Stories by Chris Mellor

Solid-state vendor grabs storage world record

Solid state disk vendor Texas Memory Systems has claimed an SPC benchmark world record using industry standard server and network hardware.

The Big Switch: Rewiring The World, From Edison To Google.

Nick Carr's The Big Switch suggests that every organisation concerned with computer storage will find that the everyday business market for storage will cease to exist. You who are reading this will no longer be involved with buying, operating, managing or servicing DAS, NAS, SAN, clustered file systems, tape backups or optical storage. I who am writing about it now won't be in the future. Techworld (and Computerworld) itself will undergo substantial modification or die.

FalconStor and Virtual Iron buddy up

In a move that reinforces the connection between server and storage virtualization, Virtual Iron has announced a global alliance with FalconStor. Each company will reference-sell the other's products.

HP muses stake in struggling supplier

HP is considering taking a stake in struggling drive array supplier, Dot Hill, paving the way for a possible expansion of its SME storage products.

MIT students power supercomputer with bicycles

A team of ten MIT students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedalling bicycles. They duly claimed the world record for human-powered computing (HPC).

HP looks to SMBs with new shared storage

HP is preparing to launch a new MSA2000 disk array product family for clustered servers, which it is targeting at SMB deployments and remote offices.

CentricStor combines disk and tape backup

Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) has overhauled its CentricStor virtual tape appliance and now offers backup to either disk or tape with the product. It is the only product to combine automated tape and disk backup in one offering.

Networked storage a thing of the past?

French startup Seanodes has a product to combine storage on many Linux servers into a single shared pool of storage, making networked storage unnecessary.

Rackspace: a realistic green pioneer

Rackspace provides datacentre facilities under a managed hosting scheme. It is building a new UK datacentre and has had a green aspect to its business for about a year and a half. How is that affecting its operations?

Western Digital launches power-efficient disk drives

Western Digital has announced new hard drives using up to 40 percent less power than competing drives.

Isilon launches world's biggest NAS cluster

Isilon has launched the largest clustered network-attached storage (NAS) system in the world with a potential 2.3PB capacity if all 96 nodes have expansion cabinets attached.

Sun to set up data center in coal mine

Sun and a consortium of other businesses are going to lower Blackbox self-contained computing facilities into a Japanese coal mine to set up an underground data center, using up to 50 percent less power than a ground-level data center.

Carbon nanotube memory coming

Startup Nantero has built a carbon nanotube-based memory wafer using standard semiconductor fabrication processes. This removes a significant hurdle in commercializing the seemingly exotic NRAM (non-volatile RAM) that could replace DRAM, SRAM and flash memory with a universal memory design.

SanDisk vaults over hard drive limitations

SanDisk has announced Vaulter, an 8GB to 6GB capacity flash memory solid state disk (SSD) from which to boot a PC's operating system. It is in PCI Express mini-card format and works in parallel with a PC's hard drive.

BitMicro unveils 1.6TB SSD

BitMicro has announced a flash memory-based solid state drive (SSD) with capacities ranging from 16GB to 1.6TB.