Primary storage devices

Why storage tiering is necessary now more than ever

Tiered storage is making a comeback by incorporating AI machine learning to take advantage of the cost and performance benefits of new SSD and storage class memory technologies. Continue Reading

What is Kubernetes CSI and how is it being used?

A recently released CSI-compliant plugin from Kubernetes could help simplify the process of connecting containerized workloads with storage systems. Continue Reading

Managing NetApp CIFS shares with PowerShell

NetApp provides a feature-rich PowerShell module to manage CIFS shares. Find out how it works, as well as how to set up a new share and establish permissions. Continue Reading

Infinidat storage fabric sews disk arrays to hybrid cloud

Infinidat hasn't followed the storage array crowd into all-flash storage, but it is following the trends of adding flexible consumption pricing and storage analytics. Continue Reading

Test yourself on Fibre Channel basics and the latest updates

Are you up to speed on Fibre Channel? Take our quiz to find out if you know how the storage networking technology works and the latest updates. Continue Reading

How EHT's black hole image data is stored and protected

The Event Horizon Telescope team had to find a way to capture, store, process and back up petabytes of radio signal data to create the world's first black hole image. Continue Reading

Cisco, Dell Technologies renew VxBlock dalliance

Cisco and Dell Technologies may be rivals in the server business, but when it comes to converged infrastructure, the two vendors remain strong partners. Cisco, EMC and VMware in 2009 formed VCE, a ... Continue Reading

Qumulo storage IPO possible, CEO says

Qumulo's scale-out storage is available as branded NAS appliances and as a software-only license. An integrated NAS fabric replicates data from local arrays to the public cloud. Continue Reading

Key QLC NAND challenges in the enterprise and how to tackle them

Limited durability and degrading performance are issues with QLC NAND. These challenges limit where the technology can be used, making it best for read-intensive workloads. Continue Reading

2 storage tiering strategies for modern media

Storage tiering makes a comeback as businesses aim to get the most out of their storage systems. Discover the rules for optimizing both intrasystem and intersystem tiering. Continue Reading

Pure Storage buys Compuverde, expands file storage

Pure Storage's second acquisition builds on its unstructured data focus, as Compuverde's file system software runs in virtual NAS or hyper-converged modes. Continue Reading

NAS vendor RackTop Systems gets first funding haul

RackTop Systems has racked up its first round of outside capital, six years after launching its “cyber-converged" BrickStor NAS appliances. The Fulton, Md.-based vendor received $15 million in a ... Continue Reading

At Dell Technologies World, Dell will put its stamp on EMC

Dell EMC storage has taken on more of a 'Dell' feel over the past year, thanks in part to reliance on PowerEdge Servers and spinning out Pivotal Software into a public company. Continue Reading

Infinidat InfiniBox preps SMB protocol nodes for Windows

All-flash arrays command most of the attention, but Infinidat claims its InfiniBox arrays deliver the performance of flash on commodity-priced spinning disk. Continue Reading

Lenovo TruScale adds twist to cloud infrastructure on demand

With TruScale Infrastructure Services, Lenovo tries to catch up with Cisco, Dell and HPE, customizing TruScale to a customer's workload and helping customers avoid capital expenditures. Continue Reading

New Dell EMC all-flash Isilon hardware compresses NAS data

Dell EMC Isilon F810 all-flash NAS array and ClarityNow software tackle unstructured file data through increased performance and data reduction over previous versions. Continue Reading

The best enterprise storage products of 2018

Get to know the 15 top enterprise storage products selected from a field of more than 100 in the 'Storage' magazine and SearchStorage annual Products of the Year competition. Continue Reading

Dell EMC PowerMax

Formerly VMAX, PowerMax flash from Dell EMC is rated to deliver 10 million IOPS. All-flash PowerMax maintains the VMAX multicontroller, but replaces SAS SSDs with NVMe. Continue Reading

Best data storage products 2018: Products of the Year

For the 17th straight year, 'Storage' magazine and SearchStorage award gold, silver and bronze to the best storage hardware and software products and services of the year. Continue Reading

IBM storage revenues skid to the finish line

IBM storage hit another blue period last quarter. After pulling out of a revenue slump to start 2018, IBM last week closed an uneven year with declining sales of storage hardware, mirroring flat ... Continue Reading

University of Utah prescribes Hitachi storage for data woes

University of Utah Health extends its Hitachi Vantara storage implementation, adding the Hitachi Content Platform object storage to modernize its data center. Continue Reading

Toshiba set to launch 16 TB HDD for cloud-scale users

Toshiba will try to get a jump on rivals Seagate and Western Digital with a new 16 TB hard disk drive that targets cloud-scale users in need of low-cost, high-density storage. Continue Reading

