• Cisco's new director-class storage switch boosts throughput 6X

  Cisco's new director-class switch for storage, unveiled today, increases throughput six-fold and offers N+1 resilience.

• WD shrinks laptop drives to just 5mm thick

  Western Digital is now shipping what it said is the world's first 2.5-inch, 5mm hard drives and solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs) for use in ultra-slim notebooks.

• Next-gen USB SuperSpeed to eliminate power cords

  USB SuperSpeed will move from 5Gbps bandwidth to 10Gbps in the coming year, but it's also leaping from 10 watts to 100 watts for charging, which could power monitors and even HDTVs.

• IBM to invest $1B in flash memory development

  After its buyout of Texas Memory Systems, IBM is now the latest on the vendor bandwagon to push flash into the data centers, saying it will invest a whopping $1 billion into flash research.

• Samsung hits high gear, rolls out densest flash chip

  Samsung today announced it is now mass-producing a 3-bit per cell, sub-20 nanometer class NAND flash chip that is the densest memory to date.

• New storage technologies to deal with the data deluge

  Enterprise storage demands are reaching a critical point, and vendors are scrambling to develop new products to deal with the data deluge. We look at how these technologies will help manage the major pain points for storage administrators.

• How big is the sound of music?

  Music fans and major recording artists are adopting lossless audio file formats to keep copies of their music thats as close to a master recording as possible, leading to multi-terabyte-sized home music storage systems.

• Nimble's all-in-one storage combines primary and backup in one box

  Start-up Nimble Storage came out of the development stage this week with its first product -- an array that combines solid state drives (SSD) with high-capacity, cost and performance serial ATA (SATA) hard drives, acts as primary and backup storage and replicates offsite for disaster recovery.

Whitepapers about storage hardware

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  EMC Guarantees 20% Capacity Advantage for its Unified Storage Systems

  Guarantees are often used by emerging vendors because they have to; when market leaders do so, it’s invariably because they want to. EMC now says that its customers will need 20% less raw unified storage capacity in NAS and/or SAN configurations than they’ll need from the competition. Read on.