Spectacular Cash Generator Sandisk Generates Spectacular Pile of Dollars
Sandisk smashed its $4.8 billion outlook for Q3 FY2026, posting $5.95 billion in revenue—a 251% year‑over‑year surge driven by NAND price spikes and data‑center demand. GAAP net income rebounded to $3.62 billion from a $1.93 billion loss, while gross margin jumped to 78.4%. The company announced a $6 billion share‑repurchase plan and declared a debt‑free balance sheet. New multi‑year “New Business Model” contracts lock in roughly $42 billion of future revenue, underscoring a shift toward higher‑margin, less‑cyclical markets.
AI Demand Drives WD Revenue’s Sky High with More to Come
Western Digital (WD) reported Q3 FY2026 revenue of $3.34 billion, a 46% year‑over‑year increase, driven by surging AI‑related storage demand. Gross margin rose above 50% and operating cash flow jumped to $1.12 billion, while the company lifted its quarterly dividend 20% to...
Commvault Beats Guidance as Revenue Growth Slows
Commvault reported Q4 FY2026 revenue of $312 million, up 13% year‑on‑year and ahead of its guidance, while GAAP profit fell 51% to $15 million. Full‑year revenue hit a record $1.2 billion, a 21% increase, but profit slipped 6.6% to $71 million. Subscription ARR surged...
Sandisk Open-Sources Accelerated SSD Pre-Conditioning Algorithm
SanDisk has open‑sourced its accelerated SSD pre‑conditioning algorithm, SPRandom, as an extension to the FIO testing tool. The method reduces the traditional conditioning window—from up to 250 hours for 256 TB drives—to roughly 6½ hours, a drop of more than 95 percent. SPRandom writes...
Hammerspace Bookings Accelerate 14x
Hammerspace reported that its 2026 bookings are nearly fourteen times the total it recorded in 2025, signaling rapid market adoption. The surge follows the appointment of Tony Asaro as chief revenue officer, who has accelerated channel partnerships with firms like...
Enterprise AI Stack Lock-In
Enterprise AI stacks involve multiple layers beyond data storage and large‑language models, and vendor‑specific logic in higher layers can create costly lock‑in. CTO Advisor Keith Townsend’s migration from Google Cloud Platform to an on‑prem DGX Spark system forced a rebuild...
VDURA CEO Sees the End of the All-Flash Array Era
VDURA CEO Ken Claffey argues that soaring SSD prices and supply constraints have ended the myth that all‑flash arrays will replace hard‑disk drives. He notes the price premium for SSDs over HDDs has ballooned from 4‑5× to 22.6×, making flash...
Commvault Cosies up to Google’s Cloud
Commvault has launched its Commvault Cloud platform and the Clumio SaaS service on Google Cloud, extending unified data protection and ransomware‑resilient backups to GCP workloads. The offering includes native protection for BigQuery, Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud SQL, and Google Workspace,...
Storage News Ticker - 24 April 2024
DataHub expanded its Google Cloud partnership by open‑sourcing a Knowledge Catalog connector and adding native Iceberg Rest Catalog support, helping joint customers such as Etsy and Trustpilot build AI‑ready context layers. Denodo’s AI Trust Gap Report revealed that 63% of...
Seagate OneTouch, FireCuda and LaCie External Drive Trifecta
Seagate unveiled three new external storage solutions across its OneTouch, FireCuda and LaCie lines. The consumer‑focused OneTouch desktop drive offers 8 TB, 20 TB and 24 TB capacities, draws power from the host via USB‑C, and includes backup tools and Rescue Data Recovery....
Graid Sees Cash Potential in KV Caching
Graid Technology announced its Agentic AI Storage Portfolio, a three‑tier KV‑Cache solution built for Nvidia's STX architecture. The portfolio leverages SupremeRAID, which pools up to 32 NVMe SSDs into a 280 GB/s virtual storage engine delivering KV‑Cache reads in 1.3 ms—77× faster...
Everpure Reveals Supply Chain Issues, Warns Customers
Everpure announced that semiconductor shortages and soaring AI‑driven demand have driven DRAM and flash component costs up 300‑900% since mid‑2025, forcing a 70% price increase for its storage systems this year. The company pledged to absorb most of the cost...
