Maxell Ships One Millionth Super DLTtape Cartridge storage news 2002, September week 2a

click here for

storage testers amalyzers

Disk to disk backup
Solid state disks
hard disks

Storage news - 2002, September week 2a

Megabyte loved reading news stories
about the storage market

CHATSWORTH, Calif. - September 10, 2002 - JMR Electronics today introduced the FORTRA® Desktop 6-Bay, a powerful, compact Fibre Channel storage solution that brings departmental-level storage features to smaller, cost-conscious organizations. Measuring just 11 inches by 7 inches by 12 inches, the Desktop 6-Bay is the smallest form factor large capacity, high-performance 2GB Fibre Channel solution on the market.

This 6-drive, 2GB Fibre Channel device offers an easy, cost-effective way to increase storage capacity and deliver an enterprise-strength storage solution to the desktop, a workgroup or department. With its small footprint, the 6-bay tower can provide up to 876GB of Fibre Channel storage in environments where space is at a premium. By adding more FORTRA enclosures, the Desktop 6-Bay can be easily scaled as storage needs grow. The FORTRA Desktop 6-Bay is optimized for image-intensive, high-bandwidth digital media environments, including post-production, HDTV, visual simulation, animation, broadcast, image databases, medical imaging and Internet/Intranet applications. This affordable device is also an attractive solution for small or home offices with massive photo, music or video files.

"The Desktop 6-Bay is a significant addition to our FORTRA product line and solves one of the most pressing problems facing IT managers how to pack more high-performance storage resources in little space," said Josef Rabinovitz, JMR President and CEO. "With its enterprise-level features and performance, at an affordable price, it can greatly enhance the storage capabilities of even the smallest organizations."

The FORTRA Desktop 6-Bay is available now through reseller channels, and has a MSRP of $1,998. ...JMR Electronics profile

September 10, 2002 - ACSL, publisher of STORAGEsearch.com is pleased to announce that Janet Downes has recently joined the advertising team as Business Development Manager. Janet will initially focus on emerging markets such as iSCSI, InfiniBand and Serial ATA.

Other news on this page

JMR Introduces New Fibre Channel Storage Solution

New Business Development Manager at STORAGEsearch.com

Tabnerus Announces U320 Test Software

M-Systems' Disti in Australia

LSI first with Serial ATA 1.0 ASIC

Scali Moves to InfiniBand

Silicon Image's SATALink Inside Intel's Desktop

Maxell Ships One Millionth Super DLTtape Cartridge

QLogic Introduces SATA Enclosure Management Controller

CNT Expands Business Continuity Consulting Practice

E4600 Gets Faster

Seagate, Intel and Silicon Image Unveil New Serial ATA II

Fujitsu Siemens Computers and ADIC in the Library

Sony Drives Record Popular DVD Formats

earlier news (archive)

Megabyte the Mouse
is 4 years old

By a strange coincidence, Megabyte's birthday was exactly the same as that of a well known enterprise storage portal.

Thoughts about Public and Private Days of Remembrance

September 11, 2002 - I knew I would find it difficult to write about this anniversary. The horror of that day a year ago still seems too vivid and fresh.

President Bush yesterday made a good speech at the Afghanistan embassy. During questions afterwards in a light moment he brushed aside reporters' attempts to ask him about his policy on Iraq, saying they would have to wait until his speech to the UN on Thursday, And he reminded us then what it was all about.

Tomorrow (September 11) will be a terrible day for many Americans - he said. Well, "tomorrow" is now today, and I guess he's right.

For all of us, the memory of that day September 11, 2001 will remain with us till the end of our days. How we first learned what had happened. The disbelief and the horror. I was lucky. I did not lose loved ones or friends. I know that many of you did. There is nothing that anyone can say to ease that pain. That loss has been a living nightmare for 365 days. The pain will not go away tomorrow, or next week when the rest of the world goes back to thinking about something else.

How long will the world remember?

At first my mind goes back to another tragedy in the last century - the Titanic. That was a disaster partly caused by the elements and partly by folly. That was 1912, 90 years ago. But September 11 was much worse than that. Your grandchildren may remember you as being really old, because you can remember where you were on that day. But the memory will live on much longer than that.

