Storage Web Digest: Dell to Manufacture Its Own SANs and More

Enterprise Storage

Dell to Manufacture Its Own SANs

Dell this week said it will cut the price of storage by manufacturing its own storage area network (SAN) systems for small and medium-sized firms. This is the first time Dell has taken over the manufacturing process. Thomas Lahive, senior analyst at research firm, Enterprise Storage Group, said: "This is a big step for Dell because it manufactures very little of its technology and this is its first big component." According to Lahive, there are huge margins in the storage business and now that EMC is effectively licensing its intellectual property, Dell will benefit greatly from the deal. "Prior to this announcement, Dell was rebranding the EMC solution, but now they will get a much larger proportion of the revenue, even though the products will be based on exactly the same design as before," he said.

Read the full story on: ZDNet UK

Personal Storage

Hitachi Unveils Do-It-All DVD-CD Recorder

Hitachi LG Data Storage this week announced a new optical disc drive that can record on all types of recordable DVD and CD. The GSA-4040B can record to DVD-R and DVD+R discs at 4X speed, DVD-RW discs at 2X, DVD+RW at 2.4X, and DVD-RAM at 3X. It is also capable of recording to CD-R discs at 24X and CD-RW discs at 16X, according to the manufacturer. The drive is designed to be used as an internal drive in desktop PCs, and has an ATAPI connector.

Read the full story on:IDG

Mac OS X Floppy Disk RAID Comes to Light

Mac OS Xs included Disk Utility may be more flexible than you think. One Mac user managed to craft together a RAID system using a series of floppy drives. Apples Disk Utility included with Mac OS X supports software-based RAID, providing a way for users to create RAID Level 0, with data striped to two or more drives, for enhanced performance; or RAID Level 1 disk mirroring, which duplicates data on two or more mechanisms for enhanced reliability. Daniel Blade Olson, manager of sales and marketing at peripheral maker Y-E Data, connected five of his companys 1x USB floppy drives to his iMac, formatted five floppy diskettes, and ran Mac OS Xs Disk Utility. Less than 20 minutes after starting his effort, according to Olsons calculations, hed created a viable floppy-based RAID system with a whopping 3.9MB capacity.

Read the full story on:MacCentral

Storage Business

IBMs Storage Tank Technology to Aid Big-Bang Research

IBM announced this week that it will collaborate with the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, to create the worlds largest data grid to help CERN physicists virtually recreate the first moments of the "Big Bang." IBMs contribution is based on the companys Storage Tank storage visualization and management technology, which will be deployed in its first real-world test to handle the extraordinarily high volumes of data that CERNs new particle collider will produce when it goes online in 2007. Data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be generated in such quantities, that in three years the Storage Tank-based grid will have to manage and process one petabyte (a million gigabytes) of information, said Jai Menon, an IBM Fellow and the co-director of the IBM Storage Systems Institute.

Read the full story on: Techweb