Flash memory and storage

NetApp Insight 2018: A primer on storage for AI, flash-enabled cloud

LAS VEGAS-NetApp expects about 5,000 customers and partners to gather here Monday as it lays out a roadmap for flash-enabled AI and cloud applications. NetApp Insight 2018 marks the fifth year the ... Continue Reading

NVMe fabric options include Fibre Channel, RDMA

Planning NVMe over fabrics? Then get to know all about the Fibre Channel and RDMA fabric options to decide which of the two approaches fits your network best. Continue Reading

Violin buys ISE, X-IO splits off Axellio

Two storage companies on the comeback trail make moves -- Violin Systems buys X-IO's ISE platform, and X-IO rebrands as Axellio. Both have been in transition over the past few years. Continue Reading

NVMe-oF fends off scale-out storage challenges

NVMe over Fabrics has proven to be a useful fix for the problems faced by scale-out storage architectures, and vendors and users alike are taking notice. Continue Reading

New memory technologies challenge NAND flash dominance

Cost and scaling limits mean planar NAND flash as we know it will slowly cede its pre-eminent place in the memory hierarchy to emerging technologies such as 3D XPoint. Continue Reading

New memory technologies challenge NAND flash dominance

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Violin Systems AFA lineup adds XVS8 power hitter

Violin, an 'emerging company that's been around a while,' adds new all-flash system that will support NVMe over Fabrics next year and promises extreme performance. Continue Reading

HPE 3PAR StoreServ all-flash fixes hospital's image problems

Riverside Healthcare dedicates its all-flash 3PAR StoreServ array to revamp its PACS. New images are stored in HPE's onboard cache for quicker retrieval by radiologists. Continue Reading

Quantum Xcellis unwraps NVMe-powered StorNext NAS

Quantum upgrades its StorNext file system to bolster file sharing and replication on Xcellis NVMe flash appliances. It's the first product release under new CEO Jamie Lerner. Continue Reading

With NVMe-oF, who needs rack-scale PCIe?

NVMe over networks is winning out as the best way to offer shared, flash-based storage systems, with Dell EMC, NetApp, Pure Storage, Western Digital and startups in the game. Continue Reading

Economic impact of large capacity archival flash

Quad level cell flash technology is leading to high capacity flash devices that have applicability in archival storage or content repositories that are primarily read access. Currently at 96 ... Continue Reading

NVMe over FC is happening, and it's time to prepare

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NVMe over FC is happening, and it's time to prepare

The extent to which the recently published FC-NVMe standard lowers performance latencies in Fibre Channel SANs will be interesting to watch in the coming months. Continue Reading

Samsung adds Z-NAND data center SSD

Samsung's new lineup of data center SSDs designed for channel sales to SMBs includes high-performance Z-NAND add-in card, U.2 and M.2 NVMe PCIe models and 2.5-inch SATA drives. Continue Reading

Tintri bankruptcy deal gives DataDirect an enterprise path

After weeks of uncertainty, the Tintri bankruptcy saga has been resolved. DataDirect Networks (DDN) said it will pay nearly $60 million for Tintri and plans to reveal the product roadmap by ... Continue Reading

Attala Systems tackles RoCE shortcomings for NVMe flash

Startup Attala said it can scale NVMe over RoCE across composable bare-metal racks. It has also partnered with Super Micro on NVMe JBOF and has data lake software in preview. Continue Reading

Key steps to destroy an SSD and protect your data

Donating a used SSD may seem like a nice thing to do, but not if you want to keep your data secure. SSD disposal and recycling are more complicated than you might think. Continue Reading

Why Intel Optane SSDs have 'failed'

Why haven't SSDs built on 3D XPoint taken off yet? Don't blame the technology; blame the marketing behind Intel Optane. New Optane NVDIMMs could fare better. Continue Reading

Pure Storage all-flash beats street, adds StorReduce dedupe

Pure Storage all-flash sales helped the vendor close a strong quarter in July, generating $309 million to beat its top-end guidance.  The revenue figure represents a 37% increase from the $224.7 ... Continue Reading