Christians still commemorate Good Friday, nearly 2000 years later. To those handful of people there at the time when their spiritual leader and guide Jesus was being executed it must have seemed that the world was coming to an end. For the christian faith, as we now know, it was only just a beginning. Jews still commemorate Passover, which celebrates the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt during the reign of the Pharaoh Ramses II, over 3,000 years ago.

As America and her friends mourn today, this first anniversary makes us strong. It keeps alive the memory of the loved ones and friends who died. Those who have suffered loss may feel some comfort from knowing that they are not alone.

September 11, is an unusual anniversary in another way, because in our society we are better at remembering happy things like birthdays or holidays like Thanksgiving.. This day, 9/11, helps us remember that at the end of life there is death. Those private anniversaries are different for us all, and on those lonely days we see the rest of the world go by and they do not see our sorrow.

October 22, 1999 - I get a phone call about 1 a.m. to say my young brother Charles has died. I can't believe it. We were only talking on the phone a few hours ago it seems. He was packing his case for a weekend vacation in Boston. We spoke on the phone several times that day, as we did every day. he was looking forward to making a lot of changes in his life when he got back, including working with me. He had tried it for a short time and enjoyed it. We were both looking forward to it. But he didn't know he was ill. He died of a sudden massive heart attack.

For the next few months, like an idiot I comfort his friends and other members of our family and reassure them how happy he was in his last days. It's true. But while I try to cheer everyone else up with this thought I put off the process of my own grieving. It hits me very hard about 6 months later. There is something in my life which is gone forever, and nothing fills that gap. My wife and friends try to help, but I am in deep depression. I'm seeing my doctor for a health check up. My physical health is fine. But my emotional state is a mess. Prozac helps. It helps a lot. If I could worry now, I would worried that a little white pill can make so much difference. After a few months I can operate as a human being taking less pills and, then it seems safe to stop taking them.

August 4, 2002 - my young sister, Anna, has learned the results of her biopsy. Because she has had no symptoms apart from a few minutes loss of her speech, we were worrying more about the biopsy than what it might signify. An MRI scan a few weeks earlier had shown a small lump in her brain. The doctors said they didn't know what it was. Could be, she had had a small stroke without realising it at the time...

"You've got a glioblastoma multiforme type 4," the surgeon said. "It's bad, very bad. It's the most aggressive type of cancer, and because of where it is we can't operate. You'll see an oncologist in about 5 days and they will tell you more about it." Anna is stunned. Her husband Mark asks the question that you should ask when you have been told this kind of thing. "How long? Six months? A year?" The surgeon shakes his head. "I can't say, maybe three months." He goes away. A few minutes later a nurse comes along. My sister has made an excellent recovery from the operation, and they ask if she would mind going home that afternoon. They need the bed.

Our world has turned upside down. Anna says to me "You're the one who spends all his time on the web and is good at searching for things. Find out what a glioblastoma is. Find out if there any treatments. Find out if there are any survivors."

During the next few days and weeks I learn more than I ever wanted to know about this terrible thing. The web sites I visit now are not just computer sites, but a new world which I didn't know was out there:- Virtualtrials.com to find out about research in this area, Quackwatch to get a counter view on so called "natural" remedies. But the best one is Young Adults Surviving Glioblastoma. When I read out some of the personal stories from that site we both cry, but she is pleased to learn that some people do survive this thing. The long term survival rate for a GBM type 4 , as we learn, is about 1%, and "long term" means anything over a year.

We're learning a lot from the web. As well as increasing our vocabulary which now includes new words like Temozolomide, Melatonin, Tamoxifen and PSK, we're also learning the difference between Phase I and Phase II FDA trials. Some researchers are keen to get my sister into a trial. The reason? It's a rare condition. Less than 15 people per million population will get a GBM type 4. Researchers find it difficult to russle up enough people to take part in a trial. We look at the data and decide against it. The problem with being in a trial is that the sponsoring doctor will not tell you about any better treatments which may be available. Mixing drug treatments invalidates their results.

Later we learn that some people with GBM type 4 have survived for years confounding the medical profession. One of them has written a book which is due to be published in the middle of August. I preorder it on Amazon and have it sent directly to Anna. She can still read, but her speech is slurring and she can't say some words. Also she can't write any more. That part of her brain is affected by pressure from the tumor.

