Software-defined storage

Software-defined storage allows customers to build shared storage with storage software that provides SAN and NAS capability, including in some cases with full enterprise features such as replication, snapshots, integration with virtualisation platforms, tiered storage and flash drives. Software-defined storage products allow customers to build shared pools of storage from commodity servers, existing storage array capacity or unused direct-attached storage.

E-Zine 21 Mar 2023
The risks of an imbalance in AI

In this week’s Computer Weekly, a leading AI expert explains the risks of an arms race in artificial intelligence caused by the domination of private sector providers. Our latest buyer’s guide examines ways to reduce IT’s energy use. And we analyse the latest damning revelations from the Post Office scandal inquiry. Read the issue now. Continue Reading
E-Zine 16 Mar 2023
CW APAC: Buyer’s guide to SASE

Appropriate networking and security functions are integral to cyber defence. In this handbook, focused on secure access service edge in the Asia-Pacific region, Computer Weekly looks at its key benefits, how cloud security firm Zscaler aims to improve, the dangers of advanced persistent threat groups and why Australian businesses are waking up to the importance of security investment. Continue Reading

E-Zine 16 Mar 2023

CW APAC: Buyer’s guide to SASE

Appropriate networking and security functions are integral to cyber defence. In this handbook, focused on secure access service edge in the Asia-Pacific region, Computer Weekly looks at its key benefits, how cloud security firm Zscaler aims to improve, the dangers of advanced persistent threat groups and why Australian businesses are waking up to the importance of security investment. Continue Reading
News 09 Mar 2023

Velero wants to become the Kubernetes backup standard

Open source Velero offers modular data protection and disaster recovery functionality via API for Kubernetes container clusters in an effort to become the standard in the field Continue Reading
News 05 Mar 2023

FlashBlade//E to open up new opportunities in Australia

Pure Storage’s FlashBlade//E will enable the storage supplier to target medical imaging and remote backup workloads and attract new customers in Australia Continue Reading
News 13 Feb 2023

Hycu aims at universal SaaS backup with R-Cloud

Hycu’s R-Cloud aims to provide an API-driven backup product for any software-as-a-service application for enterprise customers, based on a simple low-code development environment Continue Reading
News 08 Feb 2023

Rakuten targets big edge deployments with Symworld Cloud

Japanese giant Rakuten bought Kubernetes management platform Robin.io and put it in 50,000-plus telco antennas. Now it aims Symworld Cloud at enterprise edge deployments Continue Reading
Feature 07 Feb 2023

Container storage platforms: Big six approach starts to align

Container storage is a complex but vital task. We survey the big six storage makers and see methods are starting to align around management platforms Continue Reading
News 07 Feb 2023

NetApp adds QLC C-series, new A-series and subscription upgrades

NetApp C-series QLC-based array family offers flash speed with capacity, while Advance adds subscription upgrades to owned hardware, as well as a new entry-level A-series array Continue Reading
News 30 Jan 2023

Tiger’s hybrid cloud storage targets medical imaging

Tiger Bridge targets vertical sectors that find it hard to migrate to the cloud by allowing data storage in the cloud while using files locally as if stored on-premise Continue Reading
Feature 25 Jan 2023

Green storage: Savings to be made but tricky to achieve

Storage upgrades can bring energy savings. New hardware, the cloud and as-a-service procurement models all cut costs, but can need careful tweaking to get right Continue Reading
News 23 Jan 2023

NGX: Turkish arrays to challenge US mainstream storage vendors

Ankara-based NGX offers block, file and unified storage with use of cache and RAM to speed access. Software-defined storage, cloud and NVMe-over-fabrics are also coming Continue Reading
News 20 Jan 2023

DataCore software-defined storage helps car firm avoid breakdowns

Bontaz used to face regular IT outages that took too long to recover from. Then it got DataCore software-defined storage and the ability to rapidly recover from downtime Continue Reading
News 20 Dec 2022

Top 10 emerging storage trends stories of 2022

There’s a seismic shift to the cloud. In its wake, object storage, unstructured data, analytics, unified file and object, and consumption models of procurement have all been boosted Continue Reading
Feature 19 Dec 2022

