Storage

Hitachi Data Systems is looking to expand its business consulting practice and bring more partners on-board.

Iomega has announced the availability of its new REV 120GB backup drive, the third generation of its REV technology.

US-based data protection and disaster recovery software vendor, Neverfail, has set up a local office in Sydney and hired Kieran O'Shaughnessy as its Asia-Pacific channel sales director.

Michael Bosnar has resigned from his position as senior director of channels at CA.

Researchers who extracted data from a hard drive onboard the ill-fated Space Shuttle Columbia mission say the device was so thoroughly damaged by its fiery crash to Earth that it resembled simply a cracked "hunk of metal" when it appeared at their door six months later.

Corporate executives have long created IT plans to cope with major disasters, but now they're increasingly taking steps to prevent the brief shutdowns that can cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in their own right.

Microsoft's plan to fill its mammoth Chicago data center with servers housed in 40-foot shipping containers has experts wondering whether the strategy will succeed. In Microsoft's plan, each container in the data center, still being built, will be filled with several thousand servers.

When it comes to backing up virtual servers, IT administrators have a lot of choices. But increasingly, they're finding one method of backup isn't enough to satisfy all the demands of a virtual environment.

When the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications set out to build a machine with more than 200,000 server cores, the key wasn't simply shelling out cash for newer, faster silicon chips. The trick was harnessing the power of a substance that comes right out of your kitchen sink: water.

Metro Health Hospital, a healthcare system serving 130,000 patients across Michigan, is already using what some consider the desktop of the future. The hospital has rolled out server-hosted virtual desktops to every employee no matter where they are or what client device they use.

What is SpectrumData focusing on this year?

Symantec chairman and CEO John Thompson last week delivered a keynote speech to thousands of security professionals at the RSA Conference 2008 in the US. Ellen Messmer caught up with Thompson at the RSA event, where he expanded on a range of topics including vendor alliances, Symantec's competition and the importance of data-loss prevention technology.

Rackspace provides datacentre facilities under a managed hosting scheme. It is building a new UK datacentre and has had a green aspect to its business for about a year and a half. How is that affecting its operations?

APC founder and CTO Neil Rasmussen was in London recently to talk about datacentres, power and efficiency - themes that have become headline news as they transmogrify into green issues. We took the opportunity to ask him - inter alia - whether the datacentre can ever be green.

Responsible for steering the course of EMC's security franchise, Art Coviello, executive vice president of EMC's RSA Security division, says the unit will eventually contribute US$2 billion to EMC's annual revenue. In a recent interview with Computerworld, Coviello talked about a balance between storage and security needs, why administrators focused only on "dumb storage" are a dying breed and why selling risk needs no justification.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: SFF (small form factor) drives allow you to squeeze more spindles into the same rack space, giving you better performance in the same real estate. As an bonus, using 2.5-inch drives reduces the amount of electricity you use and creates less heat than using their larger cousins, essentially making your storage array less demanding on your wallet and on the electric grid.

Among the multitude of data protection challenges facing IT organizations, arguably the least favorite for IT managers is dealing with laptop systems. Each week we read more horror stories about lost notebook computers and potentially compromised data as organizations attempt to grapple with what is literally a moving target.

Every Storage Networking World conference tends to serve as a gauge on the mood of the market and provides indications of trends and directions in the storage industry, and last week's in Orlando, to me at least, reflected a storage market that is transitioning to a mature phase, where new developments are likely to be more incremental - evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

When disaster looms, who you gonna call? It could increasingly be a mathematician if IBM scientists succeed in one of their current research efforts.

Last week, while attending the Spring Storage Networking World in Orlando the big news was, believe it or not, storage networking. In this case, multiple vendors are touting Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as storage networking's future.

For years now, 3.5 inches has been the reigning size of disk drives for enterprise storage arrays. Now, however, smaller, more efficient 2.5-inch SFF (small form factor) drives are proving viable challengers to their larger brethren.

Tandberg Data StorageLibrary T80+

Reflex Technologies' Command Center is itself a virtual machine that sits on VMware's ESX server and acts as an intrusion-prevention system, watching connectivity activity between other VMs and the virtual network interface provided by VMware.

The nWorks Management Pack for VMware for Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager 2007 is a long name for a tool that provides strong VMware monitoring and management capabilities that are ultimately driven by Microsoft's management platform.

In our latest set of test of virtual machine management tools, we examined VM host-centric management, planning and accounting applications from PlateSpin and Virtugo Software, a VMware plug-in for Microsoft's Operations Manager application from nWorks, and a storage-area network management tool from Onaro (which Network Appliance has just acquired) that offers specialized insights into the virtualized world.