Software-defined storage

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

By

• Jon Toigo

CEO outlines Data Dynamics StorageX trends, future features

Data Dynamics' CEO discusses upcoming StorageX software capabilities designed to help customers find, analyze, move and manage unstructured data in a hybrid cloud environment. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

New Elastifile CEO intensifies startup's cloud focus

Elastifile's new CEO plans to increase the company's focus on filling a 'huge missing piece' of enterprise file storage for public clouds and sees more customers shifting away from on-site deployments. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Cloudian storage adds file sync/share through partner

Object storage startup Cloudian partnered with UK-based Storage Made Easy on file sync-and-share capabilities designed to target enterprises facing compliance requirements under the European ... Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Ctera Networks adds Dell and HPE gateway appliance options

Ctera cloud storage gateway appliance portfolio expands with new all-SSD and all-HDD models that enable customers to run multiple applications on the same box. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

MapR Data Platform gets object tiering and S3 support

MapR Technologies adds policy-based tiering to its Data Platform to automatically move data across performance, capacity and archive storage on premises and in cloud. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

SwiftStack 1space facilitates multi-cloud capabilities

SwiftStack launches single namespace for its object and file storage to ease data access, migration, management and search across private and public clouds. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Maxta MxSP dons its Red Hat for container storage

Maxta MxSP hyper-converged infrastructure is expanding integration with Red Hat. The software-only vendor has added support for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, which is built on Red Hat ... Continue Reading

By

• Garry Kranz

Scality storage update adds three-server option

Scality Ring 7.4 file and object storage software takes aim at easing installation and ongoing management, and it adds a lower-cost three-server entry configuration. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud launches

Red Hat expands its hyper-converged infrastructure lineup with a cloud offering that combines OpenStack and Ceph. The new option joins Gluster-based HCI for Virtualization. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Updated IBM storage products focus on cost savings and cloud

IBM storage enhancements focus on data deduplication expansion, cloud-based Storage Insights, VM-based Spectrum NAS and Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

IoT initiatives and other emerging workloads force data center change

Internet of things projects and other new technology, such as analytics and machine learning, are tied to software-defined storage and public cloud use, changing the face of IT. Continue Reading

By

• Scott Sinclair, Practice Director

New DataCore CEO looks to MaxParallel to drive expansion

DataCore CEO Dave Zabrowski takes the reins from founder George Teixeira as the company works to use MaxParallel product to go beyond storage to the software-defined data center. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

New Red Hat Storage One bundles hardware, SDS

Red Hat partners with Supermicro on first turnkey storage package, bundling Gluster Storage software, server hardware and support at one price in a single SKU. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

How open source Ceph compares to Linux Ceph products

Ceph software-defined storage is available for free, thanks to its open source nature. However, in some situations, a commercial Linux Ceph product could be the way to go. Continue Reading

By

• Sander van Vugt

Elastifile adds NFS file services to Google Cloud Launcher

Startup Elastifile makes available push-button option to deploy its NFS-based scale-out file system on hourly or long-term basis with fast solid-state drives on Google Cloud Platform. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Gluster 4.0 updated for containers, cloud

The first major release of the open source Gluster distributed file system software since December 2009 takes aim at container integration and storage management improvements for hybrid and ... Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

The danger of ageism in the tech industry and ignoring the past

Monolithic storage rules the day in spite of the advent of software-defined storage, because vendors and enterprises ignore data storage history and discount experience. Continue Reading

By

• Jon Toigo

Embrace IT digital transformation and the new tech landscape

The digital economy is increasingly defining business, and IT's relationship to business and the bottom line is becoming tied together more tightly. Continue Reading

By

• Scott Sinclair, Practice Director

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

By

• Carol Sliwa

New IBM storage products key on NAS, cloud, NVMe over Fabric

IBM launches new and updated Spectrum software-defined storage products, including a new NAS option, and commits to broadened end-to-end NVMe over Fabrics support by the third quarter. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Software-defined storage benefits to sway SDS holdouts

Software-defined storage is often misunderstood, yet the technology offers some advantages over traditional storage systems for many organizations. Continue Reading

By

• John Edwards

Six software-defined storage architecture mistakes to avoid

SDS architecture is beneficial for many companies, but organizations making the switch can miss important steps, such as capacity and migration planning. Continue Reading

By

• John Edwards

Market for software-defined systems due for a correction

Software-defined storage seems to relegate hardware to the sidelines, but that may change as hardware-centric offerings become attractive alternatives to software-on-COTS options. Continue Reading

By

• Rich Castagna

Market for software-defined systems due for a correction

 Continue Reading

The best enterprise storage systems and services of 2017

For 16 years, Storage magazine and SearchStorage have recognized the best enterprise storage systems with our annual Products of the Year awards. For this year's competition, vendors submitted new and upgraded products from the past year across five categories, including backup and disaster recovery hardware, backup and DR software and services, software-defined storage, storage arrays and storage management tools. Judges for the competition included consultants, users, analysts and Storage magazine and SearchStorage writers and editors. They assessed products based on innovation, performance, ease of integration, ease of use and manageability, functionality and value. Of the 47 finalists, only the best enterprise storage systems won coveted gold, silver or bronze to become one of our 2017 Products of the Year.

Time is of the essence. If you haven't started getting ready for the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it is time to start. GDPR goes into effect May 25, 2018, and is designed to protect EU residents' privacy and personal data by specifying rules, processes and technologies organizations must follow or use. Noncompliance -- both major and minor -- could lead to significant financial penalties that climb high enough to put some companies out of business. Compliance isn't optional; it's a must. While it won't be easy -- in some cases, particularly so -- to meet the GDPR's 87 pages and 99 articles of specifications and regulations, it isn't impossible. Read on to find out everything you need know about GDPR, see what it means for your organization and, most importantly, learn how to make sure you're not on the short end of the GDPR compliance stick.