Move to NVMe technology will depend on need and speed

As a replacement for the SCSI storage protocol, NVMe can provide more responsive storage and lower latency. But transitioning to NVMe in the data center requires thorough planning. Continue Reading

NAND flash manufacturers showcase new technologies

Get up to speed on new NAND flash technologies, including Toshiba Memory's XL-Flash, startup Yangtze Memory's Xtacking, and SK Hynix's so-called 4D NAND. Continue Reading

Revenue from NetApp all-flash spikes on strong demand

Demand for NetApp all-flash storage surged last quarter, part of strong growth across its cloud portfolio that helped it beat guidance on earnings, margins and revenue. And the storage vendor has ... Continue Reading

Scale-out Qumulo NAS qualifies latest Dell EMC PowerEdge servers

Qumulo scale-out NAS software can now run on Dell EMC's PowerEdge servers. That means Dell EMC server customers can choose between Qumulo software and Dell EMC's Isilon. Continue Reading

You'll never guess what people use Pure's FlashBlade to do

Pure Storage is finding a use case for its FlashBlade array that no one expected when the all-flash system for unstructured data launched in 2016. Brian Schwarz, VP of product management for  ... Continue Reading

IBM DS8882F converges array and mainframe in one rack

IBM skinny mainframes add a few pounds with the DS8882F all-flash array screwed into the IBM Z ZR1 and LinuxOne Rockhopper II 19-inch racks. Continue Reading

Kaminario storage goes for a run on Western Digital OpenFlex

Kaminario storage continues to push farther and farther away from its reliance on purpose-built hardware. The all-flash vendor has qualified its consumption-based Cloud Fabric software for Western ... Continue Reading

Violin Systems prepares NVMe launch, but not for drives

Violin Systems will make its first platform launch since its resurrection when it brings out a flash array with NVMe support on the front end for host connectivity in September. Violin CEO Mark ... Continue Reading

New Seagate Nytro SSD line uses Toshiba 3D NAND chips

Seagate shows off its first triple-level cell, 64-layer 3D NAND Nytro SSDs since investing in Toshiba NAND. Analysts wonder if the HDD giant waited too long to get serious about flash. Continue Reading

NAND flash shortage end could lead to dramatic price drop

Impending NAND flash oversupply will lead to price collapse of NAND flash chips and higher capacity enterprise SSDs, according to semiconductor analyst Jim Handy. Continue Reading

NVMe-oF and its many benefits take NVMe to the next level

NVMe over Fabrics is revolutionizing the storage market by making full use of data center capacity and becoming an effective replacement for SAN environments. Continue Reading

Newisys NVMe flash array chases hyperscale market

Sanmina-owned Newisys is known as a white-label server OEM to array vendors. The NSS-2560 NVMe flash provides storage density with hot-pluggable SSDs and Intel Broadwell servers. Continue Reading

The challenges of flash enterprise storage and how to beat them

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NVMe market and technology rapidly evolve

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How NVMe technology will rock the enterprise storage boat

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NVMe flash storage is shaking things up

The development of the nonvolatile memory express protocol is a huge step forward in allowing enterprises to maximize the benefits inherent to flash storage. NVMe puts storage closer to the CPU, reduces latency and increases the amount of parallel sessions available to storage devices. NVMe over Fabrics, meanwhile, is designed to retain the benefits of centralized storage by allowing the client host to talk directly to NVMe flash storage across a high-speed network. This is all good. But adopting NVMe flash storage does raise a number of questions. For example, what is the best approach to take when integrating NVMe flash storage in a particular IT infrastructure? And, perhaps, most imperative to the majority of enterprises, how well will the NVMe flash storage protocol and the devices that support it work with existing data center technologies?

From the get-go, the intrinsic possibilities and benefits of the all-flash data center seemed enormous and attractive. The idea that production databases would respond instantly to requests for unstructured data is extremely appealing to enterprises. Falling flash prices; the advent of unprecedented storage densities, with 16 TB flash drives commonplace and 50 TB-plus drives in the offing; and technologies such as compression and deduplication that work well in a flash environment make all-flash seem more reasonable than ever. The flash-only data center raises two significant issues that must be addressed, however. It makes equipping disaster recovery sites far more expensive and raises the question of why would you want to pay a premium price to maintain cold and stale data on expensive flash storage when a (still) much cheaper hard-disk option would suffice.

