Category Archives: Storage

News, Services, Storage

China Shuts Down Cloud Storage Services for Pornographic Content

“Internet companies only provide the technology to build cyberspaces for online storage, but in the end, these spaces belong to China’s online territory and, hence, fall within the government’s jurisdiction,” Qin An, a cyber security expert at the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy. China has defined Cloud Storage as a territory of the Chinese government and therefore has the jurisdiction to regulate the content stored within Clouds, allowing for immense censorship.

Pornographic content is widespread on cloud services, with users uploading videos and then selling them. The government believes it should take necessary action to halt this “immoral” behavior.

President Xi Jinping has ignited a moral campaign that aims to tackle corruption within the country’s sprawling administration as well as crackdown on inappropriate online content. After the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications launched a campaign in March “to address the emerging practice of sharing and hosting pornography via cloud storage services.” Many companies cloud storage services have been shut down. The list includes interne giants Sina, Tencent and Kingsoft as well as DBank and Alibaba.

Alibaba announced in March a complete closure of the service but dates have not yet been specified. Sina soon followed on April 25 with their announcement to close cloud services. DBank has become the sixth company to close or reduce operations after this crackdown. DBank will close all services and delete all data on July 1st, 2016. . Sina and Xunlei, which operate Vdisk andKuaiPan storage services respectively, announced closure of free accounts on June 30.

Homemade videos may still be created and uploaded to personal accounts as long as the content is treated as private information.

Throughout the massive crackdown, few companies, such as search engine Baidu and Internet company Qihoo360, have no plans to suspend any operations.

This is not the first of mass censorship in China, as Google Drive, Dropbox, Apple iTunes, Walt Disney’s DisneyLife services, and many online streaming shows have been blolcked in China. The Chinese government has expanded the word pornography to include any material it finds to be objectionable, such as political criticism. What will be censored next?

 

Comments:

Xie Yongjiang, deputy director of the Institute of Internet Governance and Law at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications: “The government has the right to supervise and intercept illegal information spread online, while companies are also obliged to prevent such information from being uploaded online in the first place by using filtration technology.”

The post China Shuts Down Cloud Storage Services for Pornographic Content appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

EMC, Flash, News & Analysis, Storage, Storage as a Service

EMC claims it can make data centres All Flash and no downtime

EMC quantum leapAs EMC prepares for its takeover by Dell it claims it has made ‘significant changes’ to its storage portfolio, converting its primary offering to All Flash, modernising array pricings and introducing a new category of flash storage, DSSD D5 at its Quantum Leap event.

EMC’s flagship VMAX All Flash enterprise data services platform and its new DSSD D5 rack-scale flash system are part of a new drive to persuade data centres to use flash technology as their primary storage medium. The vendor claims that by 2020 all storage used for production applications will be flash-based with traditional disk relegated to the roll of bulk storage and archiving.

The new all-flash portfolio will be used by databases, analytics, server virtual machines and virtual desktop infrastructures, says EMC, which predicts that the need for predictable performance with sub-millisecond latencies will persuade data centres to make the extra investment. ENC’s new XtremIO is designed for high-end enterprise workloads, while VMAX All Flash will consolidate mixed block and file workloads that require up to 99.9999% availability, as well as rich data services, IBM mainframe and iSeries support and scalable storage growth up to four petabytes (PB) of capacity.

The DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash, meanwhile, is for the most performance-intensive, traditional and next-generation use cases, such as getting microsecond response times on Oracle and Hadoop based analytics jobs. Meanwhile, the new VNX Series arrays represent an entry level all-flash offering which starts at $25,000.

EMC announced that the VMAX array has been re-engineered to offer two new all-flash models: the EMC VMAX 450 and EMC VMAX 850. Both are designed to capitalise on the performance of flash and the economics of today’s latest large-capacity SSDs.

Finally, EMC also announced the DSSD D5 which, it claimed, will be a quantum leap in storage technology, with its new Rack-Scale Flash. TEMC said the new invention will be used in high production applications such as genetic sequencing calculations, fraud detection, credit card authorisation and advanced analytics.

