Following months of dispute Western Digital and Toshiba finally kiss and make up through an agreement to "strengthen and extend their relationship"-- specifically through a joint investment in the Fab 6 facility in Yokkaichi, Japan.

The legal dispute came about a year ago, after Toshiba decided to put its prized memory business (the Toshiba Memory Corporation, aka TMC) on sale following massive losses suffered by its nuclear power subsidiary. WD objected to the sale, claiming its consent was required due to its May 2016 acquisition of SanDisk, which included half of the Toshiba-SanDisk partnerships in NAND flash memory manufacture.

May 2017 saw WD start legal arbitration proceedings against Toshiba. In turn Toshiba filed a lawsuit against WD in Japanese courts, claiming unfair competition and mishandling of trade secrets. The situation between the two companies only got more bitter from that point, making things worse for a Toshiba eager for the capital the sale of TMC would bring.

Toshiba announces the MG07ACA series-- the first 14TB conventional magnetic recording (CMR) HDDs from the company based on a 9-disk helium-sealed design, aimed at cloud-scale and enterprise storage applications.

The MG07ACA comes in 14TB 9-disk and 12TB 8-disk models. According to the company, the helium-sealed 3.5-inch mechanical design allows for better storage density and a lower HDD operating power profile than the previous MG06ACA series. Laser welding technology ensures the helium remains sealed inside the enclosure.

Connectivity comes through SATA 6Gbit/s, while access performance reaches 7200RPM. The 9-disk 14TB models achieve a 40% increase in maximum capacity over previous MG06ACA 10TB models, as well as a power efficiency improvement of over 50%.

Israeli storage startup StorONE claims to re-invent the storage stack with TRU (Total Resource Utilisation)-- a storage array controller able to provide file, block and object storage on the same drives.

TRU supports all kinds of drives (namely NVMe, SAS, SATA, SSDs and HDDs) on the same server, together with all storage protocols (block, file and object). It can provide 650000 random read 4K IOPS and effectively unlimited snapshots, and scales up to 18Gb/sec of throughput and 15PB capacity.

StorONE claims a single HDD JBOD can provide 5Gbps with high capacity utilisation, while a single virtual appliance with low resources and just 4 SSDs can reach performance comparable to a midrange storage solution. Customers can install TRU storage as a physical server or virtual appliance, and it runs on any white label hardware, vendor hardware or hyper-converged infrastructure.

The IBM all-flash storage hardware and software portfolio gets an update, with an upgrade to 3D TLC flash bringing improvements across all products in making the FlashCore line.

The transition to 3D TLC flash promises to lower both CAPEX and OPEX costs, drive systems and datacentre ROI, as well as increase storage density through the addition of hardware-accelerated inline data compression. This move is seen in the FlashSystem 900, which is used in the FlashSystem V9000 and A9000.

The updated FlashSystem V9000 offers scale-up and scale-out options, allowing improved efficiency while delivering enterprise-class data services. Meanwhile the A9000 and A9000R provide enhanced HyperScale capabilities and easier integration with existing XIV systems.