Lenovos Accomplishments; Outlining the CAS Problem

The ThinkPad is still the ThinkPad. Its been a year since Lenovo officially took over IBMs PC business, but its hard to believe that Lenovo wasnt always making all those ThinkPads.

The China-based manufacturer has accomplished a great deal in the past 12 months, reports Senior Writer John G. Spooner this week, managing growth while restructuring and bringing in new executive leadership in the form of William Amelio, formerly head of Dell in China.

But perhaps Lenovos greatest achievement going forward will be its role in legitimizing the PC business in China. The company on April 17 agreed to buy $1.2 billion worth of Microsoft software in the next year, a big step toward thwarting the piracy markets in China.

The Chinese government, which owns about a quarter of Lenovo, has made it a requirement that PC makers install "legitimate" software on all systems before shipment. This is a great deal for Microsoft, to be sure, but it also will help open up Chinese markets to other software developers and all businesses seeking to expand there.

Parkinsons Law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." In the computer world, its corollary is "data expands to fill the space available for storage." As storage needs and capacity expand, so does the need for better, more open and more robust tools to manage all that data.

In his comprehensive package on CAS (content-addressed storage) systems, eWeek Labs Senior Analyst Henry Baltazar writes that the era of proprietary solutions is over and, like all things that enable interoperability and compliance, the time for open standards is now.

Baltazar outlines the CAS problem and what is being done to solve it, particularly the developing standards of XAM (Extensible Access Method) by the Storage Networking Industry Association and two Java Specification Requests, JSR-170 and JSR-283. He also has created the latest eWEEK RFP (request for proposal) template, providing readers with the questions IT managers need to ask before investing in a CAS solution.

Contact Scot Petersen at scot_petersen@ziffdavis.com.

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