Everpure could face stiff competition in its ambitious data management pivot, as the company plans a deep push into what is already a crowded market.

At Pure Accelerate 2026, the company announced the launch of a new Data Intelligence platform aimed at streamlining data management, allowing enterprises to simplify data visibility, discovery, and control.

The launch builds on Everpure’s gradual slide toward the data management space over the last three years. At Pure Accelerate 2025, the company unveiled the Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC), designed to unify both storage and data management capabilities for customers.

The pitch by Everpure – which until recently went by Pure Storage – rests on the idea that enterprise data architectures need a comprehensive rethink, largely due to the demands placed on infrastructure by generative and agentic AI.

Many enterprises have been locked in an ‘application-centric’ approach with their IT environments for decades, which saw individual pockets of data fed into centralized applications.

Given software was expected to eat the world until a few short years ago, these practices made sense. However, this data is often locked in disparate, fragmented locations, creating bottlenecks.

According to CEO Charlie Giancarlo, Everpure wants to flip this trend on its head, enabling enterprises to adopt a ‘data centric’ – or ‘data primacy’ – approach whereby these data sets are mapped and unified.

“Instead of the apps themselves connecting to all of your data, we need to construct a context map, we need to understand the data itself, we need to understand the context of each of the data systems, each of the data environments,” he told attendees.

“Think of this as a universal data intelligence universalizing across your enterprise, where you understand not only the context of individual data sets, but how these data sets relate to other data sets as well.”

Everpure argues that this approach will reduce the number of data integrations required by enterprises, breaking down silos, barriers, and creating a single source of truth.

This is vital with the advent of agentic AI, according to Everpure. Agents require deep integration with enterprise data sets to provide context, and the “context layer” that Everpure’s new platform aims to create will, the company says, help streamline access.

That means CRM data, ERP data, you name it; this context layer is unified and far more accessible.

Everpure on a collision course

With the data management pivot, Everpure is redefining itself as more than just a ‘pure’ storage provider. It’s a natural evolution for the company given that others within its immediate sphere of influence have done the same.

Crucially, it’s a reaction to the fact that a myriad of vendors and service providers now want your enterprise data in their own platforms. Salesforce wants your data for its Agentforce service, while SAP wants you doing all your work with it, which just creates further fragmentation.

Everpure’s core value proposition here rests on unifying the various data sets you’re storing on their hardware, and relying on its solutions to consolidate and manage them, regardless of the other services you’re using.

It’s a bold move by Everpure, but one that increases the risk of butting heads with some serious big hitters in the tech industry, according to Henry Baltazar, research director at 451 Research.

“If we look at all these vendors in different silos, the reality is that to grow their revenues they have to go to adjacent. That’s what everybody’s doing,” he said.

“So, if you look at the backup side, data protection side, where did they go? They went to security and they bought the DSPM (data security posture management) vendors, kind of like what [Everpure] just did.

“[Everpure] went from storage … into more data management and governance. So, you've got these vendors on the same collision course, essentially, because that's the path forward to getting more influence, getting more revenues, and being able to talk to different stakeholders.”

Much of the same?

Data centricity is by no means a new concept. Indeed, ETL (extract, transform, load) processes date - and have been talked about at length - for more than a decade, begging the question of what’s different this time around.

This exact question was posed to Giancarlo during a Q&A with assembled media, who argued that most efforts on this front haven’t materialized. He added that as data intelligence also enables enterprises to create a shared context layer for data, that marks a “major change”.

ETL processes involved creating dedicated copies of data, which were then distributed to certain applications. The result, he said, is more fragmentation and “shadow data” that provides no value except to an individual application.

“I would argue that IT architectures, for the most part, didn't go down that direction,” he said.

“They knew data was important, but what they did is they took that important data and they copied it for every new application that they wanted to run, including all the analytics.”

AI, Giancarlo noted, appears to have been the “breaking point” for many enterprises, which have found themselves copying and replicating data sets for the various SaaS vendors they work with. It’s spiralled out of control, and Everpure thinks it has the remedy.

“AI is that breaking point for two reasons. One is the method that enterprises have started going down the AI route replicates the analytics portion, which is I copy the data again for this AI purpose, or I copy the data again for that AI purpose, and then you also have all of the, in particular the SaaS players saying, well, for my AI agent to be more used to you, you've got to give me a copy of your other data,” he explained.

“How many times are you going to replicate your data in all these different places? So I think it's reached a really clear breaking point now.”

New targets

While Everpure might face tough competition in the future, the opportunities are immense, according to Greg Macantee, senior analyst at 451 Research, particularly in terms of engagement with new enterprise audiences and leadership roles.

Simply put, Everpure isn’t just catering to IT and infrastructure operations leaders with data intelligence, it’s also opening up to CIOs and CTOs.

“It helps [Everpure] get into different personas and new accounts,” he told ITPro. “That’s kind of the contemporary issue, who are going to be your champions outside of the storage architect? Is it going to be the CISO, is it going to be the application owners, maybe the data engineer [or] data scientist?”

Making the pitch

One key question with Everpure’s data management shift is whether it has the visibility on this front. While the rebrand earlier this year reflected this, the company’s bread and butter since its inception has been flash storage.

Based on Giancarlo’s comments in the press Q&A, what is clear is that the firm is preparing for a big sales and outreach drive – and it’s a source of huge excitement internally.

“I think it’s a fairly extensive addition to what we are able to provide in the go-to-market area,” Giancarlo told journalists. “We’re very much bulking up in this area.”

“We’re hiring extensively, we will have forward deployed engineers who know a lot about our product and how to deploy it, but more importantly, can help consult with customers to be able to deploy it and start to go down this path towards data primacy.”

Partners will also play a “really important part” in championing the new approach, Giancarlo said, with systems integrators working on the frontline driving change.

“That opens up a huge opportunity for the channel, because all of that requires a lot of expertise, a lot of help, a lot of services, and so we believe that it’s a great opportunity for the channel,” he told journalists.

Execution will be critical for Everpure if it’s to have impact with this data intelligence drive, but it’s leading by example. Giancarlo revealed the company is deep into its own re-architecturing process internally, and it’s a “multi-year journey”.

Convincing customers to embark on a lengthy change process will most certainly be a challenge given the stakes at play for those dabbling in agentic AI.

Everpure is in a peculiar position when it comes to discussions around data sovereignty.

As a hardware vendor, it isn’t subject to the same scrutiny as cloud hyperscalers, but as a US company, it does face scrutiny from EU customers worried about dependency on foreign tech providers.

Patrick Smith, Everpure’s EMEA CTO, told ITPro the company is keen to engage in proactive and pragmatic discussions on this topic. Indeed, Everpure’s position on the matter is that once their storage solutions are deployed in a customer data center, it’s a hands-off approach.

“We like to be very upfront about that,” Smith told ITPro at Pure Accelerate 2026.

“When customers buy our tech and deploy it in their data centers, it’s under their control. We’re obviously a US provider of technology, but it’s under their control.”

Smith admits that the situation becomes tricky when it comes to telemetry monitoring. Everpure’s Pure One software solution collects telemetry data from arrays sitting in that data center, tracking configuration and performance metrics, and it runs in the cloud.

Everpure’s view on this, according to Smith, is that because this doesn’t contain mission-critical data, it’s not actually a big customer talking point in terms of data sovereignty posture. They at least have a choice here, though, he added.

“Every customer needs to make their own decision on that,” he told ITPro. “Some customers may choose to run what we call ‘dark sites’, where they do their own monitoring and telemetry in their own on-prem systems.”

Shifting priorities

Engagement with Everpure customers certainly shows data sovereignty has become a big concern over the last two years, according to Smith. Rising geopolitical tensions and regulatory considerations have prompted a rethink for many European firms on how they handle their data - and crucially, who they choose to safeguard it.

In response to legislative changes, a host of hyperscalers have launched dedicated ‘sovereign cloud’ services for European customers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft.

Meanwhile, the cloud repatriation trend, which dominated 2022 and 2023, is making somewhat of a comeback as enterprises look to bring data back on-prem to bolster both resilience and data protection capabilities.

The majority (97%) of companies plan to ditch public cloud in favor of in-house infrastructure, particularly for mission-critical workloads and data, according to a survey from Node4 from June last year.

The majority (97%) of companies plan to ditch public cloud in favor of in-house infrastructure, particularly for mission-critical workloads and data, according to a survey from Node4 from June last year.

“Right now, a lot of organizations are revisiting their cloud strategy, so digital sovereignty and data sovereignty are one of the triggers for them saying we’ve almost sleepwalked into this position where we have such heavy dependency on the hyperscalers,” Smith said.

Smith revealed that a prospective customer, a big European bank, was actively reconsidering a long-running cloud strategy while other customers have been making moves on this front.

“It’s a case of what was once a ‘cloud-first’ strategy, or a ‘cloud-only’ strategy, is now more of a ‘cloud considered’, and the criteria that go into that consideration are criticality of applications, the sensitivity of data,” he said.

Everpure’s sovereignty pitch

Everpure’s pitch to customers on this front is that if customers want a pure play hardware provider for their data center infrastructure, they’re the go-to option here, particularly for those repatriating workloads back on-prem.

“People have now got used to that cloud consumption model, and so the ability for us to deliver a cloud consumption model that spans on-prem, colocation, and the public cloud gives them that,” he claimed.

If they’re looking for more of a cloud-esque approach, then the company’s growing array of data management tools, such as its recently launched Data Intelligence platform, also represents a huge opportunity for Everpure.

The new platform aims to simplify data management processes, enabling users to improve data visibility and break down long-standing infrastructure silos.

Fred Lherault, EMEA CTO, Emerging at Everpure, said data visibility improvements delivered by the platform could provide marked benefits in terms of shoring up sovereignty practices.

“For a lot of organizations, they can't even say what data they have where, so even before they start thinking about changing, they can't answer basic questions, so that's one of the things I'm really excited about with data intelligence, is being able to answer those types of questions,” he told ITPro.

“That is actually the same set of questions that the compliance team is asking, that the cyber team is asking, that the AI team is asking,” Lherault added. “So there is really an opportunity to go and help a lot of people in a given organization that are trying to come to grips with that.”

Dependency concerns

For EU customers specifically, dependency isn’t just a case of who your cloud provider is and whether they’re a US-based company, Smith noted. Running parallel to data sovereignty considerations, concerns are growing over energy dependency and the impact of outages.

Two high-profile cloud outages at AWS and Microsoft last year shone a light on the scale of dependency in Europe and the potential domino effect that a major incident could cause for European organisations.

“I think the outages last year at both AWS and Azure were interesting in the fallout of those outages impacting UK-based companies, that perhaps they didn’t realize that they were dependent on,” he said.

“I think it gets even more interesting when you look at the degree of separation, because suddenly you realize that SaaS companies that you’re dependent on, where they are running their technology.

“So you may think that you’re nicely insulated or isolated from those outages, and then you suddenly find that your SaaS provider is impacted. It expands the scope of sovereignty.”

Sovereignty washing

With a big push on data sovereignty across Europe, the debate over what exactly constitutes ‘sovereign’ in terms of services has reached a boiling point, with ‘sovereignty washing’ emerging as a new industry buzzword.

CISPE, for example, has questioned the legitimacy of some services, going so far as to launch a framework designed to verify a provider’s sovereignty credentials.

Smith said the debate over true sovereign services cannot be ignored and weighs heavily on the minds of many executives. During a panel discussion ahead of Pure Accelerate this week, Smith noted that concerns over this topic will likely continue.

“I think that sovereignty washing is really important,” he said. “It’s going to come down to lawyers discussing it, because it’s all about the small print. Technologists aren’t going to make that decision on what good looks like; it’s going to be lawyers.”

“That comes with the hyperscalers bringing out regions that they call ‘sovereign regions’, and it’s a label, but what does it actually mean? It deals with the locality of the data; it may deal with the country and citizenship of the people who operate it, but does it tick all the boxes necessary to eliminate the risk?”

Smith compared sovereign services to insurance policies, noting that enterprises need to be “absolutely certain” that they’re getting what they pay for.

“You don’t want to go down a sovereign path and then suddenly find when things don’t go well that it hasn’t addressed all of the risks.”

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Rising hardware costs have placed significant pressure on Everpure in the last six months, according to CEO Charlie Giancarlo – but the company is keen to “share the pain” and ride out the storm.

Speaking at the company’s annual Pure Accelerate conference in Las Vegas this week, Giancarlo hailed customer resilience in the wake of rising costs, noting the company is frightfully aware of the difficulties many have encountered.

“Thank you for sticking with us,” he told attendees. “I apologize for the industry as a whole. We’ll eventually get through this. Unfortunately, it’s probably going to take a little bit of time.”

Giancarlo noted that Everpure is working closely with customers, but also partners, on orders to alleviate strain and pain moving forward.

Rising hardware costs have rocked the global tech industry in recent months, with enterprises and consumers alike feeling the pinch. According to Giancarlo, NAND prices have risen between 600-800% since October last year.

Naturally, this has resulted in price increases for customers, with the cost to produce the company’s products surging around 300%. While price increases have impacted customers, Giancarlo noted that the company is still operating at the “low end of our gross margin” rate.

“The lowest end of our gross margin rate that we’ve ever operated,” Giancarlo emphasized. “We want to be able to share the pain with you.”

If Everpure is indeed operating at the lower end of gross margin rates, then the company’s recent earnings report highlights a booming period for the data storage and management firm.

Revenue topped $1.1 billion in the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year - its first billion-dollar quarter and a “major milestone” Giancarlo noted during the opening keynote.

“We raised later”

Notably, Giancarlo told attendees that Everpure “raised later” with regard to price increases compared to competitors.

He later doubled down on the company’s stance in response to a question during a press Q&A session, noting that increases haven’t reflected the broader price surges.

“The price that we have to pay for semiconductors, which, as I said, has gone up somewhere in the six to eight range. It’s breath taking. Our prices have gone up by far less than that, and we’re operating at a lower gross margin.”

“We’ve been following competitors’ price raises,” Giancarlo added. “They’ve been sooner than ours, and they’ve been larger than ours.”

Competitors have indeed raised prices in response to the memory crisis. In February this year, Dell Technologies hiked prices and tightened discounts in response to the crisis, per reports from Seeking Alpha.

Speaking during a fourth-quarter earnings call at the time, Dell COO Jeff Clarke revealed the firm was “compressing discounting”.

HPE, meanwhile, also adopted an “agile pricing posture” in response to rising DRAM and NAND costs.

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Businesses are staring down an unprecedented shortage in components, with low memory stocks in particular pushing up prices across IT. Industry observers predict a fall in sales of everything from servers to smartphones.

The blame, at least in part, is laid at the feet of AI, with its seemingly insatiable demand for high-performance hardware.

AI projects are Hoovering up the available inventories of CPUs, GPUs, DRAM and storage, to run ever-larger, more powerful AI models. Manufacturers have responded by switching capacity from “commodity” DRAM and SSDs, to higher-end, higher margin components better suited to AI.

Some OEMs report that they have already sold all their capacity for 2026. Others have stopped making the components used in smartphones, PCs and servers altogether. Micron, for example, is set to close its Crucial consumer division. Others may well follow.

And, as component prices rise, sales of lower end PCs and notebooks look set to fall, in some cases dramatically. Analyst firm Gartner expects PC shipments to fall 10.4%, and smartphones sales to drop 8.4% during 2026.

Memories fade

Memory, or DRAM, has so far borne the brunt of price increases and supply shortages. But storage components, above all solid state storage, are not far behind.

Gartner predicts a 130% “surge” in combined DRAM and solid state drive (SSD) prices by the end of this year. And pressures are building beyond the consumer and personal device markets. Higher specification SSD and NVMe drives, used in servers and data centers are already in demand.

“AI‑driven demand continues to strain global memory supply chains, with DRAM and NAND flash, critical components for SSDs, in short supply. Leading hard‑drive manufacturers are reporting that their production capacity for 2026 is already sold out and prices are rising rapidly,” Jimmy Tam, CEO at data management company Peer Software, tells ITPro.

One reason is high-end storage is critical for AI model training. NVMe modules act as cache memory in AI vendors’ storage systems. These caches help storage arrays keep up with GPUs and in the AI model business, GPU utilization equals money.

But DRAM prices are pushing systems designers to make more use of cache instead of expensive memory. This adds to the demand for SLC and TLC NVMe modules used in tier-zero storage.

“High throughput and low latency NVMe flash demand increases as a palliative for prohibitive DRAM costs and availability,” says Max Mortillaro, chief research officer at analysts Osmium Data Group.

Then there is the ongoing demand from the “hyperscalers” for high-density, QLC NAND storage. “On the QLC front, demand for capacity is nowhere near stopping, especially for high-capacity drives, driven by hyperscalers,” he says.

If that is not enough, Osmium reports three-fold increases in the price of servers. This leaves CIOs, and the business services that depend on technology pipelines, facing unreliable supplies and higher costs.

Vendors agree.

“Strong component demand driven by tech titan AI buildouts has outstripped supply across the industry, dramatically increasing NAND, memory and CPU pricing. We expect that the industry, including Everpure, will see unpredictable component shortages, which could lead to extended lead times and potential shipment delays,” Everpure CEO Charlie Giancarlo told the financial markets earlier this year.

Other hardware vendors have made similar statements. NetApp, for example, describes the trend as an “unprecedented seismic shock for IT procurement strategies”.

Pandemic hangover

The storage capacity crisis is not, though, only a result of AI. Shortages are also the result of market cycles following the Covid pandemic.

In 2022, the markets saw what Scott Shadley, board director at the Storage Networking Industry Association, calls a “hoarding event”. This was followed by a downturn in the market, and an oversupply.

“This caused many companies to lower outputs. Then the ‘super’ cycle hit in late 2024 with the AI boom,” he says. “The need for all semiconductor-based products, DRAM, NAND, SSDs, and even GPUs and CPUs, went from average, to above average demand, to overly aggressive demand.”

Other factors, such as current geopolitical events, also threaten to disrupt supply chains, raise costs and lengthen lead times. This will force CIOs to make some hard choices.

“For infrastructure and data leaders, the question isn’t whether flash [storage] is valuable. It is,” Paul Speciale, CMO at object and hybrid cloud vendor Scality, tells ITPro.

“The question is whether your storage platform forces you into an all-flash posture, or whether it gives you architectural freedom to use each medium where it makes the most sense, while still delivering the performance and operational consistency modern workloads require.

“When markets are stable, it’s easy to treat storage media as a design preference. In a supply crunch, media becomes a constraint, and architectures that require one ‘perfect’ component will get exposed very quickly.”

Diversification, data cleansing and upcycling

Businesses, though, can offset some of the costs by looking at where they store data, what they store, and by delaying upgrades.

One way is to make more use of tiered storage, mixing NAND, hard drives and even tape. And organizations can also save costs by removing outdated or redundant data, as well as thinking harder about the data they capture and store. Enterprises might also keep hardware running longer, potentially using older storage arrays for less critical data.

“Organizations must recognize that placing data across different storage technologies is no longer theoretical, it is a practical necessity,” Valéry Guilleaume, CEO at data management firm Nodeum tells ITPro.

“This requires the ability to move, catalogue, and place data across heterogeneous storage systems. As data volumes continue to grow, organizations must remain open to integrating multiple storage technologies.”

Nelson Nahum, co-founder and CEO at Geyser Data, agrees. “High-speed memory and flash should be prioritized for active workloads such as AI training, analytics and production applications.

“Storing large volumes of inactive or archival data on these tiers can quickly drive up costs and exacerbate supply constraints,” he adds. “In short, the current supply pressures are encouraging organizations to rethink how they manage the full lifecycle of data.”

Storage shortages look set to continue to put pressure on CIO hardware budgets. But, in the medium term, this could yet benefit businesses, if the result is better data housekeeping.

Dell Technologies has announced a slew of new end-to-end AI services and hardware solutions, including new support for enterprise-scale data processing and new server racks equipped with the latest Nvidia chips.

Announced at Nvidia GTC 2026, the new features for Dell AI Factory with Nvidia include expanded support for data analytics, processing, and parallel file storage.

Since it was first announced in 2024, Dell has launched over 240 products, updates, and releases within Dell AI Factory with Nvidia and more than 4,000 Dell customers have started to use the offering.

This includes the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a world leader in genomics, which has used the offering to go from generating three genomes over the course of a decade to one genome every seven hours.

“The Dell AI Factory with Nvidia provides a unified, vertically integrated data foundation that brings analytics as well as AI together in a single stack,” said Varun Chhabra, SVP, Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell Technologies.

Dell has announced a range of new offerings within the AI Data Platform with Nvidia, which underpins the wider Dell AI Factory with Nvidia offering, including a new Data Orchestration Engine.

This is a no-code and low-code engine, a result of Dell’s December 2025 acquisition of the end-to-end AI development platform Dataloop.

Chhabra explained that it helps to automate data workflows for customers and improve visibility for data engineers and data scientists, to reduce the amount of manual data tagging and data pipeline creation that workers need to do.

Dell is also bringing new AI support across the Data Analytics Engine, which makes SQL data accessible via natural language processing (NLP), as well as support for Nvidia’s CUDA-X libraries within Data Search Engine and Data Processing Engine.

All told, Dell said the improvements unlock 12 times faster vector indexing and three times faster data processing. In internal tests with Qwen3-32B, the new features also enabled 19 times faster time to token.

Dell touts new storage offerings for the largest enterprises

Another major addition to Dell AI Factory with Nvidia is the Dell Lightning File System, a new tier 0, ultra-high performance storage offering intended for maximal GPU utilization and the lowest possible latency.

Dell Lightning File System delivers data transfer speeds of up to 150GB/sec per rack unit and is intended to complement Dell PowerScale and Dell ObjectScale for the most intense customer demands.

“The Lightning File System is really aimed at the largest of the large AI workloads, whether it's neoclouds, GPU as a service providers, or extremely high performance needs such as high frequency trading,” said Chhabra.

Dell said the Lightning File System offers twice the throughput of competing parallel file systems and 20 times greater performance than competitors using flash-only scale-out file systems.

Customers looking to launch large-scale AI storage clusters will also benefit from Dell Exascale Storage, a new software-defined, three-in-one architecture for deployments exceeding 10PB.

It brings together Dell PowerScale, Dell ObjectScale, and Dell Lightning File System, with up to 800 Gbit Ethernet network connectivity and 6TB/sec performance per rack performance.

“The goal here is this is not a new storage product, but a storage delivery vehicle, if you will, that customers can use to adapt different storage personalities over time without having to re-platform,” Chhabra explained.

“So if certain AI or HPC workloads are best suited for file data, they can deploy PowerScale on the Exascale Storage. If they are looking at modern applications or modern AI applications that require large-scale object storage deployment, they can deploy ObjectScale on the same cluster.

PowerEdge for frontier models

In addition to its Dell AI Factory with Nvidia announcements, Dell has used Nvidia GTC to unveil a slew of new hardware advancements.

First, Dell announced PowerEdge XE9812, a rack-scale system for the Dell Integrated Rack 9000 (IR9000) that comes packaged with the Nvidia Rubin NVL72.

Dell said the PowerEdge XE9812 can achieve 10 times lower cost-per-token compared to Nvidia Blackwell chips and needs four times fewer GPUs to inference a mixture of experts (MoE) model.

New NVLink capabilities within the rack allow it to achieve GPU to GPU bandwidth of up to 260TB/sec.

“The single rack has more bandwidth than the entire internet, which is kind of incredible,” Chhabra said.

The server is fanless, as it’s fully liquid-cooled, and quick disconnects for hot swaps and maintenance that doesn’t disrupt operations.

In addition to its latest frontier offering, Dell also announced new 100% liquid-cooled server offerings in the form of the PowerEdge XE9880L, XE9885L, and XE9882L.

“All of them have HGX Rubin GPUs and the difference between the systems is really the CPU choices,” Chhabra explained.

The XE9880L comes with dual-socket Intel Xeon CPUs, the XE9885L comes with next-generation AMD Venice CPUs, and the XE9882L comes with Rubin Arm-based CPUs.

These servers support up to 144 GPUs per rack, which are liquid cooled for higher performance per kilowatt. The servers house Nvidia HGX Rubin NVL8, which pack 8 Rubin GPUs in a 2U chassis interlinked with NVLink v6 connectivity and complemented with BlueField data processing units (DPUs) and Spectrum-X Ethernet switches.

Overall, Dell recorded a 5.5x performance improvement with this server family compared to B200 GPUs.

Dell also announced the Dell PowerEdge R9822 and M9822, which bring Nvidia’s Vera CPU to rack-scale environments.

“These two servers extend the power edge portfolio with support for the Vera processors, as I mentioned, which enable organizations to deploy modern ARM based compute on trusted power edge infrastructure,” said Chhabra.

He added that the servers are intended to support AI factories, high-bandwidth data analytics, databases, cloud-native applications, and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

Finally, Dell is launching the PowerEdge R770, R7725, and R7715, which feature Nvidia RTX Pro 4500 Blackwell GPUs for three times faster data processing than L4 tensor core GPUs, four times faster visual compute and content creation than the previous generation.

PC announcements for edge AI

addition to Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell Ultra GB300 Superchip, the workstation comes with 496GB LPDDR5X CPU memory and 252GB HBM3e GPU memory.

