Paul Shread

EMC has been lagging competitors such as IBM and Hitachi in block-based storage virtualization, but the company hopes to change that with Invista 2.0. EMC’s SAN virtualization product combines application software and hardware with intelligent switches from Brocade and Cisco to provide “non-disruptive data mobility,” said Rob Emsley, EMC senior director of software product marketing. […]

EMC’s acquisiton of Mozy two months ago put the storage world on notice that the online backup market was maturing. A pair of moves today by IBM and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) confirms the trend. IBM announced that it is acquiring Arsenal Digital Solutions, one of the oldest players in the online backup space, and […]

Xiotech has closed on $40 million in new funding to help it bring to market storage technology acquired from Seagate. The funding round, “in excess of $40 million,” was led by Seagate chairman Steve Luczo, who was elected to Xiotech’s board of directors. Xiotech, a 12-year-old Seagate spin-off, acquired Seagate’s Colorado-based Advanced Storage Architecture (ASA) […]

Hitachi Data Systems and BlueArc are moving their relationship down market with new midrange NAS offerings. BlueArc’s year-old OEM relationship with HDS has been a strong one. According to a recent SEC filing in support of its IPO plans, BlueArc said its sales more than doubled to $32.3 million in the six months ended July […]

HP on Monday took the wraps off its long-awaited storage automation software (see Storage and Data Center Automation Begin to Converge). The new capabilities, a combination of HP’s storage management expertise and technology acquired from Opsware, are part of the new HP Business Service Automation (BSA) portfolio, which combines the company’s data center, client and […]

Storage vendors continue to see as much opportunity in protecting and backing up data as they do in storing it to begin with. IBM, Sepaton and Double-Take rolled out the latest versions of their data protection offerings this week, Sepaton on the hardware side and IBM and Double-Take on the software side. Big Blue rolled […]

Sun Microsystems today debuted its long-awaited ‘Honeycomb’ technology for fixed content archiving. Sun bills the new Sun StorageTek 5800 storage system as “a new category of storage that is optimized for large-scale storage of fixed data.” Sun has pledged to open source all code associated with the project. In addition to features of CAS systems […]

Storage virtualization continues to evolve, with Hitachi Data Systems and 3PAR the latest to push the technology in new directions. Hitachi added another chapter to its virtualization story by extending the thin provisioning feature of its high-end Universal Storage Platform V to externally attached storage systems from other vendors. HDS also added support for SATAdrives […]

Dell made a bold move into the SMB storage market today by coughing up $1.4 billion for iSCSI vendor EqualLogic — a move that could have ramifications for Dell partner EMC. The move comes less than three months after EqualLogic filed for an IPO. EqualLogic has more than doubled sales annually since 2004. Enterprise Strategy […]

HP this week unveiled an appliance designed to help enterprises keep tabs on data encryption keys. The HP StorageWorks Secure Key Manager centralizes key management for encryption devices in enterprises and mid-sized businesses. Having a single point for encryption keys is essential for enterprises that have keys “in 250 different places,” said Patrick Eitenbichler, director […]

EMC continues to move outside its core storage business with another acquisition aimed at broader IT management. EMC today announced that it has acquired privately held Voyence, a provider of network device configuration and change management solutions that automate change, compliance and activation processes. The storage giant is one of a host of vendors working […]

Network Appliance today took the storage industry’s pursuit of small and mid-sized businesses to new lows with a $3,000 storage appliance. NetApp bills the new StoreVault S300 as an “all-in-one storage solution for small and medium businesses” (not to be confused with HP’s All-in-One SMB storage systems). Sajai Krishnan, general manager of NetApp’s StoreVault Division, […]