August 31, 2002 - "You must read this book" Anna says excitedly on the phone . "It arrived in the post this morning at 7 o'clock and I've nearly finished it. The author had the same lump as me, and he survived. Buy your own copy though, I need to keep this for myself." The book, Surviving Terminal Cancer by Ben Williams, does indeed give hope.

He believes that oncologists are not sufficiently up to date with the data about treatments in this field, and will typically prescribe a limited range of treatments, even though they know that they will not work. His theory, which he practised on himself, is that patients can increase their chances of survival by finding out more and using supplementary treatments. He advocates using a cocktail approach for chemotherapy, to avoid the growback of resistant strains of tumor, and just as important says that some pills and potions and foods can help boost the imune system. The problem is that some vitamins which are good at preventing the onset of cancer actually interfere with the operation of the chemo, and diulte the effect. So you have to be sure not to take those vitamins on the days that you're taking the chemo. Also many health supplement and drugs companies make a living out of selling things which provide false hope. Trying to decide which may work and which don't needs careful evaluation of research data.

September 1, 2002 - Anna lost her speech today and had a series of fits. An ambulance takes her to hospital. Because they know she has a tumor they do a new MRI scan. It shows bleeding in the brain. She may die tonight. It's a long night.

September 2, 2002 - I still have a sister. She is alive but can't talk. This is what she feared most.

September 3, 2002 - The lady in the adjacent bed died today of MRSA, the hospital killer bug. This will be a day her family remembers.

September 5, 2002 - Great news. Anna can talk again, although it's very slurred. Her thinking is still sharp and focused. She is pleased to learn that some of my customers in the US are praying for her. She reminds me what she wants me to do with the children, if she and her husband Mark both die. Mark tells her not be so ghoulish. We should cheer up because tomorrow they may be letting her go back home. I return to my car. The drive to the hospital in Brighton was 110 miles, but they are rebuilding their car park. When I arrived the waiting time to get into the car park was estimated to be 90 minutes. I can't wait that long, because Anna is seeing the doctors in a few hours to be fitted up for a radiotherapy mask. So I drive around and discover that every street in the area is parked solid, and signs warn you that your car will be towed away if you park in an unapproved place. So I eventually park down by the beach half a mile or so away and walk. It's a beautiful summer day, and sailing yachts are skimming across the water. It's hard to believe that this is the same world as inside the hospital.

September 10, 2002 - My niece Laura (age 5) was playing this morning with a new friend. We discovered a few days ago that her father has a friend who was diagnosed with a GBM type 4 about a week ago. Anna thinks that's a spooky coincidence. Anna and the other little girl will both start their first day of school next Monday (Sept 16). The school thought it was a good idea that new children should know someone when they start their first day. I remember my own first day of school over 40 years ago, and I'm sure you do too. It's a lifechanging time. Laura will remember hers too, but for another reason. The oncologist has said that because Anna's imune system is weak from the chemo, she should avoid contact with groups of people who may be ill. She shouldn't go to the school gate on Laura's first day. My sister is a fighter and is determined to make sure that Laura is not remembered as that girl in the class whose mummy died.

September 11, 2002 - we remember today the thousands of people who were murdered in America a year ago. Our thoughts go out to their families and friends, and all the millions who have been touched by those events. That memory will not fade.

Sun SPARC History

Editor Zsolt Kerekes said "When the industry went into recession last year our ad revenue slowed down to double digit growth rates, but meanwhile our readership more than doubled. As the storage market truly comes out of recession we're now planning again for the kind of business growth rates we had during the peak of the dotcom boom. Janet is a very experienced marketer and will help new customers understand the potential benefits of making themselves better known to what we believe is the most important segment in this market - You, the readers of STORAGEsearch.com."

Janet Downes has a degree in Electronic Enginering and an MBA. She is also a Member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Member of the Institute of Directors and a Chartered Marketer. Janet's corporate career included more than ten years at Intel Corp, where she became European marketing manager. She has also worked as an international marketing manager in Computervision and Crosfield Electronics. In running her own business, Downes Strategic Marketing, for the past five years, Janet has trained thousands of European marketers, in various aspects of strategic marketing and CRM, including companies such as Hewlett Packard, Siemens, StorageTek, Software AG and Lucent. Janet will continue her training business alongside her new role at STORAGEsearch.com.

