In what one might describe as attempts at staunching brain drain EMC sues a former salesman with accusations of taking sensitive information to his new employer, rival storage vendor Pure Storage.

According to the suit, among the documents taken by ex-employee Chadwick Johnson is a spreadsheet containing 93000 entries of "names, purchase histories, deal values, and other highly specific, confidential, and critical information about EMC customers." Further files include an "EMC Competitive Selling Guide” explaining “EMC’s strategy for selling its XtremIO flash storage product against Pure Storage’s FA Series products,” a document detailing customer-partner relationships, and another detailing “extensive data and analysis regarding EMC’s strategy for leveraging customer and partner relationships.”

HGST starts shipping the 2nd generation of MegaScale drives-- the MegaScale DC 4000.B, a 3.5-inch 6Gb/s SATA HDD ideal for low-workload applications within hyperscale environments.

According to the company the drive balances the power, capacity, performance and reliability requirements for the bulk storage of unstructured or big data, disk-to-disk backup, online archives or long-term data retention. 

CoolSpin performance allows the DC 4000.B to operate 24/7 within 180TB per year environments. It is rated at 800K MTBF, with 1 in 1014 non-recoverable bit error rate and 300K load/unload cycles.  Read more...

Conventional NAND flash manufacturing is soon to reach the limit IHS reports-- leading to 65.2% of NAND memory produced in 2017 being made using 3D manufacturing processes, up from the 1% of 2013.

According to the analyst 3D technology will account for 5.2% of the flash produced in 2014 before growing to 30.2% in 2015 and 49.8% by 2016.

“There’s widespread agreement that just one or two generations may be left before NAND flash made using conventional planar semiconductor technology reaches its theoretical limit,” IHS says. “As lithographies shrink further, performance and reliability may become too degraded for NAND to be used in anything but the very lowest-cost consumer products. Because NAND suppliers are compelled to continue building products with higher densities and lower prices, they will migrate to 3D manufacturing quickly in the coming years.”

Skyera proposes a new means to decide how enterprise-appropriate solid-state storage options actually are-- Size, Weight and Power, Performance, Plug-and-Play and Price, aka SWaP4. 

Based on the US military formula for the reduction of size, weight and power (SWaP), the Skyera proposal claims to deliver a "reliable" means of determining the most ideal flash solution fits a particular application. 

SWaP4 evaluates storage purchasing criteria on multiple factors (operating cost drivers, performance requirements, ease of deployment, acquisition costs) instead of just the one a vendor may decide to emphasise, allowing customers to make apples-to-apples comparisons of various solutions.  Read more...