Virtualization Strategy

Qumulo funding set for sales/marketing expansion

Qumulo closed a $30 million funding round today, which the scale-out NAS startup will likely use to hire more former Isilon employees. Qumulo is striving to replace Isilon as the scale-out NAS ... Continue Reading

2017 IT spending trends for data storage

For the 15^th year, Storage magazine has surveyed storage pros to learn about their IT spending trends for the coming months. As you'd expect, the cloud continues to pick up steam for both primary and secondary projects, while all-flash arrays and SSDs also rated highly. Hyper-converged interest, meanwhile, nearly doubled over 2016. See how your 2017 shopping list compares to today's IT spending trends.

When SSDs supplanted HDDs, it revealed many deficiencies in the traditional RAID array model. Storage vendors changed course, leading to the highly scalable, fast and reliable hyper-converged systems of today. Is it time to go all-in with hyper-convergence?

IT is rapidly evolving to keep pace with today's data-intensive business apps and trends, such as the internet of things. For storage, this means newer silicon tech, inherent analytics, embedding hybrid cloud tiering and (often) convergence with or hosting of core data processing directly, and new management techniques.

 Continue Reading

Scale-out software-defined storage market menaces traditional storage

Scale-out software-defined storage is on the rise to the detriment and decline of traditional storage products and arrays. Continue Reading

Dell EMC XtremIO adds speed to Red Sox IT lineup

A Dell EMC all-flash array knocks a home run for the Boston Red Sox organization, improving management and analytics of ever accumulating data, and speeding performance. Continue Reading

Smarter storage starts with analytics

Storage smartens up to keep pace with data-intensive business applications embedding operational analytics capabilities. Continue Reading

Purchase of NAS arrays driven by need for capacity, desire to expand

As unstructured data continues to lead storage growth, businesses are opting for scale-out NAS arrays to handle current and future capacity. Continue Reading

Flash, cloud top data storage options for storage pros

Cloud is popular among data storage priorities for primary and backup storage, while most say they will use flash in primary data storage. Continue Reading

Essential elements of copy data management

The next chapter written in the book of computer science should be all about management of copy data, the core function of IT. Continue Reading

Secondary data storage takes center stage

Once considered a necessary evil, secondary storage systems are now providing much more than just backup protection. Continue Reading

Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.2 boosts performance, containers

Red Hat's latest Gluster storage update improves performance, deepens container support and introduces space-saving alternative to three-way replication to ensure data integrity. Continue Reading

Flash, cloud top data storage options for storage pros

 Continue Reading

Smarter storage starts with analytics

 Continue Reading

Secondary data storage takes center stage

 Continue Reading

Scale-out software-defined storage market menaces traditional storage

 Continue Reading

Essential elements of copy data management

 Continue Reading

Purchase of NAS arrays driven by need for capacity, desire to expand

 Continue Reading

Scality object storage rings Cisco as hardware partner

Customers can get Scality software for object storage on Cisco Unified Computing System hardware. Raw capacity tops 3 PB per six-node chassis, with Cisco sales and support. Continue Reading

Oracle cloud storage embraces ZFS Storage Appliance

New Oracle operating system update enables ZFS Storage Appliance to transfer file- and block-based data to Oracle Storage Cloud without an external cloud gateway. Continue Reading

ZeroStack gives Intelligent Cloud Platform Nimble back-end

ZeroStack's "private cloud in a box" software is now available on Nimble Storage boxes. The vendors this week launched a joint partnership to sell ZeroStack Intelligent Cloud Platform software on ... Continue Reading

Entry-level Brocade FC switch enables NVMe flash fabric

New Brocade SAN switch turns Fibre Channel into NVMe fabric for all-flash storage. The G610 device is targeted at converged infrastructure, small SANs and rack-based flash servers. Continue Reading

Ctera Networks prepares for rise of multicloud adoption

Ctera forges partnerships with HPE and IBM to expand its data center reach; CEO says enterprise customers will focus on security and multicloud strategies in 2017. Continue Reading

