Storage news ticker – April 17

Data exchange automator Adeptia’s Automate 5.2 release, with MCP support, enables users and AI agents to access workflow status, execution history, and system diagnostics via natural language or tool-based queries. This helps organizations resolve issues faster and operate more efficiently. It also gives teams and AI agents direct visibility into how data moves across systems. Instead of navigating dashboards, users can prompt: “Show me the last executions for this integration.” 

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Ataccama announced its Ataccama ONE data trust platform will provide capabilities that empower financial institutions to meet the requirements of the EU AI Act. Specifically, Ataccama ONE will enable financial institutions to produce on-demand, audit-ready evidence that the data powering their AI systems met defined quality standards at the time it was used, without reconstructing pipeline history after the fact.

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Cirata, the active data replication supplier that emerged from the ashes of WANdisco, reported results for the first quarter of 2026. It had its first positive cash flow quarter in its reporting history and continued go-to-market momentum following a record FY25, which included the highest Data Integration bookings achieved since 2017. There was pipeline growth of 40 percent (in value) since January 2026, consisting of new logos and existing customers. There was a closing Annualized Contract Value (ACV) of $4.9 million.

CEO Stephen Kelly said: "Following a transformational FY25, where records were set for Data Integration bookings, cash flow and with 77 percent revenue growth, we have entered the new financial year with stronger momentum across our pipeline and customer engagements. Also in line with our outlook statement we achieved positive cash flow for the quarter. This is a significant milestone and represents the first reported period of positive cash generation in the Company's history and a key step towards sustainable cash generation. We are seeing encouraging commercial traction with Cirata Symphony as our expanding sales team engages with a growing set of global customers and partners."

Cirata Symphony is focused on addressing immediate, high-value customer challenges, including the migration and replication of petabyte-scale data, disaster recovery, and data modernization to support AI-driven initiatives.

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Cloudera’s Data Readiness Index survey findings show that:

• 96 percent of respondents say they are integrating AI into core business processes, but 80 percent admit their initiatives are held back by limited data access across environments
• Data quality, cost overruns and poor integration into existing workflows were leading causes of AI initiatives falling short
• 84 percent felt confident in the accuracy and alignment of their data, but only 18 percent can prove it with fully governed data

 Request the survey here.

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Cobalt Iron says its Compass Tape Gateway (CTG), with a built-in VTL, is available for IBM i shops. CTG redefines virtual tape library (VTL) functionality by delivering a fully automated, software-defined solution that integrates IBM i workloads into a unified, policy-driven data protection framework. CTG is provisioned in minutes and managed entirely through the Compass SaaS platform. CTG is available via the IBM Cloud Marketplace or by contacting Cobalt Iron for a free 30-day trial at info@cobaltiron.com.

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Commvault has expanded its Flex partner ecosystem to include Hitachi Vantara and NetApp, building on the existing Commvault Flex ecosystem with Everpure, HPE, and VAST Data. Designed for organizations with very large, dynamic datasets, Commvault Flex, previously called HyperScale Flex, delivers purpose-built data protection and resilience with a flexible architecture that connects to external high-performance flash storage pools. The Commvault Flex models are delivered as a software image that can easily be installed on validated server hardware and connected with the storage hardware of these partners. The Commvault Flex integration with Hitachi Vantara and NetApp is targeted for general availability this summer. Pricing is configured based on the specific server and storage options selected.

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Cubbit, SUSE, Elemento Cloud, and StorPool Storage are unveiling Europe's first fully sovereign disaster recovery pack at the European Data Summit in Berlin. The system claims to guarantee business continuity in the face of uncontrollable catastrophic external events – including a potential foreign vendor kill-switch. It bundles proven products into a credible, fast, and focused solution for the most critical business use cases.

 The pack enables organizations to identify critical services, build and validate a sovereign recovery setup, and progressively extend it across other workloads via synchronisation and migration. It supports compliance with NIS2, DORA, GDPR, and regional laws, while preserving full European sovereignty across the technology stack. In this way, disaster recovery becomes not only a resilience measure, but also a practical first step towards a broader sovereign cloud strategy. 

Gartner projects sovereign cloud IaaS spending in Europe to grow 3.3x, from $6.9 billion in 2025 to $23.1 billion in 2027.

