AWS is promising more disciplined and cost effective AI data pipelines with new services through its SageMaker and S3 Tables tools that go live today.
As part of its contribution to Pi Day, the cloud giant has announced general availability of SageMaker Unified Studio, which Sirish Chandrasekaran, AWS vp of analytics, told Blocks and Files was a single development environment with an integrated set of services across AWS’s data analytics and AI/ML services.
It pulls together the vendor’s Lakehouse platform, its SageMaker Catalog, “which is the governance layer”, while with “The studio…you can do everything from SQL, analytics, data prep, data integration, model building, generative AI app development, all in one place.”
It has added new models under SageMaker AI, he said, such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Deepseek R1.
“We’ve added capabilities like latency sensitive inferencing for specific models from Anthropic, Meta and Amazon. And we’ve also made it simpler in terms of how you can use Bedrock to both prototype applications but also share them across team members.”
AWS has also announced the ability to access S3 Tables from within SageMaker Lakehouse. “You can now run …. SQL, Spark jobs, model building, Gen AI apps. You can combine your S3 Table data with other data in your Lakehouse, whether it’s in Redshift with what we call native party on S3, on premises and federated sources, all of it you can bring together.”
This would all help companies – or at least those using AWS services – build a better data foundation for their AI projects, he said.
“Our perspective is the way you differentiate is through your data, because every modern business is a data business, and what’s unique to your company is your data.”
“What we’re seeing increasingly with our customers is that … the silos are slowing them down,” he said, because of challenges bringing data into the same place or collaborating between different teams. At the same time, in other organizations, the silos were blurring, he said.
Clearly some companies are rushing to pull data together as they dive into AI. This had led to fears that traditional data management disciplines and skills were being left by the wayside. Chandrasekaran said he was seeing the opposite. “What I’m seeing a lot from companies is that they have this realization now that the way they move faster is by getting back to basics.”
“How we’re reimagining the SageMaker Lakehouse, a lot of it is being able to query data where it is. You do not need to now transfer data from Redshift to S3 or from S3 to Redshift. You can query Lake data from Redshift.”
This reduced duplication, he said. “And that obviously saves costs, same as federated sources.”
At the same time he said, companies were acutely aware of the need for governance, “But I think what’s different about this new world is that governance is no longer just about compliance. It’s about confidence.” That include confidence that AI projects are using and been trained on trusted data, “but also confidence that your AI is adhering to responsible AI use policies.”
IDrive has jacked up its e2 offering, adding object replication and a brace of other enterprise level services.
Customers of the IDrive e2 S3 Compatible Object Storage platform will be able to enable automatic replication of their data across geographies. This will mean critical data will always be available in multiple regions, even when they suffer critical service failures, boosting redundancy and compliance. It also means companies can ensure up to date data is closer to the people who need it, it rather than having to ping its way across regions.
The cloud data firm operates its own datacenters to underpin its backup and data services, and initially targeted home users and small businesses. However, its IDrive e2 service, launched in 2022, is squarely aimed at developers, large organizations and enterprises.
“Replication was a natural step for us,” a spokesman said, “and stacks right up against any of the current incumbents in the object storage market today. Our customers are looking for replication, so we always want to provide e2 customers with what they are needing.”
E2 users also now get Bucket Event Notifications and Bucket Logging.
The former can be used to underpin real-time monitoring, for example, by enabling notifications when new objects are added or removed from a bucket. Likewise, they can be used to build data workflows, such as updating website content when new objects are added.
Bucket Logging will provide deeper insights into how data is access and used. So the firm reckons customers will use it for access control and security auditing, as well as for usage monitoring and, in turn, cost management.
IDrive says its service starts at under 50 bucks per annum for 1TB of capacity. Two years ago it launched an all-flash version of the e2 service.
Toshiba has doubled down on the future of spinning rust by opening an HDD Innovation Lab in Germany.
The Dusseldorf site will expand Toshiba Electronics Europe’s “evaluation” services for customers across Europe and the Middle East for chunkier storage installations where it makes sense to use traditional platter-based drives rather than their trendier, flash-based cousins.
The biggest tech infrastructure projects – the AI factories and datacentres attracting economy destabilizing levels of capital investment – are generally thought of as flash only zones.
But Rainer Kaese, senior manager for HDD business development at Toshiba, said the growing amount of data being stored, including for AI, was too great for flash alone to support. This was partly because of cost – HDD is one seventh of the cost of flash – and partly because: “The flash industry is not be able to manufacture enough capacity to satisfy the growing demand, and still will not be for a significant while.”
He said SSDs had a speed advantage, “Which makes them the best choice for local/server attached working storage”. Capacity requirements here are moderate, he continued, so the high cost of SSD capacity can be “offset” by the performance gain over HDD local storage.
