Paul Shread

StorageMarkets.com is taking an unusual approach to storage marketing. The Web site, brainchild of industry veterans John Ives and Rich Pappas, uses the opinions of storage professionals who join the online community to predict storage market direction. The site had about 225 members before its public launch this week. And while many are senior industry […]

Gear6 hopes to boost NAS performance with a first-of-its-kind centralized storage caching solution. The startup says it is the first to deploy high-capacity, high-performance cache as a scalable shared network resource, allowing data to be accessed and shared by multiple applications and hundreds or thousands of clients. The result is a dramatic acceleration of applications […]

Network Appliance’s latest virtual tape library (VTL) appliances offer compression and high performance, but the company is holding off on adding data de-duplicationuntil it can do so without affecting performance. Virtual tape “needs to be really, really fast to get the backups done,” says Krish Padmanabhan, general manager of NetApp’s heterogeneous data protection business unit. […]

Sun Microsystems was big on partnerships and virtual tape technology at this week’s Sun Forum user conference, but a little short on details. Sun announced plans to take its OEM relationship with FalconStor to the next level through joint development of an enterprise-class virtual tape library (VTL), and also announced a new partner network. Sun […]

QLogic moved further into the InfiniBand space late Tuesday with the acquisition of SilverStorm Technologies. The move is a blow for rival InfiniBand chipmaker Mellanox, which filed for an initial public offering late last week and counted SilverStorm as a top four customer, accounting for about 10 percent of sales. QLogic, long a leader with […]

Mellanox last week became the latest storage company to file plans for an initial public offering with the SEC, bringing the total number of storage companies filing for an IPO this year to five. Two of the five — CommVault and Riverbed — completed their IPOs two weeks ago, becoming the first storage companies to […]

Data protection is a big theme at this week’s Storage Decisions conference in New York, with Microsoft and VMware among the vendors showing off their wares. Microsoft on Wednesday released a public beta of the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) version 2 at the conference. The new version delivers continuous data protection (CDP) […]

Incipient on Wednesday will unveil the fruits of five years of labor and $79 million in venture funding: a storage virtualization platform that the company says is the first to be completely embedded on an industry-standard director-class intelligent Fibre Channel switch. Incipient said its Network Storage Platform (iNSP) software suite has completed beta testing and […]

Data storage has been a healthy market the last few years, holding up even as server sales stalled earlier this year. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Wall Street has suddenly warmed to storage companies again after a two-year drought. CommVault on Friday became the second storage company in two days to go public, following […]

Riverbed Technology made a strong debut on Wall Street Thursday, pricing above its anticipated offer range and then opening even higher than that. All that for a company that remains a long way from profitability. Riverbed plays in the market for wide-area data services (WADS, although Riverbed prefers the acronym WDS), which includes wide-area file […]

Rumors of tape’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Despite lost data tapes and a growing list of disk backup options, tape remains a key part of archiving and disaster recovery strategies (see Why Tape Won’t Die). Just this week, IBM and Sun Microsystems announced plans to make tape more secure with drive-level encryption, and Quantum […]

Storage companies continue to line up for initial public offerings, profitability notwithstanding. Isilon Systems on Sept. 1 became the fourth storage company this year to file for an IPO. Of the four — Isilon, Double-Take, CommVault and Riverbed — only CommVault is clearly profitable. That said, there’s a difference between filing for an IPO and […]