News

Flash storage and solid-state drives (SSDs)

• December 11, 2024 11 Dec'24

  IaaS firm uses Pure Storage as a service for ‘virtual datacentres’

  Espresso Gridpoint moved from largely NetApp to Pure Storage FlashBlade file and object for its ‘virtual datacentres’ business model that offers VMware, Hyper-V and ProxMox VMs

• December 03, 2024 03 Dec'24

  VMware ‘shock’ spawned lock-in rebellion, says NetApp

  NetApp makes predictions for 2025 that include lower tolerance for lock-in due to VMware changes, a shift to DRaaS, AI disillusionment and big spending on energy infrastructure

• November 18, 2024 18 Nov'24

  Infinidat gets in on the RAG act with workflow architecture offer

  Storage array maker says customers can get data from any NFS storage to use in RAG for internal enterprise AI projects, and claims its OS metadata expertise enables this

• November 12, 2024 12 Nov'24

  Pure Storage CTO: How AI is changing storage demands

  Pure Storage’s CTO stresses the need for adaptable IT systems to support AI workloads, advocating for open architectures and flexible storage platforms to avoid supplier lock-in

• November 11, 2024 11 Nov'24

  NetApp boosts AFF, StorageGrid and E-series hardware with 60TB drives

  Bigger drives, new CPUs and controller hardware add to upgrades to NetApp arrays that started in September, while the supplier undergoes transition to data management as a key focus

• October 30, 2024 30 Oct'24

  Scality Ring XP to offer object storage at scale with rapid access

  Lightweight S3 API trades storage features for microsecond access. Scality pairs it with all-NVMe flash in Ring XP, aimed at AI use cases for small object data in PB-scale datasets

• October 28, 2024 28 Oct'24

  Western Digital boosts HDD capacity with 32TB shingled drives

  An 11th platter gives extra capacity, while shingled (overlapped) writes – best suited to sequential recording use cases – allow for greater density and big gains in thoughput

• October 21, 2024 21 Oct'24

  Synology takes aim at enterprise customers and flash storage

  Best known as an SME and consumer brand, Synology claims multiple enterprise customers especially in backup and storage of infrequently accessed data, but has plans for flash, too

• October 15, 2024 15 Oct'24

  Google launches Parallelstore file storage at cloud AI training

  Originally driven by Intel’s now-defunct Optane storage class memory, Parallelstore offers massive parallel file storage targeted at artificial intelligence training use cases on Google Cloud

• September 26, 2024 26 Sep'24

  Auckland museum enhances digitisation efforts with storage upgrade

  A major storage upgrade is enabling the Auckland War Memorial Museum to safeguard its vast collection, ensure digital sovereignty and enhance visitor experiences using AI

• September 25, 2024 25 Sep'24

  NetApp E-series: Not part of the big message, but here to stay, says CEO

  We asked NetApp about its high-performance computing-focused E-series block storage arrays and found inconsistent messaging but ultimately a commitment from CEO George Kurian to retain it

• September 24, 2024 24 Sep'24

  Pure punts raft of unifying features in FlashBlade file and object

  Features are aimed at Pure’s file and object architecture with functionality based on software that aids management at system level

• September 24, 2024 24 Sep'24

  NetApp maintains push to data management for AI

  From data storage to intelligent data infrastructure – that’s the plan from NetApp, which has announced data curation for artificial intelligence as well as additions to its ASA and FAS storage arrays

• September 17, 2024 17 Sep'24

  Toshiba follows the pack with launch of 24TB and 28TB HDDs

  Several months behind Seagate and Western Digital, Toshiba achieves the maximum possible in commercial HDDs and benefits from a speed boost over its rivals

• September 03, 2024 03 Sep'24

  Flash prices drop as drive production increases but demand lags

  Flash prices were high in the early part of this year as a result of manufacturer production squeezes but have since dropped because demand has been slack, with flash now costing just under 10 cents per gigabyte

• August 21, 2024 21 Aug'24

  QiStor flashes key-value storage software for hardware acceleration

  US-based startup will develop storage software allied with FPGA chips to allow data storage to bypass spinning disk era block addressing to speed performance and cut energy use