The top 5 data storage questions we answered in 2018

As storage continues to evolve, many readers still are curious about the basics. In 2018, common data storage concerns included RAID, capacity and different storage architectures. Continue Reading

See how file system structure can drag down NVMe performance

Find out what matters when it comes to file system design and how to prevent file systems from becoming bottlenecks to achieving optimal performance in NVMe-based storage systems. Continue Reading

Hitachi Pentaho integration aims to subdue unstructured data

Hitachi Pentaho data integration presents Hitachi Content Platform as an object-based data lake to send cleansed data to multiple cloud targets. Continue Reading

Broadcom Brocade launches 2 new SAN management products

Broadcom releases new Brocade SAN management software to help users visualize and optimize storage and a new Fibre Channel extension switch to speed long-distance replication. Continue Reading

Data storage industry trends revealed in top 2018 news stories

AI, NVMe over fabrics and the cloud were must-read data storage stories in 2018, as were Tintri's struggles and Dell EMC's product moves. See the news that mattered as the year closes. Continue Reading

Broadcom Emulex flashes Gen 7 Fibre Channel adapter for NVMe

Broadcom releases new Emulex Gen 7 Fibre Channel host bus adapter designed for high-performance NVMe-based flash storage systems with support for 32GFC and 64GFC and PCIe 4.0. Continue Reading

Lagging Dell EMC midrange storage dampens upbeat earnings

Dell EMC on Thursday reported nearly $4 billion in storage revenue in its most recent quarter, marking its third consecutive positive earnings in storage. But executives refrained from sharing ... Continue Reading

When traditional data center technology trumps hyper-converged

Committing to a conventional data center rather than a hyper-converged approach is sometimes the smarter move. We take a look at some reasons to steer clear of HCI. Continue Reading

Newisys no longer, OEM wants to be a Viking in storage

Sanmina Corp. subsidiary Newisys recently plunged into enterprise storage with an NVMe all-flash system. In a bid to extend its presence in storage, Newisys is now called Viking Enterprise ... Continue Reading

Panasas ActiveStor chases Lustre users with portable PanFS

With ActiveStor Ultra, Panasas ports its PanFS parallel file systems to Linux. The vendor's plans include OEM server deals to sell PanFS on commodity gear for HPC customers. Continue Reading

Predictive storage analytics can watch your storage for you

Don't ask if your next storage array or software will have predictive analytics. Ask what those analytics can do for your specific systems and applications. Continue Reading

Predictive storage analytics can watch your storage for you

 Continue Reading

Why more enterprises choose to park information on cloud platforms

 Continue Reading

Quantum CEO ready to acquire to expand StorNext

Jamie Lerner’s first 90 days as Quantum CEO confirmed the idea he had about the company when he took over. Discussions with customers convinced Lerner that Quantum’s greatest strength and greatest ... Continue Reading

DNA data storage developments demonstrate serious potential

As futuristic as it may sound, writing to DNA-based data storage is well on its way to becoming a possibility. Mainstream use may be a ways away, but development has been steady. Continue Reading

Removable storage devices: Why are companies banning them?

IBM banned removable storage devices to encourage employees to use the company's internal file-sharing system. Learn how a ban like this can improve enterprise security. 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

IT migration success hinges on minimizing downtime

Data, software and hardware migration projects should, but don't always, fully exploit the features and settings of the new environment and minimize application downtime. Continue Reading

5 tips for making flash-based SSDs work with unstructured data

Using flash storage effectively for unstructured data requires upfront analysis of cost, capacity and performance, as well as continued tracking of a rapidly changing flash market. Continue Reading

NetApp Kubernetes Service launched to orchestrate containers

NetApp launched its Data Fabric architecture to adapt its storage to manage applications built for the cloud. Container orchestration had largely been a missing aspect in Data Fabric, but the ... Continue Reading

Storage Product of the Year nominations closing soon

I can’t tell you exactly how many storage products have launched in the past year, but I know it was in the hundreds. I can tell you it was more than I can count. That’s because hardly a day goes ... Continue Reading

Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 launched for entry-level SAN

While the industry watches its midrange lines, Dell EMC pushes out a new array of entry-level, flashy PowerVault systems for smaller organizations and branch offices. Continue Reading

New enterprise 14 TB HDD options cater to cloud-scale users

Enterprise-class 14 TB HDDs from Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital target cloud-scale users in need of economical, high-density storage to cope with exponential data growth. Continue Reading

Dell EMC midrange convergence due in 2019

The long-awaited convergence of the Dell EMC midrange storage into one platform will happen in 2019, according to Dell Technologies’ chief storage honcho. Jeff Clarke, VP chairman of products and ... Continue Reading

Panasas storage roadmap includes route to software-defined

Panasas network-attached storage targets enterprises with large file workloads distributed across many users. ActiveStor hybrid arrays run the PanFS parallel file system. Continue Reading

Why upgrading to a Gen 6 Fibre Channel network is a good idea

Upgrading to a next-gen Fibre Channel network provides the added performance needed to meet the demands of evolving technologies and workloads, along with other benefits. Continue Reading

Are flash workloads suited to handling unstructured data?

