Tech
Storage data management tools: What they do and what’s available | Computer Weekly
Pure Storage’s recent launch of its Enterprise Data Cloud reignited debate around storage and data management.
Pure claims its EDC addresses the management of growing volumes of data in a complex regulatory environment, and the demands storage faces from artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.
The idea of a single management layer for storage is not new. Pure is not the only supplier looking to automate storage provision and management, where storage comes in “fleets”, and data management and governance take place across local, cloud and hybrid infrastructure.
But while analysts agree Pure has a technical edge for now, most suppliers offer tools that work across on-premise and cloud technologies with the aim of reducing storage management overheads through automation and AI.
Analyst GigaOm, for example, rates Pure Storage as a leader in data pipeline support, especially for demanding AI deployments, alongside Hitachi Vantara, HPE, IBM, NetApp and Dell Technologies.
“Adopting high-performance storage optimised for AI workloads is a strategic business imperative, not merely a technical upgrade,” says Whit Walters, field chief technology officer at GigaOm.
From storage to data management
AI’s demands for vast amounts of data has pushed chief information officers (CIOs) and suppliers to look beyond technical infrastructure management of storage, and to a wider concept of data management.
This includes managing conventional metrics, such as capacity, performance and availability, and routine tasks such as provisioning and backup, to issues such as data location for compliance and ransomware protection.
At a basic level, CIOs need to control all of a supplier’s products from a single control plane, from on-premise to the cloud. This includes day-to-day tasks like provisioning, data migration and upgrades, as well as robust monitoring. Ideally, data management should integrate with the supplier’s as-a-service tools, too.
But all this becomes harder as data volumes and performance requirements increase.
“There is a growing challenge with managing enterprise infrastructure at scale,” explains Simon Robinson, principal analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. “This is not a new problem. Infrastructure and operations teams spend too much time instrumenting, fine tuning, provisioning and managing capacity for their enterprise workload. Storage is still pretty onerous in that respect.”
Improvements in storage management, he says, have mostly been technical, such as thin provisioning, and at the array level. This makes it harder to scale systems, and fails to account for integration with the cloud.
“Now the control plane needs to extend across the on-premise environment and the public cloud,” says Robinson. “That is a really difficult problem to solve.”
Meanwhile, data and storage management tools rarely work across rival supplier platforms. Even though platform-neutral storage management has been tried, suppliers reverted to their own tools, with extensions into cloud environments.
The argument is that single supplier tools offer a performance advantage that outweighs the drawbacks.
“Going back 10 years, the goal was to consistently manage a heterogeneous vendor environment,” says Robinson. “That hasn’t materialised. The trade off with all of these approaches is that you are going to get the best results if you standardise around a particular vendor’s systems.”
Some supplier offerings, such as IBM Storage Virtualize, provide multi-supplier support. But most, such as Pure’s EDC, assume IT leaders will trade compatibility for performance.
Here, we list some key data management features of the main data storage suppliers.
Dell Technologies
Dell’s PowerScale technology provides a scale-out architecture, supporting management of local and cloud storage from the same interface.
Dell includes data management for AI and unstructured data, through DataIQ (for unstructured data) and CloudIQ (for cloud).
DataIQ works across Dell EMC PowerScale and Isilon hardware, as well as S3 compatible cloud storage. Though Apex, Dell also provides a platform for multi-cloud management, although it is not specific to storage.
HPE
HPE says its Alletra Storage product gives a “cloud experience” for workloads locally or in the cloud. Its Greenlake platform provides as-a-service storage across on-premise, hybrid and cloud.
Zerto offers data protection across hybrid environments. Alongside this, HPE’s Data Management Framework 7 provides data management tools across high-performance and AI storage, including tiering and automated file movement.
Huawei
Huawei’s data management engine (DME) provides provisioning, lifecycle management, alerting and anomaly detection. It also supports multi-cloud operations, and uses AI to predict system risks, through DME IQ.
DME supports Huawei’s own arrays and its FusionStorage, as well as some support for third-party hardware and hosts such as ESXi.
IBM
IBM has a wide range of storage and data management capabilities, split across a range of tools. Storage Virtualize is a long-established tool able to manage hardware in multi-supplier environments.
IBM Storage Insights Pro is subscription-based, and provides inventory, capacity and performance management for IBM and non-IBM block storage.
IBM Storage Scale provides high-performance data management, while IBM Spectrum Control delivers monitoring and analytics across multiple suppliers on-premise and in the cloud.
NetApp
NetApp has a range of storage and data management capabilities, including through its Ontap storage operating system, its StorageGrid multi-cloud technology and its Keystone as-a-service offering.
