Chris Preimesberger

SANTA CLARA, Calif.–Dell, Opscode and Rackspace on March 9 demonstrated what they described as the first fully automated provisioning of a multinode OpenStack cloud, a new de facto cloud operating system. The demo was staged during an OpenStack gathering at the third annual Cloud Connect conference here at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The demonstration […]

VMware already supplies the world’s most popular virtualization layer for IT systems. Now the company wants to become your handy-dandy cloud computing operations provider.VMware on March 9 launched a new platform, VMware vCenter Operations, which centralizes and automates administrative control of dynamic virtual and cloud environments. The new package provides visibility throughout a private or […]

Gartner’s IT industry research confirmed March 8 what IDC had reported a few days ago: That the data storage hardware industry had a pretty darn good year in 2010. In fact, Gartner went one up and declared 2010 the segment’s highest revenue-producing year ever, the only sector in all of IT to accomplish this in […]

Western Digital, already the world’s No. 1 manufacturer of hard disk drives, is now in the process of creating an even larger HDD-making company with its $4.3 billion acquisition of Hitachi Ltd.’s No. 3-ranked disk drive operation, announced March 7.When all the papers are signed and the financial folks and regulators have duly recorded everything, […]

In a landmark storage industry deal, Western Digital, the world’s No. 1-selling hard disk drive manufacturer, revealed March 7 that it is acquiring competitor Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in a cash and stock transaction valued at approximately $4.3 billion.The breakdown was reported as $3.5 billion in cash and 25 million WD common shares valued at […]

The 4-year-old Green Grid, a consortium of data center-related technology companies, staged its annual tech forum in Santa Clara, Calif., this week. This progressive organization is one of the global leaders in promoting best practices so that data centers disrupt the environment as little as possible. Make no mistake about it. Data centers — especially […]

Hewlett-Packard made a point last Aug. 28 with its bidding battle with Dell to win the hand of utility storage maker 3PAR. The high bid was $2.3 billion, so it was not exactly an investment to shrug off as simple collateral damage. And that point was this: 3PAR is a new-age storage company with the […]

Along with most other businesses, the external disk data storage market was hit by some significant declines during the macroeconomic slowdown of 2008/2009, but 2010 was a year of strong recovery, according to a new factory revenue report released March 4 by IDC. Global disk storage revenue posted year-over-year growth of 16.2 percent, totaling just […]

It was only a matter of time before Google expanded its online storage services. (See my eWEEK colleague Clint Boulton’s news story here.) What? You didn’t know Google already provided storage? Indeed. Well, it’s not like the backup storage Carbonite, EMC Mozy, Box, i365, Dropbox, SugarSync, Asigra or others offer. There is little under the […]

At last, the White House is seeing some actual movement from U.S. federal government agencies on bringing cost- and energy-saving cloud-based services to its legion IT departments. Of course, getting the federal government to move on anything as embedded and as siloed as legacy IT would take even a united Congress a long time to […]

Removable storage device maker Imation decided March 3 to quit licensing its security software and simply buy a key supplier, Encryptx Corp. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Ten of Broomfield, Colo.-based Encryptx’s 11 employees will transfer to Imation, the company said. Encryptx is not to be confused with EncrypTix, Inc., a formerly majority-owned […]

Progressive storage software maker Coraid has taken the entire concept of tiered storage-area networks–with all their controllers, switches, complications and bottlenecks–and has thrown it out the window.In its place, Coraid has simplified and optimized enterprise data storage in a manner akin to the old direct-attached storage (DAS) scheme. But this isn’t your father’s DAS; this […]