It is capable of 20 petaflops of FP4 computing power, enough to run trillion-parameter models entirely at the edge.

Jon Siegal, SVP of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies, said the Dell Pro Max with GB300 is “purpose-built” to meet next-generation agentic AI workloads.

Dell is also bringing back the Dell Pro Precision workstation range, with a range of offerings designed to run trillion-parameter models locally for specialized industries such as healthcare, deep tech, and financial services.

In response to a question from ITPro, a Dell representative also indicated that the firm is seeing some customers fine tuning trillion-parameter models into billion-parameter small language models (SLMs).

Dell’s mobile workstations are now thinner, lighter, and more powerful. The Dell Pro Precision 5 series, available the latest Intel Core Ultra H processors and Nvidia RTX Pro discreet graphic options, delivering a blend of powerful graphics performance and up to 50 TOPS of AI processing capability.

The Dell Pro Precision 7 series is aimed at designers and creators, with RTX Pro 3000 discrete graphics in addition to the Intel chips.

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Microsoft reckons it's made a major breakthrough in glass data storage technology, touting a new technique it says can preserve information for 10,000 years.

Magnetic tape and hard drives degrade within decades, leading to research into glass - a permanent data storage material that is resistant to water, heat, and dust.

In the past, glass-based data storage has required expensive fused silica - a type of glass that is relatively difficult to manufacture and available from only a few sources.

However, the new Project Silica technology - detailed in an article in Nature - means it's possible to use the same borosilicate glass found in kitchen cookware and oven doors.

"This advance addresses key barriers to commercialization: cost and availability of storage media," said Microsoft partner research manager Richard Black.

"We have unlocked the science for parallel high-speed writing and developed a technique to permit accelerated aging tests on the written glass, suggesting that the data should remain intact for at least 10,000 years."

Microsoft’s new glass data storage technology

The new technique allows hundreds of layers of data to be stored in glass just 2mm thick, as with previous methods. However, the reader for the glass now needs only one camera, not three or four, thereby reducing cost and size.

The writing devices also require fewer parts, making them easier to manufacture and calibrate and enabling them to encode data more quickly.

Femtosecond lasers, which fire high-power laser pulses quadrillionths of a second long, are focused on a point within the glass to modify its optical properties and encode data as voxels, the 3D equivalent of pixels.

Microsoft said it's now able to cut the number of pulses used to form the voxel from many to only two. Crucially, the polarization of the first pulse is not important to the polarization of the voxel formed.

Notably, the tech giant has been able to build on this to enable pseudo-single-pulse writing. This involves a single pulse that can be split after its polarization is set to simultaneously form the first pulse for one voxel - where the polarization doesn’t matter - and the second pulse of another, where the set polarization is essential.

New storage methods could be coming soon

As part of the project, Microsoft revealed it has invented a new type of data storage in glass called “phase voxels”, in which the phase change of the glass is modified instead of its polarization, showing that only a single pulse is necessary to make a phase voxel.

"We demonstrated that these phase voxels can also be formed in borosilicate glass and devised a technique to read the phase information from phase voxels encoded in this material,” Black said.

“We showed that the much higher levels of three-dimensional inter-symbol interference in phase voxels can be mitigated with a machine learning classification model."

Meanwhile, by using a mathematical model of pre-heating and post-heating within the glass with a new multi-beam delivery system, the team found that many data voxels can be written in proximity in the glass at the same time, significantly increasing writing speed.

The team has also developed a new way to optimize symbol encodings using machine learning, along with a better way to understand the trade-off between error rates, error protection, and error recovery when evaluating new digital storage systems.

Crucially, a new non-destructive optical method identifies the aging of data storage voxels within the glass, finding it can support data lasting 10,000 years.

The company demonstrated these techniques with several proofs of concept - including storing Warner Bros' Superman” movie on quartz glass, and partnering with Global Music Vault to preserve music under ice for 10,000 years.

"The research phase is now complete, and we are continuing to consider learnings from Project Silica as we explore the ongoing need for sustainable, long-term preservation of digital information," said Black.

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Since its launch over nine years ago, Qnap's mighty 16-bay NAS cube still holds the record as the largest desktop storage appliance on the planet. On review, we have the latest TVS-AIh1688ATX, which targets AI apps such as image recognition and analysis, along with a range of enterprise tasks, including data backup and virtualization.

Starting life as the TS-1635, chassis design has generally remained the same but has seen many subsequent hardware upgrades as it's gone from a humble Amazon Alpine to an Intel Xeon W CPU in the TVS-h1688X. The TVS-AIh1688ATX takes performance to the next level as the top-end model we test sports a modern 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 285 CPU teamed up with 48GB of DDR5 memory.

With eight P (performance) cores, sixteen E (efficient) cores, an embedded Intel Graphics GPU, and Intel AI Boost NPU (neural processor unit) to play with, the appliance boasts a high 36 TOPS (trillion operations per second). Typical AI-based applications Qnap is aiming the appliance at include its QuMagie photo album categorisation, along with the QVR surveillance app's facial recognition and enhanced people counting.

Qnap TVS-AIh1688ATX-U9-48G review: Hardware changes

Along with a hugely upgraded CPU, the appliance introduces significant updates in the storage department. The twelve main drive bays still support LFF and SFF SATA HDDs and SSDs, but the bank of four SFF bays can now handle U.2 NVMe Gen4 SSDs as well as SATA models.

One feature we're sad to see go is the dual internal M.2 NVMe SSD slots. Qnap recommends running its QuTS hero OS on SSDs for the best performance, and previously we've always used the M.2 slots for these duties as they free up the main storage bays. On a brighter note, Qnap has sensibly provided the 48GB of base DDR5 memory on one stick, so you can upgrade to the maximum 192GB without having to replace it.

Networking sees changes too, as although the 2.5GbE multi-Gig port count has been halved, the dual-port 10GbE adapter card in the TVS-h1688X has been replaced with two embedded ports. This matters as it frees up the inner PCIe x16 expansion slot, which supports 260mm full-length full-height cards – the two outer half-height slots have length restrictions of 150mm due to the positioning of the dual CPU blower fans in front of them.

The TVS-AIh1688ATX is blessed with a wealth of USB ports, as you have two USB-C 4, two USB-C 3.2 Gen2 plus three USB-A 3.2 Gen2, and you can add dual Thunderbolt 5 with Qnap's optional QXP-T52P PCIe card. The HDMI port has also been upgraded from 1.4b to 2.1, allowing it to support 4K video at 60Hz.

Qnap TVS-AIh1688ATX-U9-48G review: Deployment and 10GbE performance

Qnap doesn't enforce the same draconian drive restriction policies as Synology, and we had no problems using two 1TB Western Digital SA500 SATA SSDs for system pool duties, four 22TB Western Digital Red Pro NAS HDDs for general data storage, and a quartet of 3.84TB SanDisk U.2 NVMe SSDs for performance testing. Deployment is as simple as Qnap's QFinder Pro desktop app spotted the NAS on our network and transported us to the browser-based setup routine, which automatically installed the latest QuTS hero h6 OS – more on that later.

Using the Storage Manager app, we set the SATA SSDs up as a RAID1 mirror while the HDDs and NVMe SSDs were configured as RAID5 arrays. With a NAS share on the NVMe array mapped to a Dell PowerEdge Windows Server 2022 host over 10GbE, we watched Iometer report a splendid 9.3Gbits/sec across the board for sequential and random read and write operations.

It was the same story for IP SANs with a 1TB iSCSI target delivering identical speeds across all tests. We ramped up the pressure with a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the target and saw sequential read and write speeds increase to 18.5Gbits/sec and 17.4Gbits/sec while random operations returned an equally impressive 18.5Gbits/sec and 16.7Gbits/sec. We also noted that the Intel CPU never went about 24% utilization during our test, so there's plenty left in the tank for more demanding tasks.

Qnap TVS-AIh1688ATX-U9-48G review: QuTS hero h6 new features

The latest QuTS hero h6 has a sharp focus on security and the TVS-AIh1688ATX is currently the only Qnap NAS that supports the new Secure Boot feature. Implemented at the hardware level, it verifies the appliance's firmware signature and prevents it from loading if it's been compromised.

There's support for FIDO2 passkeys for secure password-free logins and the new KMIP (key management interoperability protocol) app connects with remote KMIP servers for managing, storing and retrieving storage encryption keys. Other security features on the horizon are the Ransomware Guard which is accessed from the Malware Remover app, detects known malware and monitors processes for suspicious activity while the Secure IP Access feature will augment the QuFirewall app with granular IP-based access controls.

The High Availability Manager app allows two identical appliances to be placed in a fault tolerant active/passive cluster and has been updated with support for more Qnap NAS models. The Control Panel, iSCSI & Fibre Channel and Storage Manager apps see substantially redesigned interfaces making them even easier to use. Snapshot management gets its own dedicated app which adds extra ransomware protection with policies for creating immutable snapshots that cannot be tampered with or deleted until the retention period you set has expired.

Previously, Qnap's Qtier app was only available with its QTS OS but this has now been integrated into QuTS hero. This manages up to three storage tiers comprising NVMe SSDs, SATA SSDs and HDDs, monitors storage pool activity and applies custom schedules to control the migration of hot data across the tiers.

Qnap TVS-AIh1688ATX-U9-48G review: Is it worth it?

With Qnap's UK online store listing it for £5,660 including VAT, the TVS-AIh1688ATX-U9-48G represents a considerable investment but does deliver an impressive hardware package for the price. Qnap also offers the lower-end TVS-AIh1688ATX-U7-32G, which comes with a 20-core Intel Core Ultra 7 CPU plus 32GB of DDR5 and costs £4,464.

Its powerful CPU is clearly capable of handling a wide range of surveillance tasks, and we were impressed with Qnap's QVR Face Insight and QVR Human apps as they worked extremely well with fast reactions to activity in our predefined camera detection zones. The QuMagie app also delivered efficient categorisation, face recognition, and thumbnail generation for our big photo collections.

For surveillance operations, the appliance has almost no competition as Synology's current AI-powered NVR alternatives have dwindled to its entry-level 2-bay DVA1622. The high storage bay count and feature-rich QuTS hero h6 OS also make the TVS-AIh1688ATX appliances great all-rounders that look capable of handling a wide range of enterprise data protection, backup, and general storage duties.

Qnap TVS-AIh1688ATX-U9-48G specifications

Santa Clara, California headquartered, 100% indirect Pure Storage added 12% year-on-year to its $3.17 billion revenues for full-year 2025, and to its Q1 2026 revenues of $779 million. Product sales rose 5%; subscriptions 22%.

Founded in 2009 by John Colgrove and John Hayes as Os76 before branding as Pure Storage in 2011, Pure is 6000 employees strong, led by CEO Charles Giancarlo. The focus is on flash and data management, integrating storage hardware, embedded licensed software, and services. Partners like Kyndryl, Tech Mahindra, and NTT are joined by resellers like Bechtle, CD,W and ePlus.

Geoff Greenlaw, EMEA and LATAM channel sales vice president, says it's expanding flash into historical disk use cases, leveraging its flash software as well as quad-level cell (QLC) flash.

General manager, commercial, Amy Fowler, oversees regional channel heads, including Greenlaw, the Americas' Hope Galley, and Andrew Fisher for Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ).

Key offerings

Within the Pure Storage platform and Pure's Enterprise Data Cloud concepts are several offerings expected to power partner revenues. And in June, Pure announced various updates targeting volatile, power-hungry workloads.

Within the Pure Storage platform and Pure's Enterprise Data Cloud concepts are several offerings expected to power partner revenues. And in June, Pure announced various updates targeting volatile, power-hungry workloads.

FlashBlade hardware - unified file and object storage for unstructured data. For instance, the FlashBlade/EXA storage platform is being marketed towards AI deployments seeking to make better use of organizational data.

As Greenlaw tells ITPro: "{FlashBlade's] very focused on very high-end performance and throughput. It can become very big in healthcare where there's high volumes, very large volumes of data that need storage for long-term data retention."

FlashArrays C and X - "We're pushing on with our FlashArray tech, which is really about database[s]. In addition, we have major enhancements to our X and XL range, which is up to 30% faster than its predecessor. That's mission-critical in the world of database[s]," he says.

Portworx - a cloud-native container data management platform for Kubernetes.

"We're seeing companies increasingly competing with Broadcom VMware," Greenlaw adds. "VMware has drastically increased the price of their licensing, and customers are looking for alternative virtualized environments."

Partners are seen as drivers for seamless mobility, cost optimization, resiliency, sustainability, consistent storage services, and unified data environments, including tailored and certified offerings for AI and high-volume data. In addition, Pure Fusion v2 software caters to AI-focused data management, with Pure1 AIops included in active subscriptions and support contracts.

Pure Storage in the news

• Founder John Colgrove, in June, talked up an all-flash future, with Pure also doubling down on data management.
• Also in June, Pure//Accelerate showcased its high-performance flash hardware, broad software stack, STaaS, and Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) for combined data storage and management.
• January 2025 saw Pure announce its hyperscaler 'design win' licensing deal as hastening the death of disk.

Pure Storage for partners

Greenlaw says February's partner program update will fuel profitability for partners and Pure as changes bed in, while tech alliances with vendors such as Rubrik and CrowdStrike will further enhance its portfolio with regard to gaining net new logos (adding new customers).

"We're really doubling down on fewer, bigger bets within our channel to make Pure far more relevant to them, rather than spreading our revenue across 1000s of partners."

Partners lead customers through data storage transformation, leveraging the Pure Storage Platform for solution-specific use cases from AI to cyber-resilience. Data access, preparation, and management often bar AI success, for instance.

Also, partners will be incentivized to replace disks with Pure flash, with new solution-oriented training and enablement.

Partners are crucial to Pure's sustainability push, Greenlaw says, not least because data centers suck 2-3% of generated electricity worldwide, with datacentre storage, cooling, and space comprising most of that.

Services remain "highly relevant" to partners too, including storage as a service (STaaS) EverGreen//One, //Flex, and the more traditional //Forever.

Meanwhile, Pure's Service Specialization Program means partners can offer their own branded professional and support services for Pure technology.

In the partner program announcement, channel chief Fowler said the "reimagined" program experience will position partners for rapid growth and customers for "a sustainable future".

"Pure Storage is deeply committed to driving shared success with its partners," she says.

Partner programs, tiers, and partner types

• Partners are divided into resellers, distributors, global systems integrators (GSIs), and managed services partners (MSPs). In addition, there are Services specializations, and technology alliance partners for jointly engineered solutions.
• Tiers are Elite or Preferred, based on annual dollar values booked and technical certifications, with Elite partners eligible for higher back-end rebates and more investment in training and certification.
• Pure Storage Global Enablement certifications last two years.
  • FlashArray Architect Associate
  • FlashBlade Architect Associate
  • Platform Solutions Associate
  • FlashArray Architect Professional
  • FlashBlade Architect Professional

Partners should first qualify for the Pure Platform Positioning Certificate on explaining and selling Pure, then choose from product-focused learning paths and assessments, with or without additional training as required. Exam ordering instructions are here.

• IT professional services certifications.
  • Associate (data storage)
  • Professional (FlashArray, FlashBlade, Portworx, data protection)
  • Specialist (FlashArray and FlashBlade implementation or support, cloud block store, migration)
  • Expert (platform architect)

Further benefits, rewards, and incentives

• Individual and entity rewards for Preferred and Elite partners with partner-sourced competitive take-out deals.
• Rebates for Elite partner subscription bookings and new or strategic solutions sales.

Beyond the above, other rewards or benefits won't apply to all regions or partners, Pure says.

• Deal registration.
• Pure Digital Master Services Agreement (PDMSA) - margin for self-service purchases.
• Pure Partner Intelligence - real-time insights and analytics dashboard.
• Pure Realize - support for use-case proposals, price quotes, and solution expertise.
• Configure, price, quote (CPQ) tooling.
• Pure Storage digital badges.
• Partner Library of resources and info - log in here.
• Training catalog via Pure's Partner Academy page - log in with Partner Account details.
• Further enablement via the Partner Central partner
• Collaborations with the Technical Services teams.
• Collaborations with Business-Critical Services teams.
• Pure360 demos, videos, and test-drives.
• Pure Storage Partner Finder listing.
• Monthly cost estimator for Evergreen//One partners.
• Cost calculators for cloud block storage, STaaS, and FlashBlade//S.
• Remote installation support for FlashArray and FlashBlade.
• Further online resources - online solution briefs, how-tos, webinars, blog posts, e-books, and whitepapers.

Sign up and get on board

To become a partner, explore program details and express interest by contacting Pure Storage through its website. No membership fee is required just to join; eligibility is determined by actual sales activity. Send an enquiry on this page.

For support and questions, try this web form, or contact sales in the US by phoning 800-976-6494 or emailing info@purestorage.com.

Pure Storage is also on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook.

Welcome to ITPro's live coverage of HPE Discover 2025. We're on the ground at the Fira Grand Via in Barcelona this week to bring your rolling coverage of all the big news and announcements from Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s annual European conference.

While we're waiting for the day two keynote to begin, you can find all our coverage from the show so far here.

The show floor is already getting busy, both with people and tiny football playing robots.

Here's one of the bots in action – getting a bit overwhelmed by the attention at the end it seems. According to our tour guide they're not just on the floor to look cute and entertain – they demonstrate technology and connectivity that can be used in manufacturing.

The auditorium is starting to fill up as CEO Antonio Neri is expected on stage imminently

And here's the man himself. He's addressing the delegates, acknowledging that there's a mix of technologists and business leaders here. He's also – as expected – talking about the future of AI including 'physical AI', AKA robots. Anecdotally, this is a trend that I'm hearing more and more, which feels very "back to the future" – it was a topic of conversation pre-pandemic, as was digital twinning...

Networking, cloud, and AI are the watch words here – a bit of a shift from the edge to cloud to AI mantra of Discover Las Vegas 2024, but an understandable one. The Juniper Networks acquisition (which he's discussing now) has perhaps obviously made networking an important story for HPE. Realistically, it's also one of the main enablers of edge computing anyway.

Neri adds that he's excited to share some news about how Juniper Networks (now HPE Juniper Networking) will integrate with the company's existing Aruba Networking portfolio.

Joining Neri on stage now is Rami Rahim, formerly CEO of Juniper Networks, now VP and GM of networking at HPE. He's talking up the importance of networking in the future of enterprise infrastructure, including AI infrastructure connecting thousands of GPUs together for massive processing power.

Rahim is also talking about the idea of "self driving" networks. Expect to hear more about this both here at Discover and from HPE in the future. It seems to be a key marketing point, USP, and concept for how AI networks will work in the future.

Rahim is now talking about the differences between Juniper Mist and HPE Aruba Networking Central, how Mist was built for the cloud while Aruba was more of an on-premises play.

"We have two industry leading network AI platforms, Aruba Central and Juniper Mist, Aruba Central and Juniper Mist, both delivering real and valuable results to our customer each," says Rahim. "Every day by adopting our platforms, our customers have seen up to a 90% reduction in travel tickets and on site service calls. They've also seen a drastic decrease in the amount of time they have to spend in hands on network operations."

"Each of these solutions is unique and compelling in different ways," he says.

The two platforms are being "cross pollinated", says Rahim. Some elements of Mist are moving to Aruba Central and vice versa. Eventually, says Rahim, there will be no difference between the two.

HPE is also launching a joint WiFi-7 access point that unifies Juniper and Aruba technology. This will be launching in Q3 next year, around the time of HPE Discover Las Vegas 2026.

You can read more on these announcements in my full write-up here.

We're now onto GreenLake, the ever shifting backbone of HPE offerings. For those who have been familiar with HPE for a while, you'll know that GreenLake was originally pitched as something akin to a cloud service, with on-demand and consumption-based pricing at its core. It's now morphed into something like a managed service.

"We make deploying and managing AI data centers simpler and much more efficient, but we don't stop there; with GreenLake only HPE can provide end to end data center solutions across compute, storage and networking, along with expertise and services," Rahim explains.

Some more product announcements: the QFX5250 switch with HPE tomahawk 6 technology and MX301 edge router. Once again you can read more here.

Rahim is also talking up the AMD Helios and Nvidia AI Factory announcements from earlier in the week.

"I could not be more proud of our partnership with Nvidia, and I believe these joint solutions will give customers the assurance they need to deploy our routing technology with Nvidia's cutting edge products with confidence," he says of the continuing Nvidia partnership.

On AMD, he adds: " Iam stoked to announce the HPE will be offering AMD Helios AI rack worldwide starting next year. The Helios rack scale architecture is an open platform for large scale AI workloads, putting industry standards at the forefront of the design. So recall I said earlier that scale up networking has been uncharted territory. Well, that's about to change. I'm very excited to announce an HPE Juniper network and scale up youth nets, which designed specifically for Helios AI rack. This is an industry first scale up solution using open standard Ethernet, in other words, no proprietary vendor login."

Wrapping up, Rahim says: "It's been, what, less than six months since we closed this acquisition, and I hope you agree with me that we have already made massive progress in our integration efforts, the fact that we are here today announcing new products and solutions and not just announcing the intent, but showing them the help on the Discover show floor should tell you that we are committed not only to our vision, but to truly bring it into life."

"Now as we look forward, one thing is clear, it's time for a new generation of networks – HPE networks – to be a new leader," he continues. "We have the tech. We have the track record of innovation. We have the worldwide go to market scale, including a fantastic partner community.

"We have a bold vision, and we have the team that can execute on that bold vision and bring it all to life. So a very big thank you for believing in us and for supporting us. We could not do it without you. Thank you for joining us on this journey."

Neri is now back on stage, continuing Rahim's thoughts saying: "Personally could not be prouder of what a new combined network HPE has already accomplished and what they will do next. Rami and I had the same vision from the very beginning, which was to create a new network together, and I truly believe we are on the path to do so."

We're now moving onto hybrid cloud and, inevitably, GreenLake.

"Hybrid Cloud gives you resilience, flexibility and speed with more control and lower cost, and that's why customers are choosing GreenLake," claims Neri. "When we first mentioned GreenLake, our goal was not to build another cloud. It was to deliver a better cloud experience, one that ... [offered] a consistent cloud operating model across your entire IT estate."

A few connectivity issues have meant I've not been able to post some updates on GreenLake, Alletra Storage, and security. There will be some standalone articles on these announcements from me later!

A few bullet points on what was announced in the meantime

• New capabilities for HPE Morpheus Software, including software-defined networking for VMs hosted on HVM hypervisor in VM Essentials and Morpheus Enterprise Software
• Apstra Data Center Director from Juniper, which will be integrated into Morpheus
• Stretched cluster capabilities for Morpheus
• Zerto cybersecurity software is being integrated into Morpheus
• HPE VM Essentials backup on Veeam Data Platform 1.3
• HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 Data Intelligence Nodes with Nvidia AI Data Platform reference design

Neri is now going over some of the supercomputing announcements that were recently made just before and at SC conference in October. You can read more about the new Cray GX5000 and K3000 systems here, and the DoE supercomputer announcements here.

Welcome to Day Two of HPE Discover Barcelona 2025. No fainting robots or other foibles on the way to the main theatre this morning, sadly, but we're expecting the networking general session (aka keynote) to kick off any moment.

Networking has been one of the big topics so far this week, with former Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim taking up almost the same amount of time on stage during Antonio Neri's keynote yesterday as Neri himself.

Roll VT, it's time to start the general session.

Rami Rahim is on stage now. "It has been quite a year for us at networking inside of HPE," he says, which feels like a bit of an understatement.

The networking side of HPE's business is now 20,000 strong, says Rahim. "It's absolutely remarkable how quickly Aruba and Juniper have come together and started working side by side on a common vision, with a common objective, to create a new industry leader in network," he adds.

"Networking has never been more important in our industry, and networking has never been more important for HPE," says Rahim. This has been the theme of the whole event – HPE is a server, storage, AND networking company. Aruba has, of course, been in place for 10 years but this emphasis on networking is stronger than ever, in my experience.

We have a customer on stage now for a chat with Rahim from Lanes Group, a water treatment provider, to explain how important networking is for their business. What this means, in practice, is connecting CCTV cameras, sensors, and other operational data. They're also implementing AI for predictive maintenance, so anticipating a problem before it becomes an issue, as well as agents.

There's about an hour left of the general session and apparently we're going to be getting some live demos of the technology. Always a brave choice...

Another exec has taken to the stage to talk about uptime and the importance of the "self driving" network enabled by Marvis (a technology that came over from Juniper but is now with Aruba via the 'cross pollination' policy) and Aruba Central (still part of Aruba).

A network being "up" is not the same as being "good", he says, and really UX needs to be part of the networking conversation.

After a short VT based on two real life scenarios, we're now into what a self-driving network means. There are three elements: speed of rollout, fewest tickets and the perhaps more subjective idea of "better business outcomes".

The self driving network is dependent on AI agents and microservices, he says, highlighting the existing reputation of HPE Aruba Central and Juniper Mist.

HPE are leaning hard on the example of autonomous vehicles to explain this – how we've gone from cars with at best an oil warning light to parking assistants, blindspot cameras etc

We're having a demo of Marvis, which is a natural language trouble-shooting bot within Mist, to be perhaps a little reductive. It's a previously created demo, which is probably for the best for all involved.

