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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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 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. 

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’s CEO Charlie Giancarlo has branded disk storage ‘antiquated’ and something that cannot cope with the demands placed on it by an increasingly data-driven, AI-focused business landscape.

In a keynote speech at the Pure Accelerate 2023 conference, Giancarlo said that the rapid acceleration of flash storage capabilities in recent years has rendered disk obsolete and that Pure expects it to be consigned to the scrap heap within the decade. 

Giancarlo’s prediction comes at a critical time for both Pure and the broader storage industry itself. 

Amid the generative AI ‘boom’, organizations experimenting with and developing these powerful systems require agile, flexible, and high-performance storage capabilities - and Giancarlo believes flash is the answer.

The storage capabilities of flash showcased by Pure Storage at the conference highlighted the raw power now available to organizations seeking to innovate in the AI space. 

Pure Storage is no stranger to AI excitement, Giancarlo told attendees. Indeed, the company has been underpinning AI development at a range of companies globally for several years now, and was one of the early bullish industry players targeting this space. 

“We have well over 100 AI customers now,” he said. “Including Meta, which has built the largest AI supercomputer in the world with FlashBlade and FlashArray.”

The flash storage potential for supporting AI development received a significant boost following the deal between Pure Storage and Meta in January last year. 

At the time, Meta said that Pure’s FlashArray and FlashBlade storage options would offer the intense performance capabilities required to analyze a significant volume of both unstructured and structured data. 

Giancarlo’s comments were echoed by Patrick Smith, field CTO for EMEA at Pure Storage. 

Speaking to ITPro, he said that the recent acceleration in the generative AI space represents a prime opportunity for both the organization, but also the broader flash storage industry.

“We’ve actually been underpinning AI workloads, machine learning workloads for a long time now,” he told ITPro. “We built FlashBlade, for example, specifically to do that job.”

Smith recalled that, in years past while working on the customer side in a previous role, discussions around the potential for flash to be effectively harnessed for unstructured data was disregarded by many in the industry. 

“It’s quite remarkable. If I think back to 2015 talking about flash for unstructured data and AI development, vendors were saying ‘no, it’ll never go to flash’,” he said. 

Fast forward to 2023 and the situation has changed entirely and organizations are ditching disks and are flocking to flash storage. 

For Pure, this early adopter stance and mindset has placed it in a unique position to capitalize on the generative AI race and play a key role in supporting organizations across a range of industries 

“In 2018, Pure came out with FlashBlade as a platform deliberately targeting AI and analytics on flash. We’ve built on that, and being so early to the market means that we’ve got a lot of customers delivering AI solutions into their industries.”

“Whether it’s in healthcare, genomics, autonomous driving, we’re very well established in the space.”

Parallelism and agility 

Smith noted that flash storage, specifically the company’s own FlashBlade range, is built explicitly for large-scale datasets at petabyte scale. 

This capacity and performance capability means that organizations innovating in AI can overcome traditional hurdles and bottlenecks with regard to the flow of data. 

“[Flash] is built for massive parallelism, because, as we’ve seen from Nvidia’s share price, everyone is using Nvidia GPUs in this environment,” he said. “These GPUs have thousands of cores, all of which want to get to storage at the same time. So that’s why you need parallelism on the storage platform.” 

“You also need massive throughput because one of the things that everyone is realizing is that it’s very expensive to build these platforms, so you want to keep the GPUs as busy as you can keep them at all times, and that means not waiting for storage at the back end.”

Slow storage means inefficient GPUs, Smith added, and inefficient GPUs represent a major inhibitor for building large language models (LLMs).

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.”

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.”

If you're looking for physical rather than cloud storage, then external storage devices are the ideal solution for your back up needs, whether you are an individual or a small business. And with the digital explosion of movies, films, photos, games, and applications, external storage is more vital than ever before.

The price of external hard disk drives has fallen sharply thanks to a highly competitive storage market which has forced manufacturers to come up with novel ways of "packaging" dumb hard drive into smarter, albeit more expensive, storage appliances.

In its simplest form, an external hard disk drive is nothing more than an enclosure with a bit of electronics glued in and an internal hard disk drive stuck to it. At the other hand of the spectrum, more elaborate models boast automated backup and networking features as well as redundancy functionalities.

There are umpteen storage devices available on the market meaning that everyone's needs can be catered for, so here's our list of 10 things to be considered when purchasing an external hard-disk based storage device.

10 things to consider when

1. Storage size

Unsurprisingly, the amount of storage needed is going to determined what solution you will choose; generally speaking hard disk based devices carry the best combination of price and storage capacity.

1TB external drives can cost as little as £25; you would need more than 200 blank DVDs or more than 1,200 blank CDs just to match the capacity of these drives.

The rule of thumb is to choose a hard disk drive that has twice the capacity you currently need; this should accommodate for future needs, especially when you bear in mind that upgrading an external storage device is not as easy as doing it for a desktop PC.

2. Size of the drive

If you are seldom going to move the external storage device, it makes sense to invest in an external desktop drive which is bulkier than a portable version but will provide with more storage capacity at any given price.

If portability is your primary concern, see whether a large capacity USB flash drive could possibly answer your needs.

3. Drive connectivity

There are currently three major connections on the market – eSATA, USB and Firewire. USB 2.0, as well as its faster cousins USB 3.0 and USB C, are by far the most prevalent versions and offer great transfer speeds as well as quasi-universal compatibility.

eSATA offers improved performance and consumes less resources than USB. Firewire is often relegated to niche and high end platforms like content creation but offers the best performance of the three as well as superb compatibility with the Mac environment.

4. Your budget

External hard disk drives are slightly more expensive than their internal counterparts, and your allocated budget will help you decide whether you should go for a desktop bound solution or for a more portable one.

5. Drive speed

Storage devices using desktop-based components are likely to be the quickest but only when matched with an equally capable interface; for even faster performance, some manufacturers like LaCie, even allow two hard disk drives to be configured in RAID-0 mode, which should significantly boost performance.

6. Software

Software is often the main differentiator between the various external hard disk storage devices solutions on the market. A great software package can make up for average performance and enhance the overall user experience, especially when dealing with something like backup.

Some applications offer the ability to automatically upload files to dedicated websites, rollback systems and file encryption on the fly. Others have build-in synchronisation functionality and enable you to use your favourite applications like Microsoft Excel or Word.

7. Warranty

Some manufacturers like Seagate offer up to five year warranty on their storage solutions which comes handy should one of them fail to boot; bear in mind though that no manufacturer will provide data recovery facilities in case of hard disk failure.

8. Platform

Where you use your storage device could also determine which solution would work out best for you; are you a laptop, remote worker?

Then it might be preferable to get a USB flash drive or a portable hard disk drive solution, many of which do not need an external power source. Furthermore, if you are a Mac aficionados, purchasing a Firewire model makes more sense as it will provide you with more expandability.

9. Sturdiness

Storage devices based on traditional hard disk drives are by default fragile but some are more than others especially the bigger ones which are more likely to suffer damage when dropped down.

If you are likely to experience kicks and knocks as well as the occasional drops, then better grab a flash drive rather than a spinning hard drive.

10. Security

External storage device vendors like Western Digital bundle two hard disk drives together in order to improve redundancy if one of the hard disk drives fail; likewise, Seagate has a welcomed "on the fly encryption" feature which should keep your files safe, away from prying eyes.

Related: lost data on a flash or hard drive, external or internal? Then read our guide to the best data recovery software.

Qnap’s mighty TS-h2490FU enterprise all-Flash array (AFA) impressed us when we reviewed it last year, with a combination of pure NVMe performance and value that will appeal to budget-conscious businesses. Not content to rest on its laurels, Qnap now makes a 12-bay desktop version available for SMBs and large teams that want fast data access and run demanding workloads such as real-time 4K/8K video editing.

The TS-h1290FX will appeal to smaller offices in particular, as this compact tower is designed to be super quiet. This doesn’t come at the cost of features either, as the appliance is available with a choice of three AMD EPYC 7002 Gen 2 CPUs, has room for up to 1TB of DDR4 memory and offers all the expansion potential you could possibly want.

All three models come with pairs of embedded 2.5GbE multi-Gigabit and 25GbE SFP28 ports, and the four free PCI-E 4 expansion slots means there’s plenty of room to add a lot more. You can also balance storage costs with performance requirements, as unlike the TS-h2490FU (which only supports U.2 form-factor NVMe SSDs), the TS-h1290FX also accepts SATA SFF HDDs and SSDs.

Qnap TS-h1290FX review: Build quality and hardware features

We’ve reviewed the base model, which sports an 8-core AMD EPYC 7232P CPU teamed up with a decent 64GB of DDR4 ECC memory. A minor complaint is Qnap supplies the memory as eight 8GB DIMMs, so any upgrades will require some or all of them to be replaced, as there aren’t any spare slots.

Its slick design means the TS-h1290FX will look good on your desktop and we can’t fault build quality either; it’s presented in a sturdy pressed steel shell with a solid metal cover. Removing the lid reveals a tidy interior, with the AMD CPU topped off with a large active heatsink and easy access afforded to all PCI-E and memory slots.

A meaty 750W internal PSU sits at the rear and alongside are two 9cm cooling fans, which we found to be barely audible in our office environment – even under heavy load. A nice touch is the appliance supports plenty of GPGPU cards and Qnap has fitted two extra cables to provide additional power for them.

The two rear USB 3.2 ports can be used to add Qnap’s disk expansion tower or rack units for a cheaper, high-capacity storage vault for services such as backup. If you want better performance, the appliance accepts Qnap’s SATA and SAS expansion cards.

Qnap TS-h1290FX review: OS choices and apps

You can choose from Qnap’s QTS or QuTS operating systems during installation and we recommend the latter if you want the best data protection. Both present almost identical web consoles, but delve deeper into QuTS and you’ll find this 128-bit ZFS-based OS offers valuable features such as near unlimited NAS share and iSCSI LUN snapshots, end-to-end checksums, encryption, inline data deduplication and compression.

There’s more as along with the usual RAID suspects, QuTS supports triple parity RAID to protect against three drive failures, and triple mirroring which stores identical copies of your data on three drives. NAS share data can also be protected from tampering by applying one of two WORM (write once read many) policies.

For IP SANs, you use the standard iSCSI & Fibre Channel app and during LUN creation, you can apply thick or thin provisioning, deduplication and compression. NAS and iSCSI snapshots are easily created from the Storage & Snapshots app and can be run manually or scheduled for as often as every five minutes.

There’s no shortage of apps for the TS-h1290FX: we counted nearly 100 available in its download support page. All backup and file syncing apps are present and include Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3, Qsync Central and HybridMount plus Hyper Data Protector for protecting VMware and Hyper-V virtualised environments.

Qnap TS-h1290FX review: 25GbE performance

For our lab testing, we fitted a full house of 1.6TB WD DC SN640 U.2 NVMe SSDs in the appliance and created a single RAID5 array. Our test host was a Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs rack server equipped with dual 28-core Xeon Scalable Gold 6330 CPUs, 256GB of DDR4 and two dual-port 25GbE network cards, with Windows Server 2022 at the helm.

NAS performance over 25GbE is excellent. With a share mapped to our test server over a single DAC (direct access cable) connection, Iometer reported 23.1Gbits/sec both for sequential reads and writes with random operations returning 23Gbits/sec and 22.8Gbits/sec.

IP SAN speeds over 25GbE are equally impressive, with a 1TB iSCSI target returning Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 22.8Gbits/sec and 23.1Gbits/sec with I/O throughputs using 4KB block sizes measured at 163,200 and 142,200 IOPS. Moving to random operations saw 22.3Gbits/sec and 22.8Gbits/sec and 162,800 and 99,800 IOPS.

Stepping up to a dual 25GbE MPIO connection saw sequential and random speeds increase to 37.7Gbits/sec and 41.1Gbits/sec and 37.4Gbits/sec and 39Gbits/sec respectively. Throughput numbers for sequential and random operations improved to 215,300 and 205,210 and 206,300 and 115,100 IOPS.

With an extra Qnap dual-port SmartNIC 25GbE PCI-E card fitted in the appliance, we created a quad-port MPIO connection and recorded sequential and random read and write speeds of 58.9Gbits/sec and 59.5Gbits/sec and 50.2Gbits/sec and 51.5Gbits/sec. IOPS numbers for sequential and random operations saw reasonable increases to 307,500 and 310,200 and 304,300 and 135,400.

Qnap TS-h1290FX review: Verdict

The TS-h1290FX impresses on many levels; this quite unique desktop AFA combines a dozen PCI-E 4 NVMe SSDs with a powerful AMC EPYC processor and delivers it all at a remarkably good price. Add in the integral 25GbE ports and great performance, and you have a storage system that will undoubtedly satisfy content creators, video editors and businesses that need super-fast access to their data.

Qnap TS-h1290FX specifications

Intel CEO Pate Gelsinger has confirmed that the chip giant is ending its Optane business with a $559 million write-off.

Optane Memory was Intel's attempt to create a tier of memory that offered the performance of a hard disk drive (HDD) with the speed of a solid-state drive (SSD).

Unfortunately, Intel's plans have been hampered by a number of setbacks, including the sell off of its production facilities for 3D XPoint, the technology that underpins Optane.

The news of its end came in a vague note within Intel's Q2 earnings report, which was then later confirmed by Gelsinger on an earnings call, according to Tom's Hardware.

The reason for ending its work on Optane has been blamed on an industry shift to CXL-based architectures, which is similar to the sentiments made by Intel's former partner Micron when it too abandoned the Optane business last year. Micron was a high-volume fabricator of 3D XPoint until it decided to end its work with Intel back in 2018.

Intel was using Optane memory for both storage and memory products. When it first debuted in 2015, both Intel and Micron suggested Optane would deliver 100 times the performance of NAND storage and 10 times the density of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), thanks to the underlying 3D XPoint architecture.

There is still potential for Intel to sell off its remaining Optane business to another company, as it did with both its NAND and SSD units. The chip giant has also sold off other non-core segments of its business, such as its drone division, as part of plans to streamline its operation under Gelsinger's leadership.

"We further sharpened our focus in Q2 selling our drone business and making the difficult decision to wind down our efforts in Optane as we embrace CXL, a standard which Intel Corporation pioneered," Gelsinger said according to The Motley Fool. "We have now exited six businesses since my return."

Data storage may not be the most exciting topic in the world, but it’s a vital part of modern life - and if you often find yourself deleting old data in order to make room on your drive, then Amazon prime Day is the perfect opportunity to pick up some increased capacity. There’s a range of outstanding offers on all kinds of storage media, including microSD cards, flash drives, portable SSDs, internal disks and desktop appliances.

Although we’ve not tested all the models below, the deals have been hand-selected by our team, and represent strong savings - and most products listed have discounts across multiple capacities. All deals run until midnight on 13 July.

Check out our other Amazon Prime Day deals:

• See all Amazon Prime Day tech hardware deals
• See all Amazon Prime Day desktop PC and laptop deals
• See all Amazon Prime Day smartphone and tablet deals
• See all Amazon Prime Day monitor deals

Best Amazon Prime Day removable storage deals

Lexar Professional 2000x SD Card 64GB - Was £83, now £55

The revived Lexar brand demonstrates that full sized SD cards offer speeds that microSD still can’t match - this one can handle up to 300MB/sec read speeds and is UHS-II certified, making it ideal for photographers and videographers who want professional quality with a third off. Its £55 represents great like-for-like prices, but there’s similar reductions on larger capacities if you find yourself in need of more space.

Lexar JumpDrive Fingerprint F35 Flash Drive - Was £67, now £36

This USB 3.0 flash drive offers a generous 128GB capacity with up to 150MB/sec read speeds, making it more than adequate for every day tasks and semi-professional use alike, but comes with the bonus of a fingerprint reader built in, ensuring that your private files are never accessible by prying eyes. At over 45% off, the £36 price tag is very tempting - unless you’re a Mac user, as unfortunately, this is a Windows-only device.

Samsung EVO Select 256GB microSD Card - Was £29, now £19

Finding cheap microSD cards is like shooting fish, but finding ones from name brands that offer genuinely impressive capacities and speeds is somewhat harder. That makes this 256GB UHS-I U3 card, capable of 4K UHD, a rare steal, and one of the best prime day offers we’ve seen this year, down from £29 to £19. And if you need a full sized SD card, don’t worry - they’ve even thrown in an adapter.

Best Amazon Prime Day desktop storage deals

WD Elements 18TB External Hard Drive - Was £454, now £223

A desktop storage device from WD, offering USB 3.0 connection and a phenomenal 18TB storage capacity - more than you’ll probably ever need. The Elements range is simply plug-and-play, with no device management, automatic backup or password protection, but it's Windows or Mac-ready, and the price is over 50% off, so it's well worth a look.

Best Amazon Prime Day internal SSD deals

Samsung 980 PRO 2TB M.2 Internal Drive - Was £348, now £197

WD Black SN850 2TB M.2 Internal Drive - Was £501, now £178

With M.2 firmly established as the leading format for modern PC and laptop storage, two top brands are offering 2TB upgrades for your machine. Both offer almost identical specifications, using the latest backwards-compatible PCIe 4.0 connections, producing a dizzying 7,000MB/sec read speed. The WD has a slightly lower price, and a USP in the form of a built-in heatsink, making it perfect for upgrading a high-performance machine. The Samsung 980 Pro clocks in at £197 (43% off), while the WD Black SN850 is a whopping 65% off at £178. We should warn that the latter’s heatsink requires a few extra millimetres, however, so make sure you’ve enough room under the hood.

Best Amazon Prime Day portable SSD deals

LaCie Rugged Mini 5TB Portable External Drive - Was £160, now £98

LaCie has evolved from a French storage brand to a subsidiary of the mighty Seagate specialising in ruggedised storage. This pocket sized (2.5in) drive offers an impressive 5TB of storage via a USB-C connection - a USB-A to C cable can be substituted, but it will impact transfer speeds. More importantly, it’s rubberised, and is therefore shock, drop and pressure resistant, despite being a traditional HDD. There’s even a two-year data rescue service if the worst happens. All in all, a good deal at its £160 RRP, but a great one at a discounted Prime Day price of less than £100.

Samsung has launched its 512 GB Compute Express Link (CXL) DRAM, an industry-first.

The new CXL DRAM builds on an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) CXL controller that supports 512GB of DDR5 DRAM, a four-fold increase in memory capacity over the firm’s previous CXL offering.