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The challenges of flash enterprise storage and how to beat them

Blazing fast all-flash data centers raise important issues. It's expensive to equip DR sites and then there's all that stale data. Find out how to counteract these issues. Continue Reading

NVMe market and technology rapidly evolve

The tipping point of NVMe acceptance is fast approaching as more enterprises consider adopting the technology to maximize SSD flash investment and performance. Continue Reading

How NVMe technology will rock the enterprise storage boat

NVMe flash speeds up storage and radically alters server connectivity. How will enterprises adopt NVMe storage and how well will it work with existing technologies? Continue Reading

NetApp AI storage packages OnTap all-flash FAS A800, Nvidia

NetApp follows Pure Storage's lead, adds Nvidia GPUs to its all-flash arrays to build a storage product designed for data scientists and others dabbling in artificial intelligence. Continue Reading

Western Digital launches 15 TB enterprise SAS SSD

Western Digital's 15 TB Ultrastar SAS SSD has twice the capacity of its previous version, but only half of the capacity of Toshiba's 31 TB whopper. Continue Reading

Storage class memory advances could be a game-changer

Sometimes referred to as persistent memory, SCM may address the growing gap between storage and memory technologies. But don't expect it to happen just yet. Continue Reading

3D NAND technology: What it is and where it's headed

Following a recent NAND flash shortage, 3D NAND is seeing renewed interest from consumers and vendors. Discover what makes the technology a compelling flash memory option. Continue Reading

Gartner: all-flash array market ‘visionaries’ include Tintri

Several vendors with spotty fiscal histories made Gartner’s list of competitors angling for all-flash array market share. Gartner listed Tintri as a “visionary” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for ... Continue Reading

Toshiba, Western Digital start shift to 96-layer BiCS flash

New 96-layer 3D NAND flash memory is starting to roll out that can store more data per chip and potentially lower per-bit storage costs over  64- and 32-layer technologies. Toshiba Memory America ... Continue Reading

Dell EMC midrange storage systems nudge a little closer

Dell EMC keeps its Unity and SC midrange storage arrays on separate tracks, but shows early signs of eventually merging the platforms. Both get OS upgrades. Continue Reading

Tintri acquisition proposal leaves customers in limbo

DataDirect Networks sees Tintri's analytics and flash capabilities as an entry point to the enterprise, but Tintri customers remain in the dark about their storage vendor's fate. Continue Reading

Adoption of 32 Gbps Fibre Channel being driven by flash

Flash, along with more and bigger workloads and more demanding applications, is driving businesses to switch from 8 Gbps and 16 Gbps FC to 32 Gbps FC storage environments. Continue Reading

IBM all-flash diversifies with NVMe-based FlashSystem 9100

IBM FlashSystem 9100 scales to 32 PB of all-flash storage in a standard rack. IBM guarantees consistent latency of 350 microseconds and 100 million IOPS per four-way cluster. Continue Reading

With Tintri layoffs, hybrid vendor waves a final goodbye

A new round of Tintri layoffs has cost 200 people their jobs, including its top sales executive, as the hybrid vendor winds down operations. The move leaves Tintri with about 40 to 50 ... Continue Reading

WDC strives to become 'next great storage' company

Since its 2012 acquisition of hard disk drive rival HGST, Western Digital Corp. has bought more storage companies than any other vendor. Some of the deals were whoppers, such as the $19 billion ... Continue Reading

Is there an alternative to error correction and detection codes?

Errors in NAND flash memory can be corrected, but that becomes more difficult as NAND reaches the end of its life. Are you utilizing every available error correction tool? Continue Reading

New 12 Gbps single-port Toshiba SAS SSD takes aim at SATA

Toshiba designed a new single-ported 12 Gbps RM5 SAS SSD to replace slower 6 Gbps SATA SSDs in servers until faster NVMe-based PCIe SSDs are ready for wider market adoption. Continue Reading

Four common SSD form factors and where they work best

Solid-state drive form factors offer different benefits, from ease of transition to increased throughput. Four popular form factors are currently dominating the market. Continue Reading

The Tintri storage hourglass is almost out of sand

Time is winding down for Tintri, whose slow-motion fall could come by the end of June. The remaining question is whether the publicly traded hybrid storage vendor can complete a last-second Hail ... Continue Reading

Industry vet Lewis reveals plan to save Violin flash storage

New Violin Systems CEO Mark Lewis' strategy for saving the flash vendor focuses on its core high-performance technology and a rebuilt channel partner-oriented sales team. Continue Reading

How can SSD garbage collection help preserve drive speeds?

