At its annual investor webcast Intel announced it will start offering 3D NAND flash drives from H2 2015 and, "within the next couple of years," the technology will enable 10TB SSDs and 1TB mobile storage in a 2mm form factor.

Producing such storage is Intel Micron Flash Technologies, the Intel joint venture with storage vendor Micron Technologies.

3D NAND involves the vertical stacking of chip layers (as opposed to horizontal planar structures) on a single MLC die. The Intel-Micron take on the technology features 32 vertical planar layers and offers densities of up to 256Gbit (32GB) per MLC die or 384Gbit (48GB) per TLC die.

Data virtualisation startup Primary Data emerges from stealth mode to announces a celebrity hire-- Steve Wozniak, who leaves Fusion-io to "counsel Primary Data on technology vision and architecture."

Wozniak should feel right at home at Primary Data, as its co-founder and CTO is David Flynn, who co-founded Fusion-io and was its CEO until May 2013. Its CEO, Lance Smith, is also an ex-Fusion-io exec.

“Woz has a unique way of seeing the world through the eyes of both an engineer and a visionary, and his energy, curiosity, and excitement about technology is inspiring,” Smith says. “At Fusion-io, he helped us showcase the breakthroughs possible by adding flash in the enterprise, and we’re excited to have him on the team at Primary Data as we focus on how data virtualisation can deliver intelligent data mobility that evolves with the needs of modern enterprises.”

Quantum launches the StorNext Pro Foundation-- an integrated shared storage  solution based on the StorNext 5 collaboration and workflow software designed for use by smaller workgroups.

The StorNext Pro Foundation is compatible with the Apple Xsan filesystem, and handles up to 7 Xsan/Windows/Linux SAN clients, including 2 Windows/Linux SAN clients as core system components. It ships in 48 or 96TB configurations, and supports up to 4 volumes comprising 100 million files.

The company offers an optional StorNext AEL500 tape archive, and the 48TB version is upgradeable to 96TB. Current StorNext customers can also add a StorNext Pro Foundation to add smaller graphics, rendering and EFX workgroups.

Fujitsu launches the Eternus CD10000 Hyperscale Storage System-- a scale-out array the company claims handles the demands of very big data with "unlimited, modular scalability of storage capacity and performance."

The CD10000 is based on Ceph, the open source storage software from Red Hat-owned Intank. It presents a unified view of block, object and file storage in a single distributed storage cluster, and theoretically allows for scaling to up to 1 exabyte. This means it does not use RAID, and protection comes from replication and the system self-heals with zero downtime, at least according to Fujitsu.

The company also adds the array has a long lifespan, as customers can easily swap old nodes with new ones, and Ceph handles moving data to the new ones. Meanwhile the open source software provides low costs, fast development and anti-locking advantages.

On launch the CD10000 capacity reaches 56PB (or 56000TB) via aggregation of 224 nodes. Nodes slot in standard 19-inch racks, connect via dual 40Gbit/s InifniBand links and come in 3 types-- Basic (with 2 Xeon CPUs and 12.6TB raw capacity), Capacity (with 252.6TB of raw capacity) and Performance (34.2TB raw capacity via 10K RPM SAS 2.5-inch sindles and PCIe SSDs).