The hold is filled with storage news! Grab a bucket and BAIL

Keelhauling through the week's movers and shakers

Qumulo

The scale-out hybrid filer startup says life sciences and medical research institutions are choosing Qumulo to accelerate their data-intensive workflows, including cancer and infectious disease research, genomics, bioinformatics, proteomics, microscopy and big data. It mentions:

• Johns Hopkins Genomics (including the NIH CIDR Program at The Johns Hopkins University)
• The Center for Infectious Disease Research
• Georgia Cancer Center at Augusta University
• Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital
• DarwinHealth Inc.

Other Qumulo customers in life sciences include Carnegie Institution for Science, CID Research, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at University of Washington, UConn Health, and the University of Utah Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute. It's quite a roster.

Ron Hood, director of IT at the Center for Infectious Disease Research, said: "Qumulo Core's modern architecture is built for the future and that's what closed the deal for us. We didn't want to spend our budget on legacy scale-out storage systems that are obsolete or will be in two to three years. Qumulo supports our needs today and well into the future, so that we can achieve faster times to analysis for our most critical research."

Eat your heart out, Isilon. But, then again, maybe Isilon's all-flash system will start clawing back this lost ground?

Storj Labs and blockchain

Storj Labs, a decentralised cloud storage provider, has launched a sale of its new Ethereum-based application token, STORJ (formerly SJCX). Argon Group, a digital investment bank, is running the token sale.

Acronis, the backup supplier, is getting interested in applying blockchain for security and now here is another storage supplier jumping aboard.

Storj recently announced a migration of SJCX from the Counterparty protocol on the Bitcoin blockchain to the Ethereum ERC20 token standard in an effort to improve quality of service, reduce network transaction fees and encourage Storj users to participate in a more active and robust development community. A 1:1 conversion from SJCX to STORJ will take place for existing token holders.

STORJ tokens will enable users to provide and receive storage services in the Storj Labs network. The company is an example of how various industries, not just finance, can leverage blockchain technology and tokens to further their business.

It says selling the STORJ tokens will enable it to advance product development and [marketing alert] speed the rate of innovation in cloud storage. It hopes to align its interests with its users while accelerating developer adoption and network growth.

John Quinn, co-founder of Storj Labs, said: "Our ultimate goal here at Storj Labs is to disrupt cloud storage by delivering unprecedented security assurance, reliable performance, and blazing speeds – all without a hefty price tag. This Token Sale will help us to significantly increase resources so that we can accelerate development of our decentralised network and disrupt the traditional cloud providers. It redefines our development limits."

Storj is employed by more than 20,000 API users and channel partners like Heroku and Microsoft Azure. The company recently exited beta, transitioning users of the platform to commercial support, billing and payment plans.

Anyone interested in participating in the Token Sale should visit https://storj.io/tokensale.html.

Transaction Processing Performance Council

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has announced availability of TPCx-HS Version 2, extending the original benchmark's scope to include the Spark execution framework and cloud services.

The TPC says the original TPCx-HS benchmark was the first objective specification enabling measurement of both hardware and software including Hadoop Runtime, Hadoop Filesystem API-compatible systems and MapReduce layers.

TPCx-HS v2 should broaden the range of system topologies and implementation methodologies. It models continuous system availability 24 hours a day, seven days a week and – as an "Express" class benchmark – is publicly available for download via the TPC's website: www.tpc.org/tpcx-hs.

Western Digital

Western Digital has expanded its helium-filled 6Gbps SATA interface 10TB Red and Red Pro 3.5-inch NAS disk drives. The previous highest capacity was 8TB. The Red is for 1-8-bay NAS enclosures typically used by small office/home office businesses, spin at 5,400rpm, and have a 180TB/year workload rating.

The Red Pro are for 1-16-bay NAS systems used by small and medium businesses, spin at 7,200rpm and have a 300TB/year workload rating.

Red 10TB drives are priced at $494 and 10TB Red Pros at $533. Both have a five-year limited warranty.