Stories about: Xiotech

Exploding amounts of digital information and an ongoing transition to a so-called "information economy" will necessitate a new, more holistic approach to storage, speakers at the Storage Networking World conference said this week.

Although you often find statements that seem critical of disk drives in this column, I never criticize disk drives per se, but rather how we use them. As of late, I've been interested in the innovative use of disk drives in storage arrays. The latest news from Xiotech fits right into this discussion, providing further proof that the storage industry is fast turning evolution into revolution in rethinking its approach to disk drives.

Every Storage Networking World conference tends to serve as a gauge on the mood of the market and provides indications of trends and directions in the storage industry, and last week's in Orlando, to me at least, reflected a storage market that is transitioning to a mature phase, where new developments are likely to be more incremental - evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

A storage start-up called Atrato came out of stealth mode last week, announcing a new technology for high-speed and high-volume data access, and funding from former IBM and EMC executives.

I would bet dollars against pennies you didn't miss the EMC buzz about SSDs (solid-state drives) in Symmetrix. The vendor carefully orchestrated the announcement in hopes of capitalizing on the most interesting innovation to its portfolio in a long time.

US Navy servicemen and women don their blues, whites or khakis, depending on the occasion and task at hand. For systems engineers at the Navy's Surface Combat Systems Center, however, the color of choice these days is green.

Compellent Technologies on Tuesday announced plans to go public, following in the fresh footsteps of a host of other storage network companies.

Solid state disk (SSD) has grabbed a lot of attention lately, but analysts say it's still a niche technology that is specialized, high-priced and far from ready to supplant the bedrock that is hard disk drives. But with the promise of rocket I/O performance, some users are ignoring the cost and plopping down the big bucks anyways.

One reader writes in to ask: "I have been in the IT field for over 20 years, in several different companies. Why does it seem like in the past year I spend more time meeting with lawyers than the business people? I understand Sarbanes-Oxley issues, but my current company has been public for seven years, and we have always had "compliance" reviews, but I have been in six meetings in the past eight months with our chief counsel and other lawyers in attendance. Is this happening everywhere, or should I be concerned that something is up?"

Cisco plans to roll out a low-end Fibre Channel switch this week that supports some features of its larger director-level switches, such as virtual storage-area network capability.

ONStor, which makes a network-attached storage gateway that attaches to other vendors' storage-area network storage, Monday is expected to introduce a family of NAS systems for midrange enterprise customers.