Paul Shread

Xyratex has reached a tentative agreement with Ario Data Networks to acquire key assets from the RAID and JBOD controller startup. After shedding its RAID and bridge businesses, Ario Data plans to shift its focus to storage systems, a market it entered earlier this year, according to Ario marketing vice president Mark Pollard. UK-based Xyratex […]

For storage vendors, 2006 will be remembered as the year the sector returned to favor on Wall Street. Isilon and Double-Take both successfully completed initial public offerings on Friday, bringing to four the number of storage companies that have gone public this year. Along with Riverbed and CommVault , the storage companies are the first […]

Quantum entered the data de-duplication market this week, using technology picked up in its August acquisition of ADIC. It is the first product implementation of Rocksoft’s de-duplication technology, which ADIC had acquired in March, just a few months before ADIC was itself acquired by Quantum. It is also the first joint Quantum-ADIC product. Quantum’s new […]

Hitachi Data Systems made its long-awaited entry into the high-end NAS market on Monday with a five-year OEM deal with BlueArc. The deal, which also includes a “minority position” in BlueArc, gives HDS “the most advanced file and block system available in the marketplace today,” according to HDS CEO Dave Roberson. The deal is a […]

Onaro took the wraps off the latest version of its flagship storage resource management (SRM) software this week, adding application-centric management, among other features. Onaro, which boasts more than 70 customers and is in its fourth profitable quarter, is expanding beyond its initial change management focus into broader storage services management. SANscreen Foundation 3.5 includes […]

Storage vendors had another strong showing in the third quarter, led by a resurgent EMC. According to IDC, worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenue in the third quarter grew 9.9 percent from a year ago to $4.3 billion, the 14th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. The total disk storage systems market (both external and […]

Backup security continues to be an issue, if a recent advisory from the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is any indication (see Backup Software Under Attack). Jon Oltsik, senior analyst for information security at the Enterprise Strategy Group, said backup security “is improving, albeit slowly. Storage people still don’t realize that a storage […]

Cisco took aim at Fibre Channel switch competitors Monday with a new fabric switch that sells for as low as $5,000. Up until now, Cisco has competed with the soon-to-merge Brocade and McData in the high-end director switch space, but the new MDS 9124 is a serious play for the SMB market, starting at $5,000-$5,500 […]

Top InfiniBand chipmaker Mellanox Technologies unveiled its fourth-generation adapter architecture at Supercomputing 2006 in Tampa, Fla., this week. Mellanox, which supplies silicon to Cisco and Voltaire, among others, took the wraps off ConnectX, which incorporates connectivity to 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabrics in addition to SCSI, iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage protocols. Thanks to […]

Symantec on Tuesday announced plans to move disk-based backup away from legacy tape environments. A new application programming interface (API) called the Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage API, set for release in mid-2007, will allow intelligent disk devices to integrate natively with NetBackup backup and recovery software instead of having to emulate tape in a virtual tape […]

EMC has added archiving capabilities to its Rainfinity file virtualization and management solution, adding support for its Centera content addressed storage (CAS) platform. With the change, version 7.0 of the Rainfinity Global File Virtualization solution “now offers customers a single platform to manage both active and inactive files throughout a file’s lifecycle across heterogeneous environments,” […]

Managing and protecting the explosive growth of corporate data was a common theme at this week’s Storage Networking World, with vendors large and small showcasing their data protection and management solutions. IBM unveiled a number of new offerings, adding to its enterprise line of disk arrays, including a new flexible warranty option, and also unveiling […]