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.
As more organisations store more data longer, the IT industry seeks a better way.
EMC Thursday reported financial results for the second quarter of 2005, achieving double-digit, year-over-year revenue growth for the eighth consecutive quarter. EMC said its growth was once again driven by sales of its midrange storage systems and by its services business.
Hitachi Data Systems last week brought out new versions of its high-end and midrange storage arrays with upgrades that include RAID 6 features allowing for the failure of up to two disk drives without a loss of data.
Network Appliance said this week it intends to buy start-up Decru for US$272 million, giving legitimacy to a small but fast-growing market of storage security products. The move comes on the heels of many high-profile data thefts and losses in the financial services industry and other businesses that have spurred IT shops to begin deploying technology to encrypt archived data, analysts said.
Mark Canepa, executive vice president of Network Storage Products Group for Sun Microsystems, will be oversee the US$4.3 billion buyout of Storage Technology, and will likely lead the company once it becomes a part of Sun. Canepa spoke with Computerworld about how Sun plans to address StorageTek user concerns around service and support and product synergies.
Though they disagree on the timing, analysts claim the planned buyout of Storage Technology (StorageTek) by Sun Microsystems will probably force the cancellation of StorageTek's reseller agreement with HP.
IBM and HItachi Data Systems (HDS) Thursday announced that they have signed joint licensing agreements to extend the interoperability and compatibility of their storage systems.
Network Appliance announced two midrange network-attached storage (NAS) boxes with 50 percent better performance than its highest-end NAS boxes and four times the capacity of previous-generation midrange arrays. The boxes can also be configured with Serial Advanced Technology Attached (SATA) drives that NetApp said can be used for primary storage.
EMC executives acknowledged this week that sales of the company's midrange storage systems are skyrocketing -- at the expense of revenue from EMC's high-end Symmetrix arrays, once the company's bread and butter.
EMC at its annual users conference this week formally announced its storage virtualization technology, which will reside on products from the three leading switch vendors and will be generally available next quarter.
Time Warner this week said it will "quickly" begin encrypting all data saved to backup tapes after 40 tapes with personal information on about 600,000 current and former employees were lost in transit to a storage facility.
To say that Baptist Memorial Health Care's data storage needs are growing would be an understatement. In 2001, the hospital had 1.5TB of capacity on its storage-area network. By the end of its fiscal year this coming September, the Memphis-based health care organization expects to have 138TB on that same SAN. And it is projecting that its capacity needs will grow by five times over the next four years.
EMC Tuesday reported double-digit, year-over-year revenue growth for the seventh consecutive quarter, bucking a string of lower-than-expected first-quarter earnings announcements by other storage industry leaders such as IBM and Sun Microsystems.
