Enterprise Storage
Brocade Co-Founder Pushes San for the Masses
Believing that the current cost of storage area network (SAN) installations are too high to attract small businesses, Kumar Malavalli, co-founder of storage-switch provider Brocade Communications Systems, has invested in what he calls an “ecosystem” of eight companies that are developing low-cost and high-performance SAN technologies with the avowed goal of “taking SAN to the masses.” The strategy begins with a low-price, high-volume business model targeted at small businesses. Companies in the ecosystem are also working in areas such as security and virtualization. In a SAN environment, virtualization technology pools together arrays from multiple storage vendors operating on different platforms, so that they can be seen from one host as a single storage pool.
Read the full story on: InfoWorld
Cisco Thinks Big for Content Networks
Enterprises and service providers may be able to improve the reliability and performance of storage networks made up of hundreds of data centers with a device introduced Tuesday by Cisco Systems. The Cisco GSS 4480 Global Site Selector can manage a large content network that links many content switches at data centers around the world. Content networks are designed to give users fast and reliable access to files and applications on multiple servers. When distributed across widely dispersed locations, they can improve a companys ability to keep its data services available in the event of a disaster.
Read the full story on: InfoWorld
Personal Storage
Device Demos Terabit Storage
Researchers from Tohoku University, the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science, and Pioneer Corporation in Japan have found a new way to store huge amounts of data after figuring out how to make many tiny, inverted dots in a thin film of metal and determining a method to sense the state of each dot. The dots are as small as 10 nanometers in diameter and store one bit of information each. The researchers prototype storage device packs 1.5 trillion dots per square inch, and so could store 1.5 terabits in one square inch of material, said Yasuo Cho, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Tohoku University in Japan.
Read the full story on: TRN
Storage Business
Quantum Spin-Off Releases Storage System
Snap Appliance, a maker of lower-end storage systems, released its first product since being spun off from tape drive specialist Quantum. The Snap Server 4400 comes with a total capacity of 720GB and reads and writes data faster than previous models, the San Jose, Calif.-based company said Tuesday. The $5,795 system is rack-mountable and 1.75 inches, or “1U,” thick.
Read the full story on: CNET News.com