Yet for “big data” capacity requirements in the petabyte range, SSD would be too expensive while the performance premium is not necesary. Not least as many HDDs can be run in parallel.
“We have demonstrated that 60 HDDs in ZFS software defined storage can fill the entire speed of a 100GbE network,” he said.
Meanwhile, HDD costs have remained stable, while capacity has shot up. “There are 100+TB SSDs, but they cost several 10k+ dollars.”
The lab will focus on configuration evaluations for RAID, scale up and scale out storage systems, for enterprise, datacenter and cloud applications. It will also carry out evaluations on smaller “vertical” applications such as Soho NAS and video surveillance, ie. digital video recorder, network video recorder.
Kaese said the lab has single node systems running up to 78 disks, providing up to 2 Petabyte of storage with today’s high-capacity HDDs. “For scale out we are operating a basic CEPH cluster with three nodes and 36 HDDs,” he said, which will be expanded in the future.
The company already operates a smaller lab in Dubai. Its lab programme has hitherto thrown up innovations, he said, such as optimizing the number of HDDs for the highest possible performance.
“[We] found that a typical configuration of four HDDs (ie. in small Soho NAS) can fill the 10GbE networks. 12 HDDs match the 25GbE of Enterprise networks, and 60 HDDs would require high end 100GbE network speed to unleash the full performance of the many combined HDDs.”
Western Digital also pushed more rust into the market this week, aimed squarely at the creative sector.
These include the $8,199.99 208TB G-RAID Shuttle 8 designed for “massive storage and seamless backup consolidation – whether on location or in the studio”. It offers 1700MB/s read and 1500MB/s write in RAID 5. A 104TB device is also available.
It also unwrapped G-Drive Project devices sporting 52TB or 26TB capacities. And it has introduced the 26TB WD Red Pro HDD for NAS environments, priced at $569.99.
The move comes after IBM storage bloggers Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin were widely quoted last month saying “the writing is on the wall for spinning rust.” But then again, it always has been.
Nasuni has hitched its wagon to CrowdStrike, meaning information from the data platform will be picked up and passed through the latter’s Falcon Next-Gen SIEM platform.
According to Nasuni, the integration means users “gain a unified platform to ingest, process and manage syslog messages, enabling seamless search, reporting, dashboards, and alert action.”
A Nasuni spokesperson said this meant “security teams can take appropriate steps to protect the rest of their infrastructure.”
Further interactions between the two firms are on the cards, they added. “We’re moving onto the SOAR [security orchestration, automation, and response] side next to provide automated coordination between the two systems based on this data provided.”
The tie-up will make building workflows spanning the two platforms easier, the spokesperson claimed. “Customers won’t have to teach CrowdStrike how to understand Nasuni events; we have done that work for them.” The idea is that they’ll be able to take action as soon as the event info flows into CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike’s Falcon is probably best known for an update blunder that caused a worldwide crash of Windows computers last year.
The spokesperson was at pains to point out that last year’s outage was due to a flaky software update rather than a cyberattack. “CrowdStrike has implemented many measures to restore trust within their platform, customer base, and the general market.”
CrowdStrike’s SIEM is used by many Nasuni customers, they said. “This integration is designed to help these customers add another layer of protection for their files and make the lives easier for the security teams that are using both CrowdStrike and Nasuni.”
Nasuni has a similar integration with Microsoft’s Sentinel platform and is casting its net further, the spokesperson said. “We are continuing to pursue additional integrations with security tools that our customers use to expand the impact of Nasuni’s security capabilities.”
For its part, Crowdstrike struck an integration deal with Commvault in January.
Last month Nasuni claimed to have over 500 PB of total capacity under management. Its most recent investment round, led by Vista Equity and joined by KKR and TCV, gave it a $1.2 billion valuation.
Pure Storage has opened its arms to white box storage vendors after deciding that servicing the world’s biggest AI rigs is beyond any one storage company.
The all-flash storage pioneer’s FlashBlade//EXA platform, which it unwrapped today, sees the vendor’s inhouse technology focused specifically on handling metadata in hyperscale AI setups.
More mundane storage will be handed off to vanilla kit – although those white boxes could come from Pure itself.
International CTO Alex McMullan said the strategy “reflects a orthogonal change…in terms of making effectively a storage supercomputer for the next iteration of scale.”
Hyperscalers’ AI ambitions are so far-reaching that “the current product simply wasn’t intended to grow to the same size. So we’ve taken that decision to go where we are at this point in time.”
