Storage

Features disaster recovery-as-a-service providers must offer

A cost-effective disaster recovery as a service lets organizations of all sizes implement a dependable disaster recovery plan. Disaster recovery-as-a-service providers replicate or back up customer data to cloud data centers and then -- should disaster strike -- host and run applications remotely. There's a lot of room for disaster recovery-as-a-service providers to develop features specific to their DRaaS products, which can make sorting through those offerings daunting. Learn about the four key capabilities to look for when comparing DRaaS vendors to ensure the one you choose can handle the full range of potential disasters.

Data that goes into cold storage is often kept for compliance and, increasingly, for big data analysis. Such data is infrequently or never accessed. Typically cheaper and lower performing than primary or secondary storage, cold storage systems are designed for storing such data. Enterprises may need to make this data warm or hot at a moment's notice, though, complicating cold storage design and increasing costs. Initially based on automated tape libraries and optical jukeboxes, cold storage systems have evolved to encompass Linear Tape File System and object storage as the amount of unstructured data has grown in recent years. Software for managing unstructured data has changed the cold data landscape as well.

Employees often access and synchronize corporate data from a variety of consumer-grade sync-and-share services, putting the organization at risk. Enterprise-grade file sync-and-share -- available via the cloud, on premises or in hybrid modes -- includes enhancements to ensure security and compliance. Such features vary among vendors, but there are certain ones you should always look for to maintain data integrity and security.

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Explosion in unstructured data storage drives modernization

Increasing amounts of unstructured data are a key part of modern secondary storage environments with their distributed file systems and a scale-out object storage design. Continue Reading

By

• Steve Ricketts, Taneja Group

Are you ready for NVMe storage and the future of flash?

Three factors to consider beyond technical capabilities before designing and investing money and resources in a low-latency NVMe flash storage network. Continue Reading

By

• Scott Sinclair, Practice Director

Demand for cold data storage heats up

The exponential rise in unstructured data is one of many reasons for the upsurge in demand for cost-effective cold storage products, services and media. Continue Reading

By

• Marc Staimer, Dragon Slayer Consulting

Cloud storage adoption decisions weigh capacity and cost

Acquiring storage capacity -- particularly for backup, archiving, DR and collaborative purposes -- dominates as the main reason for storage cloud adoption trends in the enterprise. Continue Reading

By

• James Alan Miller, Senior Executive Editor

Navigating cloud-based data storage requires some caution

Cloud services are economical and easy to use -- if you know the ropes. Approach cloud computing issues with caution; you just might run into familiar on-premises storage problems. Continue Reading

By

• Rich Castagna

Are you ready for NVMe storage and the future of flash?

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Explosion in unstructured data storage drives modernization

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Navigating cloud-based data storage requires some caution

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Demand for cold data storage heats up

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Cloud storage adoption decisions weigh capacity and cost

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SwiftStack objects to object storage label

SwiftStack’s leadership team appreciated being selected a visionary in Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant for distributed file systems and object storage. The vendor even put out a press release ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

3D TLC NAND gives capacity boost to IBM FlashSystem 900

FlashSystem 900 building blocks are the foundation of IBM FlashSystem A9000 and V9000 arrays. New NAND modules use 3D TLC in place of planar 2D enterprise MLC. Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Elastifile scores OEM deal with Dell EMC

Cloud NAS vendor Elastifile has struck an OEM deal with Dell EMC, one of the startup’s first investors. Dell EMC will integrate Elastifile Cloud File System and CloudConnect cloud transfer and ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

Solid-state drive performance metrics go beyond latency, IOPS

In determining performance and lifespan of an SSD, companies must consider the drive's architecture, the storage controller and write amplification in addition to IOPS and latency. Continue Reading

By

• Robert Sheldon

Arcserve acquisition plans heating up

Arcserve is on the hunt to buy more companies. The data protection and recovery company already has made two acquisitions since becoming independent from CA Technologies in 2014. It bought cloud ... Continue Reading

By

• Sonia Lelii, TechTarget

Violin Systems CEO Abbasi says profits coming in 2018

All-flash pioneer Violin emerges from bankruptcy; 2018 plans call for profits, acquisition, NVMe deployments and software-defined scalability. Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

IBM Cloud Object Storage tweaked for on-prem, small footprints

With the latest upgrades to its object storage platform, IBM recognizes that not everyone who uses object storage does so in the public cloud.  They don’t all start with hundreds of terabytes of ... Continue Reading

