Storage news ticker – 10 December 2025

Data mover connector builder Airbyte announced updates that provide faster data transfers and predictable pricing.

• It is up to 95% less expensive to perform high-volume Snowflake syncs, depending on the use case specifics. Syncs are up to 10 times faster than previously with a rebuilt underlying loading mechanism to take full advantage of Snowflake’s native bulk loading capabilities. This is a result of significant updates to the Snowflake destination connector. By moving to direct loading and optimizing how Airbyte handles compute and storage, it now takes minutes which previously took hours.
• The Microsoft SQL Server connector is 84% faster than before.
• Syncs from MySQL to S3 increase from 23 megabytes per second (MB/s) to 110 MB/s – nearly five times faster.
• Moving 1 terabyte (TB) of data – the equivalent of 6.5 million document pages – from PostgreSQL to S3 now takes 2-1/2 hours when previously it could take 2 days.
• Re-architected data connectors with 4-10 times speed increases, which includes optimized updated connectors for Amazon S3, Azure, BigQuery, and ClickHouse.
• For small and medium-size enterprises, the new Airbyte Plus plan provides fixed annual pricing that comes with full support.

A blog tells you more.

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Assured Data Protection launched a new disaster recovery service powered by Zerto. It’s designed specifically for VMware and multi-hypervisor environments that require ultra-low RPOs/RTOs, hardware-agnostic failover, and a clear path toward alternative platforms such as Nutanix. Key highlights:

• Zerto host-based replication for continuous data protection and near-instant recovery
• Full support for VMware today, with the option to transition to Nutanix when ready
• Tiered protection model balancing performance and cost across application groups
• Complements Assured’s Rubrik-based cyber-resilience services for end-to-end protection
• Designed for organisations with 12–36 months left on VMware contracts who need stronger

The service uses Zerto’s host-based replication technology to extend Assured’s DR portfolio, enabling customers to maintain their VMware and other hypervisor environments while achieving best-in-class recovery performance. Learn more here.

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Ataccama announced a strategic investment from Snowflake Ventures. In June it said it enables businesses to turn unstructured content such as contracts, invoices, and PDFs into structured and actionable data that can be analyzed using natural language prompts, through an integration of its unified data trust platform Attacama ONE with Document AI on the Snowflake marketplace. The investment in Ataccama signals a deeper integration with Snowflake-native data quality and trust signals within Snowflake Cortex AI. Continuous compliance and automated data quality controls will be brought directly into Snowflake AI pipelines. Learn more at www.ataccama.com.

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V20.2 Tentacle is the 20th stable release of Ceph, with major changes from Squid. There are lots of updates. Get stuck in to Tentacle here.

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Back in September, CEO Sanjay Poonen told CNBC, that Cohesity could go public in 2026, with a full year of results from its Veritas merger behind it. Poonen told us Cohesity is now a $1.5 billion ARR business, triple its $500 million ARR before the Veritas transaction. He said the Veritas transaction, overall, had been excellent. That seems like it’s meeting criteria for an IPO.

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There’s been a mini exodus from DDN’s Lustre engineering organization, most notably Peter Jones, Andreas Dilger, and Colin Faber, along with several other long-time Lustre contributors. They have formed The Lustre Collective, positioning themselves as a vendor neutral, open-source focused Lustre group for HPC and AI environments. A reformed mini-WhamCloud so to speak. Lustre remains core to many of the world’s largest HPC and AI environments and DDN now has considerable focus on its Infinia object storage software. It looks as if these Lustre people are voting with their feet for a Lustre-outside-DDN future. We’re having a conversation with DDN about this loss of Lustre talent.

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A Huawei SVP, Zhou Yuefeng, who is the CEO of Huawei Cloud and President of its Data Storage Product Line, is quoted in a Huawei HC Newsroom publication on the topic of hard disk drives (HDDs). He said HDD (is the only challenge for China in the storage field, being the only core component that China’s IT industry hasn’t produced to date: “The annual consumption of hard disk drives (HDDs) in the Chinese market alone is close to 60 billion yuan ($8.48 billion). The lack of this core technology puts our industry in a passive position in the global supply chain.”

He strongly believes that the storage media should accelerate diversification and initiate a balanced development, making breakthroughs in materials, manufacturing equipment, and process. Well, yes, but what does this mean? The article concludes: “Just like 5G, data storage can also become China’s second calling card in the global tech field.”

What do we conclude from this? I don’t think he’s saying China can produce its own HDDs. Or is he? Does this; “the storage media should accelerate diversification and initiate a balanced development, making breakthroughs in materials, manufacturing equipment, and process” imply some new development?

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IDC released its Worldwide Black Book, which revealed several market-driving findings about global IT spending, among them –

• IT Spending Will Post Growth of 14% in 2025, making it the Strongest Performance Since 1996
• Massive AI infrastructure investment is driving a supercycle of tech spending around the world, with IT spending set to reach $4.25 trillion this year.
• Total ICT spending, including telecom and business services, in addition to IT spending) will reach almost $7 trillion this year.

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Unstructured data manager Komprise ran its annual industry survey. It found 85% of IT and data storage leaders are projecting an increase in data storage spend in 2026 while 74% are storing more than 5PB of unstructured data, a 57% increase over 2024, according to the Komprise 2026 State of Unstructured Data Management study.

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Neo4j has launched Fleet Manager, the first unified control plane for managing and monitoring graph databases across any environment. Fleet Manager instead gives IT leaders a single operational view of their entire Neo4j footprint: AuraDB cloud services, self-managed Enterprise Edition, and local deployments such as Desktop and Community Edition. It also supports Neo4j Infinigraph, a distributed, sharded architecture launched last month that scales graph workloads across multiple machines and environments at 100TB+ scale. Fleet Manager provides the operational footing to scale while maintaining compliance and security standards. Neo4j says the offering is a response to accelerating graph adoption with Gen AI and agentic applications.

Fleet Manager is available to all Neo4j customers, including Community Edition users, at no cost. The platform is already trusted by 84 of the Fortune 100. Learn more on its website and blog post.

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NetApp announced the appointment of Willem Hendrickx as SBVP and GM, EMEA & LATAM, effective January 5, 2026. Hendrickx will lead NetApp’s business strategy, go-to-market execution, and partner engagement across the regions.

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Qumulo tells us it’s continuing to push into the Cloud and seeing some amazing gains. In its early Q4 earnings review, it’s seeing a year over year Cloud ARR growth of 116 percent.

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SK hynix is planning to have its treasury shares listed on the U.S. stock market as American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), so that, via market trading, its overall value can be compared to, and possibly/probably uprated to, a competitor like Micron. T

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SIOS Technology announced the availability of LifeKeeper v10, featuring the new LifeKeeper Web Management Console (LKWMC) management console. LKWMC provides a unified, intuitive user interface across both Linux and Windows environments, giving system administrators visibility and control while simplifying the management of complex, mission-critical high availability and disaster recovery configurations. SIOS has also streamlined the pricing model for the new LifeKeeper version, enabling customers to purchase everything they need to implement a clustering solution in a single, simplified package.

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Matt Crowley, CEO of Scintil Photonics, has an article in EE Times that makes a simple argument: “AI Performance Now Depends on Optics (and CPO Is the Front Line)” He argues that as AI factories scale, the next real bottleneck isn’t the GPU or the storage system, but the fabric in between. In particular:

• Metrics like energy per bit (pJ/bit), latency, bandwidth density, and reach now define whether those big GPU and storage investments actually turn into tokens per second.
• Co-packaged optics is the immediate battleground, with DWDM-based CPO emerging as the practical way to get more channels per fiber and push toward sub-1 pJ/bit interconnects at the package edge.
• Foundry-aligned, fully integrated optics (lasers, DWDM, detectors on a single silicon photonics flow) will determine who can scale these fabrics into volume, not just who can show a demo rack.

The bulk of the article is a vendor-neutral look at how AI fabrics are likely to evolve over the next 12–24 months and what system designers can do now to avoid hitting an optical wall after they solve the storage wall.

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Veeam has announced a Veeam App for ServiceNow, designed to orchestrate and manage data protection for assets through ServiceNow. customers will be able to decentralize backup management, streamline incident response, and enhance visibility. Features include:

• Automation and Compliance: Automated compliance documentation and audit trails for business and regulatory requirements
• Bi-Directional Synchronisation: Real-time status updates and unified workflows between Veeam and ServiceNow
• Integration with native ServiceNow users and group management: For seamless role-based access to policies, jobs, and data.
• Accelerated Response and Traceability:Reduced manual intervention, faster incident resolution, and end-to-end traceability

Veeam App for ServiceNow is built to deliver a seamless, secure, and intelligent bridge between organizations’ Veeam infrastructure and their IT Service Management (ITSM) workflows. This enables ServiceNow users to monitor, orchestrate, and automate Veeam-powered data protection tasks without leaving the ServiceNow AI Platform. More information here.

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VergeIO, saying it’s the VMware alternative built on a single, integrated codebase, announced new support for HashiCorp Packer and Ansible, completing an end-to-end infrastructure automation chain for Enterprise IT and CSPs deploying infrastructure on VergeOS. The VergeOS automation chain now enables Packer to build standardized images, Terraform to provision VDCs, networks, and VMs, Ansible to enforce configuration and policies, and Prometheus to monitor performance and health. This chain provides organizations with a predictable, repeatable foundation for deploying and managing infrastructure while maintaining control over every step, from image build to ongoing operations. Find out more here.

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Cloud storage supplier Wasabi has expanded its cyber resilient cloud storage capabilities with Covert Copy, a patent pending, ransomware-resistant offering that allows users to create a locked, hidden copy of storage buckets to ensure critical data remains untouchable, even in the event of a cyberattack. The selected data is logically air gapped and cannot be seen, accessed, modified or deleted, without multi-user authentication approval, protecting it from any type of malicious attack.

We asked how do users recover data from it? In other words, which users can actually detect it? Wasabi said: ” Only the root account user is able to find information about the hidden copy. Users who have access to the storage management console will not be able to see covert copy information or know the location of it.” We also asked is it an air-gapped copy in a different account in the Wasabi cloud than the user’s account? The answer is: “The covert copy is not in a different account, it’s the same account. The account is protected by the requirement to activate Multi User Authorization (MUA) to prevent malicious or accidental deletion.”

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Western Digital’s Nigel Edwards, VP Channel, sees >100TB disk drives appearing by 2030, with HAMR technology advancing areal density by moving from its continuous magnetic grans-based media to to Heated Dot Magnetic Recording, whereby the laser heats discrete dots of recording media surrounded by effectively insulating rings to prevent magnetism leakage and dispersal.

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Reuters reports Chinese NAND chipmaker YMTC has sued the U.S. Defense Department, challenging a decision to include it on a list of entities allegedly working with Beijing’s military. The lawsuit, filed on Friday in the federal court in Washington, asked a judge to block enforcement of the listing and have the designation thrown out. The Pentagon added YMTC to its list of Chinese military companies operating in the U.S. in January 2024 and reaffirmed the designation earlier this year.