Intel builds 4-socket servers with 12TB Optane DIMMs to aid virtual machine expansion
Intel thinks servers will require greater Optane DIMM memory capacity to enable them to run more virtual machines. And it expects systems with this capacity to enter the market...
WD keeps fast flash Optane substitute in the wings
Western Digital is developing lower latency flash drives that are faster and more expensive than ordinary 3D NAND but slower and cheaper than DRAM.
The technology addresses the same market...
The Optane Persistent Memory mystery. Can it last the course?
When Intel announced Optane memory technology in July 2015 it claimed endurance was 1,000 times greater than NAND, At the time this was taken to mean NAND endurance limitations were eliminated.
Since...
What will Dell EMC’s unified mid-range storage box look like? Let’s not find out…
Blocks & Files tested out some ideas about Dell EMC’s upcoming unified mid-range storage box, the PowerTo-be-decided, with Dell EMC and got precisely nowhere.
I thought I would be clever...
Mid-range confusion crimps Dell EMC storage revenues
Dell EMC this week posted its fourth consecutive quarter of storage growth and anticipates a revenue boost from the upcoming unified mid-range array.
Revenues for Dell Technologies in the fourth...
Infinidat girds up loins for NVMe fabrics and storage-class memory
Infinidat's performance-boosting software upgrade, announced this week, will help the company add NVMe fabric links and storage-class memory to iInfinibox arrays.
InfiniBox 4.0.40 adds SMB support, better protection with snapshot...
VAST Data: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the hard drives
VAST Data wants to direct an extinction event for hard drives.
This is a bold ambition but VAST Data is a remarkable startup, certainly in the scope of its claims...
VAST striping and data protection
The way data is written and erasure coded is crucial to VAST’s data protection capabilities and centres on striping.
Suppose a QLC drive fails. Its data contents have to be...
VAST Data’s business sitrep
VAST Data was founded in 2016 by CEO Renen Hallak, an ex-VP for R&D at XtremIO and its first engineer. Some time before that he worked on computer science...
VAST Data’s Universal filesystem
The VAST Data system employs a Universal Storage filesystem. This has a DASE (Disaggregated Shared Everything) datastore which is a byte-granular, thin-provisioned, sharded, and has an infinitely-scalable global namespace.
It...
VAST decouples compute and storage
Separate scaling of compute and data is central to VAST’s performance claims. Here is a top-level explanation of how it is achieved.
In VAST’s scheme there are compute nodes and...
Cascade Lake AP, Optane persistent memory and endurance
Intel's new Cascade Lake AP processor supports Optane memory but the company is not revealing details about endurance. This raises doubts about its real world use.
The AP (Advanced Processor)...