Chris Preimesberger

The proposed $7.4 billion Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which was approved by about two-thirds of Sun’s stockholders July 16 and its full board of directors a few weeks before that, is facing a new legal hurdle as of Aug. 3: a possible antitrust investigation by the European Commission.The Brussels-based EC, which is the antitrust […]

Secure storage appliance maker Barracuda Networks, which has only been producing storage software for several months, has added deduplication to its Barracuda Backup Agent, a lightweight client-side application. Barracuda Networks—which should not be confused with Seagate’s Barracuda line of hard drives—already features block-level, inline deduplication in its Barracuda Backup Service in the cloud. Barracuda claims […]

Following on the heels of big new spinning-disk storage drives released by Western Digital, Toshiba and Seagate, Samsung rejoined the capacity party July 29 with Spinpoint F3, a new product line of high-density disk drives for high-performance computing systems that go up to 1TB in storage space.The F3 operates at 7,200 rpm and has capacities […]

IBM announced July 29 that it has upgraded the feature capabilities for its midrange and SMB storage packages by adding native replication as a disaster recovery option for its ProtecTIER Deduplication appliances.Replication of data has been used for years to enable IT systems to protect data in remote locations. In the past, however, the high […]

There was no hiding the ugly quarterly numbers this past week from storage industry leaders such as EMC, VMware and Symantec. All reported that their profit margins were down substantially, with Symantec’s dropping the most precipitously at 58 percent. The Cupertino, Calif.-based storage and data protection company is doing fine on the consumer side, but […]

Greenpeace activists snuck past Hewlett-Packard security guards July 28 to paint a large “Hazardous Products” sign on the roof of the IT system maker’s main building in Palo Alto, Calif., in a public effort to call out the company for what it sees as a corporate about-face on the use of toxic materials in its […]

Emerson Previews State-of-the-Art, Energy-Efficient Data Center by Chris PreimesbergerPhotos by Mark Berry No Title The started-from-scratch data center is located in the suburbs of St. Louis, Mo. When it opens on July 27, the data center will feature 6,000 square feet of raised floor, with capacity for 12,000—and ultimately 5,000—servers. The facility was designed to […]

It certainly didn’t take long for somebody to roar past Toshiba’s short-lived record of 500GB for the largest available laptop storage capacity, announced on May 14.Western Digital on July 27 introduced two new laptop drives that knocked Toshiba’s Portege R600-ST4203 solid-state laptop out of the No. 1 spot: the WD Scorpio Blue drives, available in […]

The Associated Press, for decades one of the world’s vital news content producers, is developing a new copyright management method that it believes will better protect its news articles, photos and videos from unauthorized use on the Internet.The venerable news cooperative said July 23 that it is now testing a microformat that will include metadata […]

Some international lawyers now might have to start looking for another case to keep them busy.The protracted European Commission-versus-Microsoft antitrust case, a thorn in both parties’ sides since the Clinton administration, may soon be coming to a resolution.The EC confirmed July 24 that the world’s largest software maker, in a good-faith effort to resolve the […]

Storage giant EMC, which had enjoyed double-digit profits for 21 quarters up until this year, reported July 23 that it lost ground in the second quarter of 2009 as its profit fell 43 percent from a year ago.The company’s virtualization subsidiary, VMware, reported a 36 percent drop in profits July 22. However, executives from both […]

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A National Science Foundation grant project developed largely by graduate students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has resulted in Eucalyptus Systems, a three-month-old startup which has produced new open-source cloud infrastructure software that is a key component in Ubuntu 9.04 and its upcoming 9.10 edition. Ubuntu is a popular […]