Top 10 storage and backup customer stories of 2022

Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 storage and backup customer stories of 2022 Continue Reading
Feature 30 Nov 2022

From capex to opex: Storage procurement options bloom

We look at the growing list of possibilities when it comes to paying for storage infrastructure, ranging from upfront purchases with upgrades to pure pay-as-you-go options Continue Reading
News 28 Nov 2022

Panzura partners with AWS on ransomware counter-measures

Panzura might have slipped beneath the waves, but it’s come back reinvigorated, and now boasts integration with AWS with ransomware protection and Outposts hardware Continue Reading
News 22 Nov 2022

Pure aims at near bare metal I/O with Portworx PX-Fast

PX-Fast is driven by customer need for scale and high performance in containerised environments and sees reworking of Portworx data architecture to slash storage access time Continue Reading
News 17 Nov 2022

Scality Ring 9 brings Storage Accelerator enhanced flash tiers

Scality upgrade to Ring 9 of its object (and file) storage software sees enhancements to tiering, the introduction of Prometheus-based monitoring and hooks into VMware vCloud Director Continue Reading
News 01 Nov 2022

NetApp launches BlueXP as single console across on-prem and cloud

BlueXP gives customers monitoring and control over all NetApp storage on-site and in multiple clouds. Meanwhile, its Ontap OS has added S3 object storage access Continue Reading
News 31 Oct 2022

SoftIron’s HyperCloud to ease private cloud deployments

SoftIron claims its technology stack fully automates the provisioning of storage, compute, networking and infrastructure services, providing a fully functioning, multi-tenant cloud Continue Reading
Feature 21 Oct 2022

Cloud bursting: Six key steps in planning and decision-making

We explore the key stages in a cloud bursting project: assessing the data and workflows, variants in the mechanism, application suitability, having the right resources, and planning and testing Continue Reading
News 17 Oct 2022

GRAID puts RAID on a GPU for cut-price disk protection and rebuilds

US startup puts its software on Nvidia graphics cards to offload RAID processing and throughput of 110GBps throughput across up to 32 NVMe solid-state drives Continue Reading
Feature 28 Sep 2022

AIOps for storage: Potential huge benefits, but lots of lock-in

Applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to storage can help to predict bottlenecks, diagnose I/O issues and recommend upgrades, but suppliers’ products are largely limited to their own hardware Continue Reading
News 22 Sep 2022

Dr Martens goes feetfirst into cloud-to-cloud backup

Iconic bootmaker laces up for a strategy to move all applications to the cloud, beginning with cloud-to-cloud backup for Microsoft 365 apps plus on-site VMware operations Continue Reading
News 07 Sep 2022

VMware’s vSAN 8 gets a rebuild for the solid-state storage era

At VMware Explore 2022, we interview VMware’s John Gilmartin about the new, faster vSAN, plans to use DPUs, the vSAN+ cloud offering, and VMware Ransomware Recovery Continue Reading
News 30 Aug 2022

NetApp storage goes GA for VMware Cloud on AWS

Move will bring up to 50% decrease in TCO for customers running VMware apps in the Amazon cloud, says NetApp. No date yet for extension of the service across other public clouds Continue Reading
Feature 18 Aug 2022

Huawei sets out its stall for a data-rich world

Businesses need to harness data effectively while keeping carbon emissions down. We see how Huawei is setting out to cope with the strains put on organisations, while mitigating the environmental impact Continue Reading
News 15 Aug 2022

Lightbits offers NVMe-over-TCP at 5x less than NVMe-over-FC et al

Lightbits builds NVMe-overTCP SAN clusters for Linux servers with Intel cards that accelerate network processing to give millions of IOPS with storage for public and private clouds Continue Reading
News 02 Aug 2022

VMware CEO defends Broadcom deal

Raghu Raghuram is confident that Broadcom will invest in growing VMware through a broad portfolio of assets that will serve its entire customer base, not just its biggest customers Continue Reading
News 18 Jul 2022