If you have questions about how the mouse site can help your business, please send an email to Janet@STORAGEsearch.com, including the size of your advertising budget, timescale and what you are trying to achieve.

DENVER, CO - September 9, 2002 - Tabnerus, LLC announces their new Orion Software Developer's Kit (SDK), to be released October 1, 2002. This is the Mass Storage Industry's First and Only U320 SCSI Protocol test suite of software and SDK. The Orion SDK combines thousands of man hours of development and testing into the first commercially available software development package that accomplishes the robustness and feature set depth of a proprietary hardware tester along with the availability and economics of using industry standard HBA's .

This is truly a breakthrough of epic proportions for those who are designing these high speed storage peripherals. Finally, there is a full-featured, affordable software test solution available immediately instead of having to wait up to a year for the proprietary hardware manufacturers to catch up. The Orion SDK is fully WinTel compatible and can be compiled into any C++, Delphi, Visual Basic, etc. application.

"We've always been the market leader in storage test software on engineering and field service levels," said Marissa Ponikvar, President. "With the release of the Orion software developer's kit, Tabernus is now further securing our place in the hard disk drive manufacturing community by staying ahead of the technology curve." ...Tabernus profile

KFAR SABA, Israel and ADELAIDE, Australia - September 9, 2002 - M-Systems and Mayer Krieg Embedded Computing, a leading hardware and software vendor for embedded applications and a division of Hagemeyer Asia Pacific Electronics, have entered into an agreement to expand the distribution of M-Systems' solid-state IDE and SCSI Fast Flash Disk (FFD) products throughout Australia and New Zealand. The distribution agreement opens up a market for defense, telecommunications and industrial customers throughout Australia and New Zealand who require mission-critical storage with top reliability and ruggedness.

"M-Systems' flash disks complete our product offering to our customers," said Walter Breunig, marketing manager for Mayer Krieg. "Now we can offer COTS rugged storage solutions to our customers throughout Australia and New Zealand."

"Mayer Krieg Embedded Computing is a strategic partner for promoting M-Systems' FFD products. They have a strong sales force with many years of experience in selling to the defense, telecommunications and industrial market segments," said Ofer Tsur, marketing manager for M-Systems' Solid-State Disk products. "Customers in Australia and New Zealand looking for reliable data storage now have access to M-Systems' solid-state disk products through one of the best distribution companies in the world." ...Mayer Krieg & Co., ...M-Systems profile

See also:- Sun SPARC® Resellers in Australia

MILPITAS, Calif. - September 9, 2002 - At the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) today, LSI Logic Corporation announced it is the first semiconductor company to offer an ASIC implementation of the Serial ATA 1.0 high-speed interface technology with the introduction of two new cores. Both the LSI Logic Serial ATA 1.0 Link & Transport core and the 1.5Gbs Serial ATA 1.0 Physical Layer (PHY) core are now available to customers for easy integration into an ASIC.

Processed in the LSI Logic Gflx™ 0.11-micron technology, these fundamental building blocks can be used along with the company's extensive CoreWare® library of robust intellectual property (IP). The LSI Logic Serial ATA Link & Transport and PHY technologies comply with the Serial ATA 1.0 specification approved by the Serial ATA Working Group in mid-August 2001.

LSI Logic Link & Transport technology is available as a "synthesizeable," Register Transfer Level (RTL) core and was demonstrated in Seagate's Serial ATA hard disk drive technology at IDF in Spring 2002. The 1.5 Gbs Serial ATA PHY, also demonstrated at IDF Spring 2002, uses the widely adopted LSI Logic GigaBlaze® serial transceiver core, which also supports Fibre Channel, Serial Attached SCSI, Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express and InfiniBand transceiver standards. Both technologies are available for integration into device-side and host-side ASIC solutions, eliminating the need for and cost of additional devices to bridge to Serial ATA from legacy interfaces.

