AWS has lowered the price of its fast S3 Express One Zone object storage service, affecting storage, reads, writes, data uploads, and retrieval per byte with reads seeing the maximum reduction at 85 percent. Price examples are for AWS’s US East (N. Virginia) region.
- Read requests – $0.00003 per 1,000 requests with no request limit vs $0.0002 per 1,000 requests up to 512 KB before.
- Storage – $0.11/GB/month vs $0.16/GB/month – a 31 percent reduction
- Write requests – $0.00113 per 1,000 requests with no limit vs $0.0025 per 1,000 requests up to 512 KB; a 55 percent reduction.
- Data uploads and retrieval components – $0.0032 and $0.0006 per GB compared to $0.008 and $0.0015 per GB respectively; a reduction up to 60 percent.
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Data integration supplier Fivetran has monitored data movement by its customers and says companies are investing heavily in training LLMs, refining ML models and automating critical business processes. Its numbers show that AI-driven data demand grew by 690 percent in 2024. Legal firms saw a 211.2 percent growth in data volumes as they are processing massive volumes of contracts and case data using AI. Healthcare’s 99.7 percent growth shows demand for AI-driven solutions in patient diagnostics. Retail (+54.2 percent) and manufacturing (+64.7 percent) are using AI to optimize supply chains, predict demand and automate operations. Insurance (+40.7 percent) and financial services (+27.5 percent) are leveraging AI to detect fraud, model risk, and improve customer experiences. AI-powered underwriting and automated compliance monitoring are driving major shifts in how financial data is handled.
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Hitachi Vantara released its FY2024 Sustainability Report, marking the second edition of its annual ESG progress and transparency reporting.
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IBM announced Q1 2025 results with revenues up 1 percent year-over-year to $14.5 billion and GAAP profits of $1.1 billion, down 31 percent. Software brought in $6.3 billion, up 7 percent and the highlight. Consulting delivered $5.1 billion, 2 percent down, while Infrastructure brought in $2.9 billion, a 6 percent decline. Financing returned $191 million, down 1 percent while Other revenues were 43.5 percent down at $61 million. CEO Arvind Krishna said: “We’re off to a strong start in 2025, exceeding our expectations for the quarter, driven by solid revenue growth, profitability and cash flow generation. While sentiment and the operating environment have been rapidly shifting, our performance reflects the continued success of our focused strategy around hybrid cloud and AI—especially where clients are looking for cost savings, productivity gains, and trusted partners to help them move fast and scale.”
Krishna’s outlook in these times of Trump’s tariff turbulence was quite stable in tone: “While it is still very early in the second quarter, we have not seen a material change in client buying behavior. With the caveat that the macro situation is fluid, based on what we know today, we are maintaining our full year guidance for accelerating revenue growth to 5 percent plus and about $13.5 billion of free cash flow.” IBM has z17 mainframe revenues to look forward to in the next and subsequent quarters.
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The presentations of the IBM Storage Scale User Group Meeting 04/2025 can be found here.
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Self-hosted cloud SaaS backup storage services supplier Keepit has teamed with disti Ingram Micro to expand access to Keepit’s services for VARs, MSPs, and managed security service partners (MSSPs) in the UK.
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MSP-focused CSP Livewire has selected VergeOS from VergeIO as its alternate virtualization offering for those not wishing to upgrade to new VMware licensing. VergeOS offered Livewire a smooth transition path with native migration tooling, an intuitive interface familiar to VMware users, and compatibility with existing infrastructure. VergeIO’s support ecosystem provides guided proof-of-concept deployments, hands-on migration services, and 24×7 engineering assistance.
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Lucidity’s Q1 product release includes updates designed to streamline scaling IT operations for enterprise customers. Highlights include:
- Bulk onboarding via CSV with smart batch scheduling and job tracking
- Revamped Jobs module for bulk agent installation with success metrics and progress tracking
- Azure permission visibility enhancements to meet evolving compliance requirements
- Support for Linux data volume onboarding via CSV
- Cleaner policy management across AutoScaler agent installation with success metrics and progress tracking
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Cloud file services supplier Nasuni announced 189 percent growth in the AEC sector in the last two years, almost tripling data under management. Nasuni is supporting over 250 global AEC firms, including 8 of the 10 largest firms in the US, to defend their data, while enabling global collaboration. Customers include Perkins & Will, GeoVerra, LEO A DALY, Kimley-Horn, McKim & Creed, and Ramboll Global.
