Storage

The Public Trustee of Queensland has selected HP TRIM software to provide electronic records management for some 500 end-users.

Demand for the next generation DRAM chip, DDR3 (double data rate, third generation), has spiked recently as systems makers turn to it for increased power efficiency and performance.

Network components manufacturer Emulex Corp. today said its board of directors will review a new takeover bid by Broadcom Corp., which raised its offer from $US9.25 per share to $11. That would make the deal worth about $US925 million.

The professional division of Thomson Reuters, six months into a massive data center virtualization project using Cisco Systems Inc. gear, has already seen a payback on costs.

The recent revelation that Intel Corp.'s consumer-class solid-state disk (SSD) drives suffer from fragmentation that can cause a significant performance degradation raises the question: Do all SSDs slow down with use over time?

Making the most of natural resources of farms is critical in today’s environment, where rainfalls are becoming ever so scarce.

These products will make the data center more efficient by reducing power usage of existing hardware

Moments after Paul Jorgensen realized the commercial jet he was aboard was about the crash into the Hudson River, he turned to the passenger next to him, grabbed his arm and asked him, "Are we going to die? He looked me square in the eye and he nodded. He didn't say anything. He just shook his head up and down like saying yes, we're going to die," Jorgensen said.

When it comes to flexible enterprise storage, the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine doesn't horse around. Over the last six months, the college has been putting its 7TB storage area network through its paces, using it for nearline backup and primary storage, and has this insight to share: Storage virtualization is the cat's meow.

A perusal of Internet message boards and online forums shows that fan anticipation of seeing characters from popular Japanese superhero-themed cartoons such as Gatchaman and Astro Boy make the 21st century leap to feature-length computer-generated imagery (CGI) films is reaching a fever pitch.

When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. "Wait a minute," he recalls saying, "they run a payment system on Linux?"

With more than 60 branch offices connected via IP WAN, backing-up data is critical for Sydney City Council.

September is usually too early to draw year-end conclusions, but I'll go out on a limb to say that 2008 will be remembered as a key year for SSDs (solid-state drives) -- not so much for sales figures, which won't likely reflect the hype surrounding flash SSDs this year, but for the technology itself, which remains one of the most controversial to hit storage in recent times.

EBSCOhost is a fee-based research service that provides libraries in North America with access to more than 20 million articles from 20,000-plus journals and magazines, all driven from two data centers in the coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. The data centers are owned and operated by EBSCO Publishing, the second-largest business unit of EBSCO Industries, which is one of the largest privately held firms in the Fortune 500. Michael Gorrell, senior vice president and CIO for EBSCO Publishing, explained that green IT principles are fundamental to helping the company keep up with sales growth averaging 26 percent per year for the last three years and storage growth of 200 percent annually, without equivalent growth in computing and data center infrastructure.

Saving on energy costs is obviously a good thing, but to Larry Quinlan, CIO at the consulting firm Deloitte, green IT simply makes good business sense. "If you run green IT right, you will end up with a vastly superior IT organization," Quinlan said during his keynote address at the recent Network World IT Roadmap event in the US, in which he described green IT as one of five technologies that will change IT. From reducing demand for IT resources to thin laptops, Quinlan has no shortage of ideas on how to make green IT deliver on multiple fronts.

While most major disk-drive manufacturers have developed or are already selling solid-state disk drives or hybrid drives, which use a combination of flash memory and spinning disk, Fujitsu has chosen not to develop a product for market. Joel Hagberg, Fujitsu's vice president of business development, said his company does not plan to launch any solid-state disk-drive products over the next two years because the value proposition of the technology is not compelling enough and won't be until technology breakthroughs change solid-state disk's performance and reliability.

George Peppard said as his character Hannibal Smith on The A-Team, "I love it when a plan comes together." Several trends, if not a plan, are coming together in interesting ways in technology for small businesses. Mix equal parts of online applications, netbooks, and constant wireless networking together, and you get new ways to do more work in more places for less money.

Why is Sony bothering with entertainment when it could be using flash drives to dramatically improve laptop data security?

For years companies have been deploying Massive Arrays of Idle Disks technologies to reduce data-storage energy costs. The on/off or spin/no spin approaches reduce energy consumption by putting power-hungry disk drives to sleep when they are not being used.

Mother Nature has wrought havoc in the Gulf and many of us were once again faced personally with worries over friends and family in harm's way and professionally with concerns about organizations facing uncertainty over their ability to continue or even recover their businesses. In a timely coincidence, I happened to be attending a disaster recovery (DR) conference on the west coast, and, appropriately, Hurricane Ike occupied center stage for much of the discussion. A number of would-be participants never made it to the conference as they were attending to more pressing matters back home.

While many external drives now come with a physical push-button backup option, a new genre of backup devices is emerging: one-touch USB flash drives that combine the convenience of small size with relatively sophisticated backup applications for data protection.

While many external drives now come with a physical push-button backup option, a new genre of backup devices is emerging: one-touch USB flash drives that combine the convenience of small size with relatively sophisticated backup applications for data protection.

Iometer and IOzone are great tools for testing storage devices, but they have one significant drawback: They dive deep into the minutiae of the block storage and file systems they measure and, thus, yield results that might as well be written in Greek (apologies to the Greek people) if you're not a hard disk engineer.

In my quest to test all of the latest high-capacity consumer solid-state disk (SSD) drives, I came upon OCZ Technology's Apex SATA II SSD and was impressed not so much with its performance -- though you will see a boost when using it -- as with its price.