The announcements are coming thick and fast. An inevitable focus for a European conference is digital sovereignty and we've just had the announcement that microservices through Aruba Networking Central will be available 'on prem' – inverted commas because some of the data processing is still done in the cloud, but inferencing is done on premises.

Ok some more innovation announcements. First "The power of agentic AI" – Apstra Data Center Director can identify if one device "catches a cold ... who will start sneezing next". Marvis can then be used to identify the issues and help fix them via natural language interactions. Worth noting that while these are novel to HPE, Marvis and Apstra have been imported through the Juniper acquisition.

Next innovation: This is about the importance of open systems, which the presenter says is "important for cloud and neocloud providers". Consequently the QFX5240 and QFX5250 switches are available immediately with support for SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud).

Innovation three: Data center networking operations are now integrated with Opsramp.

This means a "seamless solution that locates your application and network issues", he says.

Innovation four appears to be... Rami Rahim??

Oh no, innovation four the QFX5250 data center switch. This is apparently the frist switch using Broadcom Tomahawk 6 chips and also features direct liquid cooling, which is a specialism for HPE on its server infrastructure. You can read a bit more about the QFX5250 here.

AE Natarajan is next on stage talking about networking for the post-internet, AI era

"When we first started the internet, it was built and architected for downloads," he says. This could lead to buffering issues for large files (e.g. from Netflix), which led to caching to overcome this issue.

AI doesn't work this way, in his words AI "never sleeps". Cached data is instantly obsolete in the world of AI, and upload/download is symmetrical. Constantly, the network architecture needs to be completely different.

Ok, we're onto network security. "While AI is making our life and we can speed up things. Guess what? AI is also doing the same things to the bad actors in the world. It's the same tools that is available that these guys become more sophisticated," he says.

David Hughes, SVP and GM of SASE and security, is now on stage talking about the overlap of networking and security.

"Traditionally, the networks team is tasked with ensuring that there's great performance and reliable connectivity for people, for devices, for workloads, he says. "[For] decades now, networking has at its foundation ... the ability to connect any endpoint to any other endpoint."

"Meanwhile, the security team is tasked with protecting users data and workloads, and historically, this is being done by restricting, often with solutions that are altered on or overlaid on top of the template," he explains, adding that users are often "caught in the middle", which causes a bad experience for them.

"obody wants to choose between performance and protection. We need both, and what we believe is that a network with physical security is genius," Hughes says, before rattling through some of Aruba's pedigree in security despite being a networking company.

The addition of Juniper to HPE has enhanced this, Hughes says, highlighting the SRX appliance as a particularly stand-out example.

The answer to some of these issues is zero trust everywhere – stopping lateral movement, isolating compromised endpoints such as laptops etc.

Additionally, HPE has some product ranges that can help sitting in the categories of unified SASE, full-stack AIOps, universal zero trust networking access (ZTNA), and hybrid mesh firewall.

"Delivering with integral security, there's no need to choose between performance and protection," Hughes concludes. "We are innovating with the goal of providing solutions that align the working and security teams behind a common zero trust mission."

Rahim is back on stage to wrap up for the day. "Networking has never been more important," he says, "and this is why it is for technology. We have the track record of innovation. And most importantly, as I think you have seen by now, we have the team to deliver on everything you are seeing here at discovers. HPE networking was created to be you leader with a whole vision and the ability to execute on that vision and to bring it to light."

With that he thanks the audience and it's lights up in the auditorium. This is the end of the live blog, but not the end of our coverage, so stay tuned for more throughout this week.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced significant performance improvements for its Amazon S3 Vectors service in a bid to compensate for surging enterprise AI workload demands.

New updates for the cloud object storage service, first unveiled in July this year, mean S3 Vectors now scale up to two billion vectors per index, which the hyperscaler noted is a 40-times increase compared to preview capacity.

The service also supports up to 20 trillion vectors per bucket, AWS revealed, and will offer users 2-3x faster query performance.

The update aims to accommodate surging data volumes amidst continued enterprise AI adoption, according to AWS. The S3 service already stores more than 500 trillion objects and hundreds of exabytes of data, AWS noted.

To meet this growing demand, the hyperscaler plans to increase the maximum S3 object size to 50TB, marking a ten-times increase. This, the hyperscaler said, will enable customers to "store massive data files like high-resolution videos, seismic data, and AI training datasets as single objects in their original form".

Amazon S3 Vectors

When AWS announced the launch of Amazon S3 Vectors in July, it hailed the service as the first "purpose-built durable vector storage solution" aimed at improving affordability for enterprises with large-scale data storage requirements.

The hyperscaler claims the service can reduce the cost of uploading, storing, and querying vectors by around 90%. These cost savings are crucial given the intense enterprise focus on generative AI over the last three years.

Vector search is a technique used in generative AI applications to identify similarities between specific data points. According to AWS, vectors are a "numerical representation of unstructured data created from embedding models".

"You use embedding models to generate vector embeddings of your data and store them in S3 Vectors to perform semantic searches," the company explained in a July announcement statement.

In launching S3 Vectors, AWS aims to bring these capabilities to customer data, integrating closely with Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases and the Amazon OpenSearch service.

The goal here is to make it easier to build AI agents, RAG systems, and semantic search applications that understand both context and intent; crucial factors for enterprises developing customer-facing applications.

According to the hyperscaler, a host of customers, including BMW Group, Twilio, and Qlik are using S3 Vectors to "accelerate AI search and power recommendation systems at scale".

MORE FROM ITPRO

• AWS has a chance to show its mettle at re:Invent 2025

A third of UK organizations are failing to back up all of their sensitive data, hindering their ability to restore operations and ensure service continuity in the event of a breach.

Almost half of those surveyed by security firm Cohesity reported not backing up all their workloads, including virtual machines, applications, and unstructured data, while 38% aren’t applying consistent data categorization, backup controls, and policies globally.

Crucially, only 45% consistently follow the ‘3-2-1’ backup rule - three copies of data, stored on two different media types, with one copy kept off-site. The same number are failing to keep tamper-proof copies by using immutability across all their organizational backup data to ensure resilience against cyber attacks.

Fraser Hutchison, VP for Northern Europe at Cohesity, warned that enterprises need to sharpen their focus on backup strategies as failure to do so could exacerbate recovery in the wake of a cybersecurity incident.

"Most organizations now recognize the need to identify phishing scams or social engineering tactics; however, we can’t lose sight of what to do when disaster does strike. While complete prevention is near impossible, assurance of rapid recovery is fully within organizational control," he said.

"Our research shows that UK organizations still aren’t taking adequate precautions when it comes to data backups. By storing data on immutable platforms, they can ensure business-critical information remains beyond the reach of adversaries and that operations stay up and running, even when systems are compromised."

Sharpen up on backups

Last year, research from Beaming revealed that more than 800,000 UK firms had lost company data in the previous five years, at a total cost of more than £1 billion a year.

Businesses with between 10 and 250 staff saw the worst effects, while the most expensive data loss incidents occurred in the manufacturing sector, where the median cost was more than £60,000.

Backup strategies are now front of mind for many IT professions, alternative research shows. A survey from Kaseya earlier this year found 30% are losing sleep over lackluster backup and recovery strategies, with some pushing for a stronger focus on this area.

Complacency was also identified as a recurring problem for many enterprises, according to Kaseya. Nearly two-thirds (60%) of respondents said they believed they could fully recover from a data loss incident in the space of a day.

The reality of the situation was different, however. Kaseya’s research indicated that only 35% actually could.

Can AI solve the problem?

The boom in the use of AI is a mixed blessing, according to Cohesity. While a third of UK firms believe that generative AI adoption is progressing much more quickly than risk tolerance, 54% agree that AI capabilities are highly effective for anomaly detection and analysis.

Half of businesses, meanwhile, said they find AI tools useful for accelerated threat hunting and investigation.

"UK organizations are understandably concerned about the risks of AI technologies, with GenAI adoption still outpacing risk tolerance," said Hutchison.

"However, our research reveals some silver linings: AI is already augmenting previously time-consuming, manual security processes. By the end of next year, AI will play an increasingly central role in data security operations, enabling businesses to identify and respond faster to threats."

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Wasabi Technologies has cut the ribbon on the latest iteration of its EMEA partner program for 2026, as the cloud storage provider looks to drive further growth across the European channel.

The refresh aims to equip partners for the next wave of cloud adoption as AI workloads and data volumes continue to gather pace.

Following the move, partners now have access to a new Systems Integrator program for improved solution delivery, new AI-ready storage offerings, as well as a host of tools, certifications, and incentives.

In an announcement, Wasabi said it is also enhancing its channel-centric strategy in EMEA by actively recruiting new partners in the Nordic, Benelux, and Southern Europe regions.

“Europe is entering a new era of data growth as AI projects mature, and our partners are on the front line of that transformation,” explained Kevin Dunn, Wasabi’s vice president and general manager for EMEA.

“Our evolved partner programme puts simplicity, profitability, and scalability at the core — whether it’s helping customers dissolve data silos to successfully run AI models, manage operational resilience, or modernize backup.”

Wasabi eyes new partner benefits

The introduction of the new Systems Integrator program will help partners address complex and changing customer needs as AI transforms the security landscape, according to Wasabi.

This initiative equips partners with a range of technical tools, as well as bespoke marketing and enablement materials, to help deliver solutions across AI, physical security, and cyber resilience with “predictable” pricing options and high-performance cloud storage.

The vendor’s EMEA channel refresh also includes new AI-ready storage solutions capable of handling performance-intensive workloads, with partner margins that aim to drive profitability in competitive markets.

Meanwhile, sales and technical teams have access to hands-on enablement and Wasabi certifications, alongside co-marketing materials, dedicated account support, and incentives.

“We’re giving partners not just the technology, but the training, incentives, and margin to thrive in this fast-moving market,” Dunn added.

Wasabi’s cloud storage offering aims to provide organizations with an alternative to hyperscale cloud providers, offering a predictable and high-performance solution without the burden of hidden fees, complex tiers, or vendor lock-in.

Since the launch of its cloud storage platform in 2017, the firm has found success through its expanding ecosystem of independent cloud application partners, which includes GmbH, Waterstons, Autodata, and Dynamips.

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Magnetic tape storage might seem like a relic of a bygone era, but it’s still going strong in 2025 – and new upgrades mean it’s set to get even better.

The LTO Program, a joint initiative between IBM, Quantum Corp, and HPE, has unveiled a new generation of LTO Ultrium data cartridges offering enterprises up to 40 TB of native capacity - marking a significant improvement on previous generations.

The launch of the new range comes in direct response to surging AI-related data storage demands, with the capacity boost underpinned by “Aramid”, a new base film material which offers longer tape lengths.

“Aramid permits the manufacture of significantly thinner and smoother media, enabling longer tape lengths in a standard LTO Ultrium cartridge form factor,” the organization noted in a statement.

“This material innovation provides an extra 10 TB of native capacity than the currently available 30 TB LTO-10 cartridge, which is manufactured using different materials.”

Stephen Bacon, VP for data protection solutions product management at HPE, said the new cartridges are aimed at enterprises spanning an array of industries dealing with high data volumes, from manufacturing to financial services.

“AI has turned archives into strategic assets,” Bacon commented.

“The new 40 TB LTO-10 cartridge will help enterprise-class organizations – across healthcare, financial services, media, research, manufacturing, the public sector and beyond – consolidate petabytes efficiently, strengthen cyber resiliency with true offline air-gapping, and keep long-term retention affordable and sustainable.”

The magnetic tape renaissance

Magnetic tape storage has been going through something of a renaissance in recent years, and the advent of generative AI in late 2022 has played a key factor in this revival.

Indeed, figures published by the LTO Program in early 2024 showed a whopping 152.9 exabytes of total (compressed) tape capacity was shipped in 2023. That record was broken in July this year, with 176.5 exabytes shipped.

This marked the fourth consecutive year of growth for tape storage, underlining its continued popularity.

Tape storage has a number of distinct advantages, including low cost, durability, and easy portability. According to previous analysis from the LTO Program, companies using tape recorded an 86% lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to disk storage.

TCO compared to cloud storage was also 66% lower across a 10 year period, figures showed.

Notably, the use of tape for unstructured data storage also adds to the appeal, with this now vital in the training process for large language models (LLMs).

Tape is only going to get better

Long-term, tape storage is only going to improve, at least if the LTO Program’s roadmap is to be believed.

Through generations 11 through to 14, enterprises can expect to see significant capacity gains, eventually peaking with a 913 TB cartridge.

“The new capacity points will prioritize reliability and compelling value in terms of cost per terabyte, and ensure everyday LTO Ultrium tape solutions will remain a practical and affordable storage choice for every type of business or workload,” the LTO Program noted.

“Meanwhile, the new maximum capacity of 913 TB for LTO-14 will reduce the time needed to store and recover data, while preserving exabyte-scale growth paths for tape libraries.”

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Qnap continues to make inroads into the enterprise storage market as the TS-h2477AXU-RP NAS appliance offers a powerful rack-mount package with an impressively large capacity. Stepping up as the new flagship model in Qnap's TS-hx77AXU-RP rackmount family, it also has a keen focus on value and is a lower-cost alternative to Qnap's 30-bay TS-h3087XU-RP hybrid appliance.

Powered by a speedy 3.5GHz 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU and up to 192GB of DDR5 memory, the 4U chassis sports 24 hot-plug LFF/SFF drive bays along with dual internal M.2 PCIe Gen5 slots for NVMe SSDs. True, you don't get the extra rear SFF bays offered by the TS-hx87XU-RP range, but the TS-h2477AXU-RP has big expansion plans as it can handle eight of Qnap's 24-bay 4U TL-R2400PES-RP JBOD shelves for a total of 216 drives and up to 5PB of raw storage.

Networking options are plentiful as the appliance presents dual embedded 2.5GbE and 10GbE RJ45 ports, which are all the multi-Gigabit variety. Three spare PCIe Gen4 expansion slots mean there's plenty of room for more, and Qnap offers a wide choice of its own certified 2.5GbE, 10GbE, and 25GbE network adapters.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: Design and deployment

The appliance is clothed in a sturdy steel chassis with solid metal drive carriers, and the price includes dual 800W hot-plug PSUs. Popping the lid reveals the motherboard lurking in the base, and closer inspection shows it is the same as that used by Qnap's TS-h3077AFU all-Flash array, but with the two rear SSD cages removed and the dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots added.

The Ryzen CPU is mounted by a large passive heatsink, and cooling is handled by a bank of four cold-swap fans mounted behind the drive backplane. Four long DIMM slots sit to the right, with one occupied by the base 32GB of memory, leaving room to upgrade to 128GB without having to replace it.

The 'h' in the model name clearly shows the preferred operating system is Qnap's QuTS Hero – you can load the nimbler QTS software during the installation phase, but you'll be missing out on a wealth of data protection and storage reduction features. QuTS hero offers end-to-end checksums for transparent data corruption recovery, triple parity RAID and triple mirroring, WORM (write once read many) policies to protect NAS shares from tampering, and inline data deduplication, which requires a minimum of 16GB to function.

Qnap doesn't enforce the same drive restriction policies as Synology, and we had no problems using two Kingston 480GB NVMe SSDs for system pool duties and four 22TB Western Digital Red Pro NAS HDDs for general data storage. The web-based deployment wizard installs QuTS hero, and we then use the Storage & Snapshots app to create a mirrored array for the system pool and a big RAID5 array for our data.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: Data protection

QuTS hero offers ZFS copy-on-write for fast, almost unlimited snapshots of NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs, which can be scheduled to run as often as every minute for near-continuous protection. NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs can be encrypted, and the SnapSync app provides fast replication to remote appliances using scheduled and real-time block-level snapshots.

When creating NAS shares, you can opt to apply one of two WORM policies to protect them from ransomware attacks, and once assigned, they cannot be modified or disabled. The Enterprise policy allows a protected folder to be deleted, but stops anything in it from being individually modified or removed, while the stronger Compliance policy blocks folder deletion and only allows it to be removed by deleting the entire storage pool.

There are plenty of free backup apps available with the Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3, managing 3-2-1 protection strategies and securing local appliance data to remote NAS appliances or cloud providers, including Qnap's myQNAPcloud service. The Hyper Data Protector (HDP) app secures VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments, presents a dedicated management web console, and can run block-level backups of Windows PCs and servers that have Qnap's free NetBak PC agent installed.

During testing, we updated the appliance with the latest QuTS hero 5.3, which introduces plenty of new features, including a high availability manager that allows two identical appliances to be placed in a fault-tolerant active/passive cluster. The Control Panel, iSCSI & Fibre Channel, and Storage Manager apps see completely redesigned interfaces, while snapshot management has been moved to a dedicated app, which offers protection policies for creating immutable snapshots.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: 10GbE performance

For performance testing, we used the appliance's embedded 10GbE ports and hooked it up to the lab's Dell PowerEdge R760xs Xeon Scalable Windows Server 2022 host. With a NAS share mapped to the server, we recorded Iometer sequential read and write rates both of 9.2Gbits/sec, and swapping to random operations returned 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec.

IP SAN speeds are equally good, with a 1TB target delivering the same sequential and random rates as our NAS share. We increased the pressure with a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the target and watched sequential read and write speeds increase to 18.5Gbits/sec and 17.4Gbits/sec.

Swapping to random read and write operations delivered 18.3Gbit/sec and 16.5Gbits/sec, and we noted for the latter test, the Ryzen CPU never went beyond 17% utilization. These numbers also highlight the efficiency of the QuTS hero ZFS ARC (adaptive read cache) and ZIL (ZFS intent log) as they negate the need for SSD caches to improve random operations.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: Is it worth it?

Yes, it is, with Broadbandbuyer confirming to us an end-user price for a diskless model of £6,635 excluding VAT. Qnap's 16-bay TS-h1677AXU-RP model comes in £5,378, so the TS-h2477AXU-RP offers a lower cost per drive bay.

The TS-h2477AXU-RP is a great choice for businesses with big capacity demands, as it offers a huge storage potential, and Qnap's lack of drive restrictions means you can shop around for your storage media. The appliance performed very well in our 10GbE lab test,s and the latest QuTS hero software is packed with plenty of business apps and smart data protection features.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP specifications

Cisco has unveiled a new computing platform designed specifically for AI workloads on the edge.

Announced at the company’s annual partner summit, Cisco Unified Edge will combine computing, networking, and storage capabilities in a single platform to provide “real-time AI inference” and support for agentic AI workloads.

Cisco said the new platform is aimed primarily for organizations operating in data-intensive sectors, such as healthcare, manufacturing, and retail.

The networking giant noted it has “partnered closely” with customers across the aforementioned industries to design the platform.

"Today’s infrastructure can’t meet the demands of powering AI at scale,” said Cisco president and CPO, Jeetu Patel.

“As AI agents and experiences proliferate, they will naturally emerge closer to where customers interact and decisions are made – the branch office, retail store, factory floor, stadium, and more.

“That’s where compute needs to live. With our Unified Edge we’re making it easier to power AI in the real world with flexible, secure systems that are simple to deploy, operate, and scale as demand grows.”

So what can customers expect from the new edge AI platform?

Under the hood of Cisco Unified Edge

Cisco Unified Edge is designed primarily for enterprises looking to run AI workloads and inferencing in a localized setting, removing the need for costly cloud-based infrastructure.

The platform can be scaled based on changing storage needs, which Cisco said will remove the need for “rip-and-replace upgrades”.

“The modular chassis offers CPU and GPU configurations, redundant power and cooling, high-performance SD-WAN networks, and pre-validated designs to support today’s applications and those yet to be imagined,” the company said in a statement.

Notably, Cisco aims to simplify integration of the platform, describing it as a “zero-touch deployment” system that can be easily managed through Cisco Intersight. This means considerations such as scaling and upgrades can be carried out without the need for “on-site specialist skills”.

ThousandEyes and Splunk integrations will also be available for Cisco Unified Edge, the company added, as well as built-in security features.

“Security is built-in at the device level and can extend to applying zero trust to every access, segmentation, and protection applications and AI models,” Cisco explained.

“This approach addresses the expanded attack surface at the edge, helping secure AI operations from physical and cyber threats.”

AI at the edge gains momentum

The announcement from Cisco marks the latest in a string of moves from big tech providers to bring AI closer to the edge, meaning data is processed closer to the source as opposed to relying on cloud infrastructure services.

There are a number of key advantages for businesses in this regard, according to Forrester, particularly with regard to latency and processing speed.

“Moving AI processing to edge devices enables rapid insights that traditional cloud-based setups can’t match,” Forrester VP and principal analyst Michele Goetz noted in a 2024 blog post.

“For sectors like healthcare and manufacturing, architects should prioritize proximity to offset latency. Low-latency, highly distributed architectures allow endpoints (e.g., internet-of-things sensors or local data centers) to make critical decisions autonomously.”

As ITPro noted in February 2025, hosting AI workloads at the edge also offers distinct advantages in terms of security.

In hosting data on localized devices, this essentially allows enterprises to keep a closer eye on storage and reduce exposure to unauthorized access.

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Dropbox has announced a raft of new AI-powered features for users, including integration of its Dash AI assistant in the storage platform.

As part of the move, Dropbox said the Dash AI assistant will offer users “smarter search, intelligent organization, time-saving summaries, and contextual answers” for files hosted across the storage service.

The AI tool was first launched in 2023 as a standalone application, allowing users to search for files both within Dropbox and in third-party applications such as Slack, Google Workspace, or Jira.

So far, Dash has been restricted to selected customers. However, Dropbox said wider availability is “expected in the coming months”.

While an exact timeline on general availability has yet to be confirmed, the move marks a significant step toward full integration of AI capabilities in Dropbox.

So what can customers expect from the update?

Dropbox eyes intelligent storage search

Dropbox said Dash will improve ease of use and visibility of content and files stored across the service. Underpinning this is a natural language search function that lets users essentially describe the files and content they’re looking for.

Example queries touted by the company include insights on a company “content calendar for the Fall launch” or “what’s new in the latest version of the client proposal?”.

Thereafter, the AI assistant can provide document summaries, highlight specific data points within files related to the aforementioned prompts, or create a single overview of files stored across multiple locations.

“Because Dash in Dropbox learns from all the content you’ve already stored, you get powerful AI features within the familiar Dropbox experience you already know and trust,” the company said in a blog post.

“And the more you use Dropbox, the better Dash understands you and your team. The result: sharper search results, more relevant answers, and actually useful insights that help move work forward.”

Easy setup and multimodal features on the horizon

Integration of Dash within Dropbox will make the tool far more accessible for users, the company noted. As it was previously a standalone platform, customers were required to contact the company directly to request early access.

Users are now able to skip that step, however, and integration of the assistant takes just a few minutes.

“You don’t need to talk to our sales team to get started, and you can set everything up yourself in minutes,” Dropbox said. “Dash takes your scattered, siloed content and gives you a single source of truth, turning information overload into organized clarity.”

Alongside the announcement, Dropbox also confirmed plans to acquire AI startup Mobius Labs in a bid to ramp up multimodal capabilities in the storage platform.

Mobius Labs will help enhance in-app search features across a wider array of file formats, spanning audio, video, or images.

“The Mobius Labs team has been developing custom AI models optimized for large-scale multimedia processing,” the company said. “We'll soon be able to support even more complex workflows for search and answers in Dash.”

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OpenAI has announced plans to begin offering data residency for UK businesses following a landmark deal with the government.

Under the terms of the agreement, ChatGPT customers can now store their API Platform, ChatGPT Enterprise, and ChatGPT Edu content in the UK.

This data includes conversations – spanning text, image, and voice – code interpreter and data analysis artifacts.

Similarly, files such as uploaded images and documents, custom GPTs, and associated prompts/outputs will be covered by the data residency scheme.

"With UK data residency, new public sector partnerships, and our ongoing work through the MOU, we’re helping lay the foundation for trusted and secure AI adoption in the UK," OpenAI said in a statement confirming the move.

"We look forward to working with the government to help more British people, businesses, and institutions benefit from AI."

The government said the deal will not only enhance privacy and accountability but also reinforce national resilience in the face of growing global cyber threats, as well as unlocking further investment from businesses.

OpenAI move follows successful pilot scheme

The announcement came alongside the news that ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Edu are to be rolled out to 2,500 Ministry of Justice staff – taking advantage of UK data residency.

This follows a pilot that showed time was saved across a range of routine tasks including writing support, compliance and legal work, data and research processes, and document analysis.

“The number of people using our products in the UK has increased fourfold in the past year. It’s exciting to see them using AI to save time, increase productivity, and get more done," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

"Civil servants are using ChatGPT to improve public services and established firms are reimagining operations. We're proud to continue supporting the UK and the Government's AI plan.”

ChatGPT is already powering some tools used by public sector workers across the UK, including Humphrey, an AI assistant designed to help civil servants speed up admin tasks in areas such as planning and social care, as well as in central government.

Meanwhile, the government's Consult tool, also powered by ChatGPT, automatically sorts public consultation responses, cutting the time taken from weeks to minutes.

"We’re making sure we have the infrastructure we need to power AI here in Britain so we can transform our public services, drive growth and unlock new opportunities for every community in the country. This partnership with OpenAI is a step further in delivering that," said technology Secretary Liz Kendall.