Samsung’s latest CXL memory module also allows servers to support tens of terabytes of data at‌ ‌one-fifth‌ ‌the‌ ‌system‌ ‌latency. The EDSFF (E3.S) form factor makes the module extremely suitable for high-capacity enterprise servers and data centers.

Samsung’s 512GB CXL DRAM is also the first to support the PCIe 5.0 communication bus standard.

The company will start sampling its CXL DRAM in the third quarter of the current fiscal year, with plans to commercialize the memory module as next-generation server platforms come online.

Additionally, Samsung plans to launch an updated version of its open-source Scalable Memory Development Kit (SMDK) in the coming weeks. ‌The‌ ‌toolkit‌ ‌makes‌ ‌it‌ ‌easy to integrate the CXL memory expander into AI, big data, and cloud applications without modifying the underlying‌ ‌systems.

"CXL DRAM will become a critical turning point for future computing structures by substantially advancing artificial intelligence (AI) and big data services, as we aggressively expand its usage in next-generation memory architectures including software-defined memory (SDM)," said Cheolmin Park, VP of memory global sales & marketing at Samsung Electronics, and director of the CXL consortium.

"Samsung will continue to collaborate across the industry to develop and standardize CXL memory solutions while fostering an increasingly solid ecosystem," added Park.

The price of NAND flash storage devices may increase by 5-10% following a contamination at two of Western Digital’s manufacturing units in Japan.

The company revealed yesterday that certain materials at two of its manufacturing units, operated by its joint-venture partner Kioxia, were contaminated. It said this had affected production operations at both its Yokkaichi and Kitakami flash fabrication facilities, although the precise nature of the contimation has not been detailed.

Western Digital estimated this could lead to a shortage of at least 6.5 exabytes in flash storage availability, where one exabyte is equal to one billion gigabytes. It said it’s working closely with Kioxia to implement necessary measures to restore the facilities to normal operational status as quickly as possible.

Analysts at TrendForce have predicted that the consequences of this incident could push the NAND flash price in Q2 to spike by 5-10%.

Before this incident, analysts were predicting that the market would see a slight oversupply, with the average price from Q1 to Q2 decreasing. However, TrendForce described the effect of the contamination as significant, especially as Samsung’s experience during the previous lockdown of Xi’an, China has slowed down the price slump of flash storage. Samsung had warned that the lockdown could affect their chip manufacturing bases in the area.

The contaminated products in the incident are concentrated in 3D NAND. The damaged parts account for 13% of the group's output in Q1 22 and around 3% of the total output for the year, estimate the analysts.

“It is worth noting that the damages announced by WDC [Western Digital] likely do not account for total losses stemming for this event and the number of damaged Kioxia parts has not been aggregated, so the total number of affected bits may increase further,” wrote the analysts.

Trendforce added that any orders negotiated on a whole quarter basis should probably be unaffected in the near-term, but there may be an immediate price increase in wafer quotations this February and March.

Intel has expanded its $100,000 bug bounty program in an effort to entice “elite hackers” to report vulnerabilities in the company's firmware, hypervisors, graphics processing units (GPUs), and chipsets.

Of the 113 external vulnerabilities detected in 2021, 97 were reported to Intel through its public bug bounty program.

Dubbed Project Circuit Breaker, the expansion to Intel's existing program will see the creation of an integrated community that will offer targeted training, hacking challenges, and opportunities to explore new and pre-release products, in addition to enhanced collaborations with hardware and software engineering teams at Intel.

"Project Circuit Breaker broadens and deepens Intel's existing open Bug Bounty program by hosting targeted time-boxed events on specific new platforms and technologies, providing training and creating opportunities for more hands-on collaboration with Intel engineers," explained Intel.

"Project Circuit Breaker's first event, Camping with Tigers, is already underway with a group of 20 researchers who received systems with Intel Core i7 processors (formerly Tiger Lake)."

In the exclusive Camping with Tigers event, researchers will look for security vulnerabilities in Intel’s Tiger Lake platform. The program began in December 2021 and will be in effect until May 2022. At three milestones, eligible vulnerabilities will earn bounty multipliers.

Potential findings may include, among others, micro-architectural and firmware vulnerabilities. This covers flaws related to BIOS, IP firmware components, embedded controller, sensor, trusted platform module, and flash storage.

“We invest in and host bug bounty programs because they attract new perspectives on how to challenge emerging security threats – and Project Circuit Breaker is the next step in collaborating with researchers to strengthen the industry’s security assurance practices, especially when it comes to hardware, said Katie Noble, director of Intel’s product security incident response team (PSIRT) and bug bounty.

“We look forward to seeing how the program will evolve and to introducing new voices to the meaningful work that we do,” added Noble.

Looks aren’t the most important thing when you’re shopping for storage, but they certainly don’t hurt. The One Touch SSD is, in our view, one of the most stylish drives we’ve seen, with a smart white trim, slate-grey finish and fabric side panels that are warm and pleasing to the touch.

It’s also tiny, measuring just 50 x 70mm, and it weighs a mere 74g. You could happily carry it around in a shirt pocket. And when it comes to performance the One Touch SSD punches above its weight, using a USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection to achieve very creditable sequential read and write speeds of 910MB/sec and 958MB/sec, respectively. It’s not quite the fastest contender on the market, but when it comes to transferring large files you’ll realistically get the same experience from this drive as from a rival using the same interface.

For random access performance, it’s a slightly different story. While the multithreaded AS SSD tests didn’t expose any particular weaknesses, the One Touch stumbled in the PCMark 10 storage benchmarks, ending up with a data drive score of 598 – the lowest of any SSD we’ve seen recently. We suspect that’s down to thermal throttling, since the small size of the drive affords little in the way of heat dissipation during intensive operations.

The One Touch SSD doesn’t support hardware encryption, but Seagate does provide its own backup software, along with a free one-year subscription to Mylio Create (a service that backs up and organises your photos) and a four-month trial of the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan. Perhaps more valuable is Seagate’s Rescue Data service: if your drive fails within its two-year warranty period, the company’s technicians will do their best to recover your data, something no other manufacturer will attempt.

The price is very fair too: the 1TB One Touch SSD can be had online for £110, equivalent to 12p per gigabyte. At that price you might wonder about moving up to the roomy 2TB model, but sadly that comes in at a much less attractive £305.

Some will be turned off by the One Touch SSD’s uneven performance: if you’re looking for a USB 3.2 Gen 2 drive that can maintain top speeds when the going gets tough, consider the SanDisk Extreme or the WD My Passport SSD. In our view, though, the One Touch is just more likeable than either of those drives, and it also happens to be terrific value.

Seagate One Touch SSD specifications

SMBs that want an affordable all-Flash array (AFA) will find Qnap’s TS-h3088XU-RP could be just what they’re looking for. While SAS and NVMe SSD AFAs deliver in the performance stakes, they’re painfully expensive to populate but this rack appliance keeps your outlay at a more manageable level by supporting lower-cost SATA SSDs.

What’s more, the TS-h3088XU-RP has room for up to 30 SSDs, making it one of the highest capacity 2U AFAs on the market. It has plenty of power on tap, too; the model on review sports a 3.3GHz six-core Xeon W-1250 CPU, partnered by 32GB of DDR4 memory.

Those that want even more performance can opt for a higher-spec version driven by a 3.4GHz eight-core Xeon W-1270. This also doubles base memory to 64GB, and both models support up to 128GB using four standard 32GB DIMMs.

Qnap TS-h3088XU-RP review: Hardware features

The appliance achieves this impressive storage density by presenting 24 standard SSF bays at the front and employing two triple-drive cages at the rear. They’re all hot-swappable, support SATA HDDs as well as SSDs and are all connected to the same centrally mounted drive backplane.

The TS-h3088XU-RP is ready for some serious network action as along with four embedded 2.5GbE multi-Gig ports, the price includes a Qnap dual-port 25GbE SFP28 PCI-E card. Further expansion is possible via two free PCI-E slots - but be careful what you put in them as using the second X4 slot will drop the primary slot with the 25GbE card from x8 down to x4 speeds.

Qnap has also aimed this appliance at media editors; the Xeon W CPUs have an integrated Intel UHD Graphics P630 GPU, which supports real-time video transcoding and feeds 30Hz 4K video through to the rear HDMI port, although this is the 1.4b variety and not the higher-bandwidth 2.0 version.

Power redundancy is handled by a pair of 550W hot-plug PSUs with three internal cold-swap fans managing all cooling. Air shrouds on each one push air through the rear SFF cages and over the CPU and we measured acceptable sound levels of 63dB from one metre in front.

Qnap TS-h3088XU-RP review: QTS vs QuTS hero

The TS-h3088XU-RP supports Qnap’s QTS and QuTS hero OSes, and you can choose which one to install from the QFinder deployment app. Most businesses will undoubtedly go for the latter as it offers superior enterprise-class data protection features including ZFS copy-on-write for fast, near unlimited snapshots plus inline data deduplication and compression.

Self-healing of data corruption is handled by end-to-end checksums while replication to remote appliances gets a speed boost as it only sends changed blocks. Along with the usual RAID suspects, you can choose from triple parity RAID to protect against three drive failures or triple mirroring which stores identical copies of data on three drives.

NAS share data can be protected with one of two WORM (write once read many) policies. 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.

Qnap TS-h3088XU-RP review: QuTS hero apps

Whichever OS you choose, you’ll find both easy to use as they offer almost identical web browser interfaces. There’s little between them for apps either, and we counted no less than 111 available for QuTS hero. The standard iSCSI & Fibre Channel app is used to create IP SANs and you can apply thick or thin provisioning, deduplication and compression.

Manual and scheduled snapshots for NAS volumes and iSCSI LUNs are run from the Storage & Snapshots app and can be scheduled as often as every 5 minutes. The SnapSync feature supports NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs and replicates data to remote QuTS appliances using block-level replication run to a schedule or in real time.

QuTS hero also provides plenty of backup apps such as Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3 and Hyper Data Protector for protecting VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments. Virtualization is on the menu too, with the Container Station, Ubuntu Linux Station and Virtualization Station apps all present.

The HybridDesk Station app brings the HDMI port into play. With an HD TV, keyboard and mouse connected, we used its desktop interface to access the various plug-ins which included direct access to Chrome, Firefox, Skype and Facebook while the HybridDesk Station allows the appliance to be managed locally.

Qnap TS-h3088XU-RP review: 25GbE performance

For performance testing, we installed two 1.92TB Micron 5200 SATA SSDs in the rear carriers to use as a mirrored QuTS system pool and loaded twelve 500GB Western Digital Red SA500 SSDs in the front bays and created a RAID6 array for general data storage.

Starting with IP SANs, we created a 1TB iSCSI target and mapped it over a dual 25GbE MPIO connection to a Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable server running Windows Server 2019. Performance is impressive with Iometer recording raw sequential read and write rates of 35.5Gbits/sec and 32.6Gbits/sec with random operations returning 34.6Gbits/sec and 30.1Gbits/sec.

I/O throughput is up there too, as 4KB Iometer block sizes delivered sequential read and write rates of 246,500 and 226,005 IOPS. Swapping to random operations saw equally good read and write throughputs of 242,700 and 147,000 IOPS.

NAS performance is nothing to sniff at either, with a share mapped to the server over a single 25GbE connection delivering sequential read and write rates of 23.1Gbits/sec and 22.6Gbits/sec and random rates of 23.1Gbits/sec and 20.3Gbits/sec. The share also returned sequential and random read and write throughputs of 128,400 and 121,900 IOPS and 128,010 and 79,000 IOPS.

Qnap TS-h3088XU-RP review: Verdict

With prices for a diskless unit starting at less than £4,200, the TS-h3088XU-RP offers a very affordable alternative to costly SAS/NVMe AFAs and it won’t be beaten for sheer SSD density. Qnap’s QuTS hero OS offers great enterprise-class data protection features and the inclusion of a 25GbE adapter card adds extra value while NAS and IP SAN performance over 25GbE is very good.

Qnap TS-h3088XU-RP specifications

US manufacturer Western Digital is reportedly in advanced talks for a $20 billion stock merger with Japanese chipmaker Kioxia.

If initial reports are correct, it could create a new chip manufacturer to rival the likes of Samsung, according to details revealed by Reuters, which cited a person familiar with the matter.

It's thought that the companies could reach an agreement by the middle of September, with Western Digital CEO, David Geockeler, taking charge of the combined entity.

Kioxia, a Tokyo-based computer memory manufacturer, came to exist in its current form after Toshiba spun off its majority stake in the firm in June 2020. The founders of the company were credited with inventing flash memory in the 1980s, while it was still a part of Toshiba, and by 2018 it was estimated to have 19% of the global revenue share for non-volatile storage technology (NAND) flash solid-state drives.

By combining with Western Digital designs, which manufactures and sells storage hardware, the two companies could become a dominant force in the market for memory chips. Samsung currently has over a third of the NAND market, according to estimates by research firm TrendForce, whereas Kioxia and Western Digital have 19% and 15%, respectively.

The potential effect of the merger on the market is likely to draw attention from antitrust regulators in the US, China, and a number of other territories. Trade conflicts between the US and China have squashed deals before, such as Qualcomm's proposed $44 billion acquisition of NXP Semiconductors, which failed to secure Chinese approval in 2018.

Similar issues are currently undermining Nvidia's $40 billion takeover of UK chip giant Arm, with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority concerned it will hamper other chip manufacturers and allow Nvidia to restrict access to Arm products.

"We're concerned that Nvidia controlling Arm could create real problems for Nvidia's rivals by limiting their access to key technologies, and ultimately stifling innovation across a number of important and growing markets," said CMA chief executive, Andrea Coscelli.

Pure NVMe all-flash arrays (AFAs) are the only way to go for the best storage performance but most blue-chip solutions come with very high price tags. As it moves further into enterprise territory, Qnap aims to rock the boat with an NVMe SSD appliance that delivers a mighty hardware package at a very tempting price.

Stepping up as Qnap’s flagship enterprise-class AFA, the provocatively named TS-h2490FU not only supports up to 24 hot-plug U.2 NVMe SSDs but has AMD EPYC Gen2 power at its heart. On review, we have the high-end TS-h2490FU-7302P-128G which sports a 16-core 3.0GHz EPYC 7302P CPU teamed up with 128GB of DDR4 memory.

The TS-h2490FU is yet another addition to Qnap’s burgeoning QuTS hero stable and runs its new 128-bit ZFS-based OS. Data integrity is a key focus, and the OS supports near unlimited NAS and IP SAN snapshots, data deduplication, compression, fast replication to remote appliances and transparent self-healing of data corruption using end-to-end checksums.

This is impressive stuff for an NVMe AFA with a starting price that’s a shade over eight grand, but Qnap also throws in a couple of its dual-port SmartNIC 25GbE PCI-E adapters for good measure. Based on Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx controllers, these 25/10GbE PCI-E Gen 3 cards have dual SFP28 connectors and support DAC (direct attach cable) or fibre connections and 10GbE SFP+ transceivers.

Qnap TS-h2490FU QuTS hero edition review: Hardware features

This 2U appliance is of sturdy construction and along with a steel rack chassis, uses solid metal drive carriers. For testing, we installed 24 Western Digital UltraStar DC SN640 U.2 NVMe SSDs – a good choice for the TS-h2490FU as these mixed use SSDs are designed for demanding workloads and offered in a range of capacities to suit different budgets.

The AMD EPYC 7302P CPU is designed for 1P platforms and brings a lot of features into play that you won’t find in many competing AFAs. The motherboard has sixteen standard DIMM slots and the base 128GB of memory can be upgraded to a massive 4TB using 256GB modules.

Memory speed is 3,200MHz and with 128 PCI-E lanes up for grabs, the EPYC CPU can dish out a dedicated 32Gbits/sec channel to each SSD. And, of course, the appliance’s five PCI-E slots are the faster Gen 4.0 variety.

Upgrades won’t take long as the motherboard and its cooling fan array are mounted on a single tray which is removed from the rear by releasing two thumbscrews and pulling its locking lever down. Power is handled by dual 1,100W hot-plug PSUs which are also easily accessed at the rear.

Qnap TS-h2490FU QuTS hero edition review: NAS and IP SAN services

During installation, the quick start wizard offers you the option of installing Qnap’s QTS or QuTS hero and for this review we’ll focus on the latter. Its web interface is virtually identical to QTS so is just as easy to navigate.

From the Storage & Snapshots app, we created a single RAID50 array using all 24 NVMe SSDs but QuTS hero also offers a couple of extra RAID options you won’t find in QTS. Triple mirroring allows you to have identical copies on three drives while RAID-TP (triple parity) expands on RAID6 and protects against three drive failures.

There are plenty of options to choose from during NAS share creation: you can enable thick or thin provisioning, encryption, compression, deduplication and WORM (write one read many). For WORM, you set a retention period in days, months or years and the Enterprise policy allows a protected folder to be deleted but stops anything in it from being individually modified or removed. The Compliance policy is tougher, as the only way to delete the folder is to remove the parent storage pool.

IP SANs are configured from the separate iSCSI & Fibre Channel app and when creating a LUN, you can apply thick or thin provisioning, deduplication and compression. For testing, we created thick-provisioned LUNs with compression enabled and left their synchronous I/O settings on default.

App availability for QuTS hero is extensive so you’ll find all of Qnap’s backup apps ready and waiting. These include HBS 3, Qsync Central and HybridMount plus Hyper Data Protector (HDP) which brings data protection to VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments.

Qnap TS-h2490FU QuTS hero edition review: IP SAN performance

To test IP SAN performance over 25GbE, we used a Broadberry Data Systems CyberServe AM2-B8252 rack server. This Tyan-based server was equipped with dual 32-core 2.4GHz AMD EPYC 7532 CPUs plus 1TB of DDR4 and running Windows Server 2019 to which we fitted two dual-port Qnap QXG-25G2SF-CX4 cards and connected them to the appliance using SFP28 DACs.

Performance for a single 25GbE connection is very impressive with Iometer reporting sequential read and write speeds for 512KB block sizes of 23.1Gbits/sec and 22Gbits/sec. I/O throughput is nothing to sniff at either with Iometer 4KB blocks returning random read and write rates of 157,100 IOPS and 130,100 IOPS.

Stepping up to a quad 25GbE MPIO connection to the iSCSI target saw Iometer sequential read and write speeds ramp up to 77Gbits/sec and 74.9Gbits/sec. I/O throughput for random read and write operations also increased nicely to 334,352 IOPS and 189,900 IOPS.

Businesses that plan on using the appliance’s NAS services won’t be disappointed either. With a share mapped to our test server over a single 25GbE connection, Iometer returned fast sequential read and write speeds for 512KB block sizes of 23.1Gbits/sec and 15.2Gbits/sec.

