Chris Mellor covers storage and allied technology areas for The Register. After experience working for DEC, Unisys and SCO, he became an IT journalist writing for a variety of print publications. He edited the UK's first storage print magazine and then moved into the online world writing for IDG's Techworld, then started up the Blocks & Files blog, which was bought by El Reg.
He has written many sportscar buying guides, a few mountaineering guides and drives a car that's faster than he is.
Dell EMC lifts the post-acquisition axe: Swwwwwing
Dell Technologies' 140,000 staffers have been wincing in anticipation fror the expected 2,000-3,000 layoffs after the $67bn EMC acquisition completed, and now the wait is over. The axe is swinging and heads have begun to roll.
A person close to the events told us: "Almost 80 people have been terminated from the Hopkinton …
Two tickets to the ARM show: HPE buffs up the StoreVirtual line
HPE has given its SV3200 software a workout to strengthen its muscles with a raft of enhancements, but draws the line at using ARM for file access.
The company introduced a low-cost, entry-level, block-access array with its StoreVirtual 3200 in August last year. It comes with a pair of active-active 64-bit ARM controllers, not …
Seagate laying off 2,217 employees
Reuters reports Seagate is closing its Suzhou disk drive manufacturing plant in China, shedding a whopping 2,217 jobs.
The 1.1 million ft2 plant was formerly owned by Maxtor; Seagate having bought Maxtor for $1.9bn in May, 2006. Stifel MD Aaron Rakers puts the closure in the context of Seagate wanting to lower its quarterly …
Qumulo goes to La La Land, speeds up dreamboat Ryan Gosling
Case study
In file serving, the blue chip case studies are movie special effects. Fast file access is what the visual effects people – and by extension movie heartthrob and meme favourite Ryan Gosling, whose film they were working on – need.
Scale-out filers are the thing to use, but seemingly are not always fast enough.
So Avere jumped …
Kerching! That's the sound of Barracuda customers feeling the ransomware fear
Barracuda's business grew a little faster as customers continued moving to the public cloud and ransomware scared them into securing their emails.
Third quarter fiscal 2017 revenues were $88.8m, a good 10.9 per cent uptick on last year, and a 1 per cent increase sequentially. Net income was $1.8m, 2 per cent of its revenues, …
Panzura picks up $32 million growth funding
Cloud storage gateway supplier Panzura has raked in a $32 million E-round of funding as incoming CEO Patrick Harr proves his worth on the growth front.
We're told by happy Panzura that it had record growth in 2016, with over 100 new enterprise customers and expanding its channel and alliance presence with AWS, Google, IBM and …
How do file store-and-share firms avoid that sinking syncing feeling?
Interview
With the demise of Bitcasa, EMC selling off Syncplicity, and so forth, the enterprise file sync and share market might appear moribund. What’s happened is a trend of consolidation plus an addition of functionality for other content functions. EFSS on its own is no longer viable.
That’s the underlying message we received from …
Talena wants to be distributed database data management rock
Analysis
Talena was founded in 2013 to develop data management software for Big Data and non-relational database applications. Its data management software provides backup, recovery, test data management and archiving capabilities for Cassandra, Couchbase, Hadoop, and Vertica. The company claims its software integrates machine learning …
Kaminario gets cash for K2 biz flash dash
All-flash array supplier Kaminario has gained an additional $75 million funding in an F-round, taking total funding to $218 million.
Private equity firm Waterwood led the round; its strategy is to invest in growth-stage technology companies. Cash also came from new and existing investors, including Sequoia, Pitango, Lazarus, …
Reg man howls over HPE Moonshot IoT box
A Moonshot-class, Internet of Things HPE server is being used for down to Earth VDI by Citrix.
HPE’s Edgeline servers are for the use of connected "Things" at an IoT network's edge, the place where end-point device data is aggregated and processed before being sent to a central location. What HPE has realised is that this is …
Flashy new jobs for storage folk
Kevin Kilbuck has become chief marketing officer at NVMdurance, a tiny Irish flash endurance lengthening company that first popped up last year. It uses machine learning techniques to understand better how to write data to flash drives over the drive’s life so as to extend the drive’s endurance.
Kilbuck left Micron in …
X-IO: Reports of our demise have been greatly exaggerated
Updated
X-IO Technologies chairman and CEO Bill Miller has called in to say: "I was very surprised and disappointed to read our name in the 'Deaths' section of your 2016 year in review article.
"As Mark Twain might have said, 'the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated'."
Bill tells us: "We have undergone a somewhat miraculous …
Tintri, thrown on the El Reg grill: We'll support NVMe! We promise!
