Today is SysAdmin Day. The concept was created by Ted Kekatos, a system administrator, in 1999. He wanted to establish a special day to recognize the hard work and dedication of system administrators who keep computer systems running smoothly.
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File sharer and collaborator Box announced a new plugin for Microsoft’s next-generation AI workplace tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot. Box also announced updates to its integrations with Microsoft 365 that it says provide joint customers with enhanced features for sharing, editing, and collaborating within Microsoft Teams as well as Office products including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Box recently announced Box AI to combine foundational AI models with content stored in Box. The Copilot tool with this new integration will allow users to synthesize and summarize all their shared Box documents in Teams to draw insights from collaborators. They may also ask questions of shared content to derive milestones in an existing project, with the aim of limiting the need to scroll through Chats and Channels in order to get up to speed more quickly on conversations and new learnings.
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Data protector and manager Cohesity released yet another ransomware scare report. Over 90 percent of respondents believe the threat of ransomware to their industry has increased in 2023. Nearly 3 in 4 (74 percent) companies will pay a ransom to recover data and restore business processes. Two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) lack full confidence that their company could recover their data and critical business processes in the event of a system-wide cyberattack. Nearly half of the respondents (45 percent) confirmed their company had been the victim of a ransomware attack in the prior six months. Meanwhile, over 95 percent of the respondents revealed they would need over 24 hours to recover data and business processes if a cyberattack occurred, 71 percent said it would take more than four days, while 41 percent said over a week would be required.
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Data protector Commvault has joined the AWS ISV Workload Migration Program and attained multiple AWS Service Ready Program designations. Through the AWS ISV Workload Migration Program, customers can accelerate their migration to AWS through promotional credits and enhanced technical guidance and support. Combined with Commvault’s automated scalable and repeatable workflows, the result is pitched as a simplified, reduced-cost modernization to AWS.
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Anandtech reports Micron’s Crucial business unit has announced two new portable SSDs: the USB 3.2 Gen 2 X9 Pro, and the USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 X10 Pro. The X9 Pro comes with 1, 2, or 4TB capacities and provides up to 1,050 MBps read and 1,050 MBps write bandwidth.
The X10 Pro has the same capacities but IO is faster, with up to 2,100 MBps read and 2,000 MBps write speed.
Both use Micron 176-layer 3D NAND. A 1TB X9 Pro costs around $80, 4TB $290, a 1TB X10 Pro costs $120 and a 4TB X10 Pro will set you back $290.
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DataCore’s Perifery division has appointed Jonathan Morgan as SVP of product and technology, based in Wales. He is responsible for strategic product decisions across three development groups/technologies (Object Matrix, Swarm and OpenEBS). The role includes go-to-market alliance strategy and evangelising the product strategy. Morgan was Object Matrix CEO from 2003 to 2023, when DataCore acquired Object Matrix. Morgan will report to Perifery General Manager Abhijit Dey.
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Data migrator/manager Datadobi has a blog saying “businesses not only grapple with the management of vast amounts of data but also face the looming threat of illegal data concealed within their digital repositories. … Illegal data encompasses a broad spectrum of content or files that contravene laws, regulations, and/or company policy. It includes materials such as pirated software, confidential information obtained through unlawful means, and content that promotes or facilitates illegal activities; as well as content that is simply not acceptable or useful on the corporate network such as holiday videos and cat pics.”
Datadobi’s file metadata indexer and searcher StorageMAP, the blog says, ”can play a crucial role in assisting organizations with mitigating the risk of illegal data.” But the word ‘illegal’ means not allowed by law so how can StorageMap detect illegal data in the strict meaning of the word? We asked and Datadobi’s Steve Leeper, VP Product Marketing, said: “Users of StorageMAP can find unwanted/illegal data by executing searches for specific characteristics such as file extensions that are either not allowed per corporate policy or meet criteria for further inspection.”
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Prowess Consulting used Vdbench, an industry-standard storage benchmarking tool, to simulate a dataset with a 2:1 compression ratio and a 2:1 deduplication ratio, and check out a couple of arrays with 4:1data deduplication ratio (DDR) guarantees. It said Dell’s PowerStore 1200T demonstrated a DRR of 4.8:1, whereas a Vendor A storage platform, also with a 4:1 storage reduction guarantee, only achieved a 2.8:1 ratio. The PowerStore 1200T exceeded the 4:1 guarantee, while the Vendor A platform did not even meet the guarantee. Vendor A is unknown.
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According to a BanklessTimes.com data analysis, web3 decentralized storage supplier Filecoin’s Q2, 2023 protocol revenue witnessed a 67 percent increase, reaching $11.5 million. There was a 64 percent quarter-on-quarter increase in active storage deals and a 60 percent rise in large datasets clients in the same quarter. This marks the second consecutive quarter of revenue growth for the platform since its low of $5.7 million in Q4 of 2022.