The rumors are true: SSD speeds can slow down over time. Luckily, there are processes available that can help prevent this from happening and maintain the speedy nature of SSDs. Continue Reading

Pure Storage cloud plan gets warm reception from end users

Pure Storage made new FlashArray and FlashBlade all-flash systems generally available this week, emphasizing their role in moving data seamlessly between local and cloud storage. Continue Reading

Charge trap technology advantages for 3D NAND flash drives

Flash drive cells based on charge trap technology are less likely to leak electrons than the older floating gate cell technology. But they have reliability issues to be aware of. Continue Reading

Pure Storage software tooled up for containers, OpenShift, VMware

Pure Storage adds software for building, managing and protecting data in containers, clouds, VMs and on premises. Pure ES2 subscription offers a managed on-premises cloud. Continue Reading

NetApp CEO: Dell EMC ‘years behind’ us on flash, cloud

NetApp CEO George Kurian says things have never been better for the storage vendor since he joined the company in 2011. Kurian maintains NetApp’s all-flash platform is a hit, it’s the first major ... Continue Reading

HPE storage still on its Nimble high

Hewlett Packard Enterprise extended its impressive storage turnaround last quarter. For the second straight quarter, HPE storage revenue increased 24% year-over-year – jumping to $912 million for ... Continue Reading

Pure Storage all-flash revamp accelerates and consolidates

The Pure Accelerate conference kicks off with an NVMe-enabled FlashArray refresh and upgrades to all-flash Pure AIRI and FlashStack-Cisco UCS converged infrastructure for Oracle. Continue Reading

Micron starts shipping denser QLC SSD to select customers

Micron and Intel unleash QLC NAND flash that can store 4 bits per cell. Micron starts shipping a 2.5-inch QLC enterprise SATA SSD to select customers and targets fall for general availability. Continue Reading

Pure Storage: flash is a means, not an end, to shared data

SAN FRANCISCO – Pure Storage will push the theme of a “data-centric architecture” at its annual Accelerate user conference that begins Wednesday. Data-centric architecture is Pure’s description for ... Continue Reading

Pavilion Data gets funded for NVMe-oF push

As all-flash array pioneer Pure Storage celebrates its $1 billion in annual revenues, two of its former executives are planning the next big thing in flash. Pavilion Data, whose CEO Gurpreet Singh ... Continue Reading

Does SSD overprovisioning have storage benefits?

While overprovisioned SSDs have less usable capacity available, that space is put to good use. The majority of SSD manufacturers overprovision their drives, and for good reason. Continue Reading

Five NVMe-oF questions you've been dying to ask

The NVMe over Fabrics specification is growing in popularity, thanks to its ability to reduce latency and increase performance. But is it just a fad or here to stay? Continue Reading

NetApp NVMe AFF array plays capacity tune for AI listeners

NetApp pumps out an NVMe-ready All Flash FAS array with 30 TB Samsung drives and 700 TB of usable storage. SAN users can upgrade to FC over NVMe on select OnTap systems. Continue Reading

Dell EMC midrange storage keeps its overlapping arrays

Dell EMC plans to keep overlapping midrange storage for now. Dell Technologies World 2018 rollouts included CloudIQ analytics and Isilon SaaS beta with Google Cloud Platform. Continue Reading

NVMe technology is but a first step toward bigger things

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Three trends causing the rapid commoditization of AFA storage

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The AFA market faces unprecedented and rapid commoditization

Prices of all-flash arrays have nosedived. Massive discounts due to fierce competition are contributing to rapid and unprecedented commoditization of all-flash arrays and changes in the AFA market. Meantime, the demand for AFAs is shrinking because of increasing hyper-convergence and cloud adoption. This is bad news for storage vendors. To survive, they must innovate and differentiate themselves by solving real problems users face. But it's all to the advantage of storage buyer in today's AFA market. Learn how and why this is happening and how you can benefit.

