Paul Shread

Network Appliance and Dell were the fastest-growing storage vendors in the first quarter, according to IDC, posting year-over-year external storage revenue growth of nearly 30 percent each. EMC, the third-fastest grower among the top vendors at 12.2 percent, continued to expand its lead in the external storage market, increasing its market share from 20.4 percent […]

Cisco continued to steal market share from its storage switch rivals in the first quarter, but high-end switch leader McData showed signs of stabilizing, according to a new report from the Dell’Oro Group. The storage area network (SAN) Fibre Channel market grew 10 percent year-over-year in the quarter, and port shipments grew 38 percent, “indicating […]

Cisco Systems moved further into the WAN optimization/wide-area file services (WAFS) space Thursday with the $70 million acquisition of FineGround. Five-year-old FineGround is an application optimization specialist that just waded into WAFS last month with its Velocity-FS appliance. It’s Cisco’s second big move in the WAFS space, following the acquisition of Actona last year. The […]

BlueArc has unveiled new management software for its high-end unified storage system that offers a range of features from virtualization and information lifecycle management (ILM) to remote mirroring and compliance. The new features include virtualization, data migration, iSCSI and WORM (write once, read many) support, and remote volume mirroring. At $100,000 for a basic Titan […]

HP unveiled a program today aimed at helping small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) safeguard their data from security and disaster threats. The HP Business Protection portfolio offers business continuity for SMBs through security, data protection and availability features. To stress the importance of continuity and disaster preparedness, HP cited a recent University of Texas study […]

3PAR has unveiled software that lets users implement tiered storage more easily. 3PAR Dynamic Optimization lets users change RAID protection level, resource utilization, disk type and even location on the disk in a matter of seconds to meet peak demand and practice information lifecycle management (ILM). Pricing for Dynamic Optimization starts at less than $10,000. […]

The long-awaited replacement for parallel SCSI technology will begin to appear on the storage market in the next few months, with the introduction of serial attached SCSI (SAS) servers and storage systems. The SCSI Trade Association (STA) held an interoperability “plugfest” at UNH-IOL last month attended by about 20 vendors. With “system builds” of more […]

McData on Monday outlined plans for its merger with CNT, including dispensing with CNT’s director-class UMD switch in favor of McData’s Intrepid i10K. “UMD is a very innovative product, and the engineering team did an outstanding job,” McData CEO John Kelley said on a conference call. “We expect the Intrepid product will become more dynamic […]

Starting at the top leaves you no place to go but down, but that just might be what intelligent storage pioneer MaXXan Systems hoped to accomplish. MaXXan this week took the wraps off its MXV250 intelligent SAN switch for midrange IT environments, a scaled-down version of the start-up’s high-end MXV500 that sells for about a […]

In a move that could fuel efforts to change data storage practices, records management giant Iron Mountain has admitted losing a customer’s backup tapes and is recommending that customers begin encrypting tapes. “Iron Mountain performs upwards of five million pickups and deliveries of backup tapes each year, with greater than 99.999% reliability,” the company said […]

For the second time this year, a high-profile financial company has lost a backup tape containing customer data while shipping the tape to an off-site storage facility. Brokerage company Ameritrade has begun warning about 200,000 current and former customers about the loss of a backup tape containing their personal information, officials said this week. The […]

The end-to-end storage technology that could replace decades-old block and SCSI technologies made its debut at the Storage Networking World conference this week. Seagate, Emulex and IBM have teamed up on a joint technology demonstration of Object-Based Storage Devices (OSD) (see A Storage Framework for the Future). Object-Based Storage is an extension of the current […]