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Veeam object storage backup target supplier Object First has added a Pay-As-You-Go consumption business model alongside the traditional CapEx model. It says it now offers backup capacity from 17 TB to 7 PB with no upfront payment, monthly billing and a 1-year subscription. Users can achieve greater cost efficiency with lower per-TB pricing as they scale. All technology refreshes, service, support, and software updates are included. Customers do not pay for the appliances themselves – just for the storage that is used. Customers can reduce the risk of over- or under-sizing with Object First’s Storage Calculator, expert support, and access to an experienced partner network.
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Hyperscale analytics data warehouse supplier Ocient, which has doubled revenues for the third successive year, has closed its $132 million Series B funding and appointed Henry Marshall, previously with space infrastructure provider Loft Orbital, as CFO. Total invested funding is now $159.4 million. The B-round started in 2021, continued in 2024 and has now closed. New investors taking part in the Series B close, amounting to $42.1 million, included Allstate Strategic Ventures, Blue Bear Capital, Solidigm (SK hynix’s SSD-building subsidiary), Massive, Zelkova, and Northwestern Mutual. The cash will be used for the development and delivery of energy efficient solutions – including, we think, high-capacity Solidigm SSDs – for costly, complex, and operationally burdensome data and AI workloads.
Ocient recently launched its first named system, the Data Retention and Disclosure System for telecommunications, which enables service providers to meet lawful disclosure requirements far below the mandated timeframes and for significantly less cost and energy. It said its deepening work with industry partners including AMD, Vertosoft, Solidigm and Amdocs, and has recently been accepted into the Nvidia Inception program.
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Universal data lakehouse supplier Onehouse says its OpenEngines software automatically deploys and integrates with lakehouse tables, eliminating the headaches of manually deploying engines to support new use cases and providing a simpler alternative to commercial counterparts. Engines supported include Apache Flink for stream processing, Trino for distributed SQL queries for business intelligence and reporting, and Ray for ML, AI and data science workloads. The engines are deployed on Onehouse Compute Runtime (OCR), a specialized lakehouse runtime, and can access tables that are continuously optimized for performance. Together, these innovations accelerate queries 2x to 30x and reduce customer cloud infrastructure bills 20 to 80 percent.
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Operant AI, claiming to be the world’s only Runtime AI Defense Platform, announced its AI Gatekeeper product to bring end-to-end runtime AI protection to everywhere enterprises are deploying AI Applications and AI Agents – from Kubernetes to hybrid and private clouds. It says AI Gatekeeper not only brings Operant’s powerful 3D Defense capabilities beyond Kubernetes, it also provides completely new industry-first defenses against rogue agents, including trust scores, agentic access controls, and threat blocking for MCPs (Model Context Protocols) and Agentic AI Non-Human Identities (NHIs).
It says that, as enterprises deploy increasingly sophisticated AI Applications and Agentic AI workflows, the sprawling cloud footprint required to support such complex systems has become critically difficult to secure. AI Applications and agents are not only being built on cloud hyperscalers like Amazon EKS, Fargate, Bedrock, and similar services from Azure and Google Cloud, they are now expanding onto non-traditional platforms like Databricks, Snowflake, and Salesforce. The AI ecosystem – and the threats that come with it – are shifting closer to where the data that fuels AI actually lives. As a result, security and threat exposure are expanding. AI Gatekeeper blocks rogue AI agents, LLM poisoning, and data leakage wherever AI apps are deployed, securing live AI applications end-to-end beyond Kubernetes and the Edge.
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Vector database startup Pinecone launched the first remote MCP server to bring knowledge to agentic workflows. Every Pinecone Assistant will now also be an MCP server. The Developer MCP Server integrates into IDEs, enabling vector database prototyping and accurate code generation with tools like Cursor. The Remote MCP Server provides context from proprietary data for precise, hallucination-free RAG and agentic workloads. A general blog tells you more with a Pinecone Assistant blog focusing on that aspect.
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Chinese-founded but Silicon Valley headquartered PingCAP has launched TiDB v8.5 of its distributed SQL database. This is a unified platform for data transactions, real-time analytics and AI applications. It delivers performance similar to NoSQL with the resilience and reliability of a transactional RDBMS, making it a good choice for hyperscale SaaS services like Pinterest, Plaid and Bolt.
TiDB 8.5 includes built-in support for vector and hybrid search, along with enhancements to full-text search that improve retrieval accuracy for RAG and other AI-powered applications. TiDB 8.5 also includes enhancements such as global indexes, parallel query execution and foreign key support. TiDB’s managed Cloud Dedicated option now supports Microsoft’s Azure cloud in addition to AWS and Google Cloud. Support for Alibaba Cloud International is coming soon.
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Pure Storage Cloud for Azure VMware Solution is now in public preview. You can take a look at this new fully managed Azure Native service in a blog.