The incredibly expensive, and power hungry, GPUs that hyperscalers and model developers are spending so many dollars on are already struggling to hit 25 percent utilization, he said, because legacy storage architectures weren’t up to the job. Meanwhile, those GPUs are still sucking in the equivalent power of a typical UK household.
“The hyperscalers are trying to save every single watt they can, because every watt they save, they can turn on another GPU,” he said.
These organizations are looking at 50TB per second or better data rates, he added. “We just don’t think that’s going to be doable with our existing architecture.”
Pure’s solution is to take its FlashBlade architecture and use that “as a metadata engine for the next generation storage supercomputer.” That layer will connect to the GPU cluster over NFSv4.1 over TCP. Meta data has emerged as a key bottleneck in AI systems.
Then, he said, “If we start with something that can run a SuperPOD on its own and just use that for metadata, then we should be able to keep up with everything else that sits around it.”
The everything else comes in the shape of software-defined data nodes connecting into the cluster via NFSv3 over RDMA. The metadata engine will then direct the GPU nodes to the data nodes layer.
These could be white boxes, he said, or in time a Pure Storage node. “White boxes just run on Linux kernel with an NFS server,” said McMullan. “They are standard. Vanilla.” The only requirement on the white boxes will be to sustain two 400 GB NICs.
The metadata engine could grow to “hundreds of petabytes if we want it to. Honestly, if the metadata is 100 petabytes, we have a bigger problem on its own.” As well as tackling the GPU utilization problem, the architecture will make it easier to have AI datasets in one place, reducing the impact of fragmentation.
McMullan said the ultimate target was the problems hyperscalers and similar operators were expecting to tackle in two years’ time. “Our existing flash blade is good enough for what’s there today, but some of the new requirements customers are talking about are making us take that pause.”
He said the company had a system in the lab running around 300 nodes delivering roughly 30 TBps.
Some early access beta customers were already in place, with “three or four of those in each of the theaters.” General availability for FlashBlade//EXA is slated for the summer. But Pure itself will have to join the queue for Nvidia certification, McMullan said, which should be signed off in the second half of the year.
McMullan was clear that the product was targeted at a small section of the market, comprised of “AI natives, people are building models, who are tuning models, who are looking at RAG-based capabilities.”
So, effectively hyperscalers and the biggest of AI factories. It could also include some life sciences organizations and some telco customers. And it will likely include some high end government customers.
It’s unlikely that many enterprises will be tyre-kicking these systems though, McMullan said.
“We don’t think there’s a play. Although, given all the things that have happened in the last couple of years in this space, who knows?”
Druva’s relationship with Microsoft has been upgraded to “strategic,” meaning the data security vendor’s tech will be more tightly integrated into Azure.
The firms already work together to provide protection through the “Microsoft ecosystem,” spanning Redmond’s Windows and 365 platforms and “multiple Azure technologies.”
But Stephen Manley, Druva CTO, claimed the new relationship was “vastly different” and “encompasses deeper technical integration with Druva and Microsoft Azure cloud services.”
This will allow customers to “protect and secure cloud and on-premises workloads” and choose Azure as a storage target, the companies say.
The integration, we’re told, will enable “enhanced cyber resilience with cross-cloud protection, unified visibility across data environments, and more comprehensive data security strategies.”
Druva also has a tight relationship with AWS, under which it offers managed storage and security on the AWS platform. Which sounds a lot like the new Microsoft relationship.
Manley was at pains to point out “We’re not ‘porting’ features as much as delivering the same features in a different environment. Each cloud is unique and it requires customized integration to deliver the value and functionality the customers need.”
This means data could be stored on either platform. Manley said this makes it easier for enterprises to manage data and risks, even as new security threats arise and new compliance regimes sprout up.
“If most of their data resides in one cloud, they can use Druva to back it up across clouds. If they want copies of critical on-prem and cloud systems to be stored in both AWS and Azure, they can. If companies have sites in multiple locations, they can choose a separate cloud for each.”
Druva has long been tipped as an IPO candidate, without getting round to filing papers to kick off the process. But being able to run a bigger Azure logo in the future is unlikely to hurt its credibility with potential investors.
Manley insisted Druva’s immediate aim was to build a “long-lasting, durable brand.” And going public? “As we continue to scale, a public market offering could be in the cards, but that isn’t the goal — that’s an outcome driven by our growth.”
The worst excesses of NAND price volatility appear to be coming to an end, as Wall Street analysts throw their weight behind newly independent Sandisk.
According to reports over the weekend, Mizuho tech analyst Jordan Klein sent a note to investors last week saying that Sandisk had told customers it would be jacking up NAND product prices by at least 10 percent from the end of this month.
Apparently, Sandisk has told customers it expects demand to begin outstripping supply, with rising tariffs also feeding into its decision to markup the price list.
