Western Digital presents industrial- and automotive-grade memory cards-- the SanDisk Industrial and SanDisk Automotive, aimed at specialised applications.

Aimed at industrial scenarios such as surveillance cameras, drones, factory automation and networking equipment, the Industrial and Automotive SD and microSD cards withstand temperatures ranging from -40- to 85-degrees Celsius. They also offer fast sequential read and write speeds of 50/80MB/s to handle high bit-rate video streaming applications.

Maxta presents means for customers to migrate virtual machines from VMware ESXi to Red Hat Virtualisation, and to run both hypervisors on the fully-supported yet truly open source Maxta virtualisation solution.

The result, the company says, helps organisations reduce (or outright eliminate) the "VMware tax" through the choice of a hypervisor that best fits the needs of an application. Maxta hyperconvergence software promises to eliminate the lock-in of server hardware or hypervisors, while facilitating movement to open source virtualisation.

After all, while hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions should simplify IT management through the convergence of separate compute, storage and networking tiers into a single system, man such solutions lock customers into specific hardware or hypervisors. Through its solution, Maxta claims, customers can use any brand of standard x86 server and different hypervisors, bringing about an upper hand in negotiations with server or virtualisation vendors.

Western Digital buys further into solid state storage technology with Tegile Systems, maker of hybrid flash storage arrays for virtualised server and virtual desktop environments.

Financial details of the deals have not been disclosed.

Founded in 2012, Teile is best known for IntelliFlash, a comprehensive storage platform able to deliver storage at flash memory speeds. It also brings WD a list of 1700 customers, as well as an expanded product portfolio for its Data Centre Systems (DCS) unit.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) research reveals IT teams are putting their infrastructures-- and businesses-- at risk by not profiling application workloads and testing storage systems before purchase and deployment.

The study is co-sponsored by Virtual Instruments, and involves 412 IT professionals. It shows 59% of respondents do not profile workloads before buying a storage system, while 44% do not trust the advice of either storage vendors or VARs regarding the right solution. Such a situation can at best lead to over-provisioning and wasted spending, and at worst to new storage solutions unable to keep up with business requirements.

Making such lack of insight even worse is a failure to gauge the performance of a storage solution before it is put to work. Only 29% of companies conduct on-premises load testing before buying their next storage system, and another 11% would work with vendors or partners to conduct load testing before deciding on a purchase.