By

• Sonia Lelii, TechTarget

Cisco telemetry data gets streamed from MDS 9700 32G modules

Cisco SAN telemetry sensors capture insight on network fabrics to aid capacity and infrastructure management. The FC feature provides real-time instrumentation analytics. Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Hybrid storage arrays offer the best of all storage worlds

Hybrid flash arrays provide performance benefits over all-flash and all-hard disk storage systems and can address the varying workload demands of today's organizations. Continue Reading

By

• Logan G. Harbaugh, Independent consultant

Veeam revenue increases as enterprise deals grow

Highlighted by the largest customer deal in its history and a big bump in enterprise bookings, Veeam reported 34% year-over-year total bookings growth in the last quarter. There has been a push in ... Continue Reading

By

• Paul Crocetti, Editorial Director

Western Digital CEO vows to block Toshiba NAND sale

Western Digital CEO Steve Milligan said he remains confident his company will win its fight to prevent its NAND manufacturing joint venture partner Toshiba from selling its memory chip unit without ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

Quest data protection management adds cloud portal

Quest Software, independent again after its spinoff from Dell EMC nearly a year ago, is building out its data protection portfolio with a new cloud-based management console. The Quest Data ... Continue Reading

By

• Sonia Lelii, TechTarget

Beat VDI deployment challenges; find the best VDI storage

Companies that want to stand up a VDI deployment can choose from a variety of storage options, from traditional storage technologies to more creative approaches, such as layering. Continue Reading

By

• Brien Posey

Can Commvault HyperScale cure sales slide?

Following six straight quarters of making or beating expectations, Commvault stumbled last quarter when it missed its targets for revenue and income. The backup and data management company today ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

Hard disk vs. flash storage: The fight of the century?

When deciding which storage method you want in your corner, the benefits of flash storage are very appealing. But should you forget about hard disk arrays entirely? Continue Reading

Red Hat updates Gluster Storage for OpenShift container apps

Red Hat beefs up its Container-Native Storage with block and object interfaces and a significant increase in persistent volume density for use with its OpenShift Container Platform. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

NVMe flash array startups Pavilion Data, Vexata jump in

The 4U Pavilion Memory NVMe flash array comes with 20 controllers and 40 Ethernet ports. Vexata markets VX-100 appliances running Active Data Fabric distributed storage. Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Actifio Sky adds intelligent search across clouds

Actifio's Sky goes beyond copy data management. It searches and manages data across clouds and on-premises storage with new analytics and a global catalog. Continue Reading

By

• Sonia Lelii, TechTarget

Gen 6 Fibre Channel helps support flash, but lacks adoption

Sixth generation Fibre Channel has the potential to solve fabric-level bottlenecks, but companies tend to choose Ethernet because it has evolved more rapidly. Continue Reading

By

• Scott D. Lowe, ActualTech Media

Dell EMC acquisition: The deal of the century a year later

A year has passed since the Dell EMC acquisition, the biggest transaction in the history of IT. With the benefit of hindsight, we examine the positives, negatives and uncertainties of the deal. Did Dell buy the world's biggest storage vendor, or did EMC round out its infrastructure strategy? Was the timing of the Dell EMC acquisition good, and were the reasons behind it sound? Does it matter? What are the long-term prospects? How about the complications of integrating companies with different corporate cultures and overlapping product lines? What's the effect on the data storage market in general?

Public cloud use has increased at a remarkable rate. So much so, it's a matter of when, not if, public cloud adoption will match on-site infrastructure. Vendor lock-in is a top concern IT decision-makers and practitioners have with cloud services. An emerging set of multicloud primary storage products mitigate this problem by providing data services simultaneously across multiple public clouds. Explore the key drivers and benefits of these multicloud storage products and services. Find out what customers want from them. And learn about the vendors that meet these diverse customer requirements and how they deliver on the promise of multicloud storage.

The open source software movement has potential to change the face of storage. With the commoditization of servers and storage media, costs are low and reliability is high enough to use off-the-shelf components to build storage platforms with software-defined storage products, including open source. This trend is reducing or eliminating dependence on proprietary storage hardware and software. Find out which open source technologies support object-, file- and block-based storage individually or in combination.

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Secondary data storage: A massively scalable transformation

Capitalize on flash with interactive, online secondary data storage architectures that make a lot more data available for business while maximizing flash investment. Continue Reading

By

• Mike Matchett, Small World Big Data

Buying NAS: Do you want performance and scalability?

