eWEEK EDITORS

Encryption Questions about the splintering of the popular .zip file compressionformat may soon be resolved by the U.S. Patent Office. Two months into astandards battle between WinZip Computing and PKWare over the way .zipsoftware does strong encryption, PKWare, the company that has openlypublished the .zip specification since it was invented by company founderPhil Katz in […]

Backup appliance specialist StorServer Inc. is expanding its operating system and tape library partnerships to give users a more integrated system, officials said Tuesday. The appliances, also called StorServer, bundle a server, tape library or disk storage, and management software in one chassis. Since launching the family in 1997, there are “several hundred” customers, said […]

Enterprise Storage LTO Format Hits Diamond Status A group of companies backing the Linear Tape-Open format, last week announced that more than 10 million LTO Ultrium format tape cartridges—with a combined capacity of 2,000 petabytes—have shipped worldwide since September 2000. The LTO Ultrium format is bucking the tape storage industry trend as shipments of cartridges […]

SCO Beefs Up Web Services The SCO group, in between lawsuits and other trademark maneuvers, found time to buy Vultus and its WebFace Solution Suite. SCO, which is suing IBM for more than $1 billion, said it had acquired Vultus assets, engineering personnel and technology, which will become a core component of SCOx. SCOx is […]

Clustering Specialist RainFinity Inc. this week will launch RainStorage 2.0, which adds support for Windows, said officials, in San Jose, Calif. Prior versions of the Linux appliance, which is used to limit downtime for NAS (network-attached storage), worked only with Unix-based Network File System. The new version works with Common Internet File System. So, unlike […]

Kevin Gungiah, director of systems administration at Landmark Communications Inc.s The Weather Channel, in Atlanta, manages 22 terabytes of data on a Hitachi Ltd. Lightning 9960 SAN with Brocade Communications Systems Inc. switches. Gungiah said its easier to manage than most storage systems, thanks to standards-based, third-party software. “We evaluated a lot of different vendors. […]

China Calling with Cell-Phone Standard China, the worlds largest market for cell phones, is aggressively developing a homegrown technology that can run the next generation of mobile telephone networks, challenging the traditional dominance of American and European companies. During the 1990s, as China spent $10 billion to build a national mobile telephone network, foreign companies […]

After a decade of criticizing the complexity and high price of storage area networks, Network Appliance Inc. officials finally shipped their own SAN products last fall—and promptly found out that its not so easy. Now, less than a year later, several improvements are being prepared, mostly for the same Fibre Channel market, said Rich Clifton, […]

Read this weeks Spencer column.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is pushing forward with its low-end and midrange systems strategy via an expanded partnership with Tech Data Corp. Tech Data resellers can now sell Suns entire line of entry-level servers, including the two-way LX50 and Sun Fire V60x and V65x systems—either for x86-based Linux applications or, next month, for Solaris—and the SPARC/Solaris-based […]

REDMOND, Wash.—Without calling out its next-generation Windows desktop operating system by name, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates foreshadowed some of the forthcoming advances that the company is promising for its “Longhorn” wave of products. Gates made his remarks during his kick-off keynote at the companys annual Faculty Summit here on Monday. Attending the two-day Summit are […]

This week, more details were released about Steve Wozniaks new venture, Wheels of Zeus (WoZ), which had previously released little more than its former tag line, “Helping everyday people find everyday things.” This has recently been shortened to the simpler yet far less specfic, “Helping people.” WoZ intersects with wireless in several ways. To find […]