Philippe Nicolas

Data Storage Market Obs. & Analyst at Coldago Research #Coldago - The IT Press Tour #ITPT - #StorageNewsletter Owner - Blogger since 2005 & #TFSP Podcast Owner

[Philippe Nicolas @CDP_FST]

In the Svalbard at #AWA w/ @PiqlAs for the 2021 deposit ceremony #Archive #DeepArchive #DataPreservation #LongTerm #Tape #PiqlFilm #OpenSource

[Céline Coustaut @coustautc]

Phison unveils new additions to its product lineup at Computex Taipei. @Dutchitchannel @jsteeman https://t.co/RUHxCgCnqZ @Phison_USA #MultiCloud #NAND #Flash #SSD #NVMe #Pascari #aiDAPTIV #AI #ITPT @ITPressTour 70th Edition in California

[Céline Coustaut @coustautc]

Cohesity Bets on Recovery as AI-Driven Attacks Accelerate. @JjungSscg #securitystorageundchannel https://t.co/2zQMMkx5W0 @Cohesity #MultiCloud #DataProtection #DataManagement #Ransomware #AgenticAI #Backup #ITPT @ITPressTour 70th Edition in California

[Céline Coustaut @coustautc]

Recap of the 70th @ITPressTour in Silicon Valley @StorageTopNews https://t.co/ic5TlIgpWR
With 8 organizations: @clockworkio @Cohesity @CTERA @DDNintelligence @Hammerspace_Inc @Phison_USA @ScaleFlux & @VergeIO_Inc #MultiCloud #GPU #Clusters #Orchestration #DataProtection #ArgenticAI #Storag #KVCache #ITPT #Flash #NAND #Hypervisor #ITPT

[Céline Coustaut @coustautc]

DDN Wants to Make AI Profitable by Keeping Every GPU Busy. @JjungSscg #SecurityStorageundChannel https://t.co/JRIhwPQT3r @DDNintelligence #MultiCloud #DataManagement #HighPerformance #Infinia #AgenticAI #AI #KVCache #HPC #ITPT @ITPressTour 70th Edition in California

[Céline Coustaut @coustautc]

Hammerspace: Unternehmensdaten für KI nutzen. @JjungSscg #securitystorageundchannel https://t.co/paRu9EaEeY #MultiCloud #GlobalFS #ParallelFS #pNFS #AgenticAI #AI #KVCache #ITPT @ITPressTour 70th Edition in California

[Céline Coustaut @coustautc]

Clockwork keeps GPU clusters running during failures. @Dutchitchannel @jsteeman https://t.co/4ewUxWONXF @clockworkio #MultiCloud #GPU #Clusters #Orchestration #Optimization #FaultTolerance #ITPT @ITPressTour 70th Edition in California

[Philippe Nicolas @CDP_FST]

Amazing comment thank you @alexonline888
You're The IT Press Tour became a real must for IT companies
Glad you joined and be part of the core team now
#ITPT

[Alex Zaharov-Reutt @alexonline888]

70th IT Press Tour analysis: eight companies chasing the idle GPU, and why Philippe Nicolas and Céline Coustaut's tour has become an institution - full article here, please read on: https://t.co/ZCSPRIWpxU

Eight companies. One week in Silicon Valley. Journalists from four continents around a single table, with CEOs, CTOs and product chiefs on the other side for up to two hours at a time.

That's the formula for the IT Press Tour, and over the week of 5 October it reached its 70th edition.

@Cohesity , @CTERA , @Verge_IO , @DDNintelligence, @Phison_USA, @Clockworkio, @ScaleFlux and @Hammerspace_Inc each took a session, and I've written each of them up in detail for iTWire.

Read side by side, those eight articles tell one story. The AI boom has made the GPU the most expensive thing in the building, and almost everything else in the data centre is now judged on whether it keeps that GPU busy.

This piece pulls the eight together, draws out the common threads, and looks at why a tour that started in June 2010 now has companies queuing up to join.

Full article here, please read on: https://t.co/ZCSPRIWpxU

@ITPressTour, @CDP_FST, @CelineCoustaut, #ITPT

[Alex Zaharov-Reutt @alexonline888]

70th IT Press Tour, Part 1 of 2: Phison nearly quadrupled its quarterly revenue on AI, and now it wants flash to do DRAM's job - full video and article here: https://t.co/qyvBHOPOJ5

A year ago, Phison sat in front of the IT Press Tour and introduced us to Pascari, its brand-new enterprise SSD label. This year, Phison US President and GM, Michael Wu, opened with a slide that would make most chief financial officers weep with joy.