"More than ever, storage customers are challenged with developing products that support a broad range of storage interfaces under increased time-to-market pressures. LSI Logic recognizes these challenges and, through its investments in high speed interface technologies, has become a world leader in this field," said David Jones, vice president and general manager of the LSI Logic Storage and Computing ASIC Division. "Our customers will be able to reduce their time-to-market using our proven Serial ATA IP offerings, while also benefiting from the reduced investment necessary to support Serial ATA in their peripheral or host products." ...LSI Logic profile

IDF, San Jose - September 9, 2002 - Scali is announcing plans for making the ScaMPI MPI library available for the InfiniBand interconnect technology. The implementation will use an intermediate layer conforming to the DAT standard for enabling plug-and-play operation across different interconnects for high performance clustering. The DAT implementation will also enable ScaMPI to run over standard TCP/IP based socket layers on top of legacy interconnects. ISVs will be able to distribute one binary of their application independent of the physical interconnect and reduce their costs for qualification, test, maintenance and support.

ScaMPI is Scali´s high performance MPI implementation for Linux clusters. Unlike most other MPI implementations ScaMPI is thread-safe and thread-hot. This enables any mixture of message passing (using MPI) and shared memory programming (using OpenMP, POSIX threads, or other) inside an SMP machine. The communication between the machines is highly optimized by means of ScaMPI's specially designed collective operations, yielding a magnitude better performance compared to other legacy implementations. ScaMPI has built-in timing and communication trace facilities enabled at runtime by setting a single environment variable making it very user-friendly and versatile for software developers.

The availability of a professionally supported high performance MPI for InfiniBand implementations will enable system integrators to provide clusters with a unified high performance interconnect covering everything from high-speed I/O for storage solutions to parallel processing of compute intensive applications in one and the same system. This will greatly enhance total I/O throughput and storage capacity keeping the favorable cost structure of standard high volume servers based on Intel architectures.

Scali´s software development for the InfiniBand architecture is done in close cooperation with Intel. Intel is a minority shareholder in Scali through participation in an equity placement closed in June 2002.

"MPI support for InfiniBand architecture is critical for HPC deployments." Said Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing for Intel's Enterprise Platform Group. "We're pleased to work with Scali in their delivery of MPI library support development." ...Scali profile

INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM - September 9, 2002 - Silicon Image, Inc. today announced that its SATALink™ SiI™ 3112™ PCI-to-Serial ATA host controller is featured on an upcoming Intel desktop board. This production win cements Silicon Image's leadership role in Serial ATA, which according to Gartner will represent 94.3% of total desktop and mobile PC hard disk shipments by 2005. Serial ATA will be one of the leading features offered on Intel's next-generation enthusiast desktop board, which will begin mass production next month .

"With the availability of Intel's desktop board featuring Serial ATA and Serial ATA hard disk drives from leading manufacturers, all the necessary components are in place for the industry to transition en masse to Serial ATA," said Joel Christensen, marketing director of Intel's Desktop Platform Solutions Division. "As the supplier of the fully integrated SATA host controller, Silicon Image has played a key role in bringing our first Serial ATA desktop board to production quickly and cost-effectively." ...Silicon Image profile

FAIR LAWN, NJ - September 9, 2002 Maxell Corporation of America today announced the delivery of its one-millionth Super DLTtape cartridge into the North American market, less than two years after Quantum first started customer drive shipments of this next-generation tape technology. Maxell co-developed the Super DLTtape technology platform with Quantum Corp., and is now the first to reach shipments of one million cartridges in North America.

"Maxell is very pleased to achieve this milestone in the history of Super DLTtape technology, and we are excited by continued strong sales performance of this format," said Peter Brinkman, Maxell's vice president of marketing. "The strong demand for Super DLTtape media has been bolstered by Quantum's recent introduction of the SDLT320 drive, providing customers with an extra 100 gigabytes per cartridge to meet growing storage demands of SAN and NAS environments, as well as data-intensive digital media and Internet-based applications."...Maxell profile, ...Quantum profile

INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM, SAN JOSE, Calif. - September 9, 2002 - QLogic Corporation today introduced a new enclosure management controller for the rapidly emerging Serial ATA storage market. The GEM424 enclosure management controller provides environmental monitoring as well as configuration, status and control of hot-swap drive bays – all on a single chip. The market for low-cost Serial ATA disk drives is expected to grow dramatically in the next few years. According to a recent forecast by Gartner, shipments of Serial ATA drives will grow from 8.9 million units in 2002 to over 360 million units in 2005.