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GARR, the Italian education and research network, and geo-distributed cloud storage supplier Cubbit, have launched the pilot phase of the first federated geo-distributed storage network dedicated to universities and research institutions in Italy, the first of its kind in Europe. The network is operated by GARR on fully on-premises infrastructure. GARR has integrated DS3 Composer (Cubbit's software-defined object storage) across its datacenters in the Italian cities of Bologna, Rome, and Bari – with plans to extend the solution to all eight of its Italian datacenters in the second phase. This system provides the scientific community with an independent storage system delivering full data sovereignty, resilience, high performance, and continuous availability – even in the event of failures affecting one or more sites.

The initial capacity is 1 petabyte. Data is encrypted, fragmented, and distributed across multiple geographic locations: never exposed in full and always accessible. Key use cases include immutable backup repositories, disaster recovery, and long-term storage of scientific datasets for analysis and predictive reporting. The standout feature is the federated model: universities and research institutions can join the network by contributing their own hardware resources, taking an active role in the infrastructure while retaining full control over their own data – kept segregated from other participants, yet shareable on a selective basis for scientific collaborations.

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Physical AI for supply chains supplier Wiliot announced a strategic partnership with Databricks to run Wiliot’s Physical AI platform and industry-leading supply chain automation solutions on the Databricks platform.

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Software-defined block, file and object (Swarm) storage supplier DataCore has launched a turnkey Swarm Appliance to simplify protection, archiving, and long-term retention of unstructured data across distributed edge and ROBO environments. It includes data immutability, encryption, and integrity verification, along with integrated malware detection to identify and quarantine potentially infected data. 

DataCore has partnered with trusted vendors to deliver pre-configured, validated appliance boxes. It’s available in three models, with 50, 100, and 150 TB of usable disk capacity with metadata held on NVMe SSDs. Swarm Appliance can be deployed alongside DataCore’s StarWind HCI Appliance, which delivers highly available block storage. Learn more here. 

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It’s MAID all over again. UK-based Disk Archive Corporation says it's seeing a lot of prospects starting to repatriate their archives from public cloud to on-prem, or to private hosting. Media companies are increasingly wary of escalating egress fees and the loss of immediate control over their primary assets. Its ALTO cold archive platform offers a radical departure from the tape-based status quo by using COLD (Completely Off-Line Disk) storage. By spinning down disks that are not in use, the system achieves ultra-low power consumption and significantly extends the hardware's lifespan.

DAC says, unlike LTO, which requires a complete rewrite of the library every few generations, Disk Archive’s architecture is designed for decades of data life without "lift and shift" operations. By eliminating hidden costs like drive replacements, software licensing, and migration labor, ALTO delivers the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry.

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Dropbox has launched three new apps inside ChatGPT, aimed at making it easier to actually get work done without jumping between tools. Instead of uploading files or adding context each time, you can now work directly with your own content in a conversation, whether that's documents, company knowledge, or your calendar. The launch includes: 

• A Dropbox app for accessing, previewing and sharing files, and saving AI-generated content
• A Dropbox Dash app for searching across connected workplace tools
• A Reclaim AI calendar app for scheduling meetings and managing time

 With the Dropbox app in ChatGPT, you can easily access and preview your Dropbox files, save AI-generated content directly to Dropbox, and share links to your work without leaving ChatGPT. Bringing your files, knowledge and schedule into ChatGPT means responses are based on what you are actually working on, not just generic prompts.

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ePlus inc. has launched a Memory Optimization and Reclamation Assessment to help organizations evaluate their memory utilization, identify over-provisioned or idle workloads, reclaim stranded capacity, and adjust environments based on their actual demand, allowing them to rediscover and reallocate what they already have. This is intended to provide a fast, affordable, and reliable path to capacity access in the face of extended and widespread shortages. Check it out here.

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Data mover Fivetran has opened a new office in the City of London. It currently supports a London‑based team of 45 employees, with space for more, bringing Fivetran closer to its many UK and EMEA customers, including London Stock Exchange, Virgin Media O2 Business, Betfred, and LGT Wealth Management. Fivetran says it plays a central role in enabling Open Data Infrastructure by delivering reliable, automated data movement, data lake management, and transformations at scale.

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Cloud-native file streaming software supplier LucidLink launched the LucidLink Developer Platform, a new programmatic layer designed to help technical teams automate administration, integrate LucidLink into existing systems, and build workflows around it. See LucidLink at NAB, April18-20, Booth N2940.