Phison's revenue for the first half of 2026 was US$3.4 billion. That's 147% of what the company made in the whole of 2025 (US$2.345 billion), and it took six months.

"This year, Phison has turned into a very different company," Wu said.

This is part 1 of my Phison coverage. A large slab of what we saw, including the technical sessions from Phison CTO North America, Sebastien Jean, and several product announcements, is under embargo until 17 November, US time (18 November here in Australia). I've seen it, and part 2 is the bigger story. For now, here's everything I can tell you.

Full video and article here: https://t.co/qyvBHOPOJ5

[Alex Zaharov-Reutt @alexonline888]

70th IT Press Tour: DDN wants every GPU earning its keep, and NVIDIA and Google already run on its data engines - full article and video here: https://t.co/pKsHhiw36c

A GPU waiting for data still draws full power. DDN has built its entire pitch around that one uncomfortable fact, and with bookings growing threefold, a rebuilt executive team and a fresh inference engine, it reckons its found the money in fixing it.

I was at the The IT Press Tour (70th edition) in California last week, where DDN gave journalists an impressively detailed briefing session, under the banner Make AI profitable.

Presenting were DDN president and chief revenue officer, Kevin Delane, and DDN chief product officer, Omer Asad.

DDN’s new chief marketing officer, @AdamBerlew, sat in and chimed in as appropriate, despite being on what he told us was day eight in the job. IT Press Tour founder, Philippe NICOLAS, said this was the ninth or tenth time the tour had visited DDN. The faces on the other side of the table were mostly new.

So, how do you make AI profitable? Full article and video here: https://t.co/pKsHhiw36c

#ITPT @CDP_FST @coustautc

[Céline Coustaut @coustautc]

IT Press Tour 70: DDN - Make AI Profitable. BY @CDP_FST @StorageTopNews https://t.co/o7Ek58iNgG @DDNintelligence #MultiCloud #DataManagement #HighPerformance #Infinia #AgenticAI #AI #KVCache #HPC #ITPT @ITPressTour 70th Edition in California

[Céline Coustaut @coustautc]

IT Press Tour 70: ScaleFlux - Scale the AI data pipeline. @StorageTopNews by @CDP_FST https://t.co/V9plUgQNVc @ScaleFlux #MultiCloud #NAND #Flash #SSD #NVMe #CXL #DataReduction #AI #ITPT @ITPressTour 70th Edition in California

[Céline Coustaut @coustautc]

IT Press Tour 70: @Cohesity - Resilience for the AI era @StorageTopNews by @CDP_FST https://t.co/AF9dtpGNYH @Cohesity #MultiCloud #DataProtection #DataManagement #Ransomware #AgenticAI #Backup #ITPT @ITPressTour in California

[Céline Coustaut @coustautc]

IT Press Tour 70: @CTERA - Closing the "AI value gap" at the data layer @StorageTopNews by @CDP_FST https://t.co/Pt0K4rWcs2 @CTERA #MultiCloud #GlobalFS #FileStorage #AgenticAI #EnterpriseAI #ROBO #UnstructuredData #ITPT @ITPressTour in California

[Céline Coustaut @coustautc]

IT Press Tour 70: Phison - From NAND controllers to AI infrastructure @StorageTopNews by @CDP_FST https://t.co/wKujze72CE @Phison_USA #MultiCloud #NAND #Flash #SSD #NVMe #Pascari #aiDAPTIV #AI #ITPT @ITPressTour 70th Edition in California

[Philippe Nicolas @CDP_FST]

Great live demo for @clockworkio
Very interesting session
#ITPT

[Alex Zaharov-Reutt @alexonline888]

Clockwork pulled the power on a live AI training job, and it carried on from the same step

Live demos on real hardware are where confident startups go to be humbled. So when a Clockwork engineer in a South Bay data centre pulled on a pair of gloves, switched off a GPU server in the middle of a training run and yanked out its power cables, the room went very quiet. The full article and video is here https://t.co/ItVDLJrVtP

The job stopped at step 5,040. About a minute later it resumed at step 5,040, on a different physical machine, with no checkpoint reload and no recomputed work. That minute is the entire Clockwork pitch. GPU clusters fail constantly, and the AI jobs running on them should barely notice.

The full article and video is here https://t.co/ItVDLJrVtP

#ITPT, @ITPressTour, https://t.co/x0bD1uUm3V, @CDP_FST, @coustautc

[Philippe Nicolas @CDP_FST]

Great session with @ScaleFlux
Lots of information
#ITPT

[Alex Zaharov-Reutt @alexonline888]

70th IT Press Tour: ScaleFlux wants to be the silicon that feeds the GPU, and its handing the SSD business to its partners - the full article and video is here: https://t.co/vEdyjQDbEm

12 years ago with a bet that the CPU would become the bottleneck as SSDs got faster. It was right about acceleration, but the first big winners turned out to be GPUs and then DPUs (data processing units).We were a little ahead of schedule, ScaleFlux Co-founder and CEO, Hao Zhong, told journalists at the companys Milpitas, Santa Clara headquarters.