No one likes having to pay more for anything. At the same time, a 10 percent price bump would be a more palatable hike than the 30 percent price growth the industry was expecting earlier this year.
We’ve contacted Sandisk and Klein but have yet to hear back from either.
Sandisk only separated from erstwhile parent Western Digital at the end of last month. Over the last couple of weeks a number of other Wall Street analysts have begun coverage of the company with overweight recommendations, implying they believe the stock will outperform. Which in turn suggests they foresee a more predictable pricing environment and are not expecting prices to head south anytime soon.
Trendforce adds that other suppliers had already curbed production due to oversupply.
Philip Kaye, cofounder of Manchester-based datacenter infrastructure supplier Vespertec, said that the market can, at least, expect a lull in NAND price volatility. A post-Covid glut and the war in Ukraine had driven prices to record lows, he said, before giving way to a period of enormous fluctuations.
“Recently, however, the rate of price increases has levelled off to around 5-6 percent, a trend likely to continue into next year barring any external shocks.” Which should be reassuring. If you haven’t come to the conclusion that in the future, “external shocks” are the new normal.
SK Hynix will complete its $9 billion takeover of Intel’s NAND memory business in the coming weeks, setting the seal on the stumbling US giant’s exit from the flash business.
The news emerged as US president Donald Trump pontificated on the fate of Intel, declaring that its CEOs post Andy Grove (who vacated the role in 1998) had lost direction and allowed Taiwan to “steal” the chip business from the US.
Korean outlets reported this weekend that SK Hynix was poised to hand over the last $2.24 billion of the $9 billion price tag set on the business in 2020. The deal includes the unit’s Dalian China NAND business, which became part of SK Hynix. The SSD division became a separate subsidiary dubbed Solidigm.
The first phase of the sale saw SK Hynix take over the Dalian factory and the SSD operation, but not all the relevant intellectual property. The conclusion of the deal was slated for some time after March 2025.
With the final part of the payment made, SK Hynix will gain full control of the manufacturing IP and R&D at the Dalian unit. The buy will leave SK Hynix in a much stronger position against industry giant Samsung.
Meanwhile, SK Hynix is exiting the image sensor market to concentrate on AI focused memory, according to reports over the weekend. It is a key supplier of high bandwidth memory to GPU giant Nvidia.
As for Intel, the conclusion of the divestment represents another stage in its ongoing shrinkage. When it comes to flash, Intel had already shuttered its Optane memory business that was designed to offer faster data access than traditional SSDs. Optane was also pitched as being cheaper than DRAM but with slower access speed.
With the world of politics and technology interwoven these days, Donald Trump last week took time out from cutting intel-sharing with Ukraine to lambast Intel’s leadership since the CEO-ship of co-founder Andy Grove.
In a White House press conference centered on a $100 billion TSMC investment in the US, Trump repeated his previous claims that Taiwan “stole” the chip industry from its pioneers in the US. But he didn’t blame Taiwan for this. Rather, he said, he fingered previous incumbents of the White House for allowing that to happen.
As for Intel, he said, the company had lost its way after the Grove era. Trump described Grove, whose autobiography was titled “Only the Paranoid Survive” as a “tough smart guy” adding “I used to read about him when I was a young man.”
“He did an incredible job, he really dominated the chip businesses, and then he died and I guess they had a series of people that didn’t know what the hell they were doing and we gradually lost the chip business and now it’s almost exclusively in Taiwan.”
TSMC has pledged to build five plants in Arizona. There will be no government funding involved, and Trump took the opportunity to disparage predecessor Joe Biden’s plans to boost US chip manufacturing through subsidies. Trump claimed TSMC’s decision was a result of its fears over his plans to impose tariffs on pretty much everyone.
Kubernetes app data protector CloudCasa has integrated with SUSE Rancher Prime via a new Rancher Prime Extension. Users can install CloudCasa agents and manage and monitor backups directly from the Rancher Prime UI. They get multi-cluster management across clouds and on-premises, a single pane of glass for VM and container management, migration across any Kubernetes distribution, and “enterprise-grade security, compliance, and governance.”
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Flexera announced that the Spot acquisition from NetApp is complete and “now has the most comprehensive FinOps offering in the market,” which “empowers organizations and MSPs to manage cloud financial commitments, automate billing and invoicing, reduce workload costs, and optimize containers.”
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GPU RAID card startup Graid has raised $30 million in a Series B, bring its total funding to around $50 million. The round was led by HH-CTBC Partnership, a joint venture fund between Foxconn and CTBC, alongside Yuanta Ventures, and included participation from Delta Electronics Capital, Harbinger Venture Capital, and returning investors from Graid Technology’s 2022 Series A round. Graid will use the cash for “global expansion, product innovation, and strategic partnerships, strengthening Graid Technology’s presence in enterprise and OEM markets while meeting growing demand for AI, machine learning, and high-performance computing workloads.”
