Storage

IBM has kicked off a new financing offer on server purchases as small as $US5000.

Network components manufacturer Emulex Corp. today said its board of directors will review a new takeover bid by Broadcom Corp., which raised its offer from $US9.25 per share to $11. That would make the deal worth about $US925 million.

Ingram Micro has joined the board of industry representative organisation, Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), with Terry Dunn from the distributor’s NZ branch becoming a director.

EMC has extended from June 29 to July 10 the deadline on its $US1.8 billion offer to purchase all outstanding shares of storage backup vendor Data Domain, in an effort to entice Data Domain to abandon a deal with NetApp.

The recent revelation that Intel Corp.'s consumer-class solid-state disk (SSD) drives suffer from fragmentation that can cause a significant performance degradation raises the question: Do all SSDs slow down with use over time?

It can be a storage nightmare: Given expanding regulatory requirements and the key role that electronic records now play in lawsuits, some enterprises are saving every bit of data they have, just to be safe. As a gauge of storage demand, IDC says the total amount of disk storage shipped last year grew 40.5 percent from 2007.

Portable hard drives, in all their pocket-size splendor, now pack in plenty of storage space. Capacities up to 500GB (plus a 1TB network-attached option) and a veritable candy store of colors make choosing a portable hard drive fun.

Photo viewers, multimedia playback, memory card transfers -- these hard disk drives do more than just sit on your desk and store your digital stuff.

What was your first job?

What's holding users back? Potential security risks and a loss of IT control topped the list of perceived barriers to SaaS adoption. With so much trepidation in the air, Computerworld decided to get the real scoop, so we interviewed six executives who have tackled SaaS projects.

Juniper Networks datacentre solutions director, Bobby Guhasarkar, spoke with ARN about where the datacentre is headed and the way market conditions affect strategy.

Dell has continued to move its storage product line and services upstream, adding more sophisticated software into its arrays, which have traditionally been targeted at small to midsize businesses. At the same time, the company says it will increase its offerings around cloud-based computing, both in on-site and off-site backup and disaster recovery.

It's no surprise that Microsoft has its eye on the cloud. Cloud computing, that is.

Looming on the horizon are the nimbus, cirrus, stratus and cumulus that threaten to deliver us cloud computing imminently. Promising an end to most of the challenges and frustrations of IT systems as we know them, the concept of cloud computing is thundering through the business community to become one of the most talked about and revered subjects of the day.

Working with several enterprise clients of late, it's become apparent that there is a not-so-subtle shift of emphasis or prioritization taking place regarding the tiering of storage. To understand this, it's helpful to review the recent history and drivers related tiered storage.

The Storage Networking World show in Dallas seemed to me to represent a microcosm of the widespread concerns about the economy. There was a good deal of focus on how to do more with less, and my perception was that it was a quieter, more somber conference than usual. However, that's not to imply that there weren't some significant happenings. Here are some of the items that struck me as particularly notable:

But tests yield slower read speeds than Samsung claims

The Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System's combination of 48 drives, SSD log storage, broad protocol support, ZFS, and amazing GUI make for one great filer

Network-attached storage (NAS) devices are usually the realm of the tech-savvy, with confusing interfaces, lots of associated technical jargon and complicated maintenance. For those who want extensive storage without the complexity, the Iomega StorCenter Pro NAS ix4-100 Server comes to the rescue. This NAS device is easy to set up and easy to use.

The Iomega Prestige Desktop Hard Drive is a well-built and good-looking external hard drive that is simple to use but slower than competing drives from Seagate and Western Digital.