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Video and rich media storage management supplier OpenDrives is introducing OpenDrives Edge at the NAB Show 2026. It’s a hybrid cloud-edge performance accelerator that provides fast data movement and orchestration, delivering local-speed 4K/8K workflows for distributed teams while reducing overall costs, providing intelligent edge syncing and automated data movement between the central data hub and globally distributed teams. Changes are automatically synced back to the hub (the “source of truth”). With support for policy-based data tiering, Edge keeps active datasets closer to the users while placing less frequently accessed data in more cost-efficient storage tiers.

The first phase of OpenDrives Edge is now available, with additional caching and multi-site control capabilities planned as part of the company’s broader data services roadmap. Existing OpenDrives customers can access Edge through the company’s Atlas data storage and management platform’s Containers Marketplace, providing connections to all major public clouds: AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, with support for Oracle Cloud and others coming soon.

Future releases will extend Edge beyond Atlas to offer expanded certified hardware options, run directly on customer servers and on additional cloud compute infrastructure. At the NAB Show 2026, OpenDrives will showcase Edge at two different West Hall locations: public demos at the Sports Business Hub pod W3443-E and semi-private meetings and consultations at the Cabana W1158.

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Canadian information management and enterprise content management (ECM) supplier OpenText announced sovereign cloud partnerships with AWS and S3NS, expanding capabilities for European organizations to run AI and cloud workloads while keeping data local and under regional compliance. It says that by combining its deep experience managing regulated enterprise data with AWS and S3NS infrastructure on Google Cloud, OpenText now delivers sovereign cloud capabilities across content management, security, service management, and SAP archiving – allowing organizations to push forward on AI and cloud adoption without giving up control of sensitive data.

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OWC has appointed a new CFO, Rob Steffens, a former Marvel co-president/chief financial officer. At Marvel Entertainment, Steffens played a central role in transforming the company from a $100 million publicly traded business into a $4.5 billion acquisition by Disney, and then helping scale it into a $50 billion global entertainment powerhouse over the following decade.

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Ahead of the 2026 NAB Show, Quantum is introducing "shockproof workflows," architectures intended to mitigate AI-driven supply chain and power challenges arising from surging costs, constrained availability, and supply uncertainty for flash and hard disk technologies. It has available offerings that enable relief from energy constraints, lower storage costs, and support hardware-level cyber-resilience that traditional flash and hard-drive-only solutions can't deliver. These workflows are anchored by the company's Quantum ActiveScale object storage platform with integrated cold storage and the Quantum Scalar i7 tape library, built to hyperscaler specifications.

"Shift happens," said Hugues Meyrath, CEO of Quantum. "It's been a time of extraordinary change for media and content producers worldwide – and threats to 'business-as-usual' storage and workflow assumptions are here to stay. Most organizations that depend on flash or hard drive-only solutions are facing the need to urgently review their architectures and ask hard questions: where is my supply chain exposure, how do I contain spiking flash costs, how do I inoculate my workflows against the next disruption? These customers need actionable answers now, and an architecture that's ready for what's next – and we are ready with workflows designed to be shockproof, built by Quantum."

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Sandisk stock will be added to the Nasdaq 100 on April 20, replacing Atlassian whose stock price has fallen 62 percent since January 1. Sandisk’s stock has risen 3.34x from $275.24 on January 2 to $919.47 yesterday.

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Edge computing and HJCI supplier Scale Computing launched the Scale Computing Velocity Partner Program to enable partners to reduce dependency on vendor resources, accelerate quote-to-close, and capture more of the total value of each opportunity, especially professional services revenue. It features a faster path to revenue, competency-based rewards, predictable margins and protected deals, and a partner-first experience. Learn more here.

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SELECT by DoiT is a Snowflake cost optimization platform that works with enterprise customers like Perplexity, Deel, and Substack. One of SELECT's customers, Exiger, saw their Snowflake costs balloon 200 percent year over year after expanding access beyond their core data team to 200+ analysts. They got costs back down by 40 percent in two weeks once they had visibility into what was driving spend. The $700K in prevented costs came from automated anomaly detection catching runaway workloads before they compounded. That pattern – costs exploding when access gets democratized, teams blind until the bill arrives – is what it's seeing consistently across hundreds of enterprise deployments, and it's the dynamic that AI agents will recreate at a much larger scale.

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The SNIA has launched the MRAM Alliance Special Interest Group (SIG), bringing together industry leaders from foundries to system companies to accelerate adoption and maximize the benefits of MRAM across a wide range of applications. It says that, with its unique combination of speed, endurance, and low power, Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) is emerging as a key technology for automotive, edge, AI, and high-performance computing environments. The initiative builds on prior industry collaboration within the "MRAM Technology Group," already involving the leading companies and research organizations in the field. It is now expanding within SNIA to include the semiconductor value chain as well as several application verticals.

