Storage News » Other

Battle over ZFS heats up

vink — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:36:29 +0000

NetApp has asked one of their competitors, Coraid, to halt the sales of their EtherDrive Z-Series NAS appliances. The reason? Coraid is using the ZFS file system. Coraid has sent a letter to their customers announcing a temporary sales stop. The Z-Series NAS was announced in May, so NetApp didn’t waste any time [...] Related posts:

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EMC reminds us not to rely too much on cloud services yet

vink — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:25:12 +0000

Cloud storage might be a good idea for some use cases, but that doesn’t mean any service provider is a good choice. EMC announced last week that its Atmos Online service was no longer offering any SLA’s and is no longer supported for production usage:

We will no longer be offering paid subscription [...] Related posts:

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Toshiba and University of Tokio improve SSD write speeds

vink — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 19:22:53 +0000

Toshiba and the University of Tokio have presented an interesting technique for improving the write speed of Solid State Drives at last weeks VLSI symposium. The technique is targeted at three-dimensional NAND flash stacks; a method of stacking more NAND flash chips on top of each other to improve storage density and bring [...] Related posts:

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Nasuni announces $5000 cloud security challenge

vink — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:27:17 +0000

Nasuni, the company offering a cloud storage gateway that I wrote about earlier this year, has announced a challenge: if you can reveal the contents of a file stored via a Nasuni Filer, you can win $5,000. The contest runs for 30 days, so if you’d like to take part you better hurry. [...] Related posts:

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Toshiba doubles NAND flash module size to 128GB

vink — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 19:17:04 +0000

Less than a year after announcing their 64GB NAND flash modules, Toshiba has already provided a shipping date for even bigger 128GB chips. They have done so by switching from 32 to 64 Gbit NAND chips, built on their 32nm process.

The new 128GB device integrated 16 64Gbit NAND chips and a [...] Related posts:

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Macronix presents new 3D NAND Flash developments

vink — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:57:47 +0000

Macronix International has been doing research on new ways of stacking NAND flach memory in more efficient manners than currently possible, by using a 3D structure instead of the current practice of just stacking flash chips on top of each other (2D stacking).

Their most recent findings have been presented in two [...] Related posts:

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100 Gbps networks getting closer

vink — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:26:49 +0000

Alcatel-Lucent and T-Systems, the corporate customer arm of Deutsche Telecom, have succesfully connected two university networks using a 100 Gbps link, running over a distance of 60 km.

The link was achieved using just a single wavelength, which is an industry first. Previously links of over 100 Gbps have required trunking multiple [...] Related posts:

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IDC report shows storage software growth

vink — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:25:27 +0000

IDC’s Worldwide Storage Software Tracker report for the previous quarter was just released, and it shows some mixed data. Year-on-year growth in revenue for storage software was 7.2%, but when compared to last quarter revenue decreased by 1.6%.

Storage growth is lagging behind the double-digit hardware growth in hardware; but most vendors [...] Related posts:

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Gartner reports double-digit growth for storage market

vink — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 11:24:38 +0000

Gartner just released their quarterly report on the storage market, and the figures look good. Year-on-year growth for external storage was 18.3 percent, more than making up for last year’s decline. When compared to Q1 2008, growth is 5.2 percent.

The figures also show that EMC and NetApp are gaining the most [...] Related posts:

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Stamp-sized 1TB SSDs coming soon?

vink — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:12:51 +0000

Crunchgear reports about a breakthrough in flash memory production; a Japanese team of scientists have developed a technology that allows a 90% reduction in SSD size, while also reducing power usage and costs.

The full report can be read in The Nikkei; the chip supposedly uses radio communication instead of traditional copper interconnects [...] Related posts:

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Micron buys flash maker Numonyx

vink — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:34:13 +0000

Micron Technology, one of the world’s leading memory manufacturers, has announced they will acquire flash maker Numonyx. The deal is an all-stock transaction, worth about $1.27 billion.

The deal makes Micron the number two memory maker behind Samsung Electronics, switching places with the new number three Hynix. Interestingly, Numonyx currently has a joint [...] Related posts:

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Riverbed adding solid state storage to WAN accelerators

vink — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:47:18 +0000

Riverbed is turning to Solid State Drives to increase the speed of their WAN acceleration products. The two new Steelhead 7050 models can deliver up to 1 Gbps of WAN capacity for data center workloads, and 622 Mbps for remote office scenario’s; the previous-generation 6050 maxed out at 310 Mbps.

The 7050 comes [...] Related posts:

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3TB hard drives coming later this year?

vink — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:22:52 +0000

TDK’s most recent roadmap shows some new developments. The most important thing I found in this presentation was a roadmap for the next generation of HDD read/write heads.

Drive manufacturers are currently testing heads for 320 and 375 GB platters meant for 2.5″ drives. Models with two platters and 640GB capacity have [...] Related posts:

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EC2 performance issues, what about S3 and EBS?

vink — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 08:09:31 +0000

As reported around the web, it looks like several people have noticed performance issues with Amazons EC2 cloud computing service. While this was to be expected, some people are surprised nonetheless. For those that are surprised: please read “the truth about overselling“. It’s about web hosting, but much of the contents are true [...] Related posts:

Intel boosts X25-M SSD performance with firmware update Intel just released a firmware update for their X25-M...

SuperMicro adding double-sided storage server chassis

vink — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:13:12 +0000

SuperMicro, one of the largest suppliers for “white-box” computer makers, presented their solution for high-density storage servers last month. Most traditional storage servers offer twelve 3.5 inch SAS or SATA drives per 2U of rackspace; the only exception to this are vendors offering top-loading drives such as Sun, and those offering disk trays [...] Related posts:

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Samsung also readying 64GB NAND flash modules

vink — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:35:56 +0000

Following Toshiba’s announcement last month, Samsung has provided details about their next generation of NAND flash modules. Like Toshiba, the new modules offered by Samsung will be 16-layer stacks of 32 Gbit flash chips, providing a total of 64GB of storage per chip.

In addition to the new flash modules, they also announced [...] Related posts:

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Toshiba doubles NAND flash size

vink — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:16:51 +0000

Toshiba just announced their next generation of flash memory chips. The new lineup consists of single-chip packages that combine a number 32 gigabit NAND flash chips and a controller into a single FBGA package. Using their 32 nanometer production process, the chips are significantly thinner than the previous generation.

Toshiba NAND chip

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Future of MySQL: How serious is Oracle about open source?

vink — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:47:38 +0000

During the last days, the the fight over MySQL’s future has heated up. The European Commission still hasn’t approved it, and Michael Widenius is calling upon all MySQL users to help “save” the popular open source database from Oracle. As a response, Oracle has published some promises about MySQL’s future that were meant [...] Related posts:

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Intel and Numonyx improve phase-change memory

vink — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:07:35 +0000

Intel and Numonyx have just announced that they have achieved an important breakthrough in he production of Phase-Change Memory. This type of memory is one of the most promising new technologies currently being developed; like Flash memory it retains information when powered off, but provides faster write speeds and better durability.

One of [...] Related posts:

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Isilon in Deloitte Technology Fast 500

vink — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:57:07 +0000

Isilon has managed to reach the 119th place in this years list of the fastest growing tech companies. The list is based on the revenue growth over the last five years; during that period, Isilon has seen revenue grow by 1,395 percent. Isilon’s CEO, Sujal Patel, offered the obligatory quote for their press [...] Related posts:

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Maxwell discovers a new market for their ultracapacitors

vink — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:27:55 +0000

Maxwell sent out a press release today about their “new” PC-10 ultracapacitator. In it, they tout the benefits it has for providing backup power for, among others, solid state drives and enterprise storage systems. That comes as no surprise; Sun has shown that capacitators can be used successfully as a backup power source [...] Related posts:

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Amazon provisioning 8 petabytes of storage per day

vink — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 11:05:33 +0000

Guy Rosen did an interesting analysis of the number of virtual machines started in Amazon’s cloud. His findings were surprising, at least to me: according to his stats, nearly 50.000 EC2 instances are started daily. But it all depends on the way you look at it; it’s less than one new VM per [...] No related posts.

Cloud storage just got a huge setback

vink — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:17:42 +0000

I’d love to know how Amazons S3 stats looked the day after the Sidekick disaster. Did people stop trusting “the cloud”? Or are they just using cloud storage for less important stuff that they are also backing up in other places? The essence of cloud computing is trusting your cloud provider. Preston de [...] Related posts:

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StorSpeed presents direct competitor for Avere FXT series caching appliances

vink — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:31:38 +0000

Caching for NAS and SAN systems has been a hot topic the last few days. Late last month Dataram presented their XcelaSAN appliance that sits between a Fibre Channel SAN and the clients accessing it, storing data in RAM. A couple of days ago, Avere Systems announced the FXT series of NAS caching [...] Related posts:

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TDK shows prototype of next-generation HDD read/write heads using lasers

vink — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:28:03 +0000

At this years CEATEC in Japan, TDK will provide details about their latest advancements in HDD read/write heads. These are widely believed to be the next bottleneck when improving storage density on hard disks; one of the problems when increasing the amount of data stored on a HDD platter is heat fluctuation; when magnetic storage [...] Related posts:

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