"By using AI across our public services we’re giving key workers like probation officers and NHS staff more time to focus on delivering better outcomes, reducing time spent on admin and speeding up vital services for people."

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Dell Technologies has announced extensive updates to its AI Data Platform, aiming to help enterprises enhance the performance and scalability of AI workloads.

The advancements include enhanced partnerships with Nvidia, Elastic, and Starburst that expand Dell’s data engineering capabilities.

Dell’s AI Data Platform enables organizations to convert fragmented data into actionable insights, and the new features focus on enhancing storage and data engines across the tech giant’s services.

The changes are about catering to the growing demand for scalable AI infrastructure.

For storage, Dell’s network-attached storage (NAS) component, PowerScale, now integrates with Nvidia GB200 and GB300 NVL71 – much of this update is about reduction as it will use up to five times less rack space, 88% fewer network switches, and up to 72% lower power consumption when compared to rival services.

According to Dell, the integration will also deliver 16,000-plus GPU-scale.

Meanwhile, ObjectScale, Dell’s object storage platform, is now available as both an appliance and a software-defined option on Dell PowerEdge servers. This will offer speeds up to eight times faster than previous generations of all-flash storage.

It will also include Amazon S3 over RDMA support as a technical preview starting from December.

Dell Technologies eyes data engine boost

The announcements also included a roll-out of new and improved data engines, in partnership with AI specialist Elastic. These are for Dell’s Data Search Engine, which integrates with MetadataIQ data discovery software to search billions of files on PowerScale and ObjectScale using granular metadata.

For developers, it means they can build smarter RAG applications in tools such as LangChain with the engine. What’s more, they save compute time and keep vector databases current by ingesting only updated files.

Meanwhile, a collaboration with Starburst will deliver new features in Dell’s Data Analytics Engine, such as an Agentic Layer, which uses LLMs to turn raw data into business assets in a matter of seconds.

This is described as ‘enterprise-level AI model monitoring and governance’ as it gives teams control over both access and use.

“Access to all of your data is the foundation for enterprise AI success,” said Justin Borgman, the CEO of Starburst.

“Our expanded collaboration with Dell Technologies unites Starburst’s data federation with Dell’s AI Data Platform, giving organizations the ability to unlock insights from anywhere and accelerate their path to real-world AI outcomes.”

All ObjectScale features will be available as a preview in December, while the Data Analytics Engine’s Agentic layer will be released in February 2026. Dell’s PowerScale services with Nvidia, however, are already available.

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Data storage specialist Seagate has announced a new strategic partnership with cybersecurity vendor Acronis to help MSPs meet modern AI-driven storage needs.

The alliance will focus on equipping MSPs and global enterprises with secure and scalable archival storage solutions as AI adoption continues to drive rapid data growth across industries.

The two companies will work together to deliver Acronis Archival Storage, integrated with the Acronis platform, which is designed for infrequently accessed data and offers long-term, secure, and S3-combatible storage under a predictable cost model.

This collaboration will see Acronis incorporate Seagate’s S3-compatible Lyve Cloud Object Storage platform into its offerings, bringing a host of enterprise-grade security features such as encryption of data in-transit and at-rest, role-based access control, identity and access management, and immutability options.

In an announcement, Seagate said this combination will enable MSPs to provide customers with “seamless, cost-effective, and compliant storage” capable of handling the demands of modern AI-driven environments.

“Acronis has been at the forefront of delivering innovative cybersecurity and backup solutions, including secure data management capabilities for hybrid cloud environments,” commented Melyssa Banda, SVP of Edge Storage and Services at Seagate.

“By joining forces, Seagate and Acronis can leverage our combined global reach to deliver the highly secure storage solutions that the new frontier of AI requires—empowering enterprises to better protect their data from cloud to edge to endpoint.”

The pair said the new combined solution focuses on the needs of MSPs and IT leaders in highly regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, legal, utilities, and public administration.

MSPs can leverage the offering to address the needs of organizations that are required to retain large volumes of infrequently accessed data for years at a time, while ensuring and maintaining regulatory compliance.

Commenting on the partnership, Acronis president Gaidar Magdanurov said Seagate’s expertise in mass-capacity storage “perfectly aligns” with Acronis’ goal to offer MSPs solutions that prioritize security, compliance, and cost control.

"With over 60% of organizations managing over 1 PB of data, archival storage is a necessary solution to keep storage costs manageable,” he explained.

“Our partners will be able to address the rapidly growing demand for long-term storage of data, and address compliance, legal, and security requirements of their customers."

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Storage is a “hard problem you can never solve unless you know the future,” says John ‘Coz’ Colgrove, but it hasn’t stopped him trying over the last 16 years.

Speaking to ITPro, the Pure Storage founder has been a vocal champion of all-flash storage for nearly two decades now, having become frustrated with the sluggish performance and diminishing returns on traditional disk-based storage.

This inspiration came during his time working at Veritas Software, where he noted there were aspects to the industry that were “silly or annoying”. These included the difficulties experienced by enterprises in migrating from one storage system to another, he says, or how “ridiculously complicated they made it”.

“I had observed hard drives through 25 plus years personally, and seen how much they improved,” he tells ITPro. “But I also saw that they stopped getting faster about the early 2000s, and they then began to slow down.”

This, Colgrove says, showed there was an opportunity to shake up the market, and flash storage would be the mast he would pin his colors to.

“That provided the opening to say ‘okay it's finally time for a new, better storage medium’, and we can use that as a catalyst to fix these other things around how simple and easy it is to use, the pain of upgrading and operating and all that sort of stuff.”

The benefits of flash storage, from performance to energy efficiency and cost, have been key to the company’s value proposition since it was founded in 2009.

Flash storage has been around for decades, but it wasn’t until the late 1980s and early 1990s that it really began to take off, with a consumer device boom playing a crucial role in driving this growth.

Again, this was something Colgrove noticed at the time and it was clear that the enterprise market had to take a leaf out of the consumer domain’s book.

“In the 70s, all the cool tech was the big enterprise IT systems and things,” he tells ITPro. “Then you start getting the consumer stuff as you went through the late 80s and 90s and, suddenly, consumers had this cool, easy to use tech.”

The enterprise, by contrast, was clunky and not very user friendly, with an attitude of “here’s your system, and here’s a 1,000 page manual you have to study to use it”, he adds.

“It just made no sense. If you rented a car when you came here, you got in it, it’s not the car model you drive, and yet you can drive it and you don’t need to read the 500 page manual that they do for all the nitty gritty controls.”

The core focus here is essentially simplicity, Colgrove says, both on the hardware and software fronts, and when the company launched it had three pillars around which its strategy depended. Naturally, the first of these was leading an industry transition to all-flash storage.

“I believed then that 100% of storage was going to be all-flash and tape,” he says, adding that they’re “not going after tape” and likely never will. “100% of disk should become flash,” Colgrove adds.

Colgrove admits that at the time people “thought I was nuts” for suggesting that a transition of this sort could happen.

“Now they don’t,” he says. “The hard drive guys still think I’m nuts, but they’re just ostriches burying their heads in the sand.”

Dreams of the disk drive’s demise haven’t quite come to fruition yet, but flash has grown in popularity and this is expected to continue in years to come. The all-flash array market was valued at $14.59 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach $74.62 billion by 2032.

Elsewhere, Colgrove says attention also turned to creating products that were simple and easy-to-use. Looking back to the 90s when buying a new phone, he says the process of transferring contacts manually was an indictment of the inherent difficulty that consumers faced.

In the enterprise market, the situation was similarly tedious and offputting - Pure Storage wanted to change that.

“Ease of use is just so important, and then the better customer service/business model,” he says, referring to Evergreen, Pure Storage’s subscription model. It allows the company to continually upgrade customer storage options without the need for disruptive migrations or costly upgrades.

Evergreen sits at the heart of the company’s strategy and, Colgrove says, this has enabled customers to “get rid of the migration problems” faced in years past with disk drives.

Colgrove notes that the company has “stuck to its principles” on these topics over the years, which has proven highly beneficial and enabled it to maintain a clear, long-term roadmap.

Focusing on the data, not the storage

Looking ahead, Colgrove says the company plans to continue its focus on the data management front, which was a key talking point at Pure//Accelerate – the company’s annual conference – particularly with the launch of Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC).

“Don’t manage the storage, manage the data” has been the warcry in Las Vegas,

“I think [trends are] continuing to shift to getting more intelligence about the data,” Colgrove says.

He notes there’s a sense that dealing with data storage is almost like dealing with a “black box” and a major hurdle to adoption of EDC is educating customers that there’s value in it.

“I think we’re going to see a thrust from us in that direction around opening up the black box,” he says. “That’s a bit of a delicate balancing act at times because there are some customers who [feel that] from the array you shouldn’t be able to see data at all.”

“There’s a balancing act there that we have to crack open, that black box is the next level.”

Ultimately, Colgrove believes that the launch of the EDC will prove to customers that there are benefits to be unlocked with regard to automation, visibility, and optimization.

“I am really excited about the Enterprise Data Cloud,” he says. “And I’m really excited about the roadmap and what we’re doing with hyperscalers to wipe out disks. It’s like I said, what we started out to do. Over the next few years, we’re going to make gigantic strides in both those areas.”

A lot has changed since I first attended Pure Accelerate in 2023. Hosted in June during the early days of the generative AI boom, it was clear Pure Storage viewed this industry pivot as a lucrative opportunity to showcase the power of all-flash storage.

Sustainability benefits, energy efficiency, and performance were all highlighted as key benefits for customers dabbling in AI during this embryonic stage, and by all accounts the company nailed the messaging.

These lingering concerns around sustainability and efficiency remain the big talking points two years on, with research earlier this year showing that only a small portion of enterprises are actually tracking energy use.

Nearly three-quarters of business leaders told SambaNova Systems that they’re aware of the huge volumes of energy required to train or run AI models, and half are concerned about the challenges this brings.

Despite this, just 13% said they are actively monitoring power consumption or taking proactive steps to remedy the situation.

With enterprises running a gauntlet of soaring energy consumption rates, the sheer cost of the technology, and balancing infrastructure modernization efforts to accommodate AI, there’s a lot left to address from the provider side of things.

As one of the newer kids on the block, Pure Storage has had to box clever to pry customers away from the established industry heavyweights and its messaging around high-performance, cost efficient hardware has been paying dividends.

The firm’s Q1 2026 earnings report shows revenue hit $778.5 million, marking a 12% year-over-year increase. Subscription services were also up 17%, with the company recording $406.3 million in revenue in this segment.

An important aspect of Pure’s messaging has been simplicity and Patrick Smith, Field CTO for EMEA at the storage provider, tells ITPro that it’s an area we can expect to see a strong focus on at both its annual conference and in the year ahead.

Speaking to ITPro ahead of Pure Accelerate 2025, set to take place at Resorts World in Las Vegas, Smith says addressing customer concerns about growing complexity will be a key talking point.

“I think one of the key things that we’re focused on is taking time out,” he says. “Don’t manage the storage, manage the data.”

Smith added that Pure wants to take this simplicity message “to the next level” at the conference and showcase how it can support enterprises in scaling infrastructure while avoiding costly overheads.

Central to this approach in recent months has been the company’s Evergreen//One storage as a service (STaaS) model, which he says essentially “takes the guesswork out of deploying infrastructure” for customers.

Through the service, customers only pay for what they use as part of a subscription plan, with options available across on prem, hosted, and public cloud environments.

So far, the response from enterprise customers has been positive, Smith says, and the service is beginning to deliver huge value.

“I think the storage as a service model and that whole subscription space is really interesting when our customers properly get their heads around the model and the value it brings,” he tells ITPro.

“Because especially today, when somebody spins up a project, they're going to be asking for hardware to support that project. You have no idea, going into it, what kind of scale they're going to need, how much they're going to need, whether that project is going to be successful or not and so they're trying to second guess the future, and the crystal ball is not that good.

“So what we're finding with the subscription model is it takes the guesswork out of deploying infrastructure in their own environment, in their own data center.”

This model is appealing to enterprises not only because of its simplicity from a deployment perspective, but also the flexibility it affords as the business itself scales AI-related operations.

It basically offers a “cloud-like model” where they’re not looking years into the future and deploying up front, which proves very costly.

“They can truly consume a service, and they pay for what they consume,” he explains. “If they’re confident that they’ll consume a certain amount, they can get a discount on it by committing to a certain level. They don't have to worry about space in the environment and whether they've got enough space to meet business demand.”

So far, the strategy for Pure has proved fruitful. In its recent earnings report, total contract value (TCV) sales for the service surged a whopping 70% to $95 million, underlining the growing appetite among customers.

Looking ahead, Smith notes that continuing macroeconomic factors also play a role in the appeal. The flexibility afforded by the service means enterprises can adjust accordingly, and therefore alleviate cost concerns.

“Probably more than ever before they need that flexibility, and we’re still living in a period of uncertainty, whether it’s macroeconomic factors, the amount of uncertainty going on,” he tells ITPro.

“You can image if you’re running in a traditional storage environment, and your arrays are approaching the level where you consider it to be full… then the next internal customer comes along and says, ‘I've got this new database I need to run’, suddenly they need to buy a considerable amount of capacity, a whole system, probably with what? A three or four year depreciation cycle on it.

“That's just for one database, until the next customer comes along, and the next customer, it starts building up again. So being able to have this service where it's on Pure’s dime, whether they need to add more capacity to an existing system, or put a new system in the customer's data center. It just takes all of the legwork out of that.”

ITPro will be on the ground in Las Vegas with live rolling coverage of Pure Accelerate 2025 at Resorts World. Subscribe to our newsletter or keep tabs on our social channels for all the news and updates from the conference.

It’s been a whirlwind two years since Sonya Mathieu joined NetApp. Leading the UK & Ireland channel division has placed the industry veteran at the forefront of the firm’s push to secure its position as the leading storage provider in the age of AI.

Having joined during the embryonic stages of the generative AI ‘boom’, the company’s efforts to forge closer ties with partners and deliver success for customers has been a protracted process - but one that’s now paying dividends.

The company unveiled sweeping changes to its channel strategy in 2023, centered firmly around increasing rebate payouts and streamlining distribution agreements.

Relationships with leading - or ‘prestige’ - partners was also a key focus in this pivot in a bid to foster closer alignment on messaging, Mathieu told ITPro.

“It’s been really positive,” Mathieu told ITPro.

“We’ve got six of what we call ‘main managed partners’, which are our prestige partners in the UK, and we pride ourselves on having very close relationships at every level within those organizations to make sure we’re aligning our focus for messaging into what is top of mind for those organizations.”

“That’s been really successful over the last two years,” she added.

Similarly, on the distribution front, the storage giant has made some significant investments, according to Mathieu, largely focusing on muscling in on burgeoning growth areas, such as SAN.

“We've seen some really significant gains over the last year, which is exactly what we wanted to see.”

NetApp capitalizing on SAN

The growing SAN market is an area in which NetApp believes has both huge potential and a domain where it can pry custom from competitors. In the UK, the SAN market is £300 million-plus, Mathieu noted, and while the firm currently commands a 10% share, the plan is to delve further into this space.

“A big focus for us is around what we call ‘secure SAN’. We’ve made some significant advancements around security, and we are the most secure SAN storage vendor in the market,” she said.

Mathieu noted that, among partners leaning into SAN or its storage as a service model, those partners have doubled their business with the company over a two year period, underlining the success of this strategy so far.

Capitalizing on this is a challenge, Mathieu admitted, not least of all due to the confluence of issues affecting customer adoption rates and hardware refresh programs.

“Security is top of mind for all of our partners and our customers,” she said. “If you think about the process that organizations are going through to determine, you know, what hypervisor they want to move forward with, they’re looking at modernizing that infrastructure.”

Dialing in on the security impetus is vital here, Mathieu added. Enterprises embarking on IT modernization programs can ill afford to skimp on this area.

It’s here that NetApp has a “really unique differentiator” by being able to offer anti-ransomware protection, according to Mathieu, and it’s a message that resonates with partners and customers alike when combined with the company’s close integration with major cloud providers.

Safe, guiding hands are critical when enterprises face such high stakes.

“When we are able to lead with the security messaging and our ability to leverage cloud services, we have no competition,” she said. "It just depends on when we get into that battle and that conversation; whether it's at the beginning or the middle or the end, which always can make things a little bit challenging.”

“But there are a number of opportunities where we've been engaged and we've won and were brought in at the last minute because of the way that we challenged our customers to look at the importance around security and our key differentiators.”

Collaboration on AI is vital for NetApp

Generative AI is an unavoidable topic that has seeped its way into both the storage and security domains over the last two and a half years. NetApp has made no secret of its position on the technology, framing itself as a leading storage provider to support innovation in this space.

CEO George Kurian told ITPro in late 2023 that the company’s efforts in driving hybrid cloud adoption would be a key differentiator for customers adopting AI tools, and so far this has proved a highly successful strategy.

With regard to partner collaboration on this front, Mathieu said the company’s two-pronged approach to messaging has been crucial. This centers around highlighting the potential opportunities for partners and customers alike, but also addressing growing concerns over sustainability.

“The market opportunities are there,” she said. “The spend will be there. So it’s about making sure that we are out having conversations and enabling our customers and partners to understand the value that we bring.”

“A lot of these workloads will start in the cloud, you’ll then want to move them back on-prem, and we’re the best data management company to help them do that,” Mathieu added.

MORE FROM ITPRO

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Qnap's TS-h1290FX all-Flash NAS impressed us when we tested it as this compact desktop appliance delivered a performance that would appeal to teams running demanding workloads such as real-time 4K/8K video editing. Its AMD EPYC power, massive memory capacity, and integral support for U.2 PCIe NVMe Gen 4 and SATA SSDs did come with a high price tag and for those with more modest budgets, Qnap now offers the TS-h1277AFX.

At first glance, the TS-h1277AFX looks identical to its predecessor as it uses the same sleek desktop chassis with twelve SFF hot-swap drive bays at the front. It's all change inside though, as this model supports SATA SSDs only, is powered by an 8-core 3.8GHz AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU and its base 32GB of memory is the faster DDR5 variety which can be upgraded to a very usable 192GB.

You still get dual 2.5GbE multi-Gig network ports but the embedded 25GbE SFP28 ports in the TS-h1290FX have been replaced with copper 10GbE ports which are also multi-Gig. The PCIe Gen 4 slot count has been reduced from four to three but that still offers plenty of expansion potential with the appliance supporting Qnap's dual-port 10GbE, 25GbE, and 100GbE cards.

Qnap TS-h1277AFX review: Build quality

The TS-h1277AFX looks good on the desktop and the panel above the drive bays incorporates a backlit LCD screen showing details on all network ports and their IP addresses. The chassis is constructed of sturdy pressed steel and removing the metal cover reveals the Ryzen CPU in the center and mounted by a very large active heatsink.

Usefully, Qnap has provided the base 32GB of memory on a single stick and the four DIMM slots means you can upgrade to 128GB without having to replace it. Cooling is handled by two 9cms diameter fans and during all our performance tests, we found the appliance to be whisper quiet.

At the rear, you have Type-A and Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps ports and another new feature is video from the CPU's embedded Radeon iGPU is piped through to an HDMI 1.4b port. The appliance is also compatible with a wide range of GPGPU cards and Qnap has even fitted two extra cables to provide additional power for them.

Qnap TS-h1277AFX review: Software features

The 'h' in its name indicates the TS-h1277AFX is aimed at Qnap's QuTS hero OS which is a superior choice over QTS if you want the best data protection features. They're both very easy to use and present almost identical web interfaces but the ZFS-based QuTS offers near unlimited NAS share and iSCSI LUN snapshots, end-to-end checksums, encryption, and two WORM (write once, read many) policies for protecting NAS share data from tampering, and ransomware attacks.

It includes compression and the base memory enables deduplication which requires a minimum of 16GB. RAID options are more extensive as along with the usual suspects, QuTS supports triple parity RAID to protect against three drive failures and triple mirroring which stores identical copies of data on three drives.

Apps are in abundance with over 110 available for the TS-h1277AFX. All security and backup apps are available and include Qnap's Security Center, Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3, and Hyper Data Protector (HDP) with the latter now linking up with the free NetBak PC agent for block-level backups of Windows servers and PCs.

Along with optional cloud storage, the myQNAPcloud service provides remote access and administration of registered NAS appliances and once you've created a Qnap ID, you can use the new Hybrid Backup Center (HBC) cloud service. Currently, in beta, HBC provides centralized remote management of HBS backup and restore tasks for multiple appliances.

Each appliance requires HBS 3 and the HBC agent installed which allows you to create backup and sync jobs from the cloud portal, choose sources and destinations, schedule them, monitor them in real-time, and load a topology view to see all backup activity. A smart feature is the option to declare remote appliances as targets and if Qnap's RTRR (real-time remote replication) service isn't loaded, the HBC agent will install it for you.

Qnap TS-h1277AFX review: 10GbE performance

For our 10GbE lab performance tests, we fitted eight 1TB Western Digital Red SA500 SATA SSDs and created a single RAID5 array. With a NAS share mapped to a Dell PowerEdge R760xs Windows Server 2022 host, we recorded 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.3Gbits/sec for sequential reads and writes with the same results returned for random operations.

IP SAN speeds over 10GbE are equally impressive with a 1TB iSCSI target also returning Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.3Gbits/sec and the same rates for random operations. Moving up to a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the iSCSI target delivered sequential read and writes of 18Gbits/sec and 18.3Gbits/sec while random operations recorded 18Gbits/sec and 17.8Gbits/sec

Swapping to 4K block sizes delivered solid I/O throughputs for the MPIO iSCSI link with Iometer reporting 294,200 and 313,900 IOPS for sequential reads and writes and 294,050 and 82,900 IOPS for random reads and writes. We noted our random write IOPS test pushed the Ryzen CPU to around 90% utilisation but with all other tests, it never strayed above 20%.

Qnap TS-h1277AFX review: Is it worth it

Value is comparatively good as the price for the TS-h1277AFX with 32GB of memory starts at a shade over £3k – around £1,300 less than the entry-level TS-h1290FX. It's also a more sensible choice for businesses that want to use cheaper SATA SSDs as they won't be paying extra for the privilege of support for expensive PCIe NVMe SSDs.

It still represents a considerable investment but the appliance's powerful combination of AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU and DDR5 memory delivers extremely good performance over 10GbE with high IOPS rates for random reads and writes. The TS-h1277AFX is a solid choice for content creators and video editors that need fast access to data and Qnap's QuTS hero software delivers a wealth of features including great data protection services.

Qnap TS-h1277AFX specifications

Almost a third (30%) of IT professionals are losing sleep over their organization’s backup and recovery strategies, according to a survey from Kaseya.

Less than half (40%) of respondents feel confident in their backup systems’ ability to keep critical data safe in a crisis situation, while 30% worry that their company’s backup solutions are not good enough.

“So much is out of your control, it’s not surprising that nearly a third of IT professionals have had nightmares about their backup,” said Frank DeBenedetto, general manager at Kaseya.

“From human error to natural disasters to ransomware attacks, the only way to know your systems work is to test them repeatedly,” he added.

The report uncovered troubling statistics about the testing of organizational backup systems as well, finding that few businesses test regularly enough.

Just 15% test their backups daily and 25% test them weekly. Disaster recovery tests are undertaken by only 11% daily and 20% weekly, while 12% said they test disaster recovery systems on an ad hoc basis or not at all.

This represents a significant lack of preparedness, Kaseya warned. Especially considering that while 60% of respondents believe they can recover in the space of a day, the reality is that only 35% could.

Similarly, with just 10% of businesses reporting no IT outages over the last year, the importance of being prepared should be top of mind.

Backup preparation is key

Backups are a non-negotiable aspect of any security strategy, according to Matt Hastings, VP of product management at NinjaOne. Cloud-first backups can be useful in alleviating strain on IT teams through automatic backup procedures, he added.

“It can also simplify IT’s job to include backups as part of a broader endpoint management strategy. Automated endpoint management in particular can help IT teams minimize vulnerabilities, gain visibility and control, and maintain compliance with regulatory standards,” Hastings told ITPro.

Crucially, businesses must follow best backup practices, according to SolarWinds tech evangelist Sascha Giese, including encrypting database backup files, storing immutable copies of backups, and testing recovery processes.

“This is also an opportunity for organizations to assess how and where they are storing their data while ensuring they run the most modern performance monitoring and optimization solutions to protect data over the long term,” Giese told ITPro.

Assured Data Protections’ Rob Mackle echoed this point on immutable backups, calling them the ultimate safeguard against data loss in the event of ransomware attacks or other data-related incidents.

“Immutable backups should be a critical component of an organization’s cyber resiliency plans as they help ensure that backup data is tamper-proof and can be restored to its original state, minimizing the risk of data loss in the event of a cyber-attack,” Mackle said.

“Seeing that data is the lifeblood of most organizations, and the loss of your data or access to your data would affect the running of your business, we suggest that you beg, borrow and steal from other budgets in order to ensure you have a good backup and DR solution in place,” he added.

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A new licensing deal between Pure Storage and an as-of-yet unnamed hyperscaler could precipitate a transformation in the enterprise storage market, according to Pure Storage CTO Rob Lee.

Flash storage has long been hailed as the successor to its spinning disk counterparts, yet thus far HDDs have clung on in the enterprise market. This could all change, according to Lee.

