March 5th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Seagate Ships Third-Generation SSHDs
Seagate announced that its third-generation of solid state hybrid drives (SSHD), drives with technology designed to take advantage of the performance of SSDs without sacrificing the capacity users expect from HDDs, will begin shipping. Seagate is currently the only brand offering SSHDs, though it is worth noting that Toshiba and Western Digital have them in development. Seagate's new models include a third-generation line of their laptop SSHDs and Seagate's first desktop version as well. The SSHDs are an economical choice for gamers, media enthusiasts, and users looking to gain a performance edge while still having high-capacity drives.
March 5th, 2013 by Brian Beeler
EMC Adds Family of PCIe Flash Cards, Consolidates Flash Products Under Xtrem Brand
EMC has consolidated their array of flash offerings under new branding, Xtrem. The EMC Xtrem family incorporates three core offerings. XtremSF (server flash) includes PCIe application accelerators, XtremSW (software) includes caching solutions, formerly referred to as VFcache, and XtremIO, the all flash array formally referred to as Project X and part of the XtremIO acquisition. As part of today's announcement, EMC has revealed that they have expanded their line of XtremSF cards, adding three MLC-based offerings to the mix. Also, their XtemIO flash array is now entering directed availability with general availability expected later this year.
March 4th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Violin Memory and Toshiba Announce Strategic Alliance, Adds Velocity PCIe Storage
Violin Memory and NAND leader Toshiba announced an expanded alliance that has led to the launch of the currently available Violin Velocity PCIe cards. By virtue of this concentrated alliance, Violin has gained access to Toshiba's supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, and R&D. Both companies will be sharing their enterprise intellectual property (IP) to develop future products. Toshiba has a lot to offer as the owner of a third of the NAND market, while Violin has been developing and producing enterprise-class flash-based storage to meet the high-performance demands of businesses.
March 1st, 2013 by Brian Beeler
Consumer SSD Market Finally Consolidating - Patriot Memory Phasing Out
The consumer SSD market has for a long time been very much the wild west of technology expansionism. In the early days, everyone wanted in. Western Digital even dabbled in the space for a brief period, albeit with a controller that was more suited for USB than SSD. The former memory and overclocking companies immediately found a home with SSDs, most of them put into business by SandForce. SandForce did more to perpetuate the explosion of consumer SSDs than anyone by providing a reference design and firmware stack. Anyone could take the drive to manufacture, apply a drive sticker and immediately be in the SSD business. While early adopting consumers flocked to the promise of solid state speed, the road was full of bumps.
February 27th, 2013 by Josh Linden
CA Technologies ARCserve Adds Replication and Virtualization Capabilities
CA Technologies has announced enhancements to its ARCserve r16.5 data protection solution that add replication and virtualization capabilities designed for small and medium businesses as well as service providers seeking to quickly build or add to their data protection portfolios. This release is intended to compliment enhancements announced in October 2012 to ARCserv’s non-disruptive bare metal recovery failback capabilities and integration with CA Nimsoft.
February 27th, 2013 by Lyle Smith
OnApp Cloud v3.0 Now Available
OnApp has announced the general availability of OnApp Cloud v3.0, its latest version of cloud platform for service providers. With its integrated SAN, global CDN, and new support for VMware clouds, the OnApp Cloud v3.0 reduces costs needed to build cloud services. It also offers new methods for cloud providers to generate revenue by selling a broader range of services through their core cloud platform.
February 26th, 2013 by Josh Linden
Micron P410m SAS Enterprise SSDs Released
The P410m is the first Micron SAS SSD to leverage the company’s 25nm MLC NAND flash technology and Micron’s Extended Performance and Enhanced Reliability Technology (XPERT) platform. The P410m is shares most of its architecture with Micron’s P400m, a 2.5-inch 7mm SATA SSD that that proved itself a competent mainstream enterprise SSD in StorageReview’s recent benchmarks.
