Network Appliance next week is expected to announce an upgrade of its NearStore disk array that addresses data-retention compliance issues and is squarely aimed at grabbing sales away from EMC's Centera, according to industry sources.
IBM Corp. this week is announcing new software and hardware storage products aimed at a booming lower-end market at an industry-low price point, analysts said.
EMC Corp. last week said it plans to develop storage management software for a new line of Brocade Communications Systems Inc. switches that support network-based storage virtualization.
Low-cost Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) disk arrays are already gaining ground in near-line storage and disk-to-disk backup applications, but a faster class of drive arrays that uses the new Serial ATA interface standard is likely to challenge SCSI for high-performance applications as well.
Users left high and dry when storage software vendor BMC Software Inc. last month ended further development of a premier storage management product are about to be wooed by a small start-up backed by a multibillion-dollar parent company offering free software -- but they have to throw out old versions of BMC software.
Hewlett-Packard and IBM lead the marketplace in overall storage sales in a marketplace that grew 12 percent sequentially in the fourth quarter, despite an overall slump for the year, IDC reported today. In 2002, storage sales, which totaled US$5.4 billion, dropped 15 percent over 2001. That still beat IDC's prediction that sales would drop by 21 percent for the year.
In the name of straight-through processing (STP) of securities trades, financial services companies over the next two years will spend an estimated US$6 billion replacing their manual processes by plugging into virtual trade-matching utilities (VMU), installing middleware and integrating front- and back-end computer systems.
Storage rivals EMC and Hitachi today announced that they have agreed to settle a year-old patent-infringement legal fight dealing with data replication and migration. Under the deal, Hitachi will make payments to EMC, and both companies agreed to a five-year cross-licensing of the patents involved in the litigation so either company can use the technology.
EMC Corp. Friday announced enhancements to its high-end Symmetrix 8000 series arrays, including native Gigabit Ethernet connectivity for remote replication, mainframe support and the addition of 146GB drives that give customers more usable disk space compared with the previous model.
Later this month, Chief Technology Officer John McKinley Jr., who heads Merrill Lynch & Co.'s global technology and services unit, will leave the New York brokerage after more than four years on the job. McKinley was instrumental in crafting many key outsourcing partnerships, rolling out Linux in the data center and helping the firm recover quickly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
A US-based credit card transaction processing company last week confirmed that millions of card numbers were stolen recently when someone hacked into its computers. But it defended itself by saying the culprits may not have obtained any useful information.
Veritas Software Corp., the second-largest vendor of storage management software, is planning to expand into other IT management technologies so it can better compete against more diversified rivals such as EMC Corp., Computer Associates International Inc. and IBM Corp.
After some fits and starts, an IP version of the low-cost SCSI storage interconnect is finally in position to attract wider attention from technology vendors and users.
Leveraging an economy of scale built on the manufacturing of 40 million disk drives per year, Western Digital said Monday that it has developed an ATA drive that rivals the speed and performance of SCSI drives at a 30 percent cost savings.
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.