Vast Data upgrade boosts usable capacity, adds SaaS console

With improved data reduction algorithms, Vast has boosted its unstructured data storage offer, with 25% more usable data possible Continue Reading
News 13 Jul 2022

NHS trust cuts costs and refresh cycle with Wasabi cloud storage

Imperial College NHS Trust expects to saves 30% in storage costs and cut back on five-year refresh headaches in a move that has seen backup and archive data move to the Wasabi cloud Continue Reading
News 08 Jul 2022

How Bank BPD Bali modernised its datacentre infrastructure

The Indonesian bank has deployed the Nutanix Cloud Platform in a move to modernise its datacentre infrastructure and pave the way towards hybrid and multi-cloud Continue Reading
Feature 01 Jul 2022

File, block and object: Storage fundamentals in the cloud era

We look at the three basic ways that storage accesses data – via file, block and object – as well as the ways in which the rise of the cloud and distributed systems have brought changes to them Continue Reading
News 24 Jun 2022

Weka scale-out NAS v4 goes beyond just AWS to go multicloud

Weka v4’s multicloud capability means the scale-out NAS file system can work across customer datacentres and public clouds that include AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle Continue Reading
Feature 23 Jun 2022

Global file systems: Hybrid cloud and follow-the-sun access

We look at global distributed file systems that put enterprise data under a single file access namespace so that enterprises and branch offices can get to data from anywhere Continue Reading
Podcast 21 Jun 2022

Podcast: The legacy and modern apps that drive object storage

We talk to object (and file) storage vendor Scality about the ways the application and development environment is changing and how that is driving object storage Continue Reading
Feature 14 Jun 2022

Unified file and object storage: Three suppliers and their approaches

We look at unified file and object storage products from NetApp, Pure Storage and Scality, the differences, the workloads aimed at, and how unified they actually are Continue Reading
Podcast 31 May 2022

Podcast: How to get truly portable Kubernetes storage

We talk to NetApp CTO Grant Caley about what is needed from storage to really deliver in a world of Kubernetes containerisation and microservices portability in hybrid cloud working Continue Reading
News 26 May 2022

SoftIron readies Sydney manufacturing facility

Software-defined storage supplier SoftIron is making hardware appliances in Australia to improve supply chain resilience and address security concerns of government customers Continue Reading
News 18 May 2022

Portworx adds anti-ransomware to PX-Backup for Kubernetes

Pure’s Kubernetes storage and data protection platform adds object locking to combat ransomware Continue Reading
News 17 May 2022

Video effects firm cuts costs by 20% and goes hybrid with Hammerspace

Jellyfish Pictures saves on rising power and office space costs, as well as Brexit difficulties, by using Hammerspace to allow access to large files from any geographic location Continue Reading
News 17 May 2022

Hammerspace the ‘missing link’ for a cloud still lacking

The cloud can’t enable true multi-region working so Hammerspace helps make data visible globally and aggregate it as needed between locations with workflows set via customer policy Continue Reading
News 10 May 2022

NetApp’s cloud-era storage competitors in ‘world of hurt’

NetApp is busily reinventing itself as a cloud services provider, with its competition years behind, according to its public cloud vice-president Continue Reading
News 09 May 2022

Ctera opens up its storage to third-party analytics via APIs

File system software builds pools of NAS-like storage accessible from anywhere, with APIs to third-party tools to interrogate data for business processes, anomaly detection and more Continue Reading
News 04 May 2022

PeerGFS to add AI/ML anomaly detection to distributed file system product

Peer will add AI/ML-based anomaly detection as it ramps up security protection in its PeerGFS distributed file management software, with Linux server support also to come in 2022 Continue Reading
Feature 17 Mar 2022

Storage suppliers put Kubernetes platforms centre stage

How to orchestrate the orchestrator? Storage suppliers’ Kubernetes management platforms aim to meet storage and data protection challenge in containerised application environments Continue Reading
News 22 Feb 2022

Hammerspace offers follow-the-sun access to on-prem and cloud storage

Startup aims to succeed where others have failed and present file, block and object storage data from any and multiple locations as if it were local to the user Continue Reading
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
Feature 07 Feb 2022