EMC claims it will create a ten fold surge in performance levels. The storage hardware is capable latency of 100 microseconds, throughput at 100 GB/s and IOPS of up to 10 million in a 5U system. EMC DSSD D5 will be generally available in March 2016.

451 Group, IDC, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Research, Storage

Public cloud spending predicted to double by 2019 with storage booming

Cloud storageThe boom in public cloud service spending will propel AWS and Microsoft into the top five of the world’s biggest storage vendors, according to analysts.

Separate reports from IDC and the 451 Group suggest that the public cloud will growth overshadow the rest of IT and change the power balance.

The latest Public Cloud Services Spending Guide from IDC predicts that global spending on public cloud services will grow at six times the rate of the rest of the IT industry. With a 19.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) public cloud spending will double from last year’s $70 billion to $141 billion in 2019.

The popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS) will continue as it makes up two thirds of all public cloud spending in the forecast period. However Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) will grow faster, with spending on each rising by 27.0% and 30.6% respectively.

By 2018, most software vendors will have fully shifted to a SaaS/PaaS code base, predicted Frank Gens, Chief Analyst at IDC. This means the software industry is at a tipping point where SaaS becomes the preferred option.

The industries with the largest public cloud services expenditures in 2015 were discrete manufacturing at $8.6 billion, followed by banking and professional services at $6.8 billion and $6.6 billion, respectively. Telecommunications will be the fastest-growing vertical industry over the 2014-2019 forecast period with a worldwide CAGR of 22.2%. Other industries expecting a five-year CAGRs of over 20% are the media, government, education, retail, transport and utilities.

“The cloud is the future of IT but every organisation’s journey to the cloud is different and won’t always result in moving to a public cloud,” said Mark Ebden, strategic consultant at Trustmarque. However, he warned that companies need to assess the functions that can be moved to the cloud with the least disruption.

The fast growth of public cloud service companies is already disrupting the storage market, according to a 451 Research study. It found that public cloud storage will account for 17% of enterprise storage spending by 2017, up from 8% today. In some verticals like retail the public cloud will account for 25% of total storage spending by 2017.

Public cloud will shift the IT budget so that more money is spent on storage, according to the report. In addition, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft will become top five storage vendors by 2017. While the traditional storage players like leader EMC can dominate now, in two years spending on traditional SAN and NAS products will be more muted, said the report. Dealing with data and storage capacity growth is by far the single greatest pain point for storage managers and improving backup and disaster recovery will be the top storage objectives for 2016, according to 451 analyst Simon Robinson.

Enterprise IT, HPE, News & Analysis, Storage

HPE opens first EMEA customer engagement centre in London

HPE office logoHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has unveiled a new 14,000 square foot demonstration facility next to its new offices in London’s financial district.

The new City of London-based Customer Engagement Centre (CEC) is part of a new 67,000 square foot single occupancy on Aldermanbury Square, London. The demo centre is HPE’s first in the EMEA region. The plan is to use business experts and leaders to show potential customers what HPE’s new systems and services look like and how they can be tailored to improve the client’s productivity.

HPE said it aims to prove how four key areas of expertise can help customise each service to suit every client. The four pillars of expertise are in building hybrid IT, creating a data driven culture, security and increasing productivity.

HPE’s first area of expertise, ‘Transforming to hybrid infrastructure’ will be used to help clients bridge their existing IT with cloud environments and get the best performance from their mixture of resources.

Its expertise in ‘empowering data-driven organisations’ will be applied to help companies develop analysis techniques. HPE has promised to show them how to get faster and more meaningful insights, with a view to improving decision making and customer satisfaction, and to identify new business opportunities.

The ‘protecting digital enterprises’ strand of its expertise will be used to advise companies on risk management, protection from cyber threats and sustaining operational integrity.

The fourth area of expertise, ‘enabling workplace productivity’, will be used to help clients get the best possible options for employees, customers and partners through mobile and networking solutions, said HPE.

“We see the EMEA region as one of the world’s most dynamic technological hubs and fertile environments for this revolution, hence our decision to create the first CEC outside of the US in London,” said Peter Ryan, HPE’s MD for EMEA. The UK is HPE’s second largest market.

Meanwhile HPE Ventures has invested in software defined storage provider Scality as part of an ‘enhanced partnership’ between the companies.

