Computer storage hardware

Cloud storage and its main cost components

We run through the main items charged for by the big cloud storage providers, such as capacity, storage type, transactions, data egress, networks and data protection Continue Reading

By

• Paul Stringfellow, Gardner Systems

SAN vs NAS vs hyper-converged for virtual machine storage

The pros and cons of file and block access storage arrays vs the new breed of all-in-one server/storage architecture for storage of virtual machine systems and data Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

Blockchain and deep neural networks show digital archive promise

Every event, past and present, is in the digital archive, but there is growing concern that this data can be easily manipulated to change historical facts Continue Reading

By

• Cliff Saran, Managing Editor

Excelero and BeeGFS offer next-gen HPC based on NVMe flash

Super-fast solid-state storage in commodity servers ties up with recently-developed parallel file system BeeGFS to target high-performance computing use cases Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

V.Pharma swaps Data Domain for Quantum and cuts backup costs

Belgian pharmacy’s Data Domains had reached end-of-life and it wanted to remain in-budget. Quantum DXi worked out a lot cheaper and easy to manage, with good support Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT

Software-defined storage vs NAS/SAN: What are the options?

We look at the pros and cons of software-defined storage and weigh up when it’s a better option than buying NAS and SAN pre-built hardware shared storage arrays Continue Reading

By

• Rene Millman

Reduxio’s Magellan charts course to storage in containers

Reduxio makes its storage product functionality available via microservices in containers aimed at container-native deployments, in an initial closed customer beta Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Cloud’s low-hanging fruit: Backup, tiering and data sharing

Native cloud operations can have a steep on-ramp in terms of enterprise IT readiness, but some things are relatively easy to port to a tier of storage in the cloud Continue Reading

By

• Paul Stringfellow, Gardner Systems

Datrium rebrands hybrid cloud data platform as Automatrix

NVMe pioneer Datrium announces ControlShift disaster recovery automation as a service, while bundling its data platform offerings as Automatrix, and lauds the benefits compared to siloed IT Continue Reading

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• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Gorilla bets on Object Matrix for £1m-plus-per-episode TV shows

Customers such as Netflix, Amazon and the BBC need to be sure their content is stored safely. Gorilla Post Production chose object storage from Wales-based Object Matrix Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Email firm runs millions of mailboxes with Scality object storage

Open Xchange switches from OpenStack Swift to Scality to run 13PB of storage for millions of mailboxes across two continents for telco, mobile and TV providers Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Nasuni aims at analytics and fast migration to the cloud

Cloud NAS and object storage specialist says customers want “Lego blocks” that allow them to build for cloud workloads, and plans cloud migration tools for massive datasets Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

How to avoid a hyper-convergence minefield

How firms can implement hyper-converged infrastructure to make cost and performance savings Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Scality object storage scales to 400k mailboxes for NZ provider

New Zealand-based email hosting provider SMX needed to scale up its infrastructure to be able to handle 400,000 mailboxes, and found object storage from Scality fitted the bill Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

HPE to launch Cloud Volumes in UK and Ireland

HPE Cloud Volumes will offer enterprise-class block storage for use with AWS and Azure compute plus a replication store for backup and disaster recovery from the end of May Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Don’t let datacentres be a waste of space

Storage costs can be saved by improving the utilisation of existing storage infrastructures Continue Reading

LightBits Super SSD brings NVMe on vanilla Ethernet

Israeli startup LightBits offers super-fast NVMe flash storage over plain Ethernet networks in a move that some think will bring “iSCSI for the NVMe generation” Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT

Don’t let datacentres be a waste of space

Storage costs can be saved by improving the utilisation of existing storage infrastructures Continue Reading

By

• Valdis Filks and Santhosh Rao

NVMe is ‘ready’, say Dell EMC, Virtual Instruments and Cisco

Storage and networks big guns say super-fast NVMe flash is ready for enterprise users, with performance 10x over existing Fibre Channel and ecosystem in place Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Scale-out NAS: File storage with cloud and flash from big five

We run the rule over scale-out NAS from the big five storage array makers to find all-flash and hybrid-flash commonplace and use of the cloud as a tier almost ubiquitous Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

Pure Storage buys Compuverde to put object storage on steroids

Fast flash storage specialist Pure Storage adds object storage to FlashArray and aims to compete with NetApp on NAS while bringing flash performance to web applications Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT

Hyper-converged infrastructure vs NAS and SAN shared storage

Can compute, storage and networks in one box be a better option than shared storage? And which organisations can most benefit from it, and for what scale of deployment? Continue Reading

By

• Rene Millman

Cloud storage 101: Specifying for cloud storage

We run through key questions to ask when specifying cloud storage, such as disk type, performance, availability and the possible hidden cost of getting data out of the cloud Continue Reading

By

• Paul Stringfellow, Gardner Systems

Qumulo upgrades hybrid-flash hybrid cloud C-series with C-72T

Hybrid cloud-focused clustered NAS provider Qumulo’s C-72T takes advantage of cheaper and better components to start at 72TB and scale to petabytes from a 1U node Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

JetStream DR cloud replication aims to make backup redundant

JetStream’s IO Filter allows for continuous replication to the cloud of VMware virtual machines and virtual disks instead of scheduled snapshots or backups, and with a near-zero RPO Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

IBM sees NVMe gains in V5100F, but more to come with better apps

As IBM launches first midrange NVMe box, execs say applications need to have the SCSI designed out of them to gain the full potential of NVMe flash-equipped arrays Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Datrium makes European push as it targets storage ‘big guys’

NVMe pioneer turned hybrid cloud and “data platform” provider makes a push for the enterprise and wants to take scalps from those selling “1990s SAN technology” Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Cloud storage 101: Cloud gateways for hybrid cloud connectivity

Two of the big three public cloud providers – Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure – offer gateway on-ramps that can speed the deployment of hybrid cloud operations for SME and remote office locations Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Cranfield gets Rubrik backup plus Nutanix in drive to the cloud

Research-led university goes hyper-converged across the board with Rubrik backup appliances and Nutanix in a move to rationalise on-site physical needs and drive to the cloud Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Hard drives that do their own data processing

It’s getting hard these days to find places where container technology doesn’t feature, but in a hard drive? Yet that’s what is being explored in one of the Storage Networking Industry Association ... Continue Reading

By

• Bryan Betts, Freeform Dynamics

Azure Stack HCI: Hyper-converged, but not as Azure as you’d think

Microsoft has re-branded Windows Server Software Defined to put hyper-converged to the fore, but Azure Stack HCI isn’t totally in sync with the Azure Stack on-premise cloud platform Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT
• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Commvault adds “tape killer” AWS Glacier Deep Archive cold storage

Backup provider to offer 1-cent-a-gigabyte AWS Glacier Deep Archive as a target in a move that mirrors a trend towards the cloud and away from tape among Commvault customers Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Storage 101: Object storage in the big three public clouds

We look at the object storage services of the big three cloud providers – Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob and Google Cloud Storage – and how customers can achieve compatibility between them Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Pivot3 to target Azure, Google clouds and enhance AI/ML

Hyper-converged infrastructure maker Pivot3 plans to extend backup for its appliance clusters to additional public clouds and optimise service levels across storage tiers and cache Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Cohesity plans to put backup data to good use

Cohesity’s DataPlatform now makes use of previously dormant backup data with analytics to provide business value and to tackle threats such as ransomware Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT

Ctera teams with HPE to put cloud gateways in Simplivity HCI

X Series appliances marry HPE’s hyper-converged hardware with Ctera’s hybrid cloud file server gateway to provide edge compute with storage tiered to the cloud Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Enterprise and midrange SAN survey 2019: Hitachi, IBM and NetApp

Part two of two: While all-flash is mainstream, NVMe is an option as disk replacement for most suppliers, while NetApp leads the way with NVMe end-to-end to hosts Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Singapore invests S$200m to upgrade supercomputing capabilities

The investment will shore up Singapore’s supercomputing prowess to facilitate research collaboration, as well as address national and business challenges Continue Reading

By

• Aaron Tan, TechTarget

Enterprise and midrange SAN survey 2019: Dell and HPE

Part one of two: All-flash is mainstream, with NVMe also offered. Dell offers NVMe drives while HPE reserves it for use as storage-class memory as a cache layer Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

IT Priorities 2019: What projects are IT professionals spending their budgets on?

