Paul Shread

In a move toward the mainstream storage market, Apple has released its first storage product with support for Windows and Linux-based computing environments. The Xserve RAID storage system is a 3U high-availability rack storage system that provides up to 3.5 terabytes of storage capacity, up to 210 MB/s throughput, and pricing of about $3 per […]

The storage sector has always had its periods of pricing pressure, but lately the pressure to cut prices has grown particularly intense. A number of trends — among them the rise of low-cost IP storage, the entry of new players, and a glut of start-ups — have converged to squeeze margins among storage vendors. “Besides […]

HP has introduced new entry-level storage offerings that the company claims cost 25-50% less than comparable solutions from Dell/EMC and IBM. The HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) family includes two direct-attached storage (DAS) offerings and one storage area network (SAN) model. “They’re coming in at very competitive pricing,” Mike Karp, senior analyst at Enterprise […]

The Storage Networking Industry Association’s Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) is on a fast track to becoming an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard. The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) has agreed to take SMI-S, which helps storage products from different vendors function together under one manageable interface, through the INCITS Fast Track […]

Sun Microsystems is expanding its Grid computing offerings beyond raw compute power to include collaboration, data Grids and visualization. The new “Grid Everywhere” strategy, announced Tuesday, lets customers take a “building block” approach to Grids, says Steve Perrenod, HPTC group manager for Sun. “We believe it’s important to have a wide variety of offerings,” says […]

HP has teamed with BAE Systems and three institutions to build an advanced global computing Grid for collaborative simulation and visualization in aerospace and defense design. The collaboration will be based on open Grid standards like the Globus Toolkit and the Open Grid Services Architecture, which combines Grid technology with Web services. As part of […]

Six months ago, there were no groups dedicated solely to storage users. As of this week, there are three. Jon Toigo’s Data Management Institute started the ball rolling in May. This week, the Association of Storage Networking Professionals (ASNP) joined the fray, and the Information Storage Industry Center (ISIC) at the University of California, San […]

It seems that every day brings a new storage start-up boasting of great technology, hoping to compete against the likes of EMC and other storage giants. The market can’t possibly be big enough for all of them, can it? It can’t. A new report by early-stage venture capital firm Crescendo Ventures looked at 456 storage […]

Storage software sales experienced a bang-up second quarter, with 7.3% sequential growth over the first quarter, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker. Sales were boosted by disaster fears and new record retention regulations. “The markets for both storage replication software and backup and archive software are being accelerated by renewed customer emphasis on […]

IBM has added an upgrade option for its entry-level TotalStorage FAStT 600 storage server that enables the server to scale up to more than twice its current capacity and increase performance by 66%. The new “turbo” option will allow companies to start out small and scale to mid-range performance and capacity for less than the […]