Storage

It's been a busy week in the cloud. Dell ditched plans to build its own cloud and instead will work with partners, while focusing on private clouds. In an opposite move, VMware revealed its plans for how it will compete in the public cloud market.

Citrix ended its Synergy'13 conference on a high note, with a partner appreciation party that included drinks, food and a performance by popular band, Maroon 5. The band swooned the women (and some of the men) with their top hits, leaving everyone wanting for more by the end of the night. Warning - there may be one too many pictures of frontman, Adam Levine.

Fujitsu Forum Tokyo, the company's largest annual event, was held May 16-17 2013 at the Tokyo International Forum in Japan. 12,000 IT decision-makers and experts from around the world attended the event.

Fujitsu Forum 2013 – Reshaping ICT, Rehaping Business, Society - featured seminars and exhibitions demonstrating Fujitsu‘s latest products, services and technologies. This includes the company's initiatives to build safe, secure and sustainable cities; its approach to leveraging ICT to give customers a competitive edge, as well as the Cloud and Big Data analysis technologies that make this possible.

Box has acquired an unreleased application called Folders, designed to give iPhone and iPad users a mobile front-end interface for the cloud storage and file management and sharing service as well as for competitors Google Drive and Dropbox.

Cloudian is integrating its platform with Citrix's CloudPortal Business Manager as it aims to make it easier to roll out and manage storage as a service.

The datacentre of the future is shaped by a number of forces including commoditisation, virtualisation, integration and innovation. A group of industry experts sat down to discuss the key factors shaping the evolution of the datacentre of the future and its impact on the channel.

As we’ve become a more mobile society - working from virtually anywhere on our smartphones and tablets - we’ve also embraced various cloud storage and file sharing tools, so we can access and collaborate on our data. Younity has an entirely different approach, and it could make cloud storage obsolete.

As someone who spent billions with HP over 20 years while in IT leadership roles at Boeing and Verizon Wireless, John Hinshaw knew the big hardware, software and services company from the outside as well as anyone. In the year-and-a-half since becoming executive vice-president of technology and operations at HP, he's been putting that knowledge to use on the inside.

Not having an API is becoming like not having a website, but the interface has got to be easy for outside developers to work with.

Oracle's unveiling of a batch of servers based on new Sparc processors marked what some analysts think is a step toward an expected standardizing of the vendor's two families of Unix servers onto a single chip architecture.

Music fans and major recording artists are adopting lossless audio file formats to keep copies of their music thats as close to a master recording as possible, leading to multi-terabyte-sized home music storage systems.

In March, Western Digital agreed to buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies> (HGST), the disk drive subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., in a stock and cash transaction valued at $US4.3 billion. HGST CEO Steve Milligan will join WD as president at the closing of the deal, expected in the fourth quarter.

EMC recently held its annual Inform conference in Sydney. Keynote speaker, EMC President for Australia and New Zealand, David Webster, sat down with Matthew Sainsbury to discuss the event, market issues and its vendor partnerships.

Brian Gallagher , president of EMC 's Symmetrix & Virtualization Product Group, sat down with Computerworld at EMC's annual user conference, EMC World, to talk about the company's new VPLEX synchronous data replication product . Gallagher explained what differentiates it from rival products and EMC's existing offerings, such as Symmetric Remote Data Facility [SRDF] replication technology and Invista storage virtualization software.

Pat Gelsinger made headlines in September 2009 when he left Intel to join EMC as president and COO of information infrastructure products, a group that includes the company's information storage and information security businesses. Now, Gelsinger -- who was Intel's first chief technology officer and led both the desktop products group and the digital enterprise group during his career at the chip maker -- is making waves again.

Earlier this year, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak accepted the position of chief scientist at start-up solid state drive company Fusion-io. It's the first time since 1972, when he worked in Hewlett-Packard Co's calculator division, that he's held a technologist's position for a company that wasn't his own.

Shaw reviews the Seagate Central network-attached hard drive.

Correctly sizing a disk backup with deduplication to meet your current and future needs is an important part of your data protection strategy. If you ask the right questions upfront and analyze each aspect of your environment that impacts backup requirements, you can avoid the consequences of buying an undersize system that quickly exceeds capacity.

The recent RSA conference in San Francisco was awash in talk of big data, but it was clear there was some disagreement about what people mean by big data and some outright skepticism about it being the answer.

OK, lots of interesting stuff for you this week. First up, LinkedIn has open sourced a system called Databus, a real-time database change capture system that provides a "timeline-consistent stream of change capture events ... grouped in transactions, in source commit order."

Shaw reviews Western Digital's WD TV Play, by Western Digital.

I've been using a StarTech hard drive duplicator for a couple of years now to clone my computer's drive to other internal drives for testing purposes. Once my OS, apps and data are transferred over to a hard drive or solid-state drive (SSD), I can then use the target drive for review purposes.

HP 3PAR StoreServe 7400 combines high scalability, high performance, and a big bag of tricks for easing storage management

Seagate's Wireless Plus drive offers a terabyte of storage and a way to stash your videos, photos, music and documents or wirelessly stream them to your mobile devices.

The newest Wi-Fi technology -- 802.11ac -- promises blazing speeds of up to 1.3Gbps, according to claims made by the leading vendors.

Transcend's ESD200 external SSD is fast and very portable. Unfortunately, the backup software doesn't impress.