In November 2024, Pure Storage announced it had reached its first flash storage deal with a hyperscaler.

The hyperscaler in question is set to be revealed “soon enough”, according to Lee, who added this is the first of what the company hopes is a number of similar agreements with the other major industry players.

“We recently announced our first, hopefully, of many design wins with a top four hyperscaler who’s chosen our technology to standardize all of their storage, from their cheapest disk all the way to eventually their highest performance SSDs” he stated.

During an earnings call following the announcement, which caused Pure Storage’s share price to soar, Charlie Giancarlo, CEO at Pure Storage, said the deal could mark a turning point in the market, describing it as “the vanguard for flash storage providing all online storage in major hyperscale environments in the future.”

This could significantly shake up the enterprise storage market, Lee said, noting that the market for disk storage is incredibly concentrated on both the supply and demand side, hinting that one big move from a hyperscaler could have a major effect on the industry as a whole.

“There’s two suppliers of disks, and 60 to 70% is purchased by the top five hyperscalers. Just let that sink in for a second. So when you have a market that is that concentrated, if one of those buyers flips and stops buying disks and shifts over to flash, you can see what’s going to happen,” he explained.

“I think that’s going to be the biggest catalyst, the biggest nail in the coffin finishing the transition from disk to flash.”

Flash storage could be an unsung hero for decarbonizing hyperscalers

Lee’s comments came during a press tour of Pure Storage’s global R&D center in Prague this week. During a Q&A session, he told ITPro and assembled journalists the factors that brought the hyperscaler to the table included better reliability and performance.

The primary reason, however, focused firmly on the energy savings flash can bring compared to traditional storage methods.

Hyperscaler capital expenditure has been growing as they race to dominate the burgeoning AI market, but this has presented major challenges in terms of energy security, Lee noted.

Nearly all of the top hyperscalers now have projects to source clean energy to accommodate for soaring demand, with Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Oracle all signaling their approval for nuclear energy in particular.

With this in mind, Lee said Pure Storage has been working with hyperscalers over the last two years to both demonstrate and emphasize the benefits of flash storage in data center operations, adding that a single digit decrease in energy consumption could be enough to drive a wholesale transition to flash.

“These guys operate at such a scale that saving 1 or 2% in power overall is a huge needle-mover for them. By uptaking our technology or storage layer, they’re actually going to save more energy than building nuclear power plants.”

The rise of AI means more cloud storage is necessary – and it may even need to double, offering a big boost to cloud services.

That's according to a survey by Seagate and Recon Analytics, which asked business leaders around the world how they believe AI will impact their company's IT.

The survey found that 61% of respondents who use cloud storage now predict their storage needs will increase by 100% over the next three years. Similarly, respondents revealed that the cloud was the default for data storage for AI projects, with two-thirds of data stored in the cloud versus in-house.

"When you consider that the business leaders we surveyed intend to store more and more of this AI-driven data in the cloud, it appears that cloud services are well-positioned to ride a second growth wave," said Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst of Recon Analytics.

That's largely down to longer retention times, the Seagate report said, with 90% of respondents who are already using AI believing that holding onto data longer helps improve AI outcomes.

"As AI use cases and adoption becomes more pervasive, Recon Analytics forecasts companies will see exponential growth in their storage requirements," the report says.

"This will become even more evident when businesses move from their early AI trialing phase to being active AI users. Training LLMs, data replication, and longer data retention periods, all key elements of an AI strategy, will require increased storage investments to be successful."

The survey results echo previous research from Hitachi Vantara, which also predicted data storage capacity requirements more than doubling over the next few years.

Analysis from the firm found the average large organization currently holds 150 petabytes of data, and that will top 300PB by the end of next year — potentially sparking an increase in storage investment as companies race to boost capacity.

More data for trustworthy AI

Beyond that, almost as many Seagate survey respondents who use AI said that the adoption of trustworthy AI — which is an AI development framework that puts safety and transparency at the forefront — requires more data to be held for longer periods of time.

"Trustworthy AI is really the key to enabling mainstream adoption of AI," said BS Teh, Chief Commercial Officer of Seagate.

"With the vast majority of survey respondents saying they need to store data for longer periods of time to improve quality outcomes of AI, we’re focused on areal density innovation needed to increase storage capacity for each platter in our HAMR-based hard drives. We have a clear pathway to more than double per-platter storage capacity over the next few years."

That echoes comments made by Peter Zhou, president of data storage product line at Huawei, who said last year that storage architectures needed innovation to keep up with AI workloads:

"Data is not just used for recording, data becomes an asset that machines can use to study [the world], it’s the source of their knowledge and can enable their ‘thinking’, and now the data storage industry has to be changed."

The Seagate report also found that storage was ranked as the second most important aspect of AI infrastructure after security.

"Compute and energy have been the hot topics of the AI conversation over the past few years, but storage and security are ranked higher when looking from the storage infrastructure buyer perspective," the report noted.

Data storage capacity requirements are set to surge by 150% in the next couple of years, new research from Hitachi Vantara has revealed.

While the average large organization currently holds 150 petabytes (PB) of data, organizations are expected to be storing over 300PB of data by the end of 2026.

This is matched by an uptick in investment, with organizations' financial commitments in data storage set to more than double over the same period at an increase of 224%. Investments in AI and processing power, meanwhile, are also set to more than double.

According to the study, 31% of IT leaders said data storage capacity was a serious concern as the rate of growth is placing strain on critical assets, while some also complained of the increasing complexity of data.

More than one-third (76%) of those surveyed said more than half of their data is now unstructured.

While the demand for larger, more complex data storage is rising, the storage industry isn’t ready for this increase, Seagate CCO B.S. Teh said.

“As AI matures and scales, the value of data will increase, leading us to store more data for longer,” Teh told ITPro.

“However, the storage install base is forecasted to have a 17% CAGR - therefore at a significantly slower pace than the growth in data generated. And it takes a whole year to build a hard drive,” he added.

This growth rate disparity will disrupt global storage supply, Teh said, and businesses will need to build long-term plans around capacity to ensure storage supply as generative AI use becomes more strategic.

The AI data problem

The driving force behind this looming data problem is AI. As a technology, it demands not just access to larger quantities of data, but also lengthy storage periods.

“Whether it’s from capturing training checkpoints to saving source data sets, the more data we retain during the process, the more we can validate AI as trustworthy,” Seagate CEO Dave Mosley told ITPro.

“That data therefore needs to be available long term, not just to comply with evolving legal requirements but also to ensure that inference is explainable,” he added.

This ever-growing volume of data can cause different problems for organizations, depending on what route they choose for storage.

“While outsourcing storage comes with its own security, compliance, and potential risk, holding the data for AI internally can become eye-wateringly expensive,” Paul Mackay, RVP of cloud in EMEA and APAC at Cloudera, told ITPro.

What can businesses do?

To avoid feeling the sting of increasing data storage requirements, businesses will have to focus more keenly on data management strategies and data architectures, experts have told ITPro.

Chris Harris, VP of global field engineering at Couchbase, told ITPro that for organizations to fully unlock value from generative AI, infrastructure modernization projects must be conducted in parallel to the development of a robust data management strategy.

“To capitalize on AI investments now and in the future, organizations must ensure they can control data storage, access, and usage, enable real-time data sharing, and maintain a consolidated database infrastructure to prevent multiple versions of data,” he said.

As AI is increasingly integrated into applications, Couchbase’s VP of AI and Edge Mohan Varthakavi said, data architectures will also need to be redesigned to support new workloads.

“Companies will implement new data architectures that go beyond simple record storage to capture the ‘intelligence history’ and thought processes of AI systems,” Varthakavi told ITPro.

“They will need to simplify complex architectures, including consolidation of platforms, and eliminate data silos to create trustworthy data,” he added.

Officials from the San Francisco transportation department have announced they will be replacing their floppy disk-based train control system, jumping on the bandwagon to do away with the legacy storage platform.

The Municipal Transportation Agency board, which is responsible for overseeing San Francisco’s Muni Metro light rail network, signed a new $212 million contract with Hitachi Rail to overhaul its use of floppy disks in its aging control system.

The system was first installed in the city’s Market Street subway station in 1998, using software running the Automatic Train Control System (ATCS) that was stored on 5 ¼ in floppy disks.

The floppy disks need to be loaded each morning and also relied on an antiquated, and notoriously error-prone wire loop communication technology, officials told the San Francisco Chronicle.

They added that they expected the train control system to last for 20 to 25 years, noting it moved data at a glacial speed that was even slower than a wireless modem.

The Hitachi contract is part of a wider $700 million project to transform the Muni Metro’s control system; the purchase will still need to be approved by the Board of Supervisors.

If approved, the new communications-based system, which uses Wi-Fi and cellular signals to keep track of the precise locations of trains is expected to be in place by late 2027 or early 2028.

As part of the deal, Hitachi will provide 20 years of support.

Is this finally the end for floppy disks?

The demise of floppy disks, the once ubiquitous storage technology, has been a protracted one, with some industries and regions finding it harder than others to kick the technology.

Japan, for example, only recently ‘won the war’ on floppy disks in July 2024 after the country’s digital minister Taro Kono announced the nation’s decision to finally deprecate the storage medium in 2021.

Kono said the transition was finally complete after the country completed the process of removing over 1,000 regulations that required the government to use floppy disks in a number of instances.

Although Sony ceased production in 2011, Japanese citizens were still frequently required to submit documents for use on government systems on floppy disks.

This proved a significant issue due to the limited capacity and dismal transfer speeds, meaning trying to use the platform to store anything other than the most basic files was a challenge.

But Japan still has some way to go in getting its digital transformation efforts back on track, with Kono now turning his attention to the nation’s reliance on fax machines.

The ongoing AI boom has precipitated a change in computational methods from the CPU to GPU, and storage architectures will need to adapt to meet the new demands of AI workloads, according to a Huawei exec.

As illustrated by the unprecedented rise of Nvidia to become the AI chipmaker par excellence, the industry has transposed much of its computation demands on GPU data centers to train their AI models.

Peter Zhou, president of data storage product line at Huawei, thinks there needs to be a corresponding change in storage systems to accommodate the needs of these GPU-based facilities.

Speaking to ITPro, Zhou explained how the storage industry has remained relatively stagnant for the last decade, but advancements in machine learning, generative AI, and big data will continue to disrupt the space and force vendors to innovate.

“There were not really any big changes happening in that domain , the industry like EMC or NetApp, they have been doing what they have been doing for 10 years. Their product has not really been changed for about 10 years, but when big data and AI came to reality, everything changed” he explained.

“First of all the value of data changed…Data is not just used for recording, data becomes an asset that machines can use to study [the world], it’s the source of their knowledge and can enable their ‘thinking’, and now the data storage industry has to be changed”.

The IT industry, therefore, has to focus on ensuring their storage solutions can both accommodate the new volume of data being collected and ensure it is made available at the speeds these systems require.

Data mobility is storage industry’s biggest challenge

Zhou detailed how storage has a vital role to play in driving the efficiency of these GPU-based computation systems, noting that key considerations such as energy consumption and performance are vital for the modern business engaging in AI development.

“In today’s GPU the work efficiency is less than about 50%, which means that half the time the GPU is just waiting there and wasting energy. The only way to change this is by making the data storage system more efficient, and then the efficiency of these GPUs can be improved by about 30%, which is a lot of energy.”

But to achieve the level of efficiency these GPU clusters need, the underlying architecture of storage systems needs to evolve, according to Zhou.

“I think the architecture of data storage has to be changed. Today, out of the box data storage, the architecture is exactly the same as the normal CPU-centric architecture, which is very old,” he noted.

“The CPU is there, there’s memory directly connecting to the memory, the memory is so small and the data cannot be stored in the memory long term. And then they use the I/O interface to connect all these disks, and then when the CPU is processing the data, this data needs to be brought to the memory, and then and then back to the processor etc.”

Zhou stated roughly 60% of energy consumed by these storage devices is used for data mobility, and reducing this is the challenge storage vendors will need to overcome in coming years.

Huawei’s in-house chipset capabilities could be its greatest strength for storage innovation

The challenge for the industry, in Zhou’s view, is that the hardware needs to be changed to meet these new efficiency requirements, but the major players in data storage aren’t designing or producing their own chipsets.

This consigns them to using general purpose CPUs and other components, leaving potential efficiency gains on the table - and this is where Zhou argued Huawei have an advantage due to their in-house chip production.

“We are designing and producing our own chipsets, which means we have the capability to change the architecture of the computational system.”

He ran through some changes the company has made to move to what he describes as a ‘data-centric’ architecture. Earlier this year, for example, Huawei announced it would move away from I/O interfacing with its storage architectures with all of its components now connected to a universal data bus, leveraging Intel’s Compute Express Link (CXL) to enable faster communication with the GPU.

Zhou also raised decoupling the data plane from the control plane in storage systems, providing benefits in terms of the scalability, performance, flexibility, and management, thereby helping to avoid performance bottlenecks when tasked with large amounts of data and particularly complex AI workloads.

Many of these changes follow similar adaptations Nvidia has made on the computational side of the equation, Zhou said, adding that storage architectures will inevitably need to follow its example to adapt to the evolving needs of the industry.

“If you look into the Nvidia GPU cards, you can sense the architecture of the computational system is changing. This means data storage has to be changed to reflect this.”

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Last year’s Pure Accelerate was a flash frenzy. Riding high on the benefits of its ‘all flash’ approach, Pure Storage went all in on the sustainability and efficiency gains with flash as compared to traditional disk drives. 

Skip forward a year to Pure Accelerate 2024 and, while flash isn’t the central topic – AI has taken that title as with the majority of tech events – it's still top of mind for the firm. This is particularly true for the firm's founder and chief visionary officer John ‘Coz’ Colgrove, who has been banging the drum on the benefits of flash since founding Pure Storage alongside John Hayes purein 2009. 

From his pivotal position in the market, Colgrove is under no illusions as to the life cycle of flash, and he makes this clear in conversation with ITPro. Like any technology, Colgrove says, flash is bound to peak and return fewer efficiency and productivity gains.

“At some point in the future – far distant future – it will flatten out, because no technology goes forever,” Colgrove says. He adds it's important to think of the journey of disk technology here, by way of comparison. 

Disk storage “kept improving” for longer than anyone believed possible, Colgrove says, and only when it “flattened out and stopped improving” did there come an opportunity for new technology to take the helm, in this case flash. 

“Disk’s been on a 70-year improvement; every technology that’s tried to replace it had to get to a decent scale and then run this really gruelling race to try to catch up,” Colgrove says. “The disc out-distanced all of those until flash, and now flash is running faster than disk”.

Flash still has a long development curve

Right now, there’s no reason to think that flash is near the end of its usefulness. It’s clear flash is still improving at a rapid pace – with innovation driven by companies such as Pure Storage – and Colgrove honestly admits he has “no clue” what its eventual replacement will be.

“At some point beyond the horizon … flash will stop improving, or it will slow down,” Colgrove says. “At that point in time, that's when the next technology will have an opportunity to come along”.

That day is more than a decade away, Colgrove expects, with a real long-term storage alternative unlikely to emerge until the 2030s.

“The new technology is going to have to get to a decent scale and then run a long grueling race to catch up. When flash slows down, that's when you catch it from behind,” Colgrove adds. 

Crucially, there are still plenty of opportunities for flash to improve. “The flash guys keep figuring out ways to go in. Sometimes they shrink the cell size, sometimes they stack more layers,” Colgrove says. It's clear that flash still has a lot of avenues for innovation. 

Pure Storage’s role in flash going forward

Colgrove has some insights on Pure Storage’s future in flash specifically. “One of the things we do is we've pulled the flash management out of the direct flash module into the host, so we do it across all of the flash modules in the host”.

One of Pure Storage’s advantages, he says, lies in its ability to actively monitor decaying flash instances and to leverage insights into the write life of flash across an enterprise’s estate. This focus on oversight and storage simplicity has been key at Pure Accelerate 2024.

“It's really doing this across all the flash management that helps us be more efficient and gain a better life,” Colgrove adds. 

As  AI rears its head, Pure Storage may have to lean into the benefits of flash even more. For example, Colgrove is careful to point out the detrimental impact of AI on the environment and sustainability strategies. “AI destroys sustainability because the GPUs use so much power,” Colgrove says. 

Efficient storage is key here, Colgrove says, well-trodden ground for Pure Storage for which sustainability is a key issue. Much of the efficiencies to be gained in the storage space with regard to AI will come from more efficient data management when it comes to using data to train AI and for inferencing models.

While Pure Storage is responding to the training issue through its new AI-focused solutions, it’s a more niche concern, something Charlie Giancarlo, CEO at Pure Storage, comments on to ITPro. “Most of the training is going to happen in hyperscale clouds, a few very large tech companies, and GPU clouds, because I don't see ordinary companies wanting to do the training,” Colgrove says. 

Much of the firm’s gains can be made when it comes to inference, as companies are going to need responsive and scalable access to data to avoid unecessary data redundancy. Giancarlo says that on top of this, firms will seek to add AI access to that data on top of “all the normal access” required.

Flash can play a clear role here and Pure Storage can in turn take advantage of this demand.

“Efficient storage that is resilient, reliable, available, durable … becomes more important for that because your data’s more valuable,” Colgrove says. “The inferencing for us today is where the big opportunity for data is,” he adds, with Pure Storage’s smaller, direct flash offerings filling this niche.

Once a disruptive startup in a venture capital conference room, Pure Storage has grown into a global leader in data storage technology. Founded with the ambitious goal of transforming enterprise storage, the company introduced all-flash arrays that challenged conventional norms in the industry. Its pioneering efforts laid the foundation for a new era in data management, one where speed, scalability, and reliability are paramount. This early focus on innovation and performance has propelled Pure Storage into an indispensable role within the tech infrastructure of countless industries.

Over the years, the company's solutions have evolved to address complex demands across various sectors. Universities rely on their technology to support breakthroughs in research, while financial institutions depend on Pure Storage for robust systems that ensure secure and seamless transactions. Other prominent users include Sirius XM, which leverages the company's data platform to deliver uninterrupted streaming to millions of subscribers. Pure Storage is no longer just a storage solution; it has become a critical enabler of everyday operations in diverse fields.

As the world shifts toward artificial intelligence (AI) driven processes and sustainable technology, Pure Storage has positioned itself as a key player in this transformation. By aligning its offerings to support AI workloads, the company ensures that enterprises can harness the immense computational power required for machine learning applications. Sustainability also remains a cornerstone of its strategy, with initiatives to reduce energy consumption and environmental impact. Pure Storage is making strides not only in advancing technology but also in fostering a greener future.

This journey of growth and innovation has also brought financial success. With a market cap fluctuating between $16 and $22 billion in 2025, and annual revenue reaching $3.2 billion in the 2025, an impressive increase from $2.8 billion the previous year Pure Storage exemplifies the resilience and potential of modern tech companies. From its humble beginnings to its current status as an industry leader, the company's story is a testament to the power of vision and dedication in reshaping the technological landscape.

Here is a broad overview of the path the company has taken to become one of the most prominent names in storage, with a market cap of $21.75 billion to match.

A quick history of Pure Storage

Pure Storage was founded with venture capital funding from Sutter Hill and an ambitious goal: to define the "Modern Data Experience." Its introduction of flash storage solutions, such as FlashArray and FlashBlade, revolutionized enterprise environments, particularly data centers. By addressing the inefficiencies of traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) with modern solid-state drives (SSDs), Pure Storage established itself as a pioneer in data storage innovation.

The company entered the market at a time when businesses were transitioning to more advanced storage technologies but lacked the infrastructure to support significant change. John 'Coz' Colgrove, a founding engineer from Veritas, and John Hayes, a former Yahoo CTO, identified this technological gap, termed the "Flash Chasm," and built solutions to bridge it. Their vision enabled Pure Storage to become a significant player in the enterprise storage market.

Pure Storage went public in 2015, further cementing its influence in the industry. That same year, the company settled a patent dispute with EMC for $30 million, which demonstrated its willingness to protect its intellectual property and market position.

The annual Pure//Accelerate conference, launched in 2016, became a signature event to showcase its latest advancements, including its focus on AI and cloud integration. These conferences continue to highlight Pure's strategy to align with emerging technological trends.

As the importance of generative AI has grown, Pure Storage has positioned itself as a critical infrastructure provider for these demanding workloads. Its flash storage systems are designed to scale to the petabyte levels required for AI applications, supporting businesses in their digital transformation journeys. CEO Charles Giancarlo has frequently emphasized how Pure's solutions cater to the unique storage needs of AI, which demand speed, scalability, and sustainability.

To reinforce this position, the company has made strategic investments in AI infrastructure, such as its partnership with CoreWeave, an AI cloud provider. By combining cutting-edge technology with a focus on sustainability, Pure Storage continues to meet the evolving needs of enterprises while maintaining its leadership in the competitive storage market.

What does Pure Storage sell?

Pure Storage provides a wide range of flash storage solutions designed for data centres, complemented by software and platform tools that optimize data storage and usage. Its product lineup includes the FlashArray series, ideal for block storage, and FlashBlade, which caters to file and object data.

The company has placed significant emphasis on delivering its offerings as a service. Customers can choose cloud storage options tailored to private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud. environments, including integration with AWS and Azure. A standout offering, the Evergreen subscription model, ensures seamless upgrades to both hardware and software, fostering sustainability and prolonged hardware lifespans. This service model competes with the likes of HPE GreenLake and Dell Apex.

Recent developments have introduced features aimed at making storage systems more intelligent and automated. During its annual conference, the company unveiled Evergreen//One for AI, a pioneering storage-as-a-service product for AI applications, and an AI-driven assistant for storage management that leverages insights from customer systems to streamline operations.

Pure Storage works at the enterprise level across the private and public sectors, having worked with ScotGov to overhaul its storage approach and embrace containers, and with Mississippi’s tax authority to support critical apps.

Beyond physical arrays, Pure Storage offers storage and disaster recovery as a service products, data security solutions, AI-focused offerings, and its ‘Storage-as-Code’ options. Its tagline is “uncomplicate data storage, forever”.

Its consumption-based storage subscription service Evergreen competes with the likes of HPE GreenLake and Dell Apex.

Pure Storage's mergers and acquisitions

Before its initial public offering in 2015, Pure Storage had already secured substantial funding, including one of the largest investment rounds in its sector at the time. The company now trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PSTG.

Over the years, Pure Storage has strategically acquired several companies to strengthen its portfolio. These include:

• StorReduce, a software company, for an unannounced amount in 2018
• Compuverde, a Swedish software company, for an undisclosed amount in 2019
• Portworx, a Kubernetes data services platform, for $370 million in 2020

Doing Business with Pure Storage

Based in Silicon Valley, Pure Storage serves prominent clients such as Ford, Meta, JP Morgan Chase, and NASA. Its operations extend globally, with offices across Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific regions.

In 2025, the company revamped its partner program to enhance profitability and provide partners with tools to drive customer adoption of its platforms, particularly for artificial intelligence and cyber resilience. The updated program includes an automated system for managing service agreements and new incentives to encourage the replacement of outdated disk storage systems.

From an internal policy perspective, Pure Storage remains committed to its goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for its direct operations by 2040. A key selling point for the company is the sustainability of its products; it claims its all-flash solutions can significantly reduce data center energy consumption by up to 85% compared to competitor systems.

The company's 2024 ESG report highlights its commitment to helping customers lessen their environmental impact through reduced energy and space usage, as well as minimizing e-waste. Pure Storage plans to submit its science-based emissions reduction targets for approval in July 2024.

Magnetic tape storage might be one of the oldest storage technologies, but it appears to have found a new lease of life thanks to the generative AI boom.

A record 152.9 exabytes of total (compressed) tape capacity was shipped in 2023, according to the report from the companies behind the Linear Tape-Open Technology (LTO) program, namely Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM, and Quantum.

That’s growth of just over 3% compared to 2022, which the report puts down to rapid growth in data generation and the increased infrastructure needs of hyperscaler cloud providers and enterprise customers.

It seems that tape is turning out to be useful for storing the huge amounts of unstructured data that result from the adoption of new technologies such as AI.

“As AI and related technologies cause increases in storage requirements and costs, LTO tape technology makes the management of vast amounts of data more cost-effective and sustainable while delivering comprehensive protection against data breaches, which continue to grow in number and sophistication,” the report said.

The vast majority of enterprise data is unstructured and often ignored; however, the rise of generative AI has made this sort of data potentially extremely valuable, either for training AI models or to mine through with AI to find insights.

Some tech investment firms have even suggested that desire to get hold of this unstructured data could lead to a corporate acquisition boom. Either way, finding a way to host these gigantic datasets has become more important for enterprise customers.

Why magnetic tape storage is still in vogue

Magnetic tape has been used to store data since the 1950s, although the LTO format itself only dates back to the 1990s. 

Even if it’s an old technology, it is widely used for good reason. Tape is considered to be low cost, highly portable, and can store very large amounts of data. It’s an extremely durable storage choice which can last for up to 30 years.

LTO also features error correction algorithms with an error rate of 1 in 10^19. This, the LTO companies said, would mean it would take a whole year, with 130 tape drives writing data continually, to encounter an error that could not be fixed by LTO’s error correction technology.