• August 13, 2024 13 Aug'24

  Oracle Exadata Exascale: Big architecture shift for small workloads

  Exascale is multitenant architecture for Oracle Database that promises performance equal to dedicated infrastructure and savings compared with existing products, with AI workloads in mind

• July 02, 2024 02 Jul'24

  Interview: Nvidia on AI workloads and their impacts on data storage

  We talk to Charlie Boyle of Nvidia about data challenges in artificial intelligence, key practical tips for AI projects, and demands on storage of training, inferencing, RAG and checkpointing

• June 19, 2024 19 Jun'24

  Pure CEO: AI needs write speed and storage in place

  We spoke to Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo about why write speed is key for artificial intelligence workloads, accessible storage for AI data, and his prediction of the death of spinning disk

• June 19, 2024 19 Jun'24

  Pure deepens Fusion as reorientation to storage for AI continues

  Pure Storage launches Fusion ‘storage classes’ across its arrays as a pool of storage for AI-centric workloads, plus AI Copilot and Evergreen//One for AI storage-as-a-service

• June 11, 2024 11 Jun'24

  Nuclear waste body cuts energy use by 20% as Pure replaces HPE

  French nuclear waste agency Andra has cut storage energy use by 20% and strengthened its disaster recovery capabilities by deploying Pure Storage and 10-year controller upgrades

• June 04, 2024 04 Jun'24

  Mad Max production company gets Dell PowerScale to leverage generative AI

  One supplier enters, one supplier leaves: Australian film production company replaces HPE with Dell storage and compute as it leverages GenAI

• June 03, 2024 03 Jun'24

  Dell launches PowerStore Prime and hints at PowerScale AI boost

  Array range launched at Dell World 2024 in Las Vegas as PowerScale gets OS upgrade and new Intel Xeon CPUs, while Dell CEO hints at acceleration for PowerScale NAS

• May 26, 2024 26 May'24

  Nutanix beefs up AHV hypervisor, doubles down on AI

  Nutanix takes aim at VMware with enhancements to its AHV hypervisor along with tighter integrations with Nvidia and Hugging Face to simplify AI deployments

• May 22, 2024 22 May'24

  Infinidat adds smaller footprint G4 arrays with claimed 2x performance

  Purveyor of triple-controller all-flash and hybrid flash arrays aimed at high-end customers tails and tops InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA ranges, and adds Azure cloud storage to AWS

• May 20, 2024 20 May'24

  Toshiba shows 32TB HDDs with heat-assisted and shingled drives

  Drive maker demonstrates 32TB and 31TB capacity hard drives that boost write density by use of heat and microwave assistance plus shingled – overlapped – drive tracks

• May 14, 2024 14 May'24

  NetApp upgrades AFF all-flash as it targets AI storage

  New AFF arrays offer performance boost for artificial intelligence, while NetApp trumpets its advantages as a provider of sustainable and intelligent infrastructure for all kinds of workloads

• May 08, 2024 08 May'24

  Huawei launches exabyte-scale OceanStor A800 at AI workloads

  Chinese storage array maker announces high-performance NAS that can build out to clusters in excess of 1 exabyte, plus NVMe flash drives of 128TB coming to market next year

• April 30, 2024 30 Apr'24

  Arcitecta offers file and object storage with huge transfer rates

  Australian startup offers single namespace file and object storage with rapid access via a metadata database that puts the right data in the right place according to recent use

• April 24, 2024 24 Apr'24

  AI firm saves a million in shift to Pure FlashBlade shared storage

  AI consultancy Crater Labs spent vast amounts of time managing server-attached drives to ensure GPUs were saturated. A shift to all-flash Pure Storage slashed that to almost zero

• April 02, 2024 02 Apr'24

  Flash storage prices rise by 25% as manufacturers chase profitability

  Analysis of 30,000-plus drive prices shows cost of flash drives per gigabyte rose sharply since October 2023, as memory manufacturers limit supplies and increase prices

• March 26, 2024 26 Mar'24

  Alletra MP hardware changes see HPE orient arrays towards AI

  HPE doubles controller nodes, boosts capacity with denser drives, cuts caches and builds in 100Gbps links to bring denser, faster storage aimed at all parts of the AI/ML pipeline

• March 19, 2024 19 Mar'24

  Vast targets AI checkpointing write performance with distributed RAID

  AI checkpointing operations targeted by Vast Data as it touts QLC-based storage for AI workloads