 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

Excelero NVMesh 1.1

Startup's NVMesh software virtualizes nonvolatile memory express-based storage and lets applications access pooled storage resources at high speed and low latency. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

DataCore SANsymphony PSP6

The latest release of DataCore's software-defined storage offering, SANsymphony PSP6, enhances REST API integration, container support and cloud replication. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

WekaIO Matrix

Startup WekaIO's Matrix parallel, scale-out file software pools the fast flash storage in application servers and offloads cold data to public and private clouds. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Software-defined storage leaders talk 2018 trends in SDS, HCI

Software-defined storage, fueled by hyper-converged infrastructure and scale-out object/file storage, will grow in 2018, but terminology and product architectures may change. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Software-defined storage products: 2017 Products of the Year finalists

The 11 software-defined storage finalists in this year's competition highlight the most recent developments in flash, cloud and container technologies. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Storage startup trends: Vendors to watch in 2018

Another year is behind us, and 2017 wasn't kind to enterprise-storage startups, as a bunch went belly up or sold off their assets. Not deterred by this recent history and startup trends, a new group of companies has emerged to try and make an impact in 2018. These include Aparavi, Attala Systems, Elastifile, Minio, Morro Data, Vexata, Wasabi Technologies and WekaIO. They have products focused on hot storage sectors, such as flash, hybrid cloud, scale-out file systems and object storage. Who's behind these startups? What do they offer that the market doesn't already provide? And, given recent startup trends, what are their chances for success? Find out with an early look at these upstarts.

A server still looks like a server, and network cables and racks haven't changed much over the last couple of decades, but storage has fundamentally transformed. Disk has lost its crown as the king of primary storage and is becoming relegated to the secondary -- and even cold -- storage world. More significantly, the data center is becoming more software-defined. That means storage functions that once demanded specialized hardware now reside in adaptable, pliable, reprogrammable and easily updateable software constructs. Explore the state of the software-defined storage market.

The advent of virtualization and its need to share all resources threatened the relevance of direct-attached storage (DAS) -- storage within the server. Only the emergence of flash storage, most specifically PCIe SSDs, staved off DAS' extinction, with the likes of Fusion-io demonstrating what you could do with high-speed flash integrated in the server. Today, storage is about to move even further into the server thanks to advancements in storage-class memory -- also known as persistent memory -- technologies. Here's how, why and what this development could mean to you.

 Continue Reading

IT infrastructure automation boosts digital initiatives

Embracing automation through concepts like composable infrastructure cuts back on the use of manual IT tasks, which inhibit the success of digital business. Continue Reading

By

• Scott Sinclair, Practice Director

What's behind the rise of the software-defined storage market

The software-defined approach to storage is catching on. However, for now, enterprises prefer preconfigured SDS products bundled with hardware for easier deployment. Continue Reading

By

• Scott D. Lowe, ActualTech Media

SDS, HCI and CDP are key to dream enterprise storage system

Easy to implement and manage may be the buzzwords of the day for enterprise data storage systems, but too often daily experiences of IT professionals belie that rosy scenario. Continue Reading

By

• Rich Castagna

What's behind the rise of the software-defined storage market

 Continue Reading

Software-defined data center architecture basics for beginners

The physical, virtualization and management layers of an SDDC make it possible to pool the physical components into logical resources, regardless of the underlying hardware. Continue Reading

By

• Robert Sheldon

NVMe-focused Toshiba storage node software due in '18

Toshiba plans to deliver storage node software designed to extend the high performance and low latency benefits of NVMe-based solid-state drives over a network fabric. Toshiba Memory America’s ... Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

SwiftStack object storage integrates file protocol support

New SwiftStack 6.0 storage software supports Universal Access to data with added support for SMB/NFS file protocols to go with Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift object APIs. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Software-defined storage: Making sense of the data storage technology

Use this guide to help understand what vendors mean by 'software-defined storage,' what experts think of it and how to use it in your environment. Continue Reading

StorOne attacks bottlenecks with new TRU storage software

After six years of development, an Israeli startup launches new Total Resource Utilization storage software that aims to eliminate bottlenecks and improve storage efficiency. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Quobyte preps 2.0 Data Center File System software update

One startup's 'Google-style' software-defined storage upgrade features 'table stakes,' such as volume mirroring for disaster recovery and support for Mac and Windows clients. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 adds file, iSCSI, container support

Red Hat updates Ceph storage software with support for CephFS file system, iSCSI block interface and Linux container-based storage implementations, plus usability improvements. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

Software-defined storage products don't negate hardware's importance

 Continue Reading

Formation Data Systems exits crowded software-defined market

Formation Data's recent demise shows the challenges startups face in differentiating products in a crowded software-defined storage market, industry analysts say. Continue Reading

By

• Carol Sliwa

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

By

• Jeff Kato, Taneja Group

Scale-out software-defined storage market menaces traditional storage

 Continue Reading

Get the most value out of your SDS systems by making smart choices

There are many choices you face when looking to implement an SDS infrastructure. Making the right ones will help you get the most value from software-defined storage. Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

VMware EVO SDDC testers shoot for low storage cost

Reduced storage costs and better capacity scaling are key reasons EVO SDDC testers say they are interested in the hyper-converged private cloud stack. Continue Reading

By

• Dave Raffo

Commodity hardware is a myth

Software-defined storage vendors preach the concept of commodity storage hardware, but beware: the hardware is just as important as the apps. Continue Reading

By

• Rich Castagna