Architecting IT analyst Chris Evans has published his latest Primary Storage report, a 30-page eBook, looking at block storage offerings from Dell, HPE, Hitachi Vantara, IBM, Infinidat, NetApp and Pure Storage. The results of his analysis show NetApp and Pure Storage as the strongest performers, with Dell, HPE, and Hitachi achieving the lowest results, while IBM and Infinidat fall between the best and the worst achievers. You can get a copy via a monthly subscription of $99.
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DDN CTO Sven Oehme has been appointed to its board – an unusual move for a CTO – along with Blackstone Head of Americas Jas Khaira. Blackstone recently funded DDN with $300 million.
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MRAM developer Everspin announced additions to its PERSYST EMxxLX family, the EM064LX HR and EM128LX HR. They will operate at temperatures from -40°C to +125°C, meeting the AEC-Q100 Grade 1 standard for automotive applications. This expanded temperature range addresses the growing demand for persistent, high-speed memory in aerospace, defense, and extreme industrial environments.
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Data orchestrator Hammerspace has hired Gregg Machon to be its Global Vice President of Channel Sales and Jeff Echols as Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, Jim Choumas, who was VP Global Channel Sales for Hammerspace and built a great channel program as its foundation, is departing. Machon comes from his role as head of global channel sales at VAST Data, and his CV includes stints at Qumulo, HPE, Nimble Storage, SolidFire, NetApp, Isilon, and EMC. Echols, formerly VP of Global Partner Sales at WEKA, has worked at Nutanix, CommVault, and Dell.
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HPE commissioned DCIG to write a competitive analysis report comparing Pure Storage’s FlashBlade with its Alletra Storage MP B10000. This contrasts the disaggregated architecture of the MP B10000, with separated storage and compute elements, against FlashBlade’s active-passive dual controller design. But events have overtaken HPE and DCIG as Pure has just introduced its FlashBlade//EXA with a disaggregated design rendering the DCIG analysis largely moot.
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There is an IBM Storage Scale System 6000 with Nvidia DGX SuperPOD Deployment Guide here:
- Chapter 1. Introduction and technical overview
- Chapter 2. Architecture
- Chapter 3. Deployment
- Chapter 4. Server tuning
- Appendix A. IBM Storage Scale System 6000 hosts file for Nvidia DGX SuperPOD
- Appendix B. IBM Storage Scale System Nvidia DGX SuperPOD Solution Network Installation Worksheet
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Kioxia announced the development of its LC9 Series 122.88 TB NVMe SSD in a 2.5-inch form factor. It is a QLC SSD using 218-layer BiCS 8 3D NAND, with a PCIe gen 5 x 4 interface, NVMe 2.0 support, 0.3 DWPD endurance rating, and a 2 Tbit die. It’s planning to have customer samples available at the end of 2025 and start mass production in 2026.
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A reminder about an interesting Meta blog on the use of QLC SSDs in its datacenters. It says QLC SSDs form a middle tier between HDDs and TLC SSDs, providing higher density, improved power efficiency, and better cost than existing TLC SSDs, and faster performance than HDDs. Meta expects QLC SSD density will scale much higher than TLC SSD density in the near-term and long-term. “Meta’s storage teams have started working closely with partners like Pure Storage, utilizing their DirectFlash Module (DFM) and DirectFlash software solution to bring reliable QLC storage to Meta. We are also working with other NAND vendors to integrate standard NVMe QLC SSDs into our datacenters.”
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Ex-GigaOm analysts Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro have launched the Osmium Data Group as an EMEA-based analyst company that focuses on market research, analyst insights, and media/content creation. They’re also planning a podcast for later in 2025. They’re currently working on a prototype market research document focused on data protection. The two recently released a white paper in collaboration with Infinidat on the topic of green IT/sustainability.
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Vector database supplier Pinecone is rolling out its new architecture, designed to meet the growing and varied demands of agentic AI. It’s made significant improvements to support search and recommendation workloads, with impressive benchmark numbers. The new Pinecone serverless architecture can serve 4x as many queries with roughly 1/8th the latency, with half the compute footprint of OpenSearch. Achieving similar scale and performance as Pinecone serverless would require OpenSearch clusters scaled 10x to 100x. Pinecone handles this natively at scales from thousands to billions of vectors.
Practically speaking, apps can efficiently support millions of users or sessions with personalized data contexts. So, for example, a company building an AI agent can now create separate namespaces for each user without worrying about performance degradation. When a user returns after being inactive for days or weeks, Pinecone’s architecture can retrieve their context with response times of approximately 10ms, ensuring quality of user experience.
