Dell Technologies rolled out a bunch of updates to its year-old Dell Technologies Cloud today including a storage partnership with Google Cloud.

The supercomputer also banks on a $1 billion investment the computing giant made last year in artificial intelligence research startup OpenAI.

The research firm noted that the rate of growth of the installed base of storage capacity will be most visible in core and edge deployments.

“Legacy backup and recovery solutions suck – they’re complex, slow, expensive, and offer no path to cloud,” said Rubrik President Dan Rogers.

The new storage systems come with built-in vSphere integration enabling VMware virtualized workloads to run directly on PowerStore.

The vendor's update looks to entice customers of the legacy "shared-nothing" scale-out, storage systems with a disaggregated, shared-everything model.

The deal combines with NetApp's recent Talon acquisition to provide an integrated "modern workplace-type environment," said NetApp's Vikram Bhatia.

Project Astra offers a normalized application data management approach that results in the portability of data rich or stateful applications.

IBM Cloud Data Shield is based on Fortanix’s technology that encrypts data at rest, in transit, and while in use, thus allowing general-purpose computation on encrypted data.

The Payment Flexibility Program offers customers 0% interest financing with no down payment and up to 180-day deferrals on payments.

COVID-19 may kill the data center, or at the very least forever change storage as we know it, says Andres Rodriguez, co-founder of Nasuni.

“Notable spikes in attacks can also be correlated to key days in the COVID-19 news cycle,” wrote VMware Cabon Black threat researchers Patrick Upatham and Jim Treinen.

Google slowed hiring and data center spend due to COVID-19; GSMA marched on with MWC; and Storage unicorn Vast Data scored $100M.

Snowball Edge Storage devices now feature 40 virtual CPUs compared to 24 in the previous version and 80 gigabytes of memory.

“Vast Data now has a $140 million war chest that we will spend like camels, not like unicorns,” co-founder Jeff Denworth said.

IBM Cloud, Microsoft, Dell Technologies, HPE, VMware, Nutanix, Lenovo, and Supermicro platforms support the latest AMD processors.

Cisco pledged to preserve jobs; AWS added direct storage to ECS, Fargate; and SAP prepped for COVID-19 related uncertainty in early look at its Q1 performance.

The move targets the challenge of container storage by extending persistent data storage to containers running in the AWS ecosystem.

“Closing a major funding round during these times of economic uncertainty is testament to the promise that our investors see in Cohesity,” said CEO Mohit Aron.

Cisco, Hitachi cut hundreds of jobs; Nokia CEO walked the plank; AT&T slashed jobs; plus the latest headcount hirings, promotions, and staff changes.

The vendor's Managed Apps platform can oversee 10 cloud-native systems, including database and logging, monitoring, and alerting applications.

Lenovo also rolled out new NVMe storage systems that integrate with AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM public clouds for hybrid cloud storage.

Microsoft cloud usage has spiked 775%; Google gifted $800 million to slow the spread of COVID-19; and security experts continue to battle COVID-19 cyberattacks.

IDC predicts server market revenues will decline 3.4% year over year to $88.6 billion in 2020 while external enterprise storage will slide 5.5%.