Chris Preimesberger

Sun Microsystems, which revealed on Nov. 14, 2008, that it planned to reduce its global work force by 5,000 to 6,000 employees-15 to 18 percent-began carrying out that dreadful duty Jan. 22.Sun confirmed that layoff notifications were sent to about 1,300 employees as part of that action. Reductions were made across all levels, including vice […]

Seagate Technology apparently changed its mind Jan. 21 on a firmware fix for its Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive that The Station announced here last Friday. The embattled disk drive maker, which announced 800 layoffs plus the resignation of CEO Bill Watkins on Jan. 12, rescinded the patch after it reportedly caused 500GB versions of the […]

UPDATED: Once again, we’re reminded that data center automation is a key trend for 2009. Los Angeles-based Network Automation, a small but significant maker of software that streamlines and integrates business processes, said Jan. 21 that it is now taking preorders for AutoMate 7, a popular utility that automates hundreds of IT processes with drag-and-drop […]

ProStor Systems named a new president/CEO Jan. 21. He’s Frank Harbist, who joins the Boulder, Colo., company after 21 years at Hewlett-Packard. Harbist’s mission will be to continue to grow ProStor’s RDX removable disk product line. An RDX system is a low-end, tape-replacement data storage package designed to provide small and midsize businesses with easy-to-use […]

WAN provider Riverbed Technology Jan. 20 said it has acquired Mazu Networks, a 7-year-old, privately held company that helps enterprises optimize the performance of global applications by providing detailed network monitoring and reporting services.Mazu will immediately become a business unit of Riverbed. In addition to the acquisition of all of Mazu’s outstanding securities, Riverbed will […]

News organizations, content delivery networks and ISPs reported record streaming video viewership Jan. 20 following the television broadcast and subsequent Webcasting of the inauguration of Sen. Barack Obama as the new president of the United States.CNN.com shattered its old record of 5.3 million live video streams-set on election night, Nov. 4, 2008-before the actual swearing-in […]

Here’s a last-minute news flash Mike Hall at Seagate Technology sent me Jan. 16: “Seagate has isolated a potential firmware issue in certain products, including some Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives and related drive families based on this product platform, manufactured through December 2008. In some circumstances, the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible […]

Storage 2009: Success Will Depend on Efficiency Looking ahead to the new year and economic recession, all indications are that virtualization will help the next 12 months become IT’s year of pursuing efficiency. In data storage, this means finding and utilizing as much disk capacity as possible to make best use of existing hardware and […]

Judging by the reaction of analysts and telecom/networking industry people, the Jan. 14 news that Nortel is filing for protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of the U.S. bankruptcy laws was not much of a surprise.North America’s largest telecom infrastructure and unified communications provider made the court filing in both Canada and the United States […]

By all accounts, 2008 was the year storage virtualization graduated from the University of Testing & Quality Assurance and matriculated into the real world of business production. Industry researchers Forrester, IDC, Gartner, Enterprise Strategy Group and The Yankee Group have all reported that virtual machines — whether used for storage, operating systems, enterprise applications or […]