Stories by Chris Mellor

Intel inside storage now

Intel has introduced two 4Gbit/s optical transceivers that offer double the speed of most Fibre Channel networks for around the same cost.

It's not big but it's clever says Seagate

Seagate Technology is launching its new Small Form Factor (SFF) hard drive intended for server and storage consolidation needs early next week. Seagate claims that its new 2.5-inch enterprise disc drive platform will enable a new era of rack server and storage arrays and blade servers.

Serial-attached storage standardised

Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) has become an ANSI standard. The SCSI Trade Association (STA) and INCITS, the International Committee for Information Technology Standards, operating with ANSI approval, has approved SAS. The parallel SCSI bus technology is reaching the end of its life and a serial version of SCSI is poised to replace it.

Pretty MAIDs all in a row

LONDON (01/28/2004) - SATA disks are fuelling the advent of disk-to-disk backup with its elimination of the backup windows and virtually instant restore. SATA disks are also used to store fixed content data as with EMC Corp.'s Center and Storage Technology Corp.'s BladeStore. But SATA disks' reliability is a concern and an array of hundreds of spinning disks is not cheap. Think of all those power supplies cables, cache memory and controllers needed for each drive.

NetApp dances the ILM dance again

LONDON (01/27/2004) - Network Appliance Inc. is partnering with IXOS Software AG and Princeton Softech Inc. to ensure ILM products are available on its products.

Wot? Emulex talks a lot of SBOD

LONDON (01/21/2004) - Emulex Corp. has extended its Switched Bunch of Disks (SBOD) availability through arrangements with Quantum Corp. and BlueArc Corp.

One BOD after another

LONDON (01/20/2004) - Back in October last year Emulex Corp. acquired Vixel Corp., a maker of InSpeed switch-on-chip ASIC used in storage arrays. Emulex wanted to become a supplier of embedded storage switching products. It has now made the first move. End users won't see the benefit for a few months yet though.

Enhanced disk-based backup from Quantum

LONDON (01/15/2004) - Quantum Corp. announced the availability of the DX100, its second generation enhanced backup system, providing a disk-based backup device, positioned by Quantum as a backup front end to a tape device backend, typically a library, used for archival purposes.

Veritas reveals the bare facts

LONDON (01/13/2004) - Veritas Software Corp. has announced Bare Metal Restore 4.7, designed to automate server, database and application recovery in Windows and some Unix shops. The software automates and simplifies the recovery process and eliminates the need to manually reinstall operating systems and configure hardware. It supports Red Hat Inc. Linux 2.1, AIX 5.2 and Windows server 2003.

Companies look more closely at Serial ATA

LONDON (01/13/2004) - Via Technologies Inc., the chip maker, has announced its VIA VT6421 discrete controller chip, providing Serial ATA RAID. It supports the full spectrum of x86 processor platforms for desktop and mobile PCs, enabling control through PCI and CardBus (PCMCIA) interfaces.

Faster servers supporting more users coming

LONDON (12/08/2003) - Volume production of DDR2 memory chips has begun. This is a faster performing follow-on to double data rate, synchronous dynamic RAM (DDR SDRAM), today's high performance system standard. DDR2 memory also draws less power than DDR memory. The memory can transfer more data per second than DDR memory. Servers using this memory, along with high speed CPUs and faster busses, will be capable of supporting more networked users and of running applications faster.

HDS offers bundled SAN with McData iSCSI switch

Hitachi Data Systems has partnered with McData to offer small-and medium-sized enterprises a lower cost alternative for FC SANs, the Hitachi TrueNorth iSCSI SAN Solution. SMEs cannot afford FC SANs. The HDS iSCSI SAN includes the Hitachi Thunder 9570V modular storage system, the McData Eclipse 1620 SAN internetworking switch, and enablement services.

Plasmon introduces G-Series optical libraries with UDO

LONDON (11/21/2003) - Plasmon has introduced its first G-Series optical libraries with UDO -- Ultra Density Optical -- drives offering 30GB capacity per disk. The new UDO libraries are being introduced at prices similar to the existing MO (Magneto Optical) storage libraries, with triple the capacity. They can be ordered now through Plasmon's channel partners and start shipping in volume next month.

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