The current, ninth generation, technology can store up to 18 terabytes (TB) of data on a single cartridge (45TB compressed); the LTO roadmap plans to increase capacity up to 144TB by generation 12. Since the first LTO products arrived, over 5.6 million drives, 371 million cartridges and 517,958 billion GB of media capacity have been shipped, the companies said.

The companies argue that tape has an 86% lower total cost of ownership than disk and a 66% lower total cost of ownership with cloud storage over a ten-year basis. 

The major disadvantage of tape is, of course, that it’s much slower at transferring data which is why it is often used for offline backup situations where reliable storage is more important than speed.

“The probability of losing data through degradation, however, is far less than it being maliciously encrypted in a ransomware attack, or destroyed by fire, flood or acts of war in the data center,” the companies note.

Indeed, one of the other reasons for the ongoing popularity of tape is as a backup technology, something that has become essential as a result of the rise of ransomware. Many companies will use the 3-2-1, or even the 3-2-1-1 backup rule, which means having at least three copies data stored on two different types of storage mediums, one of which is off-site and (for addition peace of mind) one that is off-line: tape is usually the ‘1’ in either case.

“LTO tape will endure as a critical component of storage architectures across the enterprise, especially as tape technology itself continues to improve to handle even larger volumes of data and more intensive workloads,” said Tom Coughlin, storage analyst and president of Coughlin Associates, quoted in the LTO companies’ press release

“The latest annual tape capacity shipment media report signifies the continued importance of LTO tape technology in the digital storage hierarchy not only today, but also far into the future as storage needs evolve in complexity and cost,” he said.

Content creators seeking a powerful storage system for their video masterpieces may find Qnap's TVS-h874T could be just the ticket. Proudly claimed by Qnap as the world's first Thunderbolt 4 NAS, this 8-bay desktop box sports a pair of these 40Gbits/sec ports for those who want fast access for 4K video production.

There's plenty of power to hand as Qnap offers a choice of Intel's Gen12 Core i7 or Core i9 CPUs. We have the cheaper option on review which sports a 12-core Core i7-12700E CPU offering eight 2.1GHz Performance cores, four 1.6GHz Efficient cores, and an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 770 GPU.

The appliance comes with 32GB of DDR4 memory upgradeable to 64GB – an important feature as the 'h' in the model name indicates Qnap is aiming this NAS primarily at its QuTS hero OS. This is more demanding than Qnap's QTS as it requires at least 16GB for its inline data deduplication feature and 32GB to get the best performance from 10GbE upgrades.

Qnap TVS-h874T review: Hardware features

The appliance is encased in a sturdy steel chassis with solid plastic lockable tool-free drive carriers and removing the metal lid reveals a tidy interior with Qnap's QXP-T42P Thunderbolt 4 card fitted in the lower of the two PCIe slots. Space is limited here as accessing the upper X16 slot requires an L-shaped screwdriver, otherwise the power supply will have to be removed to gain access to its bracket screw. 

The motherboard sits in the right side of the chassis with the CPU fitted with a large finned passive heatsink and partnered by a small cooling fan further back. General chassis cooling is handled by two 12cms diameter rear fans and during testing, we were impressed with how quiet the appliance was making it a great choice for small offices and home workers.

The 32GB of base memory is supplied as two 16GB DDR4 SO-DIMM modules so any upgrades will require one or both of them to be replaced and for reasons that escape us, Qnap has placed warranty stickers over the edge of each stick stating it will be voided if they are removed. Below the memory modules is a pair of easily accessible M.2 2280 NVMe SSD slots and these are the PCIe Gen 4 variety.

Qnap TVS-h874T review: 10GbE NAS and IP SAN performance

We fitted a pair of Kingston 480GB M.2 NVMe SSDs and after following the web console's wizard to install QuTS hero, we used them as a mirrored array for the initial system pool. For general data storage, we fitted a quartet of 22TB Western Digital Red Pro NAS drives and used the Storage & Snapshots app to create a big 58TB RAID5 pool. 

For our 10GbE performance tests, we installed a dual-port 10GbE SFP+ fibre adapter in the appliance and called up the lab's HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen11 rack server for host duties. This was equipped with dual 32-core 2.1GHz Xeon Scalable Gold 6430 CPUs, 256GB of DDR5 memory plus a dual-port 10GbE SFP+ adapter and running Windows Server 2022. 

With a NAS share on the RAID5 array mapped over 10GbE to the server, we recorded top Iometer sequential read and write rates of 9.3 and 9.2Gbits/sec, and swapping over to random operations returned very similar results. These numbers highlight an important feature of QuTS hero as its ZFS file system's ARC (adaptive read cache) and ZIL (ZFS intent log) features are already very efficient making SSD caches unnecessary. 

Moving over to IP SANs delivered equally impressive results with a 1TB target recording high sequential and random read and write rates of between 9.3Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec. We ramped up the pressure with a dual-10GbE MPIO link to the target and watched Iometer sequential and random read rates increase to 18.2Gbits/sec and 17.8Gbits/sec with write operations settling at 18Gbits/sec and 17.7Gbits/sec respectively.

I/O throughput for the MPIO iSCSI connection was also excellent. Dropping to Iometer 4KB block sizes delivered sequential read and write rates of 210,700 and 206,800 IOPS and changing to random operations saw read and write throughputs of 202,300 and 162,600 IOPS. We noted during all our tests that the QuTS resource monitor showed CPU utilization never going above 12 per cent so we can't see it having any problems delivering Thunderbolt 4 speeds

Qnap TVS-h874T review: QuTS hero features

QuTS hero offers superior data protection features to QTS with its ZFS copy-on-write delivering near unlimited NAS and iSCSI LUN snapshots along with inline data deduplication and compression. End-to-end checksums handle self-healing of data corruption while the SnapSync app provides fast snapshot backups to remote QuTS appliances using block-level replication run to a schedule or in real-time. 

Along with the standard RAID arrays, you can also opt for triple parity RAID to protect against three drive failures or triple mirroring which stores identical copies of data on three drives. A choice of two WORM (write once read many) policies can also be applied to NAS shares during creation to protect their data from tampering or accidental deletion.

App choices for both OSes are equally impressive and include key backup utilities such as Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3 which helps create a 3-2-1 appliance protection strategy and now supports the new myQNAPcloud hosted storage. Virtualization is on the menu with the Container Station, Ubuntu Linux Station, and Virtualization Station apps all present while Hyper Data Protector keeps your VMware and Hyper-V VMs safe by backing them up regularly.

Qnap TVS-h874T review: Is it worth it?

With the model on review costing around £2,700 excluding VAT, the TVS-h874T represents a considerable investment but its powerful Core i7-12700E CPU provides a good return as performance is extremely good. The appliance's high memory capacity makes it a perfect platform for Qnap's QuTS hero OS which offers a wealth of enterprise-class data protection features and it's a good choice for video editors that want super-fast Thunderbolt 4 ports and plenty of storage potential. 

Qnap TVS-h874T specifications

For modern enterprises, enabling smooth collaboration across distributed teams and sites is imperative. However, legacy storage systems often result in more friction than fluidity, creating frustration among team members and hitting productivity hard.  Employees - and data - end up siloed in isolated repositories, wasting time piecing together scattered datasets and file versions.

At the same time, IT teams struggle to manage disjointed storage pools while attempting to make fragmented systems work cohesively. And public cloud tools can raise valid data sovereignty and security concerns if used alone. As such, a new approach is needed.

There are also budgetary constraints, with organizations facing more pressure than ever before to do more with less while still delivering on BAU expectations as well as driving the business forward.

Indeed, while analyst firm Gartner predicts that worldwide spending on IT will increase by 8% in 2024, it’s a pool of money for many having to stretch much, much further. 

The analyst also recently noted that CIOs are experiencing what it has termed ‘change fatigue.’ That is too much going on, too quickly to even be able to stand still let alone keep up. 

“Faced with a new wave of pragmatism, capital restrictions or margin concerns, CIOs are delaying some IT spending,” said John-David Lovelock, distinguished vice president analyst at Gartner.

“Organizations are shifting the emphasis of IT projects towards cost control, efficiencies and automation, while curtailing IT initiatives that will take longer to deliver returns.”

An innovative hybrid storage architecture could be a well-received solution to these problems. By converging private and public cloud capabilities, companies can give distributed teams unified access and simplified coordination within a global namespace. Workstream continuity across locations becomes a reality.

The hybrid model offers the versatility of public cloud resources while retaining localized performance and governance of on-prem infrastructure. For enterprises ready to move away from fractured collaboration, a hybrid solution delivers IT simplicity and unlocks increased productivity, especially for distributed teams.

The advantages of streamlined collaboration with Hybrid Share

For distributed enterprises, providing intuitive collaboration tools across multiple offices is critical. That said, the reality is that employees often find themselves isolated and unable to access unified assets. The result is valuable time wasted struggling to sync and share files, which results in stifled innovation, decreased productivity and, ultimately, hampers overall organizational efficiency.

Hybrid architectures have emerged as a potent remedy to this problem, purpose-built for seamless cross-location teamwork. By converging the capabilities of private and public clouds, a hybrid solution unites data access within a single global namespace. This means that workers can enjoy simple, real-time file syncing across all sites. The confusion and inefficiency caused by multiple file versions are eliminated with centralized access.

The benefits of hybrid architectures extend beyond just data access. Remote team members can conveniently access shared folders from anywhere using a desktop app, thereby enhancing their ability to collaborate and contribute effectively. For IT administrators, hybrid solutions offer scalable storage that seamlessly grows with business needs. Moreover, cached local data ensures quick access to frequently used files, further boosting productivity.

Security is another crucial aspect where hybrid architectures shine. Comprehensive security measures down to the file level safeguard sensitive data without limiting collaboration. Permissions stay aligned to corporate policies for uniform governance across all locations and teams. Additionally, built-in file versioning enables easy rollback after mistakes, providing an extra layer of protection against data loss.

The hybrid approach simplifies IT oversight while giving distributed teams the workstream continuity they deserve. It brings together the best of both worlds - unified productivity for teams and administrative ease for IT departments. With the versatility of hybrid architecture, achieving this balance is now possible.

Hybrid architectures are transforming the way distributed enterprises operate by breaking down silos and fostering collaboration. They offer a robust solution to the challenges of data access, security, and scalability while enhancing productivity and efficiency across teams. As more organizations recognize these benefits, the adoption of hybrid solutions is set to rise, shaping the future of enterprise technology.

Transitioning to simplified collaboration

For enterprises struggling with the limitations of fragmented private cloud storage, transitioning to a hybrid architecture offers a compelling path forward. Adopting a hybrid solution can simplify daily operations and unlock the full potential of cross-location collaboration.

Rather than undergo disruptive data migrations, companies can implement hybrid capabilities atop existing infrastructure for greater ROI. The switch is designed to be non-disruptive, with no retraining needed for users already familiar with directory services like Active Directory.

With a hybrid approach, files reside accessible in a unified global namespace rather than scattered across siloed repositories. Teams enjoy streamlined coordination powered by seamless access and instant syncing. Workstream continuity prevails regardless of site.

For IT administrators, hybrid solutions present a consolidated view of storage and activity. Oversight is centralized versus spread across disconnected pools. Privileges, access controls, and permissions remain uniform.

Hybrid capabilities scale on demand to accommodate growth and prevent capacity limits from hindering productivity. Local caching ensures high-speed access to frequently used files without reliance on bandwidth.

Case in point - How Andresen uses Hybrid Cloud to streamline video projects

Creative digital production company Andresen Digital experienced the benefits of Hybrid Share first-hand. With teams dispersed across the US and Europe, Andresen struggled to collaborate on large imaging and video projects. Employees wasted time transferring files and assets between locations, never sure if they were working from the latest version.

By implementing Synology's Hybrid Share solution, Andresen unified its global workforce within a collaboration workspace hosted on the secure C2 Storage cloud. Now project teams can instantly synchronize files and access a centralized set of data, no matter where collaborators are located. Confusion over versioning was eliminated, and transfers of large graphic files accelerated.

Andresen creatives can easily share their work-in-progress with stakeholders through shared folders. Remote employees can also conveniently access assets using the C2 desktop app when working from home or on the go. Time previously lost to syncing delays has been recouped and can be spent elsewhere delivering business value. 

"Thanks to Hybrid Share, I'm not limited to local talent, but can stand out and look for talent globally. That solves a lot of problems,” says Jeff Grant, Global Head of Production and Technology, Andresen Digital.

With streamlined collaboration powered by Hybrid Share's globally accessible namespace, Andresen smoothed coordination on digital imaging projects across their worldwide team. The results were transformative. As one Andresen manager put it, "Thanks to Hybrid Share, location is no longer a barrier to talent or teamwork."

Experience the benefits first-hand with a free trial of Synology Hybrid Share. Consult with one of our experts to learn how Hybrid Share can unite your multi-site teams within a simplified IT infrastructure. Or visit Synology.com to explore how Hybrid Share provides the administrative ease and collaborative power your organization needs.

A business case that makes real sense

The benefits are clear - simplified IT management alongside frictionless collaboration across distributed teams and locations. The hybrid architecture delivers workstream unity previously unattainable.

Purpose-built hybrid solutions like Synology Hybrid Share allow enterprises to realize these benefits through seamless integration of private and public cloud capabilities. For organizations seeking to transform cross-location collaboration, hybrid represents the future.

For more information, visit the Synology site.  

Ransomware has been a persistent threat for many years, posing serious challenges for organizations threatened by the prospect of being locked out of networks and having their critical data stolen. 

At the same time, the amount of data businesses manage has been growing exponentially, meaning there’s little choice but to turn to more sophisticated data management and backup systems designed with security front of mind.

When a ransomware attack strikes, the logical next step for a victim organization is to restore data from backups – but as we’ve recently seen, even backups are no longer safe from cyber criminals. In fact, almost all ransomware attacks (93%) target backups, and in three-quarters of such cases, hackers succeed in preventing victims from restoring their data, according to Veeam’s 2023 Ransomware trends report.

Some 85% of organizations were targeted at least once in the last year, with ransomware attacks increasing by 12% over this period. It’s never been more critical to ensure your backups are as resilient as possible. This is where platforms like Object First’s Ootbi come in, offering ransomware-proof, object-based backup safeguards for Veeam customers. Hence, businesses have a reliable and ransomware-proof backup from which they can restore data when targeted. 

Big data is fuelling the growing attack surface

Organizations are collecting, managing, and storing vast quantities of data, with the scale increasing over time. The amount of data created, captured, and copied globally is expected to be 181ZB by 2025, which is just shy of three times the figure of 64ZB in 2020, according to Statista. 

Historically, businesses have depended on multiple-point products to safeguard the growing volumes of data they manage, including target storage, media, and master servers. Because these create numerous silos, which span a combination of cloud and on-prem storage, this could widen the attack surface. 

Ransomware operators effectively have a much bigger target to aim for, with such a regime undermining the effectiveness of a backup solution. Reducing the attack surface by adopting a unified system should be an absolute priority for organizations that operate such sprawling data infrastructure.

Without one, it might also become much harder to detect ransomware operators that have already infiltrated corporate networks and are engaged in a data exfiltration process. These gangs are highly effective in siloed environments in which an organization has little visibility over the data. Backup tools that employ artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems are a vital pillar of defense if you’re hoping to detect and stop ransomware attacks in real time, leading to faster attack discovery.

Why is ransomware targeting backups?

Backups are your primary insurance policy against ransomware attacks– cybercriminals know this. While one in six organizations fully recover data from backups following a ransomware attack without ever having to pay the ransom, according to Veeam’s report, that still leaves five in six unable to successfully restore from a backup. For these businesses, the time it takes on average to recover is 3.4 weeks, which translates to 136 business hours worth of downtime. Of those that aim to trigger a restoration point, 56% risk infection during that process, the report added.

But just because this is the way things are now doesn’t mean this is how things should be, and certainly not something organizations should just accept. 

Indeed, businesses should still try to attain the best possible backup system for their critical business assets and data. But they must also strive for fit-for-purpose configuration, ideally based on object storage, to ensure their backups are resilient and become a genuine insurance policy, not just one in name. 

Modern threats demand modern solutions, and scalable, immutable, and flexible backups are becoming more highly coveted. 

It’s also far preferable to house data in object storage format, which is ideal for the vast quantities of unstructured data businesses generate, rather than using the once more conventional file or block storage. 

Because many on-prem systems aren’t optimized for block storage, looking to object-based solutions, like Object First’s Ootbi for Veeam customers, would be ideal for organizations hoping to safeguard their data and guarantee a restore point can remain intact if ransomware strikes.

Simple but effective backups

Designed for high backup performance and ransomware recovery, Ootbi is the first storage appliance explicitly designed for Veeam software and offers immutability out of the box. Minimal setup is required, and the system eliminates the risk of ransomware due to its immutable nature. 

Object First’s Ootbi delivers optimized object storage for Veeam and supports backup data ingest speeds up to 4GB/s. Better yet, the Instant Recovery feature lets users run failed workloads directly from backups within minutes. Such a system provides organizations that use Veeam backup software a much stronger edge in the fight against ransomware. 

In today’s climate, ensuring your organization has a sophisticated and immutable backup has never been more critical. Object First’s solution resolves such concerns with a compact, simple-to-use, and cost-effective offering. Storage buckets, powered by AWS S3 object lock, synchronize with the Veeam v12 direct-to-object storage configuration, in turn, powered by the Smart Object Storage API. This is an OS that’s hardened with no root or backend access. Customers can also rack, stack, and power the system up within minutes, while linear scaling means simply adding more nodes as and when they’re needed.

With ransomware rife and backups increasingly under threat today, there’s no use in hanging onto antiquated systems. On the other hand, adopting an immutable and secure backup system may give you the best chance of keeping ransomware-proof backups from which you can restore data.

Download the whitepaper from Object First for more information, or request a demo.

The Scottish government’s Agriculture and Rural Economy (ARE) Directorate has quietly become one of the most agile, dynamic government agencies as part of its longstanding relationship with Pure Storage. 

Responsible for coordinating subsidies for businesses and farmers operating in agriculture, the ARE Directorate plays a crucial role in ensuring the industry in Scotland remains productive – and, crucially, profitable. 

Serving upwards of 20,000 farmers, the ARE Directorate pays out more than £700 million in subsidies annually. These payments are vital to ensure farmers can operate and the country remains fed. But to ensure it can continue to serve the industry, the division was forced to adopt an agile approach to innovation. 

This began with an ambitious overhaul of its storage infrastructure eight years ago, according to Neill Smith, head of IT infrastructure at the ARE Directorate. Speaking to ITPro, Smith says the decision to embark on this transformation process was due to a changes to its subsidy application practices and the fact teams were wasting valuable time and resources maintaining existing infrastructure. 

Ditching the shackles of legacy hardware

Reforms and changes to subsidy applications meant development teams at the ARE Directorate were forced to build a raft of new applications to accommodate for new schemes and an increased volume in user traffic. 

“During our last big agricultural reform piece in 2014, we were revamping our subsidy based applications,” he says. “All of Europe did it.

“We were developing using new technologies both for applications and hardware, and we had traditional storage with Dell EMC. This was a large project, but what we noticed was that we had a large number of developers – circa 100 or thereabouts – and they were doing around four builds a day.”

Each of these builds, Smith explains, took an average of 30 minutes per developer, consuming a significant amount of time from each day. 

The reality for Smith was its existing storage infrastructure wasn’t able to contend with the scale of demand, and the pace of development. This was placing significant strain on the division. 

Farmers have a lengthy window to submit subsidies through the ARE site. However, in the run up to deadlines, there’s often a traffic surge, meaning performance is key. Combine this with the rapid pace of app development, and it was obvious change was required. 

With this in mind, the ARE Directorate began exploring alternative storage options, such as solid state drives (SSD), Smith says. After an extensive procurement process – that included a proof of value (PoV) that saw teams compare the performance of different solutions – the department selected Pure Storage’s FlashArray. This option won both in terms of performance and cost. “We’re all taxpayers here; we’re trying to drive good value,” he adds.

Organizational buy-in on hard mode

Smith notes while the storage transformation process was relatively streamlined, a key challenge the team encountered was emphasizing the benefits of the overhaul itself. In this way, working within a public sector environment, with taxpayer value in mind, presents different challenges compared to similar projects in the private sector. 

Some government departments can be inherently resistant to change, Smith suggests. “Sometimes it’s easy enough just to keep the lights on and not take risks,” he adds. However, in this instance, Smith was keen to drill home the long-term benefits that this overhaul could deliver for the developers, broader department, and, ultimately, the taxpayer. 

“The government is always resistant to change,” he says. “I think that’s the nature of the beast in a political world – and that’s a prevailing trend in any government. There’s a fear factor but I’m always on the opposite side of that.”

Smith recalls that framing the project as a value driver was critical to ensuring it had the necessary approval and backing. “It’s how you frame it,” he continues. “It’s about us being able to provide a better solution and use cool new tech. 

“It’s about creating the right culture and allowing people to fail and get things wrong. But in doing that, you’re allowing people to relax and deliver something that’s actually going to be fit for purpose rather than rushing through a solution.

“You might deliver it on time, but then it ultimately becomes a higher operational overhead because you’ve implemented something that’s not sound.”

Going against the grain on containerization

Smith tells ITPro the ARE Directorate’s current focus is on embracing containerization for core applications as part of what he describes as an “agnostic multi cloud approach”. 

The flexibility of containerization and the portability benefits it affords was something that the team had been considering for some time. Smith adds that while many organizations have traditionally went “all-in” with a specific hyperscaler, the ARE Directorate was keen to explore alternative options.

“We were looking at containerization, or the orchestration of containers, so Kubernetes was very much on our agenda,” he explains. “But we were seeing the bigger picture in terms of portability with containers. Having the ability to run that container when you want, where you want, was exciting.

“We were already on our AWS journey by then, but I wanted to explore if I could possibly look to do an agnostic approach to multi-cloud - so move a containerized workload on-premise on a virtual machine (VM) estate, running in OpenShift, then move that into AWS.”

For this, Smith once again engaged with Pure Storage, namely Portworx. The storage giant acquired the startup in 2020 in a bid to support and accelerate customers’ hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. The team conducted another PoV with Portworx and quickly realized there was scope to deliver marked improvements to flexibility and developer productivity. 

This proof of value involved taking a core application running on-prem, migrating it to AWS, and then Azure, before bringing it back on-prem. The entire process was completely in “around one and a half minutes”, he says. 

The Portworx roll-out took roughly two weeks , Smith adds, and has since unlocked significant value for the broader team in terms productivity, efficiency, cost, and, crucially, security. 

If a cloud provider encounters a security incident or breach, then workloads can be taken back on-prem to bolster safety. Similarly, in an era of rising cloud prices, the ability to take workloads back on-prem and avoid costly overheads is another key benefit, he says. 

Portwork now forms a core part of the ARE Directorate’s multi-cloud approach, Smith says. And, moving forward, the department sees the flexibility of multi-cloud as a means to drive further innovation, deliver long-term value for the division, and continue supporting the agriculture sector across Scotland. 

It saddens me greatly to be delivering this wake-up call. Almost as much as it saddens me that I’m so late to this particular party. However, it seems that many unfortunate Windows 11 users have been experiencing the “BitLocker ransom” problem for six months or more. 

The problem is your Windows 11 PC or laptop can turn BitLocker disk encryption on, and not tell you about it, in the course of an earlier Windows Update process. Later on, this invisible change grows teeth, when a later (and in my case, optional) update includes a file that, perversely enough, is sufficiently similar to other types of threat that your data is “at risk”. The only way to protect it is by encrypting the boot volume of your machine, and demanding a recovery key before you’re allowed back in.

If you’re lucky, you have some way of getting to your Microsoft account not involving using the now utterly stone-dead bricked laptop, to obtain the recovery key. If you’re like me, then various policies of my own, such as not traveling with more than one laptop and not logging into my Microsoft identity for protracted periods of time, are likely to keep it out of reach. 

As Microsoft says, those might not be the only set reasons why you can’t retrieve the key. Perhaps the most annoying one is that if a different login enabled BitLocker at the outset – easily done, given how short on warnings or progress reports the whole process is – then it’s likely that they get sent the recovery key, not you. Not that you can figure out who to chase down in that scenario, because giving away the account name with the key in it would constitute a “security breach”. 

There are fixes, but every last one of them is about before it happens, not after. You can disable BitLocker, either via the Control Panel, or using PowerShell, or Group Policies (even if you’re not in a corporate network).

I was amazed to find out just how many fellow administrators were really not sure of how their various afflicted machines got that way in the first place. Their puzzlement made me feel a lot better: as a group of hardcore systems admins, well used to Microsoft behavior with system updates, they were shocked to find that some of their personal devices had gone to DEFCON 1, with BitLocker turned on silently and without their consent – or so they thought, not having looked hard or often at this bit of the system. 

The reason to bring your attention to this is, in fact, all about its long-term, slow-motion car crash effect. I am not at all convinced the preventative Group Policies, drive formatting, or Control Panel pages are going to help. Microsoft has a good deal of previous for not caring about dissenters; some settings come back, even when you’ve decided you don’t want them.

