HGST pumps out 12 Gbps SAS SSDs

Western Digital Corp.'s HGST subsidiary this week launched what it claims are the industry's first 12 Gbps SAS solid-state drives.

The 25 nm Ultrastar drives use multi-level cell NAND flash and range in capacities from 200 GB to 1 TB. HGST is pitching the drives for high-performance applications, such as online banking, big data analytics and cloud computing.

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ViaWest chooses SolidFire flash array for performance, storage QoS

Denver-based cloud service provider ViaWest turned to a SolidFire all-flash array for the underlying storage of its cloud to improve performance and management.

Matt Wallace, ViaWest's director of cloud architecture, knew an all-flash array would give him a performance boost, but he also needed to manage that performance for multiple customers. That led him to SolidFire, which offers granular quality of service (QoS) for its flash arrays aimed at cloud providers.

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CloudSigma offers SLA-guaranteed SSD cloud

CloudSigma AG, a Zurich, Switzerland-based cloud computing service provider, is adding a solid-state drive (SSD) cloud storage service backed by service-level agreements (SLAs) for performance and availability. CloudSigma launched the cloud service in a private beta program this week, and plans to make it generally available later this year. Read more

Tucci at Oracle OpenWorld: Cloud transition will prove disruptive

Private cloud storage, cloud computing and virtualization will be the keys to dealing with the massive data deluge hitting the IT world, EMC Corp. CEO Joseph Tucci said Monday in his Oracle OpenWorld keynote address in San Francisco.

The theme of EMC World 2011 in May was “cloud meets Big Data,” and Tucci and EMC president Pat Gelsinger brought those topics to Oracle customers this week. Tucci and Gelsinger didn’t make any stunning announcements during their keynote presentations, but they did reiterate EMC’s commitment to the cloud, VMware’s virtualization platform and solid-state storage.

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Keep compliance data safe when using cloud archiving

The cloud is an obvious candidate for storing compliance-related data. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers pitch their services as an economical way to rid your on-site storage of reams of rarely accessed information that requires strict security and access controls. But experts warn about stashing your compliance data using cloud archiving without carefully examining available third-party services.

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Concerns with cloud backup solutions: Security and performance top list

There are many things to like about cloud backup solutions, such as inexpensive capacity, reduced capital expenditures and simplified data management. The cloud computing distributed architecture and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model allows you to sign up, get started and change your service quickly and inexpensively.

But that architecture and delivery model makes some administrators nervous.

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Nasuni adds Hyper-V and Azure support to primary cloud storage appliance

Nasuni Corp. today released an upgrade of the Nasuni Filer virtual appliance that serves as a gateway to cloud storage providers. Nasuni 2.0 includes support for the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, Windows Azure cloud-services platform, Microsoft Distributed File System (DFS), and Windows Previous Versions file restore technology.

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