Chris Preimesberger

SAN FRANCISCO — SAP, one of the international masters of the on-site enterprise application and middleware world, and mobile IT are two terms that hadn’t been mentioned in the same sentence too often before April 10. That’s because the German software and database products and services company had a low-visibility public persona when it comes […]

NAND flash memory, the nonvolatile solid-state media that has changed the data storage industry in a profound way, is 25 years old this year and has developed into a strategic IT force that no one could have imagined back in its early days. NAND chips are primarily found in USB keys, solid-state processors, small notebook […]

Whats Driving Identity Management Projects Today? Governance, risk and compliance pressures primarily drive today’s identity management strategies. Failure to control access to sensitive data and applications can impact a company’s brand reputation, stock price and compliance posture. Demand for identity management is also being fueled by the amount of rapid employee change faced by global […]

Cisco Systems and one of its key storage partners, NetApp, said April 11 they are upgrading the FlexPod data center system–a partnership project of the two neighboring companies based on Cisco’s Unified Computing System–to work more efficiently inside smaller data centers. FlexPod, which uses NetApp storage arrays to go with Cisco servers and networking, is […]

A growing number of enterprises are realizing the value of providing a social-networking intranet for their employees so that they can more easily collaborate on–and monitor the progress of–various projects. Seeing a clear market opportunity, virtualization software provider Citrix April 11 acquired Podio, a company that provides exactly that: cloud-based work-collaboration software that runs as […]

1987: Toshiba Launches NAND Flash Toshiba launched NAND flash at the 1987 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco. Flash memory (both NOR and NAND types) was invented by Dr. Fujio Masuoka while working for Toshiba around 1980. According to Toshiba, the name “flash” was suggested by Dr. Masuoka’s colleague, Mr. Sho-ji Ariizumi, because […]

Moving an enterprise to the cloud is all about hybrid approaches. It has to be, because very few companies are willing to ditch their current onsite IT for a complete offload to a subscription system or systems run by someone else. Hewlett-Packard is as aware of these “take-one-bite-at-a-time” corporate initiatives as anybody. On April 10, […]

French storage hardware and software maker LaCie, which specializes in providing equipment for small enterprises, said April 6 that it has released its five-bay RAID server for PC and Macintosh file backup as an optional diskless model. LaCie’s 5big Network 2 machine provides an automated backup package for PC and Mac desktops and laptops; quick […]

Oracle has added an analytics option to the administration of StorageTek, the tape storage franchise it inherited in the Sun Microsystems acquisition. The Redwood City, Calif.-based giant on April 9 announced Oracle’s StorageTek Tape Analytics, which is intelligent, automated monitoring and management software for StorageTek tape libraries. Many StorageTek deployments can number in the thousands […]

The world’s largest Linux software and services provider, Red Hat, got into the storage software business in October 2011 by acquiring a virtual appliance-type file system, Gluster, which enables access to the same data as both an object and as a file. Red Hat wasted no time in producing its first Red Hat Storage Software […]

Google has come a long way since it launched its first Android consumer device, the Nexus One, with HTC back in January 2010, in its first attempt to compete with the Apple iPhone. Well, that one crashed and burned. Verizon veered away and eventually decided to stick with the iPhone and (eventually) other Android phones, […]

The ante has been upped again in the storage capaciousness department. Western Digital‘s HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) division has produced the only 4TB, 7,200 RPM, 3.5-inch enterprise-class hard drive currently available in the storage industry. WD’s Ultrastar 7K4000 drive is designed for 24×7 enterprise applications such as big data analytics, cloud computing, data […]