Storage and Data Protection News for the Week of January 9; Updates from Infinidat, NVIDIA, ThreatLocker & More

Solutions Review Executive Editor Tim King curated this list of notable storage and data protection news for the week of January 9, 2025.

Keeping tabs on all the most relevant storage and data protection news can be a time-consuming task. As a result, our editorial team aims to provide a summary of the top headlines from the last week in this space. Solutions Review editors will curate vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy storage and data protection news items.

For early access to all the expert insights published on Solutions Review, join Insight Jam, a community dedicated to enabling the human conversation on AI.

Top Storage and Data Protection News for the Week of January 9, 2026

Backblaze Appoints Dan Spraggins as Senior Vice President of Engineering

Backblaze named Dan Spraggins as SVP of Engineering, tasking him with leading the company’s global engineering organization as its storage cloud increasingly powers AI and data‑intensive workloads. Spraggins brings more than 20 years of experience running large-scale software, platform, and AI engineering at firms including HP, Rackspace, and CA Technologies, and will focus on advancing Backblaze’s cloud for next‑generation data‑driven applications.​

Read more → https://ir.backblaze.com/news/news-details/2026/Backblaze-Appoints-Dan-Spraggins-as-Senior-Vice-President-of-Engineering/default.aspx

DDN Powers Integrated Compute, Data, and Offload at Scale for NVIDIA Rubin Platform

DDN announced deep collaboration with NVIDIA to power the NVIDIA Rubin platform with its AI data intelligence stack, delivering exascale data access, distributed KV cache tiering, and BlueField‑4–accelerated storage services. The integrated design targets up to 99% GPU utilization, 20–40% faster time‑to‑first‑token for long‑context inference, and simplified AI factory operations across more than a million GPUs already running on DDN worldwide.​

Read more → https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260106984546/en/DDN-Powers-Integrated-Compute-Data-and-Offload-at-Scale-for-NVIDIA-Rubin-Platform

Infinidat’s Latest Upgrades Aim to Make Ransomware Thieves Shiver

Infinidat expanded its InfiniSafe cyber resilience stack with built‑in immutable snapshots, logical and remote air gaps, fenced forensic environments, and Automated Cyber Protection that triggers snapshots as threats appear. InfiniSafe Cyber Detection uses AI and machine learning to detect ransomware in storage with 99.99% accuracy, and the platform guarantees sub‑one‑minute InfiniBox recoveries and 20‑minute InfiniGuard recoveries with 100% availability SLAs, addressing capacity growth, ransomware risk, and rapid recovery in a single integrated solution.​

Read more → https://blocksandfiles.com/2026/01/06/infinidats-latest-upgrades-should-make-ransomware-thieves-shiver/

KIOXIA Unveils the Next Generation BG7 Series SSDs for PC OEMs

Kioxia announced its BG7 Series client SSDs, the first to ship with BiCS FLASH generation 8 3D flash using CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology, delivering up to 1,000,000 random IOPS and 7,000 MB/s sequential reads for notebooks and desktops. Compared to BG6, BG7 improves random and sequential performance by roughly 10–16% and boosts sequential‑write power efficiency by about 67%, while adding an NVMe 2.0d feature set, a new 2242 form factor, DRAM‑less HMB support, Opal SED options, and capacities from 256 GB to 2 TB.​

Read more → https://americas.kioxia.com/en-us/business/news/2026/2026-01-05-1.html

Kiteworks and Concentric AI Announce Strategic Partnership to Deliver Comprehensive Data Security Governance and Enforcement

Kiteworks and Concentric AI formed a strategic partnership that combines Concentric’s AI‑powered semantic discovery and classification with Kiteworks’ policy‑driven enforcement to protect sensitive data as it moves outside the enterprise. Concentric’s labels (such as “Confidential,” HIPAA, or GDPR) flow into the Kiteworks Private Data Network, which then automatically applies controls like encryption, watermarking, access limits, and possessionless editing, creating continuous, auditable protection for data shared via email, MFT, SFTP, forms, and APIs.​