Every Windows 11 user needs to take steps to prevent this particular bear trap from closing on their work-in-progress documents, emails, and so on. Of course, if you have been a total goody-two-shoes and accepted all of Microsoft’s suggestions for online data sync services, and you have several fully-licensed, synchronized, and up-to-date machines, then your stuff ought to be reachable.

But when the Windows 11 machine I was reviewing displayed the BitLocker Recovery Key screen, I was a long way from my other machines. That’s what I use laptops for, working while traveling. As a frequent traveler, I have developed a few hard and fast rules that rather go against the assumptions that Microsoft presents as part of its excuses package for BitLockering. One is that I minimize logging in to online accounts while away from my home network, mostly to avoid the floods of paranoid warning messages this causes. Another is, no online purchasing while traveling, whether on my own machinery or others which circumstances force me to use. I don’t even like the US habit of walking off with my credit cards and doing the contactless transaction themselves.

At the moment, I am telling all my user contacts not to leave documents on Windows 11 devices of any kind. Last time, I mentioned keeping scans of my vital identity documents on a USB key dangling beside my house keys: that’s been upgraded a bit because I find my current minimum working set of files and emails is a good few gigabytes. 

In the long term, I won’t be using Windows 11 at all until a satisfactory solution to this foolishness emerges. In fact, all the way through the writing of this column, my oldest, most presentable laptop has been downloading three complete versions of Fedora Linux, one after another. I assume each is about a DVD’s worth of code, but even my older machine is coping well so far. It will be with me on my next trip in a few days’ time; the Windows 11 machine will be at home, on the bench, awaiting a solution.

The searing heat of the Nevada desert sun during Pure Accelerate 2023 came with a pinch of irony. It offered a fleeting glimpse into what it might be like being a storage drive in a data center rack unit; roasting hot and gasping for the cool embrace of a power-hungry air conditioning unit. 

Heat has long been an unavoidable reality in the data center. A myriad of spinning disks guzzle power and generate heat for every second they’re active – and they need to remain active. It’s the operator’s job to ensure the temperature is moderated efficiently to avoid dreaded failures. 

But “disks are done”, as Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo said, and the company predicts by 2028 no new hard disks will be sold, with enterprises shifting to more modern, efficient drives. 

This shift forms part of a natural evolution in the industry, attendees heard, with Giancarlo comparing it to the transition from vinyl records to CDs or VHS and DVDs to streaming services in the last two decades. 

“It only took five or six years for DVDs to completely take over the market from VHS,” he said. “And if we look at 2006, within five years, Netflix, which was sending out DVDs – versus Blockbuster that started out on VHS – completely changed in terms of share. Five years later in around 2011, Blockbuster went bankrupt.”

Making the case for sustainable data storage

The sustainability benefits of flash storage versus legacy disk-based storage make the format highly compelling. It was a recurring theme throughout Pure Accelerate 2023, with several sessions highlighting the growing need for the storage industry to adopt more environmentally-friendly practices. Globally, data centers account for between 1-2% of all global electricity consumption, exacting a significant hit on the environment and power grids.

Traditionally, a big reason for this has been the use of those pesky inefficient disk drives spinning endlessly. The heat generated by these drives demands intensive cooling, which in itself results in added costs and energy consumption. 

In fact, anywhere between 30 to 55% of data center energy usage is dedicated to powering cooling systems, research shows, equating to a significant chunk of overall power consumption. 

Pure is highly vocal on the fact that its own products can unlock up to an 80% reduction in power consumption. Flash drives also provide up to a ten-fold boost to power and space efficiency compared to disk drives. 

That’s not exclusive to Pure products, either. NetApp, a competitor in the space and another industry stakeholder bullish on the potential of flash, reports similar performance metrics.

With that in mind, it seems evident that flash should be the natural go-to for organizations conscious of their environmental impact. But if flash can deliver marked energy efficiency improvements, then why isn’t there widespread adoption as of yet?

IDC research shows more than 90% of exabytes in cloud data centers are still stored on HDDs, with the remaining 10% stored on SSDs or flash. 

Cost, Pure conceded, has been a traditional hurdle for organizations. As various speakers noted, however, enterprise data storage and hyperscaler data centers are also among the “last bastions'' of hard disk usage – and both segments account for a significant portion of global data storage. 

If that is the case, then it’s clear there is still a long way to go until flash storage adoption is ubiquitous and global businesses can begin mounting a serious offensive to reduce energy consumption. 

Data center e-waste is a growing concern

Components used to create the disk drives present at many sites also contribute to the seemingly endless amount of e-waste that scars the earth. 

Shawn Rosemarin, VP for customer engineering at Pure Storage, noted the e-waste aspect of current hard disk use in the data center industry should be a huge cause for concern.

Research from the Circular Drive Initiative (CDI) shows around 90% of hard disks are destroyed when they reach end-of-life, with the majority of drives having just a five-year lifespan. This endemic practice of destroying hard disks adds to the global stream of nearly 54 million tons of e-waste annually.

Flash, however, boasts greater longevity than hard disk and, from a mechanical standpoint, is a far more simplistic design than its predecessors. 

Rosemarin noted that flash storage produces 85% less e-waste compared to disk, which if taken at face value could represent a step change in tackling this global issue. But again, this is dependent on how rapidly adoption continues to grow. 

Data centers and energy crises

Flash storage doesn’t represent a total silver bullet for energy efficiency and carbon reduction for the data center industry, however.

Despite notable benefits highlighted at Pure Accelerate, it is clear that there are significant future challenges ahead - especially when one considers the current state of the global energy market. 

Research from the European Commission projects that data centers will account for 3.2% of all electricity by 2030, marking an increase on current levels and a significant surge since 2018. 

The power demands of data centers have reached such a point that, according to a report from the Financial Times last year, London housing developments were put on hold because there simply wasn’t enough electricity to meet commercial and residential demands. 

These straining demands placed on electricity grids were among one the key challenges Rosemarin highlighted at the conference - and it’s clear this is an issue he expects to continue. 

“We have for the first time in our existence an electricity crisis with no end in sight,” he said. “We’ve already got countries telling public cloud providers ‘we don’t want your tax dollars, we have no more electricity’.”

“And so if we’re only going to turn more GPUs and TPUs and CPUs on, where are we going to find the power to do this? 

IDC research also shows that data volumes are expected to continue growing over the next three years - to around 221ZB of data generated globally. 

With this in mind, it’s clear that flash storage adoption will require a serious acceleration in adoption rates to deliver the power-related benefits it’s being hailed for. 

The performance and capacity advantages are clear, but without widespread adoption, the environmental impact of data centers running largely on hard disks will remain a lingering problem.

An optimistic outlook for flash adoption

Despite obvious challenges, Pure Storage appeared highly confident flash represents “the future” of data storage. 

CMO Matt Burr described the days of hard disks as a “dark age” and believes the “future is flash”. It's a bold claim, but one supported by current statistics. 

Research shows the all-flash array market will grow at a CAGR of around 26.3% over the next five years, representing a serious shift toward broader adoption of flash storage. 

This mood of optimism was prevailing through Pure Accelerate 2023, but while the data storage industry may be leaving the "dark ages" and entering its enlightenment period, key hurdles still lie ahead. 

In the wake of the pandemic, it was crucial for IT departments to ramp up their technological capabilities to support increased digitization efforts. 

Overnight, businesses were dealing with challenges such as implementing contactless payments, teleconferencing, telemedicine, and e-commerce. 

Unfortunately, this acceleration meant some businesses did not factor in tech debt, which refers to the off-balance-sheet accumulation of all the tech work companies are required to do in the future. 

As a result, today’s digital transformation investments are being threatened by this tech debt. To compound this challenge, pressing ahead with digital transformation initiatives on top of a foundation of legacy IT architecture risks creating an expensive and difficult-to-maintain infrastructure, which is also impacting organizational performance and increasing cyber risk. It has become a vicious cycle.

The channel is constantly evolving in step with the changing business landscape, and never more so than in the last couple of years. IT budgets have been cut across the board against a challenging macroeconomic environment, coupled with war and energy crises. The result is companies being stuck with underperforming, complex, and energy inefficient legacy solutions. 

This has also meant there is less opportunity for the channel to help organizations with their digital transformation, as technology CapEx spends have been reigned in, impacting the channel’s bottom line.  

Today, the channel is looking for ways to continue delivering the innovation that companies desperately need, with never before seen levels of flexibility and customization, all without large upfront costs.

Enter Storage as a Service (STaaS)

STaaS is a service focused consumption model for storage procurement that allows organizations to provision the capacity and performance they need on-premises, in the cloud, or any other combination and pay for it on an as a service basis. 

STaaS is a great option for enterprises that need infrastructure to accommodate different workloads for short and longer-term projects without operational or cost penalties, so long as effective SLAs are put into place. 

It removes much of the complexity and risk associated with data storage and reduces friction, costs and complications associated with sharing data across the enterprise. 

Crucially, STaaS doesn’t require the same substantial CapEx outlay of traditional IT infrastructure. 

A win-win for the channel and businesses

The storage as a service market was valued at $17.30 billion in 2020 and, according to research firm ATR, is expected to grow 16.1% by 2027 to $49.54 billion.

For partners, this development offers a promising outlook. STaaS provides a means for the partner community to offer modern, energy efficient solutions to meet customer aspirations and challenges. 

They can serve a wider range of customers, both those who buy hardware through a CapEx model, those looking for more flexibility through as a service and also a middle option where customers want to own the hardware but not manage the solution. 

Ultimately, it's about being able to provide customer choice and meet their needs. 

Without the ability to offer this, partners might see themselves sidelined in favor of hyperscalers which offer convenient, though often not ideal solutions, to channel partners’ customer bases.

The reason why STaaS is resonating is because organizations can do more with less, when STaaS is delivered as a true service offering, allowing customers to streamline processes and operations traditionally managed internally back to the STaaS provider. 

This benefit is over and above the ability to align spend with actual consumption and the significant economic benefit that delivers. Furthermore, STaaS can deliver the same cloud-like experience without necessarily requiring a commitment to public cloud. 

This has created new opportunities for customers to realize the outcomes that are typically associated with the public cloud without the associated adoption challenges.

Hurdles for partners to avoid with STaaS

Not all STaaS offerings are created equal and partners need to look to offer a true value-added service, as some vendors simply offer OpEx billing disguised as a service. This would be more like a lease, where products are deployed on a multi-year cycle and upgraded at the end as part of forklift upgrades. 

For channel partners to succeed they should offer solutions with guaranteed service levels and automated upgrades to meet performance and capacity guarantees at no additional cost. Partners should also check if the STaaS provider is able to provide file and block access storage as well as fast file and object storage on the same hardware. 

Only then will all workloads be covered - from fast transactional block access to unstructured file data, to fast throughput for analytics and recovery. Monitoring software is another plus as it gives customers an overview of the capacity utilization and performance of the storage infrastructure on-premises and in the cloud. 

Some partners that do not have a wealth of experience selling as-a-service solutions may see challenges in shifting from a CapEx orientation to selling service subscriptions. 

Such challenges might include a lengthier revenue collection timeframe, adapting quoting/invoicing systems/processes to subscription-oriented transactions, and adjusting the compensation models of their internal sales teams. 

Partners also face the challenge of ensuring internal sales teams are trained to sell as a service/subscription/consumption-oriented solutions, a skillset that can be different from selling hardware or software-oriented maintenance packages.

Partners that want to participate in the growing as a service market should establish a formal transformation program to analyze and adopt the changes needed to internal skills, processes and technology.

STaaS driving the channel’s bottom line

With those challenges come new opportunities, however. As a service sales present a unique moment for partners to add value to offerings by bundling in additional services, reducing investment needed by the customer in the areas of IT admin and maintenance. 

Even partners that do not have aspirations to ‘layer in’ a higher-level service wrapper will find that STaaS sales will drive more frequent contact with the customer and greater insight into customer challenges and opportunities to address them. The as a service model generates much higher frequency contact with the customer than would a traditional CapEx transaction.

The best technology vendors out there are offering training and enablement activities for pre-sales and service delivery teams on how to position and then deliver STaaS, to consultation on how partner organizations can smoothly transform themselves from traditional product-oriented organizations to service-oriented. 

This partnership will make a real difference to the channel’s bottom line this year and beyond. 

Virgin Media O2 has saved “millions of pounds” in costs by enhancing data center efficiency through the introduction of flash storage drives, according to a senior company official. 

Ajit Sharma, business optimization manager at the telecoms giant, told attendees at Pure Accelerate 2023 that the integration of the devices in data center operations followed a deal with Pure Storage to adopt its FlashArray//X drives. 

This move, Sharma said, delivered significant operational and financial benefits, including a 98% reduction in its data center footprint. 

The integration of flash drives also resulted in a 96% reduction in power consumption, Sharma said while hailing the improvements made to the company’s data architecture. This has enabled the firm to reduce the impact of rising energy costs amid the cost-of-living crisis. 

“In the UK we’ve seen our power costs increase by nearly five to ten times depending on who you’re co-locating with in the data center space,” he explained.

“We don’t have our own property, but most of our own data centers are co-located with Equinix and other companies. Unfortunately, we’re at their mercy due to what’s going on across the sector as well as what’s going on across the world as well.”

A survey of data center professionals from Aggreko last year found that 60% reported energy bill increases of up to 40%. 

Given the rise in energy costs over the last year, Sharma said that by reducing power consumption, the company has experienced a “huge reduction in costs”. 

Maximizing data center space

As part of the transformation program, Virgin Media O2 reduced its storage racks from 42 to three, and runs its storage on a select number of flash arrays which are able to handle over four petabytes of data. 

A key factor in the firm’s ability to reduce its footprint lies in the compact nature of flash storage drives compared to traditional storage devices, such as hard disks, Sharma said. 

Reducing this footprint represents a long-term strategy and was more than about delivering immediate cost savings. Looking ahead, this will cut the need to invest in additional data centers across the country. 

“The UK is a much smaller country in terms of size,” he said. “So by being able to re-use and improve sustainability, we don’t need to go and build new data centers.”

“So we’re helping the UK and the community to ensure that we’re not using more space than is required. We’re saving millions of pounds by not building new data centers.”

Re-investing cost savings

The cost savings from this data center transformation strategy means that Virgin Media O2 has also been able to reduce e-waste levels and re-invest in other areas of the business, creating a positive cyclical process of optimization, cost savings, and re-investment. 

This has been especially critical for the firm as it prepares for the eventual roll-out of 6G technologies, Sharma added. 

“In the last year alone we got rid of over 48,000 tons of e-waste,” he said. “What we’re seeing from the money that’s being saved in e-waste and the ability to reduce our data center costs, is that it’s been refunded into other parts of the business.”

“We’ve seen 4G and 5G, and 6G is going to be out soon as well. So we need to invest our money in the right places - this helps us on that journey.”

Pure Storage has unveiled an expansion of its Pure//E product family with the launch of the new FlashArray//E drive at its annual Pure Accelerate conference in Las Vegas. 

The storage firm said that the all-new FlashArray//E will include the upcoming release of the industry’s largest 75TB QLC DirectFlash Modules, representing a step change in storage capacity and performance for businesses.

The new array will provide “unmatched savings” in both power and space, according to Pure Storage, providing an 80% reduction in power, 60% lower operational costs, and 85% less e-waste compared to traditional disk-based storage. 

Similarly, the firm said the new product range is capable of 4x greater energy efficiency compared to all-flash arrays currently available on the market. 

In a press briefing ahead of the launch, Shawn Hansen, VP and general manager for FlashArray at Pure Storage, told journalists the launch will act as a “key differentiator” for the company in the storage space. 

“We simply think we have a multi-year advantage,” he said. “It will be very hard for others to come in and offer what we’re doing with the //E family.”

The announcement follows the launch of FlashBlade//E earlier this year, and extends the Pure//E family to support unified block and storage, in addition to scaled capacity of up to 4PB. 

As part of the announcement, Pure Storage revealed the new array will “expand customers’ options to tackle data growth” and unlock greater value from operational data by offering a baseline of 1PB of capacity. 

This, the company said, will reduce traditional business frustration over data storage in offline archives or having to expand inefficient, costly disk systems to harness data efficiently. 

The firm said the decision to offer a 1PB capacity comes amid a period of surging data growth, with many organizations struggling to keep pace with demanding volumes of data. 

“Data continues to grow at a monumental rate,” Pure Storage said in a launch statement. 

“This is unsustainable for large-capacity, price-sensitive workloads leveraging legacy and disk-based storage solutions that are ill-equipped to manage growing demand while maintaining competitive cost structures, reducing data center space, and eliminating inefficient power usage.”

Also announced on day one of Pure Accelerate 2023 was the release of the next-generation FlashArray//X and FlashArray//C R4 models. 

Pure Storage said the new FlashArray//X series will provide larger enterprises with enhanced data agility, performance, security, and cost savings. 

These models will also offer significant performance boosts of up to 40%, according to the company, as well as an 80% increase in memory speeds, and a 30% “inline compression boost” to stretch storage capacity for enterprises. 

“Pure pioneered all-flash storage, and the 4th generation of FlashArray//X and FlashArray//C extends our multi-year leadership advantage,” Hansen said. 

“We’re driving the revolution of an all-flash data center at the cost of disk – which unlocks the incredible density, OPEX, and power efficiency savings needed for next-generation data centers.”

The storage industry is entering a period of expected growth despite challenging economic conditions, with research from Fortune Business Insights predicting that the market will surge from a 2023 valuation of $247.3 billion to $777.9 billion by 2030.

This growth rate highlights the insatiable appetite among businesses globally, driven by both a rapid growth of data volumes and heightened demand for artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and cloud-based services, the study suggests.

It's against this optimistic backdrop that Pure Storage heads into its Pure Accelerate annual conference, a 1,000 attendee-strong celebration of data storage and management being held in Las Vegas next week. Sustainability is also likely to get plenty of airtime, as well as cloud-native development, data management, and data protection.

Artificial intelligence in the spotlight

As one might expect, AI is set to feature heavily at Pure Accelerate 2023, with a range of sessions catered specifically for data engineers, IT leaders, and data scientists tasked with “building and innovating around data pipelines”.

The company has positioned itself as a key vendor in the emerging AI space in recent years, serving organizations spanning the media and entertainment, financial services, and pharmaceutical industries.

In May this year, the company announced a partnership with South Korean-based voice recognition provider, MediaZen, to provide the FlashBlade storage platform for use in its R&D operations.

This will enable MediaZen to markedly improve time-to-market for its AI services and modernize its legacy storage architecture, the companies said at the time.

The generative AI boom of the last nine months, prompted by the emergence of systems such as ChatGPT, has heralded the rapid adoption of automated systems among businesses globally.

But this shift means business considerations such as reliability, scalability, and cost are now more pressing than ever, leading organizations to assess how their IT architecture can accommodate for adoption.

 Ahead of the conference, Charlie Giancarlo, CEO at Pure Storage told ITPro that the company views recent generative AI developments as a prime opportunity to capitalize on this burgeoning market space – and it’s an area Pure Storage has an established foothold in.

“It’s clear that our continued innovation strongly resonates with our customers, whether it’s for artificial intelligence and machine learning, rapid recovery from ransomware, high performance databases, electronic design automation and video editing, traditional or cloud-native applications, and now also for secondary storage environments such as content and media stores, enterprise imaging, and even traditional backup and archive,” he said.

Sustainability and green supply chain innovation

Pure Storage customers and partners will be well aware of the growing necessity of supply chain sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations.

Sessions at the conference will explore the unique sustainability-related challenges that both customers and partners currently face.

This will include how to develop a ‘greener’ data storage estate and how sustainability and energy efficiency have emerged as key considerations for IT decision makers today.

Last year, Pure Storage announced a comprehensive shift toward advancing its sustainability efforts and enabling customers to curtail their environmental footprint.

This included the launch of the new Pure1 Sustainability Assessment, which gives customers broader visibility of their environmental impact and provides recommended steps to optimize energy efficiency.

The company has also sharpened its focus on improving the sustainability of its core products, including the FlashBlade//S suite of tools. These now provide more than double the power efficiency as previous versions, the company said.

Bucking industry challenges

Pure Accelerate 2023 comes amid a challenging period for the data storage industry, with acute macroeconomic factors placing strain on both providers and customers alike.

Despite this, Giancarlo said that the company has performed well during difficult operating conditions, adding that there are emerging opportunities for growth in the coming months.

While its most recent earnings call showed a 5% decrease in year-on-year revenue to $589 million, the company still exceeded analyst expectations.

“We were pleased with our recent Q1 performance in what continues, overall, to be a challenging IT environment,” Giancarlo told ITPro. “While we saw continuing caution by enterprise and cloud customers in Q1 similar to what we saw in Q4, we also experienced enhanced demand for our most cost efficient solutions, especially Evergreen//One.”

Giancarlo said the company expects to continue increasing its market share and “pick up even greater momentum” amid a flurry of new products and services rolling out in the year ahead.

ITPro will be covering Pure Accelerate 2023 live from Resorts World Las Vegas between 12 June and 16 June. To stay up-to-date with the latest news and announcements from the conference, follow our live blogs and subscribe to our newsletter.

Dell’s second in-person conference since the COVID-19 pandemic sees the industry mainstay ditch the riverboat faćades of Las Vegas’ Venetian for the tropical, South Seas-themed Mandalay Bay. 

Far from just being superficial, the move to a larger venue is fullling anticipation that Dell Technologies World 2023 will be its biggest yet, both in terms of size and the scale of the company’s strategic ambitions.

Multi-cloud as a service, the future of work, modern data infrastructure, edge computing, and cyber security are among the core themes, as the firm hopes to move on from recent layoffs and reaffirm its overall vision.

All eyes on Project Alpine

Updates to Dell Apex will without a doubt consume a lot of bandwidth, due to its broad portfolio spanning multi-cloud, storage, and security. But we also expect to hear more on Project Alpine, which the firm first teased last year.

Dell seeks to bring block, file, and object storage under one roof, regardless of the hyperscaler that customers use. Indeed, cloud has never been more important, and if Dell can offer customers more consistency, they could be onto a winner.

Its acquisition of cloud orchestration startup Cloudify in January could also fit into this vision for a seamless cloud experience.

Gartner has also identified edge architectures as a key trend influencing the future of cloud, with Dell vying to position itself to meet this demand.

Setting the pace on AI

Customers and partners will also be excited to see how Dell handles the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) for business, and how innovations in this space fit into its broader strategy.

It’s more or less impossible that generative AI won’t get a look-in. And indeed, CEO Michael Dell will touch on how Dell can “create a better future for all through the powerful combination of technology and human creativity”. 

The day-two keynote – ‘Embracing new potential’ – will explicitly focus on AI, and it’s likey Dell will lay out how companies can adopt these systems more effectively, in areas such as improving data insights. This is opposed to the glitzy appeal of chatbots.

Dell announced an AI initiative with Nvidia in January which fits this mold exactly, with a slew of its next-generation Dell PowerEdge servers optimized for AI and analytics work alongside Nvidia’s H100 AI chips. The firm has also promised ‘intelligent’ services across the breadth of its services, and this also seems like prime real estate for competitive, valuable AI.

Generative AI could change security among other fields, and if Dell can capitalize on this by introducing quality-of-life features such as generative summarisation of dense data at the edge, it could help to cement its place in the IT stacks of existing customers.

Dell has room to maneuver, with a customer base that would certainly benefit from a means to adopt AI seamlessly, without the need the train training large datasets.

Sustainability as a core tenet

The words “Dell Datastore” are likely to be on the lips of keynote speakers too. Championed at last year’s conference, Dell’s fastest-ever storage option is the kind of product ripe for new upgrades when it comes to energy efficiency.

Anxieties around business energy bills surged last year, and with businesses set to bet on sustainability as the key to long-term stability, it would be remiss of Dell to not properly address sustainability and wider ESG implementation in its announcements.

That shouldn’t just mean inviting prominent figures like film director James Cameron to deliver a “trailblazer” talk. Dell’s designated an entire ‘sustainability journey’ for attendees, but it remains to be seen whether the actual substance matches the theme’s prominence.

Like with most major tech conferences in 2023, the elephant in the room at Dell Technologies World will be layoffs. The firm outlined plans in February to cut 6,650 roles worldwide, equivalent to 5% of its total workforce, after it sustained particularly poor device sales. We’ll certainly be hoping to drill down into how Dell plans to address these anxieties.

ITPro will be covering Dell Technologies World 2023 between 22 May and 25 May. Stay up-to-date with the latest news and updates by following our live blogs, and subscribe to our newsletter to catch the latest in-depth stories.

It's been a few years since Qsan updated its NAS appliances, but the Qsan XCubeNAS XN8112R signifies the wait is over. Coming in at the pinnacle of a range of six new models, the XN8112R is designed to offer SMBs an expandable hybrid storage solution with a sharp focus on performance.

Along with 12 front SATA LFF/SFF bays, the appliance has four SFF bays at the rear that support U.2 NVMe SSDs. These can be used as a high-performance storage pool or teamed up with Qsan's new hybrid SSD cache service, and there are two internal M.2 NVMe slots that also support both options. 

The CPU gets a welcome update, with the elderly Xeon E3-1225 v6 in the XN8012R replaced with a modern 2GHz quad-core Xeon D-1712TR. The base 8GB of DDR4 ECC memory can be boosted to a huge 256GB using the four DIMM slots. 

