Stories by: Deni Connor

Dell entered the Fibre Channel over Ethernet market last week with OEM deals from Brocade and QLogic and endorsed 10Gigabit Ethernet as a customer's technology of choice.

EMC rolled out this week its much anticipated FAST software, which automatically migrates data between tiers of storage based on policies the storage administrator sets.

Symantec has announced that it has enhanced three of its flagship products – Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server – with support for migrating data into and out of solid state drives and the ability to reclaim unused storage. In addition, the company has enhanced the failover capabilities of Veritas Cluster File System to work with structured data in Oracle, Sybase or IBM DB2 applications.

Locust Storage came out of stealth last week with the announcement of a 'green' storage product that allows a 90 per cent reduction in power over traditional storage vendors.

Cisco, EMC and VMware last week unveiled the much rumored joint venture to sell their products to companies wanting to build internal clouds. Called Acadia (for who knows what reason), the joint venture is a collaboration between the three companies that will launch in 2010 and sell what they call Vblocks, preconfigured packages of Cisco UCS blade servers, EMC storage gear, VMware virtualization software and EMC Ionix management software.

Last week in storage garnered several announcements from SteelEye, 3PAR, Brocade and Thales.

At Storage Networking World a couple of weeks ago, the focus was on solid-state drives and cloud technologies.

Managing both the hardware and software of rivals has been a standard feature for management software vendors for years. Only recently however, have virtualization vendors begun to follow suit -- offering the ability to manage not only their own virtual server environments, but those of competitors as well.

Virtual-server vendors are following the example of systems-management and physical-server vendors by expanding their management applications to control not only their own virtual server environments, but those of their competitors.

These days in IT, you can buy a service for anything - including, once again, your storage.