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Trino open source, distributed SQL supplier Starburst launched its AI data assistant, AIDA, a new capability that helps organizations move from static reporting to faster, more context-aware decision-making. AIDA introduces reasoning capabilities that allow users to explore and analyze data using natural language, grounded in governed, distributed data, not just queries or summaries.

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HCI supplier StorMagic achieved 36 percent annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth over the past fiscal year (April 1, 2025 - March 31, 2026) while expanding both its global salesforce and partner ecosystems. It also completed corporate rebranding.

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UnicornIQ has appointed ex-Scale Computing co-founder and CEO Jeff Ready as a stratergic advisor. The company says it provides an essential data pre-processing layer that automatically creates a verified Source of Truth (SoT) before the data ever reaches an AI system. "We resolve contradictions, eliminate semantic redundancy, and assign a verifiable confidence score with absolute provenance to every fact. For the customer, this guarantees data integrity and project success; for the investor, it positions UIQ as the non-negotiable infrastructure layer for any company that wants an actual, measurable ROI on their GenAI strategy."

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A Veeam DataTrust and Resilience Report 2026 found: "In our survey of more than 900 security leaders across the C-suite and frontline security roles, 90 percent said they were very to extremely confident they can recover from a cyber incident within their defined recovery time objectives (RTOs). Actual outcomes are less reassuring. Among organizations that experienced a cyber incident in the past 12 months, more than 40 percent reported customer or constituent disruption or financial loss. Ransomware outcomes are even tougher. For incidents that contributed to operational loss or encryption of data, only 28 percent fully recovered all affected data. Another 29 percent ended up with data loss, downtime, or business disruption." Download the full report here.

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VMware replacement supplier VergeIO says the oVirt API is the established interface for KVM-based virtualization environments. Major backup vendors adopted this standard. VergeOS 26.1.2 implements this interface natively within the platform. Backup platforms connect to VergeOS through the same driver they already use for KVM environments, authenticate, and operate at full production scale. Veeam’s oVirt driver connects to VergeOS 26.1.2 with no modifications and no custom code. The integration deploys in under an hour and runs at full production scale from day one. 

VergeOS and oVirt-compatible backup platforms divide data protection responsibilities cleanly. VergeOS operates at the infrastructure layer, maintaining continuous data availability and supporting recovery at the scale of entire Virtual Data Centers. Failures at the disk, node, or site level are absorbed within the platform. Backup platforms handle the granular layer – file-level restore, application-aware protection, and long-term retention. Each system operates within its intended role. Native oVirt API compatibility is available today in VergeOS 26.1.2 and later.

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Virtuozzo provides open source-based hyperconverged cloud technology that combines cloud services with a single web interface for MSPs. It’s expanding its board of directors to support the next phase of growth.  Jason Magee (CEO of Cynet) and Charles Ryan (partner at Almaz Capital) join the board, along with Peter Bergstrom as a strategic advisor (Administrator at the US Department of the Treasury). The leadership expansion follows Virtuozzo’s February 2026 announcement of new CEO Kurt Daniel and of how the company is unifying its cloud technologies into a single, integrated product. 

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Blockchain infrastructure provider Tatum is making 11 TB of historical blockchain datasets available through Walrus. Web3, decentralized storage supplier Walrus enables Tatum to package and distribute blockchain data as structured, programmable files directly on-chain, without relying on centralized storage or custom delivery pipelines.

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Archival systems supplier XenData announced Backup for LucidLink, Archive for LucidLink and Cloud-Connect for LucidLink. All three products run on a Windows platform, typically a cloud-based virtual machine such as an EC2 instance from AWS. 

• Backup for LucidLink provides an enhanced disaster recovery strategy, synchronizing content to an entirely different storage location. It supports backing up to any AWS, Azure, Seagate Lyve or Wasabi datacenter. Archive for LucidLink is ideal for offloading finished projects and it allows an administrator to easily move files and folders from a LucidLink Filespace to standard object storage on one or multiple public clouds, including AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Seagate Lyve, and Wasabi object storage. 
• Cloud-Connect for LucidLink allows files stored in existing AWS and Azure object storage, including on inaccessible tiers, to be easily added to a LucidLink Filespace. 

This suite of products will be demonstrated for the first time at NAB 2026 in Las Vegas, April 19-22, in the XenData booth at W2811.