Paul Shread

An idea more than 40 years in development is beginning to work its way into the storage marketplace. InPhase Technologies will ramp up volume production of its holographic storage drives and media in mid-2007, and early units available for the first half of the year are already committed, according to company officials (see InPhase Nears […]

As grid technology gets absorbed into enterprise fabrics, it could become inseparable from technologies such as virtualization and service-oriented architectures (SOA) and the creation of enterprise utilities, according to 451 Group analysts Steve Wallage and William Fellows. One consequence for grid computing, the analysts said in their 2007 grid computing outlook, is that the term […]

Hitachi Data Systems made its long-awaited entry into the high-end NASmarket on Monday with a five-year OEM deal with BlueArc. The deal, which also includes a “minority position” in BlueArc, gives HDS “the most advanced file and block system available in the marketplace today,” according to HDS CEO Dave Roberson. The deal is a big […]

Storage vendors had another strong showing in the third quarter, led by a resurgent EMC. According to IDC, worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenue in the third quarter grew 9.9 percent from a year ago to $4.3 billion, the 14th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. The total disk storage systems market (both external and […]

Symantec on Tuesday announced plans to move disk-based backup away from legacy tape environments. A new application programming interface (API) called the Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage API, set for release in mid-2007, will allow intelligent disk devices to integrate natively with NetBackup backup and recovery software instead of having to emulate tape in a virtual tapeapproach. […]

Gear6 hopes to boost NASperformance with a first-of-its-kind centralized storage caching solution. The startup says it is the first to deploy high-capacity, high-performance cache as a scalable shared network resource, allowing data to be accessed and shared by multiple applications and hundreds or thousands of clients. The result is a dramatic acceleration of applications across […]

Data protection is a big theme at last week’s Storage Decisions conference in New York, with Microsoft and VMware among the vendors showing off their wares. Microsoft on Wednesday released a public beta of the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) version 2 at the conference. The new version delivers continuous data protection (CDP) […]

The first quarter of 2006 was a strong one for storage vendors, according to IDC, with the top four vendors all posting double-digit growth. Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues grew 10.3 percent from the year-ago quarter to $4.2 billion, according to IDC’s Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker. The total disk storage systems […]

Shares of Sun Microsystems leapt 9% in late trading Monday on news that CEO Scott McNealy will step down after 22 years at the helm. President and COO Jonathan Schwartz will take over as CEO, effective immediately, while McNealy will remain chairman and a full-time Sun employee. The company has long been under pressure from […]

Microsoft last week unveiled a software-enabled SAN boot of Windows Server 2003 using iSCSItechnology co-developed with IBM. Microsoft made a number of other storage-related announcements at this week’s Storage Networking World conference, including the availability of Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 through OEMs, plans for its iSCSI target technology acquired from String Bean Software, and […]