February 26th, 2013 by Brian Beeler
EMC VMAX Cloud Edition Announced
EMC has launched VMAX Cloud Edition, an update to the previously announced VMAX SP. While SP was targeted to service providers, EMC found enterprises and others who provide IT as a service, be it for internal or external clients. The VMAX Cloud Edition is more encompassing and serves the storage needs for anyone who needs to provision application storage in a self-service model. VMAX Cloud Edition promises to bring enterprise-grade storage with a simple deployment model that includes a self-service portal, pre-configured service level catalog, metering and chargeback reporting and APIs to enable connectivity with other business application needs.
February 25th, 2013 by Josh Linden
CommVault Simpana 10 Data Management Platform Now Available
The Simpana platform is comprised of individually-licensed modules to Analyze, Replicate, Protect, Archive, and Search data across an enterprise and across devices and locations by leveraging a consolidated virtual ContentStore pool. The arrival of Simpana 10 brings more than 300 new features to reduce risk, administrative overhead, and support costs. According to CommVault, Simpana 10’s new grid-based architecture and parallel deduplication doubles the platform's potential performance and scale.
Read moreFebruary 23rd, 2013 by Josh Linden
Barracuda and Drobo Announce Drobo 5N Integration with Barracuda’s Copy
Barracuda and Drobo have announced a joint endeavor to offer a Drobo 5N client for Barracuda’s Copy cloud storage platform. The Drobo 5N is a NAS appliance for small office environments and prosumer applications such as photography, video, and other types of digital content creation. The Copy client will allow 5N users to designate shared files that will be synchronized and accessible over the internet.
The Buffalo DriveStation DDR is a USB 3.0 external storage device for both PCs and Macs that features 2TB and 3TB capacities and is designed to deliver greater performance than standard external drives by offering an additional 1GB cache for accelerated transfer speeds. The DriveStation DDR also includes the Buffalo Tools software suite for Windows which is designed to boost performance and enable users to backup their content and manage their device effectively. Additionally, DriveStation DDR is compatible with Time Machine and users can use Time Machine with DriveStation Axis to back up Macs.
The Samsung SSD 840 is an entry-level consumer SSD and is the first to be made with TLC (Triple Level Cell) NAND. This differs from the MLC (Multi Level Cell) NAND used in every other consumer SSD. Up to this point, TLC NAND has only been used in less critical applications like USB thumb drives and memory cards, but its acceptance in the SSD space is emerging in large part because of the reduced cost of the NAND packages. Of course the tradeoff for the lowered price-point is endurance, but as consumers are coming to accept, most of them really don't write all that much data to their drives. The Samsung SSD 840 is built off of the same platform as the Samsung SSD 840 Pro with the Samsung MDX triple-core ARM 9 controller which is clocked at 300MHz and leverages Samsung's NAND and proprietary firmware.
The Unitrends Recovery-943 Backup Appliance has 97TB of raw capacity and robust connectivity options, and it incorporates standard features found on existing Unitrends Recovery appliances such as backup, archiving, instant recovery, and disaster recovery functionality. In the past, these recovery appliances have been configured and marketed to small and medium businesses. These smaller organizations face complex backup requirements and don't have the dedicated resources and expertise needed to apply multi-platform backup-administration and as such have been Unitrends target-market. The Recovery-943 is however a step-up from previous Unitrends options with three times the storage capacity of its predecessor and the ability to scale the functionality of the Unitrends RecoveryOS to the enterprise market.
The OWC Envoy Pro EX is a USB 3.0 bus-powered portable storage device that offers capacities up to 480GB and is pre-formatted and primarily designed for Apple systems, though PC users can reformat and use the drive as well. The OWC Envoy Pro is the bare unit, while the EX models add SSD storage using 
HP has been going through a transformation recently when it comes to the 
The WD My Passport Ultra, announced today, is a USB 3.0 portable storage device with capacities from 500GB up to 2TB that features local and cloud backups. The My Passport Ultra includes software for automatic backups to the host system or to the My Passport Ultra as well as the ability to use Dropbox to backup to the cloud. The Ultra, WD's latest My Passport iteration, also enables users to setup password protection and hardware encryption to keep data stored on the device secure from unauthorized access. Cosmetically-focused, the WD My Passport Ultra is available in four different colors (titanium, red, blue and black).