Although SANs still rule the modern the data center, the NAS array maintains a position high up on tech buyers' shopping lists for new primary storage. Continue Reading

By

• James Alan Miller, Senior Executive Editor

A year later: Pros and cons of the Dell and EMC merger

Our experts take measure of the Dell EMC acquisition, the storage and technology merger of the century, a little more than 12 months after the deal closed. Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz
• Dave Raffo

Komprise adds data lifecycle management, deeper analytics

Storage startup updates data management software with additional policy-based data migration options, more granular analytics and GDPR-focused confinement capabilities. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

A long hot summer for the enterprise storage market

Use of magnetic tape in enterprise storage is set to break out, even as the cloud market slows and software-defined storage and hyper-converged infrastructure stumble. Continue Reading

By

• Jon Toigo

NetApp customers, partners press on after Las Vegas shooting

About 4,000 NetApp customers and partners attended the vendor's Insight user conference expecting storage news. Instead, they had to absorb the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Open source technology promises to alter enterprise storage

Open source storage software could alter the face of the industry by cutting costs and delivering greater flexibility over existing storage infrastructure. Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

Multicloud storage mitigates risk of public cloud lock-in

Multicloud storage strategy allows for the shifting of data across public clouds so you can avoid lock-in to a single provider, reduce cost and improve workload efficiency. Continue Reading

By

• Jeff Kato and Jeff Byrne

A long hot summer for the enterprise storage market

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A year later: Pros and cons of the Dell and EMC merger

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Multicloud storage mitigates risk of public cloud lock-in

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Open source technology promises to alter enterprise storage

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Secondary data storage: A massively scalable transformation

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Buying NAS: Do you want performance and scalability?

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Scality Connect ports S3 apps to Azure Blob storage

Scality's Connect software opens access to Microsoft Azure Blob services for S3 API-compatible applications, making it easier to port S3 API apps to Microsoft cloud storage. Continue Reading

By

• Sonia Lelii, TechTarget

Data Dynamics StorageX 8.0 adds analysis, S3 support

Data Dynamics beefs up StorageX file management software with new single-view analysis portal and support for Amazon S3 API-compliant object storage. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Microsoft Azure taps NetApp Ontap for native NFS storage

NetApp Ontap will become available in Microsoft public cloud as the Azure Enterprise NFS Service. Will we see NetApp do the same for Amazon Web Services? Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

SoftNAS Cloud architecture gets facelift, new features

SoftNAS Cloud architecture splits into distinct products for primary NAS, secondary storage and replication across clouds, and targets multicloud and hybrid cloud implementations. Continue Reading

By

• Sonia Lelii, TechTarget

Investigate how copy data management systems curb data sprawl

The top copy data management vendors offer innovative products to reduce the staggering amount of data that organizations create by replicating multiple copies of production data. Continue Reading

Infinidat boxes up $95M funding haul

Infinidat picked up $95 million in funding today to help fuel an aggressive product expansion – including moves into secondary storage and a public cloud offering. Goldman Sachs Private Capital ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

NetApp Insight: Las Vegas should have time to grieve first

LAS VEGAS - This blog was supposed to tell our readers about the big developments surrounding Day 1 of the NetApp Insight user conference.  Sadly, today’s subject matter touches on more sobering ... Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Toshiba memory business sale faces bumpy road

Toshiba signs a $17.7 billion deal to sell its memory business to a Bain-led consortium that includes Dell and Seagate, but Western Digital's SanDisk wants to stop it. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Navigating the all-flash array storage buying process

Companies of all sizes are turning to all-flash storage arrays to meet their storage capacity, performance, reliability and data protection requirements. Continue Reading

Dell EMC’s XC (Nutanix) HCI box protects MS Hyper-V VMs

Dell EMC today enhanced its Nutanix-powered XC hyper-converged platform by adding data protection features for Microsoft Windows Hyper-V. The news, made during Microsoft Ignite, shows Dell EMC is ... Continue Reading

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• Dave Raffo

Entry-level Dell EMC SC Series adds data features

Dell EMC's SCv3000 launch includes automated hybrid tiering, data compression and replication with federated clusters. Dell EMC announced a money-back efficiency guarantee. Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

How can I guarantee the best Ceph performance?

Ceph object storage performance is largely based on network speed, but journal disks and the right file system for object storage devices also play a role. Continue Reading

By

• Sander van Vugt

Accelerate predictive analytics software with flash technology

For organizations that must analyze large amounts of data quickly and efficiently, nothing beats solid-state storage. Predictive analytics applications perform better with flash. Continue Reading

By

• John Edwards

Qumulo Core File Fabric knits cloud bursting, replication

New Qumulo storage fabric replicates data between local and public cloud storage on AWS. QF2 is the first version of Core that runs in a public cloud. Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Is there a Ceph client to connect Windows machines?

