Arm-based workloads Continue Reading
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News
02 Jun 2021
SA-based MSP shuns HCI for Nebulon cloud-defined storage
SYSDBA needed to refresh its HPE 3PAR arrays, and so looked at hyper-converged but decided on cloud-defined storage from Nebulon that marries local storage with a cloud control plane Continue Reading
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News
02 Jun 2021
HPE latest quarterly filing hints at ProLiant shift
Installed base of ProLiant server customers on a path to consumption-based, as-a-service subscription for hardware modernisation Continue Reading
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Feature
01 Jun 2021
Gartner: How to turn old datacentres into critical IT assets
IT infrastructure and operations leaders are increasingly focusing on new ideas and technologies alongside ways to deliver business value Continue Reading
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News
01 Jun 2021
Exagrid pays $2.6m to Conti ransomware attackers
Backup appliance specialist hit by Conti ransomware in May with cyber criminals downloading employee and customer data, confidential contracts and source code Continue Reading
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News
25 May 2021
Valence brings storage virtualisation for the cloud era
Startup 22dot6 launches Valence, software-defined storage that throws a virtualisation layer over any backend storage via multiple nodes that split metadata and storage services Continue Reading
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News
25 May 2021
Oil and gas firm halves backup licence cost with Hycu move
Summit E&P made a strategic move to Nutanix hyper-converged and away from NetApp and VMware and wanted backup that could handle virtual machines and physical servers Continue Reading
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Feature
25 May 2021
Where to run containers? Bare metal vs virtual machines
We look at the key differences between running containers in virtualised environments and on bare metal servers and focus in on the main trade-offs and decision points Continue Reading
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Feature
24 May 2021
How Bureau Veritas migrated 85% of its applications to the AWS cloud
In six years, France-based services giant BV has migrated 115 applications to the AWS cloud, mostly using in-house expertise. We talk to the company’s IT director Continue Reading
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Feature
20 May 2021
What digital transformation means for data storage
We survey the key planks of digital transformation and look at the storage technologies emerging to support it, such as NVMe and QLC flash, hyper-converged infrastructure and cloud storage Continue Reading
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Feature
17 May 2021
Container-native storage: A definition, and what to ask suppliers
We look at container-native storage – aka cloud-native storage – what defines it, and its benefits as a way of bringing persistent Kubernetes storage to containerised applications Continue Reading
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News
13 May 2021
Portworx gets container-native array management for Pure hardware
Container storage player Portworx builds in container-native functionality to allow discovery, provisioning and management from inside Kubernetes cluster, but only on Pure arrays so far Continue Reading
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Feature
11 May 2021
Computational storage: What is it? Why now, what for, who from?
Computational storage is an emerging architecture category, in which compute is put near storage to address I/O bottlenecks resulting from large volumes of data Continue Reading
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News
04 May 2021
Nebulon helps DCI offer high-performance edge hyper-converged
Cambridge-based cloud and colo provider DCI will offer DataQube servers with Nebulon, which marries a cloud control plane with local PCIe-connected flash storage Continue Reading
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News
29 Apr 2021
Intel seeks broader platform play with Ice Lake
Company is counting on performance improvements from its third-generation Xeon ‘Ice Lake’ chip and its broader platform strategy to regain its mojo in the market Continue Reading
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Feature
28 Apr 2021
Backup failure: Four key areas where backups go wrong
We look at the key ways that backups can fail – via software issues, hardware problems, trouble in the infrastructure and good old human error – and suggest ways to mitigate them Continue Reading
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News
27 Apr 2021
Scality launches Artesca container-native object storage
Object storage specialist gets on a burgeoning container object storage market with Artesca, which runs from Kubernetes to provide persistent storage for containerised applications Continue Reading
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News
23 Apr 2021
Intel quarterly results reveal tactics to address ARM in the datacentre
The chipmaker aims to make use of standard chip libraries and offer its customers different ways to package and optimise Intel silicon Continue Reading
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Feature
22 Apr 2021
Five reasons to look at hyper-converged infrastructure
HCI promises easy setup, purchasing flexibility, low procurement and operation costs, reliability and all in one box – but there are challenges too Continue Reading
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News
22 Apr 2021
Australia and India team up on critical technology
The first three projects under a joint research grant programme will focus on developing ethical and regulatory frameworks for quantum computing, AI and 5G Continue Reading
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News
21 Apr 2021
Winemaker racks Pure all-NVMe all-flash for rapid SAP response
Concha Y Toro also pocketed a 35% saving in storage costs following a move from as-a-service storage provision to Pure Storage FlashArray//X all-flash hardware Continue Reading