The storage of unstructured data is a hurdle for many organizations. Object storage keeps it organized but lacks speed thanks to hard disks. Luckily, a better way is on the rise. 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

Drobo, Nexsan HDD arrays merged in new holding company

If you’re a struggling niche disk array vendor, what's the next step you take to survive? You combine your HDD arrays with another disk vendor in the same boat. That's what low-end NAS vendor Drobo ... 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

Dell EMC Isilon, ECS gain ClarityNow for unstructured data

Dell EMC on Thursday picked up file software to help project teams access, control and manage unstructured data on heterogeneous storage. The deal for Agoura Hills, Calif.-based DataFrameworks is ... Continue Reading

Understanding data storage and its import eludes younger IT folks

 Continue Reading

Understanding data storage and its import eludes younger IT folks

Jon Toigo has a lot to say about the consistent disparagement and disregard many young people in the IT industry show toward data storage technology and management. 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

Storage networking technologies explained

Make sure you know the differences among network fabrics, such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand, before making decisions about your storage network infrastructure. Continue Reading

PATA and SATA: The evolution of disk standards

Disk standards have evolved over time, and while PATA and IDE may have reliability on their side, growing support and advancements for SATA may make it the preferred 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

Repurpose legacy storage systems for reliability and savings

Planning to move to a new data storage platform? Before kicking your older legacy storage hardware to the curb, consider the benefits of repurposing your existing technologies. 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

Storage Spaces Direct requirements you need to know about

Microsoft's architecture uses commodity hardware to create highly available, software-defined storage. But success depends on following the vendor's rules and recommendations. 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

New HPE SAN switch is based on Cisco Gen 6 FC technology

It may not set off fireworks, but Hewlett Packard Enterprise heads into the July 4 break with a finalized portfolio of Cisco-based StoreFabric Fibre Channel switching gear for its all-flash arrays. ... Continue Reading

Dell and VMware hammer out deal, but no reverse merger

Dell and VMware have taken a step – maybe only the first step – on a journey to fund Michael Dell’s on-again, off-again love affair with going public. Dell Technologies, parent company of storage ... Continue Reading

Qumulo storage parts the clouds with its K-Series active archive

Qumulo introduces the K-144T archive appliance to complement its scale-out NAS systems. The K-Series starts with six nodes, and customers can scale storage in 144 TB increments. Continue Reading

Molecular memory could boost HDD density

Researchers working with molecular storage have discovered a way to create smaller hard drives with more density. But don't expect to see the technology on the market anytime soon. Continue Reading

Qumulo files away $93 million for QF2 expansion

Qumulo closed a $93 million funding round today, giving the scale-out file storage vendor “fuel” to compete with the established players in a rapidly expanding market. BlackRock Private Equity ... Continue Reading

HPE adds bulk to M-series Ethernet SAN switching

Hewlett Packard Enterprise expanded its M-series Ethernet storage switching with a smaller switch and orchestration software designed to improve management features for iSCSI SANs. HPE first  ... Continue Reading

Dell EMC storage finally gains some post-merger market share

Dell Technologies on Monday projected positive share growth in enterprise storage, the first quarter that has happened since the Dell and EMC merger closed in 2016. The next question is whether the ... Continue Reading

MAMR hard drives could shake up the storage industry

Microwave-assisted magnetic recording technology may be the next breakthrough HDD technology, promising lower cost and higher reliability than heat-assisted magnetic recording drives. 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

Server maker IXsystems sets sail with new TrueNAS flagship

The vendor claims shipments of its storage systems recently surpassed an exabyte of combined capacity. TrueNAS M-Series is a new high-end system with DRAM, NVDIMM and NVMe. Continue Reading

Hitachi VSP boosts performance and analytics

Hitachi Vantara outfits new Virtual Storage Platform models with more and faster processors and memory, adds midrange arrays, but makes no NVMe promises yet. Continue Reading

All-flash and hybrid HPE Nimble Storage arrays get updates

HPE enhances its Nimble all-flash arrays with support for NVMe and storage-class memory. Additionally, the vendor collapses its hybrid systems into one product line featuring deduplication. 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

Dell EMC storage strategy talk buzzes Dell Tech World

Dell EMC World is no more. The combined vendor has renamed its annual user summit Dell Tech World, where data storage product upgrades will touch flash, HCI and software-defined. Continue Reading