The Computer Weekly/TechTarget IT Priorities 2019 survey finds that cloud maturity, security and automation are among the hot areas for spending Continue Reading

By

• Cliff Saran, Managing Editor

SME backup products offer diverse routes to the cloud

We take the temperature on cloud-era SME-focused backup products that come as “traditional” software, replication-centric protection environments and hardware appliances Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Cohesity opens up backup data to analytics and applications

Hybrid-cloud backup appliance provider launches marketplace for applications that can apply intelligence, such as analytics, to data held in backup and secondary data stores Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Backup product approaches vary as they take aim at the cloud

Use of the public cloud for backup data is something all the backup software suppliers provide, but implementations range from simple S3 connections to expansive software offerings Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

MWC 2019: Huawei claims massive lead on 5G readiness

At a pre-Mobile World Congress event in London, Huawei’s Ryan Ding shared details of the firm’s rapidly expanding 5G mobile portfolio, and laid into his competitors Continue Reading

By

• Alex Scroxton, Security Editor

Pure launches ObjectEngine cloud dedupe, plus inter-rack NVMe

Flash storage pioneer offers flash-to-flash-to-cloud ObjectEngine on-premise and in the cloud while boosting connectivity between datacentre racks with NVMe-over-fabrics Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

NVMe startups’ different routes to flash performance gains

NVMe offers huge flash performance benefits, but no one is quite sure how to overcome the challenges that brings and startups are trying several different approaches Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

Career choices for storage admins as technologies converge

There is collateral damage in datacentre convergence, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for storage administrators to stick with storage-centric skillsets. Two solutions exist Continue Reading

By

• Yann Serra, LeMagIT

Australia’s defence department keeps old PCs out of landfills

Department has securely wiped data from used devices and kept 1,300 tonnes of e-waste out of landfills Continue Reading

By

• Beverley Head

Cloud the rising star of storage: Eight years of text analysis

Tracking word frequency in nearly a decade’s worth of storage content shows how cloud has come of age, flash has gone mainstream and how we don’t talk about virtualisation any more Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Payday lender cuts troubleshooting by 30% with Virtual Instruments

Curo Financial thought storage was slowing down its websites, but found virtual machine and network issues were to blame. To fix this, it’s going proactive on storage performance issues Continue Reading

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• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Swiss bank moves away from file with Cloudian object storage

PostFinance opts for Cloudian object storage as it migrates 100 million files away from NetApp and builds S3-compatible archives for Hadoop and Apache Spark Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Watercolour World digitises ‘photographs’ of the pre-camera age

Charity dedicated to making thousands of fragile pre-1900 watercolour paintings available on the web has launched its site with help from Fujitsu scanner maker PFU Continue Reading

By

• Brian McKenna, Senior Analyst, Business Applications

A cloud compliance checklist for the GDPR age

The cloud is supposed to make things simpler, but when it comes to compliance, things can get complex. Here is a look at the essential elements of a cloud compliance strategy Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

Veeam Cloud Tier adds tiered storage for backups in S3 clouds

Virtualisation backup specialist adds tiering of Veeam Availability Suite data to AWS, Azure and S3-compatible clouds, which can now also be used as a repository for its N2WS cloud-native backup Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Podcast: How to get ready for the California Consumer Privacy Act

If you have any customers in California, you need to know about that state’s equivalent to GDPR. Mathieu Gorge of Vigitrust talks through what you need to achieve compliance Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Veritas launches Docker container backup in NetBackup

Docker is becoming an industry standard form of application virtualisation, and with that comes the need to back up Docker environments and data. Veritas joins CommVault and Asigra in doing so Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Nottingham Building Society boosts storage and saves power with Nexsan deployment

Building society ditches geriatric IBM storage array to gain reliability, boost capacity by 20 times and make energy savings with Nexsan, but rejects flash storage for spinning disk SAN Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Storage 101: Structured data and its storage needs

Structured data is declining as a proportion of all data but its importance to business applications and its organised nature make its storage requirements very specific Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

Podcast: Storage and compliance priorities in 2019

Mathieu Gorge, CEO of Vigitrust, looks ahead to key areas in compliance in 2019, including mushrooming data volumes, GDPR fines and the California Consumer Privacy Act Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

20TB hard drives expected in 2019 as Seagate HAMR is tested by NetApp

Heat-assisted method of writing to disk looks likely to push HDD capacities to 20TB this year, with 40TB possible by 2023, for media suited to colder data Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Top 10 cloud storage stories of 2018

