As powerful and beneficial as flash storage can be, many organizations are overspending on capacity they don't need, deploying flash in the wrong places, and inefficiently spending on flash applications that are not appropriate for their real business objectives.

In the midst of going private, Dell executives said today they've already consolidated their three storage product divisions into one, they are working on merging their system management interfaces, and they have a number of new products coming out over the next year.

QLogic's technology for clustered cache storage on SAN adapters will hit the market this month in the form of adapters with integrated 200GB or 400GB flash cards.

AT&T will sell the BlackBerry Z10 touchscreen smartphone on March 22 for $199.99 with a two-year contract, the carrier confirmed.

Huawei Technologies' enterprise division is ramping up its European presence, helped by the announcement this week that SAP has certified the company's servers to run its HANA in-memory platform. Such deals with SAP and other big software vendors will be key for Huawei to succeed in the enterprise.

The enterprise storage picture is changing fast as resources are abstracted through virtualization, new computing options like cloud are embraced, and companies search for ways to extract more value out of the data they already are swimming in, even as more arrives in the guise of big data.

EMC today announced its first purpose-built, all SSD array along new PCIe server flash cards and a new software suite that can offer administrators a single view of all their flash assets across the data center.

Dell unveiled upgrades to its deduplication appliance line, the DR-series, whose models can now grow to 81TB and replicate data from up to 32 remote offices to a central node.

Enterprise storage demands are reaching a critical point, and vendors are scrambling to develop new products to deal with the data deluge. We look at how these technologies will help manage the major pain points for storage administrators.

Virtualizing x86 infrastructure isn't just a one-step process -- as servers change, the whole data center must change as well. While server hypervisors such as VMware's ESX, Microsoft's Hyper-V and Xen can make IT more efficient and cost-effective, many of the virtualization advantages can be canceled out when data centers rely on technology and processes that haven't been updated for the virtualization age.

Either because server disks are full or because virtualization is a natural growth path, organizations large and small are moving toward shared storage. For large enterprises, high-capacity storage-area networks make sense, but what about small or mid-sized enterprises new to shared storage?

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.