Storage sales make IBM blue

After four straight quarters of growth, IBM storage hardware revenue crashed in the first quarter of 2018. IBM reported a 15% decline in storage hardware revenue, a drop that dragged the entire ... Continue Reading

Qumulo P-Series packs NVMe into scale-out NAS

Qumulo goes after organizations with large, unstructured data stores that have a new need for speed with its all-flash NVMe P-Series scale-out NAS, which holds up to 24 NVMe SSD drives in a node. Continue Reading

Latest data storage technology takes application-centric approach

 Continue Reading

SAN purchase and deployment criteria by the numbers

 Continue Reading

Learn storage techniques for managing unstructured data use

 Continue Reading

Seven ways to unlock the power of all types of unstructured data

New storage services have emerged to help IT pros maintain and deliver access to ever-larger and more valuable data sets, particularly all types of unstructured data. These include data sets for big data analysis, DevOps, storage self-service and cost-control purposes, among other things. This data explosion is the result of several trends, including growth of files and file systems, machine-generated data streams, web-scale application exhaust, endless file versioning, finer-grained backups and rollback snapshots. If you're architecting a new approach to storage and dealing with various types of unstructured data storage at a global enterprise scale, we have seven advanced storage capabilities you should consider.

The on-demand nature of the cloud has not only changed the way enterprises consume and pay for IT resources, it has profoundly altered our understanding and expectations of IT services and infrastructure in general. More enterprises expect to obtain the features they want when they want them and to pay for those features only when and if they need them. This has been acutely felt by vendors and consumers alike in the fragmented and dynamic storage market. It has altered how storage providers deliver expected core features, such as deduplication, replication, compression and encryption, and has led to the development of niche products that meet application-specific needs and use cases. This issue clarifies the new and evolving data storage landscape to help you buy and deploy the right storage products with the features you require and more easily acquire the products you may need in the future.

 Continue Reading

Latest data storage technology takes application-centric approach

These data storage strategies support the use cases customers want without breaking the bank or forcing them to buy technology they don't really need. Continue Reading

SAN purchase and deployment criteria by the numbers

Capacity and application needs drive businesses to deploy new storage area network systems, while criteria such as number of LUNs and multipathing are key to purchasing decisions. Continue Reading

Learn storage techniques for managing unstructured data use

Rearchitect storage to maximize unstructured data use at the global scale for larger data sets coming from big data analytics and other applications. Continue Reading

Upgraded Infinidat InfiniBox hoists sail on product launch

Infinidat disk arrays double capacity to 8 petabytes per rack. The new InfiniBox products include InfiniSync DR box, InfiniGuard backup appliance and the Infinidat-hosted Neutrix Cloud. Continue Reading

Dell data storage remains the weak link in FY18 revenue

Finding a way to grow enterprise storage and data protection will comprise a major focus for Dell Technologies this year, company executives told analysts during an earnings call on Wednesday. Dell ... Continue Reading

Primary storage optimization overcomes a range of challenges

Enterprises turn to different products, technologies and tools to optimize primary storage, overcome data storage challenges and make networked storage deployments more efficient. Continue Reading

Nexsan arrays 'ARM' national lab with redundant disk storage

Nexsan Unity disk arrays are based on a dual-controller NST platform. Argonne National Lab uses the storage for continuous operations in inhospitable environments. Continue Reading

Primary storage optimization overcomes a range of challenges

 Continue Reading

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.

 Continue Reading

WekaIO CEO says focus will stay on AI, life sciences

WekaIO CEO Liran Zvibel sees partnerships with HPE, Mellanox and AWS as key for the startup, as it pursues growth opportunities in artificial intelligence and life sciences. Continue Reading

More Nimble, HPE storage revenue jumps 24%

Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage sales rebounded last quarter, thanks to the addition of Nimble Storage and an improvement of the 3PAR SAN platform. HPE storage revenue of $948 million grew 24% ... Continue Reading

RackTop Systems, Seagate launch secure NAS

RackTop Secure Data Protection Platform transfers data to cloud or other storage systems. It is intended for enterprises with compliance requirements. Continue Reading

Best data storage products 2017: Products of the Year

Storage magazine names winners of 2017 Products of the Year awards for best storage products in backup and DR, software-defined storage, storage arrays and management tools. Continue Reading

Infinidat InfiniBox 3.0

InfiniBox 3.0 stores data on disk, deploying a small amount of flash as an acceleration tier. Its caching algorithm ensures the hottest data is on the fastest storage media. Continue Reading

Pure FlashBlade

Pure Storage FlashBlade is optimized for unstructured data analytics. Its system-on-a-chip architecture uses custom NAND flash blades to accelerate data and its metadata. Continue Reading

Datrium DVX 3.0

Datrium impresses judges and wins top honors with its DVX storage architecture, designed to sidestep latency and deliver performance and speed at scale. Continue Reading