“The enterprise storage market is diverging into latency-optimized and capacity-driven segments,” said Manish Goel, GM for storage at HPE. “As the leader in enterprise and hyperscale servers, and the fastest growing vendor in all-flash storage with HPE 3PAR StoreServ, this Scality partnership gives us a leadership position in capacity-driven storage as well.”

flash storage, Infinio, Storage, Storage and Information Management

Infinio Blog: Executive Viewpoint 2016 Prediction

This post originally appeared on Virtual-Strategy Magazine and is authored by Scott Davis, CTO at Infinio, a GreenPages partner.  It does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of GreenPages Technology Solutions.

 

It’s that time of year for CTO predictions. The rate of innovation and disruption across IT is certainly accelerating, providing ample opportunities for comment. Although there is a significant amount of disruptive change going on across many disciplines, I wanted to primarily focus on storage observations for 2016.

Emergence of Storage-class Memory

Toward the end of 2016, we’ll see the initial emergence of a technology that I believe will become the successor to flash. This new storage technology (storage class memory, or SCM) will fundamentally change today’s storage industry just as dramatically as flash changed the hard drive industry. Intel/Micron calls one version 3D XPoint and HP/SanDisk have joined forces for another variant.

SCM is persistent memory technology – 1,000 times faster than flash, 1,000 times more resilient, and unlike flash, it delivers symmetric read/write performance. SCM devices connect to memory slots in a server and they are mapped and accessed similarly to memory, although they are slightly slower. Unlike previous generations of storage technology, SCM devices can be addressed atomically at either the byte level or block-level granularity. Operating systems will likely expose them as either very fast block storage devices formatted by traditional file systems and databases (for compatibility) or as direct memory mapped “files” for next-generation applications. Hypervisors will likely expose them as new, specially named and isolated SCM regions for use by applications running inside the guest operating system (OS).

I expect that SCM will provide unprecedented storage performance, upend the database/file system structures we’ve grown accustomed to, and further drive the trend towards server-side storage processing, shaking up everything from storage economics to application design.

VSAN becomes an Alternative to HCI

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a sales strategy wrapped around a software-defined storage architecture that has garnered much attention in the past few years. HCI offerings comprise integrated hardware and software “building blocks” bundled and sold together as a single entity. The hardware is typically a server with direct attached storage disks and PCI-e flash cards. All the software needed to run virtual workloads is packaged as well, including hypervisor, systems management, configuration tools and virtual networking. Perhaps most relevant to our part of the industry, there is always a software-defined storage (SDS) stack bundled with HCI offerings that virtualizes the disks and flash hardware into a virtual storage array while providing storage management capabilities. This SDS stack delivers all the storage services to the virtual machines.

In VMware’s EVO:Rail offering, VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) is this integrated storage stack. Now battle-tested and rich with enterprise features, VSAN will become more prevalent in the datacenter.  Organizations attracted to cost-effective, high-performance server-side software-defined storage solutions no longer have to embrace the one-size-fits-all hyperconverged infrastructure sales strategy along with it. They will increasingly choose the more customizable VSAN-based solutions, rather than prepackaged HCI offerings, particularly for sophisticated enterprise data center use cases.

Flash Continues to Complement Traditional Spinning Drives, Not Replace Them

While the all-flash array market continues to grow in size, and flash decreases in price, the reality of flash production is that the industry does not have the manufacturing capacity necessary to enable flash to supplant hard disk drives. A recent Register article quoted Samsung and Gartner data that suggested that by 2020, the NAND Flash industry could produce 253 exabytes (EB), which is three times the current manufacturing capacity at a cost of approximately $23 billion.

 

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Are you interested in learning how Infinio could potentially fit into your IT strategy? Reach out!

 

 

Channel, News & Analysis, Red Hat, Storage, Storage as a Service

Red Hat launches software defined storage systems that run on commodity hardware

redhat office logoOpen source software vendor Red Hat has launched a portfolio of open, software-defined storage systems which will cut costs by running on commodity hardware. The systems will be sold through a variety of sources across Red Hat’s sales channel.

The logic of selling Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage system through different channels is to widen the scope of opportunity for Red Hat’s partners, it said. The technology will be made available to any participants in the Red Hat Connect for Business and Red Hat Embedded programmes, as well as all Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Providers from 2016.

Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are open source, software-defined storage systems designed to cater for rapid expansion. They will run on commodity hardware and have durable, programmable architectures the vendor said.

Each is suited for different types of enterprise workloads and similarly enterprise customers will be able to mix and match the Red Hat partners whose skill sets are suited to the technical and vertical market conditions.

Red Hat Advanced and Premier partners are authorised to sell Red Hat Storage solutions, but only if they meet the training requirements for their region’s partner programme via the Red Hat Online Partner Enablement Network (OPEN). Having qualified, however, the resellers can be kept motivated as they benefit from competitive and flexible pricing models. Further service incentives come from opportunities to earn additional margin and recurring revenue.

Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage subscriptions are scheduled to be available to partners through the Red Hat Embedded Program by the end of 2015. Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are scheduled to become available to Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Providers in 2016.

Training and certification, marketing and sales programs, and technical content for Red Hat Storage solutions will be available to certified partners in the Red Hat Connect for Business Partners portal.

“By making Ceph Storage and Gluster Storage enterprise-procurement friendly, Red Hat is positioning itself as a formidable IT storage supplier,” said Ashish Nadkarni, program director at analyst IDC.

3PAR, Flash, HPE, News & Analysis, Storage, Storage as a Service

HP launches 3Par flash storage – building block for all flash data centres

HPHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has launched new flash storage devices which it claims will bring the day of the all flash data centre and lighting fast cloud services closer.

The HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage systems will be the data storage blocks in the flash data centres of the future, its claims. When all the memory, storage and processing of data is run on flash technology, data centres will create the most competitive environment possible for cloud services, according to HPE.

HPE has also integrated 3PAR StoreServ with its new HPE StoreOnce and HPE StoreEver product lines to ensure protection and retention keep pace with demand. It is this integration which will speed the progress of modernising data centres, according to HPE, because it means that new and mixed media types can work together in the same array while maintaining performance and enterprise-class resiliency.

Earlier in November the Storage Performance Council testified that a new world record speed was achieved by the 3PAR StoreServ 20850 all-flash array. HPE claims it produced better performance levels than the rival EMC VMAX 400K, but at half the price.

Among the new HPE offerings are a 3PAR Flash Acceleration system for Oracle, 3PAR Online Import software and support for 3d NAND drives.

The Flash Acceleration drive could makes databases perform 75% quicker while enabling legacy systems like EMC VMAX to remain in place, claims HPE. This, it says, is half the price of upgrading the legacy storage system.

3PAR Online Import software makes it easier to move off hard disk drive (HDD)-bound legacy storage, such as EMC, HDS and IBM XIV, and onto flash. Support for 3D NAND drives means that solid state drive (SSD) technology can be installed cheaply.

HPE claims it can save the massive expense involved in buying pure flash systems by creating a flash-optimised design that supports both file and block storage as well as a secondary tier of HDDs.

HPE also announced new systems to help customers as they move away from traditional backup silos in favour of integrated flash array and application data protection.

“Organisations want game-changers like flash without introducing risk,” said Manish Goel, HPE’s general manager for storage, “to meet those demands, Hewlett Packard Enterprise simplifies flash storage from the entry to enterprise.”

Adobe, Content & Applications, Document Management, DropBox, News & Analysis, Storage, Storage as a Service

Adobe tweaks Document Cloud to unblock Dropbox and make e-signing easier

AdobeAdobe has announced two improvements to document management in the cloud, by making PDF files more manageable in Dropbox and solving one of the snags in electronic document signing.

One billion users of Adobe Acrobat DC and Adobe Acrobat Reader will now be able to edit PDFs as they sit in Dropbox folders, the vendor has announced, as it has worked with Dropbox to simplify the way that PDF files can be edited with Adobe apps.

According to Adobe, the billion mobile devices and desktop computers in the world that have Adobe Acrobat software contain 18 billion PDF files whose functions are limited by Dropbox. The blockage that stopped users from editing those files has now been removed as part of a drive to make Adobe Document Cloud more efficient, the vendor claims.

