Chris Preimesberger

As if we don’t already have enough distractions, Google has to go and make permanent its 30th anniversary tribute to the old chestnut, Pac-Man, by creating its own Web site. Last Friday, as millions of the world’s computer-tethered workers were finishing a week’s labors and looking forward to the weekend, Google published a mini version […]

A couple of I/O-focused storage companies have teamed up to set a new IOPS world record. NextIO, a provider of I/O acceleration appliances for storage systems, and Fusion-io, which makes flash-based solid-state (ioMemory) memory cards, announced May 24 that they have broken the land speed record for IOPS performance in a single rack-mount flash array. […]

IT markets seem to be getting more splintered all the time. AT&T on May 24 started operating a cloud-based backup service specifically for mobile devices used by small and midsize businesses.Using the AT&T Tech Support 360 Backup and Go service, employees who work remotely won’t have to worry about losing documents, said Ebrahim Keshavarz, vice […]

Seagate pulled no punches on May 24, introducing a spinning-disk/solid-state hybrid drive that it boldly described as the “world’s fastest drive for laptops.”The Momentus XT, which can hold up to 500GB of capacity in a 7200-rpm package, will become available for the first time as an upgrade in Asus laptops. The OEM pricing is notable, […]

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Clearwell Systems is one of the market leaders in the burgeoning e-discovery software business. There are many aspects to this kind of specialized search which can take legal folks through mountains of stored data, including email, photos, video, financial documents, human-resource records, health records, sales and marketing documents and many others. Text […]

Google on May 20 launched a new cloud storage service specifically for software developers that will provide another option alongside several similar online services, including Amazon’s well-established Simple Storage Service, or S3.The announcement was made at the Google I/O 2010 developers’ conference at Moscone West in San Francisco.Amazon might have anticipated this new competition, announcing […]

10 Things Businesses Should Know About Cloud Payment Systems by Chris Preimesberger Consolidate Payment Vendors Each vendor relationship costs time and money. It’s usually more cost-effective and efficient to use a full-service payments provider who can process all payments (credit cards, debit cards, ACH [Automated Clearing House payments], check services and gift/loyalty cards), and using […]

Seagate isn’t broadcasting it yet, but the world’s largest disk drive-making company is moving ever closer to demonstrating the world’s first 3TB hard drive for laptops and desktops. Easier engineered than done, apparently. Seagate product manager Barbara Craig told tech blog Gearlog a few days ago that the drive might be ready by the end […]

Hitachi Data Systems said May 18 that it is shipping a new version of its data center monitoring software for midsize IT environments, which-thanks largely to widespread use of virtualization-are getting as complicated as large enterprise systems.Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer 2.0 is an all-in-one performance monitor that continually checks the availability of all servers, routers, […]

Rebit, which has created a foothold in the desktop disk backup business by building single-purpose plug-and-play machines that even a computer novice can use, is now expanding into the network-attached storage (NAS) space for small-office and single users.The Longmont, Colo.-based storage hardware and software maker on May 19 unveiled NetSmart, fully automatic storageware that continuously […]

Amazon Web Services, perhaps feeling pressure from a spate of competing services from conventional storage companies as well as startups, came out May 19 with what amounts to a price cut option for its Simple Storage Service cloud backup service.Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage is designed to store noncritical, reproducible data and files at lower […]

iSuppli, the smart Southern California-based IT analyst, tells us that the market landscape in NAND flash arena is changing. Toshiba, which invented NAND flash in the 1970s but was overtaken by Samsung as the world’s leading producer in recent years, recorded the strongest performance among the top NAND flash suppliers in Q1 2010. The Japanese […]