Computer storage hardware

Hamming code

Hamming code is an error correction system that can detect and correct errors when data is stored or transmitted. Continue Reading

By

• Gavin Wright

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Backup maintenance: Five key points to consider

Effective backups need to ensure all data is protected, and to track media and software changes. We look at five key things to consider Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

Veritas aims at autonomous backup discovery and provisioning

Veritas bets on a backup platform that can discover all enterprise data – on-premise and in the cloud – and make its own decisions about the optimal place to store copies Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Stephen Pritchard

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Data gravity: What is it and how to manage it

Data gravity can attract increasing amounts of data, and brings with it onerous management overheads. We look at how to mitigate data gravity in datacentre and cloud Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Podcast: SaaS data protection vulnerability and how to manage it

We talk to backup and data management supplier Cohesity about the added vulnerabilities of software-as-a-service data in a hybrid cloud environment and how best to manage multiple data sources Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Dell server, storage, PC sales grow despite component supply chain woes

Dell executives cite the company’s use of “alternative” component supply chains as server, storage and PC sales grow despite difficulties for most of the market sourcing parts Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

IT Sustainability Think Tank: Incorporating circular economy principles into IT procurement

With sustainability moving up the boardroom agenda, CIOs and IT managers should look to revamp their IT procurement strategies to align with the principles of the circular economy, but where should they start? Continue Reading

By

• Craig Melson, TechUK

Cloud-to-cloud backup: When native cloud protection is not enough

There is a certain amount of protection built into cloud services, but it has its limits and full data protection requires that cloud data is secured with cloud-to-cloud backup Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

China using top consumer routers to hack Western comms networks

An advisory from US cyber authorities shares details of multiple vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state actors to hack into Western telecoms networks Continue Reading

By

• Alex Scroxton, Security Editor

Pure FlashBlade//S and Evergreen//Flex boost as-a-service push

FlashBlade//S brings two new arrays in which customers can upgrade controllers and capacity, while //Flex allows capacity to be bought and moved across any QLC or TLC Pure array Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Kubernetes backup products and 10 key players

We look at 10 key players in Kubernetes backup, why they are needed, what they offer and why you need to watch out for duplication between application teams and the IT department Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

IT departments need holistic circular economies to fight climate change

With sustainability moving up the boardroom agenda, IT managers should revamp procurement strategies to align with the principles of the circular economy, but what does this mean for managing the IT lifecycle? Continue Reading

By

• Sebastian Klovig Skelton, Data & ethics editor

Four obstacles to hybrid cloud storage – and possible solutions

We look at obstacles to hybrid cloud storage, such as complexity, a need for object storage, application suitability, and cost, with potential ways to mitigate the problems Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Stephen Withers

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

The limits and risks of backup as ransomware protection

Backups can provide a sound means of recovery from ransomware infection, but they are not 100% certain to foil attackers. We look at the limits and risks of depending on backups Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

Pure to offer on-prem object storage as Snowflake data source

Pure Storage partnership with Snowflake will see the cloud data warehousing platform make use of on-prem FlashBlade fast file and object storage as a source for analytics data Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

IT infrastructure used to launch DDoS attack on Russian targets

Organisations could unwittingly be participating in hostile activity against the Russian government as compromised IT infrastructure is used without their knowledge to launch denial of service attacks Continue Reading

By

• Sebastian Klovig Skelton, Data & ethics editor

Disaster recovery is an essential service for EDF with Phenix-IT

EDF has built disaster recovery tracking, planning and testing software on a six-month upgrade cycle based on governance, risk and compliance functionality in Mega’s Hopex platform Continue Reading

By

• Alain Clapaud
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Podcast: War, geo-political risk, data storage and compliance

We talk to Mathieu Gorge, CEO of Vigitrust, about impacts on compliance and data storage from instability in geo-political events, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

RAM-based solid-state drive (SSD)

A RAM-based solid-state drive (SSD) is a storage device made from silicon microchips that has no moving parts and stores data electronically instead of magnetically. Continue Reading

By

• Todd Erickson
• Robert Sheldon

Fibre Channel (FC) port types

A Fibre Channel port is a hardware pathway into and out of a node that performs data communications over an FC link. Continue Reading

By

• Robert Sheldon
• Todd Erickson

Snapshots vs backup: Use both for optimum RPOs

We look at snapshots and backup, the key difference, their pros and cons and how best to use the two approaches in an integrated data protection strategy for optimal RPO Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

How Veeam helped grocery chain Franprix escape its backup hell

French supermarket chain had backup windows that ran well into the next working day and restoring deleted files could take days. It chose Veeam in a contest with Cohesity Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Hammers sign Acronis as backup and security in one

West Ham United set to replace separate backup from Veeam and a variety of security products with Acronis Cyber Protect to have backup, data protection and file share on a single platform Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Storage requirements for AI, ML and analytics in 2022

We look at what is needed for artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the pros and cons of block, file and object storage to store and access very large amounts of often unstructured data Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

Pure says unstructured data needs storage scale and performance

Podcast: Pure Storage says huge growth of unstructured data and its diversity means storage has to be able to scale with it and offer performance to gain insights Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Snapshots best practice: Five key things you need to know

We look at snapshots best practice, including the way they work, why they are not the same as backups, how to avoid heavy processing overheads and key user permissions tweaks Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Backup types explained: Full, incremental, differential, synthetic

We look at backup – on-prem and cloud – and the key variants available, from full backup to synthetic full, via incremental, differential, incremental forever and reverse incremental Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Backup: N-able emerges from white box to aim at enterprise customers

It spent years integrated with Solarwinds and as a re-sold product, but now it plans to target enterprise customers with a backup product that aims at granular file protection and restore Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Ad agency slashes NetApp costs with Datadobi data migration

US-based branding agency needed to migrate 20TB of large files to new NetApp hardware, but unwilling to stomach the vendor’s migration costs it chose Datadobi instead Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

NetApp Cloud Insights gets AI monitoring and ransomware detection

Cloud Insights adds artificial intelligence-based continuous audit and monitoring of entire IT estate and generates impact assessments from performance events, plus anomaly alerting for ransomware Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Quantum launches ‘scale-out’ i6H rackmount tape library

Aimed at hyperscalers and enterprises, the LTO-9 system comes in a rackmount form factor that can be deployed anywhere in the datacentre as part of a common pool of storage Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Police EncroChat cryptophone hacking implant did not work properly and frequently failed

Surveillance operation against EncroChat encrypted phone network had repeated technical failures Continue Reading

By

• Bill Goodwin, Computer Weekly

Cloud-era disaster recovery planning: Maintenance and continuous improvement

In the final article in this four-part guide to disaster recovery planning, we look at how and when to update, maintain, audit, review and continually improve the DR plan Continue Reading

By

• Paul Kirvan

Five key points on file locking vs object locking

We look at file vs object storage locking mechanisms, how different forms of storage ensure data consistency, and especially how object storage is tackling the challenge Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Limelight gains large CDN scale with Edgecast acquisition

Leading CDN provider gains extra scale with strategic purchase, claiming to have created global leader in edge-enabled software services with diversified revenue across products, clients, geographies and channels Continue Reading

By

• Joe O’Halloran, Computer Weekly

Micron 7450 aims its 176 TLC layers at QLC flash use cases

New 176-layer tech brings densely packed flash cells in drives that come in 2.5”, M.2 and EDSFF form factors, aimed at datacentre workloads from archive to database storage Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Software firm saves storage array costs with Nutanix hyper-converged

Banking SaaS provider Vialink needed more IOPS when its NetApp arrays slowed up, but Nutanix hyper-converged proved a better package than Pure Storage and Dell EMC, too Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Cloud storage cost challenges and how to tackle them

We look at cloud capacity procurement pitfalls, forecasting challenges, the danger of over-buying, supplier lock-in, deciphering billing and resizing capacity when projects finish Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

Define RPO and RTO tiers for storage and data protection strategy

We look at RPO and RTO in defining data protection and disaster recovery strategies and how to specify tiers that reflect the importance of different systems in your organisation Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Backup heads to cloud as ransomware hits 76% and RTOs/RPOs fail

Veeam survey finds most can’t recover the data they want or do it in time, ransomware is now a ‘disaster’, use of the cloud is increasing, but the datacentre is still very important Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

NetApp provides data infrastructure for EMBL

European Molecular Biology Laboratory uses NetApp to enable researchers to share and process high-end electron microscopy data Continue Reading

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Tiger offers lightweight file access for hybrid cloud

Roar data, anyone? Tiger offers local access to cloud data, with only parts of the file being worked on downloaded and file locking in cloud buckets to ensure integrity Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Paul Kirvan

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

storage filer

A storage filer is a type of file server designed and programmed for high-volume data storage, backup and archiving. Continue Reading

By

• Robert Sheldon

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

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Paul Kirvan

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Hybrid cloud storage: The devils are in the details

When it comes to storage, one thing is clear – cloud does not change everything Continue Reading

By

• Tony Lock, Freeform Dynamics

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Hybrid cloud storage: Options for rearchitecting enterprise IT

Hybrid cloud is seen as a way to have the best of both the on-premise and public cloud worlds. We look at the pros and cons of hybrid cloud storage Continue Reading

By

• Cliff Saran, Managing Editor

direct access

In computer storage, direct access is the process of reading and writing data on a storage device by going directly to where the data is physically located on the device rather than having to move sequentially from one physical location to the next to find the correct data. Continue Reading

By

• Robert Sheldon

MoonBounce firmware bootkit shows advances in malicious implants

MoonBounce firmware bootkit shows evident technical improvements over others, making it a more dangerous threat to organisations. It is being used by Chinese state-backed actors Continue Reading

By

• Alex Scroxton, Security Editor

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

By

• Paul Kirvan

The race to quantum computing

In this week’s Computer Weekly, researchers are racing to create the first commercially useful quantum computer – we look at one of the European candidates. Cyber security is one of the greatest risks facing the global economy, warns the World Economic Forum. And we examine the role of employee experience in hybrid working. Read the issue now. Continue Reading

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Pat Brans, Pat Brans Associates/Grenoble Ecole de Management

Avoid complexity in data storage decisions

With more options for on- and off-premise data storage, the need for simplicity is greater than ever Continue Reading

By

• Junade Ali

Evolving datacentre chipsets put cooling, power and software management techniques under microscope

New processor designs that could revolutionise approaches to supporting higher power densities at the rack still look years away, it appears Continue Reading

By

• Fleur Doidge

One SSD to ruler them all

If you’re at all curious about what comes next in enterprise storage devices, you need to know about EDSFF, the Enterprise and Data Centre SSD Form Factor – better known as the “ruler” format. ... Continue Reading

By

• Bryan Betts, Freeform Dynamics

direct access storage device (DASD)

A direct access storage device (DASD) is a type of secondary storage device that supports direct access to the stored data, as opposed to sequential access, which is slower and less efficient. Continue Reading

By

• Robert Sheldon

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

By

• Stephen Pritchard

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Stephen Pritchard

UAE joins the race to produce a usable quantum computer

As part of its ongoing effort to keep up with the latest technology, the United Arab Emirates has begun work on the region’s first quantum computer Continue Reading

By

• Pat Brans, Pat Brans Associates/Grenoble Ecole de Management

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Cloud storage compliance pitfalls: Post-pandemic and post-Brexit

We look at the key areas of cloud storage compliance that can trip you up, with shared responsibility with cloud providers and data residency among the most important Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

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

By

• Stephen Pritchard

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

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics)

IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) is an electronic interface standard that defines the connection between a bus on a computer's motherboard and the computer's disk storage devices. Continue Reading

By

• Robert Sheldon
• Sonia Lelii, TechTarget

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Stephen Pritchard

Cohesity beefs up ransomware and disaster recovery offer

Disaster Recovery as-a-service, Data Govern and project Fort Knox available or in development as data protection supplier augments its portfolio with ransomware firmly in mind Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

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

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor