Enterprise Storage
Serial ATA and Serial Attached SCSI Working Groups Aim for Compatibility
The Serial ATA II (SATA) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) working groups have reached agreement to make their technologies compatible at the system level. The collaboration between the two groups is still forming, but the goal aims to let SAS controllers, host bus adapters and subsystems accept SATA hard disk drives. However, because of price and performance differences, the reverse wont be true. According to executives from both industry groups, the effort will reduce inventory and engineering costs by allowing OEMs to configure systems as they are shipping out the door. SAS systems with SATA support are expected to ship in 2004.
Read the full story on:CMPnetAsia
Personal Storage
Western Digital to Launch 10,000-rpm Desktop Hard Drive
According to a x-bit labs report, Western Digital will announce its first 10,000-rpm hard drive for desktop computers on Tuesday. The new line of drives will offer an 8MB buffer and Serial ATA-150 interface. The drives will feature an MTBF of 1.2 million hours and the company plans to offer 5 year limited warranty. Western Digital was also the first introduce 7200-rpm hard drives with an 8MB buffer to the desktop.
Read the full story on:x-bit labs
Storage Business
IBM Gives Price Break on Storage Bundle
IBM last Friday announced a program under which customers can save money if they lease IBM servers and storage systems at the same time. The program, called “Skip One Payment,” is essentially a discount that lets customers skip the first of 36 monthly leasing payments, IBM said in a statement. The promotion, which applies to most IBM server and storage gear, is effective now and will run through June 30. The program could have another benefit for IBM. By leasing rather than selling equipment, it gets predictable revenue, something most companies are eager to have in the uncertain economy.
Read the full story on:CNET News.com
Peace Before the Storage Storm?
For the most part, 2003 had been a pretty quiet year for the storage industry until last weeks EMC introduction of its new Symmetrix system. As one of the first big announcements of the year, EMC is striking the spark to fuel the storage industry competitive fires for the year ahead. With hopes of beating EMC to the punch, prior to the Symmetrix announcement both IBM and Hitachi Data Systems came out with enhancements to their high-end systems: IBMs Shark and HDS Lightning. The updates were both targeted to dent EMCs position — HDS attacked EMC on the capacity front, while IBM concentrated on openness. And while the vendor battles are heating up, the IETF is also on the verge of ratifying the iSCSI standard after a long, weary, anticipation-filled period of time.
Read the full story on:InfoWorld