Qnap TS-h2490FU QuTS hero edition review: Verdict

Businesses that thought they couldn’t afford NVMe all-Flash storage arrays can think again as the TS-h2490FU delivers a powerful solution at a remarkably low price that even includes quad 25GbE ports. The AMD EPYC Gen 2 CPU and heap of DDR4 memory deliver great IP SAN performance while Qnap’s QuTS hero OS presents an impressive range of NAS and IP SAN storage services including enterprise-class data protection features.

Qnap TS-h2490FU specifications

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Qsan made its first play for the SMB all-Flash array (AFA) market a couple of years ago with its speedy XCubeFAS XF2026D, but its most recent successor, the XF3126D, shows it still means business. Qsan claims the XF3126D is the world’s first entry-level native NVMe storage array and along with big performance claims, it aims to beat the competition soundly on value.

This 3U rack mounter sports no less than 26 SFF hot-swap bays, all ready to receive U.2 form factor NVMe SSDs. The chassis has dual 800W PSUs for hardware redundancy, and the price includes two hot-plug controllers running in active/active mode for fully transparent failover.

The array is driven by Qsan’s slick XEVO operating system, which it created specifically for its AFA arrays, and SMBs are a particular target; it’s designed to be affordable, user-friendly and easy to deploy.

Qsan XCubeFAS XF3126D review: Controller features

Each controller comes with 16GB of DDR4 ECC cache memory and their six DIMM slots allow this to be field-upgraded to a generous 384GB. Cache protection for both controllers is handled by a single removable unit in the front panel, which incorporates a cache-to-flash module and integral battery backup unit.

The controllers are well endowed in the processing department too, as they’re blessed with 1.9GHz 6-core Xeon Scalable Bronze 3204 modules. Each controller has its own personal cooling arrangements with a row of four fans at the rear of the sled - although these are the cold swap variety, so the controller will need removing to replace failed ones.

Gigabit management ports are present on each controller and they include dual embedded 10GbE SFP+ iSCSI data ports to get you started. The two expansion bays per controller present plenty of extra data port options, and Qsan offers modules with dual and quad 10GbE iSCSI or 8/16Gbps Fibre Channel (FC), dual 32Gbps FC or dual 25GbE iSCSI.

For our review, Qsan provided a quad-port 16Gbps FC expansion module in each controller. We were also supplied with a full house of 960GB Micron 7300 U.2 NVMe SSDs, but note the price we’ve shown doesn’t include these.

Qsan XCubeFAS XF3126D review: Deployment

Qsan’s QFinder app made light work of deployment, discovering the array on the lab network and providing direct access to the XEVO web interface. It is, indeed, very easy to use and its smart dashboard presents a comprehensive overview of SSDs, pools, volumes and hosts, a pie chart showing storage and snapshot usage plus three real-time graphs for overall latency, IOPS and throughput.

Storage provisioning is a swift affair. From the console’s Storage tab, we created a pair of 10 SSD RAID6 thick-provisioned arrays and allowed the wizard to add one volume in each one. RAID options are massive. The XF3126D supports every array type you can imagine, including enhanced EE types which add more spare drives to a pool for faster rebuild times.

For performance testing, we used two Xeon Scalable servers running Windows Server 2019 and fitted with ATTO Celerity quad-port 16Gbps FC HBAs. Host mapping is a simple process, and all our FC connections were automatically discovered so we could quickly assign dedicated volumes to both test servers over quad FC MPIO links.

A feature worth mentioning is the controllers operate in synchronous mode and not the more-common ALUA (asymmetric logical unit access). This matters, as hosts connected across both controllers not only have link redundancy but all are active and optimized.

Qsan XCubeFAS XF3126D review: Storage features

Snapshot management is simplified with Qsan’s protection groups, which allow multiple volumes to have one snapshot schedule applied to all group members. You can fire off snapshots on-demand or apply schedules to run them on specific days and as often as every 15 minutes.

The XEVO OS also provides options for local replication to another storage pool and remote replication to an external array. Replication tasks can have one of eight traffic shaping groups applied to enforce bandwidth restrictions during peak and off-peak periods.

Data recovery is uncomplicated too; selecting the gear wheel next to a volume loads the Snapshot Center which lists all available snapshots. Choose one and you can roll the volume back or expose the snapshot as a new LUN for manual data recovery.

You can also keep a close eye on SSD usage and remaining life from the QSLife feature. Click on the heart symbol in the top right corner and it’ll show you the remaining life of each SSD along with a usage graph and you can assign three alert levels for early warnings of SSDs reaching the end of their life.

Qsan XCubeFAS XF3126D review: Performance

Performance is impressive with Iometer reporting cumulative sequential read and write rates for both servers of 98Gbits/sec and 94.9Gbits/sec. Swapping over to random operations returned read and write rates of 98Gbits/sec and 31.3Gbits/sec.

I/O throughput for random operations is equally good, and changing to Iometer 4KB block sizes delivered cumulative read and write rates of 357,000 and 105,500 IOPS with latency of between 0.84ms and 4.6ms. The web console provided plenty of information on performance during our tests - although the one number it can’t report on is controller CPU utilization, as the console doesn’t have an option to display this.

Our final test was to see how the array handled a controller failure, so we simply pulled the top one out whilst Iometer was running. Failover was completely transparent: the second controller was promoted to master status, Iometer continued unabated (albeit at half speed), and web console access was automatically swapped over to the active controller’s management port.

Qsan XCubeFAS XF3126D review: Verdict

With room for 26 U.2 NVMe SSDs and Xeon Scalable-powered dual controllers, the XCubeFAS XF3126D offers a lot for its sub-$20k MSRP. Along with completely transparent failover, we found FC performance to be good across the board, and the array’s smart XEVO OS makes light work of configuration and storage provisioning.

Qsan XCubeFAS XF3126D specifications

As many as 90% of previously-owned storage media devices such as USB sticks and hard drives contain some form of private and business data from its former owners, a new study by Kaspersky has found.

This data ould include anything from banking documents and company emails to private messages and pornographic content, according to the cyber security firm.

Kaspersky’s Global Research & Analysis Team (GReAT) made the discovery while analysing the contents of 185 second-hand storage devices, out of which only 11% were found to be entirely clean. The team discovered that as many as one in five devices contained data that could be found and extracted immediately, while almost three-quarters (74%) held data that could still be recovered through file carving.

According to GReAT Europe head Marco Preuß, “the potential damage if personal data falls into the wrong hands is enormous”.

“Identity theft, access to accounts, blackmail or even social ruin of the original owners would be possible. In addition, data could be used to carry out attacks on the previous owner of the device as well as close family, friends or peers,” he said.

The ownership of second-hand devices is becoming a more prevalent practice due to sustainability efforts. Kaspersky found that out of 2,000 UK consumers, 649 had bought a used computer, 802 a mobile device, and 321 had purchased used storage media.

However, the well-intentioned practice has potential to turn into a security nightmare. Among the 649 second-hand computers, 13% contained contact details for the previous owner, one in ten held business-related data, and another 10% discovered official documentation such as passports and driving licenses. Similar percentages were found across mobile devices, USB sticks, and hard drives.

The researchers also found documents containing passwords and login details of former owners – which could easily be used to hack into an organisation.

GReAT DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) head Christian Funk warned that “the criticality of sensitive, personal data seldom loses its effectiveness over time, even if the collection itself is far in the past”.

“Only a complete overwriting of the actual information on a data carrier can remedy this,” he added.

Intel has reached a deal to sell its NAND memory and storage business to SK Hynix for $9 billion (£6.9 billion).

The deal will see the South Korean semiconductor giant take over Intel's NAND SSD business, NAND component and wafer business, and the chipmaker's Dalian NAND memory manufacturing facility in China. Intel's Optane memory business is not part of the deal, however, and will remain with the US chipmaker.

SK Hynix says the deal, which will turn it into the world's second-largest NAND memory producer after Samsung, will enhance the competitiveness of its storage solutions, including enterprise SSDs, in the rapidly growing NAND flash space.

“I am pleased to see SK Hynix and Intel's NAND division, which have led the NAND flash technology innovation, work to build the new future together,” said Seok-Hee Lee, CEO of SK Hynix.

“By taking each other's strengths and technologies, SK Hynix will proactively respond to various needs from customers and optimise our business structure, expanding our innovative portfolio in the NAND flash market segment, which will be comparable with what we achieved in DRAM.”

Intel, on the other hand, says it plans to invest the deal's proceeds into various artificial intelligence, 5G, and intelligent autonomous edge capabilities.

Bob Swan, Intel CEO said: “I am proud of the NAND memory business we have built and believe this combination with SK Hynix will grow the memory ecosystem for the benefit of customers, partners and employees.

"For Intel, this transaction will allow us to further prioritize our investments in differentiated technology where we can play a bigger role in the success of our customers and deliver attractive returns to our stockholders.”

The deal comes just a year after Intel sold the majority of its modem business to Apple for $1 billion, which it said at the time would allow it to “[put] our full effort into 5G".

Intel and SK Hynix say regulatory approval is expected by late 2021, with a final closing of all assets, including Intel’s NAND-related intellectual property, set to take place in March 2025.

In the meantime, Intel will continue to produce wafers at its Dalian facility and will retain its IP.

Fujitsu has always had a sharp focus on delivering affordable all-Flash arrays to enterprises and SMEs, but its latest family of Eternus AF appliances goes one step beyond. These aim to beat the competition soundly on value and claim an impressive ‘six nines’ of redundancy, along with a wealth of data protection features.

On review is the entry-level Eternus AF250 S3, a 2U rack appliance which supports SAS3 SSDs and comes with dual controllers functioning in active/active mode for transparent failover. It also sees a substantial hardware upgrade over the older AF250 S2, sporting a faster 8-core 2.2GHz Intel Xeon D CPU, while DDR4 cache memory receives a doubling in maximum capacity to 128GB per controller.

Extra features keep on coming; the new controllers can handle up to 8 ports of 32Gbps FC or 16 ports of 16Gbps FC or 10GbE iSCSI. Storage expansion is also vastly superior as the AF250 S3 supports up to 10 external drive enclosures for a total of 264 drives – the AF250 S2 only supports a single disk enclosure and a maximum of 48 drives.

The improved hardware gives a substantial performance boost, with Fujitsu claiming an increase over the AF250 S2 of nearly 40% to 600,000 IOPS for random read operations. Cache protection remains the same with the controllers incorporating Ni-MH batteries plus NVRAM to protect the cache contents in the event of a power failure.

Fujitsu Storage Eternus AF250 S3 review: Installation

For initial deployment, we pointed a browser at the primary controller’s remote access network port and followed the quick start wizard to configure basic details. These include the system hostname, administration security and the IP address of the maintenance port, which is used for general web management access and for the SF Express software.

It’s important to set up SNMP correctly on the array as SF Express uses this for all management. You need to create a new SNMP user on the array assigned with the ‘Software’ role and over on the SF Express host, add dedicated admin groups with management and monitoring privileges.

The appliance’s web console hasn’t changed from previous versions and you start by creating RAID Groups (RGs). The price we’ve shown includes two 960GB SAS SSDs but for testing, we fitted eleven 960GB SAS SSDs, which we used to create a single RAID10 RG with a global hot-spare.

For thin provisioned volumes (TPVs), you create a dedicated storage pool and as volume space gets used, the array dynamically assigns new blocks to it from the pool. Attention and warning capacity thresholds are applied to a pool and when they are reached, the appliance will send out an alert.

Inline deduplication and compression are included and can be applied only to TPVs. Another valuable feature is integral data encryption; you can request that this is carried by the controller’s firmware or use SEDs (self-encrypting drives).

Fujitsu Storage Eternus AF250 S3 review: Data protection

All volume cloning, snapshots and replication are configured using the SF Express software, which can manage multiple arrays from a central host. We installed it on a Windows Server 2019 system and logged into it with the local user we had previously created.

We’ve included the Storage Cruiser upgrade too, which enables data tiering, automated QoS (Quality of Service) and enhanced performance monitoring. This adds a lot of versatility - you could for example, enable QoS on an all-Flash tier for high-demand apps and use TPVs with deduplication and compression where the priority is on storage savings.

Next up is OPC (one point copy), which creates a one-off clone of a source volume to a local destination while QuickOPC clones a volume and updates it incrementally. Meanwhile, EC (equivalent copy) mirrors one volume to another in real-time on the same array while the REC (remote EC) performs this to a remote array for disaster recovery.

Create dedicated SDVs (snap data volumes) and you can use SnapOPC+ (one point copy plus) to take copy-on-write snapshots of selected source volumes. Capacity management is eased by the ability to create a dedicated SDV pool- so if an SDV runs out of space, it can take some from this until you increase the SDV’s size.

Fujitsu Storage Eternus AF250 S3 review: Performance

Our review system was supplied with two 16Gbps FC ports in each controller and for performance testing, we used a Dell PowerEdge T640 server running Windows Server 2019 and equipped with a quad-port ATTO Celerity FC-164P FC adapter.

Access controls are tight, and Fujitsu’s Affinity Groups manage connections between hosts, ports and LUNs. Our server’s four FC connections were automatically discovered by the appliance, so we put them all in one host group and linked them together with LUN and port groups.

You can modify a volume’s ALUA (asymmetric logical unit access) settings so we changed it to active/active for our mapped volume. This allowed us to achieve a high performance quad-port MPIO link to the server with all four FC paths active and optimised.

For sequential read and write operations, we recorded impressive Iometer rates of 39.1Gbits/sec and 32.4Gbits/sec which remained rock steady when we swapped to random operations. Dropping to Iometer 4KB block sizes returned equally good sequential read and write rates of 579,000 and 208,700 IOPS while our random tests saw 580,000 and 220,000 IOPS.

Fujitsu Storage Eternus AF250 S3 review: Verdict

Our only issue with Fujitsu’s Eternus AF arrays is their complicated deployment processes. There are a lot of features to manage and all too often, we found ourselves hunting through the web console, SF Express interface and copious software documentation to remind ourselves where they were lurking.

Even so, there’s no doubt the improved hardware specification has had a big impact on performance as the Eternus AF250 S3 is considerably faster than its predecessor. Combining this with the high expansion potential and low starting price makes this all-Flash array a good choice for demanding enterprises and SMEs.

Fujitsu Storage Eternus AF250 S3 specifications

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SMBs looking for the best storage performance will find all-Flash arrays (AFAs) a great choice, although most mid-range and enterprise level solutions are way beyond their budgets. Synology's FlashStation appliances are designed to offer SMBs a more affordable and versatile NAS/IP SAN solution, with the FS6400 delivering an impressive hardware package for less than 10K.

The FS6400 replaces the FS3017 which was launched early in 2017 and it's endowed with a vastly superior specification. You have a pair of 2.1GHz Intel Xeon Scalable Silver 4110 CPUs in the driving seat and partnered by 32GB of DDR4 ECC memory expandable to 512GB.

The FlashStations are all about choice as they support cheap, high-capacity SATA SSDs, expensive, high-performance SAS3 SSDs and spinning disks as well. With 24 SFF hot-swap bays available, the FS6400 allows SMEs to use a mix of technologies so they can balance performance with their budget and save more cash by using their own choice of storage devices.

Two Synology SAS12G HBAs handle all drive bays and the FS6400 supports two 12-bay RX1217sas or 24-bay RX2417sas external disk shelves - although with only one available expansion port, you can't daisy-chain them over redundant links. Two spare PCIe slots are also available, allowing the dual embedded 10GBase-T ports to be augmented with 10GbE, 25GbE and 40GbE adapters.

Synology FlashStation FS6400 review: RAID F1

Synology's discovery web portal found the appliance on the lab network and downloaded the latest DSM 6.2 OS - winner of this year's 'best software' award from our sister publication PC Pro. We fitted four enterprise-class 1.92TB Micron 5200 Max SATA SSDs and DSM automatically created a RAID F1 array from them.

RAID F1 was developed by Synology to stop SSDs all wearing at equal rates, thereby avoiding the potential for multiple, simultaneous SSD failures. When an F1 array is created, the DSM software automatically nominates one SSD for sacrifice.

It writes more parity blocks to this SSD ensuring it'll reach the end of its lifespan before the other array members. You can keep a close eye on its estimated lifespan from the DSM Storage and Snapshots app and when it is replaced, the array takes the next oldest for this role during the rebuild.

Synology FlashStation FS6400 review: SATA SSD performance

We started our performance tests with iSCSI and called up the lab's Dell PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower server running Windows Server 2019. Once logged in to a 500GB block-based target over a dedicated 10GbE connection, Iometer reported sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec.

With a dual 10GbE MPIO connection in action, we saw speeds ramp up nicely to 18.5Gbits/sec and 12.6Gbits/sec. Dropping the Iometer block size to 4KB returned good throughput with the MPIO link delivering sequential read and write rates of 185,200 IOPS and 167,000 IOPS, dropping slightly to 181,300 IOPS and 155,500 IOPS for random operations.

NAS performance is up there too, as a mapped share returned Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec. NAS I/O throughput is another winner; here, the share delivered 162,000 IOPS and 129,500 IOPS for sequential reads and writes while random reads and writes settled at 158,000 IOPS and 92,000 IOPS.

We ramped up the pressure by mapping another share on the same Micron-based array to a second Xeon Scalable Windows server over a dedicated 10GbE link. With Iometer running on both servers, we recorded cumulative sequential read and write speeds of 18.5Gbits/sec and 17.2Gbits/sec plus random read and write throughputs of 296,500 IOPS and 171,500 IOPS.

Synology FlashStation FS6400 review: Data protection features

Value gets a boost too, and Synology's DSM 6.2 software offers a superb range of storage and data protection features all included in the price. Whereas many competing AFAs require license upgrades for feature enhancements and to increase the number of snapshots supported, DSM allows you to create up to 1,024 per NAS share and a total of 65,536 per system.

Support for BTRFS volumes brings NAS share and iSCSI LUN snapshots into play. Managed by the Snapshot Replication app, we created snapshots on demand and scheduled them at regular intervals as often as every five minutes.

LUN snapshots can also be managed directly from the iSCSI Manager app and data recovery is a cinch - simply choose a snapshot, clone it or copy it in place. NAS snapshot restoration is run from the Snapshot Replication app and if you opt to browse their contents, it loads the File Station app where you can download a file or email it as an attachment.

Synology FlashStation FS6400 review: Virtualization

Virtualization features are in abundance as DSM is certified for use with VMware's vSphere and VAAI software, so the appliance's advanced iSCSI LUNs support features such as hardware assisted locking, full copy, full clone and thin provisioning. And then there's DSM's very own Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) app which allows the appliance to host VMs running pretty much any OS you fancy.

The VMM dashboard provides quick access to VMs and the vSwitch service can be used to isolate them on specific network ports. Even better, VMM offers protection plans for scheduled backups of selected VMs using snapshots, as well as facilities for applying retention policies to achieve a desired RPO (recovery point objective) in hours, days or weeks.

The VMM app has another trick up its virtual sleeve as you can use it to run other instances of DSM. You get one free license included as standard, allowing you to create a virtual appliance and present a specific set of storage services.

Synology FlashStation FS6400 review: Verdict

With its single expansion port and lack of dual controllers, the FS6400 doesn't offer the same levels of redundancy as many competing AFAs but it beats them handsomely for value. It offers a powerful Xeon Scalable package for the price, Synology's DSM software delivers a wealth of storage features as standard and overall performance using low-cost SATA SSDs is impressive.

Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo has laid out his vision for the company's future, highlighting the importance of the cloud and signalling a move towards a more platform-based approach to storage technology.

The company is celebrating its ten-year anniversary this year and speaking at Pure's annual Accelerate conference in Austin, Texas, Giancarlo told attendees that data needs to be reimagined in the same way that networking and compute have been through virtualisation.

"What we've learned is that we really want these different environments - the application environment, the server environment, the network environment, and now even the data environment - we want it to be flexible. We want it to be a pool of resources that can be used by any application or any environment in any location," he said. "The time came for networking. The time came for server virtualization. And we think the time is right to virtualize the data."

"That is pools of storage with different characteristics, different storage classes, that can be called on demand by API on an enterprise-wide basis, managed by policy, and managed by AI-based management."

The past ten years of Pure's existence have seen a radical shift in enterprise IT as businesses moved to embrace cloud services. The initial hype around cloud services led some to predict that traditional on-premise infrastructure would be rendered obsolete as organisations moved to a purely cloud-based model.

However, while this has vision has given way to a general acceptance that multi-cloud usage models are the more realistic option for most of the market, the rise of cloud storage has forced Pure storage and other historically on-prem vendors to adapt to the new paradigm.

Pure's approach has been to lean into the multi-cloud model, introducing a number of features and products designed to make it easier for customers to integrate its storage arrays into a multi-cloud infrastructure. The most recent of these are the Cloud Block Store for AWS and CloudSnap for Azure offerings, both of which have just gone into general availability.

The company wants to take this even further, however, aiming to make its products the building blocks of a single, unified storage system allowing customers to seamlessly move data and workloads between different storage arrays, tiers and clouds depending on factors like performance requirements, capacity and latency.

"Our first decade was really revolutionising individual storage products. Revolutionising, first of all, what was called Tier 1 storage, really making it 10 times more dense, 10 times more price-effective, and 10 times easier to operate. But to a large extent, it was still the same storage that people were used to buying."

"What we really see in our second decade is that storage shouldn't be about product-by-product experience, it really should be about a system of storage that is easy for the full enterprise: for the application developers, for DevOps. And really, storage should be a set of resources that the entire enterprise can use, rather than dedicated systems that are dedicated to an application by application basis. And so really, we're going to create a system of storage environments rather than individual storage products."

The company has come one step closer to making this kind of unified environment a reality with the launch of its new FlashArray//C, a capacity-optimised flash appliance designed to handle Tier 2 secondary storage tasks. This, the company says, allows it to address multi-tier operations. The next big frontier for Pure is integrating multi-protocol functionality into its portfolio, which the company will do through integrating the technology of Compuverde, a startup that Pure acquired earlier this year.

"When you're multi-cloud, multi-tier and multi-protocol, you now have the basis upon which to start creating storage classes," Giancarlo said. "That is the ability under API to basically define what type of performance level, platform and location you want your storage on, and for that to be provided automatically."

"What we're promising you for our next decade - and actually, it's going to be much shorter than that, over the next several years - is delivering to all apps, all the different protocols, all different storage classes, and every possible cloud, as a service; delivering it all as a service, defined by API. That's what we call a modern data experience."

Pure Storage has taken aim at the secondary storage market with the launch of the industry's first all-flash appliance designed for Tier 2 storage.

Announced at the company's annual conference in Austin Texas, the new FlashArray//C is an addition to the FlashArray portfolio, which is intended to complement the flagship FlashArray//X by making flash storage affordable for less-critical secondary storage duties.

Over the past several years, many companies have started using flash-based appliances for their mission-critical data centre storage, due to the higher reliability, lower latency and faster transfer speeds flash offers over spinning-platter hard drives.

HDD-based appliances, however, have an advantage over flash rivals in that they're generally much cheaper on a cost-per-GB basis. As such, flash has been the province of only the most critical of workloads, while drive-based appliances have been used to store large volumes of data that don't need to be accessed as frequently.

With the new FlashArray//C, Pure hopes to shift that balance by offering a drastically reduced cost-per-GB than traditional flash appliances. The key to this is the use of quad-layer cell (QLC) NAND technology, which is much denser than the triple-layer cell technology used by most NAND chips. This allows each chip to store higher volumes of data, meaning fewer individual chips are needed to achieve a given capacity.

While the new FlashArray//C promises a substantial advantage over HDD appliances for Tier 2 workloads, there are still a number of factors that make it unsuitable for the kind of Tier 1 applications targeted by the FlashArray//X.

One key factor is that of longevity. Indeed, Pure Storage's vice president of strategy Matt Kixmoeller pointed out that QLC is dramatically lower than TLC in terms of the wear levels and endurance, so the high I/O levels of Tier 1 applications would wear it out much faster than Pure's existing FlashArray products.

"We optimised FlashArray//C very differently. We didn't just take QLC and shove it in the array, we rewrote all the flash management algorithms. At the highest level, the biggest difference is we've optimised for longevity, and the trade-off there is performance," he said.

"So if you look at a flashArray//X, we're now down in the hundred-microsecond range. FlashArray//C is two to four milliseconds. And so we're a lot less aggressive about writing it into the flash, we keep it in cache longer, we wait for overrides - we do more work to write into the flash very gently and take care of wear management much more aggressively. And that's why these are fundamentally different products."

The new FlashArray//C is available in three models: the C60-366, a 3U unit with a 1.3PB effective capacity and a 366TB raw capacity, the 6U C60-878 with a 3.2PB effective capacity and an 878TB raw capacity and the top-end 9U model with a maximum effective capacity of up to 5.2PB and a maximum 1.39PB raw capacity.

Customers can also take advantage of Pure's 'Evergreen' support subscription to ensure maximum reliability, as well as the company's suite of data management tools, including the Purity operating system, Pure1 cloud management software and built-in snapshot, migration and replication tools. The company is recommending the new array for tasks such as Oracle, VMware or Microsoft SQL Server instances, as well as disaster recovery, archiving and test/dev applications.

"What QLC actually delivers is a price point that means you are ultimately totally disrupting what others would frame as Tier 2, which means that at that price point, disk actually becomes null and void," James Petter, Pure's vice president of international (every territory outside North America) told IT Pro.

"So what are the objections we get? 'Oh, flash, it's too expensive' - well, it solves that one. Then, density; 'oh, it's not that dense', but QLC is naturally dense, therefore you can remove a whole heap of racks and your TCO will therefore be better. So that argument is then solved as well. I think we're going to see a whole new market opportunity open to us that we haven't had before. That will allow us to have far broader, deep conversations with customers and partners that will allow them to make more money and more margin."

Alongside the new FlashArray//C, the company has also launched a new range of DirectMemory modules powered by Intel Optane DC storage class memory. These modules plug directly into Pure's FlashArray//X70 and X90 models to boost performance and reduce latency for applications like databases and other Tier 1 tasks, with no additional configuration required.

The company is claiming substantial performance benefits from this technology; according to analysis based on telemetry gathered by its Pure1 Meta management tool, the majority (80%) of customers can reduce their latency by at least one fifth, while 40% could see a massive reduction of between 30 and 50%.

One use-case it highlighted was SAP HANA performance; a FlashArray//X with DirectMemory Cache offered 90% of the performance of an in-memory HANA instance at a 65% lower overall cost.

Both the FlashArray//C and the DirectMemory Cache are available to purchase as of today. Pure Storage was unable to provide any guidance on pricing, citing the fact that every deployment is customised based on the client's requirements and that all sales go through Pure's channel partners. However, a Pure representative assured that the new FlashArray//C would be "cheaper than a FlashArray//X".

The company's FlashBlade product has also been upgraded, with capacity doubling to 120 blades and 20PB of single name-space, with this offering in directed availability as of today.

The news wasn't all hardware-focused, however; the company announced that its CloudSnap for Azure snapshot replication service and its Cloud Block Store for AWS management software have both now gone into general availability after being announced last year.

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As part of its annual Dell Technologies World conference in Las Vegas, tech giant Dell has unveiled a barrage of new and updated hardware products which are set to hit the market later this year.

With updates to virtually every segment of its portfolio, including storage, servers, laptops, networking and more, the new hardware covers use-cases such as employee mobility, AI development, cloud data backup and more.

The announcements follow a number of updates to the company's software and services businesses, including a VMware-powered data centre-as-a-Service product, support for VMware on Microsoft Azure and a new endpoint management service. All of the company's announcements have been primarily aimed at supporting and enabling digital transformation, with a particular focus on enabling multi-cloud infrastructure deployment model.

Dell Latitude

Across its business laptop portfolio, Dell has updated three of its key ranges: the Latitude, Vostro and Precision families. The new Latitude 3000, 5000 and 7000 ranges offer a number of features designed to make workers more productive while on the move, as well as support for Intel's 8th-gen vPro processors. The 7000-series, which comes in 13in and 14in sizes as well as the 12in Latitude 7200 2-in-1, can be fitted with up to 32GB of RAM and include features such as 4x4 Cat16 cellular antennae and an inbuilt privacy screen to minimise unwanted snooping.

The 5000-series, meanwhile, is available in 13in, 14in and 15in variants, all of which use a reinforced carbon fibre chassis. Configuration options include full HD, narrow-bezel and touchscreen displays, along with 8th-gen Intel processors and dedicated graphics chips. The range also includes the Latitude 5300 2-in-1, a 13in device weighing in at a hefty 1.4kg with a full HD screen, up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage capacity.

At the entry level, the Latitude 3000-series covers 13in, 14in and 15in sizes, and starts at an agreeable $599 (459). The new Latitude portfolio offers a number of additional features, such as fast-charging which Dell says provides up to 80% charge in just one hour or 35% in 20 minutes, as well as intelligent WiFi which automatically connects to the strongest available network. They can also be configured with security features like smart card readers, biometric authentication and Dell's SafeBIOS tool.

Dell Vostro

Moving onto the Vostro range - primarily geared towards smaller businesses - Dell has launched two new models. The Vostro 13 5000 is a 13in device weighing less than 1.2kg and measuring 14.9mm; Dell claims it's the thinnest and lightest Vostro ever. It features a full HD screen, and super-slim bezels reminiscent of the company's flagship XPS 13.

For those that need slightly more power, the Vostro 15 7000 comes with a 6-core Core i7 Coffee Lake-H processor and built in Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU at the top end. Like its smaller stablemate, it also uses a narrow-bezel full HD display.

Dell Precision workstations

In terms of performance, the top end of Dell's laptop range is occupied by its Precision workstations. Some models can go for upwards of 2,500, but Dell is also catering to thriftier businesses (as well as students and amateur creatives) with the newest entries to the Precision family.

The Precision 3540 and 3541 mobile workstations are designed to offer a balance between affordability and processing horsepower. The 3540 supports quad-core 8th-gen Intel processors, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, with 2TB of storage and AMD's Radeon Pro GPUs. The 3541 is even more well-equipped, featuring a maximum spec that includes an 8-core, 9th-gen Intel processor or a 6-core Xeon chip, as well as professional-grade Nvidia Quadro graphics with 4GB of memory.

Both laptops use a 15.6in display and weigh in at less than 2kg. Like all of Dell's workstations, they're also both ISV certified for use with professional software like Solidworks and Autodesk.

Storage

Data centre infrastructure was not neglected, either. New entries have been added to Dell EMC's storage portfolio, data protection and hyperconverged infrastructure ranges, as well as other lines.

Dell's Isilon range of scale-out NAS appliances is being joined by the new Isilon H5600, a 4U appliance which Dell claims offers improved rack density, throughput and memory and SSD caching. The company is touting its applicability for entertainment and media customers in particular, and the new product is supported by updates to its OneFS software which now allows for up to 252 nodes for a total capacity of 58PB.

Dell's PowerMax storage product is also getting updated to support Intel Optane DC persistent memory drives, which Dell says will halve its latency. PowerMax drives with Optane DC memory will be ready to ship by the end of the year. A new PowerMax plugin to manage VMware vRealize Orchestrator has also been made available, while the Container Storage Interface API for container management and Ansible Playbooks are coming this summer.

For organisations that want to adopt a multi-cloud strategy, the company has launched new Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services, which enables customers to consume storage running on Dell's Unity, PowerMax and Isilon appliances on a cloud-like model, connected to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform or VMware on AWS. The appliances are hosted by an MSP and connected directly to the cloud, allowing for on-demand cloud deployment, automated disaster recovery, analytics and other use-cases.

The crown jewel of the company's storage announcements, however, was the new Unity XT appliance. Aimed at the mid-range market, this 2U rack storage box features dual active controllers, dual socket Intel Skylake CPUs and supports NVMe drives. It's user-upgradeable too, and Dell says that it takes just 10 minutes to install and 15 minutes to configure. It's got 50% more drives than the previous generation of Unity storage, delivers twice the performance, 75% better response times and supports more than 50% more VMs. It's also apparently capable of a hefty 5:1 reduction in data rates.

Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services will be generally available starting later this month, with availability for the new Isilon and Unity platforms following in June and July respectively.

Data protection

The power of data was (as always) a key theme at the conference this year, so it's fitting that Dell launched new data protection products as well. First up, the company's all-new PowerProtect software platform offers fast and simple backup and replication functionalities, as well as automated policy-based backups for VMware vSphere environments. This is accompanied by the PowerProtect X400 hardware appliance, a 2U rack-mounted appliance powered by Intel Xeon processors, which is available in all-flash or hybrid configurations with a starting capacity of 64TB and a maximum limit of 448TB on the flash model. It also uses artificial intelligence for automatic load-balancing.

Dell also announced a lower-capacity variant of its Integrated Data Protection Appliance DP4400. Aimed at smaller businesses, the new model offers 8-24TB and can be upgraded to a maximum capacity of 96TB. The DP4400 will be available starting from this month, while the PowerProtect platform is expected in July.

Networking

In addition to storage, new networking products were also shown off. The company announced the Dell EMC SD-WAN Edge, an integrated platform that combines Dell hardware with VMware's SD-WAN software, offering it to customers as a subscription-based package. On top of that, Dell's consulting arm will now offer advisory, design and implementation services to any company looking at rolling out an SD-WAN deployment.

The company's network switch business has been rebranded too: it's now known as the PowerSwitch portfolio, in order to bring it into closer alignment with the PowerEdge, PowerMax and PowerProtect families. The first products under this new umbrella will be the PowerSwitch S5200-ON range, available in 12-port, 24-port and half-width versions and supposedly offering a 2.5x improvement in performance versus previous models.

HCI and servers

Finally, the company's server and compute portfolios also grew. Dell's hyperconverged infrastructure family is joined by a new rack-mounted 2U VxFlex appliance to complement the VxFlex integrated rack, which was formerly known as VxRack FLEX. Powered by Intel's Xeon Scalable chips, these HCI products allow customers to take advantage of Dell's offering without the need to be fully standardised on VMware infrastructure.

For customers exploring machine learning, the Dell EMC DSS 8440 is a monster dual-socket 4U server designed for training AI models. It features twin Intel processors, up to 10 NVMe and SAS drives and a maximum of ten Nvidia Tesla V100 Tensor Core machine learning processors, and Dell has partnered with an accelerator startup to optimise it for model training tasks. The DSS 8440 will be hitting the market in Q2 this year, and the new VxFlex appliance will arrive in July.

Storage specialist Qsan has a reputation for delivering affordable SAN solutions and now makes its play for the SMB all-Flash array (AFA) market sector. The XCubeFAS XF2026D is its first dedicated AFA offering and delivers an impressive range of features and performance at a price SMBs will find very appealing.

The chassis supports up to 26 SFF drives - two more than many competing 2U arrays. Along with dual hot-plug PSUs and fans, the chassis includes dual controllers running in active/active mode offering fully transparent failover.

This isn't Qsan's first AFA; it employs an almost identical hardware package to the XCubeSAN XS3226D which was introduced two years ago. What makes the XF2026D different is its XEVO OS and HTML5 web interface, which Qsan built from the ground up specifically for AFA applications.

Qsan XCubeFAS XF2026D review: Controller construction

The controllers are each powered by a quad-core Xeon D-1500 processor partnered by 32GB of DDR4 cache memory field upgradeable to 64GB. Cache protection is nicely covered as the small expansion slots above each PSU house a cache-to-flash module on one side and a battery backup module on the other.

Along with dual 10GBase-T iSCSI data ports, each controller accepts two expansion cards with quad-port 16Gb/sec FC and 10GbE SFP+ plus dual-port 16Gb/sec FC and 10GbE copper options available. Note that the second expansion slot on each controller has a maximum bandwidth of 20Gbits/sec so may restrict performance if quad-port cards are installed in it.

Expansion potential looks good and the controllers also have dual embedded 12Gb/sec mini-SAS ports. Using Qsan's 26-bay XD5326D disk shelves, you can daisy-chain up to 4 of them over dual-redundant links for a maximum of 130 SSDs.

Qsan XCubeFAS XF2026D review: Qsan XEVO

Deployment in the lab was swift. Qsan's QFinder app discovered the array and provided direct access to the XEVO web interface. Even a quick glance at XEVO impresses as its interface is totally different to Qsan's standard SANOS 4 software and, dare we say, much better designed.

The console opens with an informative status screen showing installed SSDs, storage usage, an overview of arrays, pools, volumes and hosts plus bold real-time graphs for overall latency, IOPS and throughput. We used eight Seagate Nytro SAS3 SSDs and moved to the interface's Storage page where we quickly created two four-drive RAID10 storage pools and let the wizard create one volume in each pool.

For performance testing, we used two Xeon Scalable servers running Windows Server 2016 and installed ATTO Celerity quad-port 16Gb/sec FC HBAs in each one. Host mapping is a doddle and all HBA WWNs were auto-discovered on connection to the array, allowing us to quickly map each server to a dedicated volume.

One noteworthy feature is the controllers operate in synchronous mode and not the more-common ALUA (asymmetric logical unit access). The bottom line is you can connect your hosts across both controllers for redundancy but, unlike ALUA, all MPIO links are optimized with none sitting idle in standby.

Qsan XCubeFAS XF2026D review: FC performance

With both our servers connected to the Slot 1 modules over quad-port 64Gbits/sec FC MPIO links, we watched the XF2026D deliver an impressive performance. To get a baseline, we ran Iometer on one server which reported 49Gbits/sec and 37.2Gbits/sec for sequential read and write rates and 49.1Gbits/sec and 47.3Gbits/sec for random operations.

Changing to 4KB blocks returned 370,000 and 215,000 IOPS for sequential reads and writes falling to 364,000 and 150,000 IOPS for random operations. With both servers running Iometer, we recorded a cumulative 97.6Gbits/sec and 70.3Gbits/sec for sequential reads and writes with random operations returning 97.7Gbits/sec and 53.2Gbits/sec.

General throughput is excellent with Iometer reporting a cumulative 691,500 and 429,500 IOPS for sequential reads and writes while swapping to random operations saw these settle at 686,700 and 301,000 IOPS. Latency is impressively low as we saw Iometer record no more 0.5ms for all our IOPS tests.

The only number we can't report on is controller CPU utilization, as the XEVO console doesn't have an option to display this. Furthermore, Slot 2 does, indeed, introduce bandwidth limitation as swapping the FC modules across from Slot 1 and rerunning a throughput test on one server saw around 220,000 IOPS for sequential reads.

Qsan XCubeFAS XF2026D review: Data protection and SSD monitoring

XEVO's protection groups streamline data protection operations as you can place multiple volumes in them and apply one set of schedules to control snapshots plus remote replication to an external array and local replication to another storage pool. Snapshots can be run on selected days as often as every 15 minutes while replication tasks can have one of eight traffic shaping groups applied to enforce bandwidth restrictions during peak and off-peak periods.

Data recovery is just as quick; just load the Snapshot Center by clicking on the gear wheel icon next to a volume in the protection group. This loads a list of snapshots where you apply the one you want to revert to or expose it as a new LUN for manual file and folder recovery.

Another smart feature of XEVO is QSLife. Accessed from the same console, this provides precise data on the remaining life of each SSD, presents usage graphs for each one and has three alert levels so you're never caught out when an SSD reaches the end of its working life.

Qsan XCubeFAS XF2026D review: Verdict

During testing we found the XCubeFAS XF2026D capable of delivering top speeds and IOPS over FC, although the lower bandwidth of the controller's second expansion slot may impact on overall performance. Nevertheless, it offers an impressive range of storage features for the price, the XEVO OS is a pleasure to use while its active/active architecture and six 9s reliability make this AFA a great choice for hosting mission-critical storage.

Verdict

Priced right for budget-conscious SMBs, Qsan’s XF2026D teams up enterprise-class storage features and fault tolerance with great all-Flash performance

Chassis: 2U rack

Storage: 26 x SAS3 SFF hot-swap drive bays

Power: 2 x 770W hot-plug PSUs

Cooling: 2 x hot-plug fan modules

Other: Cache-to-Flash and battery backup modules

Two hot-plug controllers each with the following:

CPU: Quad-core Intel Xeon D-1500

Memory: 32GB DDR4 cache (max 64GB)

Array support: RAID0, 1, 0+1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50, 60, N-way mirror

Ports: Gigabit management, 2 x 10GBase-T data ports

Expansion: 2 x host card slots, 2 x 12Gbps mini-SAS (SFF-8644)

Management: Web browser

Lexar has launched a 1TB high capacity storage flash card, offering ample storage for multimedia files including photos and videos.

The 1TB Lexar Professional 633x SDXC UHS-I card has been designed to fit into mid-range DSLRs, HD camcorders, or 3D cameras with read speeds of up to 95MBps.

Next-generation Ultra High Speed-II technology is faster, with speeds of up to 300MBps, but 1TB capacities aren't available yet, making Lexar's card a happy medium for those that need the capacity and speed.

Combined with UHS-I technology that supports high-speed data transfers, even large files record quickly to the card, meaning there's no latency whether you're shooting HD video footage or large-format pictures.

"Almost fifteen years ago, Lexar announced a 1GB SD card," Joey Lopez, senior marketing manager at Lexar said. "Today, we are excited to announce 1TB of storage capacity in the same convenient form factor."

He explained the company decided to launch its high capacity flash storage cards to support the demands of customers.

"As consumers continue to demand greater storage for their cameras, the combination of high-speed performance with a 1TB option now offers a solution for content creators who shoot large volumes of high-resolution images and 4K video," he explained.

Lexar is the first company to formally unveil a 1TB storage card. Although SanDisk said it would be launching one back in 2016, it's still yet to go on sale.

Lexar's 1TB Lexar Professional 633x SDXC UHS-I card is now available to buy for $499 (388).

Get ready for a revolution in enterprise computing. Until now we've had flash memory and DRAM as distinct entities, one for system storage, one for system memory. Both might now use solid-state technologies, but in terms of architecture, capabilities, costs and applications, they couldn't be more different. DRAM has always been fast, highly resilient and connected to the CPU by the fastest-available interconnect, but it has also been expensive, capacity-constrained and volatile the moment the power goes off, all the data is lost. Flash memory is cheaper per GB and wins on capacity, but even the fastest SSD technology can't compete with DRAM for high-speed bandwidth or overall read/write performance.

In the past, this wasn't a problem. When processors, applications and platform architecture were the compute bottlenecks, neither memory constraints nor SSD performance really held us back. Now, however, businesses are working with bigger datasets than ever before and striving to pull insights in near-real time from that data. They're investing in virtualisation, building flexibility and scalability into our IT, working to maximise the utilisation of every CPU core and system resource. They're building private and hybrid clouds designed to run next-generation business applications; applications that transform customer relationships and optimise all aspects of our operations. The streams of data running through are growing exponentially, and organisations need all the compute resources they can get their hands on to get the maximum value.

That's not such a problem for the world's largest enterprises, which have the capital to splash out on huge pools of DRAM, running vast multi-terabyte databases in-memory or maxing out the capacity of their hardware. However, medium-sized and smaller enterprises don't have that choice. DRAM is too expensive. Flash isn't nearly fast enough. In the new era of computing, the gap between flash memory and DRAM is preventing them from getting where they need to go.

Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory fills that gap. Designed to work with Intel's next-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Platinum processors, this new form of memory isn't just a big step forward, but potentially a bona-fide game changer.

Developed from Intel and Micron's cutting-edge 3D XPoint memory technology, Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory combines many of the advantages of DRAM and flash. The revolutionary architecture gives you higher densities and capacities than DRAM at a significantly lower cost. Yet it offers performance that's close to DRAM levels and far beyond anything conventional NAND-based flash technologies can deliver. The modules look and feel like DDR4 modules, albeit high-end performance modules with an enterprise-grade heatsink. However, where DDR4 capacities would normally stop at 64GB (vastly expensive) or 128GB (close to extortionate), Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMMs start at 128GB and go up to 512GB and at a fraction of the price.

What's more, as the name suggests, this new kind of memory is persistent. Run it in the first of its operating modes, Memory Mode, and it acts just like a large-scale pool of DRAM memory, the Intel Xeon Scalable processor intelligently using DRAM to cache the most frequently accessed memory while the Optane DC Persistent Memory delivers bulk capacity. This is transparent at the application level, giving you the benefits of large memory capacity at a far more affordable cost.

Run it in the second operating mode, App Direct Mode, and the application and operating system work with the two types of memory independently, the Intel Xeon Scalable processor directing operations that require low latency to use the DRAM and those that need capacity to use the Optane DC Persistent Memory. In this case, the data held in the Optane DC Persistent Memory is retained even when the system is powered off or rebooted. While the OS and applications will need to be reloaded, in-memory databases and analytics frameworks may not.

What does this mean for enterprise computing? For a start, applications that involve both large datasets and heavyweight compute power can take advantage of an architecture that gives you huge capacity at the system memory level without the latency of moving data to and from the storage level. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and High-Performance Computing applications will all see the benefits. We've already seen how organisations like the University of Pisa have harnessed the performance of Intel Optane storage; using memory-intensive undersampling techniques to shrink MRI examinations from forty minutes down to two. Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory should take this to another level.

It's a similar story with in-memory databases and big-data analytics or any application where you want to operate on a large dataset in close to real-time. Intel has claimed a 7x to 9.1x performance advantage when handling in-memory databases on an Intel Xeon Scalable Platinum 8170 and Optane DC Persistent Memory, as opposed to the same system with a more conventional DRAM plus SSD architecture. With Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory, you can put an entire Redis database in-memory and have sub-millisecond latency without the vast expense of doing so with DRAM. This has led Redis CTO and co-founder, Yiftach Shoolman, to say that we believe the next-generation server architecture will be all persistent memory. This is going to change the entire database market.'

And the impact will be every bit as big on virtualisation and, in turn, private and hybrid cloud. At the moment hardware servers offer a wealth of raw compute power, but are held back by the constraints of the DRAM that support them; you might have the cores and cycles to deploy more VMs or containers, but that means little if you don't have the RAM to do so. With Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory, you can add system memory in much greater densities, running up to three times as many virtual machines on the same hardware or as many as four times the number of database containers. For organisations deploying their own private or hybrid cloud, it becomes much, much easier to create pools of compute and storage resources that can be provisioned and scaled on demand. And as this memory is persistent, shutting down or rebooting a server doesn't have to mean serious downtime. In fact, reboot times change from a matter of minutes into seconds.

This isn't simply changing the way enterprises run mission-critical high-performance applications or operate virtualised IT, but also changing which enterprises can do so. By bringing down the cost of running some of the world's most memory-intensive applications, Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory brings them in reach of a much wider range of organisations. Startups and medium-sized enterprises aren't shut out of the A.I. and Machine Learning revolutions. They can harness next-generation analytics to compete. If Intel's new memory tech lives up to expectations, we could be seeing the start of a new era for the datacentre.

Find out more about Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory

Lenovo has announced a strategic partnership with NetApp, which will see Lenovo integrating NetApp's hybrid cloud data management technology into the largest storage portfolio launch in the company's history.

Released under the ThinkSystem banner, the new range will comprise ten flash storage platforms, featuring NetApp's data management technology but manufactured and distributed by Lenovo. All of the platforms will also make use of Lenovo's XClarity controller - an excellent management console that IT Pro praised as "radically improved" over its predecessors.

In addition to the new product line, NetApp and Lenovo are opening a joint venture in Lenovo's home country of China, which will focus on research and development and go-to-market strategy specifically for the Chinese market.

Brad Anderson, NetApp's senior vice president and general manager of cloud infrastructure, noted the move is seen as a way to bring together innovative technology and simplified products and services with the aim to help customers modernise their IT and accelerate their global digital transformations.

The first fruits of this partnership - the ThinkSeries DE and DM ranges - are available now, targeting the entry-level and mid-range storage markets. The president of Lenovo's data centre group, Kirk Skaugen, promised that later releases would give the company full coverage of the entire storage market.

"We're the world-leader in price performance for entry SAN and fibre-channel, but we're only participating in the entry part of the market. With the ten new products... we'll be able to support 92%-plus of the market," he said. "The entire storage market will be accessible to Lenovo."

Lenovo is hoping to use the new range to tempt existing customers of main rivals HPE and Dell EMC to jump ship in favour of the new co-developed offering. Dell and HPE have both previously snapped up storage firms that Lenovo had existing partnerships with: namely, EMC and Nimble. Skaugen told IT Pro that the company was not worried about another competitor snapping up NetApp to bolster its storage line in a similar fashion.

"I think that's always a possibility. Of course, Lenovo could always get bought by someone as well," he said. "That's something that we look at when we build agreements very seriously, but we think we've picked the right partner."

Lenovo has also committed to maintaining its support of and partnership with Nutanix - one of NetApp's biggest competitors in the cloud data management market. Lenovo is Nutanix's fastest-growing OEM partner, and Skaugen even went as far as to commit to becoming the company's biggest OEM within the next 2 years. He stated that Lenovo would maintain strong ties with both companies, however.

"At the end of the day, when people come to us from Nutanix, they've probably already chosen Nutanix - they're just trying to figure out do they want to deploy it on Dell, or on the NX, or on Lenovo," Skauger said. "We're all about customer choice. It's very clear we have an extremely strong partnership with NetApp... Our relationship with Nutanix will be strong; NetApp's current relationships with Cisco and Fujitsu will be strong."

The ubiquitousness of Flash modules for consumer electronics has drastically decreased its price, and with major investments from the likes of Intel and Samsung in fabrication plants, Flash is now commonplace and viable for mainstream use.

The technology development has also prompted a significant shift in how storage is designed, and also the competitive landscape of vendors. Although Solid State Drive (SSD) vs Hard Disk Drive (HHD) pricing at the low end is around eight times the cost; the comparison is not equal. Like comparing a car with a journey with a train ticket; by some metrics, SSD and other Flash-based technologies may well be cheaper than traditional hard disks.

The potential of SSD and other Flash-based solutions, for example, PCIE cards within servers, has been recognised for its ability to dramatically speed up application performance. This varies between vendors such as start-ups like Pure, Tintri and Violin as well as certain product lines from HP, Dell, IBM, EMC and NetApp.

Latest News

07/09/2018: Intel releases “world’s densest” silent SSD

Intel has announced the arrival of a brand new SSD for datacentres, with the solid-state drive (SSD) becoming the firm’s densest drive offering to date.

The tech giant revealed that the new PCIe-based QLC Intel SSD D5-P4326 – dubbed “the ruler” - can store up to 32TB of data whilst measuring up at around the same size as a traditional 12cm ruler.

“The new SSD is Intel’s densest drive ever, and is built on Intel® 3D NAND technology, which stacks memory cells atop each other in multiple extremely thin layers, instead of just one,” Intel said. “Memory cells in the D5-P4326 are stacked 64 layers deep.”

Thanks to its compact design, the SSD also generates less heat than older disk drives and requires just half of the airflow that’s required to keep a traditional drive cool – a perk that will, in turn, help keep air-condition costs down for businesses, Intel added.

Data centres can also line up 32 of the D5-P4326 side-by-side in order to handle up to a petabyte of data in a single server slot – a setup that will consume one-tenth of the power of a hard disk equivalent, whilst taking up just one-twentieth of the space.

29/08/2018: NAND flash memory prices will continue to fall

NAND flash memory stick prices have seen a consistent downward trend over the last few months, with the latest reports now suggesting that the decline is expected to continue during the second half of 2018.

According to DRAMeXchange (via Digitimes), the downturn is the result of both oversupply and disappointing demand for the storage devices – with prices predicted to drop 10% sequentially during the third and fourth quarters of this year.

However, it’s predicted that these lower NAND prices could have a positive knock-on effect, with OEMs looking to increase the storage capacity of their devices as a result. Smartphone manufacturers, for example, have increased storage space on their flagship devices in recent times, moving to 256GB or 512GB – whilst their mid-upper range offerings have seen a boost to 64GB and 128GB.

Despite the weaker-than-expected demand, the resulting smartphone memory boost will result in a "positive contribution" to NAND flash consumption during 2018, DRAMeXchange concluded, whilst the decline in flash prices will continue into the first half of 2019 due to "seasonal factors".

Elsewhere, a drop in solid-state-drive (SSD) prices could also encourage many notebook manufacturers to include SSDs in their devices, DRAMeXchange said.

25/07/2018: Western Digital releases new NVME SSD for gamers

Storage solution provider Western Digital has released a high-performance solid state drive (SSD) designed to improve gaming experience as well as high-resolution video performance.

The Black 3D NVMe SSD removes the traditional storage bottlenecks associated with many drives, allowing it to shift high amounts of data quickly and seamlessly.

The M.2 drive incorporates new NVMe architecture and controller, providing improved power management as well as optimal integration with Western Digital 3D NAND. The 1TB model boasts a sequential read speed of up to 3,400 MB/s and write speeds of up to 2,8001 MB/s.

On top of that, Western Digital says it also features up to 500,000 random-read IOPS for delivering extreme throughput, making it suited to multi-threaded applications as well as data-intensive multitasking environments.

"Today's gaming applications require increasing capability from their PCs, and this will only continue to advance," said Khwaja Saifuddin, senior sales director for the Middle East at Western Digital.

"Whether it's a new gaming rig or a video-editing workstation, our innovative NVMe drives will power many existing and future environments that enable data to thrive."

The new SSD is available now in capacities of 250GB, 500GB and 1TB.

16/07/2018: Seagate re-enters consumer SSD market

Data storage firm Seagate has announced the release of a new solid state drive (SSD) for the consumer market, seemingly marking a renewed focus on storage for traditional PCs and laptops.

The BarraCuda SSD is a SATA III drive as opposed to the faster NVMe models on the market - meaning speeds won't reach the heights of other available options - but Seagate says the SSD's speeds of 560MB/s and 90K IOPS provide "the desired capabilities for nearly every compute need and provides a first-rate solution for every budget".

"With this launch, Seagate continues to build on the evolution of its storage capabilities, now offering a full range of HDD, hybrid and SSD solutions for the everyday computer user to avid PC system architects and professionals," Seagate said in a press release.

The new BarraCuda SSD arrives with a standard 2.5in form factor across the range, as well as SATA 6GB/s interface and an ultra-low power mode that allows for reduced power consumption.

The new SSD line comes in storage options of 250GB (available for £74.99), 500GB (£109.99), 1TB (£229.99) and 2TB (£449.99). Currently, the drives are exclusive to order through Amazon - although Seagate says its products will be available elsewhere from September.

20/04/2018: Samsung’s 6Gbps SATA SSD doubles storage capacity for datacentre applications

Samsung has officially unveiled details of its new PM883 SSD, with the drive becoming the highest density datacentre SATA drive at 8TB.

Announcing the rollout in a press release, the Korean tech giant revealed the new high-performance SSD drive to be the first of its kind to boast LPDDR4 DRAM packages, as well as a 6.0Gps 2.5-inch SATA interface.

The PM883 is also the first to allow power management in individual SSD units for improved energy efficiency - thanks to the inclusion of a SATA 3.3-compliant Power Disable (PWDIS). Additional power saving technology also means that the drive consumes just 2.8 watts of power when reading and 3.7 watts when writing.

The SSD drive’s read and write speeds stand at 550MB/s and 520MB per second respectively – whilst random reads clock in at 98,000 IOPS and random writes at 28,000 IOPS.

“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to enable a high level of storage density with low power consumption, which thanks to the efficiency of our 64-layer V-NAND-based technology, allows us to double the capacity of current SATA storage,” said Jim Elliott, corporate senior vice president for memory sales and marketing at Samsung Semiconductor Inc.

“Our expanded lineup for the PM883 will offer up to 8TB to allow optimal use in existing enterprise and cloud storage systems.”

Flash Vs SSD

Often used interchangeably, it is worth noting that Flash and Solid State Disk (SSD) are neither same thing, nor rival technologies.

A better analogy is to think of Flash as eggs and an SSD as an omelette. Flash is a form of non-volatile, high-speed read and write media that holds digital data. Types of Flash can be found in many diverse areas from USB drives to smart phones. While SSD is a type of hard disk that instead of using magnetic media to write, store and read data uses a form of Flash memory.

An SSD has all the physical characteristics of a traditional hard disk but has faster read and write speed, lower energy consumption and heat generation. The trade-off for these advantages is a higher cost per GB of data when compared to traditional HDD and lower lifespan for high-intensity application with lots of reads and writes.

Meanwhile, in an all-Flash model, Flash replaces disk as the tier supporting the most IOPS intensive workloads. Yet, these systems still need to architect a management layer to move cold data to other less expensive storage tiers. Other vendors like Avere have carved out a successful niche using Flash caches mixed with cloud-based goodness to make slow hard disks and even cloud storage deliver more IOPS.

The vendor ecosystem is incredibly rich. With the form factor of the SSD electively a slot into the SATA interfaces used by spinning disks, the intelligence for getting the best out of Flash is now a software, rather than a hardware engineering problem. This has led to an explosion of storage vendors integrating Flash to boost performance plus a whole host of clustering, replication and even backup appliances.

For the channel, utilising a Flash-based solution is not complex. The vendor ecosystem makes the deployment of Flash no more challenging than a NAS and far less complex than FC SAN or InfiniBand-based solutions. However, comparing which vendor is “best” for any given customer situation is a bit tricky.

From a hardware vendor perspective, the number of players is actually quite small. Samsung sells the most NAND chips and devices followed by Intel, with SanDisk a close third. The rest of the field has sub-double digit market share and includes the likes of Micron Technology and Toshiba. The “Who has the best price versus performance?” question changes on an almost quarter by quarter basis and factors like reliability and brand play out similarly to the hard disk Seagate vs WD vs Quantum, etc. debate. It’s all much of a muchness.

Higher up the stack when it comes to use cases, the various merits of the approaches offered by the start-ups and established players already listed requires a case by case investigation.

For example, Avere has done very well in media and entertainment while Tintri is focused on highly virtualised environments. Yet for all the noise of these start-ups, analysts tracking the numbers say it is still the big incumbents dominating the markets when you add up all the combinations of how Flash is used across all-Flash and hybrid systems.

Based on IDC numbers, EMC has 36 percent market share, Netapp has 20 percent, Hitachi has IBM at 11 percent and many of the start-ups may have low single digits shares.

What is clear is that the market is growing. Any channel partner without a Flash strategy or portfolio needs to get one. The good news, it’s not very hard and every vendor and even latecomer HP with its 3PAR technology has a viable Flash solution. Where many partners are saying they are reducing the number of vendors they want to engage with, Flash-based storage is still an area where many of the smaller players have better and more cost-effective solutions than the big guys. It is likely that at least one of the bunch of start-ups will get gobbled up in the next few years, although picking a horse to back in the crowded field is a hard call.

It’s also worth noting that although SSD is, for the most part, a common and interchangeable device, the Flash arrays and solutions are not. Unlike the mix and match nature of a multi-vendor SAN, each Flash solution is vendor proprietary. With no dominant player yet across every use case, channel partners have a good opportunity to partner early and win deals based on merit and not just brand.

Dell EMC aims to retake the mid-range storage market with an 'aggressive counter-attack' on the competition. In a bold pincer movement, it has updated its entire SC storage array family and introduced a future-proof storage loyalty program with 3-year satisfaction and efficiency guarantees.

Along with a hardware refresh across its hybrid SC arrays, it introduces two new all-Flash models and in this exclusive review, we look at the SC5020F. This was provided with the latest SCOS 7.3 software which delivers improved performance, higher storage capacities and new management features.

The SC5020F comes as standard with every advanced feature enabled with a perpetual license. The line-up is impressive and includes intelligent deduplication and compression, storage federation, data progression, RAID tiering, thin snapshots, replication, all management tools and much more.

Dell EMC SC5020F: Hardware

The SC5020F employs a 3U rack chassis with dual, active/active hot-plug controllers. Each is equipped with an octa-core 2.4GHz Xeon E5-2630 v3 CPU and 64GB of DDR4 cache memory.

It supports up to 30 internal SFF SSDs and can be expanded hugely outside the box. Using SC420F 24-bay SAS3 expansion shelves, the drive count can be pushed to 222 per array and more when configured as a federated array with up to 10 members.

Each controller comes with four 10GBaseT data ports plus PCI-Express and mezzanine card slots. Dell EMC now offers 100GbE as well as 10GbE and 25GbE adapters plus 8/16Gbps and 32Gbps FC options.

The SC5020F supports read- and write-intensive SSDs and Dell EMC advised us it expects most customers to be using it to handle read intensive workloads. To this end, our review system came with 30 1.92TB read-intensive SAS3 SSDs spread equally across the head unit and an SC420F expansion shelf.

Dell EMC SC5020F: SCOS standard features

The SC5020F supports two storage tiers of read- and write-intensive SSDs and SCOS uses profiles to control which tiers data should reside on and how data progression is managed. RAID array creation is automatic as SCOS selects them to suit each tier with options for RAID0, 5, 6, 10 and dual-mirrored arrays.

Physical storage is amalgamated into a Disk Folder pool within which virtual volumes are created and mapped to selected data ports. Storage profiles determine when data tiering occurs and its scheduler can be used to run this as often as every five minutes.

Profiles apply deduplication and compression which can be enabled globally or on selected volumes. Quality of service (QoS) profiles limit available bandwidth to selected volumes and can use IOPS or MB/sec values or both together.

Dell EMC SC5020F: SCOS 7.3 new features

Distributed sparing is designed to avoid wasted space on high-value, high-capacity SSDs. Our 1.92TB read-intensive SSDs are certainly far too pricey to use as global hot-spares sitting idle in standby.

Distributed sparing takes advantage of the fact that SC arrays manage RAID protection at the page level. This allows it to take capacity from multiple in-use SSDs and present it as a reserved rebuild space. Along with the cost advantage of having all SSDs in active service, it offers up to a five-fold reduction in array rebuild times.

The Live Volume feature allows volumes to be replicated between SC arrays and SCOS 7.3 increases the number supported from 100 to 500. It now uses the same volume ID between arrays for seamless failover and adds ALAU (asymmetric logical access unit) support allowing MPIO connections to the primary Live Volume to be advertised as optimal and those to the secondary one as non-optimal for failover purposes.

Dell EMC SC5020F: Management

SCOS 7.3 delivers enhanced management features with the Unisphere for SC web server running on both controllers for failover. It presents a well-designed HTML5 interface offering easy access to the array's local storage features.

Next up is the Unisphere Central for SC which runs on a VMware host and manages multiple SC arrays from a central web console. Dell EMC's DSM software gets an update to a 2018 R1 version and you'll need to run this as it can do things that Unisphere for SC can't, such as configuring the Live Migrate and Live Volume functions.

The free CloudIQ cloud-based app shows the status of all arrays and provides health information. It uses call-home data from each array to build up a health picture and after logging in with your Dell EMC support credentials, you can view lists of service actions that need to be performed.

Dell EMC SC5020F: Performance

We focused our performance testing on virtualized environments and used dual Dell EMC PowerEdge R840 Xeon Scalable rack servers running VMware ESX 6.5 and configured as a single cluster. These were connected to the SC5020F via sixteen 16Gbps FC ports and eight VMs were created on the ESX cluster with each running Linux CentOS.

On the SC5020F, we created a total of 32 all-flash volumes which four assigned to each Linux VM. We loaded Iometer on a dedicated Windows Server host, ran the Dynamo load generator remotely on each VM and declared them to Iometer.

Using Iometer 512KB block sizes, we watched our test rig return a total raw sequential read throughput of 13,100MB/sec. Moving to random operations saw a slight increase in throughput to 13,175MB/sec.

Changing to a 4KB block size saw a random read throughput of 410,000 IOPS. Our workload test used the same block size with an 80/20 random read/write distribution and this returned an equally impressive 280,000 IOPS.

Dell EMC SC5020F: Verdict

The SC5020F is very competitively priced for mid-sized businesses and with every advanced storage feature included, there are no worries about future investment in extra licenses. Available as a free update to existing SC customers, SCOS 7.3 also delivers an extensive range of new features and performance improvements.

The Unisphere management tools are a welcome addition although we found the DSM app will still be required for some storage configuration tasks. The SC5020F is easy to deploy and delivered good performance on our lab tests while Dell EMC's 3-year storage efficiency and satisfaction guarantees will provide that all-important peace of mind.

Verdict

The SC5020F is a great choice for mid-sized businesses that want a high performing all-Flash array at a sensible price and solid guarantees that it will deliver in the long term

Chassis: 3U rack

Storage: 30 x SFF hot-swap drive bays

Power: 2 x hot-plug 1485W PSUs

Cooling: 2 x hot-plug fan modules

Dual hot-swap controllers each with the following:

CPU: 2.4GHz 8-core Xeon E5-2630 v3

Memory: 64GB DDR4

Array support: RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 10 DM

Storage (SC5020F): 15 x 1.92TB SSDs

Storage (SC420F): 15 x 1.92TB SSDs

Max storage: 222 drives per array

Expansion: 1 x PCIe slot, 1 x mezzanine slot

Network: 4 x 10GBaseT, 16 x 16Gbps FC, Gigabit management

Software: Dell SCOS 7.3

Management: Unisphere for SC, Unisphere Central for SC, Dell EMC Storage Manager 2018 R1

Fujitsu has championed bringing the price of all-Flash storage down to a point where SMEs will take notice and it now goes further with its latest Eternus AF250 S2. This 2U storage array builds on the successes of its predecessor, the AF250, and aims to make all-Flash storage even more appealing.

Hardware redundancy is excellent as along with dual hot-plug PSUs, the AF250 S2 comes with dual controllers functioning in active/active mode. Data port choices have improved too, as each controller has two expansion slots which now support dual-port 32Gbps FC modules, as well as 8/16Gbps FC and 10GbE copper or SFP+ iSCSI options.

Their integral SAS expansion ports were made active in the original AF250 last year so the S2 model also allows you to double SFF drive capacity to 48 by adding a single drive shelf. The new controllers see a small speed boost with the 6-core 2GHz Xeon in the AF250 replaced with a 2.2GHz version, but maximum system cache memory stays pegged at 64GB.

Fujitsu has also made a few tweaks to its OS and its combined efforts result in a small reduction in latency and some IOPS throughput improvements. The array incorporates Fujitsu's new Cache Protection feature which replaces the capacitor in the older controllers with a long-life Ni-MH battery plus NVRAM and in the event of a blackout, the cache contents are written to memory.

Fujitsu Storage Eternus AF250 S2: IP SAN performance

Our review system came with four 10GbE SFP+ iSCSI ports and six 1.92TB HGST SS200 SSDs which we used to create a high-speed RAID10 array. For performance testing, we used a pair of Xeon E5-2600 v4 Windows Server hosts equipped with Emulex dual-port 10GbE SFP+ adapters.

With one server logged on to a 500GB target over a dual-port MPIO link, Iometer reported excellent sequential read speeds of 18.1Gbits/sec but considerably lower write rates of 9Gbits/sec which remained constant when swapping over to random operations. Dropping to 4KB block sizes saw I/O throughput for random reads and writes settle at 71,000 IOPS and 31,500 IOPS.

We logged the second server onto a dedicated target over an MPIO link and watched cumulative sequential read and write rates increase to 34.7Gbits/sec and 15.1Gbits/sec. Random operations saw a similar picture with cumulative read and write IOPS stepping up to 104,000 and 63,500.

A key feature of Fujitsu's all-Flash arrays is their low latency and the AF250 S2 didn't disappoint. For both the single server and dual server 4KB IOPS tests, we measured average read and write latencies of only 0.6ms and 1.3ms.

Fujitsu Storage Eternus AF250 S2: Installation and provisioning

Management contact is initially made via a direct connection to the first controller's remote access port. Its web console fires up a wizard which guided us through setting a hostname, securing admin access, configuring SNMP and setting the IP addresses of the controller's maintenance ports.

The main web interface hasn't seen any cosmetic changes but is easy enough to use. For storage provisioning, you start by adding selected SSDs to RAID Groups (RGs) and can choose from stripes, mirrors, RAID5 or 6 plus high-performance RAID10.

Within each RG, we created multiple volumes which were automatically assigned a LUN. For thin provisioning, you create a dedicated storage pool and as space in thin provisioned volumes (TPVs) is used, new blocks are dynamically assigned to them from this pool.

The AF250 S2 includes inline deduplication and compression which can be applied as required to TPVs. When creating a TPV, you can decide whether to have either or both of these features enabled.

Fujitsu Storage Eternus AF250 S2: Affinity Groups

Access controls are strict as Affinity Groups manage connections between hosts, ports and LUNs. First, you need to create groups for selected hosts, ports and LUNs and then link them together with Affinity Groups.

For host groups, we were disappointed to find that the array still can't auto-discover iSCSI connections so we had to enter each host's full IQN and IP address manually. From previous Eternus tests, we know that the auto-discover feature works fine with FC hosts.

The AF250 S2 scores for its integral Quality of Service (QoS) feature. This is very versatile as you can set bandwidth limits in IOPS on individual volumes, host connections and ports or choose to leave some with unlimited bandwidth.

Fujitsu Storage Eternus AF250 S2: SF Express features

All volume cloning, snapshot and replication functions are managed by the SF Express software which is installed on a separate Windows host. We loaded it on a virtualized Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V VM and connected it to the array via its management port IP address.

The price we've shown includes the SF Express software, the SF Cruiser upgrade and the AdvancedCopy Manager licenses. These handle volume copy, snapshot and cloning services plus synchronous and asynchronous replication to remote Eternus appliances.

Other valuable features include advanced performance monitoring and fully automated QoS. Activating the AdvancedCopy Manager also enables copy functions for backing up targets mapped to Exchange and SQL Server hosts.

Fujitsu Storage Eternus AF250 S2: Verdict

The Eternus AF250 S2 doesn't offer any major improvements over its predecessor but it scores for its excellent data protection features and high levels of redundancy. IP SAN performance is a mixed bag but read speeds are very good while its low latency makes it ideal for performance-sensitive applications.

The price of our review system is the list price provided by Fujitsu and includes all software, the quad 10GbE iSCSI ports and the six 1.92TB SSDs which each cost around 1,800 apiece. With Fujitsu's current promotions, you can save up to 40% on the list price making the Eternus AF250 S2 an affordable all-Flash option for SMEs.

Verdict

Fujitsu’s new Eternus AF250 S2 is great choice for SMEs that want all-Flash storage, low latency and abundant data protection features at a sensible price

Chassis: 2U rack

Storage: 24 SFF hot-swap drive bays

Drives included: 6 x 1.92TB HGST SS200 SSDs

Power: 2 x 805W hot-plug PSUs/fans

Dual hot-plug SAS3 controllers each with the following:

CPU: 6-core 2.2GHz Ivy Bridge Xeon

Memory: 32GB DDR3 cache/BBU

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, global/dedicated hot-spare

Data ports: 32Gbps FC, 8/16Gbps FC or 10GbE iSCSI (max 8)

Ports included: 2 x dual-port 10GbE SFP+ iSCSI

Expansion: External SAS3 port

Management: Web browser, SF Express

Software: Fujitsu SF Express, Cruiser Standard/QoS, AdvancedCopy Manager Local/Remote

Warranty: 3 years on-site NBD

Lenovo is upping its game in the storage market as its latest ThinkSystem DS series of arrays aim to offer an enterprise-class feature set and performance at a price mid-sized businesses can afford. On review we have the top-dog DS6200 a 2U appliance that targets I/O intensive applications and offers end-to-end 12Gbits/sec SAS support, real-time data tiering, high availability and a mighty expansion potential.

Along with 24 SFF drive bays, the DS6200 is endowed with dual controllers running in active/active mode. Each as a generous 16GB of cache memory, perform low-latency cache mirroring and team up a super-capacitor and Flash memory to protect their contents during a power outage.

Our review system has Lenovo's CNCs (converged network controllers) installed, which each have four SFP+ ports and support both 8/16Gbits/sec Fibre Channel and 1/10GbE iSCSI operations. You need to manually set their personality using the CLI but you can have them as all FC, all iSCSI or a mixture of both where the first pair are FC and the second pair are iSCSI.

High-speed SAS3 support extends to the CNC's expansion ports. You can daisy-chain up to nine disk shelves from them using fault-tolerant links for a total of 240 SFF or 108 LFF drives, and mix and match different shelves as well.

Lenovo ThinkSystem DS6200 review: Installation

Deployment doesn't get any easier as the appliance's web console runs a wizard that handles enabling management access and configuring system settings including SNMP monitoring. Out of the box, our CNCs had their port personalities set to iSCSI but we wanted FC support for our performance tests.

It's easy enough to change and we used the PuTTY client to SSH to the appliance and from its CLI, used the set host-port-mode' command to change them all to FC. Next up is virtual storage provisioning, where the appliance manages two storage pools with one assigned to each controller.

We were supplied with eight 800GB SSDs for testing and quickly created a four-drive RAID10 pool, or disk group, for each controller. As we were only using SSDs, the appliance placed them in the Performance tier and if you add SAS hard disks, they'll go in the Standard tier while Midline SAS drives are automatically allocated to the Archive tier.

The base license only supports real-time data tiering across SAS and ML-SAS HDDs and to use all three tiers, you'll need an optional license which costs around 2,553. However, the base license does enable SSD read caches which can be assigned to disk groups and are not part of the tiering process.

Lenovo ThinkSystem DS6200 review: FC performance

For performance testing, we used two Xeon Scalable and two Xeon E5-2600 v4 Windows Server 2016 hosts, all equipped with QLogic single-port 16Gbits/sec FC adapters. We mapped a dedicated virtual volume to each server and connected two servers to Controller A and the other two to Controller B.

Our first test using a single server delivered excellent results with Iometer reporting steady sequential read and write rates both of 12.3Gbits/sec. Random read rates held steady while write speeds dropped to 7.5Gbits/sec.

With all four servers in the Iometer mix, we recorded top cumulative sequential reads and writes both of 49Gbits/sec. Total random read and write speeds settled at 48Gbits/sec and 30Gbits/sec with each server recording average I/O response times of less than 0.3ms

I/O throughput is excellent as Iometer recorded cumulative sequential read and write rates of 388,000 and 115,000 IOPS. Moving to random operations saw read and write throughput drop to 228,000 and 114,000 IOPS with latency on all four servers hovering around the 1.2ms mark.

Lenovo ThinkSystem DS6200 review: Snapshots and management

The base license includes snapshot support for up to 128 targets which can be optionally increased to 512 or 1024. They're easy to manage and can be run on-demand or scheduled as often as every minute within a set daily time window, with an option to retain up to 32 for each volume.

We found snapshot recovery is equally swift as we selected a volume and viewed its snapshots in the list below. After choosing the one we wanted, we disconnected any hosts, selected the Rollback option and had our deleted data returned to its rightful place in a matter of seconds.

Asynchronous replication is another optional feature and a bonus is the DS6200 can replicate volumes to any remote ThinkSystem DS or older Storage S series appliance. It requires iSCSI connections to function and can be set to run immediately and as often as every hour.

We found the appliance's web interface very easy to use, and it provided quick access to the various storage functions. It also provides a handy performance section where we could monitor all components ranging from a single drive or host port to an entire controller.

We run Lenovo's XClarity Administrator as a Hyper-V VM in the lab and it automatically discovered the DS6200. Once we'd supplied our management credentials, it was amalgamated into the Storage section of the XClarity web console where we could view a full hardware inventory, monitor power consumption and temperatures, remotely control power and watch out for system alerts.

Lenovo ThinkSystem DS6200 review: Verdict

Mid-sized businesses that baulk at the cost of all-Flash storage arrays can rest easy with Lenovo's ThinkSystem DS6200. It offers a host of affordable enterprise storage virtualization features and teams them up with integral real-time data tiering, great Flash performance and plenty of room to expand capacity.

Verdict

The ThinkSystem DS6200 is a fine choice for mid-sized businesses that want the best storage performance, real-time data tiering and scalability at a sensible price

Chassis: 2U rack

Storage: 24 x SFF hot-swap drive bays

Power: 2 x 580W hot-plug PSUs

Two controllers each with the following:

Memory: 16GB cache with super-capacitor and Flash memory

RAID support: RAID1, 10, 5, 6

Data ports: 4 x SFP+ supporting 8/16Gbps FC and/or 1/10GbE iSCSI

Management: Gigabit Ethernet

Expansion: 12Gbps SAS3 ports (max 108 LFF/240 SFF drives)

Other ports: Mini-USB CLI port

Snapshots: Base 128 (optional 512 or 1024)

Management: Web browser

Warranty: 3 years on-site 9x5 NBD

Options: SSD Data Tiering License (01GV561), £2,553 ex VAT

British firm Integral has become the new king of smartphone storage, releasing the world's biggest microSD card with a total storage capacity of 512GB.

The new card surpasses the previous record holder SanDisk, which claimed the title with a 400GB model back in August last year. Sandisk's 400GB card is still faster than Integral's higher-capacity unit, however, with a maximum data transfer speed of 100MB/sec compared to Integral's 80MB/sec maximum.

"Consumers have been clear in their call for increased storage, as mobile devices have become essential to many in everyday life," said James Danton, marketing manager for Integral.

"The need to provide extended memory for smartphones, tablets and a growing range of other mobile devices such as action cams and drones has been answered. As a company, we are very proud to be the first to achieve the 512GB capacity milestone in microSDXC, worldwide".

The release marks a watershed moment in mobile storage, as users are now able to outfit their smartphones with a storage capacity equal to (if not greater than) most laptop SSDs. The new card also meets the V10 video speed class standard, meaning that it's capable of recording and playing back 4K video with no issues.

This is worth noting, as although cloud storage has become mainstream in recent years, the continuing advancement of smartphone camera technology has let to users generating higher and higher quantities of data on a regular basis.

Integral's new microSD card will go on sale next month, and while the company currently hasn't released any pricing, it's all but guaranteed to fetch upwards of 200, as SanDisk's smaller card generally commands a price of around 220.

SSD shipments will continue to rise as the IT industry continues its adoption of 3D NAND Flash.

In the coming 12 months, research firm IDC expects the cost of SSDs to reduce considerably as NAND flash supply constraints diminish. This will lead to more manufacturers integrating SSDs into their devices - particularly PCs.

IDC thinks the worldwide SSD unit shipments to increase at a CAGR of 15% over the next five years, with adoption in the PC and consumer electronics devices market increase by a slightly higher 15.8% CAGR. In terms of what this means in monetary terms, IDC expects SSD-related revenues to reach $33.6 billion (£25.13 billion) in 2021, growing at a CAGR of 14.8%.

"SSDs continue on a path to become a more broadly used, ubiquitous storage technology across IT markets," said Jeff Janukowicz, research vice president, Solid State Drives and Enabling Technologies.

"SSDs play an important role in making the digital transformation possible, a dynamic that IDC expects will continue to propel the adoption of SSDs and underpins the secular growth of the SSD market for both the client and enterprise segments."

IDC also thinks higher-capacity SSDs will become available at more competitive price points, meaning we'll start to see manufacturers upping the storage of notebook and desktop PCs as well as in detachable tablets or 2-in-1 tablets such as the Microsoft Surface.

The enterprise market will also benefit, with lower SSD prices on a per-gigabit basis for servers, network storage arrays (all-flash arrays and hybrid flash arrays), and hyperscale cloud service provider datacenters.

Pure Storage has partnered with EMEA distie PNY Technologies to get its AI-friendly flash arrays into the hands of end-users.

Teaming up with PNY means Pure Storage can take advantage of the distributor's wide customer network and partnership with NVIDIA to offer end-users a powerful solution to run their computer workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning and science-based applications.

“Tapping into the established and experienced NVIDIA Partner Network, not only brings significant opportunity for customers, but also opens many new markets, sectors and application use cases to us," Ben Savage, Head of EMEA channel at Pure Storage added. "Its potential is significant – the technologies are truly complementary and we have big ambitions for what together, they will deliver.”

Pure Storage will offer its FlashBlade built-for AI and analytics platform through PNY Technologies to rectify many of the challenges associated with processing vast amounts of data on legacy storage solutions. The solution offers 8TB of usable storage, 75 GB/s read throughput, 25 GB/s write throughput on just half a rack.

“This partnership enables our customers to finally unleash the power of their compute capability," Jérôme Bélan, EMEA CEO at PNY Technologies said. "We are convinced at PNY that Pure Storage is bringing with FlashBlade a real breakthrough in the storage industry.

"We are excited to offer the combination of the high performance computing power of NVIDIA’s AI supercomputing platform with the speed, agility and efficiency of Pure Storage FlashBlade. We are set to super charge high performance computing environments of our customers.”

Knowing how to check RAM speed and size on your laptop or personal computer is a key part of optimizing your machine’s performance. However, not all users know how to do this, and often wrongly conflate memory and storage. 

RAM, or Random Access Memory, is a system's short-term memory, allowing a computer to store the temporary data it needs to perform everyday tasks, such as booting up. 

It is typically fitted to a computer's motherboard in the form of removable sticks, each having a maximum capacity set to multiples of 2GB (2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, etc). 

As such, it's a critical function for your computer that helps it to run smoothly.

However, it is also a sure-fire way to boost performance as it can be replaced or upgraded. Such a task requires some initial technical knowledge, but once learned it is one of the easiest upgrade tasks and can completed relatively quickly.

How to check RAM speed and size

RAM is essentially short-term memory and mainly handles quick but necessary tasks to reduce the processing burden on the CPU. It is often a limited capacity storage, such as 8GB for a smartphone or 16GB for laptops. Hence the larger the RAM size the better the overall performance as it can offer more computational support to the CPU.

You can upgrade your RAM size, though you will first need to know where it is on your machine. It is also recommended that you first check your RAM speed and the capacity of RAM that can be added to your machine's motherboard. It is slightly different on Apple and Windows-based products, but we have a full guide for all machines below.

On the About screen, you should see information on the device name, processor type, and speed, installed RAM, device, and product ID, whether it's running a 32-bit or 64-bit operating system, and some miscellaneous data.

If you're using Windows 11, you’ll notice that installed RAM shows two numbers. The first is the total amount of RAM installed on the system, and the second shows ‘usable’ RAM, which indicates how much RAM your apps and processes can utilize at any given time.

This latter number will always be slightly lower, as it accounts for some capacity that's always reserved for critical Windows processes.

Given the way it interacts with the system, it’s most efficient to install RAM in multiples of four. That means your total installed RAM should show as 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, and so on. Some older machines may have 2GB of RAM but given that Windows 11's system requirements suggest at least 4GB to run efficiently, you’ll find that machines come with at least that amount these days.

If you have a number displayed that’s not a multiple of four (for example, 6GB), it’s possible that a RAM stick has failed or is not installed correctly. For example, having an installed RAM of 12GB could indicate that of your four sticks of 4GB of RAM, one has failed.

It's a slightly easier process on Mac, with the added bonus of Apple providing additional information on the type of RAM that's installed too. Once you have your pop-up window, you should be able to see the RAM's size, its speed (the technical term is 'frequency'), and type, in that order.

What RAM should I buy?

Now that you've learned how to check RAM speed and size and establish how much you’re using, it’s good to explore your uses of this memory a little more, and understand how much is needed in other use cases. 

Most users can typically get away with 4GB of RAM, providing all they plan on using their PC for is standard office activities, such as running productivity software, web browsers, or a collaboration platform such as Microsoft Teams. 

However, if you find that you already have this amount of RAM and your device performance isn’t up to scratch, it could mean that the issue doesn't lie with how much RAM you have. In this instance, it might be worth carrying out a triage.

If you work in an industry that needs to use more demanding programs, you’re probably going to need more RAM to get the job done. Engineers might use programs like computer-aided design (CAD) software while videographers might go for editing suites like the Adobe Creative Cloud apps. 

For these workloads, and others like programming, your PC is going to need around 8GB of RAM, but it’s recommended to get at least 16GB or 32GB. This doesn’t stop you from installing more RAM and going even higher, but this will depend on the RAM capacity of your motherboard. Some desktop users running 64-bit versions of Windows will find they’re able to install a huge 6TB of RAM.

It’s a good idea to search for a little more information on this before heading out to make your purchase. A great source for collecting this data is CPUID’s free CPU-Z utility. Simply download and install it on your device, get it up and running, and then head to the Memory tab.

Don’t get swamped by the amount of information in this tab, as most of it isn’t relevant for what you’re looking for. Instead, focus on:

• The type of memory your motherboard uses. This will usually be displayed using DDR
• Your motherboard’s memory frequency, which can be referred to as the RAM speed
• How many memory slots are found on your motherboard. Usually it will be two, but you might find it will have one or, sometimes, four

RAM frequency and RAM type

Although it’s advisable (especially for inexperienced buyers), you don’t necessarily need to stick to the specifications of the RAM already installed on the system – you can shop around as much as you want so long as your motherboard supports it. Motherboards generally support a variety of RAM frequencies and you may find what’s installed is the lowest end of this range.

It's important to note that the exact frequency of the RAM doesn't really matter here, only that your motherboard supports it. RAM frequencies don't operate in the same way as, say, a CPU, so higher numbers don't necessarily mean massive performance boosts. You may be tempted to upgrade your existing 2,400 MHz RAM to something that's listed as 3,600 MHz, but there's very little point.

The type of RAM, on the other hand, absolutely does matter, as motherboards are generally far more restrictive in this regard. It's common to see DDR3, DDR4, and DDR5 RAM types listed online, with each number representing a newer generation of architecture. 

It's important to check the specs of your motherboard, as support for multiple RAM types, or support for the latest generation of RAM, isn't always common and usually comes at a premium.

Tips for buying RAM

Make sure you have space: Before you do anything, it's important you check that your system allows for RAM expandability. While most modern PCs and laptops will have an extra slot for adding in more memory, some older machines might not. The same is true for unusual form factors, as in some devices – such as convertible 2-in-1 devices – the RAM is probably glued to the motherboard, in which case, you’re stuck with it.

Be wary of MacBooks: Many models of MacBook are the same in that they do not offer upgradeable RAM. iMacs are similarly strict with RAM upgrades and Apple forces buyers to select it in the initial configuration. With the newer Apple silicon chips, memory is baked into the chip itself and thus cannot be upgraded at a later date. Integrated RAM is also increasingly seen on Windows-based PCs, so these will need to be checked as well before embarking on a RAM spending spree.

Keep things consistent: If you’re using more than one slot, put identical RAM sticks in every slot. That means that unless you're 100% sure what you’re doing, don’t be tempted to buy a single stick of RAM to sit alongside another of a smaller size. This can actually leave you with a less stable computer than you started with and you won't enjoy the speed benefits of a faster RAM. It really is worth investing in a matching pair of identical chips – same speed, same RAM, same brand. This is one of those jobs that is worth doing well. We’d also recommend a top brand like Samsung, Crucial or Kingston, bought from a reputable supplier rather than a no-name brand bought from an online marketplace.

Avoid used RAM: We’d always recommend getting it new, unless it has a cast-iron guarantee, as RAM chips are pretty fragile. Simply touching them at the wrong moment can fry them, and their golden connector pins can be easily damaged with repeated installs.

Check for CAS values if relevant: CAS Latency, often listed as CL or CAS, is a measure of latency, which in simple terms means the time the memory has to wait to deliver data to the CPU. While this won't be too important unless you're building a high-spec PC, it's worth noting that the lower the CAS value, the faster the latency.

Keep it cool: Heat spreaders, too, are worth looking out for. While unlikely to offer a major performance boost to your machine, having this feature can help to reduce how hot the memory get which should prolong the life of your RAM.

Handle RAM with care: RAM is fragile stuff and needs to be handled with the best possible care. That’s why getting it right the first time is so important – retailers are often reticent about taking back RAM, as once it’s been out of the protective bag, it can break if mishandled even slightly.

The good news is, RAM upgrades can bring a lagging computer back to life, and even make a cheap, low-spec computer feel more top-shelf. It’s easy to fit, and you should feel a difference in responsiveness the very next time you turn it on.

Last month, Scott Dietzen, CEO at All Flash storage vendor Pure Storage, took to the stage at the company's annual Accellerate event in San Francisco to unveil a series of product updates geared towards supporting the next generation of computing, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine and deep learning, and real-time data stream analytics.

He told attendees that the firm's All Flash portfolio would provide the platform for delivering data across these increasingly complex workloads and applications.

Positioning All Flash as the storage platform for future high-end applications has some weight – particularly as many workloads can't be easily moved to an environment like public cloud, as they need to be close to where the data is generated.

"If you're going to do IoT stuff properly, you can't afford the roundtrip latency to the cloud," explains Softcat solutions director, Sam Routledge.

The All-Flash market is also showing healthy growth; while sales of other external storage types like disk and hybrid systems have fallen, analysts at the Dell'Oro Group estimate the All Flash Array market was worth $1.3 billion in Q1 17, representing a 48% bump over the same quarter in 2016. It says it expects the All Flash Array market to grow nearly 40%, achieving nearly $7 billion in sales in 2017.

There's also more choice for channel partners than ever before. Once dominated by start-ups like Pure, more legacy vendors are building out their All Flash portfolios. Indeed, the top two manufacturers by market share are currently Dell EMC and NetApp.

"Flash is the mainstream choice for new on-premises deployments as customers seek to lower total cost of ownership while gaining greater speed and responsiveness from key business applications," said NetApp's CEO, George Kurian.

Discounting many of the high-end applications, the cost of flash technologies has also fallen in the last couple of years, meaning it's now a viable option for more companies.

"Any organisation that's buying into storage of any size is going to buy at the very least a hybrid array, but it's probably All Flash these days," says Routledge. "The true cost differential – when you factor in the compression and the deduplication that squashes the data down so you can get more data on [the storage medium], which you can do on Flash but you can't do as efficiently on spinning disk – it probably comes out equal. Taking storage as a bottleneck off the table, it's probably worthwhile."

So how can the channel grab a slice of this burgeoning market? This latest generation of arrays are comparatively easy to install and maintain, which means there's very little traditional service revenues for the VAR. This means channel firms must look to alternative sources of revenue around the sale.

"It also gives the partner the opportunity to make more margin, selling high value services rather than feeds and speeds," says Alex McMullan, Pure's VP EMEA field CTO. "Whether that's consulting services, migration, genomics, so it elevates the partner's conversation from IT to business outcomes."

"A few years ago, it would be four or five days to install, now it takes you longer to get it out of the box than to get it up and running," says Bill McGloin, chief technologist - information, at Computacenter. "The obvious observation would be that it would be bad for us, but we don't look to make any kind of service revenue, it's all the application services, migration services that you wrap round that, that's where the revenue is.

"It will be interesting to see how that resonates in the UK market."

Flash storage, once considered an expensive alternative to traditional storage solutions like HDDs, has taken centre stage in recent years as lowered prices have made it more accessible.

Flash storage is, simply put, a data storage technology found in computers, smartphones, tablets, cameras, and all-flash arrays that uses flash memory.

With microsecond latency and the ability to keep data without a power source, flash storage is fast and reliable. It’s also versatile, with solutions that can work for both average consumers and enterprises.

How does flash memory work?

Flash memory is made from solid state chips. They have transistors connected to each other so they function like a NAND logic gate. Flash memory is non-volatile; this means it can preserve data even with the power off. Data is stored using a charge much like a capacitor representing a bit. These are inside surface-mounted chips connected to a printed circuit board.

When flash memory is erased, it's done so in entire blocks rather than individual bits. The drawback of this is that it's slower than RAM and will also wear out faster than it. But flash memory now lasts longer thanks to software techniques such as wear levelling (this arranges data across these blocks so that erasing and rewriting doesn't wear out a single block prematurely).

What are the benefits of flash storage?

Flash memory, unlike traditional hard drives, doesn’t have any moving parts. This makes it more durable and ideal for use in more rugged or easily dropped devices, like a mobile phone. Since a high capacity of storage can be packed in smaller units, flash memory can be stored in compact, lightweight forms like USB drives and camera memory cards.

Flash is also faster than a normal hard drive, with high transferring speeds and the ability to boot up an operating system far more quickly.

Different types of flash storage

Flash storage comes in two architectures: NOR and NAND.

NOR is best known for providing high-speed random data access by connecting memory cells in parallel. James Bore, managing director of tech and security consultancy Bores Group, says this method allows the system to access every cell individually.

Consequently, it’s ideal for computing scenarios where the user needs to access small datasets quickly, like configuration files and executable code. NOR is commonly used in the firmware and bootloaders of embedded technologies like wearables and other small connected devices.

NOR is one of the oldest types of flash storage, tracing its origins back to the early 1980s. Japanese engineer Fujio Masuoka invented NOR in 1984 while working for Toshiba. But it wasn’t until the end of this decade that the technology was commercialized, with Intel launching the world’s first NOR chip in 1988.

NAND is another well-known type of non-volatile memory. It was created by Masuoka in 1987, three years after he invented NOR storage. Brought to market by Toshiba the same year as its creation, NAND works by linking memory cells in a sequence. This makes NAND ideal for storing large datasets. However, as pointed out by Bore, its random data access speeds are slower than NOR.

Because NAND is optimized for high-density storage and is generally considered more cost-effective than NOR, Bore says it’s used in “almost all consumer flash storage devices” found on the market today. These include smartphones, tablets, computers, MP3 players, digital cameras, USB sticks, microSD cards, SSDs, and more.

NAND storage can vary based on the number of bits stored in cells, with the cell acting as a “single transistor”, according to Bore. The main types of NAND storage are single-, multi-, triple--, and quad-level cells. Bore adds that “various voltage levels” are used for storing these bits, pointing out that triple-level cell NAND storage stores three bits but has eight charging levels.

Each type of NAND storage has different performance, endurance, and cost benefits. Generally speaking, the more bits per cell NAND storage has, the greater storage density and affordability it’ll offer. The tradeoffs, though, are reliability and endurance. These factors can affect the use case of the different NAND storage types.

For example, single-level cell NAND storage stores a single bit and offers high endurance, making it suitable for industrial and enterprise applications. But it can be costly. On the other end of the scale, quad-level NAND storage will store four bits in a cell for high-density storage. Its use cases include consumer electronics, data analytics, AI, cloud computing, data archiving, and more. However, it’s not as durable as single-bit NAND storage and therefore wouldn’t be as suitable for some industrial and enterprise environments.

While NAND storage already comes in many different forms, this space is fast-evolving. Penta-level cells are already in development, and Bore says some people in the industry are already talking about the next big thing: hexa-level cells. Another recent development is 3D NAND, which increases the density of flash storage even further by stacking several layers of cells vertically.

All flash versus hybrid

Two common types of storage solutions are all-flash arrays and hybrid flash arrays. But what do they do, and how do they differ?

An all-flash array (AFA) does exactly what it says on the tin: it only contains flash storage, which comes in the form of a solid-state drive (SSD). Compared to traditional hard drives, AFA storage can access data faster, consumes less power, boosts the performance of applications, and lowers latency. Its use cases range from cloud and high-performance computing to data analytics and video editing.

On the other hand, hybrid flash storage uses both SSDs and hard disk drives (HDDs). They’re perfect for those who want a more powerful alternative to traditional HDDs but don’t have the budget for a costly AFA system. Describing hybrid flash as “more cost-effective” than AFA, Bore says they use flash “as a cache to store the most frequently-accessed data”.

What is NVMe?

Non-volatile memory express (NVMe), is a storage access and transport protocol developed specifically for flash storage. It succeeds SATA and SAS protocols, designed for HDDs, and uses the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) physical interface to enable high-speed data transfers between storage devices and computers. In addition to higher performance, NVMe offers lower latency than SATA and SAS.

What are the disadvantages of flash storage?

Despite these benefits, there are still several drawbacks to this storage system you’ll need to consider when weighing your options.

Flash has a limited number of rewrite-erase cycles before individual blocks can no longer be used. The cells will wear out after 10,000-one million erasings. Reading disturbs nearby cells and hence it can not read the same cell too many times, and in some cases you may need a special version of a programme to protect the drive from wearing out prematurely.

Is flash storage getting cheaper?

Flash storage is more expensive than a normal hard drive because it's still a relatively new technology. The spinning platters of metal the make up a traditional hard drive, on the other hand, have been around for decades, allowing the technology to mature and become cheaper as manufacturing processes are finessed.

Although flash storage had been getting cheaper over the years, prices have recently spiked due to surging demand for all-flash arrays in data centers. In April, Tom's Guide reported that flash drives rose between 126-251% year on year, in a surge running roughly parallel to rising RAM prices.

This isn't the first time flash storage prices have fluctuated due to changing market conditions. During the COVID pandemic, when many factories around the world closed to comply with lockdown rules, flash storage manufacturers struggled to access the materials needed for creating flash drives. Shipping was also delayed in this period. Consequently, the cost of flash drives increased by 30%.

NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) has taken a swipe at its main Flash storage rivals during its annual Partner Executive Forum.

The event last week in Lisbon – which was football-themed – saw Matt Watts, NetApp’s EMEA director of technology and strategy, tell partners that competitor EMC’s products aren’t “a bad set of players but they don’t know how to make them work as a team.”

Watts (pictured) described EMC’s XtremIO Flash storage as “losing traction” and having “some very significant architectural limitations”, before moving onto the vendor’s midrange storage platform EMC Unity.

“If you’re building a Flash array from the ground up, like what they have done, what would be the one feature that would be top of your list when you’re using Flash, which is the most expensive medium you can buy? It would be deduplication. And what’s the one feature it doesn’t have, and have no plans to have? Deduplication. So they clearly seem to be confused as to where they’re taking their products at the moment.”

Moving on to criticise Flash players at the other end of the market, Watts claimed Pure Storage “feels like they’ve got one really, really, really good player, and now everyone’s worked out what his style is and unfortunately one player doesn’t make a team. People want more than that. People want solutions.”

Meanwhile, NetAPP’s VP for EMEA, Gos Hein van de Wouw, indicated that Pure will struggle with the cost of continuing growing its business outside the US. “The financial [investment] has gone and they’ve realised they are just a niche player,” he said.

For its part, NetApp says its All-Flash array business has grown to an annual net revenue run rate of more than $700m.

Latest IDC figures report NetApp’s All Flash Array revenue grew 238.2 percent year over year, 2.7 times faster than the market growth of 87.4 percent year over year. The analyst also says NetApp is now the number two Flash player worldwide, behind EMC.

“I don’t think we’ve ever been in a better position in the products we have, but we’ve also never been in a better position when it comes to the competitive landscape,” said Watts.

Founder of analyst firm Quocirca, Clive Longbottom, agrees that the remainder of 2016 and 2017 will see the death of some All-Flash players “as the incumbents finally get their acts together”. However he believes “Pure has kept up a degree of momentum, and has probably managed to reach critical mass to survive.”

He comments: “Violin has pretty much self-imploded, and will struggle to survive beyond the end of the year. Kaminario, Nimble and others have a lot of work to do in ensuring that their messages resonate fully with the market and to cross the chasm to being of the right critical mass to survive longer term.”

However, the analyst issued a warning to NetApp regarding the vendor’s positioning in object-based storage.

“Although NetApp has an object-based storage appliance, it is not in a position to compete with the up and coming or incumbent object storage vendors, such as HDS, DDN, Scality, HGST, and so on – and object is the fastest growing segment – although starting from a very small base – of the market,” he says.

“So while NetApp seems to be in a far better position than it has been for some time, it still faces its own challenges – especially in a landscape where every Flash vendor is clamouring for a bigger piece of the pie.”

NetApp: “We’ve got our mojo back”

NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) last week sent a message to its channel partners: “We have our mojo back in Flash.”

The storage vendor admits it is coming off the back of a “difficult” twelve months; it saw the departure last June of CEO Tom Georgens, as well as a number of high-profile execs in the following months, leading to a restructure at the top of the organisation and a new leadership team put in place.

Speaking to NetApp’s top European partners at its Partner Executive Forum in Lisbon last week, the firm’s new EVP worldwide field and customer operations, Henri Richard (pictured), admitted: “It’s been a difficult year, a challenging year. IT spending is under pressure, and NetApp was not immune to that reality,” he said, pointing to a decline in revenues to $5.5bn.

However he maintained NetApp is “still a solid company and an incredible brand”, adding “We have a momentum exiting FY16 that’s not reflected in these numbers.”

Richard claimed he is optimistic about NetApp’s potential to return to profitability – a claim buoyed by new data just released by IDC that has the vendor gaining impressive traction in the competitive Flash storage market. The analyst reports that NetApp is second only to EMC worldwide, and currently holds the number one spot in EMEA.

While the figures don’t yet take into account NetApp’s acquisition earlier this year of All-Flash array vendor SolidFire, the firm says its All Flash FAS (AFF) 8000 series, launched in June 2015, is the fastest growing product in NetApp’s history. Further, the purchase of SolidFire means NetApp can tap into the firm’s historic relationship with service providers, and expand the business into the new lucrative hunting ground.

Pointing to the IDC numbers, Richard said: “NetApp has got its mojo back in Flash...It’s quite a turnaround for a company from a couple of years ago, when I know some of the partners were questioning it from a Flash strategy standpoint.”

Gaining market share, he said, is “the only measure of success,” adding “It’s important because, frankly, it’s been a while since NetApp gained share.”

Partner priorities

Of NetApp’s $5.5bn revenue, 81.5 percent goes through channel partners, more than $4bn. Richard said he had directed his team that NetApp should have a “partner-first mentality”.

Richard went on to outline NetApp’s go-to-market priorities for FY17, which revolves around partners selling the vendor’s entire portfolio. “We have a lot of small competitors that have more of a niche product than anything else, and eventually it becomes complicated for their customers to manage a lot of small point product solutions,” he said.

The exec also said NetApp wanted to improve CRM integration, forecasting and planning as well as being more responsive to partners.

Logicalis’ chief digital officer for Europe, Chris Gabriel, attended the event and agrees that NetApp appears to be on the up once more. “Two years ago you may think we would be writing NetApp’s epitaph by now. This shows you should never count a person out too quickly,” he told Channel Pro.

“The execs seemed confident, they were open, they were looking forward, and they were buoyed by good market numbers coming out from the analysts. In my view, they are at the forefront of the third platform opportunity, and have some genuinely differentiated product, so for them and us this isn’t a time to look back at what could have been but to what could be.”

Other industry watchers remain slightly more cautious. “The change of CEO was much needed – the new focus that George [Kurian, Georgens’ successor as CEO] seems to be bringing in looks like it is having a positive impact,” commented Clive Longbottom, founder of analyst firm Quocirca. However, he warned that Kurian himself can’t imagine a turnaround until 2018. “Whether investors and Wall Street will wait that long remains to be seen.”

He added: “NetApp seems safe for the moment – but in a rapidly changing market, it will have to recreate the early days of the company where it was a major game changer, making EMC more honest and responsive to its customers and being innovative and fast in the market.”

Richard however, remains optimistic regarding NetApp’s future: “Frankly many partners have told me, that for a while at the water cooler, NetApp was not being the new shiny thing that people were talking about in the enterprise. Shame on us. We’re going to change that. I’m going to make sure we get this edge back on our brand.

“It’s one of the better brands in the industry, we just need to give it back its shine,” he said.

NetApp takes a swing at Flash rivals

Flash storage vendor Tegile Systems has downplayed any potential threat to its business following the addition of an All-Flash array to Nimble Storage’s hybrid Flash line-up.

Until recently, Tegile was the only player in the space that offered both hybrid and All-Flash systems. However Tegile’s VP of EMEA, Paul Silver, says the vendor still has a number of features in its kitbag that differentiates it from the competition – in particular multi-protocol support across its range of products, which includes block and file, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, as well as NFS, CIFS & SMB 3.0.

“Flexibility is the message,” says Silver. “Those other guys only support block-based protocol and when you choose one of them, that’s what you stay with; you cannot change that. With us, it’s infinitely variable, and you can do so any time.”

“The difference between us and a Nimble [is] we can offer everything from an entry level system, all the way to large Flash systems, and scaling Flash up or down, based on the customers’ workload,” adds Tegile CEO, Rohit Kshetrapal, referring to Tegile’s All-Flash, hybrid and multi-level Flash system, Intelliflash HD.

“Channel partners can talk about hybrid, about All-Flash, about very large capacity All-Flash systems or any combination; we can protect them in the future because we know we can expand the hybrid or Flash capacity independently on the same array, and we can adopt future protocols should the client want to go that way. The end user isn’t boxed into a corner,” says Silver.

Channel partners

There’s apparently no love lost between the next generation storage rivals, with a 2015 Tegile blog going so far as to accuse Nimble of using “playground” tactics to win deals.

Tegile has 40 channel partners in the UK, of which 10 are ‘tier one’ partners that lead with the vendor in sales.

“This is not an over-distributed product,” says Silver. “We’re limiting the amount of people that are selling it rather than adopting a scorched earth policy of signing up everybody. That means there’s opportunity for everyone.”

Choice has always been a big feature of Infortrend's EonStor storage arrays and the latest DS 4000 Series has it by the bucketful. These use hybrid controllers supporting four host board options allowing you to choose from 10GbE iSCSI, 8/16Gbps FC, 10GbE FCoE and 12Gbps SAS-3.

The new modular controllers include dual 1GbE iSCSI ports and have room for two host boards. There's more as the controller's 2.2GHz Xeon D-1500 SoC supports DDR4 cache, the standard 8GB can be boosted to a whopping 256GB and it's protected by a fast-charging capacitor.

Snapshots, volume copies and volume mirrors are included in the price while optional data tiering supports up to four storage tiers where hot data is kept at the top for the best performance. Remote replication is also an option as is the new SSD cache feature which uses up to four SSDs per controller to accelerate random read access.

On test is the DS4024RUCB 24-bay model which Infortrend supplied with a full house of 200GB Toshiba SAS-3 eMLC SSDs along. There are dual controllers, each with four 16Gbps FC ports. Expansion potential is staggering as the controllers have dual SAS-3 ports and support up to 444 drives using Infortrend's 16, 24 and 60-bay disk shelves.

Controllers and MPIO

In dual controller arrays, both are active and all host ports are available. However, if you use them for creating redundant links over multi-path I/O (MPIO) links, the path to the secondary controller functions as a standby link and its bandwidth is not aggregated with the primary link.

When you create a logical drive, you assign either controller A or B as its primary one. Essentially, the port on the secondary controller only comes into play if the primary port fails.

This gives you more choice as you can create multiple virtual volumes and use either controller as their primary link. It's also possible to create aggregated MPIO links simply by mapping volumes to multiple ports on the same controller.

For Windows Server 2012 R2, avoid Infortrend's EonPath software and only use Microsoft's DSM for MPIO links. The muddled and outdated user manual fails to mention this and we found that EonPath doesn't provide options to choose MPIO policies such as round robin or weighted paths.

Easy storage provisioning

Deployment is a piece of cake as we used the array's RAIDWatch web console to create two RAID6 logical drives each with 12 SSDs and assigned one to Controller A and the other to B. Within the drives, we created partitions of varying sizes and mapped them to selected FC ports.

Drives are placed in logical volumes with an appropriate RAID level assigned

RAIDWatch only provides basic access to storage services so you'll need to use the SANWatch app to manage snapshots, volume copies, replication and data tiering. Its interface is very similar to the RAIDWatch console so it's easy to use and its home page provides a useful array of performance graphs.

Partition snapshots can be scheduled regularly - as often as every 5 minutes

The price includes a standard snapshot license supporting 64 per volume and 128 per system which can be taken manually or scheduled as often as every 5 minutes. Rollback is fast as we recovered deleted data from a partition in 30 seconds although it did have to be unmapped first.

SSD caches and tiering

As our review system was fully populated by SSDs there was nothing to be gained from the SSD cache feature. For arrays using standard hard disks, you install SSDs in the head unit only and place them in the cache after which the array automatically moves frequently accessed data to them.

For data tiering, you have a 2-tier license costing a one-off fee of 1,899 with a 4-tier license increasing this to 2,999. To use it, you create separate logical drives, enable tiering and assign each a priority from 0 to 3 where Tier 0 would comprise fast SSDs.

Sadly, data tiering doesn't occur in real-time so you must run on-demand or scheduled migration jobs from SANWatch. Scheduled jobs can be run as often as once a day and move blocks to the appropriate tier based on usage.

Different drives can be placed in up to four tiers based on their performance and capacity

Stratospheric performance

To test Infortrend's bold performance claims, we used four Xeon E5-2600 servers running Windows Server 2012 R2 and all equipped with Emulex LightPulse dual-port 16Gbps FC adapters.

We created four partitions and mapped each one to two ports on the same controller so we could create 32Gbps MPIO links. Using Iometer, we recorded around 2,560MB/sec for sequential reads on each server giving us a cumulative 10,240MB/sec not far off the claimed 11,000MB/sec.

We found Infortrend a tad pessimistic on its write speeds as instead of the claimed 5,500MB/sec, we saw a much higher cumulative speed of 7,700MB/sec. General I/O performance was remarkable when using small 4KB transfer requests in Iometer, our four servers generated an incredible 1 million IOPS for sequential reads and 526,000 IOPS for writes.

During our lab tests we recorded over 10,000MB/sec for Iometer sequential read operations

Conclusions

The hybrid controllers in the new EonStor DS4024RUCB make it one of the most flexible storage arrays we've yet seen. It packs in an impressive range of features for the price and has huge expansion potential while performance for all-flash arrays is simply stunning.

Verdict

Its fine blend of features and amazing all-flash performance makes this storage array a top value choice for storage hungry businesses

Chassis: 2U rack

Storage: 24 x SAS-3 SFF hot-swap drive bays

Power: 2 x 530W hot-plug PSUs with cooling fans

Two hot-swap controllers each with the following:

CPU: 2.2GHz Intel Xeon D-1500 SoC

Memory: 8GB DDR4 cache (max 256GB) with capacitor

Array support: RAID0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50, 60, JBOD, global hot-spare

Host interfaces: 2 x 1GbE iSCSI, 2 x host board slots

Network: 1GbE management port

Expansion: 2 x 12Gbps SAS

Management: RAIDWatch, SANWatch

Options: Dual 16Gbps FC board, £977; dual 10GbE SFP+ iSCSI board, £390; SSD Cache license, £1,499 (all ex VAT)