Storage Digest: Overland Aims Up-market with 500-Cartridge Tape Library, and More

Overland Aims Up-market with 500-Cartridge Tape Library

IBM Symphony Pushes Data Center Provisioning

Sony DVR Packs Plenty of Storage

LaCie Announces DVD±RW Drive with Porsche Design Skin

Applied Micro Scoops

Enterprise Storage

Overland Aims Up-market with 500-Cartridge Tape Library

Overland Storage Inc. last week announced its biggest tape library yet with the 500-cartridge NEO 8000. The library, which uses the same robotic arm design as the previous-generation systems, now lets Overland cover the entire midrange tape spectrum, said Christopher Calisi, Overland president and CEO. The company expects to start shipping the 8000 by the end of 2003. Fara Yale, research analyst at Gartner Inc., said Overland will have a challenge in trying to prove itself to higher-end enterprise customers. "For Overland, its moving into new territory," she said. "Traditionally in the tape automation market, theyve been midrange to low-end player with smaller libraries. This will put them into competition with companies like StorageTek, which is very strong in high-end markets like that."

Read the full story on:Byte and Switch

 

IBM Symphony Pushes Data Center Provisioning

IBM this month plans to roll out a set of intelligent system-provisioning tools that can track the use of mainframes, servers and storage devices and automatically redirect data flows as needed. The overall product offering, code-named Symphony, is designed to help IT managers take advantage of underutilized computing resources and move processing workloads off of systems that are nearing their capacity thresholds. IBM would be the first major vendor to actually come to market with software that gives users the ability to provision server resources on the fly, said Richard Fichera, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. "This is a really important capability for anybody attempting to do virtualized data centers," he said. "If IBM can truly do what theyre claiming, this raises the bar for other players." Still, it will likely take years for IBM and its rivals to fully flesh out the provisioning functionality, Fichera added.

Read the full story on:Computerworld

 

Personal Storage

Sony DVR Packs Plenty of Storage

A new Sony hard-drive based digital video recorder will go on sale in November, capable of recording for two weeks nonstop, the company said this week. The Cocoon CSV-EX11 uses a pair of 250GB hard drives to record up to 342 hours of video in the lowest of three quality modes. Standard mode cuts this to 171 hours, while high quality mode reduces this further to a still-respectable 114 hours—or just under five days. There is no DVD drive built into the recorder but it is possible to link the machine via Ethernet to a Sony Vaio computer running the companys "Click to DVD" software. The CSV-EX11 will go on sale on November 1 in Japan at $,1380.

Read the full story on: PCWorld.com

 

LaCie Announces DVD±RW Drive with Porsche Design Skin

LaCie this month will ship a new line of DVD drives designed by Porsche Design GmbH. The drives will be available with high-speed FireWire or USB 2.0 connection. Prices will start at $249, the company said. Read the full press release here

 

Storage Business

Applied Micro Scoops Up JNI, Moves into Storage

Applied Micro Circuits Corp. moved into the storage networking space recently with the acquisition of host bus adapter firm JNI Corp. "This acquisition significantly extends AMCCs networking silicon technology expertise beyond the Wide Area Network into the high-growth SAN market," AMCC CEO Dave Rickey said in a statement. Under the terms of the agreement, AMCC will pay $7 per share in cash for each outstanding share of JNIC common stock, or about $190 million, and will assume all outstanding JNI employee stock options.

Read the full story on:InternetNews.com