Judy Mottl

One could almost see the saloon doors flapping, feel the dust coming off a dirt road and hear the unsnapping of holsters as IBM unveiled its new storage portfolio strategy yesterday — clearly spoiling for a showdown with EMC. Cue the whistling soundtrack of a Sergio Leone Western. Instead of selling customers standalone hardware, or […]

New research from IBM (NYSE: IBM) claims the vendor’s solid state disk (SSD) storage efforts can outperform the fastest hard disk drive (HDD) storage systems by 250 percent. IBM’s SSD storage research — with assistance from Fusion-io and code-named ‘Project QuickSilver’ — is an “ongoing cross-IBM initiative” for developing integrated information infrastructures, according to a […]

Amazon Web Services has launched its Elastic Block Store (EBS) as part of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment to let users create large volumes that can behave as raw, unformatted hard drives. Pricing for EBS is based on storage provisioned monthly, starting at 10 cents per gigabyte monthly and 10 cents per 1 million […]

Add NetApp to the list of enterprise technology companies who say the current macroeconomic climate isn’t holding them back — a list that suggests the slowdown isn’t hitting the storage space as much as other IT sectors. During its earnings report yesterday, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) said it continues to see increasing revenue in the quarter […]

Given how cheap storage has become, it’s understandable that enterprises are expanding arrays to house growing data. But stocking up on hardware and software to hold more and more information is a costly misstep, according to a Gartner report released yesterday. Compliance regulations and legal concerns are pressuring IT to keep every bit and byte […]

EMC (NYSE: EMC) has once again retooled its Clariion midrange storage systems — but this time with a twist. In addition to bulking up capacity, the CX4 series now includes built-in advanced features such as virtual provisioning, flash drives, improved network connectivity and enhanced disaster-recovery options. While the new series announced today doubles the capacity […]

Three months after it acquired continuous data protection (CDP) startup FilesX, IBM has rebranded the solution as IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) FastBack. CDP, also known as continuous backup, has been growing in importance as a way for companies to better ensure that files are safeguarded. The process automates file backups each time a change […]

Texas Memory Systems (TMS) is debuting a RAM-based solid state disk drive (SSD) for enterprises able to say “price be damned” in exchange for intense performance, fast speed and high storage capacity. Starting at $140,000, the RamSan-440 quadruples current available RAM-SSD capacity and can handle up to 600,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS), according to the […]

Amazon’s S3 service ran into some stormy weather on Sunday when technical glitches knocked the company’s “cloud” storage offline for several hours. The company’s service — also known as “Simple Storage Service” — offers storage hosted “in the cloud,” on Amazon’s servers. But the service went offline for three hours when communication problems among S3’s […]

Aiming to simplify the task of managing Web-based and local storage for small businesses, EMC (NYSE: EMC) has made its Retrospect Express software the connecting link between the vendor’s Mozy online service and its Iomega backup drives. The result is an all-in-one, local and remote protection approach aimed at small to mid-sized businesses (SMB) that […]

This week is shaping up to be one of the busiest in the history of data tapes, with HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Sony (NYSE: SNE) teaming up to create the next generation of Digital Audio Tape (DAT), while Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) fight for the crown of being first with a 1 […]

Sun has launched a new line of cheaper and bulkier open storage boxes for enterprises wanting greater capacity in an easy-to-scale fashion. The J4000 line features three systems ranging from 12 drives to 48 drives that can connect directly to servers running Solaris, Linux or Windows as well as OpenSolaris platforms. Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) also […]