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Storage news ticker - 13 February 2026
BackBlaze published its 2025 Year-End Drive Stats report analyzing the performance of 344,196 hard drives across 30 models. In the last 2025 quarter the drive honor roll was:
- HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 4TB: 1 failure
- Seagate ST8000NM000A 8TB: 0 failure
- Seagate ST12000NM000J 12TB: 1 failure
- Seagate ST16000NM000J 16TB: 1 failure
- Seagate ST16000NM002J 16TB: 0 failure
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WDC WUH722626ALE6L4 26TB: 1 failure.
Red flags were raised over the annual failure rate (AFR) for 3 drives:
- HGST HUH728080ALE600 8TB: 10.29%
- Seagate ST10000NM0086 10TB: 5.23%
- Toshiba MG08ACA16TEY 16TB: 4.14%
The Seagate drive’s AFR was attributed to end of life activity, while the 8TB HGST model’s increased AFR was potentially caused by vibration issues. The 16TB Tosh drive had a 16.95% AFR last quarter. Firmware changes seem to be making the rate fall and the Backblazers hope it will fall further.
The full 2025 Drive Stats report and downloadable dataset are available at www.backblaze.com/drivestats/. Backblaze will also host a webinar to walk through the 2025 annualized failure rates, break down the data for interesting trends, and share the latest from the Backblaze drive fleet happenings on Wednesday, February 18, 2026 at 10:00 a.m. PT.
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Hitachi Vantara CTO Jason Hardy has resigned and is off to pastures new, but unknown. There has been a suggestion that it could be Nvidia but with no substance to it.
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An HPE survey into the VMware market revealed that more than two thirds of enterprises are planning material changes to their virtualization strategy within the next two years as pressure mounts from AI, cost uncertainty, and performance demands. The next 12 to 24 months marks an inflection point for virtualization as enterprises move from planning to active transformation. AI readiness – not solely virtualization licensing costs – is the primary force reshaping strategies in favor of a flexible, hybrid operating model. Security, observability, and data protection are also rising as essential pillars of modern virtualization.
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For details, read HPE’s The Great Virtualization Reset report by clicking the link.
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Morgan Stanley has produced a NAND supplier quarterly revenue chart, reproduced here. You can see the rise as memory prices skyrocket, with Samsung and SK Hynix showing particular jumps.
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Two Moshe Yanai-connected companies have been declared bankrupt. Michal International Investment LLC is a Massachusetts-registered investment firm based in Lawrence, New York, with holdings in data storage firm Infinidat. Yanai owns 50% of it. MII Aviation Services LLC is also a Massachusetts-registered entity based in Lawrence, New York, representing Yanai's helicopter flight services interest. Both companies filed voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petitions on February 1, 2026, in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, where they are being jointly administered.
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NetApp announced that Thailand’s insurance regulatory authority, the Office of Insurance Commission (OIC), has used ONTAP Snapshot technology to reduce the time back up large, mission-critical databases by over 90%, shrinking the process from hours down to minutes, without affecting the performance of main workloads.
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Veeam backup target supplier Object First announced its strongest year to date, reporting a 183% year-over-year increase in worldwide bookings in 2025, its second consecutive year of triple-digit growth across bookings, customers, and channel partners. There was strong international momentum, led by EMEA with 515% year-over-year bookings growth and 125% growth in the Americas. Six-figure and above deals increased 250% globally. Its global customer base grew 193%, with transacting partners up 215%.
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Redis has a new version, 8.6, which the company says delivers "the latest performance and resource utilisation improvements to make it the fastest Redis yet.…This new release delivers a set of community-requested updates that make day-to-day development and operations smoother. It includes new Streams safeguards, more eviction control, better hotkey visibility, simpler TLS auth and more flexible time series handling.” Find out more in a blog.
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Sony has decided to exit the Blu-ray disc recorder market as the widespread availability of streaming services has snuffed out demand, with final shipments of recorders to begin this month. It has already ended production of Blu-ray recorders and ceased manufacturing recordable discs in February last year. Blu-ray players will continue to be shipped for the time being.
Sony launched the world's first Blu-ray recorder in 2003, with the format winning the war against HD DVD, led by Toshiba and NEC, as it supported higher-quality video for films and television. According to the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association, domestic shipments of Blu-ray recorders peaked at 6.39 million units in 2011 but stood at less than 10 percent of that figure in 2025 at 620,000 units.
Sony, which has been increasingly scaling back its hardware businesses, is pivoting to entertainment businesses, such as anime and films, as part of its strategy to accelerate expansion.
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HCI vendor StorMagic has appointed Scott Mann as Global SVP of sales. He comes from being MD and VP of Scale Computing International. Scale was bought by Acumera in July. Mann brings 15-years’ sales leadership experience in the IT tech space, with a focus on security, virtualization, edge computing and hyperconverged infrastructure, at companies like Scale and WinMagic.
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Stravito has appointed Tina Cush as VP of Marketing. It named Stephen Smyth as Chief Product Officer, and Lori Mills as SVP of Sales North America last December. Cush comes from being CMO at fleet intelligence platform IntelliShift, Director of Enterprise Growth Marketing at Dataminr, and Vice President of Growth Marketing at EMARKETER. Stravito helps large enterprises centralize, store, share, and activate market research, consumer insights, and related data.
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Synology and Wasabi Technologies announced a strategic partnership so that customers of Synology’s ActiveProtect line of enterprise backup appliances can seamlessly extend their backup strategies to Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. This integration enables IT teams to protect mission-critical workloads using a single management platform and select Wasabi as a native S3-compatible cloud destination for off-site copies, long-term retention, and immutable storage.
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VDURA has appointed two new board members, Eddie White and Craig Bernero.
Eddie White is Strategic AI Infrastructure Lead for startups at Google Cloud. We’re told his experience aligns directly with VDURA’s focus on AI service providers, Neoclouds, and global enterprises navigating the transition from pilot AI workloads to sustained production environments. His expertise in scaling GTM motions, partner ecosystems, and enterprise adoption will support VDURA’s next phase of growth.
Bernero is the founder of iPreact, an advisory firm supporting startups through Fortune 100 enterprises, and currently serves on the board of ImmersionIQ. He has been an SVP at Dell and EMC. He said: “ I look forward to joining the board and helping guide VDURA through its next phase of growth.”
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Gothenburg-based Vesiro, a Chalmers University spinout, has a performance-enhancing Elasticsearch plugin that helps companies reduce server requirements by up to 50 percent while increasing search speeds by up to three times. It has raised €1.6 million ($1.9 million) in a seed round. The funding will be used to scale its Elasticsearch plug-in. The round was led by Chalmers Ventures, with Industrifonden as co-lead, alongside Staffan Truvé and a group of new and existing angel investors.