The improvement was achieved after the two companies integrated their applications and services on mobile devices, desktops and the web, according to Kevin M. Lynch, general manager of Adobe Document Cloud.

Users can now view and edit PDF files stored in their Dropbox Basic, Pro and Dropbox for Business accounts with any changes automatically saved back to Dropbox. Collaboration has also been simplified, Abode claims, as Acrobat DC users can now execute the full range of tasks promised by the application. Editing text on PDF files, organising pages and converting documents to their original format will no longer be hindered by Dropbox environment. Meanwhile, the synchronisation of documents will no longer be restricted by glitches between Adobe and Dropbox operating software.

Adobe has had to adjust as customers have constantly evolved, said Lynch. “Today, mobile has become the rule and people expect to complete work quickly and simply wherever and whenever they need. Our work with Dropbox will help Document Cloud customers be more productive,” said Lynch.

Adobe has also created new options for e-signing in Document Cloud in a bid to make electronic document management easier. New functions include a visual drag-and-drop Workflow Designer, digital signatures (a more advanced secure form of e-signatures) and Enterprise Mobility Management and Signature Capture.

Adobe said it has worked with Workday, Salesforce and Ariba to add e-signing options to their respective HR, sales, procurement and legal systems.

Bryan Lamkin, Adobe digital media’s general manager, promised, “a new level of efficiency”.

Dell, EMC, M&A, News & Analysis, Storage, VMware

Dell said to be considering EMC acquisition

Dell serversComputing giant Dell is in advanced talks to buy storage company EMC according to a WSJ report, citing the inevitable people familiar with the matter.

A full acquisition seems unlikely since EMC is around double the size of Dell if you compare its $50 billion market cap with the $25 billion is cost to take Dell private. More probable would be for Dell to keep just the storage part of EMC, while spinning off VMware, which is mostly owned by EMC.

Another report from Re/code, which was itself acquired from the WSJ by Vox Media earlier this year, insists only the storage part of EMC has ever been on the table. It also makes the point that Dell would have to add significantly to its current debt pile of $12 billion to fund any deal.

If this move did go ahead it would set a new record for the value of tech-only M&A, topping the $37 billion Avago is paying for Broadcom. Dell is increasingly been moving towards enterprise IT, and away from PCs, since it was taken private by its founder. It has often been outbid by the likes of HP for in enterprise IT acquisitions in the past and EMC may be viewed as a relative bargain, having failed to recover its dotcom bubble highs.

Cleversafe, hybrid cloud, IBM, News & Analysis, Storage, Storage as a Service

IBM acquires storage vendor Cleversafe in hybrid cloud play

IBMEnterprise IT giant IBM has announced it will be acquiring object-based storage software and appliances vendor Cleversafe to boost its storage and hybrid cloud offering.

IBM will integrate the Cleversafe portfolio into its IBM Cloud business unit. The growth in the amount of unstructured data companies are looking to process, coupled with the need to find a balance between on-premise and cloud storage deployments, has created the demand for more storage options and greater flexibility, according to IBM.

“Today a massive digital transformation is underway as organizations increasingly turn to cloud computing for innovative ways to manage more complex business operations and increasing volumes of data in a secure and effective way,” said Robert LeBlanc, SVP of IBM Cloud. “Cleversafe, a pioneer in object storage, will add to our efforts to help clients overcome these challenges by extending and strengthening our cloud storage strategy, as well as our portfolio.”

“IBM is an innovator and leader in cloud and storage and we’re excited about the opportunities that lay ahead once this transaction closes,” said John Morris, President and CEO of Cleversafe. “Together with IBM we can extend our object storage leadership position to address the broadest set of workloads for clients with the most expansive set of object-based solutions.”

The terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but Cleversafe employs 210 people so the size of the acquisition is likely to be in the tens of million dollars.

Incidentally IBM has also announced a new mobile cloud security solution aimed at enterprise, which is a combination of products from both companies.

“More employees are using mobile devices to be more productive. At the same time, data and apps are moving to the cloud. The changes are exciting, but security needs to be top-of-mind,” said Steve McGaw, CMO of AT&T Business Solutions. “Trusted collaborators like IBM are helping us better address changing business models. Together we’re giving options to deliver highly secure mobile access to cloud apps and data.”