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Enterprise Storage
SEC Holds Fast on WORM Standard for Securities Firms
In an interpretation of its rules governing the logging and storage of electronic communications such as e-mail, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week clung to the status quo: Broker-dealers must continue to use WORM, technology. The Securities Industry Association (SIA) immediately responded, saying its concerned that the commission neither addressed nor resolved key issues it has been raising for years regarding helping firms manage an explosion in volume of electronic communications. In late February, the SIA sent the SEC a letter asking the agency to remove the technology-specific language from its Rule 17a-4, which governs the retention of electronic records. The trade group said firms should be allowed to pick the storage medium of their choice and put controls and procedures around access and archiving.
Read the full story on:Computerworld
Seagate Preps New Itsy-bitsy Drives
Seagate is developing 2.5-inch form-factor, 10,000-RPM drives that the company said will let enterprise users pack 70 percent more storage into the same amount of space required by todays larger, 3.5-inch drives. The new unit, which Seagate refers to as its Small Form Factor (SFF) drive, will be 2.5 inches long, 15 millimeters high, and 70 millimeters wide. The SFF drive will support SCSI, Fibre Channel, and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interfaces, and will hold either one or two platters. Seagate expects to start shipping the SFF drives to OEMs in early 2004.
Read the full story on:Byte and Switch
Personal Storage
Toshiba Develops 36GB Blue Laser Disc
Toshiba this week will introduce a dual-layer rewritable optical disc with the blue-laser-based Advanced Optical Disc (AOD) format that the company is developing with NEC. The disc is the same size as a CD or DVD and is capable of storing up to 36GB of data. It is one of two rewritable disc types that make up the initial AOD format proposal, the other being a single-sided disc capable of storing 20GB. The AOD format also includes 15GB and 30GB read-only disc types. The AOD format will compete in the market with Sonys Blu-ray, which is also based on blue-laser technology.
Read the full story on:Computerworld
Storage Business
Ciscos Q3 SAN Revenues Near $10 Million
Cisco Systems revenues were down from a year ago, but it continues to show a tidy profit. For its third quarter of fiscal 2003, Cisco earned (pro forma) $1.1 billion, or 15 cents a share on revenues of $4.6 billion. While Ciscos core business may be sliding a little, the companys surge into storage is going well, CEO John Chambers said on a conference call last week. He singled out SANs as one of the most promising new advanced technology segments for the company. In the third quarter, he said, Cisco brought in nearly $10 million in storage revenues. The company expects to double that number sequentially each quarter for the next couple of quarters.
Read the full story on:Byte and Switch