GDPR compliance grips U.S. firms, too

U.S. organizations are taking General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance at least as seriously as their European Union counterparts, according to a recent survey commissioned by Veritas ... Continue Reading

New Drobo NAS eyes home business, department workgroups

Low-end NAS specialist Drobo is pushing further down market, launching a performance-oriented hybrid NAS aimed at small businesses and distributed collaboration. The five-bay 5N2 Drobo NAS is a ... Continue Reading

Reduxio Systems snares venture funds, moves closer to IPO

Storage startup Reduxio Systems has bulked up its venture capital, a stepping stone to a potential IPO. On Monday, the hybrid flash vendor nabbed $22.5 million in Series C financing from private ... Continue Reading

Avere Cloud NAS receives Google funding injection

Google is throwing its investment weight behind the Avere Cloud NAS technology. Google joined Avere Systems' $14 million Series E funding round that closed today, highlighting the importance of ... Continue Reading

Intel Optane SSD starts shipping to select customers

New Intel Optane SSDs based on long-awaited 3D XPoint technology ship to early customers, promising up to eight times the performance over NAND flash-based NVMe PCIe SSDs. Continue Reading

IBM Cloud Object Storage gains cold vault tier

IBM enhances its cloud object storage based on Cleversafe technology with flexible pricing and a long-term, three-tiered cold vault object store for inactive data. Continue Reading

Tegile Systems sees opportunities in NVMe, HPE-Nimble buy

The Tegile CEO talks about how the all-flash market is shaping up with the advent of NVM express, and how his company is battling against the major data storage vendors. Continue Reading

HPE 3PAR all-flash target allows persistent containers

HPE 3PAR flash container reference architecture bundles Mesosphere orchestration software with ProLiant blades, 10 GB SAN FlexFabric and StoreServ 8200 arrays. Continue Reading

Five factors to consider before buying all-flash storage arrays

Before purchasing all-flash array storage, you should determine whether your site plans to integrate AFA storage into its existing infrastructure or to start a new storage silo. Continue Reading

Bumpy ride predicted as HPE storage absorbs Nimble SANs

Merging the Nimble Storage product line with HPE gear and engineering teams creates overlap and competition for its R&D budget. Other storage startups see an opening. Continue Reading

Pure Storage flash array fuels Lifescript's DevOps strategy, CDM

Women's health website Lifescript 'transformed into a DevOps shop after implementing Pure Storage all-flash arrays from and Actifio copy data management.. Continue Reading

Zerto software makes gains in busy disaster recovery market

The year 2016 was a wild and crazy one for business disasters. An increase in ransomware attacks and IT outages such as Delta's constantly made headlines. These high-profile issues drove the need ... Continue Reading

Pure Storage backup data replicates to Cohesity disk

All-flash vendor Pure Storage is teaming with converged data protection startup Cohesity to enable tiered storage of array-based snapshots. Customers can replicate primary storage snapshots between ... Continue Reading

Enterprise HDDs launch from Seagate, Toshiba

Flash may dominate the storage headlines, but there are still signs of life with HDDs. Seagate showed off 12 TB helium-based enterprise HDDs at last week's Open Compute Project Summit in Santa ... Continue Reading

Startup Excelero shares server-based NVMe flash

Excelero's NVMesh Server SAN is generally available after two years of proofs of concept by hyperscale data centers. The product builds SAN capacity from server-based NVMe flash. Continue Reading

Veritas Enterprise Vault, backup apps embrace Google cloud

Veritas Technologies has been busy cozying up to public cloud providers in 2017, adding an extended partnership with Google to the list this week. The partnership includes Veritas NetBackup and ... Continue Reading

DSSD D5 flash appliance sales cease, Dell EMC says

The DSSD D5 for PowerEdge servers from Dell EMC was the first product from the merged vendors. DSSD instead will be used to accelerate existing and new all-flash systems. Continue Reading

Building a business case for all-flash array storage

To make a business case for purchasing AFA storage, you must first understand what your applications need in terms of IOPS, latency and throughput. Continue Reading