Google’s Cloud Storage Gets Faster and Smarter for AI
Google Cloud unveiled a suite of AI‑focused storage upgrades at Next ’26, including the high‑throughput Cloud Storage Rapid service, an enhanced Managed Lustre offering, and new Smart Storage capabilities. Rapid Bucket promises over 15 TB/s bandwidth and sub‑millisecond latency, while Rapid...
Dell Turns up PowerMax Dial to 11
Dell announced the release of PowerMax OS 10.4, enhancing its flagship PowerMax storage arrays with faster performance, advanced ransomware detection, and deeper integration with VMware and Red Hat OpenShift. The update delivers up to 25% faster read response times for SRDF‑protected...
VAST Data Launches F Funding Round, Highlights Customer Wins
VAST Data announced the launch of a $1 billion F‑round funding, bringing its valuation to roughly $30 billion. The company reported over $500 million in Contracted Annual Recurring Revenue (CARR) and more than $4 billion in cumulative bookings. Its Rule of 40 metric—a blend...
WD's Chief Product Bod Peers Into the AI Data System Future
Western Digital’s chief product officer argues that AI data centers are fundamentally data systems, requiring layered storage architectures rather than pure compute power. He highlights that each inference cycle creates massive logs, traces, and metadata that can rival the size...
Wasabi Gets Quarter Billion Credit Facility
Wasabi announced a $250 million credit facility, led by Bain Capital’s Private Credit Group, following a $70 million equity raise for AI‑focused cloud funding in January. The debt will fund expense spending such as infrastructure and operational costs, while the earlier equity...
Kioxia Debuts Fast QLC Slablet SSD for PC Makers
Kioxia has launched the EG7 SSD, a QLC‑based successor to its BG7 drive, offering identical capacity options (256 GB to 2 TB) and near‑identical performance, with a modest boost to 6.2 GB/s sequential writes. The drive uses 218‑layer 3D NAND, is DRAM‑less, and...
EuroStack and the Kill Switch
Four European vendors—Cubbit, SUSE, Elemento Cloud and StorPool—have announced the EU’s first EuroStack‑style sovereign disaster‑recovery pack, aiming to protect businesses from a potential U.S. kill‑switch that could block access to critical digital services. The initiative is part of a broader...
Quantum Computing and Storage
OVHcloud has added Quantum Computing‑as‑a‑Service (QaaS) by offering Quandela’s 12‑qubit Belanos photonic quantum computer on a pay‑as‑you‑go basis. The quantum processor works alongside OVH’s traditional object storage, with data encoded into photonic states before each run and results post‑processed on...
Storage News Ticker – April 17
April 17’s data‑management ticker highlighted a wave of product launches and market milestones aimed at simplifying AI‑driven data workflows and bolstering sovereign‑cloud resilience. Adeptia’s Automate 5.2 adds natural‑language querying for workflow diagnostics, while Attacama ONE offers audit‑ready evidence to satisfy the EU...
NetApp Enters Air-Gapped Google Distributed Cloud
NetApp has entered a four‑year enterprise agreement with Google to deliver its AFF, StorageGRID and Trident storage solutions on Google Distributed Cloud’s air‑gapped offering. The partnership, executed through World Wide Technology, makes NetApp the latest validated storage supplier for GDC’s...
New Approaches to Tackling Ransomware Recovery
Ransomware attacks are increasingly targeting backup data, rendering traditional zero‑trust models inadequate. Object First introduced Zero Trust Data Resilience (ZTDR), expanding zero‑trust principles with backup segmentation, multiple resilience zones, and immutable storage. Its appliance leverages Zero Access architecture to deliver...
Isle of Man Wants to Turn Datasets Into Balance-Sheet Assets
The Isle of Man has introduced a Data Asset Foundation (DAF), a statutory legal structure that lets companies register curated datasets as formal property assets. Once entered into a DAF, data can be listed on balance sheets, used as collateral,...
Pinecone Claims up to 97% Lower Costs with Dedicated Read Nodes
Pinecone has launched its dedicated read nodes (DRN) as a generally available offering, promising up to 97% lower query costs compared with its on‑demand pricing. The service is aimed at workloads with steady high query‑per‑second rates, large vector collections and...
Say Hello to VMware Alternative Arcfra
Arcfra, a Singapore startup founded in May 2024, has quickly become a notable player in the hyper‑converged infrastructure (HCI) market. Its AECP v6.3 platform, built on the Arcfra Cloud Operating System, delivers over 11 million IOPS, 130 GiB/s bandwidth and sub‑100 µs latency, earning a...
Commvault Announces Trio of AI Tools for Data Prep, Agent Oversight, Resilience
Commvault unveiled three AI‑focused solutions—Data Activate, AI Protect, and AI Studio—within its Commvault Cloud platform. Data Activate curates protected backup data into trusted AI‑ready datasets, supporting Apache Iceberg, Parquet, Azure and Snowflake integrations. AI Protect continuously discovers AI agents, maps...
Sandook Delivers Pooled SSD Performance-Boosting Management
MIT and Tufts researchers unveiled Sandook, a two‑layer software system that manages pooled SSDs in datacenter clusters by continuously profiling each drive and dynamically assigning read‑write weights. By routing requests away from SSDs undergoing erase cycles or garbage collection, Sandook...
Hungry Private Equity Eyeing up Commvault
Private equity firm Thoma Bravo, among others, is evaluating a bid for data‑protection specialist Commvault, which is currently exploring sale options with Goldman Sachs. The company posted record Q3 FY2026 revenue of $314 million and surpassed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue,...
Everpure Says TurboQuant Turns KV Cache Into a Storage Problem
Everpure’s TurboQuant algorithm compresses the high‑bandwidth memory (HBM) KV cache by roughly five‑fold, turning a memory capacity bottleneck into a storage‑I/O challenge. By quantizing 128‑dimensional vectors to three‑bit representations, the technique retains a cosine similarity of 0.94 while shrinking a...
WEKA Claims Nvidia CMX Support Plays to Its Strengths
Nvidia’s GTC 2026 announcement introduced the CMX KV‑cache extension for RDMA‑connected SSDs, prompting industry speculation that it could erode WEKA’s advantage with local SSDs in GPU servers. WEKA counters that its NeuralMesh client and server software already supports Nvidia Grace...
DDN Hires Chief Revenue Officer
DDN announced Kevin Delane as President and Chief Revenue Officer, bringing experience from Salesforce, Cohesity and Everpure. The hire follows a $300 million Blackstone investment and a wave of senior appointments in product, finance and operations. Delane will oversee global revenue...
VDURA Says 30 TB QLC SSD Capacity Now Costs 22.6x More than HDD
VDURA’s Flash Volatility Index shows that by Q1 2026 a 30 TB QLC SSD costs 22.6 times more than a comparable 30 TB HDD, up from 4.9× a year earlier. Prices for 30 TB QLC SSDs surged from $2,450 to $15,121, a 517% increase, while...
Samsung Fabs Memory Gold
Samsung Electronics reported a preliminary first‑quarter 2026 operating profit that surged 755% year‑on‑year, driven by soaring high‑bandwidth memory (HBM) prices. Revenue jumped 68% to ₩133 trillion (about $88.5 billion), while operating profit reached ₩51 trillion (roughly $37.9 billion). The profit outstrips Micron’s total quarterly...
Volumez Veers Towards Agentic AI Data Infrastructure
Volumez, once known for ultra‑fast block storage, is pivoting to an agentic AI data‑infrastructure platform. The startup now touts more than 13 TB/sec bandwidth, dwarfing rivals that cap out below 2 TB/sec. The strategic shift has coincided with the departure of several...
How to Navigate the Storage Crunch in the AI Era
AI‑driven workloads are outpacing traditional storage planning, turning five‑year forecasts into a relic. Companies face stretched lead times and compressed project windows, forcing a shift from "buy‑and‑build" to on‑demand storage services. Everpure’s Evergreen architecture offers a service‑level‑backed, outcome‑focused model that...
Nutanix Pushes Agentic AI, Bare-Metal Kubernetes at .NEXT 2026
At its .NEXT 2026 conference, Nutanix unveiled a suite of AI‑focused offerings, highlighted by the Agentic AI platform that integrates with Nvidia AI Enterprise to deliver multi‑tenant GPU inference for neocloud providers. The company also introduced NKP Metal, a bare‑metal Kubernetes option...
Nasuni Reckons It Has the AI Juice
Nasuni has expanded its public‑cloud portfolio by adding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and rebranded to emphasize AI capabilities. The company introduced Active Everywhere v6, which gives edge teams LAN‑speed access to governed file data, and AI Activate, a Model Context Protocol layer that...
