Cloud storage and backup provider Backblaze announced a partnership with PureNodal, “a next-generation cloud platform purpose-built for AI and high-performance compute (HPC) workloads,” to deliver an efficient, high-performance, and cost-effective service for enterprise-scale workloads such as AI model training, data analytics, and media rendering. By combining PureNodal’s AI-optimized compute platform—including cloud fabric, low-latency software-defined networking (SDN), and high-performance infrastructure—with Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage, the partnership delivers a powerful, scalable foundation for AI and HPC workloads without the complexity or cost of legacy cloud solutions.”
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Blackmagic Design’s Cloud Backup 8 is a new rackmount media backup product using HDDs which syncs to Blackmagic Cloud for backing up collaborative projects in DaVinci Resolve. It has 8 independent hard disk slots, 4 x 10G Ethernet ports, and an HDMI monitor output that shows storage status. The storage map shows a graphic representation of the total hard disk capacity and real time read and write access happening for the connected users. There are also graphs that show customers the data transfers on the Ethernet connection. The vendor says it’s “perfect for archiving completed projects to low cost storage” and costs $1,495 from Blackmagic Design resellers.
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Connectivity supplier Cloudflare announced the industry’s first remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, generally available access to durable Workflows, and a free tier for Durable Objects. “These offerings enable developers to build agents in minutes, rather than months, simply, affordably, and at scale.” MCP servers built on Cloudflare can retain context, providing a persistent, ongoing experience for each user. Read more in a blog.
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Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Realtime, a suite of products to help developers build real-time audio, video and AI applications, easily and at scale. Dyte.io, a leading company in the real-time ecosystem, joined Cloudflare to help create RealtimeKit – a toolkit within Realtime that includes SDKs, server-side services, and UI components to simplify building real-time voice, video, and AI applications. RealtimeKit reduces development time from months to days, offers built-in recording capabilities enables true AI-human conversations with low latency (tens of milliseconds) and scales to millions of concurrent participants.
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Cloudian CMO Jon Toor said about the Trump tariffs: “While we can’t address the macro picture, we believe that our software-defined model provides greater hardware sourcing flexibility. And for those who prefer an appliance, we offer the advantage that we’ve stockpiled some kit that will continue to be offered at pre-tariff prices while inventory lasts. On-prem offers the advantage of offering data sovereignty, as well as being inherently lower cost when demand is continuous (as it usually is in storage).” There’s more in a blog.
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Cloud monitoring business Datadog has expanded monitoring capabilities for BigQuery. Now in preview, the >35 extensions help users view BigQuery usage by user and project to identify those incurring the most spend, pinpoint the long-running queries in those segments to optimize, and detect data quality issues. BigQuery is Google Cloud’s fully managed and serverless enterprise data warehouse.
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Search company Elastic announced Elasticsearch runs with up to 40 percent higher indexing throughput on C4A VMs, powered by Google Axion, Google’s first custom Arm-based CPU, compared to previous generations of VMs on Google Cloud. Elastic used a macro benchmarking framework for Rally with the elastic/logs track to determine the maximum indexing performance on Google Axion-powered VMs. C4A also powers Elastic Cloud Serverless.
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Fivetran introduced its Managed Data Lake Service for Google’s Cloud Storage. It seamlessly ingests data from 700+ connectors into Google Cloud Storage, automates conversion to open table formats like Iceberg and Lake for flexibility and interoperability. The Google Cloud integration enables native support for governance, compliance, and BigQuery. It reduces compute costs while accelerating data pipelines into Google Cloud. More details here.
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A Gartner Research paper says businesses and other oganizations should stop buying storage products and buy storage platforms instead. Its summary says: To improve modernization outcomes, I&O leaders must transition from traditional storage infrastructure to infrastructure platforms. This research will help them evaluate their existing infrastructure and explore the requirements, components and selection process for new enterprise storage platforms.”
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Google Cloud announced:
- Anywhere Cache: the industry’s first consistent zonal cache that works with existing regional buckets to cache data within a specific zone. Store once and access anywhere across a continent, enabling faster data access for AI workloads. Google is seeing up to 2.5TBps per zone and 70 percent lower latency.
- Rapid Storage: A way to concentrate data in the same zone that GPUs and TPUs run in, with the ability to mount a bucket as a file system to allow AI frameworks to access object storage more seamlessly. Powered by Google’s internal Colossus file system and its stateful protocol – and now directly available to Google Cloud customers. It offers <1ms random read and write latency, 20x faster data access, 6 TBps of throughput, and 5x lower latency for random reads and writes compared to other leading hyperscalers.