Integrating Ceph and Windows isn't as straightforward as connecting Ceph to Linux machines. You'll need a Ceph Gateway or SUSE Enterprise Storage to get the job done. Continue Reading

By

• Sander van Vugt

Enter Your Great Storage Product in the Products of the Year Competition

In just a few days, the door will shut—and your outstanding data storage product will be left standing out in the cold rather than in the running for a Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com Storage ... Continue Reading

By

• Rich Castagna

Dell EMC storage gets new boss

Of all the EMC executives who left the company since the Dell acquisition, the departure of David Goulden will have the greatest impact on the Dell EMC storage business. Dell dropped the news that ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

How do I enable file sharing on Ceph object storage?

The open source Ceph project prioritizes efficient data storage over easy access, so companies that want to set up file sharing on their object stores must do a little extra work. Continue Reading

By

• Sander van Vugt

New Pure Storage CEO Giancarlo faces scaling challenge

Former Cisco exec Charles Giancarlo takes over as CEO of Pure Storage from Scott Dietzen with the all-flash pioneer set to become a billion-dollar baby. Will profits follow? Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Nasuni cloud NAS helps score $38 million in funding

Cloud-based file service provider Nasuni last week closed on $38 million in funding to boost its expansion plans in research and development and its channel and go-to-market efforts. The Goldman ... Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Everspin Technologies nvNITRO ST-MRAM SSDs ready to ship

Everspin's new ST-MRAM-based nvNITRO Storage Accelerator pledges 'DRAM-like' performance, but analysts say the high price could limit the SSD's use cases. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Toshiba memory business sale points to Bain-led consortium

The Toshiba memory business could be sold to a Bain Capital-led consortium that reportedly includes Apple, Dell Technologies and Seagate if the parties can strike a deal that passes legal muster ... Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Dell EMC Isilon helps preserve tennis history

At the U.S. Open tennis tournament last week, Rafael Nadal solidified his Hall of Fame credentials and Sloane Stephens became a hall of fame candidate. And the International Tennis Hall of Fame ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

Can I replace HDDs with SSDs to support in-memory storage?

Replacing all your HDDs with SSDs won't solve the storage issues associated with in-memory databases. Look to hyper-convergence and NVDIMMs instead. Continue Reading

By

• Jim O'Reilly

Spectra Logic BlackPearl NAS disk appliance launches

Spectra Logic has added a midrange BlackPearl NAS disk appliance to augment its tape-based object storage. Spectra Logic launched the object-based BlackPearl line as a linear tape file system ... Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Back-end storage considerations for in-memory processing

Storing hot data in main memory removes the latency associated with hard disk and solid-state storage operations; it's the best option for need-it-now data. Continue Reading

By

• Jim O'Reilly

Tintri revenue misses target, but earnings are a surprise

Private enterprise cloud specialist Tintri Inc. on Thursday posted mixed financial results in its first earnings call since going public in June. The bottom line: lackluster Tintri revenue was ... Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Dell EMC storage sags in the middle

What do you do when storage sales slow down? If you’re Dell EMC, you add velocity to the sales process. “Storage velocity” was a frequently used term during Dell’s earnings call this morning. On ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

Tintri Enterprise Cloud Series federates 64 flash nodes

Flash vendor Tintri in July expanded storage clustering to enable customers to build a massively scalable private enterprise cloud. On Tuesday, the Tintri enterprise cloud strategy added another ... Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

How NVMe over Fabrics will change the storage environment

Expect NVMe to supplant SCSI and SAS protocols for SSD storage and NVMe over Fabrics to find a place in high-end networking deployments for transporting data. Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

HPE storage more Nimble after $1.2 billion buy

HPE storage sales received a boost last quarter from its $1.2 bilion Nimble Storage acquisition. HPE did not break out its total storage revenue by product, or even give a total amount except to ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

BackupAssist CryptoSafeGuard aids ransomware backup strategy

Windows data protection specialist BackupAssist is the latest vendor to provide a capability that helps combat ransomware. The Australia-based company recently launched CryptoSafeGuard, part of its ... Continue Reading

By

• Sonia Lelii, TechTarget

Cloudian CEO sees favorable trends in object storage market

Cloudian CEO Michael Tso notes favorable trends for object storage: Capacities are increasing to petabytes, and customers want to use different clouds for different workloads. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Persistent data storage in containerized environments

The most significant challenge to the rise of containerized applications is quickly and easily providing enterprise-class persistent storage for containers. Continue Reading

