Maxtor announced Wednesday that it will be shipping a backup device for Apple Computer hardware that can store up to 500GB of data and offers management features that emulate enterprise-class device functions such as shared network connections, automatic file backup and backup status reports.
EMC said Friday that it will "rebalance" its workforce by 1,000 employees this year, using the savings from layoffs to hire new workers for sales and marketing. At the same time, the storage vendor announced preliminary fourth-quarter and year-end results that beat its expectations and set a revenue record.
Sun Microsystems recently announced new servers based on its UltraSparc T1 processor but still remained mum on its storage plans. The new vice-president of strategy and planning for Sun's Data Management Group, Randy Kerns, spoke about the status of the integration of recently acquired StorageTek and Sun's plan to address the coming threat to tape systems of holographic storage.
Unitrends Software unveiled an upgrade to its near-line disk backup array aimed at the small-to-midsize business market that's designed to allow companies to restore servers from almost any point in time right down to the operating system.
Despite taking some market share from EMC this past quarter, Hitachi Data Systems remains in fifth place for external and internal disk storage sales, behind EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell. Dave Roberson, president and chief operating officer of HDS, spoke with Computerworld about how virtualization and tiered storage has been instrumental in grabbing market share. He also acknowledged that his company's go-to-market strategy needs an adrenaline boost, with lower-end systems and better reseller partnerships being key to moving up the food chain.
Iron Mountain announced that it is buying LiveVault for US$50 million in a move to bolster its electronic data vaulting services. LiveVault's online server backup and recovery service has been resold by Iron Mountain for the past five years and targets small and midsize businesses.
Quantum is set to announce various security features for its tape and disk storage products -- some available now and others planned for next year -- to help IT managers do a better job of protecting stored data from unauthorized access and disclosures.
Symantec on Monday announced upgrades to the discovery tool for its popular Veritas Enterprise Vault e-mail and instant messaging archiving software.
EMC and data management software vendor SenSage Tuesday announced a bundled storage and security software offering that enables IT managers to monitor IT events from a single database repository.
Two vendors unveiled products based on the InfiniBand high-speed networking specification last week, marking a revival of sorts for a technology once seen as a rival to Fibre Channel before faltering.
Network Appliance on Thursday announced double-digit second-quarter revenue growth and said it continued to grab market share in the network-attached storage (NAS) market. Network Appliance said its revenue for the quarter was up 29 percent, or US$483 million, over the same quarter last year and up 8 percent from the previous quarter. That 29 percent growth rate was roughly four times the growth rate of the overall storage market.
An IT industry organization that includes leading IT vendors such as Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Intel said Tuesday it has successfully demonstrated extended computing capabilities using InfiniBand technology. The demonstration was part of the SCinet conference in Seattle.
Despite advances in tiered storage technology, many IT managers say they have no idea of the value of their companies' data and can't manage it in any automated way.
IBM this week brought out a line of midrange storage arrays that offer network-attached storage capabilities and can transfer data via Fibre Channel and the IP-based Internet SCSI protocol.
Two years ago, David Kaercher, vice president of core services for Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America, had a dismal storage utilization rate of around 30 percent and little buy-in from business executives who didn't want to spend money on systems they didn't understand.
