HPE announces what it claims are the "most significant set of 3PAR storage innovations to date"-- including a next generation 3PAR Operating System (3PAR OS 3.3.1) acting as a "futureproof foundation" for hybrid IT.

According to the company, the 3PAR OS 3.3.1 features Adaptive Data Reduction (ADR) for comprehensive data compaction to lower capacity costs, updated 3PAR Peer Persistence enabling disaster recovery across greater distances, off-premises copy management with HPE Recovery Manager Central (RMC) and expanded automation capabilities for the 3PAR StoreServ Management Console (SSMC).

In addition, it provides a "seamless path" to emerging technologies such as storage class memory (SCM) and NVM Express (NVMe), while handling the requirements of "third wave" flash evolution that pure-play all-flash systems cannot. These include support for cloud-native applications, datacentre-wide orchestration and tier-1 resiliency.

Toshiba claims to "bridge the value gap" between top-end enterprise and entry-level desktop HDDs with the MN series, a storage line featuring 7200RPM performance and up to 8TB capacity.

The MN series comes in a 3.5-inch form factor, and is ideal mid- and entry-level NAS enclosures, remote-office backups, archival storage and home multimedia data archives. Connectivity comes through 6Gbits/s SATA interface, while performance specs include 7200RPM speed, 1 million hour MTTF rating and a rated annual workload of 180TB transferred.

The company adds the drives are designed for 24/7 operation, with rotational vibration compensation technology providing consistent performance in tower and low-density style multi-drive enclosures such as small NAS platforms.

VoltDB launches an upgrade of the in-memory SQL database sharing its name-- VoltDB 7.0, a version customers can deploy either on-premise or in-cloud.

Described by the company as the world's fastest in-memory SPL database, VoltDB 7.0 powers apps managing large amounts of data generated from a variety of sources. It offers powerful multi-site/cluster, multi-version cross-datacentre replication (XDCR) to lower application latency and improve availability and disaster recovery across multiple datacentres, as well as enhanced real-time analytics and streaming data support.

Also included is support for continuous queries over high-velocity event streams, including AWS Kinesis stream ingestion and export, and includes a Confluent-certified Kafka Connect utility.

IBM announces an all-flash refresh of the DS8880 storage array series-- one denoted by the addition of an F suffix aimed at mid- and high-end customers with strict uptime requirements.

The expanded series includes 3 arrays, the DS8884F, DS8886F and DS8888F. All are based on the IBM Power Systems server and use PCIe 3.0 connectivity, even if they lack the latest NVMe protocol. The company claims also the arrays offer "six nines availability," or continuous operation 99.9999% of the time.

The business-class DS8884F scales from 6.4 to 154 TB of flash capacity, and comes with 256GB DRAM cache and 32 fibre channel and FICON ports. The enterprise-class DS8886F scales from 6.4 to 614 TB of flash capacity, and is configured with 128TB DRAM cache and 128 fibre channel and FICON ports. The analytics-class DS8888F scales from 6.4 TB to 1.22 petabytes of flash storage capacity, and has 2TB cache and 128 fibre channel and FICON ports.