By

• Mike Matchett, Small World Big Data

Your enterprise data management strategy needs a superhero

Data management products are the Superman, not the Batman, of storage. They have built-in superpowers that provide the innate power needed to manage data. Continue Reading

By

• Jon Toigo

Persistent storage readied for containerized applications

Traditional application architectures are limited in their ability to scale and meet the demands of today's fast-growing data, cloud and IT environments. Containerization -- with its support for Agile design, development and deployment methodologies -- promises to overcome these challenges. Containers weren't originally designed to implement full-stack applications or any application that needs persistent storage. With containers gaining support from storage array makers, we're starting to see arrays allowing containerized applications to take advantage of primary storage. Find out how storage vendors are bringing persistent storage to the world of containerized applications.

Nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) replaces SCSI at both the device and network levels to deliver greater bandwidth and lower latency to internal storage devices. And with the development of NVMe over Fabrics, the NVMe command set can work across the network via external storage. Discover the benefits of NVMe over Fabrics, when to deploy the technology, how to implement it and which vendors are making it happen.

Copy data management (CDM) protects production data and improves the management of production data copies, with the aim of cutting storage costs, improving data visibility and compliance, and speeding up data access. Until last year, it was the province of point products. But the market is changing, and the technology has gone mainstream as the largest data protection and storage vendors have joined the CDM fray. Find out which CDM capabilities companies value most and what is being done to meet growing demand. What advantages can CDM bring to your IT data storage environment?

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The power and benefits of encouraging IT disruption

IT can't remain a reactive cost center and cheerful help desk, but must become a competitive, cutthroat service provider and powerful champion of emerging disruptive technology. Continue Reading

By

• Mike Matchett, Small World Big Data

The copy data management market is starting to go mainstream

Products from copy data management vendors protect and manage production data to lower storage costs, speed data access and streamline self-service access to data copies. Continue Reading

By

• Steve Ricketts, Taneja Group

Coho Data falls victim to 'cutthroat' data storage market

After receiving $76 million to develop DataStream hybrid NAS arrays, Coho Data can't find more investors and falls into the storage startup graveyard. Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Elastifile grabs $16M to stretch sales staff

Startup Elastifile, which sells a distributed file system that spans flash and cloud storage tiers, picked up $16 million in funding today. The startup also gained a new strategic investor in ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

Persistent data storage in containerized environments

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How NVMe over Fabrics will change the storage environment

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Your enterprise data management strategy needs a superhero

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Get control of data storage growth before things go haywire

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The power and benefits of encouraging IT disruption

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The copy data management market is starting to go mainstream

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Nutanix revenue jumps as competition grows

Hyper-converged pioneer Nutanix grew revenue 72% in its first year as a public company. Nutanix revenue grew to $767 million during a span in which competition intensified. Dell EMC, Hewlett ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

How to determine the true cost of flash

If you want to add flash storage, it's important to consider the cost per IOPS and gigabyte compared to HDD volumes, as well as the difference between consumer and enterprise SSDs. Continue Reading

By

• Brien Posey

VMworld 2017 Notes: Dell favors storage R&D over M&A

LAS VEGAS -- Before their merger, EMC and Dell were active buyers of storage companies. In the past year, neither has made an acquisition. That’s understandable, considering the price that Dell ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

Kaminario K2.N gives composable infrastructure an NVMe twist

Kaminario's K2.N all-flash infrastructure creates multiple virtual arrays from clustered resources. Compute nodes and NVMe shelves connect via RDMA over Converged Ethernet. Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Tegile becomes the latest Western Digital acquisition

Western Digital's acquisition spree continues with the pickup of flash vendor Tegile Systems. The drive-maker says Tegile storage complements its ActiveScale object storage. Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Selecting the best object-based storage platform for your needs

Object-based storage systems can provide the scalability needed to meet organizations' increasing unstructured data storage requirements. Learn how to pick the right platform. Continue Reading

The leading object storage vendors offer broad range of options

Explore how the leading object storage systems can be accessed, how they integrate with the cloud, what data security they provide and the various deployment options they offer. Continue Reading

By

• Scott D. Lowe, ActualTech Media

Pure Storage CEO swap: Dietzen out, Giancarlo in

Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen resigned unexpectedly Thursday, as the all-flash pioneer named former Cisco executive Charlie Giancarlo its new leader. Dietzen will stay at Pure as chairman, ... Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

Hedvig storage upgrade adds flash tier, encryption options

Hedvig software-defined storage enables 'all-flash hybrids' by supporting tiering across different types of solid-state media inside of commodity hardware systems. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa