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 enterprise data. Cloudian’s survey revealed 84% of senior IT leaders exceed cloud storage budgets, prompting a wave of on‑premise expansion, and Egnyte launched AI Safeguards and an AI Assistant to govern content. Additional moves include Backblaze preserving its original Storage Pod, Databricks partnering with Paris’s STATION F, and Weebit Nano raising $56 million to advance ReRAM for edge AI.
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...
Komprise’s Flash Stretch Tiers NAS to Cloud for Flash Capacity Savings
Komprise introduced its Flash Stretch Assessment service, which analyzes on‑prem NAS environments and recommends moving rarely accessed files to public‑cloud disk to free up expensive SSD capacity. The offering arrives as NAND shortages drive SSD prices up roughly 130% by...
NetApp Seals Elastio and Commvault Deals for More Resilience and Less Ransomware
NetApp announced partnerships with Elastio and Commvault to bolster its Ransomware Resilience Service. Elastio’s agent‑less detection and Provable Recovery controls will be embedded in ONTAP snapshots to spot zero‑day ransomware and provide immutable recovery points. Together with Commvault, NetApp will...
US Clouds Cast Long Shadow over EU Data Sovereignty, Says Osmium
Osmium Data Group warns that using US‑owned cloud providers for backups undermines European data‑sovereignty, even when the physical datacenter sits in the EU. The firm evaluated four source‑and‑destination scenarios, ranking a Europe‑owned source and datacenter as highest compliance, while a...
XCENA Bets on CXL Memory with Compute Baked in, CEO Explains
South Korean startup XCENA, formerly MetisX, is commercializing CXL‑based memory pooling that embeds RISC‑V compute in its MX1 product. The company has raised roughly $50 million to date and is now pursuing a Series B round to scale deployments. MX1’s Near‑Data Processing...
Seagate: If You're Adding Platters, You've Hit a Density Wall
Seagate’s SVP Jason Feist says the company is doubling down on areal‑density growth, leveraging its Mozaic 3 and upcoming Mozaic 4 HAMR drives that deliver 3‑4 TB per platter, rather than adding more platters like Western Digital. He notes that hyperscalers prefer higher‑density, cost‑efficient...
NGX Rolls Out ExaScale Block Storage for AI Workloads
NGX announced the ExaScale software‑defined block storage array, a scale‑out system that can grow from a few terabytes to exabytes of usable capacity. Designed for AI, analytics and other data‑intensive workloads, it leverages NVMe, RDMA and three‑way replication to deliver...
Kioxia Eyes GPU Memory Stack with High-Bandwidth Flash Push
Kioxia announced the GP Series, a high‑IOPS SSD built on Gen 2 XL‑Flash, targeting GPU servers with dramatically faster data access. The drive, packaged in an E1.S PCIe 5 enclosure, aims for 10 million IOPS by 2026 and 100 million random‑read IOPS by 2027....
Future of Memory and Storage Event Sold to Terrapinn
The Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) conference, the premier flash‑focused event, has been sold by Conference Concepts to Terrapinn, the world’s largest privately owned events firm. The 20th‑anniversary edition is slated for August 4‑6, 2026 at the Santa Clara Conference...
Storage Ticker - 20 March
The March 20 Storage Ticker roundup highlighted a wave of enterprise‑focused innovations, from Broadcom’s world‑first post‑quantum‑safe Emulex SecureHBA to Alation’s outcome‑based metadata governance automation. AI‑ready storage gained traction as Cloudian earned Nvidia‑certified foundation status and Denodo added a Lakehouse accelerator...
Big Changes in Latest GigaOm Unstructured Data Management Radar Report
GigaOm released version 6 of its Unstructured Data Management Radar, expanding the vendor set to 23 and appointing James Brown as the new analyst. The report reclassifies 11 suppliers as leaders and 12 as challengers, with notable moves such as Panzura shifting...
Dell’s AI Story Electrified by Lightning
Dell unveiled an AI Data Platform built with Nvidia that adds a four‑layer architecture and a new parallel file system called Lightning. Lightning delivers up to 150 GB/s per 1‑RU enclosure and can be stacked to achieve roughly 6 TB/s per rack,...
Women Get Data-Driven Health Boost as FA Tackles Sports Science's Male Bias
The Football Association (FA) has partnered with Google Cloud to address the historic male bias in sports science by collecting and analyzing female‑specific health data for England’s Lionesses. A 2024 audit showed only 4% of research examined female cohorts, leaving...
Solidigm Strikes Out in New AI Computer Vision Direction
Solidigm, traditionally a NAND fabber and SSD supplier, has launched Luceta, a generative‑AI computer‑vision platform aimed at manufacturing inspection. The software lets customers create and train models in weeks, achieving over 90 percent precision and enabling rapid edge deployment. While Luceta...
Qdrant Pockets $50M to Push Composable Vector Search
Qdrant announced a $50 million Series B round, raising its total capital to $87.5 million since its 2021 launch. The funding will accelerate its push for composable vector search, a model that lets developers combine dense, sparse, and metadata‑based retrieval at query time....
VAST Data Raises $1B at $30B Valuation as AI Storage Demand Surges
VAST Data announced a $1 billion Series F raise that lifts its valuation to $30 billion, making it Israel’s most valuable private high‑tech firm. The funding round pushes total capital raised to $1.38 billion and signals a dramatic jump in annual recurring revenue, now...
VDURA Pairs V5000 Flash with WD Data60 and Data102 Disk Shelves
VDURA announced that its all‑flash V5000 system will be paired with Western Digital’s Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 hybrid JBODs, creating a tiered storage solution for AI workloads. The hybrid architecture combines low‑latency SSDs with high‑density HDDs, delivering up to 3.26 PB...
Everpure Stretches ActiveCluster to Metro-Distance DR for File Workloads
Everpure announced that its ActiveCluster technology now extends to metro‑distance disaster recovery for file‑based workloads. The feature adds synchronous replication and policy‑driven automation, allowing files to stay online during outages and move across the entire fleet without manual intervention. ActiveCluster...
Box Pitches 'Virtual Filesystem' Layer for AI Agents
Box unveiled a virtual filesystem layer that lets AI agents interact with enterprise data as if navigating a traditional file hierarchy. The abstraction routes directory prefixes to varied back‑ends—S3, SQLite, local disk, or Box’s own content platform—while preserving versioning, permissions,...
Storage News Ticker – March 9
In its March 9 storage news roundup, vendors announced a range of security, AI, and edge‑storage initiatives. Commvault introduced identity‑security tools integrating Active Directory with CloudSEK intelligence and added Okta recovery support, while Datadog opened a new UK datacenter to broaden...
Missouri Team Shows How to Rewrite Bits Stored in DNA
University of Missouri researchers have demonstrated a technique to rewrite data stored in DNA, overcoming the long‑standing limitation that DNA‑encoded information was immutable. The method pairs a compact electronic module with a nanopore sensor, translating electrical signals into binary bits....
Storage News Ticker – March 2
Snowflake expanded its Cortex Code CLI to run in local environments, enabling AI‑assisted coding across dbt, Apache Airflow and other non‑Snowflake data sources under a subscription model. London‑based Cristie Software introduced FSBlocker, a lightweight kernel driver that locks down files...
Druva Uses Graph Relationships to Mine Metadata
Druva has introduced Dru MetaGraph, a graph‑database layer that stores backup metadata as interconnected nodes, enabling AI agents to answer security and compliance questions with real‑time context. The approach stems from three drivers: security queries are fundamentally relationship‑based, customers need instant,...
Scality RING Becomes Back-End Object Store for WEKA NeuralMesh
Scality and WEKA announced that Scality RING will serve as the back‑end object store for WEKA’s NeuralMesh high‑performance AI file system. The partnership leverages NeuralMesh’s SSD‑based front‑end with RING’s cost‑efficient, disk‑based object tier, delivering up to ten times faster performance than...
How AI Is Forcing Storage Back Into the Enterprise Conversation
Early enterprise AI projects allocated most budgets to compute, treating storage as a leftover expense. As AI moves from experimentation to production, organizations discover that data readiness and storage performance, especially for retrieval‑augmented generation and inference, are the real constraints....
StorONE Arrays Adopt External Flash JBODs in Flash Program
StorONE introduced a 9x ROI on Flash program that pairs its S1 disk‑drive array with external SSD JBODs, creating an automatic two‑tier system that places hot data on flash and warm or cold data on HDDs. The solution leverages the...
Platters: WD New Disk Drive Tech Hits Lucky 14
Western Digital announced a 14‑platter hard‑disk drive architecture that boosts capacity by roughly 27% over its current 11‑platter models, enabling 40 TB drives in 2026 and paving the way for 44 TB HAMR units later this year and 100 TB drives by 2029....
Pure Storage Wants to Demolish Your Storage Silos
Pure Storage’s Cloud service extends its Purity operating environment to AWS and Azure, delivering a single‑pane‑of‑glass storage layer that feels identical to on‑prem FlashArray. By abstracting the underlying cloud hardware, the platform offers native APIs, replication, and security while adding...
Dell VP Says Discrete Beats Disaggregated Storage for AI
Dell VP David Noy announced that discrete storage architectures outperform disaggregated designs for large‑scale AI workloads, reversing Dell’s earlier promotion of disaggregation. He cites PowerScale’s integrated controller‑drive chassis as delivering lower rack space, fewer switches, and reduced power consumption. The...
SK Hynix Proposes HBM and HBF Hybrid for LLM Inference
SK Hynix unveiled H³, a hybrid architecture that couples high‑bandwidth memory (HBM) with high‑bandwidth flash (HBF) on a single interposer to accelerate large‑language‑model (LLM) inference. HBF provides up to 16× the capacity of HBM while maintaining comparable bandwidth, serving as...
Cubbit Powers Swiss Cantonal-Level Sovereign Cloud for Ailanto
IT integrator Ailanto announced a sovereign cloud service for Swiss organizations built on Cubbit’s DS3 Composer software‑defined object storage. The offering launches with 1 PB of capacity hosted in Swiss‑based data centres and will expand later in 2026. It provides S3‑compatible,...
Xinnor's Alternative Software RAID Filer for AI
Software RAID vendor Xinnor unveiled xiNAS, an all‑flash NAS filer built on its xiRAID stack, XFS, and NFS over RDMA, targeting AI, HPC and data‑intensive workloads. In a Supermicro validation, a single node achieved up to 74.5 GB/s sequential read and...
Simplyblock Provides Postgres Git-Style Branching
Simplyblock has launched Vela, a self‑hostable platform that provides instant, Git‑style branching for PostgreSQL databases without copying data. The solution leverages copy‑on‑write on local NVMe storage and deep Kubernetes integration to deliver high‑performance, low‑latency environments. Vela targets AI workloads that...
Simplyblock Provides Postgres Git-Style Branching
Simplyblock unveiled Vela, a platform that delivers instant PostgreSQL branches using copy‑on‑write technology on its high‑performance block storage. The solution eliminates traditional snapshot‑restore cycles, offering developers rapid, cost‑effective cloning without data duplication. Vela is cloud‑agnostic, Kubernetes‑native, and supports NVMe/TCP and...
IBM Refreshes FlashSystem Lineup with Faster 5600, 7600, and 9600 Arrays
IBM announced a refresh of its FlashSystem all‑flash storage family, introducing the 5600, 7600 and 9600 models that replace the 5300, 7300 and 9500 generations. The new arrays feature Gen 5 FlashCore Modules with up to 105.6 TB per drive and a...
IBM Refreshes FlashSystem Lineup with Faster 5600, 7600, and 9600 Arrays
IBM has refreshed its FlashSystem all‑flash portfolio, introducing the 5600, 7600 and 9600 arrays to replace the 5300, 7300 and 9500 models. The new 9600 delivers up to 6.3 million IOPS, 3.3 PB raw capacity and a compact 2‑RU chassis, while the...
Storage News Ticker – 9 February 2026
The storage‑focused news ticker highlighted a wave of AI‑centric and security‑driven product launches, from Aerospike’s default Dynamic Data Masking to Cloudera’s on‑prem AI inference and Trino‑powered warehouse. Databricks secured a $5 billion equity round, reporting $5.4 billion ARR with strong AI revenue,...
VMware Exiteeers Targeted by Alibaba’s NexaVM
Swiss‑based NexaVM, backed by Alibaba, delivers an all‑in‑one VMware replacement aimed at mid‑market cloud service providers, sovereign‑cloud operators, and hardware‑agnostic OEMs. The platform bundles a production‑grade KVM hypervisor, Ceph‑based hyper‑converged storage, integrated Kubernetes‑as‑a‑Service, and multi‑tenant management under a subscription licence....
VAST Data Plans Funding Round so Early Stock Holders Can Get Cash
VAST Data is closing a $1 billion financing round that values the AI‑focused storage vendor at roughly $30 billion. The bulk of the cash will come from a secondary sale where existing shareholders dump 5‑6 shares for each new issue, generating $700‑$850 million...