Keystone can control storage across on-premise and the cloud, and includes governance, compliance and ransomware protection, as well as deployment and management tools. BlueXP allows users to control storage and data services across local and cloud systems.
Hitachi Vantara
Hitachi Vantara’s VSP One offers a single data plane to integrate data and simplify management across on-premise and cloud. It supports block, file and object, as well as software-defined storage (SDS) and, unusually, support for mainframes.
VSP One SDS can run on third-party hardware, as well as on Amazon’s cloud. VSP 360 provides cloud orchestration as well as fleet management; Everflex provides storage-as-a-service.
Pure Storage
Enterprise Data Cloud allows customers to manage data across a “storage cloud”, regardless of the location of physical storage. This allows customers to focus on managing data, it says.
It also allows any Pure array to work as an endpoint for the fleet. EDC is made up of Pure’s hardware layer, its cloud-based Pure1 storage management and optimisation platform, and its Pure Fusion control plane for fleet management.
I tried the battery version, which does require you recharge it every couple of weeks, but the wired-in version is the top recommendation on our guide to the Best Video Doorbells.
A Better Birdhouse
I had a new-to-me problem this spring: bird invasion. A little bird made a nest in my front-door wreath without us noticing. One evening, my sister opened the door, and the bird flew out of the nest and straight into our house. After a 30-minute battle to get it outside again (and keep my cat from eating it), it wasn’t until we saw the bird fly off the door again the next day that we realized it was calling our home its home, too.
If this is a common problem at your house, our resident bird-gear tester Kat Merck has a solution: a smart nesting box. Birdfy makes a few different smart bird feeders we like for bird-watching, and the Nest Duo is a birdhouse that lets you watch the birds while they nest inside of it. It’s a slim, attractive box that will add to your front yard’s style while also packing two solar-powered cameras (one facing the entrance, one focused inside) so you can bird-watch from multiple angles. It comes with different hole sizes to appeal to different species, metal predator guards to prevent chewing around the hole, and a remote control to reset or recharge the camera without disturbing your feathered neighbors.
Stylish Smart Lights
Govee
Outdoor Clear Bulb String Lights
I’ve liked Govee’s smart outdoor string lights before, usually for my holiday decor, and have previously recommended something similar with a bistro-light-like look that happened to be smart. These clear bulb string lights are part of Govee’s current lineup and have a contemporary twist with a triangle in the center instead of the wire filament. These are a fun option for outdoor lights you can enjoy on warm nights, and they can do every color and shade of white without looking as bulky as permanent outdoor lights. (Added bonus, these lights are also Matter compatible!)
Fresh Bulbs
Cync
Smart LED Light Bulb, PAR38
If you have light fixtures you want to remote-control, add an outdoor smart bulb. There are tons to choose from, and you can usually find one from any brand you already have at home. The only downside is that outdoor-rated smart bulbs are usually 4.75-inch-diameter PAR38-style bulbs, so they’re best for downward-facing floodlights on your porch or balcony. They’ll likely be too big to fit in a wall fixture as a replacement for a normal-sized bulb. Don’t just grab any smart bulb—not all are outdoor-rated. Check for mentions of outdoor use and waterproof ratings to make sure they’re safe to use. I’m a big fan of Cync bulbs, and the brand has an outdoor version of the Cync Full Color bulbs I like to use indoors. You’ll be able to add fun colors as well as shades of white, so you can turn the porch a spooky orange or red for Halloween, pink for Valentine’s Day, or the colors of your favorite sports team on game day.
Remote-Controlled Garage
If your garage is the centerpiece of your home’s curb appeal, you can control it as easily as a smart door by adding a smart controller. You can do two different styles: I have the Chamberlain MyQ professionally installed smart garage opener, which means the device that controls my garage has these smarts built into it (plus a camera, but I find it doesn’t work great with how far the device is from my Wi-Fi router), or you can get a smart garage controller that can add smart features onto an existing garage door. Both let you check whether the garage is open or closed and operate it remotely, and you can add a video keypad that doubles as a video doorbell and can let you open or close the garage without your phone.
Smart Shades
The front of my home faces west, so it’s absolutely baking at the end of the day. What I need to add are some of our favorite smart shades to automate closing the shades on that side of the house at the right time of day. These also give your home a nice, cohesive look and immediate, controllable privacy from the outside world. WIRED reviewer Simon Hill recommends the SmartWings shades as his top picks, and Lutron’s Caseta shades if you’re looking for a more upgraded look.
Invisible Swaps
Looking to add some smarts without touching your existing setup? These switch-ups can make your front door and yard smart without being visible.
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April might be springtime in the northern hemisphere, but some of the best streaming services seem to think it’s the perfect time for a dry run of spooky season. How else to explain the arrival of some exquisitely dark slices of horror, like 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple arriving on Netflix, Weapons coming to Prime Video, or Shelby Oaks landing on Hulu? If you prefer your off-season Halloween viewing to be in the vein of campy B movies rather than serious scares though, horror specialist Shudder has you covered with Deathstalker, a gloriously cheesy reboot of a near-forgotten ’80s series.
Reality is often scarier than fiction though, as shown by Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere—his first documentary film with Netflix, exploring the dark side of social media and the world of toxic male influencers. (Be sure to read our interview with the filmmaker.) And if the thought of that leaves you wanting something a bit more wholesome to watch, thankfully Zootopia 2 has popped up on Disney+—and there’s even a rabbit in that, for some appropriately springtime imagery.
Here are WIRED’s picks of the best movies to watch right now.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
The fourth film in the long-running postapocalyptic horror series switches focus from rampaging rage zombies to a more dangerous threat: humans. OK, OK, “people are the real monsters” isn’t a hot take for the genre, but The Bone Temple offers a unique twist, with 28 Years Later survivor Spike (Alfie Williams) trapped in the company of a murderous gang led by deranged satanist “Sir Lord” Jimmy Crystal (Sinners’ Jack O’Connell). The villain is modeled on disgraced British TV presenter Jimmy Savile, whose sexual abuse crimes hadn’t been revealed by the time of the initial outbreak in 28 Days Later, adding a dash of real-world terror.
As the group stalks what remains of the English countryside, Spike’s only hope might be Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), whose experiments on curing alpha zombie Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) might hold humanity’s last hope. Although best watched back to back with its predecessor for the full, horrifying picture, director Nia DaCosta’s chapter stands on its own—and earns bonus points for one of the best uses of Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” in film history.
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere
It’s the silence that does the trick; British documentarian Louis Theroux always knows when not to speak and instead let his subject expose themselves for the world to see. It’s a masterful technique whether Theroux is investigating the Westboro Baptist Church or UFO conspiracy theorists, but it is rarely put to better use than in his latest outing: exploring the online “manosphere” subculture of self-appointed “alphas” offering toxic advice on how to be a “real man.” Speaking with key figures in the loosely defined movement, Theroux’s mild-mannered approach often leaves them to do most of the talking, exposing shockingly misogynistic and extremist views. Even more distressing? The quiet revelation that for many of them their performative masculinity is all just one big grift, and how they rationalize the harm they cause in pursuit of a payout. Depressing but compelling viewing—not all men, but definitely all of these men.
Crime 101
Jewel thief Mike (Chris Hemsworth) is the best in the business, a meticulous planner who pulls off his heists without leaving a shred of evidence—much to the consternation of LAPD detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), who doesn’t even know exactly who he’s hunting for a string of thefts. Elsewhere in the City of Angels, Sharon (Halle Berry) is an underappreciated VP at an insurance firm, frustrated at being passed over for promotion for years. She’s the perfect insider to help Mike orchestrate an elaborate $11 million diamond heist. But as Lou uncovers evidence connecting to Mike’s past, and the chaotic, violent biker Ormon (Barry Keoghan) aims to take the score for himself, even the most masterful planning can’t prevent everything spiraling dangerously out of control.
Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s former chief product officer who was recently tapped to build a new AI workspace for scientists, Prism, is leaving the company, WIRED has confirmed. Weil was previously an early executive leading product at Instagram.
OpenAI is also sunsetting Prism, which the company launched as a web app in January this year to give scientists a better way to work with AI. The company is folding the roughly 10-person team behind it into Thibault Sottiaux’s Codex team. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the changes, and tells WIRED this is part of the company’s effort to unify its business and product strategy. OpenAI has broader ambitions to turn Codex, its AI coding application, into an “everything app.”
Weil, who joined OpenAI in June 2024, announced last September that he would be starting a new initiative inside of the company called “OpenAI for Science.” Now, OpenAI is dispersing those employees throughout the company’s product, research, and infrastructure teams. An OpenAI spokesperson reiterated the company’s commitment to accelerating scientific discovery, and says it’s one of the clearest ways AI can benefit humanity.
OpenAI is currently trying to refocus the company around a few key areas, such as enterprise offerings and coding. Last month, OpenAI’s CEO of AGI deployment Fidji Simo told staff that the company needs to simplify its product offerings. The push to divert resources to more consequential efforts resulted in OpenAI discontinuing its Sora video-generation app.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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