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Data orchestrator Hammerspace has partnered with Yition.ai, a Chinese company aiming to democratize AI. Yition is little known outside China. Hammerspace says Yition has “cost-effective and scalable AI storage” offerings. The integration with Hammerspace will add “the high-performance data path to power large-scale compute clusters efficiently, the data orchestration to unify data sources, and standards-based approach to use the compute, storage, and networking infrastructure of the customer’s choice.”
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HarperDB is rebranding as Harper, “removing the database notation from its corporate name and identity. This simplified name, new brand identity, and redesigned website reflects the company’s evolution from a database vendor focused on performance, to a full stack application delivery platform that enables data architects and development teams to transform the economics of their organization through the accelerated speed and scale of data-intense workloads.”
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Huawei’s Dr Peter Zhou, president of its Data Storage Product Line, said at MWC 2025 Barcelona that its “AI-Ready data lake breaks data silos, making data visible, manageable, and available.” Its “Data Storage provides the AI-Ready data lake solution, diverse data storage services, and the FlashEver business model, empowering carriers to turn their disordered data into high-quality assets to unlock the value of data.” Huawei has launched the “New-Gen OceanStor Dorado Converged All-Flash Storage and OceanStor A Series High-Performance AI Storage. These solutions boast 100 million-level IOPS, financial-grade reliability, and efficient AI training and inference, supporting tens of billions of daily charging services and robust mobile financial services.” The New-Gen OceanStor Pacific All-Flash Scale-Out Storage provides industry high density and low power consumption with exabyte-level scalability.
“Another new offering is the New-Gen OceanProtect All-Flash Backup Storage for data protection. The storage offers five times faster data recovery than industry alternatives. The Huawei DCS AI Solution provides a one-stop AI full-process toolchain and containerized environment, accelerating fine-tuning and large-scale deployment of AI models. The FlashEver business model provides an evolutionary, flexible architecture to enable seamless upgrades for live-network equipment.”
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Public cloud backup storage service supplier Keepit announced the publication of its new report, “Intelligent data governance: Why taking control of your data is key for operational continuity and innovation,”which “covers the foundational importance of data control in the age of AI, with a focus on ensuring modern enterprises’ cyber resilience and compliance.” The “report finds that data governance is a key tool when striving to stay compliant as regulations such as NIS2, DORA, and GDPR are impacting organizations.” Download the report here.
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Lightbits says a “massive online retailer, with multimillions of products in as many different categories, powers its eCommerce business with the Lightbits fast and flexible cloud data platform.” The multibillion-dollar company commands the largest share of the market in their region. The platform currently services millions of registered users, millions of daily visits, and delivers millions of shipments per month – and those numbers are increasing rapidly. “The Lightbits Cloud Data Platform forms the ideal combination to provide disaggregated, and composable storage and integrate natively with their Kubernetes environments.”
“The implementation consists of tens of clusters of 16 dual instance, high-performance nodes per datacenter – two instances of Lightbits are run on the same physical machine. This allows Lightbits to get 25-30 percent higher performance out of a single machine. Each Lightbits node consists of Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V2 servers with high-performance Intel 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable Processors, Intel Optane Pmem, and Intel Ethernet Adapters, and Micron NVMe SSDs. This implementation schema delivers performance and data replication advantages. This organization can leverage different replication scenarios for different workloads.”
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Micron has enhanced its LPDDR5X memory with error correction code for the automotive market. The “LPDDR5X-optimized error correction code (ECC) scheme mitigates all system in-line ECC penalties delivering a 15 to 25 percent bandwidth increase. This new LPDDR5X-optimized ECC scheme, called direct link ECC protocol (DLEP), not only delivers increased performance but also helps LPDDR5X memory systems achieve the ISO 26262 ASIL-D hardware metric through reduced failures in time (FIT).” It “delivers approximately 10 percent lower power consumption on a pJ/b (picojoule-per-bit) perspective and a minimum 6 percent additional addressable memory space.”
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Micron announced the world’s first G9-based UFS 4.1 and UFS 3.1 mobile storage products to accelerate AI on smartphones. The UFS 4.1 offering provides proprietary firmware features for flagship smartphones such as zoned UFS, data defragmentation, a pinned writebooster, and intelligent latency tracker. More information here.
