Storage news ticker - 25 July

Commvault-sponsored IDC research found 90% of respondents believe they need to improve identity-management capabilities to address risks from agentic AI systems, and 58.7% said significant improvements or a complete overhaul is required. The research also showed 98.4% of respondents need better IT-security team collaboration, 26.7% have dynamic RBAC supporting AI, and 57.7% have not fully defined their Minimum Viable Business. Commvault announced an IDC Cyber Readiness Assessment tool to evaluate resilience for an AI-driven future.

Storage news ticker - 25 July Acceldata , which supplies its xLake data platform so enterprises can autonomously run data analytics and AI agents in cloud, on-premises, hybrid, and sovereign environments, has expanded in Europe and recruited Ali Afsar as SVP, Data Strategy from HSBC, and Colin Fernandes as Director of EMEA Market Development & Global Sales Enablement. He comes from Sumo Logic and VMware. Justyn Goodenough serves as Vice President, EMEA, and continues to expand the team with several new hires into the field team. …. Cohesity CTO Anubhav Gupta is on the move after almost 10 years there. The company said: “Anubhav has decided to leave Cohesity to pursue his goal of starting a company,” and thanked him for his contributions. … Cyber-resilience supplier Commvault says its sponsored IDC White Paper, Resilience Operations: The Discipline that Makes Readiness Provable, July 2026, found 90% of respondents believe they need to improve their identity-management capabilities to address risks introduced by agentic AI systems, while 58.7% said significant improvements or a complete overhaul of their identity-management approach is required to manage this. Think of AI agents as digital employees. Existing research https://www.rsa.com/news/press-releases/uk-reports-worse-data-breaches-and-greater-concern-for-it-help-desk-risk-rsa-id-iq-report-unveils-top-identity-threats/ shows 69% of global organisations experienced an identity-related breach between 2022-25. Other findings from Commvault’s research include: 98.4% of respondents expressed the need for better collaboration between their IT and security teams 26.7% have dynamic role-based access control RBAC supporting AI and analytics 57.7% have not fully defined their Minimum Viable Business – a requirement for organisations to understand the minimum elements of their IT infrastructure that must be recovered to keep their company running Commvault also announced the IDC Cyber Readiness Assessment, sponsored by Commvault, an interactive tool that organisations can use to evaluate resilience preparedness for an AI-driven future. The Cyber Readiness Assessment and white paper are available here https://www.commvault.com/resources/analyst-report/resilience-operations-the-discipline-that-makes-readiness-provable . The Cyber Readiness Assessment tool will be available in the coming months. … Keith Townsend, the CTO Advisor , has set up a Layer 2c https://layer2c.com/ web site which states “Layer2C is an independent AI infrastructure assessment resource from The CTO Advisor. It evaluates AI infrastructure vendors against the 4+1 Layer AI Infrastructure Model — a framework that maps where decision authority resides across the AI stack, from compute and networking through data, orchestration, runtime, reasoning, and applications.” It helps enterprise technology leaders evaluate where AI infrastructure vendors actually operate — across compute, data, orchestration, runtime, reasoning, and applications — and where your organization still owns governance, cost, evidence, and accountability. Each assessment maps vendor capabilities against the 4+1 Layer AI Infrastructure Model and scores every component using the Decision Authority Placement Model DAPM : Retained, Delegated, or Ceded. There are 25 assessed vendors on the site and you can compare and contrast https://layer2c.com/compare them. …. Citrini analyst Jukan posts https://x.com/jukan05/status/2080523239135343084 that Chinese DRAM supplier CXMT abruptly ejected Huawei engineers from a cleanroom at its plant when Huawei complained too strongly about CXMT memory price rises. … Databricks’ CEO Ali Ghodsi has explained https://x.com/TheTranscript /status/2078969376402010200 its reasoning behind the latest fund raise https://www.blocksandfiles.com/data-protection/2026/07/17/storage-news-ticker-17-july/5274466 : "We host open-source models such as Kimi and offer them to our customers. Demand has been so strong that we are running out of GPUs across multiple regions. We nearly exhausted our GPU capacity in Asia, and demand is rising in countries including Japan, South Korea, the United States, and India. We, therefore, need to acquire a large number of additional GPUs, which requires significant funding. That demand was what triggered our latest fundraising round: we were inundated with customer requests and needed more GPU capacity. GPUs are extremely expensive to acquire.” … Databricks and Microsoft announced an expansion of their decade-long strategic partnership into the 2030s, to help enterprises scale their AI deployments by connecting it with their own business context. The expanded partnership will see: Increased Microsoft integration: Databricks Genie and Unity AI Gateway will be further integrated across the Microsoft ecosystem, including Microsoft 365, Teams, Copilot, Power BI and Microsoft Foundry, helping organisations bring trusted enterprise data into everyday AI workflows. Deeper commitment to Azure: Databricks will run its own core business operations and analytics on Azure Databricks, demonstrating confidence in the platform at enterprise scale. Greater AI capabilities: Databricks will expand its use of Microsoft's Azure Cobalt infrastructure to improve performance and efficiency for AI agents and data-intensive workloads. "Together, the companies are helping enterprises move beyond generic AI by connecting models and agents to trusted business data, while maintaining governance, security and cost control." … DCIG has a new Competitive Intelligence Report exploring AI storage differences between HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 and Dell PowerScale. Get it here https://dcig.com/2026/07/dcig-cirpt-hpe-x10000-dell-powerscale/ . … Denodo supplies data management and virtualization SW which creates a virtual layer on top of existing databases, cloud storage, applications, big data systems, etc., so users and applications can query everything as if it were a single integrated source. Its Denodo Platform v95.5 release has an expanded enterprise knowledge graph within the Denodo Data Marketplace, to improve the view of data context and provide AI with a more trusted foundation, plus metric views, enabling consistent, standardized metrics within the semantic layer. The Denodo Assistant gets enhanced reasoning ability and there is expanded connectivity across the data and AI ecosystem, to improve the flow of active context across disparate data sources and the quality of business decisions. Learn more here https://www.denodo.com/en/denodo-platform/whats-new . … UK-based data analytics and consulting company GlobalData announced the adoption of the Model Context Protocol MCP across its data and AI products. GlobalData says the way organizations consume intelligence is changing. Users want to ask questions inside the AI tools they already use, not log into a separate platform. Data teams want structured outputs they can model, not just packaged content. And leaders want intelligence inside their CRMs, copilots and agents – where decisions happen. The MCP introduction “lets enterprise AI systems and agents connect to GlobalData's proprietary intelligence through secure, governed integrations, taking GlobalData from a platform you visit to intelligence embedded where decisions are made.” … Reuters reports https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/kioxia-owes-viasat-229-million-infringing-flash-memory-patents-us-jury-says-2026-07-16/https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/kioxia-owes-viasat-229-million-infringing-flash-memory-patents-us-jury-says-2026-07-16/ a federal jury in Waco, Texas, said Kioxia owes satellite-communications company Viasat $229 million for infringing a patent covering computer memory technology, according to a court document. Kioxia's flash-memory devices violate Viasat's patent rights in technology that allows such devices to consume less power and improves their reliability and longevity. Viasat said it developed improvements to flash-memory technology – which stores data on transistors using electrical charges – while designing error-correction systems for satellites. it alleged that Kioxia's flash-memory devices include error-correction technology that works in the same way as its patented technology. Viasat has brought similar allegations https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/viasat-sues-western-digital-kioxia-over-data-storage-patents-2021-11-29/ against data-storage company Western Digital meaning Sandisk now in a separate lawsuit that is still ongoing. … SW-defined block storage supplier Lightbits Labs announced support for Ubuntu, saying that customers can now build high-performance, disaggregated storage environments using Ubuntu without sacrificing high-performance, scalability, or operational simplicity. Request a Free Trial https://www.lightbitslabs.com/pricing/ and experience how easy it is to run Lightbits on Ubuntu. … Composable systems supplier Liqid announced a strategic collaboration with AMD to deliver next-generation AI infrastructure. The collaboration pairs Liqid’s UltraStack 30 GPU pooling tech with AMD PCIe-based Instinct GPUs to give enterprise and cloud customers scalable, efficient AI infrastructure. Liqid enables customers to dynamically pool and scale-up 30x GPUs, 60 PFLOPS of FP8 performance and more than 4TB of aggregate HBM3E, to a server, creating large, pooled accelerator fabrics that can deploy models of the largest size. The result is breakthrough AI performance, higher GPU utilization, and industry-leading token economics.By pooling and sharing AMD Instinct GPUs over Liqid’s fabric, customers get: Up to 3.7x higher tokens per second — significantly greater inference throughput than traditional servers. Up to 2.1x more tokens per dollar — generate up to two times more AI tokens from the same capital investment. Up to 1.8x better tokens per watt — double inference efficiency, cutting power consumed per generated token. The Liqid platform is designed to be CXL memory pooling ready, providing a future path to memory expansion and shared memory access across multiple servers. … Mithra Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of ShelterZoom, launched Mithra AI, a trust infrastructure for enterprise AI that enables organizations to verify every AI response against trusted data. It’s a cryptographic Single Source of Truth SSOT that verifies enterprise content before it reaches any AI model. It's model-agnostic, sitting beneath OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Grok rather than replacing them, and deploys through APIs, SDKs, OEM partnerships or as a complete enterprise system. It also ships as a prepackaged AI-native content management system, an AI security deposit box for enterprise knowledge and IP, built for healthcare, government, financial services, legal and other regulated sectors. Conscience IQ founder Kirby de Lanerolle is on record deploying it across healthcare and defense. … Multi-protocol, real-time multi-tiering storage array provider StorONE has partnered with V-Valley, an Esprinet Group company, to expand access to its enterprise storage platform across the Italian market. V-Valley will add StorONE to its data management portfolio and support partners with training, pre-sales expertise, business development, and demand generation. Zion Gabai , EVP of International Sales, StorONE, said: “V-Valley is the ideal partner to expand StorONE’s presence in Italy. Their strong distribution channel relationships and technical expertise will help resellers deliver a differentiated storage solution that addresses the most pressing challenges customers face today.” … Research house TrendForce says that leading chipmakers and CSPs have pursued both hardware and software innovations to overcome memory bottlenecks as surging KV Cache demand in the first half of 2026 collided with constrained memory supply. Penguin Solutions, Marvell, and Meta have introduced KV Cache servers and CXL switches to expand the memory hierarchy and increase effective memory capacity. Meanwhile, Nvidia and Google have developed technologies such as KVTC and TurboQuant to compress KV Cache and reduce memory consumption. TrendForce provides an in-depth analysis of these architectural innovations in its report, "Overcoming the Memory Bottleneck: CXL Expansion and KV Cache Compression Innovations." For more comprehensive market data and technical insights, refer to the full report here https://www.trendforce.com/research/download/RP260715HU . … ScoutAM archive supplier Versity has won the German Climate Computing Center DKRZ, Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum as a customer. DKRZ is Germany’s national supercomputing center for climate research, serving more than 1,000 climate and earth-system researchers. It brought a new hierarchical storage management system online for one of the world’s largest climate simulation archives, in partnership with NEC, and building a new tape archive. DKRZ’s Levante supercomputer utilizes a 130 PB global Lustre file system for project data, model output, and temporary processing. This is the high-performance working tier where researchers generate and analyze large datasets. ScoutAM transfers data between DKRZ’s HPC systems and the archive at aggregate speeds of up to 30 GB/s over 2 PB per day . A ScoutAM managed 8.2 PB combined SSD and HDD cache absorbs peak ingest loads and keeps a portion of archived data immediately accessible without mounting tape. DKRZ can use the archive as an active capacity tier. Data moves off Lustre quickly enough to free premium storage, while the cache allows frequently recalled datasets to return without waiting for physical media. Versity says DKRZ brought its entire 254 PB archive onto the new system with no data migration. No data was rewritten. This archive spans ten tape libraries, including three Spectra Logic TFinity libraries, with 130 LTO drives and capacity for as many as 100,000 tape cartridges. The legacy archive stayed in place and stayed readable while new data began landing in an open format on current-generation media, and the cutover was measured in hours, not the years a full migration cycle would have demanded. Rewriting 254 PB across five media generations would have been a multi-year, high-risk undertaking. Instead of moving the data, ScoutAM ingested the existing metadata and treats the legacy archive as a read-only tier. New writes land in the open Versity format on current-generation media, while every legacy file remains fully accessible in place, transparent to users. Nobody has to wait years for a tape rewrite, and nothing goes dark during the transition. ScoutAM includes metadata capabilities so scientists can search, locate, and retrieve their own data directly, with automatic metadata extraction and custom tagging built in. … xMEMS has launched a pizeoelectric fan-based cooling chip, the XMC-1200, saying it’s the world’s smallest active micro fan and can be used to cool chips in smart glasses. The chip uses the same technology as Frore’s AirJet Mini, https://www.blocksandfiles.com/flash/2023/08/24/frore-goes-insane-in-the-membrane-with-cooling-tech/1589274 which is used by Iodyne. The XMC-1200 measures just 46mm², enabling integration into space constrained designs like glasses’ temple arms and other compact wearables. Paired with the Astra2 drive ASIC, the system consumes just 70 mW of typical power, minimizing impact on battery life, while delivering up to a 10°C temperature reduction at a 1W thermal load. This allows smart glasses and AR/XR devices to maintain sustained performance without overheating or throttling. …