The storage stories enterprise IT leaders actually read.
Volume 342, Issue 4 · 7 articles from 3 issues
Quantum's Skip Levens argues modern LTO tape is a cost-effective, secure tier for holding large AI datasets until needed.
Skip Levens of Quantum notes that AI training datasets are doubling every eight months, but data does not need high-performance storage at every stage of the pipeline.
Keeping all candidate datasets on always-on flash or disk becomes costly at scale, capping how much data an organization can keep in play.
He argues modern LTO tape now acts as an active tier that can stream data into fast storage when needed, at a fraction of the cost per terabyte with strong energy efficiency. Tape also adds hardware encryption, WORM immutability and offline air-gapped protection for irreplaceable data.
DCIG shares six early findings from its research into software-defined object storage products ahead of its TOP 5 reports.
DCIG has begun researching SDS object storage solutions for a series of TOP 5 reports and shares six early insights from about twenty products.
The market splits into purpose-built object platforms, unified unstructured data platforms and Ceph-based offerings, and about half of providers offer appliance, cloud or managed-service deployment options.
S3 compatibility masks real architectural differences, and hybrid cloud capabilities vary widely. Immutability is now table stakes, while AI claims in product messaging often lack supporting technical detail and need closer scrutiny.
IDC reports Q2 2026 enterprise storage revenue hit $10.3B and server revenue hit a record $166.3B, both driven by AI demand.
IDC's tracker shows the external storage market accelerating after a sluggish 2025, with storage revenue up 33.6% year-over-year to $10.3 billion and all-flash arrays making up 52% of revenue.
High-end systems priced above $250K surged 90.6%, reflecting large-scale AI deployments, while component shortages pushed prices up.
Dell Technologies led both markets with 23.8% storage share and 13.4% server share.
The server market grew even faster, up 52% to a record $166.3 billion, with GPU-accelerated systems generating $87.4 billion and average selling prices for those servers jumping 43.6% to nearly $170,200, as growth broadened beyond hyperscalers to neoclouds and enterprise inference workloads.
Cloud file system supplier CTERA reports that only 4.4% of enterprise file data is actively used.
Cloud file system supplier CTERA commissioned research analyzing 16 petabytes of live production data across 856 file-share scans, finding that 95.6% consists of redundant, obsolete, or trivial data serving no clear business purpose.
Key findings include 83.1% of stored capacity in files unmodified for over a year and only 9.9% of data accessed within any 90-day period. CTERA CTO Aron Brand noted that enterprises are running their most expensive storage tier as what is effectively a cold archive.
The company's new Edge Filer v7.13x includes an Archive function to move inactive data to cost-efficient cloud storage.
Comcast Global CISO Noopur Davis credits her unplanned rise from developer to security leader to seizing interesting opportunities.
Noopur Davis, Comcast's Global CISO overseeing 1,500 security professionals, began as a software developer at Intergraph before moving into software engineering process work at Carnegie Mellon, where collaboration with Microsoft on trustworthy computing drew her into cybersecurity.
Leadership roles at Intel followed en route to her CISO role, and she emphasizes pairing technical expertise with business acumen. She favors a calm, "no-drama" management style during crises, builds teams that balance cohesion with individual brilliance, and works to prevent burnout by ensuring downtime after intense projects.
Davis attributes her success to flexibility and avoiding rigid career planning in favor of pursuing interesting opportunities as they arise.
StorageReview tests Solidigm's 30.72TB D5-P5430 Gen4 QLC SSD for mixed data center workloads.
StorageReview reviews the Solidigm D5-P5430, a 30.72TB Gen4 QLC data center SSD in the E3.S form factor built on 192-layer 3D QLC NAND with an 8KB indirection unit.
Rated for 7,000MB/s sequential read and 3,000MB/s sequential write, the drive hit roughly 3.1GB/s in checkpoint writing and saturated the Gen4 ceiling at 7,125MB/s in random reads, with strong 152.5K IOPS in 4K random writes that beat larger QLC competitors.
Endurance is rated at 31.92PBW (0.58 DWPD over five years). Though three years old, the review concludes the P5430 remains well suited to read-heavy and object storage workloads.
IDC recorded 33.6% annual enterprise storage market growth in Q2 2026, with all-flash arrays taking over half of revenue.
IDC's enterprise storage systems tracker recorded $10.34 billion in total Q2 2026 revenue, the second-highest quarter on record and up 33.6% year-over-year. All Flash Arrays led with $5.4 billion (52.1% share), growing 42.9% year-over-year, while high-end systems priced above $250,000 surged 90.6% on AI infrastructure deployments.
Dell kept market leadership with 42.5% revenue growth, while Everpure grew fastest among the top five vendors at 50%. Growth was driven by rising memory and NAND component costs, deferred storage refreshes catching up, and forward purchasing ahead of expected price increases, with NetApp, HPE, and Huawei rounding out the top five at below-market growth rates.