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Enterprise Storage
Your Storage Area Networking Needs
Interoperability is the greatest challenge in building SANs, a roundtable of U.S. IT executives has concluded, and theres a demand for vendors that can easily provide interoperability among Unix, NT and mainframes. Most SANs are recent, and implementation has been driven by cost savings. Half of the roundtable of 10 deployed storage virtualization at their company, pointing to improved utilization and reduced costs.
Read the full story on: The Register
Ciscos VSANs: Hype or Innovation?
Cisco Systems is leading off sales pitches for its new MDS 9000-series Fibre Channel switches with a proprietary technology—Virtual SANs—that Cisco claims provides superior scalability and manageability features. A number of independent industry analysts and executives say VSANs are useful, but primarily for very large-scale SANs. Meanwhile, some competing Fibre Channel switch players say VSANs are just marketing hype and dont offer advantages over the traditional zoning techniques used to manage SAN fabrics.
Read the full story on: Byte and Switch
Personal Storage
Report DVD Sales Rise, Recorders to Fuel Growth
The rapid growth in sales of DVD players will continue over the next few years, said research firm In-Stat/MDR Tuesday. DVD player shipments grew by 61 percent in 2002, driven by consumers attraction to the formats improved picture and audio quality as well as smaller discs. The market for DVD players will hit 84 million units in 2006, spurred by the emergence in 2005 of units that can record as well as play DVDs. Shipments of DVD recorders will reach 32 million units in 2006, the study said.
Read the full story on: Yahoo! News
Storage Business
Storage Sees Action in VC Down Year
Venture capital investment fell 60 percent this year, but 2002 was still the fourth-highest investment year in the history of venture funding, according to a report by Ernst & Young and VentureOne. Close to $19 billion has been invested in more than 2,500 VC transactions in the United States, Europe and Israel year-to-date. Unlike the majority of stagnant 2002 IT investments, storage networking startups have seen a fair bit of action. Close to 30 storage companies completed M&A activity this year. For 2003, storage software startups are expected to scoop up the majority of M&A deals, while the flock of next-generation NAS hardware players will string out the pennies to make it through the year.
Read the full story on: Byte and Switch