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Mozy unveils Stash online collaboration, file cache Tweet This

January 25, 2012

Mozy today announced that a beta version of its Mozy Stash is now available. Stash lets customers keep files online, synchronized and accessible from a variety of computers, smartphones and tablet computers.

Stash is available with subscriptions to MozyHome and will be available with MozyPro in the future.

Cleversafe expands to 10 Exabytes Tweet This

January 25, 2012

Cleversafe today announced that its distributed object-based storage system can now be expanded to as much as 10 exabytes to support Big Data applications. This is possible through a Portable Datacenter, which contains 21 racks, each with 189 storage nodes and 45 3TB drives per storage node. Cleversafe has deployed this configuration acoss 16 sites with 35 Portable Datacenters per site.

Amazon Unveils Cloud Storage Gateway Tweet This

AWS Storage Gateway is a software-based appliance that uploads snapshots to the Amazon’s S3 storage cloud.

Amazon joined the rest of the cloud storage gateway vendors on Wednesday with the announcement of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Storage Gateway, which attaches and transports customers’ on-premises storage to the Amazon S3 cloud.

http://informationweek.com/news/storage/systems/232500460?queryText=amazon

Fusion-io quarterly earnings disappoint Wall Street Tweet This

January 24, 2012

Fusion-io reported its second fiscal quarter, ending December 31, with a GAAP net loss of $5.7 million on much lower gross margins. In after-hours trading, the stock was off 13.41% or $4.07 per share. This compares to the prior quarter’s GAAP earnings of $7.2 million. So dismal were the GAAP results that the company only reported non-GAAP numbers during the conference call, which were positive, but open to questions that only a team of accountants could answer.

During the conference call lasting until 6:00PM Eastern, the company lost about $340 million of its total market capitalization. Despite assurances from CEO David Flynn and CFO Dennis Wolf that it was a truly great quarter, the street was not buying it. The greatest concern from the financial analysts asking questions was that gross margins had eroded something like 12 percentage points from fiscal Q1. While guidance given after Q1 had predicted a drop in gross margins due to transition to a new generation of products, it was clear by the tone of the questions and the big sell-off that no one was expecting this kind of margin erosion, let alone driving red ink into the GAAP numbers. Of more concern was Q3 guidance, which predicted more red ink in the GAAP numbers, and a return to higher gross margins waiting until Q4.

Our take: Wall Street punishes those who can’t product sequential quarter winnings, and for the first time since going public, Fusion-io felt the cruel belt of a disappointed equity market. Between the lines, and looking at inventory growth, it is pretty clear that the company suffered from a certain amount of overhang in Q2, that is, customers buying new products at lower gross margins than the mature products with higher margins. Another factor had to be that a number of large end-user deals went through the OEM channel rather than on a direct basis, and margins had to be shared with the OEMs. In the roller-coaster of relatively small-cap public companies, FIO will need to have more than one good quarter in a row to gain back the high-flying confidence held since its IPO. – James E. Bagley

Caringo updates object storage Tweet This

January 24, 2012

Caringo today released a new Caringo Object Storage Platform that now supports objects of up to 4TB in size, increased reporting and management and improved service and support.

CAStor, Caringo’s object storage engine, now stores files of unknown size and objects as large as 4TB. The company has also added server and storage status reporting using Net-SNMP and graphical reporting on replication progress and performance. The workflow engine, Content Router, now supports the enumeration of named objects, allowing more expansive object searches and indexing. Caringo’s Cluster Services Node has also been enhanced with a new capability to automatically restart failed services due to network interruption or other causes. And, finally, administrators can now have more granular control of node-based configuration parameters.

Cloud vendor Symform nets funding Tweet This

January 24, 2012

Symform, a maker of a collaborative cloud, announced today that it has received $2 million in funding from WestRiver Capital, bringing its total Series A funding to $7.5 million.

The company’s peer-to-peer Global Cloud Storage Network lets users contribute unused storage in exchange for cloud storage.

Avalanche Technology reels in funding Tweet This

January 23, 2012

Avalanche Technology, a maker of spin torque memory, yesterday announced that it has received $11.5 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Thomvest Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Leader Ventures and Vulcan Capital.

The company is making a non-volatile memory called Spring Programmable Memory (SPMEM), which is targeted to the telecommunications, computing, mobile and networking space, where high data reliability and performance are necessary.

Patrick Corrigan

Patrick H. Corrigan

phcorrigan@ssg-now.com