- Storage Intelligence: A feature providing binsights and management capabilities for storage estates at scale, including AI-powered metadata analysis and cost optimization recommendations. It offers metadata analysis at scale and intelligent cost optimization recommendations, making Google Cloud the first hyperscaler to provide such sophisticated, environment-specific storage insights.
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Hammerspace has won Buck, “the award-winning creative agency behind 2D/3D animation, branding, and immersive experiences for brands like Airbnb, Apple, FedEx, Microsoft, GitHub, Amazon, and Rivian,” as a client. It’s now operating as one unified studio across facilities in LA, NY, Amsterdam and Sydney for more than 800 artists, “enabling artists and technologists across continents to work in the same live file system – no more wrangling versions, waiting on syncs or duplicating media.”
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HighPoint says its PCIe Gen5 and Gen4 NVMe Switch AICs and adapters can help PCIe expansion and M.2 acceleration, offering bandwidth, flexibility, and scalability. Designed to host multiple PCIe devices, including GPUs and M.2 accelerators, the solutions are aimed at helping businesses to overcome PCIe resource limitations, optimize infrastructure, and deliver next-generation performance for datacenters, edge computing, and high-performance environments. Details here.
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Reuters says Huawei’s 2024 revenues rose 22.4 percent, the fastest rate in five years, to 862.1 billion yuan ($117.9 billion) but its profit declined 28 percent Y/Y to 62.6 billion yuan ($8.63 billion) due to heavy R&D investment.
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Malware threat detector Index Engines launched the latest version of CyberSense, v8.10. It’s fully integrated with Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery and provides an industry-first raw disk corruption detection, advanced threat analysis, and seamless integration to fortify cyber resilience. It says that, with >1,500 global installations, “CyberSense’s highly-trained AI ensures data integrity, empowering organizations to detect corruption from cyber threats and recover with confidence.” Custom YARA rules within CyberSense support detection of patterns in files, allowing it to identify even zero-day ransomware that hasn’t been seen before.
CyberSense has Rapid Threat Detection with Delta Block Analysis. It has ensures seamless integration with leading security and backup solutions, including PowerProtect Data Manager 19.18 & 19.19; Avamar 19.12, NetWorker 19.12; Commvault Backup and Recovery 11.36; Cohesity NetBackup 10.5, including NetBackup OST (Open Storage Technology); and Oracle ASM RMAN. CyberSense is available now through Dell Technologies and its global partner network.
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Cloud data management supplier Informatica announced its CLAIRE Copilot for data integration and CLAIRE Copilot for iPaaS are both in preview. It has GenAI Recipes for application integration for Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Databricks Mosaic AI, Google Cloud Vertex AI and Gemini, Salesforce Pega GenAI, ServiceNow Generative AI, and Oracle Select AI among others. There are new AI-powered chunking, embedding and PDF-parsing capabilities for unstructured data.
Informatica MDM SaaS now integrates with CLAIRE GPT, enabling NLP-based search and metadata exploration of business entities and associated attributes within master CLAIRE-generated glossary descriptions. GenAI-Powered Natural Language for Data Marketplace allows users to explore data marketplaces through conversational queries, simplifying data discovery and enhancing accessibility.
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Informatica added support for the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, API Center and Cloud Data Access Management (CDAM) services running natively on Google Cloud to its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform. It said the full support for Databricks has300+ connectors for data ingestion, no-code data pipelines running natively within Databricks for data preparation and transformation, data quality and profiling for data within the Databricks Data Intelligence platform, and enterprise-wide data governance with seamless integration with Unity Catalog.
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Kingston has launched a DC3000ME PCIe 5.0 NVMe U.2 SSD using 3D TLC NAND for server applications. It features up to to 2,800,000 random read IOPS, 14 GBps sequential reads, latencies of <10µs read and <70µs write with endurance of 1 DWPD for 5 years and 2 million hrs MTBF. The drive is tuned for strict QoS (99.9999 percent) and has AES-256, TCG OPal 2.0, onboard power loss protection and 128 namespaces are supported.
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Kioxia, AIO Core and Kyocera ave developed an broadband optically connected PCIe gen5 SSD prototype. It combines Kioxia NAND and SSD with AIO Core’s IOCore optical transceiver and Kyocera’s OPTINITY optoelectronic integration module technologies. Kioxia says by replacing the electrical wiring interface with optical and utilizing broadband optical SSD technology it significantly increases the physical distance between the compute and storage devices, while maintaining energy efficiency and high signal quality.