Primary Data DataSphere update improves scalability

Primary Data updates its DataSphere metadata engine to boost scalability and performance, support more hardware options, and connect to multiple Amazon S3-based cloud buckets. Continue Reading

HPE acquisition of Nimble gives it another SAN platform

Surprising HPE acquisition snares hybrid flash vendor Nimble Storage for proposed $1.2 billion. HPE picks up Nimble arrays and vaunts InfoSight storage analytics and monitoring. Continue Reading

HPE’s Nimble Storage acquisition expands its struggling portfolio

Hewlett Packard Enterprise today made its second major storage acquisition of 2017, spending $1.2 billion on all-flash and hybrid array vendor Nimble Storage. The Nimble Storage acquisition comes ... Continue Reading

SwiftStack object storage gets two-way Cloud Sync

SwiftStack 5 object storage software upgrade enables two-way data synchronization between on-site private cloud storage and public cloud storage from Google and Amazon. Continue Reading

Riverbed SteelFusion edge devices embrace NFS

Riverbed adds NAS support to SteelFusion to broaden the reach of the remote office storage appliance, which already supports SAN and object storage. Continue Reading

Nutanix revenue still growing for now

In its early days, Nutanix's biggest challenge was convincing people that hyper-converged appliances were a better fit for their organizations than traditional server/storage systems. Now that ... Continue Reading

The state of flash storage performance

All-flash arrays have virtually eliminated flash storage performance issues, for now. But applications and user expectations will eventually catch up. Innovations in flash technology -- such as nonvolatile memory express and storage-class memory (flash DIMM) -- promise to keep solid-state storage ahead of the curve, however. We discuss these technologies and more as we explore the current and future states of flash storage performance.

DevOps allows developers to rapidly create, develop, amend and deploy applications using Agile methodologies. DevOps resources, including storage, are consumed differently, though, taking more of a cloud-like approach.

Security and compliance concerns are big obstacles to public cloud storage adoption. Reliability, data movement and poor application performance, frequently from irregular spikes in network latency, are other important caveats. We provide tips on how to overcome these and other issues.

 Continue Reading

A cure for secondary data storage services blues

Effective user-centric data storage management eases copy data management and object storage uptake while enabling secondary storage services to evolve. Continue Reading

Infrastructure provisioning made easier with hybrid cloud storage

Storage provisioning delays slow down IT initiatives and negatively impact both revenue and the bottom line, which make hybrid clouds a realistic and attractive option. Continue Reading

Overcome problems with public cloud storage providers

Security and compliance concerns are chief obstacles to public cloud storage adoption, as IT managers are hesitant to have their critical data reside outside the data center. Continue Reading

Storage plays catch-up with DevOps environment

To deliver an Agile or DevOps environment, the way in which resources, including storage, are consumed and deployed changes to a more cloud-focused approach. Continue Reading

SAN arrays maintain primary data storage dominance, for now

Solid-state flash is the most sought-after technology for primary storage, as storage area networks remain the main focus of increasing capacity for most enterprises. Continue Reading

The state of flash storage systems

Making flash storage performance even faster has little to do with the media itself and more to do with the storage infrastructure that surrounds it. Continue Reading

Cisco HyperFlex systems snap with Veeam

Virtual backup specialist Veeam Software is treating hyper-converged Cisco HyperFlex systems the same way it treats storage arrays when it comes to snapshots. Veeam's direct snapshots will work ... Continue Reading

Data storage infrastructure starts with science-fiction inspiration

Find out what happens when you take a cue from an old science-fiction movie and build an 'interocitor' that becomes its own storage infrastructure. Continue Reading

Classification of data can solve your data storage problems

Having a data classification process in place can make your data smart enough to know what to do with itself, allowing you to attain the holy grail of enterprise data storage. Continue Reading