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Nexla has enhanced its Integration Platform, “expanding its no-code integration, RAG pipeline engineering, and data governance capabilities.” You can “integrate any data, create AI-ready data products, and deliver GenAI projects without coding, and up to 10x faster than the alternatives.” Nexla uses AI to connect, extract metadata, and transform source data into human-readable data products, called Nexsets, that enable data reuse and governance. Its agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework lets companies implement RAG for agents and assistants without coding, and uses LLMs during each stage to improve accuracy. For example, Nexla can get context from multiple data products, use a unique algorithm to rank, prioritize, and eliminate data, and then combine the context with a rewritten query and submit it to just about any LLM.
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OpenDrives CEO Sean Lee has reorganized the company to form two leadership teams, largely promoting existing execs. The Corporate Leadership Team (CLT) oversees overall company strategy and shareholder value, and the Senior Management Team (SMT) drives day-to-day operations and execution. Stefan Grycz joined OpenDrives as director of sales in January 2025. Joel Whitley, partner at IAG Capital Partners, said: “As lead investor, IAG is fully committed to driving OpenDrives’ success. We are confident that this leadership team will enable OpenDrives to continue its growth and out-innovate the competition. The OpenDrives software platform is poised to change how M&E and DevOps engage with data and storage in ways no one else can.”
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Phison announced that its PCIe Gen4x4 PS5022 controller, designed for automotive applications, has become the world’s first SSD controller to receive ISO 26262 ASIL-B compliance certification. This ensures that electronic components within a vehicle can detect random failures in real-time and can transition into a safe state to support impact prevention for driving safety.
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Data integrity supplier Precisely has a DataLink partner program to streamline the integration of the Precisely data portfolio with data from trusted providers via pre-linked datasets. Inaugural partners include Precisely, GeoX Analytics, Overture Maps Foundation, and Regrid, with additional partners coming soon. The “Data Link program transforms the traditionally complex and time-consuming process of mapping disparate third-party datasets into a seamless customer experience. Organizations no longer need to stitch together data from multiple vendors, navigate complex integrations, or evaluate dozens of disconnected datasets.”
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Vector database supplier Qdrant has updated its Qdrant Cloud with “single sign-on (SSO), cloud role-based access control (RBAC), granular database API keys for granular RBAC, advanced monitoring and observability with Prometheus/OpenMetrics to connect external monitoring systems, and a cloud API for seamless automation.” Learn more here.
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The Qumulo Cloud Data Fabric is available now with Qumulo 7.4.1 and “enables organizations to make any data, in any location, instantly available with total control. Customers can create data portals in under 10 seconds that enable remote users to connect to and access data anywhere in the world, as if it were local. Predictive Caching enhancements improve application performance up to 2X compared to existing solutions by inspecting data access patterns and prefetching data into the cache before a client requests it.” Customers can “Read and Write data with strict data consistency across the Cloud Data Fabric, instantly, with assured data and application correctness.” Also, “loading only folder and file metadata at the remote site improves application responsiveness while preserving WAN bandwidth.”
It’s available globally through major IT infrastructure resellers and system vendors, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Supermicro, distributors, and most major public clouds, with prepay and pay-as-you-go options. Pricing is based on the data stored and shared across Qumulo’s data core infrastructure. Learn more here.
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Qumulo has partnered with large file transfer business MASV to create a high-performance, enterprise-grade data ingest and access pipeline enabling seamless petabyte-scale data ingest into Cloud Native Qumulo (CNQ). This supports large-scale AI model training and data analytics with scalable cloud-native infrastructure. Find out more here.
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Application HA and DR supplier SIOS announced that SIOS LifeKeeper and SIOS DataKeeper clustering software have been validated for use with Cimcor’s cybersecurity offering, the CimTrak Integrity Suite. This allows Cimcor customers to “seamlessly integrate high availability and disaster recovery into their CimTrak environments, ensuring continuous protection against cyber threats and minimizing downtime in critical cybersecurity operations.”
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View Systems, in collaboration with Alpha3 Cloud, announced the launch of Managed View AI, a comprehensive turnkey GenAI platform designed for enterprises and government organizations that need AI-driven insights while retaining full control of their data. “We are pleased to work with Alpha3, Ampere and other AI Platform Alliance members to advance enterprise AI deployment standards and practices while enabling deeper integration of our technologies,” said Keith Barto, chief product and revenue officer at View Systems. “Managed View AI allows organizations to deploy AI workloads with confidence and optimize their deployment based on specific workload requirements, with options to add GPU or other accelerator support as needed.”
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ReRAM developer Weebit Nano has a partnership with ultra-low-power AI computing business Embedded AI Systems (EMASS). The EMASS SoC “delivers unparalleled energy efficiency and cost advantages, with best-in-class AI capacity.” Weebit ReRAM “delivers lower power, faster read and write speeds, and cost advantages compared to traditional non-volatile memory (NVMe) technologies like flash.” The combined system “can deliver new levels of performance and power efficiency for edge AI.” Attendees at the embedded world 2025 Conference & Exhibition can see a live demonstration of the integrated technologies.
