Last week I was reading this article on Ars Technica discussing the latest Samsung M.2 format drives to hit the market.  In something similar to a DIMM format, you get up to 2TB of capacity and read/write speeds of 3.5Gb/s and 2.1Gb/s respectively.  M.2 comes in a range of sizes and was originally developed for… Read more »

Chris Mellor at The Register has an interesting article following up on rumours of NetApp moving into the hyper-convergence market.  This intention shouldn’t be a surprise in some respects.  As the storage market fragments, the incumbents have to adapt to the needs of customers and hyper-converged systems are – by any measure – popular. Storage… Read more »

Recently I was asked to review a document that used as a reference a piece of work from Google which talked about the need to relax the resiliency levels of hard drives and SSDs.  The premise is interesting; hyper-scalers claim they could do a better job in managing performance and availability if the HDDs they… Read more »

On the day the Dell/EMC acquisition/merger completed, HPE announced it was selling off a load of non-core software assets in a “spin-off” merger with UK’s Micro Focus.  HPE gets $2.5 billion in cash and HPE shareholders get a 50.1% ownership of the new entity, which will continue to be called Micro Focus.  In addition SUSE… Read more »

Software Defined Storage (SDS) is one of those terms that has been readily hijacked by vendors over the past few years.  The term developed from the adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN), used to define the separation of control and data traffic in the networking world that provides the abstraction needed to deliver more efficient… Read more »

So it appears the rumours were true as Nutanix finally announces the acquisition of both PernixData and calm.io, a start-up focused on DevOps automation.  Naturally the blog post and press release from Nutanix puts a positive spin on things, with talks of shared vision, shared ambition and a “like-spirited” approach to IT operations. As I discussed in… Read more »

In a deal worth $4.3 billion, Rackspace is being acquired by investment company Apollo Global Management for $32 a share.  From what I’ve read so far, the press releases are putting a spin on it that implies the private route allows Rackspace to transform the company without the stress and attention of being a public… Read more »

Earlier this year I was at HPE Discover in Las Vegas and talking to Calvin Zito (HP Storage Guy) about the latest IDC Storage Tracker results.  Calvin posted on the Around The Storage Block blog, covering details on both servers and storage.  He highlighted the fact HPE was now ahead of EMC in terms of… Read more »

Hot on the heels of Samsung’s 15TB SSD, Seagate has announced their own hyper-capacity drive, an (as yet) unnamed 60TB SAS solid state disk.  The new product was announced at the recent Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, USA.  So is 60TB setting a new standard?  Is it a practical device for every day… Read more »