The state of flash storage systems

 Continue Reading

Storage plays catch-up with DevOps environment

 Continue Reading

Infrastructure provisioning made easier with hybrid cloud storage

 Continue Reading

SAN arrays maintain primary data storage dominance, for now

 Continue Reading

Overcome problems with public cloud storage providers

 Continue Reading

A cure for secondary data storage services blues

 Continue Reading

Classification of data can solve your data storage problems

 Continue Reading

Data storage infrastructure starts with science-fiction inspiration

 Continue Reading

Startup Hedvig secures $21.5 million funding round

Software-defined storage startup Hedvig Inc. secured another $21.5 million in funding to create new bundled hardware and software component options, expand into the Asia-Pacific region, and add ... Continue Reading

Tintri storage strategy shoots straight at public cloud

Tintri's storage is evolving to help customers utilize cloud-based services. Tintri added synchronous replication to its VM-aware VMstore arrays and plans to integrate AWS support. Continue Reading

Pure Storage revenue results rosy, guidance thorny

Pure Storage revealed two surprises during its fourth quarter earnings call. One the plus side, the all-flash vendor exceeded its forecast and expectations for revenue during the quarter and all of ... Continue Reading

IBM happy to stay out of hyper-converged infrastructure market

"You can be a purist and say what we do is converged, not hyper-converged, but it’s about the job you’re trying to do. The two worlds are blending together," Walsh said.. Continue Reading

IBM flash storage key to turnaround, says GM Walsh

Ed Walsh takes over as general manager of IBM storage to reignite sales. He says customers 'challenged by disruption' turn to flash storage to modernize IT. Continue Reading

HPE storage sales slipped sharply in late 2016

Storage is among the casualties of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's struggles following the break-up of Hewlett-Packard. The vendor reported HPE storage revenue declined 12% year-over-year to $730 ... Continue Reading

Nexsan Unity adds compliance archive appliance

Nexsan Unity arrays integrate optional secure compliance archive for petabytes of unstructured data. Data files written to primary storage are immediately copied to the archive. Continue Reading

NAND flash shortage has SSD supply, pricing impact

Flash shortage could slow price declines and constrain SSD supplies through the end of 2017 as manufacturers make difficult transition from 2D/Planar to 3D NAND technology. Continue Reading

AFA storage has total cost of ownership advantages over HDDs

All-flash array storage TCO advantages, including reduced power and cooling and increased performance, can help an organization justify its use to store their active workloads. Continue Reading

AFA storage advances may mean the end of the hybrid market

Flash price drops and speed boosts make the all-flash array the smart choice over hybrid storage arrays for most enterprise users, not just those with high-performance computing needs. Continue Reading

Cloudian, Panzura expand cloud data archiving options

Cloudian and Panzura have come up with new cloud data archiving products to help organizations move on-premises data to the cloud. Cloudian's new HyperStore 4000 is a 7U scale-out object storage ... Continue Reading

NetApp hyper-converged entry: Better late than early?

NetApp is entering the hyper-convergence arena with the latecomer's cry: We may be last into the market, but we'll be the best. Emboldened by the recent strong revenue growth of its late-to-market ... Continue Reading

Storage Spaces Direct a key option in Windows Server 2016 features

Windows Server 2016 includes new and updated capabilities with Storage Spaces, Storage Replica, Storage Quality of Service, data deduplication and Resilient File System. Continue Reading

Dell EMC VxRail hitches ride on Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

Dell EMC’s VxRail turned one today, and the vendor marked the anniversary by adding the hyper-converged platform to its Enterprise Hybrid Cloud package. Dell EMC claims over 1,000 customers for ... Continue Reading

Caringo FileFly cleans data off Windows Storage Servers

Caringo FileFly powers Secondary Storage Platform that works with Microsoft DFSR and ReFS to offload passive, unstructured data from a Windows storage server. Continue Reading

The data storage industry will turn upside down in 2017, or will it?

Rich Castagna reviews the prognostications offered by data storage vendors on the future of data storage technology in 2017. Continue Reading

Announcing the best data storage products of 2016!

This year marks the 15^th edition of the Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com Products of the Year awards, recognizing the best storage products of the past year. Nominated products competed across six categories, with the top in each category receiving bronze, silver or gold. Judges graded finalists on innovation, performance, manageability, ease of integration and use, functionality and value.

Modern storage arrays may offer previously unheard of max capacities, but that doesn't mean you won't have problems meeting today's ever-increasing storage capacity and performance requirements. We explore how to squeeze more bits and bytes out of storage systems without negatively affecting storage network performance through best practices for evaluation and configuration as well as tools to help with monitoring and management.

 Continue Reading

Hyper-convergence: It's for more than primary data storage

The lines between primary and secondary storage and applications such as hyper-convergence remain blurry. But they are a starting point for further discussion. Continue Reading

The data storage capacity growth survival guide

You can keep your storage investments in place, allow for capacity increases, and solve performance and application problems, while gathering data to plan for new growth. Continue Reading

Businesses use enterprise file sync-and-share market to collaborate

Enterprise file sync and share solves numerous business problems by offering organizations a way to provide more secure document sharing and collaboration. Continue Reading

'Holistic' data protection tools, a marketing meme on the rise

Though vendors are calling their data protection products 'holistic,' they should blend security and disaster recovery services to improve their functionality. Continue Reading

Businesses use enterprise file sync-and-share market to collaborate

 Continue Reading

The data storage capacity growth survival guide

 Continue Reading

The data storage industry will turn upside down in 2017, or will it?

 Continue Reading

Hyper-convergence: It's for more than primary data storage

 Continue Reading

Tegile Systems IntelliFlash HD

Tegile Systems IntelliFlash HD intended to appeal to medium and large enterprises looking to consolidate multiple workloads on a single all-flash array. Continue Reading

Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays (AF-Series)

Nimble's first all-flash array family scales from 20 TB to petabyte and 8.2 PB of usable storage and 1.2 million IOPS per four-node cluster. Continue Reading

Hitachi Data Systems Virtual Storage Platform VSP F800

Modular rack-mounted Hitachi Data Systems VSP F800 runs the vendor's SVOS operating system software and is equipped with custom-designed flash storage modules. Continue Reading

Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe

The VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe stops companies from needing to send captured packet data back to vendors and wait for the analysis to identify performance problems. Continue Reading

Data Dynamics Inc. StorageX 7.8

Data Dynamics upgrades StorageX with new data protection features and functions, and makes it so users can customize their own data mobility policies with a REST API and SDK. Continue Reading

Zadara Storage Cloud

Zadara Storage Cloud provides block, file and object storage-as-a-service either on-premises hardware managed by Zadara, in the cloud, or both. Continue Reading

Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash Arrays (CS-Series)

Nimble Storage jumped on the all-flash bandwagon in 2016, but didn't forget its disk fans by upgrading its CS-Series mixing flash and hard disk drives. Continue Reading

Avere Systems Cloud-Core NAS (C2N)

Building on its NAS Edge filer technology, Avere rolled out Cloud-Core NAS (C2N) product, which puts file and object storage in one system that spans on-premises and the cloud. Continue Reading

Best data storage products 2016: Products of the Year

Learn more about the best data storage products for 2016 in backup/DR software, backup hardware, storage and SAN management, server-based storage, and all-flash and disk/hybrid. Continue Reading

Qumulo QC update adds flexible file quotas, PB array

Qumulo NAS upgrade allows data to move between quota domains without rewriting the file system. QC360 hardware is a petabyte-scale addition to its QC-Series hybrid disk lineup. Continue Reading

Microsoft Office 365 backup included in Acronis Backup 12 update

Acronis has added cloud-to-cloud backup for Microsoft Office 365 in the latest version of Acronis Backup. Acronis Backup 12 protects Microsoft Office 365 and 15 other platforms, all under one ... Continue Reading

Kaminario K2 array boosts performance, capacity

New Kaminario all-flash array features higher performance and capacity, improves data reduction guarantee to 4:1 and offers faster storage networking options. Continue Reading