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Software RAID supplier Xinnor has partnered with Advanced HPC to implement an improved backup and restore system for a US federal agency focused on scientific research. The agency sought to address performance bottlenecks and enhance data throughput to its Spectra Logic T950 tape library and now uses a system using Xinnor’s xiRAID with 12x 30 TB and 2x 6.4 TB Gen 4 NVMe SSDs “to meet the agency’s needs for high-speed read and write capabilities, seamless integration with existing infrastructure, and scalability for future growth.” Read the case study here.
Agentic AI is coming to startup Weaviate as it develops three agents to perform tasks using its open-source vector database.
The Weaviate agents use large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on its APIs to perform tasks in the Weaviate vector database environment. The LLM pre-training makes them “experts in performing Weaviate-specific data tasks based on natural language commands.” Three agents are being launched in preview mode this month.
Alvin Richards
Weaviate VP of Product Alvin Richards stated: “Weaviate’s development tools come with batteries included. By unifying data management, agentic workflows and vector storage and search on our enterprise-class infrastructure, we empower development teams to quickly create applications that bring intelligent AI to the masses.”
The first one, the Query Agent, accepts queries in natural language, decides which data in Weaviate is relevant, formulates the necessary searches, retrieves the data, correlates and ranks the answers, and then returns the results. It can chain commands together, taking the results of a previous query and extending it with a new prompt. This Query Agent can simplify complex query workflows and accelerate Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.
The company says the Transformation Agent can, based on the natural language instructions passed to it, automatically update data, create new properties, add new data, and more. This agent, according to Weaviate, can be used for cleaning and organizing raw data for AI, generating and enriching metadata, automatically categorizing, labeling and preprocessing data, or translating an entire dataset.
The Personalization Agent “can go beyond static, rules-based recommendations and deliver smart, LLM-based personalization on the fly,” making “it easy to curate search results tailored to each user’s preferences and interactions.” We’re told it can “be used in conjunction with Weaviate Query and Transformation Agents to deliver hyper-personalized user experiences in real-time.”
Bob van Luijt
Weaviate Agents will become available in Weaviate Cloud as they are released, including the free Developer Sandbox. Query Agent is available now, and Transformation and Personalization Agents are coming later this month.
Bob van Luijt, Weaviate CEO and co-founder, said: “Vector embeddings have been at the core of AI’s development—from early deep learning models to transformers and today’s large language models. What started as a linear process—data to vector, to database, to model, to results—evolved into dynamic feedback loops, giving rise to agentic architectures. This milestone is a natural next step in a journey we saw beginning a decade ago. … And what’s most exciting is that this is just the beginning.”
Cyber-resilience dominates the latest Rubrik features, with a dozen new protection points in its latest rollout that it says will help detect, repel, and recover from cyberattacks.
The company is moving its protection product line across more environments, including the public cloud, SaaS and on-prem apps, and enhancing its ability to detect threats and verify user identities.
Arvind Nithrakashyap, Rubrik CTO and co-founder, stated: “We are seamlessly integrating new technologies across the world’s major cloud platforms, SaaS offerings, and on-premises so our customers can better detect compromised data, enhance the speed of identifying affected data, and accelerate the discovery of clean entry points.”
The new capabilities in the public cloud include:
Cloud Posture Risk Management (CPR), which automatically discovers and inventories cloud data assets, identifying unprotected or sensitive data en route.
Oracle Cloud Protection: Rubrik Security Cloud (RSC) will support data protection for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) beginning with Oracle databases and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS).
Azure DevOps and GitHub Backup: Rubrik now protects Azure DevOps and GitHub with automated backups, granular recovery, extended retention, and compliance coverage.
Rubrik Cloud Vault (RCV) for AWS provides a secure off-site archival location, with flexible policies and/or regions, and immutable, isolated, logically air-gapped off-site backups, role-based access controls, encryption, and retention locks.
The SaaS area has two items, enhanced protection for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Sandbox Seeding for Salesforce, which is planned for later this year. Users can select objects and records depending on specific criteria to prevent seeding errors by analyzing data selection size versus destination size availability before moving data to the sandbox environment. Users will be able to save queries for future repetitive use.
The on-prem world gets Identity Recovery across Entra ID and Active Directory (AD). It includes orchestrated Active Directory Forest Recovery to restore entire identity environments without reintroducing malware or misconfigurations.
Rubrik now protects PostgreSQL with data backup, availability, and recoverability. It has also added Red Hat OpenShift support with automated, and immutable backups and fast recovery.
