Go to:

IT Jobs

As this week's heatwave subsides, we cover what you may have missed in the storage market through dehydration:

Adaptec's three-in-one: its Snap Appliance division released an updated operating system which it said improves SCSI performance, plus adds the NDMP protocol. A new Snap Server 18000 doubles previous file and block I/O performance. It offers both NAS and SAN-type access. And it added wide area replication between Snap Servers for disaster recovery. See our longer story here. [4 August]

Arkeia and Coraid told us that they will work together to certify Arkeia's network backup software on Coraid's EtherDrive Storage Blades. The blades offer networked disk storage using standard Ethernet connections. Arkeia also got $4 million equity funding to spend on product research, sales and marketing. Expect new products. [4 August]

Atempo said its Time Navigator is optimised for Itanium 2 processors on Red Hat Linux AS and HP-UX operating systems. The certification was performed on SGI Altix, Bull NovaScale and NEC platforms. [4 August]

Atempo also gained certification with HP's StorageWorks Enterprise Backup Solution (EBS). The two companies tested and cross-certified the complete range of HP StorageWorks enterprise and business class tape libraries as well as HP StorageWorks tape autoloaders (LTO and SDLT drives). [10 August]

BlueArc and Engenio announced an arrangement in which BlueArc's Titan SiliconServer will include Engenio's enterprise-class Fibre Channel and Serial ATA controllers. BlueArc is also introducing SATA as an offering, alongside existing FC disks. BlueArc is delivering a NAS product and Engenio customers can now use BlueArc kit. [5 August]

Brocade has the Enterasys CEO joining its board. We might expect better integration between Brocade SAN switches and directors and Enterasys' high-speed networking gear. [4 August]

Connected Corporation has a deal with Fujitsu Siemens whereby FS systems will have DataProtector/PC added to its IT portfolio of storage software. DataProtector automatically backups data on a PC or laptop whenever employees log onto the corporate network.

Emulex goes open source. It announced Emulex Open Source Linux HBA drivers will be integrated into Novell's newly-announced SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 operating system. Emulex Open Source Linux drivers are also available from the Emulex website. [4 August]

Emulex and 4Gbps Fibre Channel: Emulex head Paul Folino said in a financial statement, "Emulex has already succeeded in capturing our first design win for our next generation 4Gb HBA solutions during the fourth quarter at one of our key OEMs, and we expect more to come." [6 August]

Exabyte said customers buying IBM pSeries servers will be able to have its VXA2 tape drive with it. It will also be sold separately by IBM. [4 August]

Fibre Channel connections to grow. There is a report that Fibre Channel connectivity will grow according to research by Dell'Oro. FC fabric switch port shipments will grow from 1.7 million this year steadily to 6.2 million in 2008. Most growth will be at the low end. [10 August]

HP and Certance have extended the DAT 72 roadmap with a new third generation. It should store around 300GB raw data, at 16Mbit/s and arrive around 2009. Both companies are convinced disk-based backup isn't going to shrink the SME tape backup market yet.

Market capitalisation storage leaders. From Yahoo! comes this table of the market capitalisation of the leading storage firms:

• EMC - $25.9 billion
• Seagate - $5.1 billion
• Sandisk - $3.8 billion
• Storage Technology - $2.8 billion
• Western Digital - $1.5 billion
• Brocade - $1.2 billion
• Imation - $1.2 billion
• Maxtor - $1.1 billion
• Emulex - $841.5 million

M-Systems introduced a new version of its DiskOnKey thumb drive KeySafe software with security feature. It autoplays when plugged into a USB port and requests a user password. Data is stored in encrypted private zone of device or unencrypted shared zone. It can store up to 2GB in total. [5 August]

Memory card technology looks set for a boost. A new format will transfer data over USB 2 and reach 120 Mbit/s - 10 times faster than other cards, according to Digitimes report. It will also hold up to 2TB, yes, two terabytes of data. [9 August]

QLogic is supporting Intel's new Xeons: it has announced its entire line of SANblade Fibre Channel and iSCSI host bus adapters will support the new Xeon processor-based platforms that include Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (EM64T). [4 August]

Seagate Savvio 2.5in disk drives are to be used in IBM 1U xSeries 336 servers. Each server will have four drives and capacity for RAID 0, 1 or 5 functions. [5 August]

Seagate again. The company has filed a complaint in a Minnesota court aiming to prevent an ex-employee joining competitor Western Digital. Worries centre on proprietary read/write head technology disclosure. [9 August]

Toshiba has introduced its 60GB 1.8in micro drive for PDAs, music players, small notebooks and similar devices.

Western Digital is shipping 250GB 7200rpm WD Caviar RAID Edition (RE) hard drives, "designed and manufactured to enterprise-class standards". An EIDE interface is also available. Its lifespan is stated as 1,000,000 hours. [4 August]

Veritas announced immediate availability of its Storage Replicator 3.0, software to protect remote office data through real-time data replication. [4 August]