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Enterprise Storage
New Controller May Jump Start iSCSI Market
A new price point—driven by a higher level of chip-level integration—can spur growth in a new market. That may be the case with an iSCSI storage networking device from iReady. Working with National Semiconductor, iReady and National engineers integrated hardware iSCSI acceleration, a full TCP/IP offload engine (TOE), Gigabit Ethernet MAC and PHY functions from National and an IPsec encryption/decryption block. Arun Taneja, a storage analyst who heads The Taneja Group, said the devices $75 price point is the number one change that this controller brings to the market. “It could serve as a kick starter for the iSCSI market,” Taneja said. Taneja said several other storage IC vendors have recently come to market with iSCSI silicon but at higher prices, and usually requiring external Gigabit Ethernet PHY silicon as well.
Read the full story on:EE Times
The Sad State of Storage Security
Storage system security is getting short shrift by everyone from vendors to users, research firm The451 said in a recently released report. The sheer complexity of a SAN, in terms of size and scale, can create topologies and scenarios where faults in the SAN design can trigger the equivalent of denial of service attack. This situation could leave applications unable to access data from sophisticated storage systems that might have multiple core switches, lots of edge switches, and a hundred or more storage servers. And the move to route data over less-expensive IP channels may open up a new can of worms. “Storage is increasingly being exposed to the Internet,” analyst Simon Robinson said. “Such things as iSCSI and other standards offer companies greater efficiencies by linking disparate SAN islands, but theres a potential vulnerability there.”
Read the full story on:InformationWeek
Personal Storage
Disney DVDs to Self-Destruct in 48 Hours
Flexplay Technologies Inc. last week announced that Buena Vista Home Entertainment Division of The Walt Disney Company will use its flexible play DVD technology to make movies available to consumers in test markets beginning this August. The branded EZ-D media will incorporate Flexplays proprietary flexible-play technology into a standard DVD. A Flexplay-enabled DVD is similar to a conventional DVD, except that it has a 48 hour viewing window that begins when the disc is removed from its packaging.
Read the full press release here
Storage Business
Gartner: Flash Memory Market Booming
Removable solid-state storage devices surged in sales during 2002, increasing nearly 73 percent over the year before, according to a report released last week by Gartner. Flash card revenue climbed 66.8 percent to almost $2 billion in 2002, up from $1.2 billion in 2001; but USB-based flash drives rose even more dramatically, posting an increase of 373 percent, rising from sales of just $36.3 million in 2001 to $135.6 million in 2002. “The flash card and USB flash drive market is price-point driven, which means that consumers will buy the maximum number of megabytes of storage that their budget will allow, so the market greatly benefited from the reduced costs associated with the adoption of advanced semiconductor device technology,” semiconductor analyst Joseph Unsworth said.
Read the full story on:Techweb