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Scale-out filesystem supplier Qumulo announced the availability of Pay-As-You-Go pricing for Cloud Native Qumulo (CNQ) in the AWS Marketplace. It says Pay-As-You-Go is ideal for customers evaluating cloud storage without committing to an upfront purchase. As organizations migrate data to the cloud, they can better assess costs based on actual usage. The existing Prepaid Credits are ideal for customers who want to align with a pre-budgeted procurement model or are happy to pre-pay in exchange for a discounted rate. Credits are consumed as the product is used, just like Pay-As-You-Go. Cloud Native Qumulo (CNQ) Pay-As-You-Go is available now in AWS Marketplace. Pre-paid pricing remains available for volume-based discounts for enterprise customers with predictable workloads.
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China’s Sangfor Technologies, a supplier of cloud computing and cybersecurity, has been named a Sample Vendor in Gartner’s A Guide to Choosing a VMware Alternative in the Wake of Broadcom Acquisition report, published March 18, 2025. It says its Sangfor Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) has been recognized as a tactical alternative for organizations seeking to modernize infrastructure while mitigating risks associated with VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom.
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App HA and DR supplier SIOS Technology announced a strategic partnership with DataHub Nepal, which supplies co-lo, hosting, datacenters, cloud, and managed services in Nepal. The collaboration aims to strengthen the availability and resilience of mission-critical applications for businesses across the region.
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Korean DRAM and NAND fabber SK hynix’s revenues for its first 2025 quarter were 17.6391 trillion won ($12.4 billion), its second-ever highest, with 8.1082 trillion won ($5.7 billion) in net profit. It said the memory market ramped up faster than expected due to competition to develop AI systems and inventory accumulation demand. It responded to the demand with an expansion in sales of high value-added products such as 12-layer HBM3E and DDR5.
Due to the characteristics of the HBM market, in which supply volume is mutually agreed a year in advance, the company maintains its earlier projection that HBM demand will approximately double compared to the last year. As a result, sales of 12-layer HBM3E are expected to favorably increase to account for over 50 percent of total HBM3E revenues in the second quarter. For NAND, the company plans to actively respond to demand for high-capacity eSSD, while maintaining profitability-first operation with cautious approach for investment.
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SMART Modular has expanded its CXL Offerings with the E3.S 2T 128 GB CMM (Compute Express Link Memory Module) being added to the CXL Consortium’s Integrator List. The E3.S 2T 128 GB CMM utilizes the CXL 2.0 standard, providing a PCIe Gen5 x8 interface and supporting up to 128 GB of DDR5 DRAM. It’s designed to enhance server and datacenter performance by enabling cache-coherent memory expansion, good for HPC, AI, ML, and other data-intensive applications. This complements the existing listing of SMART’s 4-DIMM and 8-DIMM CXL memory Add-in Cards (AICs).
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Data warewhouser Snowflake unveiled research revealing 93 percent of UK businesses are reaping efficiency gains from the adoption of generative AI, outpacing the global average of 88 percent. As many as 98 percent of UK businesses say that they’re training, tuning or otherwise augmenting their LLMs to capitalise on the success of gen AI. Yet just 10 percent of UK businesses have a high level of capability when it comes to using unstructured data for gen AI. Despite this, 93 percent of UK businesses say they plan to increase spending on cloud-based data warehousing solutions over the next 12 months. The “Radical ROI of Generative AI,” research report by Snowflake, in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group, surveyed 1,900 business and IT leaders across nine different countries — all of whom are actively using gen AI for one or more use cases.
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StorONE has announced an expansion of its strategic partnership with Phison Electronics to launch an AI-native, intelligent on-premises storage platform. Available in Q2 2025, the joint system combines StorONE’s platform with Phison’s aiDAPTIV+ memory extension technology to support secure, scalable LLM training and natural language-accessible storage management.
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HDD manufacturer Western Digital, in collaboration with Microsoft, Critical Materials Recycling (CMR) and PedalPoint Recycling, announced that its multi-party pilot program transformed ~50,000 pounds of shredded end-of-life HDDs and other materials into critical rare earth elements (REEs), while reducing environmental impact. HDDs use a range of rare earth elements (REEs) like Neodymium (Nd), Praseodymium (Pr) and Dysprosium (Dy) to help HDDs read and write data. Trad recycling methods recover only a fraction of these aterials, often missing rare earths entirely, leading to unnecessary waste.
This multi-party pilot showcases what WD says is a highly efficient, economically viable system that achieved a ~90 percent high-yield recovery of elemental and rare earth materials that can be used by the US supply chain. The process also extracts metals like gold (Au), copper (Cu), aluminum (Al) and steel, feeding them back into the American supply chain. The environmentally friendly, acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) technology used in this project was invented and initially developed at the Critical Materials Innovation (CMI) Hub. A WD blog discusses this topic.
