Chris Mellor

London

Storage Editor at The Register

Editor and Founder at Blocks and Files

Storage writer for Blocks & Files. Also on BlueSky.

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Articles

NetApp revenues rise to all-time highs, but can it sustain? – Blocks and Files

1 week ago | blocksandfiles.com | Chris Mellor

Analysis: NetApp posted record revenue this quarter, helped by all-flash array sales and public cloud storage demand. In the fourth fiscal 2025 quarter ended April 25, NetApp reported record revenues of $1.73 billion, up 4 percent on the year. There was a $340 million profit (GAAP net income), 16.8 percent more than a year ago. Its full fy2025 revenues were its highest-ever, at $6.57 billion, 5 percent more than fy2024 revenues, with a profit of $1.2 billion, 20.7 percent up on the year.
Latest generation LTO-10 tape arrives at SpectraLogic – Blocks and Files

1 week ago | blocksandfiles.com | Chris Mellor

Tape library and systems vendor SpectraLogic announced LTO-10 support across its tape library product set, but IBM’s tape drive shrinks the expected capacity and loses backwards compatibility. LTO-10 is the latest LTO tape generation and the LTO organization’s spec has specified a 36 TB raw capacity and 90 TB compressed capacity at 2.5:1 compression. LTO tape reels are made by Fujifilm and Sony and tape drives by IBM.
VMware splitters help to beef up Nutanix revenues – Blocks and Files

1 week ago | blocksandfiles.com | Chris Mellor

Nutanix enjoyed a classic beat-and-raise results pattern in its latest quarterly earnings report. Revenues in hyperconverged infrastructure software supplier Nutanix’s third fiscal 2025 quarter, ended April 30, were $637 million, beating its $630 million high-point estimate, and up 22 percent year-on-year. It reported $63.4 million of net profit (GAAP net income), roundly beating the year-ago $15.6 million loss.
MinIO adds support for AWS’s fastest S3 API – Blocks and Files

1 week ago | blocksandfiles.com | Chris Mellor

MinIO is supporting AWS’s fastest S3 storage tier to offer object data access for AI and data-intensive analytics workloads. S3 Express One Zone has a 10x lower latency to first byte compared to the standard S3 offering. It comes at a price, costing nearly five times more at $0.11/GB/month than S3 Standard’s $0.023 for the first 50 TB/month.
Pure Storage expects hyperscale sales bump this year – Blocks and Files

1 week ago | blocksandfiles.com | Chris Mellor

Pure Storage’s first quarter revenues rose in double digits with no signs of order pull-ins from tariff uncertainity. Revenues grew 12 percent year-on-year to $879.8 million in the quarter ended May 4, beating the $770 million outlook. Pure reported a net loss of $13.9 million, better than the year-ago $35 million loss.
Storage news round-up - May 29 – Blocks and Files

1 week ago | blocksandfiles.com | Chris Mellor

Alluxio, supplier of open source virtual distributed file systems, announced Alluxio Enterprise AI 3.6. This delivers capabilities for model distribution, model training checkpoint writing optimization, and enhanced multi-tenancy support. It can, we’re told, accelerate AI model deployment cycles, reduce training time, and ensure data access across cloud environments.
Hitachi Vantara primes partnership-driven AI push – Blocks and Files

1 week ago | blocksandfiles.com | Chris Mellor

Hitachi has worked to re-evaluate the fit of its Hitachi Vantara subsidiary to respond faster to the market’s adoption of AI and AI’s accelerating development, according to its Chief Technology Officer. In late 2023 Hitachi Vantara was reorganized with a services unit spun-off, a new direction set, and Sheila Rohra taking control as CEO. It built a unified storage product data plane, a unified product control plane and an integrated data-to-agent AI capability.
Salesforce snaffles Informatica to feed Agentforce with data – Blocks and Files

1 week ago | blocksandfiles.com | Chris Mellor

SaaS giant Salesforce is entering into an agreement to data integrator and manager Informatica in a bid to strengthen its Agentforce’s data credentials, paying $25/share (totalling around $8 billion). Informatica’s current stock price is $23.86. Salesforce says buying Informatica will give it a stronger trusted data foundation needed for deploying “powerful and responsible agentic AI.” It wants its Agentforce agents to work at scale across a customer’s Salesforce data estate.
PEAK:AIO uses CXL memory to rescue HBM-limited AI models – Blocks and Files

1 week ago | blocksandfiles.com | Chris Mellor

PEAK:AIO claims it is solving AI inferencing model GPU memory limitations with CXL memory instead of offloading KVCache contents to NVMe flash drives. The UK-based AI and GPU data infrastructure specialist says AI workloads are evolving “beyond static prompts into dynamic context streams, model creation pipelines, and long-running agents,” and the workloads are getting larger, stressing the limited high-bandwidth memory (HBM) capacity of GPUs and making the AI jobs memory-bound.
The elephant in the storage supplier room: How to deal with AI – Blocks and Files

1 week ago | blocksandfiles.com | Chris Mellor

Comment: The big issue for storage suppliers is AI – how to store and make data accessible to AI agents and models. Here’s a look at how they are responding to this. Using AI in storage management is virtually a no-brainer. It makes storage admins more effective and is becoming essential for cybersecurity. The key challenge is storing AI data so that it’s quickly accessible to models and upcoming agents through an AI data pipeline.