"The GEM424 enables OEMs to use low-cost Serial ATA to deliver systems with levels of availability and manageability found today only in systems with SCSI or Fibre Channel drives," said David Race, vice president and general manager of the QLogic Management Products Group. ...QLogic profile

MINNEAPOLIS, MN - September 09, 2002 - CNT announced today that it has expanded its Business Continuity Consulting Practice to include Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and data availability assessments. These offerings add to CNT's broad consulting and professional services capabilities, which include enterprise backup assessments, solution design, integration and implementation, and life cycle maintenance services.

CNT helps customers determine the value of their information assets and the cost associated with data loss or downtime, establish their recovery point and recovery time objectives and then map those business objectives to the right technology solution. CNT uses its experience in multi-vendor storage integration to develop solutions that speed deployment of critical applications, leverage and consolidate existing resources and architecture, and provide a faster return on customers' investments. The result for customers is a customized business continuity solution, tailored to their unique business requirements and designed to provide optimum efficiency and flexibility.

"Our customers often struggle with how to take the first step in approaching business continuity," according to John Verdonik, CNT director of professional services. "Our new consulting offerings help clients take that elusive first step in creating a clear relationship between revenue generating business processes and IT infrastructure. As a result, the enterprise can better design and justify the appropriate level of recoverability to support the business." ...CNT profile

Editor's comments:- who would have believed when we started the mouse site back in 1998, that storage would ever get so complicated?

See also:- SAN training

Milpitas, Calif. - September 9, 2002 - LSI Logic Storage Systems, Inc. today announced the general availability of a new 2 gigabit per second Fibre Channel drive module that will enable storage systems that use the company's 4884 controller to deliver increased IOPS performance for transaction-based applications.

"The true measure of a storage system's performance is its ability to deliver data to and from media quickly and efficiently," said Steve Gardner, manager, product marketing, LSI Logic Storage Systems. "With a performance improvement of up to 30% in 4884 controller-based storage systems such as our E4600, the new 2 Gb drive module delivers even higher performance results than when the E4600 was named the leader in the Storage Performance Council's May benchmark test results."

The new 2 Gb drive module features redundant, dual-active drive loops to access the dual-ported Fibre Channel drives ensuring maximum performance and complete accessibility to all drives in the event of a loop or cable failure. All the primary components in each drive module are customer replaceable and hot-swappable. The 2 Gb drive module enables 4884 controller-based storage to linearly scale IOPS performance, taking full advantage of the maximum 224 drives that the controller supports. Full 2 Gb/s 4884 controller-based storage now delivers 41,000 sustained IOPS from media and 110,000 burst IOPS from cache. ...LSI Logic Storage Systems profile

SAN JOSE, Calif. - September 09, 2002 - Seagate, Intel andSilicon Image today at the Intel Developer Forum demonstrated new Serial ATA II interface capabilities that are defined by the upcoming Serial ATA II specification. Among other breakthroughs, the working system showcased today implements Native Command Queuing which enables a hard drive to take multiple requests for data from the processor and rearrange the order of those requests to maximize throughput. Serial ATA II hard drives will be able to queue and execute requests without any assistance from a system's CPU or motherboard chipset.

"Seagate's work to develop new technologies like Serial ATA gives our customers greater opportunities to create new products in the PC and entry-server markets, with new features and new levels of performance," said Darci Arnold, Seagate vice president, Global Marketing. "Our R&D leadership and our work with technology leaders like Intel and Silicon Image continues to enable breakthrough advances for our customers."

Parviz Khodi, Silicon Image vice president of marketing, stated, "Our collaboration with Seagate and Intel made this important demonstration possible. Only integrated Serial ATA drive and host solutions have the features necessary to perform native command queuing, which is critical to Serial ATA II functionality. We designed the SiI 3112 host controller with enhanced capabilities beyond the requirements of the Serial ATA 1.0 specification, enabling the implementation and demonstration of next-generation Serial ATA II command queuing capability today. As the first and only production-ready, fully integrated Serial ATA host controller, our SATALink SiI 3112 is a key enabler in the industry's transition to Serial ATA and a testament to our leadership in implementing Serial ATA technology."

