Stories by Lucas Mearian

  • EMC reports double-digit growth in Q2

    EMC this week reported double-digit revenue growth during its second quarter across almost all of its product lines, from storage systems and software to services. While the results met analyst expectations, some experts said EMC should be wary about losing sales in its core product, the high-end Symmetrix storage array.

  • The coming robot revolution

    Robots, from mechanical dogs that can learn new tricks to automated vacuum cleaners that avoid furniture, are steadily becoming a part of everyday life. But the real robot boom lies just ahead, experts say.

  • EMC releases upgraded ControlCenter

    EMC Monday announced the latest version of its flagship storage management software, which it said offers "more complete support" for competing products such as arrays from Hewlett-Packard (HP), Hitachi Data Systems and IBM, as well as Linux servers.

  • Hitachi mixes Fibre Channel, Serial ATA drives

    Hitachi Data Systems will announce plans to mix Fibre Channel and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) disk drives in its midrange arrays -- a move that puts a different twist on the emerging trend to support different types of drives in a single enclosure.

  • Trumping tape

    Massive arrays of idle disks are giving a boost to disk-based backup systems, which could replace tape libraries for some applications. Lucas Mearian reports.

  • EMC gives in to tape

    For the first time in its history, EMC has decided to offer an enterprise-class tape library as part of its product line and will begin reselling Advanced Digital Information's tape libraries next month.

  • Sun revamps storage line, pricing

    Sun Microsystems has announced its first near-line arrays based on Serial Advanced Technology Attachment disk drives, which it claims will offer 70 per cent more storage capacity than similarly priced Fibre Channel-based disk arrays.

  • NetApp CEO on earnings, competition

    Network Appliance recently posted fourth-quarter and year-end financial results showing a 39 percent increase in quarterly earnings over the same period last year -- and a 31 percent increase over 2003 as a whole. NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven spoke with Computerworld about the company's financial results, the competition from vendors embracing the Windows Storage Server 2003 NAS operating system and when the company's global distributed files system would be ready.

  • EMC to build virtualization storage router

    EMC this week announced at its annual users conference that it plans to begin beta testing by next quarter of an enterprise-class "storage router" that will be able to pool storage capacity and migrate data seemlessly between boxes without impacting business applications.

  • Users question viability of new storage standard

    The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced last week that more than 100 products from 14 leading storage vendors have been qualified on a new interoperability standard. But members of a user group were skeptical that their multivendor storage-area networks could be easily managed through a single software interface.

  • SANs come up to speed

    Storage networking equipment vendors are preparing a slew of new Fibre Channel switches and host bus adapters that can effectively double the speed of current storage-area networks (SAN) to 4Gbit/sec. Products based on the 4Gbit standard, first advocated by chip makers last year and approved by the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) and the American National Standards Institute last June, are slated to roll out this year. The technology could serve as an interim migration step to products based on the 10Gbit/sec.