Paul Shread

Analysts from Gartner and IDC are seeing signs that the data storage market may finally be turning around. Gartner reported that worldwide external controller-based disk storage revenue declined 7.3 percent from a year ago to $3.9 billion in the third quarter. IDC said worldwide external disk storage system factory revenue fell 10 percent to $4.4 […]

EMC (NYSE: EMC) today announced new clustering capabilities for its Centera data archiving systems, and the data storage giant also announced a new search and indexing partner for its Data Domain deduplication systems. The new Centera Virtual Archive lets customers cluster up to four 128-node Centera content addressed storage (CAS) systems into a campus-wide virtual […]

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) posted much stronger than expected quarterly results late yesterday and said it isn’t worried about a new partnership between rival EMC (NYSE: EMC) and Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and VMware (NYSE: VMW). NetApp reported a slight revenue decline from the year-ago quarter to $910 million — but that was nearly $30 million better […]

Two data storage vendors are out with new products this week that they claim can save users a bundle over more traditional storage systems. Nexenta and ParaScale both use open source software and commodity hardware to lower storage costs for enterprises. Nexenta uses Sun’s (NASDAQ: JAVA) ZFS file system and x86 servers to create enterprise-class […]

EMC (NYSE: EMC) and HP (NYSE: HPQ) have their eye on the laptop and desktop protection market with new data storage offerings. EMC has extended its Avamar enterprise data backup and deduplication software to cover laptops and desktops, while HP is rolling out a new offering aimed at protecting data on users’ personal computers. The […]

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced general availability of Exchange Server 2010 this week, and the messaging platform comes with new data storage and protection features. E-mail archiving, e-discovery, regulatory compliance and security figure prominently in the new release, with features such as a Personal Archive, retention policies, legal hold, single-item restore, multi-mailbox search and access control. […]

A couple of Wall Street analysts had good things to say about NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) and Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) this week — and one suggested that NetApp might make a good takeover target for Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and that Brocade might not be up for sale. NetApp will report its quarterly results a week from […]

HP (NYSE: HPQ), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and 3PAR (NYSE: PAR) all have new data storage offerings this week, and a common thread among the three is their readiness for server virtualization environments. HP announced new iSCSI SAN, data deduplication, tape and virtualization offerings. IBM announced new mirroring and space reclamation features for its XIV storage […]

HP (NYSE: HPQ) is rolling out new data storage systems based on Ibrix technology just a few months after acquiring the clustered file system specialist. The new HP StorageWorks X9000 network storage systems come in three models with choices of 1GbE or 10GbE and start as little as $1.50 a gigabyte. HP says the NAS […]

Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) is adding Linux support to its Backup Exec System Recovery solution for small businesses. Backup Exec System Recovery 2010, a data and system backup and recovery solution that offers bare metal restore, automates the backup process of an entire system or individual files and folders and allows for quick restores to the […]

EMC (NYSE: EMC), Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and VMware (NYSE: VMW) officially unveiled their long-awaited data center partnership today, a coalition first reported by Enterprise Storage Forum in August. The three companies have come together as the Virtual Computing Environment coalition — which also works out nicely to be an acronym of the three IT giants […]

A three-year effort to add Sun’s (NASDAQ: JAVA) ZFS file system to Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) Mac OS appears to be dead. A notice appeared late last week on the Mac OS Forge Web site that the ZFS project has been discontinued. A posting on the Open Solaris list suggested that the deal came apart over […]