How open source is shaping data storage management

Open source data storage offers a great deal of flexibility, but unlocking its benefits will require strong technical resources to meet requirements such as stability, high availability and security Continue Reading
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
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
News 12 Jan 2022

OVHCloud hit with customer class action over March 2021 datacentre fire

OVHCloud said it cannot comment at this time on the legal action, which is being embarked upon to compensate customers who claim to have lost data as a result of the public cloud firm’s datacentre fire in March 2021 Continue Reading
Opinion 11 Jan 2022

Need rapid networked storage? Take a look at NVMe-over-TCP

Lightbits helped develop NVMe-over-TCP to provide shared NVMe storage capacity over existing TCP-based networks Continue Reading
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
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
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
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
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
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
Blog Post 22 Oct 2021

Vast Data goes massively larger

As every environmental naturalist and hard core rave fan knows, the jungle is massive and jungle [music] is massive. Data is also massive, so much so that it can easily be described as vast. ... Continue Reading
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
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
Feature 13 Oct 2021

APAC expert guide to storage management

In this expert guide to storage management in Asia-Pacific, we unpack the developments shaping storage management and key strategies to extract business value from data Continue Reading
News 12 Oct 2021

NetApp adds CloudCheckr to Spot portfolio

CloudCheckr brings multi-cloud audit capabilities as well as visibility of security and governance in an acquisition that adds to its cloud price optimisation in the Spot portfolio Continue Reading
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
News 28 Sep 2021

Pure launches Fusion cloud control layer for storage

Pure Fusion is a storage control plane across cloud and datacentre. Portworx Data Services also launches to provide database management for container storage platform Continue Reading
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
Feature 30 Jun 2021

Lakehouse concept aims to merge data lake and data warehouse

Data lakes are big, amorphous and difficult to access, while data warehouses are costly and aimed at structured data. The data lakehouse aims at analytics in an age of unstructured data Continue Reading
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
E-Zine 21 Jun 2021

CW APAC: Career guide to cloud computing

In this handbook, Computer Weekly looks at the skills required for cloud professionals to succeed in an evolving industry, the risk to jobs posed by automation and the disciplines being taught at Future Tech Academy Continue Reading
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
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
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
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
Blog Post 20 May 2021

Computational storage series: Model9 - The cloud + computational storage sweet spot

Software runs on data and data is often regarded as the new oil. So it makes sense to put data as close to where it is being processed as possible, in order to reduce latency for performance-hungry ... Continue Reading
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
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
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
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
News 12 Apr 2021

Ctera KubeFiler to bring Kubernetes storage to its cloud gateways

KubeFiler uses the container storage interface to allow Kubernetes to access persistent storage as if it were from a local NAS device, and while keeping existing access profiles Continue Reading
Feature 06 Apr 2021

Where now for storage? Hitachi, IBM and Pure Storage

Part II: Storage supplier strategy in the cloud era: Hitachi, IBM and Pure Storage. We snapshot the big six hardware makers, as they take things to the cloud and as-a-service models Continue Reading
Feature 06 Apr 2021

Where now for storage? Dell EMC, NetApp and HPE

Part I: Storage supplier strategy in the cloud era: Dell EMC, NetApp and HPE. We snapshot the big six hardware makers, as they take things to the cloud and as-a-service models Continue Reading
Feature 12 Mar 2021

Ski firm dumps ‘motley’ storage for DataCore software-defined

Eurogroup cuts power usage by 70% and rackspace from 84U to 7U as it consolidates multiple physical servers and storage protocols onto SANsymphony software-defined storage Continue Reading
News 04 Mar 2021

Veritas looks beyond NetBackup for growth in ASEAN

Veritas has seen increased demand for its availability tools as it looks to address backup and recovery requirements from cloud, database and VMware workloads Continue Reading
News 01 Feb 2021

Netbackup 9 adds flexibility with hyper-converged backup options

Veritas’s enterprise backup flagship is available in hyper-converged infrastructure and has embraced containerisation, for better hardware and application scalability Continue Reading
News 22 Jan 2021