• February 26, 2024 26 Feb'24

  Storage and backup spend in 2024 targets risk and resilience

  The TechTarget and ESG spending intentions survey finds big bias towards averting risk and building organisational resilience, but on-premise storage a significant planned outlay

• February 19, 2024 19 Feb'24

  Music agency halves space and energy costs with switch to Pure

  SUISA handles billions of royalty payments, but had capacity and storage admin nightmares with its EMC hardware. It cued up Pure Storage for simple admin, space and cost savings

• February 06, 2024 06 Feb'24

  Inside NetApp’s cloud and AI strategy

  NetApp’s senior executives talk up the company’s efforts to support AI initiatives and deliver first-party storage services on public cloud platforms

• January 31, 2024 31 Jan'24

  Seagate uses HAMR to hit 30TB in Exos hard drives

  HDD giant Seagate unveils 30TB Exos drives with higher areal density, aimed at hyperscaler customers, with products at 50TB promised for 2028 in its roadmap

• January 23, 2024 23 Jan'24

  NVM Express boosts computational storage standards

  New command sets allow for computational storage with NVMe flash and includes frameworks to allow local memory usage in processing workloads on storage hardware

• January 17, 2024 17 Jan'24

  Data on Kubernetes Community aims at K8S storage scaling solution

  DoKC works on community solutions for Kubernetes. It aims to develop storage scaling automation for the containerised platform outside the orbit of the big vendors

• January 11, 2024 11 Jan'24

  QLC made gains but storage innovation focus was on software in 2023

  Storage hardware innovation has taken a back seat – QLC flash excepted – as the big storage suppliers build around software-based variants and optimisation on modular product sets

• December 21, 2023 21 Dec'23

  Top 10 storage stories of 2023

  In this 2023 review, we consider if flash will thrash disk, what the Toyota outage shows about capacity planning, how to achieve green storage, the backup and compliance risks of AI, the lowdown on DPUs, and more

• December 21, 2023 21 Dec'23

  Top 10 storage supplier strategy stories of 2023

  In 2023, we looked at the top storage suppliers, their market share and how they set themselves for a future of hybrid cloud, containerisation and consumption models of purchasing

• December 11, 2023 11 Dec'23

  Panasas set for Mach.2 throughput with multi-actuator HDDs

  Scale-out NAS maker claims to be the first enterprise array maker to use multi-actuator HDDs designed for hyperscaler architectures and which double throughput

• November 22, 2023 22 Nov'23

  Nebulon upgrades SPU to Medusa2 with Nvidia DPU hardware

  Nebulon aims to replace HCI with its OS on an offload card that it claims reduces server resource use by 25%. Medusa2 uses Nvidia DPU hardware and its own cloud control plane

• November 20, 2023 20 Nov'23

  IT not ready for AI, Pure Storage survey finds

  Storage, compute and networking hardware won’t cope without upgrades, and that often means total IT infrastructure overhaul

• October 24, 2023 24 Oct'23

  NetApp ‘unified storage’ adds new ASA block storage at Insight

  Las Vegas event sees NetApp continue its evolution to hybrid cloud and data management player announce ASA C-series and Keystone and Kubernetes storage enhancements

• October 23, 2023 23 Oct'23

  Dell updates PowerStore, PowerMax and PowerFlex storage

  Dell storage upgrades include improved AIOps, lower energy usage, real-time HA failover, seamless hardware replacement, and enhancements to take advantage of DPU acceleration

• October 16, 2023 16 Oct'23

  Flash prices drop towards spinning disk levels in 2023

  Number-crunching data on 17,000-plus drive prices shows cost of flash drives per gigabyte fell by around 10% in past six months while hard disk drive per-gigabyte prices stood still

• October 11, 2023 11 Oct'23

  Pure offers Evergreen energy and rackspace cost guarantees

  Pure Storage will take upfront payments for power and rackspace and guarantee those for product lifecycles in its Evergreen One, Flex and Forever consumption purchasing models

• October 03, 2023 03 Oct'23

  How Pure Storage is supporting AI workloads

  Pure Storage’s cloud-compatible and energy-efficient modular flash storage architecture is well-poised to address the data storage demands of artificial intelligence workloads