Stories by Lucas Mearian

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.

Merrill Lynch CTO John McKinley leaving

Merrill Lynch & Co. announced last Friday that John A. McKinley Jr., the head of the company's Global Technology & Services unit and its chief technology officer, is leaving the brokerage at the end of next month to take a job in the technology marketplace, where he began his career.

EMC reports uptick in sales, but $119M yearly loss

EMC today reported a net loss of US$119 million for fiscal year 2002 and a fourth-quarter loss of $64 million. Still, the company's earnings report showed vast improvement over last year's results, which included an annual loss of $508 million.

HP to resell Cisco's switches

Hewlett-Packard has become the second major vendor to officially announce that it will resell Cisco Systems' new line of Fibre Channel switches. Although the announcement is no surprise to industry watchers, it's nevertheless a major milestone in Cisco's planned entry into the storage-area network (SAN) marketplace.

StorageNetworks cuts half its workforce, replaces CEO

Storage service and management software vendor StorageNetworks said in a statement Wednesday that it will lay off 50 percent of its workforce and replace its CEO and co-founder, Peter Bell.

EMC heralds uptick in earnings

EMC has announced better-than-expected preliminary earnings for its fourth quarter -- good news it credited to an uptick in customer spending, particularly in the area of midrange storage arrays.

Banks pick up pace of IT outsourcing

A combination of intense competition, the sluggish economy and the lure of pay-as-you-go IT services is prompting a growing number of banks and brokerages to outsource back-office systems and business processes.

Super AIT tape technology breaks 1TB barrier

Sony on Monday announced the first production tape drive and cartridge that breaks the 1TB capacity barrier, leapfrogging two competing cartridge and drive technologies by at least six months, according to those companies' development road maps.

HP, NetApp pull ahead of EMC in storage sales

With competition in the storage marketplace intense this quarter, EMC was knocked out of first place in key market revenue areas, including network-attached storage (NAS) and open storage-area networks (SAN), a report from market research firm IDC shows.

MasterCard completes payment processing system

MasterCard International Inc. on Monday will announce the completion of a new US$160 million payment processing system that includes a single, open messaging standard to simplify communications among merchants, 25,000 US financial institutions and back-office clearing systems.

Brocade announces layoffs despite revenue uptick

Leading storage switch vendor Brocade Communications Systems Inc. Thursday announced an uptick in revenue for its fourth quarter and for 2002 overall, in line with lowered expectations. The company also said it has laid off 160 employees, or 12 percent of its workforce, as part of a restructuring to save money.

IBM revamps NAS line

As part of a growing industrywide focus on midrange storage products, IBM announced Wednesday that it has doubled the processing power and capacity of its midtier network-attached storage (NAS) array and gateway device and added what analysts believe is the industry's first integrated TCP/IP offload engine.