The data explosion has pushed storage systems to the breaking point, leading many enterprises to spend a good deal of their IT dollars on the cloud, backup storage and on-premises flash, according to the TechTarget 2018 IT Priorities Survey. More than half of those surveyed will see their IT budgets increase in 2018, according to the IT spending trends study. And the average growth in spending across all enterprises will be about the same this year as it was in 2017. Demand for on-premises storage infrastructure, meanwhile, continues unabated for a large percentage of companies, as it does for hyper-converged and converged infrastructures.

Reliance on the cloud is leading almost a third of respondents to consolidate cloud workloads to better meet the management challenges presented by multiple cloud environments, while the on-demand model of the cloud itself has altered how we expect to consume and pay for IT resources. This includes storage, where vendors have changed how they deliver core features like deduplication and compression. The 2018 IT spending trends highlighted in this issue shed considerable light on today's storage market. This, in turn, will help elucidate your present and future storage needs.

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Three trends causing the rapid commoditization of AFA storage

Advancing technology and changing market forces have shifted the dynamics in the all-flash array market, opening it up to new challengers and benefiting customers. Continue Reading

NVMe technology is but a first step toward bigger things

NVMe is an inevitable move forward for flash technology that begins the transition to storage-class memory and will lead to even more significant storage advances. Continue Reading

Dell EMC all-flash PowerMax replaces VMAX, injects NVMe

Dell EMC rebrands its high-end, all-flash VMAX system as PowerMax, which is packed with NVMe flash and inline data reduction. A single system scales to 4 PB, with an onboard AI tiering engine. Continue Reading

AFA storage tackles big data analytics challenges

The latest generation of all-flash array storage is delivering the high performance and low latency required to support petabyte-scale big data analytics workloads. Continue Reading

Demystifying the hybrid storage array buying process

Hybrid flash storage offers numerous benefits over using just SSDs or HDDs. Learn how to assess your organization's needs for a hybrid storage array and how to evaluate the different hybrid arrays to find the right fit. Continue Reading

Cisco MDS FC Director switches expand with eye on NVMe

Networking giant Cisco adds two MDS FC Director switches for small and medium-sized businesses. The vendor said it wants to speed transition to 32 Gbps FC for NVMe flash. Continue Reading

SSDs vs. HDDs: When is all-flash storage overkill?

The SSD vs. HDD analysis isn't as simple as it looks. SSD prices are falling, and capacities increasing. But HDDs are still a good deal and fine for many noncritical workloads. Continue Reading

Veeam and Pure Storage team up on data protection, production

Four months after the release of Veeam's Universal Storage API, Veeam and Pure Storage have teamed up to streamline data protection and storage, and speed recovery. The integration -- initiated ... Continue Reading

Ultrathin memory storage device could spell breakthroughs

According to its creators, atomristor technology promises a vast improvement on modern flash storage devices, but mainstream use may still be far off. Continue Reading

Broadcom preps for NVMe over Fibre Channel with Brocade gear

Broadcom ships its first Brocade FC switching products and updates SAN management for NVMe with the goal of making Fibre Channel the fabric of choice for NVMe storage. Continue Reading

Leading hybrid storage arrays offer flexibility, scalability

By examining how leading hybrid storage systems address scalability, system management and company size, your organization can select the array that will best meet its needs. Continue Reading

How to get the full benefits from NVMe flash storage

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How to get the full benefits from NVMe flash storage

Consolidate and increase the density of your organization's workloads in a flash storage system to take full advantage of NVMe's parallelism and reduced latency. Continue Reading

Nvidia, Pure Storage FlashBlade lift 'AIRI' infrastructure

Pure Storage AIRI is AI-ready infrastructure that integrates Pure's all-flash FlashBlade NAND storage blades and four Nvidia DGX-1 artificial intelligence supercomputers. Continue Reading