Storage News Ticker – April 7
April’s storage news roundup highlights major AI and security investments, shifting cloud economics, and strategic acquisitions. Nvidia poured $2 billion into Marvell to accelerate AI‑RAN networking, while SAP announced a deal to acquire Reltio’s master‑data platform, underscoring the push toward AI‑ready...
Kioxia Killing Off Old NAND Chippery
Kioxia has issued an end‑of‑life notice for its third‑generation 3D NAND products, including 64‑layer planar and sub‑96‑layer chips such as SLC, MLC and TLC. Sales will cease in September 2026 with final shipments ending by the close of 2028, giving customers...
Remote NetApp Array over Photonic Link Nears Local Access Speed
A proof‑of‑concept demonstrated that a NetApp flash array accessed over IOWN’s all‑photonics network (APN) can deliver performance nearly identical to local storage, with less than 1 % increase in GPU training time across distances up to 3,000 km. The 100 Gbps single‑mode fiber...
Cohesity Talks up Post-Veritas Merger Strategy
Cohesity’s CFO Eric Brown outlined a three‑stage post‑merger strategy after acquiring Veritas’ data‑protection portfolio in February 2024. The plan began with a customer‑retention phase that unified sales teams and allowed partial down‑sells to keep Veritas clients. In fiscal 2026 the focus shifts...
Halcyon Days for HYCU as the Pair Link up on Ransomware Pitch
HYCU is embedding Halcyon’s ransomware‑detection software into its R‑Shield platform, creating a unified solution for ransomware detection, prevention, and recovery. The enhanced offering protects workloads across virtual machines, data warehouses, finance apps, storage buckets, and git repositories in hybrid and...
EDB Postgres AI for WarehousePG: Reclaiming Control of the Enterprise Data Warehouse
Enterprise data warehouses are increasingly seen as costly, inflexible assets, prompting a shift toward open‑source alternatives. EDB Postgres AI introduces WarehousePG, a PostgreSQL‑based, petabyte‑scale MPP warehouse that promises up to 58% lower total cost of ownership while delivering predictable performance. The...
Toshiba Goes Glassy-Eyed with 11-Platter 34TB SMR Drive
Toshiba is sampling 30‑34 TB SMR drives that use eleven glass platters inside a helium‑filled enclosure, boosting capacity to 34 TB. The MG12 series achieves an areal density of 3.09 TB per platter, roughly 15% higher than conventional CMR, and offers 12 Gb/s SAS...
Walrus Pitches MemWal as Decentralized Storage for AI Agent Memory
Walrus Foundation, backed by Mysten Labs, launched MemWal, a developer SDK that offers decentralized, blockchain‑based storage for AI agents' long‑term memory. The service leverages the Walrus protocol on the Sui blockchain and is paid for with the $WAL token, which...
Dell Polishes PowerProtect, PowerScale and PowerStore
Dell announced a suite of upgrades to its PowerProtect backup appliances, adding a unified dashboard, AI Assistant, and TLS v1.3‑enabled secure transport. The enhancements also include a 75:1 data‑reduction ratio, new analytics for Oracle RAC, and simplified Cyber Recovery deployment. Security...
Nvidia and Its Partners' KV Cache Extenders
At GTC 2026 Nvidia unveiled its CMX KV‑cache extension platform and the STX modular reference architecture, adding a new G3.5 flash tier that offloads LLM inference context from GPU memory to NVMe storage. Nvidia claims CMX can deliver up to five‑fold...
Storage News Ticker - 27 March
Aerospike introduced a LangGraph integration that adds a persistent memory layer, giving agentic AI workflows millisecond latency and fault‑tolerant context storage. Commvault expanded its tie‑up with Microsoft Security, streaming backup alerts to Sentinel and enabling AI‑driven incident investigation. IDC data...
Three SSD Makers Buy Into Nanya to Secure DRAM Supply
SanDisk, Kioxia and Solidigm are each investing roughly $500 million, with SanDisk contributing $1 billion, in a $2.5 billion private‑placement deal for a 3.9% stake in Taiwan’s Nanya Technology. The equity purchase is paired with a multi‑year supply agreement that guarantees each SSD...