Network ports abound, with embedded quad 2.5GbE plus 10GbE SFP+ while the two PCI-E Gen4 slots accept Qsan's dual-port RJ-45 and SFP+ 10GbE cards. Use them with Qsan's optional SAS3 adapters and you can add multiple disk shelves up to a total of 426 drives for a mind-boggling 9.2PB using 22TB hard disks.

Qsan XCubeNAS XN8112R review: Setup 

Deployment is swift. We installed 12 22TB Western Digital DC HC570 data centre drives plus four of Qsan's 3.8TB PCI-E 4 NVMe SSDs and left the XFinder app to discover the appliance and load the QSM software. From the custom setup option, we created a RAID5 array using the hard disks and assigned the NVMe SSDs to the storage pool as a hybrid cache – you can use them for a tiered storage pool if you wish.

The QSM web console is simple to use but there's a dearth of apps, with Qsan offering only six for file management, backup, hardware monitoring, media management, cloud syncing and antivirus. For the XN8112R, Qsan doesn't include its VPN, SQL database, web service and hypervisor manager apps. 

The provided apps cover all the basic business requirements, though, and QSM has some tricks of its own, as this ZFS-based OS offers enterprise-class data-protection features. These include copy-on-write snapshots for NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs, the aforementioned data deduplication and intelligent real-time data tiering, block-level replication and a choice of three WORM (write once, read (many) policies to protect NAS share data from tampering.

Performance is a winner, too. A NAS share mapped over 10GbE to a Dell T640 Windows Server 2019 host delivered sequential read and write speeds both of 9.2Gbits/sec, while random rates settled at 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.9Gbits/sec. IP SAN speeds are great, with a 1TB iSCSI target returning 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec for sequential read and write operations and 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.4Gbits/sec for random ones.

We upped the pressure with a quad 10GbE MPIO link to the target and saw sequential read and write rates leap to 36.9Gbits/sec and 23.3Gbits/sec. Swapping to random operations returned equally good speeds of 36.7Gbits/sec and 15.6Gbits/sec, although for the last test we noted CPU utilisation peaking at 80%.

The apps Qsan does provide are easy to use and the Backup app can secure data to Rsync-compliant remote appliances, use Amazon S3 cloud accounts and replicate folders between XCubeNAS appliances using the Xmirror service. The Cloud Sync app manages one-way and two-way sync jobs with Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive, and we had no problems linking it up with our Dropbox account. 

SMBs looking for a hybrid storage solution with monumental capacity potential will love Qsan's XCubeNAS XN8112R. It delivers great 10GbE performance and, although apps are in short supply, Qsan's QSM software offers a good range of data management features.

Qsan XCubeNAS XN8112R specifications

Cloud storage provider Wasabi Technologies has announced the appointment of tech industry veteran Jon Howes as its new vice president and general manager for EMEA.

Howes brings 20 years’ experience to the business, with extensive expertise in scaling go-to-market models for tech companies in EMEA, including Juniper Networks, Oracle, and Infovista.

At Wasabi, his initial priorities include growing the firm’s channel presence, scaling its partners and customer base, as well as strategically increasing its headcount in key European markets - such as the UK, France, and Germany.

Ultimately, Wasabi is looking to build on its recent growth across the region, having snapped up a flagship deal with Liverpool Football Club, as well as 1,800 other new partners. 

The firm also revealed it has achieved a near-90% APR growth rate.

“Demand for predictably priced, secure, high-performance cloud storage is growing at an unprecedented pace in EMEA, making Wasabi a perfect fit for the market,” Howes said. 

“Our immense traction across Europe is a testament to the value we bring to enterprises and organizations across sports, media and entertainment, surveillance, education, healthcare, and more.”

Wasabi has also established a full go-to-market team to support these growth ambitions, which includes Eric Peters as country manager of Benelux and Southern Europe, Daniel Arabié as his equivalent for Central Europe/DACS, and Kevin Dunn as the lead for the UK, Ireland, and the Nordics.

The new managerial additions bring extensive sales and channel experience from previous roles at AWS, Cloudian, EMC, Juniper Networks, and Nimble Storage.

“Being at the helm of Wasabi’s EMEA operations is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I look forward to the expansion of Wasabi hot cloud storage in this important region along with our industry-leading team,” Howes added.

Wasabi has positioned itself as a scalable cloud storage provider, with no fees for egress or API requests, and no vendor lock-in. 

Its accompanying suite of products and tools includes the recently-announced Wasabi Surveillance Cloud, which offers bottomless storage for video surveillance, and its Carbon Footprint Calculator, which helps partners accurately measure and report on energy use. 

The company said its offering is ideal for the channel due to its ease of use, integration functionality, and high level of protection.

Since opening its Amsterdam storage region back in 2019, Wasabi has expanded its capabilities with further storage regions in London, Frankfurt, and Paris to help meet customer data sovereignty needs. 

The firm has also raised more than $500 million in funding to support its international expansion ambitions. 

Dropbox has announced it plans to cut 16% of its workforce, equivalent to around 500 staff, as the company bets on artificial intelligence (AI) to support future operations. 

In a statement yesterday, CEO Drew Houston outlined the reasoning behind the company’s round of layoffs, noting sluggish growth and economic headwinds have “put pressure on our customers” and the business. 

While economic factors have played a role in the decision to cut staff, Houston said that recent developments in the AI space have also played a key role. 

By cutting staff, it appears the company will be able to focus on the development of AI-supported products, on which the company has been bullish in recent months. 

“The AI era of computing has finally arrived,” he said. “We’ve believed for many years that AI will give us new superpowers and completely transform knowledge work. And we’ve been building towards this future for a long time, as this year’s product pipeline will demonstrate.”

Houston said that the acceleration of generative AI products has unfolded “more rapidly than any of us could have anticipated” and that Dropbox seeks to keep pace with competitors exploring the use of AI within core service offerings. 

Crucially, he noted, this means that the company will focus heavily on attracting staff with skill sets spanning AI and early-stage product development.

“In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible,” he said. “However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development.”

“We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more.”

Dropbox’s decision to cut staff comes amid a period of rising concern over the potential impact of AI on the global jobs market. 

The acceleration of generative AI products such as ChatGPT in the last six months has sparked warnings that human workers could be at risk as companies seek to integrate AI platforms and streamline processes. 

ANALYSIS

The explicit connection between the layoffs and AI is likely to leave a bad taste in the mouths of workers who have been promised for years that these tools will assist them, rather than replace them.

Houston has said the quiet part rather loudly in his admission that Dropbox would move people around rather than engage in layoffs “in an ideal world”.

Artificial intelligence, particularly new generative AI models into which many companies have heavily invested, has arrived at an unfortunate time where worker rights and security are concerned. 

It also provides grim reading for those in the tech industry and beyond who work in a department that could soon adopt AI tools on a larger scale.

The UK’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) has already issued a warning over the potential for AI to endanger workers’ rights, and these conversations will only intensify as practice such as this continues. 

A recent study from Goldman Sachs suggested that as many as 300 million jobs worldwide could be lost to automation. 

The study, published in March, predicted that around 18% of work could become computerized and that AI-related job losses are expected to significantly impact advanced economies. 

“A new wave of AI systems may have a major impact on employment markets around the world,” the company said. “Shifts in workflows triggered by these advances could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation.”

Sam Altman, CEO at OpenAI, the California tech company behind ChatGPT, has been vocal over the potential risk of AI-related job losses in recent months. 

In an interview with ABC News in March, Altman warned that he was a “little bit scared” of what generative AI tools could mean for the global labor force. 

"It’s going to eliminate a lot of current jobs, that’s true,” he said at the time. “We can make much better ones. The reason to develop AI at all is that I believe this will be - in terms of impact on our lives and improving our lives and upsides - will be the greatest technology humanity has yet developed.”

Data. It’s the lifeblood of modern businesses. By analysing the vast amounts of data that are now accessible to almost all organisations, it’s possible to anticipate customer behaviour and demand, know when robots on an assembly line are likely to need maintenance, and analyse the potential efficacy of new pharmaceuticals.

As the saying goes, though, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing – as many organisations are finding out. With the rising tide of data showing no signs of abating, many are at risk of being overwhelmed by it and there’s no easy resolution; putting an end to data collection isn’t feasible for a modern business and identifying what (if any) extant information can be removed is also an almost impossible task.

Data also presents a risk, as well as being a valuable resource. Malicious actors may want to steal it, it could end up compromised as part of a ransomware campaign, or an innocent mistake could lead to a self-inflicted data breach. Depending on the nature of the incident and how long it lasts, this could be a very costly affair.

Thankfully, there are modern solutions to these very modern problems, and for many the answer may lie in secure, on-premise scalable storage, delivered by a trusted partner.

Cloud capabilities, on-prem assurances

Cloud computing bears some responsibility for the proliferation of data, but it has also been put forward as a way of handling it. Initially, organisations turned to the public cloud – notably hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure – to store the data they were creating.

There’s been a creeping realisation, however, that this is not the best use of public cloud resources and gets very expensive very quickly. Ultimately, the hybrid cloud model and a return to on-premise storage solutions for some workloads – particularly if latency or data sensitivity are an issue – is becoming a more appealing option.

Synology is a leader in storage hardware for businesses of all sizes. For over 20 years it has been producing NAS servers that can be found in data centres and branch sites across the world. It has developed several ranges that offer the scalability and performance of public cloud, without the cost and latency downsides. And, as a trusted partner and number one brand in Switzerland, it can work with customers to ensure the hardware they’re investing in meets their needs exactly.

A century of data

The Imperial War Museums (IWM) consists of five sites – the Imperial War Museum, the Churchill War Rooms, and HMS Belfast in London, Duxford in Cambridgeshire, and Trafford in Greater Manchester. Founded in 1917 at the close of World War I, it houses collections covering all aspects of modern warfare from across the globe, including thousands of hours of video footage.

The IWM has been digitising the vast quantities of tape archival footage in its possession at ever increasing resolutions, as well as adding footage from current conflicts. Most recently, it has switched to 4K resolution with zero compression, which has led to massive data growth with around 15-20TB of footage being added each week and the total size of the collection nearing 2PB.

Finding the right kind of hardware to store all this data on was becoming an ever-increasing challenge for the IWM team. In trying to handle the influx, it had ended up with dozens of NAS appliances, which wasn’t a long-term viable solution.

To solve these problems, the organisation turned to long-time partner Synology. First, two of the company’s FS range of all-flash storage arrays were implemented – the FS2017 and  FS6400 – for ultra-fast writes when footage is being uploaded. These arrays also mean there’s plenty of room to store footage until it’s moved, and backed up to a separate cold storage tape library.

It then replaced the multiple NASes it had with two Synology HD6500 Petabyte Scale Solution, with one acting as a backup for the other to mitigate the risk of any of the precious footage being archived being lost. Each 60-bay unit is capable of storing up to 960TB per chassis and were both recently supplemented by one RX6022sas each, adding up to a further 960TB per unit.

“Not many NAS devices support what we need,” explains Rob Tyler, IT DAMS manager at IWM. “Having the option and flexibility to be able to contact Synology with feature requests, knowing that they will be read, researched with a strong chance they will be put into production is fantastic and reassuring.”

Containing your data deluge

While most organisations aren’t at the centre of an effort to preserve the history of global conflict, nevertheless we have our own data storage needs. It’s important to think about what you want to do with your data, how you want to get it to work for you, and then seek out the best solutions for the job. With Synology, you can work together to discover how on-premise NAS appliances can help you tame the ever rising tide of data in your business.

IT admins have reported issues with Dell workstations allocating excessive hard drive space, filling over 95% of disks and up to 100% in some cases. 

The bloating files related to system remediation and required manual fixes for fleets of machines.

One admin raised the issue in an online discussion that generated similar stories from others across the industry.

Those involved in the discussion agreed the issue stemmed from Windows System Protection and Restore having been incorrectly allocated 100% of disk space. 

Multiple users shared similar hard drive problems, and pre-installed Dell software emerged as the common factor among the pros.

“This past week I've suddenly had 5 laptops flagged for hard drive usage exceeding 95%,” one admin said.

“Turns out it was the same issue for every one. Something was up with the Windows System Protection and Restore settings. The disk space usage was set to 100% which in turn filled up the entire drive.”

"We have been unable to replicate the concerns posted online," Dell told ITPro.

"If customers or IT admins experience this scenario, please contact your local Dell technical support centre. To date, we have not received any customer inquiries on this topic."

To fix the problem, users can access the system control panel via the Windows Run command, delete all restore points, and reduce System Protection disk space allocation to a lower percentage. 

The top respondent within the discussion suggested the problem could lie with Dell’s SupportAssist Remediation software, and noted that deleting the restore points and uninstalling the application fixed the issue for them.

Dell’s official user guide for SupportAssist Remediation, also known as SupportAssist OS Recovery, states that it “provides a recovery environment that consists of tools to diagnose and troubleshoot issues that may occur before your computer boots to the operating system”.

SupportAssist is Dell’s automated system support software, housing a number of smaller programs for specific purposes such as data remediation and firmware updates.

Another user clarified that although they had experienced the same disk problems with Dell workstations, it was not a ubiquitous issue.

“It's worth noting we have probably had this happen on about 10-15 machines out of the 120-ish deployed,” they said.

Others said that if Dell SupportAssist Remediation is uninstalled, another piece of pre-installed software called Dell Command Update would automatically reinstall it a short time later.

As the SupportAssist Remediation is included in critical updates, those who wish to remove it permanently are required to change Dell Command Update’s settings to exclude the category ‘Application Software’.

In a 2021 thread, users in the Dell subreddit characterized Dell SupportAssist as “bloatware”, and claimed it is prone to introducing errors to devices.

In the past, the software has been criticized by multiple network administrators for automatically setting the netlogon service to “manual”, which can break group policies on domain-joined machines.

This article was updated to include a statement from Dell.

Western Digital has reportedly refused to negotiate with ALPHV, the cyber criminal group that claimed responsibility for the attack on the company in March.

ALPHV claimed the attack on Western Digital on Tuesday, saying that the storage firm had not responded to any of the criminals’ attempts to make contact.

The group alleged that Western Digital doesn’t know the nature of the files that were stolen and has made no attempt to contact ALPHV to understand the extent of the breach.

ALPHV suggested that it was able to travel fairly deeply into Western Digital’s network, offering no indication to the public of what kind of data it stole, other than a suggestion that it has files relating to Western Digital’s firmware.

“Important documents will be released while priceless artifacts will be sold,” ALPHV wrote on its deep web blog.

“At this moment, nothing has been sold or leaked. Despite our attempts over the past two weeks, Western Digital has not responded to any of our attempts,” it added. 

“Even the most naive organizations would want to know precisely what was taken, this situation demonstrates the lack of corporate governance.”

ITPro has contacted Western Digital for comment.

ALPHV also suggested that when Western Digital first filed its 8-K form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - a legal requirement in the US compelling companies to disclose significant information to shareholders within four days - it “misrepresented several details”.

In the company’s regulatory filing, it said it had suffered a “network security incident” that first took place on 26 March.

It said an unauthorized third party gained access to a number of its systems. 

These service outages persisted until 12 April, according to Western Digital’s status page, which now says all services are running as normal.

The company also said in the filing that it had engaged outside incident response experts, was coordinating with law enforcement, and was “implementing proactive measures” to secure its systems.

If ALPHV’s claims are true, that it has stolen 10TB worth of data from Western Digital, as reported by TechCrunch, the company was either not aware of the data theft or chose not to inform investors in the 8-K.

The cyber criminals also told the publication that they were demanding an eight-figure fee for the return of its data, denying the use of ransomware.

The incident is then believed to be a pure extortion scenario, similar to the attacks by Cl0p abusing the GoAnywhere MFT vulnerability in more than 100 attacks around the world. 

These attacks involved an established ransomware group opting for a pure extortion model rather than deploying a ransomware payload.

ALPHV suggested on its blog that despite the extensive amount of data it has on Western Digital, it would not publish anything if it chose to pay the extortion demands.

“Please do not feel sorry for these hounds,” ALPHV wrote. “I can assure you that they are far more corrupt than you realize, and we have evidence to support our assertions.

“It’s approaching fast. But we are not superior to them. We apologize but we won’t divulge if they pay.”

It also said the blog post could be considered a “final warning”. 

This likely means Western Digital has been sent a deadline for payment, or the group will leak the entirety of the files it stole from the company online.

Analysis

When it comes to attacks such as these, it raises questions about who exactly holds the real leverage.

On one hand, ALPHV has claimed to have a huge amount of Western Digital’s data, an amount that, like it expressed in its blog, would make it surprising for a company not to even try to understand what it contained.

That said, it wouldn’t be the first time a cyber criminal outfit has lied to get a rise out of a specific company - LockBit has used this tactic numerous times in the past year. 

The examples of Mandiant and Thales spring to mind.

Without a leak of the data we won’t know for sure if the group’s claims are true.

Western Digital’s apparent refusal to even speak to ALPHV on the matter, again, if true, is somewhat of a head-scratcher. 

ALPHV is right in saying we would usually expect a company to at least engage with the group to understand the nature of the stolen data, and perhaps try to negotiate the extortion demands down, even if it is just to buy some extra time.

But, we know the company engaged outside incident response experts to manage the situation. 

Through investigations, Western Digital may have realized that the stolen data did not amount to anything sensitive or personal, and would be happy to see minor files dumped online just to show a stand against the cyber criminals.

Those investigations may also have revealed the overall size of the stolen data to be much smaller than what ALPHV has claimed.

Then again, all of the criminals’ claims could be true, but it just refuses to negotiate with cyber criminals as a company policy, for example.

Ultimately, so much is unknown about the scenario. The criminals are usually the most vocal in these cases, but are also infamously the most untrustworthy. By contrast, Western Digital has not been especially vocal on the incident. 

I would expect the company to weigh in on the latest claims, but it did not reply to our requests for comment at the time of writing.

It will be interesting to see how the incident unfolds over the coming days and weeks.

Popular perception suggests Japan is at the cutting edge of consumer electronics, robotics and aerospace research. It’s also a country where you can whiz around at high speed on a bullet train and then sit on a toilet that checks your blood pressure before cleaning the bowl.

In that sense, you’d think the nation would have no trouble letting go of the past. So when Japan’s government ministers recently called time on floppy disks, the world was surprised. Surely they had disappeared from the land of the rising sun many moons ago?

As it turned out, the country has more than 1,900 regulations determining how data should be shared, and loads of them still require the use of floppy disks, as IT Pro has covered in the recent past. It led a perplexed Tara Kono, Japan’s Minister of Digital Affairs to enquire: “Where does one even buy a floppy disk these days?”. But it would seem that Japan is not alone in having a long-term love of this particular storage medium.

The retro dream is being kept alive today

Rewind to the mid-1990s and it’s fair to say that everyone used them. The floppy disk was at its peak with more than five billion being sold worldwide and barely an office worker or student would leave the house without one in their pocket. Yet, in 1998, Apple announced it was ditching the floppy disk drive when it released the iMac G3. The writing was on the wall from that moment on.

By March 2011, just 12 million 3.5in floppy disks were being sold each year in Japan, with CDs, USB sticks and the cloud rising in popularity. Sony, which had a 70% market share, then ceased sales of the format it had introduced in 1982. It was at that stage, however, that a former tax lawyer called Tom Persky snapped up a couple of million disks, boosting a floppy disk collection that was already sizeable. He wanted to continue selling them and today he has about 500,000 left, proclaiming himself to be the “last man standing in the floppy disk business”.

A Sony employee shows off a 3.5in floppy disk in 1997 with a 200MB storage capacity

Persky’s floppies are stored in a warehouse in Lake Forest, California. As well as 3.5in disks, Persky also has 5.25in and 8in varieties and they form the stock for a business called floppydisk.com which has been around for more 20 years. Each day, he sells roughly 500 disks. It’s a far cry from sales of even 2011, but still perhaps surprising. “It’s a big world out there, man,” the 73-year-old says, when confronted with astonishment at the numbers. “People want floppy disks and I probably get about 20 orders for blank discs each day.”

Floppy disks are a flexible medium

There are many reasons why floppy disks are still being used. Persky points to them being a storage medium for many healthcare computing devices, for instance, and they’re also used in avionics. The US Defense Department had stashes as recently as 2019 despite their limited capacity. Indeed, the boo Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives Of A Flexible Medium includes interviews with people who continue to use them whether for archiving or distributing films. Persky also loves Nick Gentry’s disk-based artworks.

“I’ve never had a Japanese government customer,” Persky continues. “But I do have Japanese customers who are preserving old games or using the disks for music devices or pianos. I’ve also had governments contact me around the world, mostly in the US. I always ask people what they intend to use the floppy disks for because I want to be able to sell more of them.”

In general, customers fall into one of three categories. There are hobbyists trying to preserve old mediums or old games and software. Then there’s a group of industrial users who bought machines that require floppies to get information in and out – think embroidery, with the machines designed to last 50 years. Finally, there are people who want floppy disks for art projects or other promotions.

How reliable are floppy disks?

There are some obvious questions to ask given the market is so reliant on second-hand disks. For starters, how long do floppy disks actually last? Are you at high risk of buying a dud? Is there a distinct advantage in buying “new old stock”? After all, if you’re buying a blank then you’re likely going to be entrusting it with your data. You don’t want to lose what you save. You need to have trust.

As expected, the answers to these questions are far from clear-cut. You could easily grab a floppy from 30 years ago and load it without a hitch on a retro computer. In the experience of Tokyo official Yoichi Ono, floppy disks are reliable. They “almost never broke or lost data,” he told Nikkei Asia in 2021.

But, according to a 2005 report in the New York Times, 3.5in floppies were estimated to have a lifespan of just ten years so long as they were handled and stored with care. Christian Bartsch, who used to work for Cachet Software, maker of the infamous Amiga disk-copying program X-Copy, also points to issues.

Among the most notable is the deterioration of the data itself thanks to bit rot and the repelling of densely clustered magnetic charges. “The magnetic particles realign themselves to reach equilibrium,” Bartsch says. “This is the so-called digital cliff. Once too much data has become ambiguous, it’s impossible to determine its original state.”

Tara Kono, Japan’s Minister of Digital Affairs, has waged war on outdated technologies like floppy disks and fax machines

Persky has an immediate response. “Nothing’s forever, right? People think CDs last forever but they don’t and, if you’re comparing USBs and floppy disks, I’d take a floppy every time,” he says. “It’s not uncommon for me to have a USB flash drive fail one time out of 20 or 30 but that’s not going to happen with a floppy disk.”

So why are experiences so varied? It would seem that the type of disk being used could make a difference with anecdotal evidence suggesting 5.25in disks are relatively robust. “We run a service where we take information off a floppy disk and send it to people, and there was a government entity that stored information on 5.25in floppy disks,” Persky says. “It sent 130 5.25in floppy disks written in 1990 and we were able to recover all the data from 127 of them. I defy you to do that with a USB drive, CD or DVD.”

Reviving data from a floppy disk

If you’re worried that you may lose any data stored on a stash of floppy disks you’ve left in a cupboard, you may want to go and retrieve them as soon as possible. What you do then depends on the disk type and format and how you want to make use of those disks.

Perhaps the most straightforward way to view a disk’s content is to run it via its original retro hardware. In this situation, you could take an Amiga-formatted 3.5in floppy and insert it into an Amiga computer. So long as the drive is working and the disk hasn’t corrupted, you should be successful. Another way is to grab a working floppy disk drive and connect it to a modern computer. Windows 10 and Windows 11 support the floppy disk format and you can buy inexpensive USB 3.5in floppy drives online.

Windows 11 supports the floppy disk format, meaning you can plug a 3.5in floppy drive and begin backing up your data

Simply plug one in and insert a PC-formatted 3.5in floppy disk and you will be able to access its files, perhaps retrieving those old WordPerfect documents that you had long forgotten about (rename the .wpd files to .doc and launch them in Word). Other files could be converted using zamzar.com or viewed by running them via the x86 emulator DOSBox.

The situation is trickier regarding 5.25in or 3in floppy drives, however. You can’t buy USB versions of these so you’re going to have to find a used device. Trouble is, connecting these drives isn’t straightforward so, if you’ve got a bunch of Commodore 64 or Amstrad CPC files on 5.25in or 3in discs, for instance, then you’re going to have to delve a little deeper both in terms of the process involved and your pocket.

One thing’s for sure, if you have 3.5in floppies containing data created on an Amiga, Atari ST, Archimedes or myriad other retro machines you can’t just insert the disk into a USB drive and expect a PC or Mac to recognise the files. The trick is to sit a device between the drive and your computer that will help make sense of the disk’s content.

BBC-FDC is one such device – a floppy disk interface that not only allows a drive to be connected to Raspberry Pi but controls it so that retro-formats can be read. Then there are floppy disk controllers for PC and Mac that are popular with archivists. It’s often a matter of plugging the board and drive into a computer and running software to create disk images. The resulting files can then be run via retro emulators on a modern machine.

What you then do with the original disks afterwards is up to you. As Persky suggests, you’re likely to have few problems selling them. Just don’t offer them to the Japanese government. Kono is determined to stamp out their use in Japan and he’s not going to stop there. “I’m looking to get rid of the fax machine too,” he said. “I still plan to do that.”