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Enterprise Storage
IBM Lab Stacks Storage Bricks
IBM researchers are prototyping a new storage system that packs hard-drive modules into a dense, Rubiks Cube-like structure. Big Blues Collective Intelligent Bricks project builds 3D stacks out of the eight-inch modules, each containing 12 hard drives and six network connections. By the first quarter of 2003, IBM hopes to have built a three-by-three-by-three-brick prototype with a total of 32 terabytes of storage, said Jai Menon, an IBM fellow and storage research manager at Big Blues Almaden Research Center in California.
Read the full story on: CNET News.com
Signiant Wins EMCs Love
Signiant Inc. has signed up EMC Corp. as its first software OEM—big news for the two-year-old Nortel Networks spinoff, which has been angling for more than a year to broaden its business model beyond its origins as a managed services provider (MSP) and into software licensing. EMC (which is reselling Signiants software as OnCourse) wanted to add heterogeneous file distribution to its NAS offerings and decided Signiant could get it there faster than if it went alone, says Paul Ross, EMC director of storage network marketing. The financial terms of the deal werent disclosed, but EMC says it has an exclusive, three-month license to resell Signiants file-distribution software.
Read the full story on: Byte and Switch,
Personal Storage
Sharp Notebook Doubles as a Hard Drive
Sharp last week unveiled a notebook PC that does double duty as an external hard drive. When the notebook is powered off and placed in its cradle, a desktop computer has direct access to the notebooks internal hard drive via USB 2.0. The new machine joins Sharps MM1-1 series; the basic model packs an 867-MHz Crusoe TM5800 processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 15GB hard drive with a 10.4-inch XGA LCD.
Read the full story on: PCWorld.com
Plextor SCSI 40-12-40 CD-RW Due Early Next Year
Plextor Corp. has announced their PlexWriter 40/12/40S CD-RW drive, which will ship early in 2003 as an internal 5.25-inch half-height drive or as an external drive. It will connect to Macs or Windows systems via an Ultra SCSI (SCSI-3) interface, which delivers a burst transfer rate of up to 20MB per second. The PlexWriter 40/12/40S features 40X CD-Write, 12X CD-Rewrite, and 40X-max CD-Read.
Read the full story on: MacCentral
Storage Business
Storage Boom Ahead: How to Cope
As the amount of information considered “mission-critical” soars to dizzying levels, the problem of maintaining reliable access to data requires more than a diligent backup system and the occasional quota audit. Simply containing the data is not the problem. Network attached storage (NAS) devices are cheap and plentiful, and mostly do exactly what they say on the box. The issue is how to allocate the right mix of speed, robustness and permanence to the gigabytes of information flowing in and out of the company.
Read the full story on: vnunet.com