Read more → https://www.dispatch.com/press-release/story/136369/kiteworks-concentric-ai-announce-strategic-partnership-to-deliver-comprehensive-data-security-governance-enforcement/

NVIDIA BlueField‑4 Powers New Class of AI‑Native Storage Infrastructure

NVIDIA introduced BlueField‑4 data processing units as the core of AI‑native storage infrastructure, offloading networking, security, and storage services from CPUs to a programmable, accelerated control plane. Combined with Rubin‑class AI factories, BlueField‑4 enables KV cache tiers, context‑memory extension, and telemetry‑driven data placement that keep GPUs fed while reducing latency and infrastructure overhead.​

Read more → https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-bluefield-4-powers-new-class-of-ai-native-storage-infrastructure-for-the-next-frontier-of-ai

SK hynix Shows 16‑Layer 48 GB HBM4 Memory Modules at CES 2026

SK hynix demonstrated 16‑high 48 GB HBM4 stacks at CES 2026, signaling the next leap in high‑bandwidth memory density for large‑scale AI accelerators. The new HBM4 generation targets significantly higher bandwidth and capacity per package, enabling larger context windows, bigger models, and more efficient AI training and inference.​

Read more → https://www.techpowerup.com/344834/sk-hynix-shows-16-layer-48-gb-hbm4-memory-modules-at-ces-2026

University of Southern Denmark launches energy‑efficient AI and HPC data center

The University of Southern Denmark opened a new AI and HPC data center built around liquid‑cooled infrastructure and renewable‑aligned power to minimize energy use and emissions. The facility will support research spanning AI, climate, and engineering, and is designed as a testbed for sustainable supercomputing practices in Europe.

Read more → https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/university-of-southern-denmark-launches-energy-efficient-ai-and-hpc-data-center/

University of Waterloo scientists discover first method to safely back up quantum information

Scientists at the University of Waterloo demonstrated the first method for reliably backing up quantum information, using entangled states and error‑correcting encodings to store and later restore qubits without measuring and destroying them. This breakthrough suggests a path toward practical “quantum backup” for future quantum computers, potentially improving fault tolerance and long‑term quantum memory.

Read more → https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/university-of-waterloo-scientists-discover-1st-method-to-safely-back-up-quantum-information/

Expert Insights

Watch this space each week as our editors will share upcoming events, new thought leadership, and the best resources from Insight Jam, Solutions Review’s enterprise tech community where the human conversation around AI is happening. The goal? To help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend through expert advice, best practices, predictions, and vendor-neutral software evaluation tools.

Watch the 7th annual Insight Jam LIVE!: Human Development Focus & the Impact of AI Now On-Demand

This year’s show is the first since Insight Jam’s YouTube channel crossed 1 million subscribers; a showcase of how network effect works. Every keynote, panel, and highlight will be streamed live and preserved for on-demand viewing — amplifying the reach of every speaker and extending the impact of every insight in an evergreen way.

Read on Solutions Review

Solutions Review Editors Launch New ‘Human-AI Ledger’ Newsletter to Chronicle the Human Impact of AI

Artificial intelligence is everywhere—but understanding its human impact has never been more urgent. That’s where Solutions Review‘s latest newsletter, The Human-AI Ledger, comes in. Designed to chronicle how AI is reshaping the way we learn, work, lead, and live, this newsletter explores the soft side of AI—the non-technical, deeply human dimensions that determine whether this technological revolution helps us thrive or leaves us behind.

Sign up now to get a weekly debrief of the latest human-centric news, insights, and commentary coming out of this emerging discussion.

Sign Up Free

Solutions Review is Getting Set to Host ThreatLocker for ‘Stop Ransomware with Zero Trust’ on January 13

In this session, we’ll explore the anatomy of modern API attacks, from data harvesting and token replay to business logic abuse and AI-assisted reconnaissance. We’ll also examine why traditional application security controls fall short, and how Radware delivers visibility, behavioral anomaly detection, and mitigation at scale. Understand how Radware detect and mitigates attacks on APIs without slowing innovation.

Register on LinkedIn

For consideration in future data protection news roundups, send your announcements to the editor: tking@solutionsreview.com.