The end of Moore's law for SSD performance

SSDs are seeing diminishing returns as Moore's law ends and quantum effects set in. Multilayers and more bits per cell are temporary fixes, but both have drawbacks. Continue Reading

NVMe compatibility is key when transitioning SAS and SATA SSDs

Getting ahead of the SSD interface performance curve requires foresight and careful planning. As NVMe technology evolves, new adopters are looking for ways to ease the changeover. Continue Reading

Pure Storage CEO Giancarlo races toward NVMe-oF, ponders HCI

The new Pure Storage CEO sees NVMe as the immediate future for flash storage; he's also considering hyper-convergence and 'looking at some things' on the M&A front. Continue Reading

Toshiba NVMe lineup adds new SSDs, software to pool drives

Toshiba bolsters NVMe support with new 2.5-inch U.2 and small-form-factor M.2 solid-state drives and KumoScale storage software to pool NVMe SSDs over a network fabric. Continue Reading

Symbolic IO becomes Formulus Black

Symbolic IO has changed its name as part of “complete rebranding” months after its founder was arrested on a domestic violence charge. Symbolic IO is now called Formulus Black. The company made no ... Continue Reading

Nimbus Data due to ship 100 TB SSD this summer

Nimbus Data claims the new ExaDrive DC100 will draw less power, improve endurance and provide balanced read and write performance compared with other enterprise SSDs. Continue Reading

Hybrid storage array vendors offer simplicity, ease of use

Although hybrid arrays are similar in functionality from one system to another, subtle differences in features can make one array more appropriate for a given application. Continue Reading

How to mitigate SSD vulnerabilities

SSDs could pose a security risk for organizations that aren't careful when they decommission drives. Learn what you need to know about keeping data stored on SSDs safe. Continue Reading

NVMe SSDs: Is there a need for all this speed?

Everything you should know to decide if nonvolatile memory express is right for your enterprise and, if it is, how to plan for the future of flash storage. Continue Reading

NVMe SSDs: Is there a need for all this speed?

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The future of flash storage: Is NVMe right for your enterprise?

Cracks in the SAS and SATA protocols started to appear with the rise of SSDs and the exponential performance improvements they delivered over HDD technology. This led to the development of the nonvolatile memory express protocol to exploit flash's potential. As the future of flash storage, NVMe addresses many of SAS and SATA's shortcomings by, among other things, connecting storage devices closer to the processor to reduce latency and introducing parallelism using multiple I/O queues and greater queue depth to match flash's ability to process many requests in parallel -- something SAS and SATA drives can't do. NVMe SSD adoption is leading to new storage architectures and helping give rise to disaggregated approaches to storage. NVMe-based devices come at a cost premium, however. Find out if and when you should move to NVMe and what the best use cases are for the future of flash storage and your enterprise.

Monetizing malware through ransomware has led to massive financial losses for companies worldwide. Ransomware is a megabillion-dollar industry and is becoming more sophisticated all the time. Although data backup restoration remains the best way to deal with a ransomware attack, it's no longer foolproof. It's time to rethink your organization's backup and restoration processes, acknowledge the hidden dangers of replication and revisit your permissions model to strengthen your defenses against the ransomware threat. Here's how.

Economic espionage, the theft of intellectual property and trade secrets, is another threat U.S. companies face. It can be rogue employees with access to company information doing the stealing, but most often, cybercriminals commit the crime. Effectively combatting economic espionage requires implementing a range of IT measures covered in this article.

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Tintri flash sales won't keep CEO Klein in job much longer

Popularity of Tintri E6000 flash storage helped the vendor beat quarterly revenue and earnings estimates on Monday, but muting the upbeat tone was news of layoffs and CEO Ken Klein’s decision to ... Continue Reading

Pure Storage revenue tops $1 billion, says ‘hello’ to profit

Pure Storage has joined the billion-dollar club. On Thursday, the all-flash provider completed two long-sought goals by posting fiscal-year revenue of $1.023 billion, up 41%, en route to achieving ... Continue Reading

NAND flash memory technologies evolve to support QLC

QLC NAND pushes the storage capacity of flash devices higher, but devices can wear out more quickly than other NAND types because more data can be written to the same cell. Continue Reading