Interview
El Reg has been quizzing array vendor after array vendor on their views about the technology change from SAS/SATA to NVMe flash drives and to NVMe over Fabrics array access. Today it's the turn of Tintri, and it thinks NVMe is an important technology watershed, but not as huge as the change from disk to solid state storage – the …
WD slims down SSD to squeeze into little Black drive range
WD has added an SSD card to its previously all-disk Black range.
The Black PCIe SSD comes in 256GB asnd 512GB capacities and features an M.2 2280 format with an NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 host connection. It is WD's third flash product using branding previously reserved for disk drives, joining the Blue and Green 2.5-inch SARA SSDs. …
Yep. Bitcasa's called it quits
Analysis
Cloud file storage startup Bitcasa - a firm cynics might say had an apparent death wish - has called it a day.
An odd posting on its website by CEO Brian "Tap" Taptich reads:
Bitcasa is no more, and this is not bad news. Thanks to the very hard work, generosity and persistence of a number of folks – from employees to …
Meet the Tesla of the backup world – Datos IO (no, it doesn't make boxes that catch fire)
Analysis
Startup Datos IO is the Tesla of the backup industry, redesigning data protection for distributed apps and focussing on high-end customers with code to solve specific problems no one else can solve anywhere near as well.
It now has ten paying customers for its RecoverX distributed database backup product, six months after its …
CloudByte chews on Elastistor, sinks teeth into OpenEBS
Analysis
Startup CloudByte is having a substantial exec and strategy makeover as it embraces an open source approach to containerised storage.
We came across CloudByte just over a year ago when it popped up with its ElastiStor software running on OEM’d SanDisk (now WD) InfiniFlash hardware, the box with a bunch of flash inside it. …
Vendors flash smartphone storage in Vegas
Toshiba and SanDisk are showing off Android phone backup and monster microSD/USB stick products at CES in Las Vegas, but they don’t want what happens in Vegas to stay in Vegas.
Toshiba’s Canvio for Smartphone is a 500 GB 2.5-inch disk drive inside a flattish circular disk of a case with cable connection to an Android …
Nutanix releases fifth version of Acropolis
Unlike what's happening with the famed Athenian ruin, Nutanix is building up its Acropolis product, and has made v5.0 available with more than 45 new features.
These cover its Acropolis data plane, the Prism management plane, and its built-in hypervisor, AHV. The additions make AHV, Nutanix claims, a candidate target for …
2016 – the year 3D XPoint came down to earth from Planet Hype
Storage Review in 2016
Storage in 2016 saw its on-premises SAN/filer array heartland assaulted by the public cloud on the one hand, and hyper-converged and software-defined storage on the other.
The now-classic dual-controller disk array went hybrid to keep storing primary data, but all-flash arrays are taking on that role and so the hybrids went …
Drones will be able to carry 120GB footage of you in the shower if Seagate has its way
Seagate is partnering with drone maker DJI to develop onboard storage for its unmanned aerial vehicles.
They say drone cameras are gaining resolution and flight times are getting longer, both of which mean more data needs to be stored in flight. DJI's Inspire 2 drone can record 5.5K video for example, and a 25-minute flight …
Regular or premium? Intel pumps out Optane memory at CES
CES 2017
Intel has announced Optane memory products in M.2. format to ship in the second 2017 quarter.
Optane is Intel’s brand for its 3D Xpoint memory, jointly developed with Micron, and a non-volatile memory that is faster than NAND but slower than DRAM. Intel says (PDF) “a hard disk drive coupled with Intel Optane memory affordably …
Seagate performs upgrade transplant surgery on LaCie external drives
CES 2017
With two Seagate LaCie drive revisions, we see the storage industry doing what it does best at a device level; capacity and connectivity upgrades so as to store more data and get at it faster.
The LaCie d2 and Rugged products are nattily designed by Neil Poulton and are external drives for creative video, image and music …
Toshiba faces nuclear power goodwill cost meltdown
Toshiba is facing such horrific cost-overruns with its US nuclear power plant projects it may have to sell assets, such as its flash memory business, to cover them.
Its US subsidiary, Westinghouse Electric, is building four AP1000 power-generating reactors in the United States and costs are getting out of hand, with multi-year …
What's that surging down the Yangtze? It's a 3D NAND flash flood
China's Yangtze River Storage Technology (YMTC) has started building a 3D NAND flash plant.
YMTC, through its ownership of contract chip manufacturer XMC, has started building a memory semiconductor fab on a 13-hectare site at the Donghu New Technology Development Zone in Wuhan. Tsinghua Unigroup, which owns 51.04 per cent of …
