Recent Posts

• Scale-out NAS bounces back to fight for unstructured data against object storage

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 11 Nov 2019

There’s a scrap breaking out between object storage and scale-out NAS. The battleground is the market for customers that need to deal with very large amounts of unstructured data. In October, ...

• IBM supercharges scale-out NAS with NVMe in Elastic Storage 3000

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 04 Nov 2019

Product development in storage often feels like a bolting together of existing categories of product. You take one advance from here and mate it with another from over there. Getting the timing ...

• Cloudian sees S3 interest and object storage going mainstream

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 30 Oct 2019

Object storage, based on Amazon’s S3 – pretty much a de facto standard now – is set to go mainstream. That’s the view of Cloudian’s co-founder and CEO Michael Tso. He says it’ll be, “The next NFS”, ...

• Commvault’s Hedvig throw of the dice

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 11 Sep 2019

Commvault’s $225 million purchase of software-defined storage maker Hedvig looks like a rational move given the way the backup market is changing. But it also looks like a massive and potentially ...

• StorOne's $799 per month storage array leasing offer: How does it stack up?

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 09 Jul 2019

Looking at the promise from StorOne to offer its software-defined storage for $799 a month – that’s about £640 – for 15TB of file, block or object storage capacity, I thought I’d compare it with ...

• Storj: Can uberization of cloud storage succeed?

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 12 Nov 2018

On the face of it, cloud storage should be an ideal candidate for an “excess capacity”, “sharing economy” business model. Otherwise termed “Uberization”, we’ve seen the rise of apps and services ...

• IBM and Red Hat: Inspired or desperate? And a difficult journey ahead

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 06 Nov 2018

IBM’s proposed $34 billion purchase of Red Hat looks like a good idea for both sides. But is the proposed coming together borne of inspiration, or desperation? In other words, were the two ...

• Tape’s got a future but are use cases narrowing in the age of analytics?

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 24 Sep 2018

The headline grabbers in storage are usually the quick – flash, NVMe etc – or the harbingers of the next generation, such as the cloud. But in some ways these are the extremes, the outliers. In ...

• Scality gets $60m but keeps quiet about what it’ll spend it on

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 25 Apr 2018

French object storage specialist Scality recently raised $60m of funding, but what will that money go towards? The company – most well-known for its RING object storage product – is in the middle ...

• Microsoft revives MAID with Pelican, but tape can still sleep easy

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 18 Apr 2018

A decade ago storage journalists were quite keen on a new technology around at the time. That was MAID – Massive Array of Idle Disks – which were basically disk-based backup target devices with ...

• Is HTTP doomed? Could blockchain help replace the Internet as we know it?

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 11 Apr 2018

Tim Berners-Lee is rightly famous as the originator of HTTP, a fundamental of the World Wide Web as we know it. But according to some, HTTP is old hat. It has helped create a web full of dead ...

• FileShadow shows hybrid cloud push evident at SME and prosumer level

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 28 Mar 2018

There’s a drive towards hybrid cloud evident at the moment. From hyper-converged products that offer cloud capability to single namespace file and object systems that allow seamless working between ...

• File locking and workload limitations in Cloudian hybrid cloud storage

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 15 Mar 2018

Hybrid cloud has had a boost recently with the emergence of file/object environments that allow customers to operate a single namespace between on-premise and public cloud locations. One of the ...

• Cloud on the rise as hybrid cloud storage shows real maturity

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 05 Feb 2018

This year’s storage news so far has provided a firm impression of the increasing prominence of the cloud, and in particular of attempts to harness the public cloud and private datacentre in hybrid ...

• Microsoft purchase of Avere marks a hybrid cloud-y start to 2018

  Antony Adshead - Computer Weekly 22 Jan 2018

Microsoft’s acquisition of Avere for an undisclosed sum, announced at the beginning of the year, marks the swallowing of an always-interesting storage player and a significant move for Microsoft ...