While hard disk drive (HDD) supplies are starting to resurge, inventories will not be back to normal until the third quarter of this year and prices will remain unusually high through 2014, according to market research firms IHS iSuppli and Coughlin Associates.

Startup Starboard Storage Systems today came out of quiet mode with its first product: a storage array that discerns between structured and unstructured data in order to tailor I/O performance. It's also designed for use in virtualized server environments.

IBM Tuesday unveiled several upgrade options for the flagship grid-based XIV Storage System, including the ability to use solid-state drives (SSDs) as cache to increase performance by up to three times.

Intel Monday started shipping its fastest enterprise-class solid-state drive (SSD), the first to use the SandForce (now LSI) SFI-2281 NAND flash controller , which promises 500MB/sec-plus performance.

EMC today launched its long-awaited "Project Lightning," now called the VFCache product line, an initiative to sell PCIe-based NAND flash cards for servers as a caching element to increase I/O performance by up to 4,000 times.

Nimbus Data Systems today announced a new all-NAND flash storage array aimed at enterprise-class data centers that it said matches disk arrays on price, but outperforms everywhere else.

Object-based storage vendor Cleversafe today announced the availability of a storage system that can house up to 10 exabytes (that's 1 billion gigabytes) of data in a single pool of capacity.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci today offered a high-level overview of the company's product roadmap, which includes a refresh of its VMAX Symmetrix array, its VNXe hybrid array and the general availability of its embedded flash storage product for servers.

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.

Start-up Nimble Storage came out of the development stage this week with its first product -- an array that combines solid state drives (SSD) with high-capacity, cost and performance serial ATA (SATA) hard drives, acts as primary and backup storage and replicates offsite for disaster recovery.