Stories by: Bryan Betts

This year's Storage Networking World Europe show focused attention on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). However, while SAN vendors promoted FCoE as a way to extend Fibre Channel's reach and longevity, skeptics described it as unnecessary -- and perhaps even a Cisco-powered Trojan horse intended to wipe out rival networking supplier Brocade Communications.

Cloud storage startup ParaScale is targeting enterprises, as well as service providers, with new software that it claims can turn a group of heterogeneous servers and storage arrays into a redundant and self-healing private cloud of storage.

Network Instruments has developed what it claims is the largest network data recorder available. The GigaStor SAS has a capacity of up to 288 terabytes, and was originally developed for a U.S. military customer which needed to store a month's worth of the traffic on its network, said Douglas Smith, the company's president and co-founder.

Replacing different-capacity WAN accelerators with a standard-sized but software-limited box can cut costs and reduce upgrade woes, Expand Networks has claimed.

Nexsan has introduced a storage subsystem which it said could enable users to consolidate their long-term business-critical data stores into a single consolidated platform.

Akamai and Citrix are linking up to offer global application optimization, combining Akamai's Internet-based web application acceleration (WAA) service with Citrix NetScaler application optimization gear in customer sites.

Silver Peak has launched what it claimed is the biggest WAN accelerator ever - a box able to optimize, de-duplicate, compress and encrypt 1Gbit/s of WAN traffic.

Riverbed has done deals with several developers of network monitoring software to get them to add support for its Steelhead WAN appliances.

Telephony has at last become an IT product, claimed Nortel as it announced SCS500, an open source-based unified communications suite for small and mid-sized businesses.

De-duplication has become popular for backup data, but not for primary storage. Now, US start-up company Ocarina Networks wants to change that, with a data reduction technology which it claims can shrink live production data too - even if the file formats are already compressed.

As mobile devices evolve and grow more sophisticated, so too do the ways that we interact with them.