Stories by Lucas Mearian

Analysis: Serial ATA takes on SCSI

Low-cost Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) disk arrays are already gaining ground in near-line storage and disk-to-disk backup applications, but a faster class of drive arrays that uses the new Serial ATA interface standard is likely to challenge SCSI for high-performance applications as well.

Fujitsu Softek offers lifeline to BMC customers

Users left high and dry when storage software vendor BMC Software Inc. last month ended further development of a premier storage management product are about to be wooed by a small start-up backed by a multibillion-dollar parent company offering free software -- but they have to throw out old versions of BMC software.

IDC: Storage market grew 12 percent in Q4

Hewlett-Packard and IBM lead the marketplace in overall storage sales in a marketplace that grew 12 percent sequentially in the fourth quarter, despite an overall slump for the year, IDC reported today. In 2002, storage sales, which totaled US$5.4 billion, dropped 15 percent over 2001. That still beat IDC's prediction that sales would drop by 21 percent for the year.

Trades at top speed

In the name of straight-through processing (STP) of securities trades, financial services companies over the next two years will spend an estimated US$6 billion replacing their manual processes by plugging into virtual trade-matching utilities (VMU), installing middleware and integrating front- and back-end computer systems.

EMC, Hitachi settle patent fight

Storage rivals EMC and Hitachi today announced that they have agreed to settle a year-old patent-infringement legal fight dealing with data replication and migration. Under the deal, Hitachi will make payments to EMC, and both companies agreed to a five-year cross-licensing of the patents involved in the litigation so either company can use the technology.

EMC adds IP to Symmetrix

EMC Corp. Friday announced enhancements to its high-end Symmetrix 8000 series arrays, including native Gigabit Ethernet connectivity for remote replication, mainframe support and the addition of 146GB drives that give customers more usable disk space compared with the previous model.

Merrill Lynch's John McKinley Jr.

Later this month, Chief Technology Officer John McKinley Jr., who heads Merrill Lynch & Co.'s global technology and services unit, will leave the New York brokerage after more than four years on the job. McKinley was instrumental in crafting many key outsourcing partnerships, rolling out Linux in the data center and helping the firm recover quickly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

System break-in nets hackers 8 million credit card numbers

A US-based credit card transaction processing company last week confirmed that millions of card numbers were stolen recently when someone hacked into its computers. But it defended itself by saying the culprits may not have obtained any useful information.

Veritas looks to diversify

Veritas Software Corp., the second-largest vendor of storage management software, is planning to expand into other IT management technologies so it can better compete against more diversified rivals such as EMC Corp., Computer Associates International Inc. and IBM Corp.

Stage set for easy, cheap rollouts of IP-based storage

After some fits and starts, an IP version of the low-cost SCSI storage interconnect is finally in position to attract wider attention from technology vendors and users.

Western Digital unveils ATA disk with SCSI speed

Leveraging an economy of scale built on the manufacturing of 40 million disk drives per year, Western Digital said Monday that it has developed an ATA drive that rivals the speed and performance of SCSI drives at a 30 percent cost savings.

iSCSI protocol approved as standard

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) this week approved a protocol that will allow network administrators to eventually take millions of small servers that have been locked into direct-attached storage systems and plug them into Ethernet storage networks for backup and management.

Storage key to NASA investigation

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) officials said this week that voice messages, video and photos being collected from the public are creating a data picture that will play a key role in determining the cause of the Columbia disaster. The trick will be managing that data.

EMC formally debuts new Symmetrix line

EMC Corp. on Monday unveiled the long-awaited line of its high-end Symmetrix disk arrays, which are built on a new internal architecture that leapfrogs throughput more than four times over its closest competitor and allows customers to buy small and scale the arrays into enterprise-class configurations.

Analysis: Intelligent storage

Imagine a storage device that uses its own horsepower to manage data, requires no manual settings for security and doesn't care if the client server speaks in blocks or files. That's the promise of object-based storage. Object-based storage technologies shield the application or operating system from the low-level details of managing file storage. In one method, intelligence is added to the storage device in order to offload low-level storage management tasks traditionally handled by the operating system, such as mapping files to actual storage blocks on the disk drive and managing file attributes and other associated metadata.