Top trends in cloud storage in 2018 included key enablers of hybrid- and multi-cloud such as native cloud storage, array makers’ cloud appliances and distributed file systems Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Top 10 storage stories of 2018

Key trends in storage in 2018 included hybrid and multicloud storage, container storage, and hyper-converged infrastructure. Meanwhile, flash storage has evolved with NVMe Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

NVMe is fast flash storage, but big five suppliers take it slowly

NVMe flash offers blistering performance gains but so far the big five storage array makers have tended to opt for gradual implementations rather than radical new architectures Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

Douglas Engelbart, the forgotten hero of modern computing

Half a century ago, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated an experimental computer that laid the foundations for modern computing. His vision to use computing power to solve complex problems in all areas of human activity has become reality, but not in the way that he imagined Continue Reading

By

• Jake Charles Rees

What is storage-class memory and what is it used for?

HPE has announced the availability of storage-class memory in its products and other array makers are expect to follow. So what does SCM do for analytics-centred workloads? Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Data protection, backup and replication in the age of the cloud

A data protection and backup strategy has to take account of the expansion of the sphere of IT, from the datacentre to the public cloud to devices and locations at the edge Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

Tackling legacy systems by making IT evergreen

In this week’s Computer Weekly, we assess strategies for continuous IT improvement to help evergreen IT replace the difficulties caused by legacy tech. Our new buyer’s guide examines next-generation networking technologies such as SD-WAN. And we hear about digital transformation in the charity sector in an interview with the IT leader at Parkinson’s UK. Read the issue now. Continue Reading

How to build SME storage using public cloud storage

Small companies can often take advantage of public cloud storage offerings to supplement or replace on-premise infrastructure. We look at key options in file, block and object storage Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

Virtual Instruments aims to be “the brain of the datacentre”

Virtual Instruments hopes artificial intelligence and machine learning functionality that helps IT staff spot connections between application and storage performance could put an end to the “war room” Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

HPE shows off first fruits of $4bn edge computing investment

Tech supplier has beefed up its Edgeline portfolio with new hardware and software offerings to make it easier to manage edge devices, applications and data Continue Reading

By

• Aaron Tan, TechTarget

Data volumes set to hit 175ZB with a tectonic shift to the cloud

There will be more data in the public cloud than enterprise datacentres or consumer devices by 2025 as data shifts location, according to a study by IDC and Seagate Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Storage 101: Unstructured data and its storage needs

Unstructured data exists in huge volumes, but often it is semi-structured with metadata. We lift the lid on unstructured data and key approaches to its storage Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

NetApp and Pure show strong results on flash storage and cloud

NetApp records healthy year-on-year revenue increase with flash showing out well, while Pure Storage sees incredible earnings for its flash products over 12 months Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Survey: Data very fragmented, and that’s a worry for most

Cohesity-sponsored survey finds most organisations store multiple copies of secondary data and worry about the cost and the effect on their competitiveness Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Sixth form college rebuilds after fire with Scale hyper-converged

Xaverian College suffered a server room fire but took the opportunity to build a hyper-converged infrastructure with Scale Computing that did away with costly VMware licence fees Continue Reading

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• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Pure Storage makes big hybrid push with Cloud Data Services

Flash storage pioneer makes a big deal of its object storage architecture as it launches Pure capacity in the AWS cloud, plus replication to the cloud for on-premise hardware Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Rubrik adds Oracle, NoSQL and SAP Hana data protection

Scale-out backup appliance maker has already ticked most physical and virtual support boxes and is now filling out the details with enterprise application support Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Panasas refreshes with ActiveStor Ultra in push to the enterprise

Scale-out NAS maker Panasas wants to make its ActiveStor storage more attractive to enterprises by touting its ease of use and putting storage nodes on commodity hardware Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Fortunes of storage vary in big five led by Dell EMC and NetApp

The big five take 50% of the enterprise storage market, with Dell EMC and HPE dominating. But some struggle with successive quarters of shrinkage while others see storage shine Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Hyper-converged backup appliances bring flexibility benefits

Backup appliances in scale-out format allow data protection to be scaled easily by simply adding extra nodes. But is it an idea that’s ready for the enterprise? Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

Excelero adds NVMe flash via Ethernet and Fibre Channel

NVMesh2 will allow NVMe flash connectivity, so customers can use existing network hardware between servers. Erasure coding for data protection is also added Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