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Rubrik, along with cybersecurity author and former New York Times lead cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth, launched a new podcast series, To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy. The podcast, hosted by Perlroth as she is appointed Chief Cyber Raconteur at Rubrik, tracks the Chinese hacking threat as it evolved from trade secret theft, to mass surveillance, to a far more alarming phase: embedding in US government agencies, power grids, transportation hubs, and water systems. To Catch a Thief is a nine-part series that unpacks the high-stakes world of digital espionage and sabotage, and sheds light on many stories of Chinese cyberespionage that have remained untold. It’s available on all major podcast platforms.
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A recent Wall Street Journal article said two large cloud-computing customers had each ordered one exabyte’s worth of Seagate HAMR disk drives, meaning tens of thousands of disk drives.
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Decentralized storage provider Storj is partnering NodeShift and providing storage for its decentralized AI cloud platform. NodeShift customers can deploy Storj’s decentralized storage alongside their compute VMs and GPU instances, “offering a cost-effective, secure, high-performance, scalable alternative to traditional cloud solutions.”
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HDD manufacturer Toshiba told Wedbush analysts it has achieved 31 TB capacity using energy assist/SMR technology in a lab environment on an 11 platter HDD. It has demonstrated 32 TB on a ten-disk platform with HAMR technology with initial drive sampling at customers expected to be this year. Tosh believes the HAMR transition will be elongated as customers take their time to ensure reliability and ascertain appropriate use cases. It also believes that it would cost approximately $240 billion in incremental investments for the NAND industry to address the 1.2 ZB of storage currently produced by the HDD industry.
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VAST Data added more AI features to its Data Platform software, saying its shared-everything approach allows for all servers to search the entire vector space in milliseconds:
- Vector Search & Retrieval: The VAST DataBase is the first and only vector database that supports trillion-vector scale with the ability to search large vector spaces in constant time. It can automatically embed vectors for search and retrieval.
- Serverless Triggers & Functions: The VAST DataEngine is the first and only system to create real-time workflows without background ETL tools and scanning to provide GenAI access from source data. With event-driven automation for AI workflows and real-time data enrichment, this system can embed and serve context to agentic applications instantaneously, providing high-speed queries, serverless processing, and automated pipelines to ingest, process, and retrieve all enterprise data (files, objects, tables, and streams) in real-time.
- Fine-Grained Access Control & AI-Ready Security: VAST now offers row- and column-level permissions, unifying permissions for raw data and vector representations, ensuring compliance and governance for analytics and AI workloads.
More info here.
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VAST Data is partnering with Nebius, with its AI-native cloud, to deliver AI cloud computing for enterprises across the globe. VAST says: “Nebius AI Cloud leverages the latest compute, paired with the VAST Data Platform’s Disaggregated Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture and exabyte-scale DataStore to provide the speed, performance, multi-tenant security and reliability needed to ensure optimal operational efficiency … After a thorough proof-of-concept (PoC) evaluation against competing alternatives, the VAST Data Platform demonstrated superior performance, seamless integration with Nebius’ cloud environment, and a fast-track deployment model that reduced operational risks.”
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Datacenter virtualizer and VMware alternative VergeIO updated its VergeFabric SDN offering, integrating SDN directly into VergeOS at no additional cost with no dedicated SDN VM required, no external firewalls nor VLAN complexities. VergeFabric is available immediately as part of VergeOS. For more details, visit VergeIO’s website.
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Weebit Nano has completed AEC-Q100 150°C operation qualification of its Resistive Random-Access Memory (ReRAM) module in semiconductor manufacturer SkyWater Technology’s 130nm CMOS process. AEC-Q100 is the standard automotive stress test qualification for integrated circuits (ICs). The result validates Weebit’s embedded ReRAM non-volatile memory (NVM) technology for high-temperature automotive applications.
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Software RAID supplier Xinnor announced a reseller partnership with Supermicro “that demonstrates extraordinary performance” in mission-critical storage environments. The agreement enables Supermicro to offer xiRAID Classic with their NVMe server portfolio, including:
- Up to 226 GBps sequential read and 64.4 GB/s sequential write speeds
- 12 million IOPS random read and 1.53 million IOPS random write
- 95-100 percent RAID efficiency with zero downtime capability
- Complete resilience against multiple drive failures and entire server node outages