Serial ATA is an evolutionary replacement of the Parallel ATA physical storage interface in the desktop as well as the cost-sensitive server and network storage market segments. It uses thinner, more flexible cables and lower pin counts, allowing computer makers to design systems with cables that are simpler to route and install, improving thermal designs and facilitating smaller form factor systems. Beginning next quarter, Serial ATA will be deployed in numerous products to connect such internal storage devices as hard disks, DVDs and CD-R/Ws to the motherboard in desktop and mobile PCs, cost-sensitive servers and networked storage. Serial ATA II products may become available as early as next year, and will be fully compatible with first generation products. ...Intel profile, ...Seagate Technology profile, ...Silicon Image profile

Editor's comments:- command queuing and reordering have been available in SCSI systems for many years. This is an important feature for high performance systems.

Munich/Germany - September 09, 2002 - ADIC and Fujitsu Siemens Computers are expanding their long-standing OEM partnership to include a new, high performance tape library solution. Starting immediately, Fujitsu Siemens Computers will offer ADIC's Scalar 10K tape library through its worldwide sales channels. The decision was preceded by a successful pilot phase that included several on-site installations, one of them for a well-known German logistics company.

The Scalar 10K, is not only the fastest and most flexible library system currently on the market but also introduces the industry's, the first "capacity-on-demand" tape storage system, and the first library designed for data consolidation in SANs. Supported solutions range from 7 to more than 50,000 cartridges.

"Unfortunately the value of solid data backup solutions often only becomes obvious in an emergency. This is why it is important to eliminate risk due to operating errors and defects in the storage network before a data loss occurs. The automation of the backup-/recovery processes is indispensable – regardless of how large or distributed the IT systems are within a company," says Peter Jilek, Executive Vice President Enterprise Products at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. "Together with our partner ADIC we can look back on a long, successful partnership in this area and can offer joint solutions that not only guarantee the highest degree of security for enterprise data but also provide long-term security for the investments our customers make in storage solutions."

"This agreement expands a long relationship between ADIC and Fujitsu Siemens Computers," said Bill Britts, ADIC Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "We are combining ADIC's intelligent libraries and storage management software from both companies with the systems expertise, consultative services, and ongoing support provided by Fujitsu Siemens Computers. The result is the industry's most effective family of Enterprise-class data storage solutions for both backup and high capacity archiving." ...ADIC profile, ...Fujitsu Siemens Computers profile

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Sept. 9, 2002 - Sony Electronics today introduced its Dual RW drives, the first combination drives for the PC to support the DVD+RW, DVD+R, DVD-RW and DVD-R formats. The new Dual RW drives, the internal DRU-500A and the external DRX-500UL, encompass four popular DVD recording formats for the utmost in recording functionality and playback compatibility. By combining the DVD rewritable (DVD+RW/-RW) formats with the DVD write-once (DVD+R/-R) formats, the Dual RW drives allow computer users to transfer home movies from tape to DVD discs, customize and edit them for a personal touch, and then play them back in nearly all DVD-Video players and DVD-ROM drives.

Sony's new drives are also the industry's first to support up to 4X DVD-R recording, making them the fastest DVD rewritable drives on the market. In addition, the drives support 2.4X DVD+RW/+R recording and 2X DVD-RW recording. It is expected that 4X DVD-R and 2X DVD-RW media will become available in the near future. Both Dual RW models also support 24X CD-R and 10X CD-RW recording (using high-speed CD-RW discs), making them ideal all-in-one recording devices.

"Sony is eliminating the need for consumers to choose one format over another by introducing a drive that supports the most popular DVD formats," said Robert DeMoulin, marketing manager for branded storage products in Sony Electronics' IT Products Division. "Whether consumers are looking to create write-once discs to inexpensively share home movies, or rewritable discs for video or data storage, the Sony DRU-500A and DRX-500UL drives offer complete solutions for digital recording."

The internal Sony DRU-500A drive comes with an ATAPI interface for easy installation inside a PC while the external Sony DRX-500UL drive features both an i.LINK and a USB 2.0 interface for simple set-up and maximum flexibility. The DRU-500A DVD/CD rewritable drive will be available in October for an estimated retail price of under $350, and the Sony DRX-500UL will be available in November for less than $430. ...Sony profile

current STORAGEsearch - News

Marketing Views

STORAGEsearch

SPARC Product Directory

the "SPARC Bible" since 1992

ACSL - the publisher