IBM refreshes StorWize with NVMe flash and NVMe-over-fabrics

Big Blue boosts midrange arrays with NVMe and NVMf capability and launches Spectrum Discover, a Data Lake metadata-focused data analysis tool, plus a new tape drive, the TS1160 Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

As data volumes grow, backup needs analytics, says StorageCraft CEO

Backup appliance maker’s CEO says backup needs analytics so customers can prioritise restore of critical data in a world where volumes increase by 50% a year Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Igneous enhances unstructured data management product

Specialist Igneous allows customers to backup and archive, search, manage, move and handle large sets of unstructured files that mainstream NAS can find difficult to handle Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Flash storage in the cloud from the big cloud providers

We survey the big three cloud providers – AWS, Azure and Google – and find a range of mostly block storage flash storage options with performance choices available. Continue Reading

Internet of things challenges in storage and data

The internet of things (IoT) brings challenges, with a host of new edge devices and data. We look at edge and core processing, compliance and information lifecycle management in IoT Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

Violin to add X-IO flash, hybrid and disk as mid-range options

Reborn Violin Systems is to buy X-IO’s spinning disk, all-flash and hybrid flash storage systems in a bid to provide more mid-range options to its customers Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Hammerspace launches with hybrid cloud-era NAS virtualisation

Startup Hammerspace launches from five-year stealth to make NAS files available anywhere, on-prem and in cloud, with technology that splits metadata and payload for lightweight virtualisation Continue Reading

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• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Public Health England builds Ceph and Lustre cloud for analytics

Healthcare analytics and modelling organisation Public Health England built an open source cloud from Red Hat Ceph object storage and Lustre scale-out file access storage to petabyte scale Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

CW Middle East: Middle East warms to humanoid robots

Countries in the Middle East are warming to humanoid robotics, robotic process automation and artificial intelligence as these technologies become widely accepted globally. Also in this issue, read why Saudi Arabia has called on London’s fintechs to set up in the country with the promise of government support, and find out how the Gulf Warehousing Company has introduced cloud-based technology to replace paper processes used by its HR department. Continue Reading

Ctera to enhance multi-cloud after $30m funding boost

Ctera does “NAS replacement” on object storage in the cloud, but wants its customer on-premises hardware to be smarter to allow tiering of data to multiple private and public clouds Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Violin launches XVS8 flagship high-performance flash array

Reborn Violin Systems launches flash boxes that can scale to petabytes and are aimed at transactional, analytics and virtualisation use cases, with NVMe upgrades expected Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

How to implement a multicloud storage strategy

We look at how to build a multicloud storage strategy and benefits such as performance, availability and features, as well as potential limitations such as data mobility Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

New cloud storage services for Microsoft Azure at Ignite 2018

Microsoft launches Data Box hardware appliances for cloud ingestion, Avere vFXT cloud NAS, Ultra SSD storage based on NVMe flash and Azure Premium file storage Continue Reading

By

• Christophe Bardy

Object storage: On-prem, in the cloud and hybrid

We take a look at the object storage market and products and find offerings made to build public and private clouds that often provide a link between the two Continue Reading

By

• Stephen Pritchard

OpenStack storage update 2018: After Rocky

Snapshots and container storage support are among recently added functionality in the open source private cloud platform, but vendor driver support for OpenStack is not universal Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

Flash storage in the cloud from the big cloud providers

We survey the big three cloud providers – AWS, Azure and Google – and find a range of mostly block storage flash storage options with performance choices available Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

EU-backed bid to cap idle energy use by datacentre servers moves closer

Move to improve the energy efficiency of datacentres by capping idle energy use by servers by 2020 comes one step closer, despite opposition from IBM, HPE and Dell-EMC Continue Reading

By

• Caroline Donnelly, Senior Editor, UK

BFI deploys SpectraLogic tape in PB-scale digitisation project

British Film Institute got SpectraLogic tape and Black Pearl when it wanted multi-petabyte capacity and the ability to write tape archive of 10,000 movies into its workflows Continue Reading

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• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Red Hat to throw its hat in with Container Storage Interface

Software maker will add Container Storage Interface support to its existing OpenShift Container Platform and GlusterFS-based scale-out file system container storage Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor