This week the International Space Stations NAS gives vent, Nebulon pumps out a survey, Pliops talks about its storage processor, we see how Pivot3s video HCI is getting better system management, and take a look at Veeams quarterly boast.

The International Space Station summary report for July 27 includes this gem; Payloads Network Attached Storage (NAS) Cleaning: The crew cleaned inlet/outlet vents of the NAS to prevent the NAS from automatically powering off due to inadequate processor or Hard Drive cooling that can be caused by blocked vents. Memo to self: we should all clean our vents.

Nebulon has commissioned an independent survey that exposes the biggest challenges that enterprises face in transforming their on-premises application storage environments.

Siamak Nazari, co-founder and CEO of Nebulon, issued a canned quote: The impact of the pandemic is forcing CIOs worldwide to reconsider their operations. Reducing costs through server-based storage alternatives without the restrictions of hyperconverged infrastructure, and reducing operating cost pressure through cloud-based management of the application storage infrastructure are crucial initiatives for IT organisations looking to survive this new normal.

The survey was completed by IT decision makers at 500 companies in the IT, financial services, manufacturing, retail, distribution and transport industries across the UK, US, Germany and France. This seems like a supplier polling potential customers and finding out, and telling them, they need its product.

Nebulon makes an on-premises, server SAN, bolstered with storage processing offload cards, which is managed through a cloud service.

More than 10 tier-one cloud and enterprise companies, including the database supplier Percona, have tested and evaluated the GPU-like, PCIe card storage processor device from Pliops.

The startup says the devices boost performance by more than 10x, reduces five 9s latency by up to 1000x, and increase flash price performance by more than 90 per cent. These results were indicated for almost all workloads using flash. Pliops is planning general availability of its Storage Processor later this year.

Steve Fingerhut, president and chief business officer, issued a canned quote: The Pliops approach accelerates compute-intensive functions and eliminates bottlenecks solving the dilemma of choosing cost at the expense of performance and vice versa.

Veeam doesnt talk revenue figures, preferring instead to talk percentage growth in regular press releases. The latest this week announced annual recurring revenue (ARR) increase of 20 per cent year-over-year for Q220 the biggest second quarter in the companys 14-year history. Veaam reported its biggest quarter for total bookings of its fastest growing product, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, with an 89 per cent YoY increase and a 75 per cent YoY gain in overall subscription bookings.

AWS has announced new EC2 Instances based on Graviton2 processors with local NVMe-based SSDs. The d variant of the three instance types M6gd, C6gd, and R6g have up to 2 x 1.9 TB NVMe SSDs. They offer 50 per cent more storage GB/vCPU compared to M5d, C5d, and R5d instances and are designed for apps needing high-speed, low latency local storage, such as scratch space, temporary files, and caches. Details can be found on the AWS News Blog and Whats New at AWS posts.

A Minio blog says: the ARM architecture, with the introduction of the Graviton2 processor by AWS, has closed the performance gap to Intel and even surpassed it for multi-core performance. There are AWS Graviton performance testing details in the blog.

TechRadar is teasing a feature about a potential 1PB SSD from Nimbus Data, possibly using compression to ramp its 400TB raw capacity up to 1PB usable with availability in 2023.

HCI supplier Pivot3 has added intelligent system health and best practices analysis features to its Acuity software.

SANBlaze announced its SBExpress v 8.1 software release to provides NVMe SSD manufacturers the ability to test native NVMe PCIe devices as well as NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabrics) devices. V8.1 builds on the Industry Standard SBCert (Certified by SANBlaze) NVMe qualification platform adding advanced automated testing features. The SW works in conjunction with the SANBlaze SBExpress-RM4 PCIe NVMe Gen4 test system hardware to test PCIe Gen4 NVMe devices.

Supermicro and Scality are selling Scality RING object storage on Supermicro server and storage hardware with a reference architecture design. It comes in performance-optimised and capacity-optimised versions. The two say they deliver a petabyte-scale storage framework offering cost-effective scaling, performance, and resiliency paired with Supermicros predefined hardware configurations that offer users an appliance-like deployment and service levels to meet enterprise requirements. You can download basic datasheet-type details.

Supermicro has unveiled a new generation of its top-loading storage systems (60-bay and 90-bay), which are optimised for enterprise environments. They support scale-up and scale-out architectures and are available in single-node and dual-node configurations, with the drives evenly split between each node.

The NAND market is weakening, according to TrendFocus. The market research firm says demand from the retail end has been recovering in June and July, but demand for PC and server SSDs has softened. as a result of decelerating demand for cloud and remote access services. A.

TrendForce forecasts the quarterly decline in NAND flash ASPs will likely reach 10 per cent under the impact of the pandemic, due to excess inventory. This is despite the traditional peak season for electronics sales and the release of Apples new iPhones in 3Q20. TrendForce forecasts the oversupply in the NAND Flash market will intensify in 4Q20, further exacerbating the decline in NAND Flash ASP. YMTCs capacity expansion this year is expected to continue in 2021.

Verbatim has announced the StorenGo ALU Slim a compact, lightweight portable hard drive in a metal enclosure with USB 3.2 Gen 1 connection for data transfer speeds of up to 5Gbit/s. It has 1TB and 2TB capacities, weighs 150g, is 0.9cm thick, and includes a Micro-B to USB-A cable and a USB-A to USB-C adapter. The drive is FAT32 formatted. For content with files sizes larger than 4GB, software is supplied on the drive to reformat to HFS+ for Macs and NTFS for PCs. Suggested retail price is 62.99 for 1TB and 82.99 for 2TB.

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This week in storage, featuring a mucky International Space Station NAS system - Blocks and Files