Hitachi Data Systems is taking storage systems market share from competitors EMC and IBM, particularly in the area of high-end disk arrays, according to reports released this week from A.G. Edwards & Sons and Bear, Stearns & Co.
Keeping data secure, tracking who uses it and managing it in a way that maintains backup windows and keeps information available to customers -- especially after an interruption in service or a disaster -- are among the top issues for IT executives, according to users who took part in a panel discussion yesterday at Storage Networking World.
A panel of users at this week's Storage Networking World in Orlando said they are either having difficulty funding disaster recovery projects or are rethinking how they protect data to better ensure 100 percent reliability in restoring systems in case of a disaster.
EMC said it won't be part of an open-source storage management group that plans to develop software that can not only discover multivendor devices on a storage network, but also control those devices in a standard way.
Japanese vendor Optware, which this week is opening the U.S. branch of its holographic disk storage business, expects to ship three iterations of its high-density products by the end of 2006 -- and is aiming to break the 1TB capacity mark by 2008. Optware's Magnum HVD drives will have up to 200GB of capacity when they're released next year, according to Terry Loseke, president of Optware America.
EMC reported double-digit growth for the ninth consecutive quarter. But the storage vendor also said sales of its midrange Clariion array cooled somewhat, as did sales of its high-end Symmetrix hardware -- mainly due to cautious customer adoption of the latest version of the high-end array, officials said.
Coppin State University in Baltimore, faced a data explosion that had overwhelmed its two Fibre Channel storage arrays, forcing it to look for a way to supply its departments with easy-to-manage online storage that wouldn't break the school's budget.
EMC Wednesday said it plans to discontinue selling its line of low-end network-attached storage (NAS) arrays based on the Windows Storage Server platform. EMC's NetWin 110 and NetWin 200 will stop shipping in November because of poor sales, according to an EMC spokesman. Instead, the company will begin reselling low-end NAS products from one of its Select Program partners, which analysts said will likely be Dell Inc.
Michael Feinberg, chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard Co.'s StorageWorks division, spoke with Computerworld at the Storage Decisions conference here this week about planned layoffs at HP (<a href="http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=55250431">See story</a>), the replacement earlier this year of CEO Carly Fiorina with Mark Hurd and about how that has affected his division. Feinberg also talked about the recent acquisition of storage resource management vendor AppIQ (<a href="http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=1196850202">See story</a>).
Iron Mountain announced this week that it has signed a deal with Decru to use its technology to encrypt all of its internal data backed up to digital tape. Iron Mountain executives said the move is in part designed to set an example for customers.
Microsoft Tuesday announced the availability of its disk-to-disk continuous data backup product, Data Protection Manager (DPM). The software saves up to eight snapshots of data off Windows servers throughout the day, allowing IT administrators to restore files from disk faster and use a larger number of data points from which to recover information.
Sun Microsystems' $US4.1 billion acquisition of Storage Technology was expected to close on September 1, leaving in its wake a much smaller independent tape-vendor market. Executive vice-president of the Network Storage Products Group at Sun Microsystems, Mark Canepa, will be overseeing the combined Sun/StorageTek division.
Russ Miller runs a monster of a server cluster that eats storage at an incredible rate. The bandwidth requirements alone on his 22TFLOPS system force Miller to look outside the storage box, so to speak, for better throughput and scalability.
Under pressure from users to boost its midrange hardware performance and functionality, EMC announced Wednesday that it has upgraded the internal architecture of its Clariion arrays, bumping up capacity and adding higher-end functions including data migration both inside and outside the box.
IBM Tuesday unveiled several storage products that it said will bring iSCSI and enterprise-class functionality -- including WORM (write-once, read many) disk storage -- to the small-to-midsize (SMB) business market.