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Pete Paisley, VP Business Development at MagStor, said about IBM’s tape drives and Trump’s tariffs: “I’m highly certain we all get from Japan or China and will be figuring out how to process the additional costs soon. I’d not heard previously that IBM is performing a value added step in AZ prior to your article, regardless as to whether they import at cost or wholesale value it will be a significant impact to costs for all I’m afraid. MagStor is small and nimble and is working on advantageous solutions in the meantime.”
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Large file transfer supplier MASV announcing upcoming integration with Adobe’s Frame.io V4. Ti s will enable faster, easier scalable capture-to-cloud workflows, automating repetitive manual tasks and accelerating production timelines for large-scale media enterprise teams by automating the transfer and organization of massive files. The MASV-Frame.io V4 integration will be available to all MASV users later in 2025.
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MASV has hired Gene Villeneuve as its CRO. His experience spans roles at eyko, Tehama, Cognos, OLAP@Work, Business Objects, and IBM. Villeneuve’s deep expertise in building strategic partner ecosystems—including referral networks, resellers, integrators, and value-added resellers (VARs)—will be pivotal in fueling MASV’s momentum across media and entertainment, while spearheading its expansion into new enterprise markets and global territories.
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Mainframe app to public cloud migrator Mechanical Orchard launched its Imogen end-to-end mainframe modernization platform, and a partnership with global technology consultancy, Thoughtworks. Imogen rewrites mainframe applications safely and quickly by focusing on the behavior of the system as represented by data flows, rather than on translating code. Using data capture agents, an incremental approach and a patented method of creating deterministic outcomes from generative AI, Imogen helps organizations create a new technology foundation that it says is easy to change and forward-compatible. It uses real-time data flows to rapidly validate code generated by AI so that it’s accurate, well-factored and ready to deploy to the cloud. Find out more here.
A joint offering with Thoughtworks, AI-Accelerated Mainframe Modernization with Mechanical Orchard, “takes a holistic approach to legacy modernization, focusing on system behavior rather than just code, so clients can modernize what matters.”
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Cloud file services supplier Nasuni announced findings from its industry research report, The Era of Hybrid Cloud Storage 2025, based on a survey of 1,000 purchasing decision makers across the US, UK, France, and DACH regions. While AI investment is the top spending priority for nearly half of businesses, only one-fifth of surveyed companies feel confident their data is AI-ready. Nasuni is pitching that it can get that data AI-ready.
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Immutable object storage Veeam backup target supplier Object First has run research finding that 81 percent of IT professionals say immutable backup storage built on Zero Trust principles is the best defense against ransomware, and 54 percent view target backup appliances as more secure than integrated appliances.
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According to TechCrunch, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI will add support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, across its products, including the desktop app for ChatGPT. MCP is an open source standard that helps AI models produce better, more relevant responses to certain queries.
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Perforce has released the 2025 State of Open Source Report in collaboration with the Eclipse Foundation and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The report covers open source investment, culture, compliance risks, and other areas that hinder further open source usage. It’s available for free download at: The 2025 State of Open Source Report or here.
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Proxmox announced Backup Server version 3.4. It has optimized performance for garbage collection, granular backup snapshot selection for sync jobs, static build of Proxmox Backup client, and increased throughput for tape backup. This version is based on Debian 12.10 (“Bookworm”), but uses a newer Linux kernel 6.8.12-9 and includes ZFS 2.2.7 (with compatibility patches for Kernel 6.14). While the kernel 6.8.12-9 is the stable default, Linux kernel 6.14 can optionally be installed for better support of the latest hardware. Proxmox Backup Server seamlessly integrates into Proxmox Virtual Environment—users just need to add a datastore of Proxmox Backup Server as a new storage backup target to Proxmox VE. Proxmox Backup Server 3.4 is now available for download.
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CRN reports Pure Storage is planning to reduce special pricing discounts which could mean an overall increase in hardware prices by approximately 10 percent. Services and software prices are not slated to change.
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Japan’s Rakuten Symphony announced the addition of object storage to the Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage Platform. “Kubernetes-ready, highly scalable and cost effective, object storage brings greater durability, flexibility and simplification for managing large volumes of data in use cases including data lakes, cloud-native storage, and machine learning. Object storage will be generally available to any Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage customer in May 2025.”
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Reltio and Microsoft Fabric have a new, joint product: Reltio Zero Copy Integration with Microsoft Fabric. It allows Azure customers to seamlessly store, manage, and share data on OneLake, using Reltio Data Cloud’s flexible data governance. Reltio provides Fabric with reliable, real-time customer data, driving business teams with comprehensive analytics and better enabling AI tools. More information here.