MinIO stakes leadership claims in cloud object container storage

2016 startup MinIO reckons it has first mover advantage as a container-native platform that provides private/cloud object storage in and orchestrated by Kubernetes Continue Reading
Feature 18 Jan 2021

APAC buyer’s guide to data management

In this buyer’s guide, we look at the challenges surrounding why enterprises are struggling to deal with data, the use of cloud data management platforms, artificial intelligence, and recommend some best practices Continue Reading
News 11 Jan 2021

Malaysia’s storage market dips amid uncertainty

Malaysia’s enterprise storage market declined 9.2% in 2020, but recovery is on the cards this year as business confidence improves Continue Reading
News 21 Dec 2020

Top 10 container storage stories of 2020

Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 container storage stories for 2020, when providing persistent Kubernetes storage, backup and disaster recovery became a key challenge for many organisations Continue Reading
Feature 14 Dec 2020

Five hyper-converged infrastructure use cases to watch

We look at workloads ripe for hyper-converged infrastructure deployment. These include virtual servers and desktops, SMEs/remote offices, Kubernetes, and analytics and machine learning Continue Reading
News 27 Oct 2020

Commvault launches Metallic backup service in Europe

Backup giant adds backup as a service, with cloud-to-cloud backup and e-discovery functionality that can work across on-site datacentres and the AWS and Azure clouds Continue Reading
Feature 23 Oct 2020

Unified file and object storage: The best of both worlds?

Unified file and object storage tackles growing volumes of unstructured data in a way that’s compatible with traditional and cloud-era applications, and friendlier to analytics Continue Reading
E-Zine 14 Oct 2020

CW APAC: Trend Watch – storage

Many organisations turn to cloud to cut storage bills, but the options available and potential costs are many and varied. In this handbook, Computer Weekly takes a peek at future storage technologies, such as helium and DNA, and offers some valuable tips on how to keep cloud storage costs under control. Continue Reading
E-Zine 13 Oct 2020

The future of storage

In this week’s Computer Weekly, we examine emerging technologies in storage such as helium disks and DNA. Ransomware is becoming more sophisticated and the attackers more tactical. And as the EU’s top court challenges the UK over surveillance, we ask what this means for data privacy after Brexit. Read the issue now. Continue Reading
News 07 Oct 2020

Carhartt shifts old data to the cloud with Komprise

US-based workwear manufacturer cuts storage costs from $1 to $0.25 per gigabyte as it deploys data management software and shifts old files to Microsoft Azure Blob and Cold storage Continue Reading
Feature 06 Oct 2020

NVMe-over Fabrics: How NVMe-oF revolutionises shared storage

NVMe brought super-fast flash storage to the datacentre, but it needs NVMe-oF to allow it to bring the benefits of rapid access and low latency to SAN and NAS shared storage Continue Reading
News 29 Sep 2020

Red Hat rivals VMware and Nutanix with hyper-converged OCS 4.5

Red Hat’s OpenShift 4.5 extended container orchestration to virtual machines. The arrival of OCS 4.5 moves the solution into the realm of hyper-converged systems Continue Reading
News 21 Sep 2020

Nutanix boosts storage performance by 50% with BlockStore

Hyper-converged infrastructure pioneer Nutanix boosts access to NVMe and potentially Optane storage with BlockStore, which avoids the need to access the deepest layers of the OS Continue Reading
News 21 Sep 2020

India’s storage market takes hit but hasn’t lost its shine

The slower growth in storage spending in India amid the Covid-19 pandemic is expected to be mitigated by digitisation efforts by financial services and manufacturing firms Continue Reading
News 16 Sep 2020

Pure flashes the cash, paying $370m for Portworx

Flash storage pioneer believes container storage is the next frontier and pays big money for container persistent storage software provider Portworx in deal set to close this month Continue Reading
Feature 15 Sep 2020

A peek into the future of storage

Flash-based storage is here to stay and will continue to be enhanced, even as helium and DNA are being primed for use in the distant future Continue Reading