The company has extended its anti-malware functionality:
New security features for Azure and AWS, which use machine learning and automation, include Anomaly Detection, Data Discovery, and Classification, and soon, Threat Hunting and Threat Monitoring. They are all designed to work together “to proactively detect and mitigate cyber threats, accelerate recovery, and ensure sensitive data remains protected and compliant.”
Rubrik is planning to extend its Orchestrated Recovery capabilities to the cloud beginning with Azure VM and featuring automated recovery sequences, regular test recovery scheduling, and recovery reports to reduce human error.
Turbo Threat Hunting scans at scale by using pre-computed hashes in Rubrik’s metadata, with no need for file-by-file scanning. It claims clean recovery points can be found in seconds. Testing found Turbo Threat Hunting scans 75,000 backups in up to 60 seconds.
Enterprise Edition for Microsoft 365 is covered with Sensitive Data Discovery, to identify and protect high-risk data before an attack happens, and Prioritized Recovery, which restores critical data first. Coming soon are Anomaly Detection, Threat Monitoring, Threat Hunting, and Self-Service Recovery capabilities.
Nithrakashyap says: “Cybercriminals won’t stop innovating, and neither will we. Our utmost priority is the security, safety, and appropriate accessibility of our customers’ data, regardless of where the data lives.”
As long as cybercriminals invent new methods and attacks, Rubrik can respond with new features to keep its subscription-paying customers feeling safe and ready to repel attacks.
Bootnote
Rubrik itself suffered a security intrusion last month. A February note by Nithrakashyap says the company “recently discovered anomalous activity on a server that contained log files.” It took the server offline. “An unauthorized actor accessed a small number of log files, most of which contained non-sensitive information. One file contained some limited access information … We have rotated keys to mitigate any residual risk, even though we found no evidence that access information was misused.”
He emphasizes that “after a detailed analysis with the third party partner, we have found no evidence of unauthorized access to any data we secure on behalf of our customers or our internal code.”
PEAK:AIO has a new 2RU 1.5 PB AI Data Server product, using Dell hardware, that ships data at 120 GBps.
PEAK:AIO is an AI-focused UK storage startup that supplies software-defined storage on third-party hardware, which it manages and controls closely to cut latency and increase throughput. Its 2RU servers have been delivering 40 GBps to mid-size GPU clusters, using NFS and NVMe-oF, and can now go three times faster.
Mark Klarzynski
The new hardware incorporates Solidigm’s 61.44 TB QLC SSDs and data is pumped across Nvidia’s CX7 Ethernet NICs. PEAK:AIO says specialized fields such as healthcare and research need pretty much the same high-speed GenAI model capabilities as those produced by massive datacenter infrastructure systems. It says its systems are less costly but still very fast and energy-efficient. PEAK says it has a new NVMe software stack that “eliminates legacy Linux bottlenecks” to provide better performance for data-intensive AI apps.
Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Mark Klarzynski stated: ”Our approach addresses both ends of the AI infrastructure spectrum. For smaller, innovative projects, this 2U solution delivers unmatched performance and energy efficiency in a compact form. For large-scale deployments, it becomes the foundation of a new generation of scale-out file systems, purpose-built to meet the energy and performance demands of modern GPUs.”
The CX7 requires a PCIe Gen 5 bus and it maxes out at 50 GBps. We understand that Dell’s PowerEdge R7625 rack server has a 2RU chassis and supports up to eight PCIe gen5 slots. Three single-port CX7s, each using a PCIe gen5 x 16 lane slot, will deliver 120 GBps. The R760 supports up to 24 NVMe SSDs, and filling these slots with the 61.44 TB Solidigm SSDs produces 1.5 PB of raw capacity.
Klarzynski tells us: “Dell Technologies validated Solidigm’s 61TB NVMe drives and NVIDIA’s 400Gb crypto interfaces within the R7625 exclusively for us, outpacing the mainstream 15TB solutions. … This move highlights our scale and global ambitions. Our 2U AI Data Server (1.5PB, 120GB/sec) sets a new industry benchmark for efficiency.”
The AI Data Server can be connected directly to an Nvidia GPU server for small or new-start projects, with a switch being added to hook it up to multiple GPU servers, up to 10 of them. The data servers can be scaled out to support more GPUs.
Dell PowerEdge R7625
PEAK says it enjoyed 400 percent growth in 2023 and 2024, much in the USA, and plans to launch a new range of products later this year to complement its new AI Data Server that will, “with Dell Technologies’ backing … disrupt energy, cooling, and density challenges.” It also has an upcoming line-rate cryptographic offload capability integrated with the CX7.
