Storage: News

It's never been easy to access - much less analyse - the vast amount of data available to, for example, determine changes in customer behavior or sentiment, optimize routing of telephone switches based on call patterns, or analyze financial portfolio pricing or risk. Traditional business intelligence systems rely on highly structured (and usually transactional) data stored in massive data cubes and data warehouses, which requires significant upfront work to decide what is being analyzed and to ensure all the data is consistent with that goal - that is, you know what you are looking for. But that approach isn't useful for exploring trends or patterns, especially in external data that wasn't formatted for your needs.

The second iteration of Oracle's Exadata database engine will feature flash storage embedded within the server machine, eliminating the need to source data from storage disks and cutting query processing time significantly, a company executive revealed Friday.

Fujitsu is rolling out a new server designed specially for cloud computing providers.

According to IDC Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced a slight increase in year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter of 2009 (Q4- 09) with revenues of $US3.09 billion, representing 0.5 percent growth over the same quarter one year ago, as well as 6.3 percent growth from the previous quarter (Q3-09).

The global market for business IT continuity and disaster data recovery solutions will grow from $24.3 billion in 2009 to exceed $39 billion in 2015, according to ABI Research.

In the years to come, Microsoft's data centers may not be huge buildings tightly packed with server racks, but rather rows of small, stand-alone IT units spread across acres and acres of cool, cheap land.

EMC executives believe that Fibre Channel storage could be a thing of the past in just a few years as enterprises increase adoption of flash memory for I/O-intensive applications, while storing less-frequently used data on inexpensive SATA drives.

Defence is known to be a big spender on IT, but just how much it does spend is now available to the public through a new web-based tool.

Server virtualisation can reduce IT costs, enhance performance and improve data centre space utilisation, but it can also introduce power and cooling challenges than can limit an organisation's ability to realise the opportunities.

Corsair has announced a new family of USB flash drives that the company said approach the maximum performance available from the USB 2.0 interface, which offers 480Mbit/sec throughput.