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The Flash Memory Summit announced this year’s recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award: Amber Huffman, who is being recognized for her achievements in bringing flash storage into the mainstream of the data storage industry by founding and driving the standards – ONFI, NVMe, AHCI, OCP and UCIe – that have made flash memory a mainstream storage medium for virtually all computing applications. She’s currently a principal engineer at Google Cloud. Before that she was a 25-year vet at Intel, finishing up as an Intel Fellow and VP, and CTO of its IP Engineering Group, leaving in late 2021 to join Google.
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Data orchestrator Hammerspace says its revenues are growing at nearly 300 percent Y/Y. Customers include3 largest global Telcos, private Space exploration, hyperscale Large Language Model pipeline, online game development, Federal government, VFX and Entertainment, retailers, and more. It is targeting mid-size and large enterprise and hyperscalers as potential AI use-case customers, saying its high-performance data orchestration software can feed AI pipelines with more data faster in what is a new AI-influenced data cycle.
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Hitachi Vantara has launched its Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) for Azure Stack HCI, starting with just one Hitachi server and scale up to 16 nodes. It supports multiple validated configurations, including a Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) one. Customers can purchase UCP for AzureStack HCI with the Hitachi EverFlex infrastructure-as-a-service subscription model.
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IBM Storage Scale v5.1.8.1 has just been released. It has a tech preview of Storage Scale (GPFS and then Spectrum Scale as it was) on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) through cloudkit (an interactive CLI-based multi-cloud provisioner). The cloud-kit provides the ability to deploy an IBM Storage Scale Cluster on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) public cloud, including provisioning of all required cloud infrastructure, installation, and initial configuration of IBM Storage Scale. More info’ here.
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High-end array supplier Infinidat has appointed Richard Connolly as regional director for the UKI and the DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) regions. He was the Director of Global & Strategic Accounts at Palo Alto Networks and before that a global sales director at Hitachi Vantara.
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Fabless 3D X-DRAM semi-conductor startup NEO Semiconductor’s CEO, Andy Hsu, will deliver a keynote address titled “New Architectures which will Drive Future 3D NAND and 3D DRAM Solutions”on August 9th at 11:40 a.m. PT at the Flash Memory Summit in San Jose. A new AI application for 3D X-DRAM called “Local Computing” will be disclosed, drastically increasing AI chip performance to a new level never reached before. He’ll mention other new memory structures derived from 3D X-DRAM for 3D NOR flash memory, 3D Ferroelectric RAM (FFRAM), 3D Resistive RAM (RRAM), 3D Magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM), and 3D Phase Change Memory (PCM). These new memory structures will bring technological breakthroughs for migrating these memory cells from 2D into 3D.
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HCI vendor Nutanix has added Mark Templeton to its board of directors. He was most recently CEO of DigitalOcean, and prior to that spent 20 years at Citrix Systems (a Nutanix Partner), including 14 years as President and CEO. Templeton currently serves on the boards of Arista Networks and Health Catalyst, as well as several private company boards.
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Samsung posted consolidated revenues of KRW 60.01 trillion for its Q2, 2023 quarter with profits of KRW 0.67 trillion. The Memory Business – DS division – posted KRW 14.73 trillion in consolidated revenue and KRW 4.36 trillion in operating losses for the second quarter. It saw results improve from the previous quarter as its focus on High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and DDR5 products in anticipation of robust demand for AI applications led to higher-than-guided DRAM shipments. The division will focus on sales of high-value-added products such as DDR5, LPDDR5x and HBM amid expectations of a recovery in demand. It will continue to strengthen mid- to long-term competitiveness by increasing investments in infrastructure, R&D and packaging technology, while also enhancing the completeness of the Gate-All-Around (GAA) process.
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Data analytics software supplier SQream says its petabyte-scale GPU-based SQL analytics database SQream DB is available on the Samsung Cloud Platform (SCP). The Samsung Cloud Platform (SCP) was launched by Samsung SDS in 2021. SQream became available on the Alibaba cloud in 2018. It also runs on AWS, Azure, GCP and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
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Synology announced the amount of data backed up in its cloud storage and backup platform, Synology C2, has surpassed 200 PB, an increase of 47 percent over the same period last year. Additionally, over the last 12 months, Synology said it saw faster adoption among customers with larger datasets (over 50TB) compared to the previous year. The cloud platform offers two services for organizations seeking cloud backup: C2 Storage for backing up Synology servers, and C2 Backup for protecting edge and cloud data.
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Teledyne LeCroy has released SVF/Enduro v5.3 software with support for testing Flexible Data Placement (FDP), which enables SSD suppliers to verify performance and compliance for their NVMe storage devices. FDP creates a whole new command set that moves the responsibility of data placement away from the drive controller to the host application.
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Replicator WANdisco, just readmitted to the AIM market, has appointed Xenia Walters and Chris Baker to its Board as Non-Executive Directors in a board-level shake up. Interim CEO Stephen Kelly and interim CFO Ijoma Maluza become permanent and both join the board as well. Current board member Karl Monaghan will step down ahead of the next AGM in August.
