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Okay, so it's getting dark early and it's cold, but the storage market lives on...

3Par, Egenera and Inkra Networks announced that Savvis Communications is entering the UK market. Its "virtualised utility services delivery platform" is built on technologies from the three and enables Savvis to charge customers only for the resources they use.

Accordance Systems has announced its ARAID 2000 is shipping. It is a Serial ATA (SATA) RAID storage product that automatically mirrors data onto a second drive. The RAID intelligence is built into the product - no additional controller boards or drivers are required to use the device.

Comment: How long will it be before PCs have a RAID mirroring option as a standard offering?

Atto Technology has released its ATTO iPBridge 1500E/D iSCSI-to-SCSI bridge. Supporting Microsoft’s iSCSI software initiator, the iPBridge 1500 offers companies a way to link existing SCSI storage devices into an Ethernet network. (It's cheap too!)

Cisco is still plugging away at the storage market and has added two products to its MDS 9000 line of directors and switches. They are made for transporting SAN traffic outside the data center, which make them suited for disaster recovery and remote backup applications. Both products, the MDS 9216i fabric switch and the MDS 9000 Multiprotocol Services Module, are equipped with 14 Fibre Channel ports (2Gbit/s) along with two Gigabit Ethernet ports - configurable for FCIP or iSCSI. Cisco also announced a new version of the MDS 9000 O/S, SAN-OS 2.0, which offers hardware-assisted compression, FCIP tape acceleration, hardware-based IPSec encryption, and extended Fibre Channel buffer credits.

From the David and Goliath department: Cornice, sued for patent infringements by bothSeagate and Western Digital has now counter-sued [pdf] Western Digital, following on from its counter suit against Seagate. The suits are all about gaining success in supplying high capacity one-inch drives.

EMC announced new PeopleSoft applications support as well as custom applications support on Oracle and Sybase databases for its EMC DatabaseXtender software.

Decru announced certification of its DataFort storage security appliances with ADIC Scalar tape libraries and Pathlight VX disk-to-tape backup products. (DataFort is a turnkey security appliance providing wire-speed AES-256 encryption for stored data on disk and tape.)

Decru has also completed interoperability testing of its DataFort storage security appliances with Cisco's MDS 9000 family of directors and switches

Emulex is really speeding along. Not content with notching up Emulex, Fujitsu and IBM to take its InSpeed switching technology, it has also won over NEC.

FalconStor aannounced support for Intel’s initiatives to deliver scalable NAS and SAN solutions for the SOHO and SAN OEM market segments. FalconStor will customise its IPStor software specifically for the Intel XScale technology.

Hitachi GST has announced new 5400rpm notebook drives. The Travelstar 5K100 is for standard notebook applications and the E5K100 for more demanding data-access applications. These 100GB hard drives offer, Hitachi GST claims, "the broadest capacity points, the highest shock tolerance and the lowest power consumption in their category".They also have Serial ATA (SATA) support.

IBM has built a computing grid with storage elements for Sinopec, China's largest producer and marketer of oil products. The grid infrastructure improves access to distributed data that resided in multiple independent silos across the company. IBM worked with an enterprise information integration (EAI) software provider called Avaki.

Iomega announced the release of its NAS 100d entry-level network-attached storage (NAS) server. Available in 160GB and 250GB capacities, it has wireless network capabilities and offers flexible, easily expandable network storage for smaller enterprises. It would be somewhat surprising if wirelessly accessed storage became more common except in hard to wire locations.

Another nail in the coffin of tape's use as a first line backup medium? Microsoft has announced its entry into the disk-based backup and recovery market with a Data Protection Server (DPS) product. It's a low-cost, continuous, disk-based backup and recovery solution. DPS is designed to provide robust data protection for Windows Server System products. More than 20 storage industry partners have announced their support for it.

ILM arrives for data warehousing. Sand Technology has released its Searchable Archibe product. This takes a data warehouse database and compresses it, using various compression algorithms, to up to 95 percent of its original size. The shrunken data set can then be searched, in its compressed state, for data to be restored for a BI application to work on it. The compressed data can also be stored on nearline or offline storage releasing front line disk space.

Samsung has reportedly developed a 60nm 8GB NAND flash memory device that could lead to 16GB capacity flash memory cards. (Think 4,000 MP3 files or just hours and hours of corporate videos.)

Storcase has introduced the Infostation 10-Bay 1U SCSI & Fibre to SATA RAID Enclosure. Using 2.5in drives it is, the company says, "extremely space-efficient (and) supports storage capacities and data throughput rates that would require much more rack space and consume considerably more power with traditional 3.5in drive enclosures.