After a long time, now people start realising storage is becoming important again.Thats a polite way of saying the AI boom has eaten the worlds memory and flash supply, and ScaleFlux has spent a decade building exactly the sort of controller silicon and firmware the industry now cant get enough of.

The full article and video is here: https://t.co/vEdyjQDbEm

@ScaleFlux , @CDP_FST , @ITPressTour , @coustautc , #ITPT, @iTWire

[Zettalane Systems @ZettalaneSys]

1/ MayaNAS is now generally available on Google Cloud Marketplace — enterprise NAS and the Lustre parallel file system, one engine, bulk data in Google Cloud Storage, in your own project. 🧵

https://t.co/0WvLAgFc7W

@googlecloud @gcloudpartners #Lustre #MLPerf

[Philippe Nicolas @CDP_FST]

What an @ITPressTour it was - great 70th edition for sure #ITPT

[Alex Zaharov-Reutt @alexonline888]

When VergeIO's new CEO sat down in front of journalists from four continents in Palo Alto, he summed up his reason for being there in one line. "We thought the market was finished, and now it's opened up all over again." Full video and article here: https://t.co/jrX8cTY64W

He should know. He spent half his career at VMware selling the very products VergeIO now wants to replace, and he ran worldwide sales for vSAN while it took the hyperconverged crown from Nutanix.

Now he's betting that Broadcom's pricing, a renewal wave and a sudden spike in SSD and memory prices have reopened a market everyone assumed was settled.

Who was in the room

@VergeIO_Inc opened day one of the 70th IT Press Tour, run by The IT Press Tour founder, Philippe Nicolas.

@Verge_IO CMO, George Crump, had briefed the tour in January, a session I wrote up as The 400,000-line rebellion.

Presenting were VergeIO CEO, Parag Patel, VergeIO Chief Marketing Officer, George Crump, and VergeIO Technical Solutions Strategist, Dave Vincent, who joined about two months ago and ran the demos.

VergeIO Marketing Director, Sarah Dubois, organised the session.

Crump is a familiar face to storage watchers. He founded analyst firm Storage Switzerland and joined VergeIO in January 2023 from StorONE.

Full video and article here: https://t.co/jrX8cTY64W

#ITPT @CDP_FST @coustautc

[Alex Zaharov-Reutt @alexonline888]

Hammerspace says production AI dies in the data layer, and its fix already ships in your Linux kernel - the full article and video can be seen here: https://t.co/wm9q8jWuPi

70% of enterprise AI projects sail through the proof of concept and then quietly die before production. Hammerspacereckons it knows why, and it argues the cure is sitting on storage you've already paid for.

I was at The IT Press Tour, 70th edition, in Redwood City, California, on 8 October 2026, where Hammerspace VP of product marketing, Floyd Christofferson, gave the assembled journalists a fast-moving tour of the company's technology, its customers and where it thinks enterprise AI is heading.

Christofferson opened by placing his job somewhere in the middle of product and marketing.

Sitting at the end of the table was Hammerspace VP of products and operations, Douglas Fallstrom, who I was told is one of the company's founding team.

Christofferson described Fallstrom's daily life as wrangling the engineers who are building this stuff into the product, which sounds about right for anyone running products at a storage company.

The 70% problem

Christofferson had flown in from an HPC user forum in Germany, where he said research AI adoption is running hot (around 70% utilisation) on carefully curated data sets.

Before that hed been at the SNIA Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara.Enterprise is a different beast.

At SDC, Christofferson heard the CTO of the Berkshire Hathaway group of companies (an SGI alumna, which Christofferson, himself ex-SGI, clearly considered a strong reference) tell a room of technologists that roughly 70% of enterprise AI projects fail.They succeed at the POC stage.

They fail on the way to production. To see the rest of this article, and the video, go here: https://t.co/wm9q8jWuPi

#ITPT @ITPressTour @CDP_FST @coustautc @Hammerspace_Inc

[netzpalaver @netzpalaver]

Ctera setzt auf Forward-Deployed-Engineering gegen den KI-Fachkräftemangel

@Ctera #DataIntelligence #Datenmanagement #künstlicheIntelligenz #ForwardDeployedEngineering #Governance #KIFachkraft #MLOps

https://t.co/Ms5oeBqpww