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Scality object storage software is being used by document storage business Iron Mountain. The Iron Cloud Object Storage offering “focuses on data archiving and backup, integrating with existing processes to provide a cost-effective cloud-based storage option that protects against accidental deletion and offers rapid recovery, even down to individual file levels. To improve cyber resiliency, Iron Cloud Object Storage offers an offline, air-gapped secure copy of data, ensuring recovery from ransomware attacks and protecting against potential threats that may appear after restoration.” More info here.
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HCI Vendor StorMagic has promoted Susan Odle to CEO from Chief Growth Officer. Odle joined StorMagic in August 2024; it’s been a meteoric 8 months. The prior CEO Daniel Beer will remain as a non-executive member of StorMagic’s board of directors. Before joining StorMagic, Odle served as founder and CEO of 8020CS, COO of BDO Lixar, and VP of operations at both GFI Software and Youi.TV. Additionally, she was honoured as one of Top 50 Women in SaaS by The Software Report in 2020. Odle is based in Ottawa, Canada.
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China’s TerraMaster unveiled its “revolutionary product, the D9-320, a 9-bay intelligent storage enclosure. As a flagship model featuring an innovative “independent drive power control system,” the D9-320 offers a massive 198TB storage capacity, 10Gbps high-speed transmission, and precise nine-channel power management, providing professional-grade storage expansion solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, NAS users, and tech enthusiasts.” The D9-320 supports nine drives in single-disk mode, with a maximum single-drive capacity of 22TB. More details here.
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Tessell, a startup offering a multi-cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS) “that enables enterprises and startups to accelerate database, data, and application modernization journeys at scale, today announced its $60 million Series B funding round, bringing total funding to $94 million. The round was led by WestBridge Capital, with continued strong participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and new investments from B37 Ventures and Rocketship.vc. This capital will accelerate Tessell’s go-to-market expansion and fuel research and development in AI-powered data management within the evolving enterprise data ecosystem.”
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Trump’s tariffs have received a 90 day pause and storage suppliers are affected:
- China – 145 percent – This affects Sandisk SSDs, Seagate HDDs, Solidigm SSDs, Toshiba HDDs. Recordable Blu-ray/DVD.
- India – 10 percent – Recordable Blu-ray/DVD.
- Japan – 10 percent – Kioxia SSDs, Sandisk SSDs, Sony tape, Toshiba HDDs, Recordable Blu-ray/DVD. Hitachi Vantara storage arrays.
- Malaysia – 10 percent – Seagate HDDs, Western Digital HDDS.
- Philippines – 10 percent – Toshiba HDDs.
- South Korea – 10 percent – Samsung SSDs, SK hynix SSDs
- Taiwan – 10 percent – Recordable Blu-ray/DVD.
- Thailand – 10 percent – Seagate HDDs, Western Digital HDDs.
China just raised its import tariffs to 125 percent on US products which will affect US-based storage product suppliers shipping into China. In effect Chinese suppliers will stop shipping into the USA and US suppliers will stop shipping to China until and unless these tariff walls are torn (negotiated) down.
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As reported by IT Home, China’s UNIS (Unisplendour – owned by Tsinghua Unigroup) has launched its S5 (1 and 2TB), and the S5 Ultra (2 and 4TB) M.2 2280 SSDs using TLC 3D-NAND and a PCIe gen5 x 4 interface. The S5 is DRAM-less, reads up to 14.9GBps and writes up to 12.9 GBps. Its random read/write IOPS are 1,800,000/1,700,000. The S5 Ultra reads up to 14.2GBps and writes at 13.4GBps and its random read/write IOPS mumbers are 1,700,000/1,600,000. Its endurance is 1200TBW at 2TB and 2400TBW at 4TB.
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VMware alternative and virtualized datacenter supplier VergeIO announced the availability of ioMetrics, a Prometheus-compatible monitoring system purpose-built to provide granular observability across VergeOS environments. It gives customers detailed insight into the storage, compute and networking layers – vSAN tier monitoring, cluster insights, node and hardware metrics – “streamlining performance management, capacity planning, and proactive alerting.” It’s designed for integration with observability platforms like Grafana, LogicMonitor, and Dynatrace.
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Open-source distributed SQL database supplier Yugabyte announced the first of its next-generation agentic AI apps, Performance Advisor for YugabyteDB Aeon, its software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. Yugabyte also announced an extensible indexing framework designed to support the seamless integration of state-of-the-art vector indexing libraries and algorithms, augmenting the capabilities offered by pgvector. The Performance Advisor agentic AI application allows developers to detect potential issues before an application is deployed and offers timely insights to SREs, and platform engineers to help with performance optimization.
