Samsung &
Microsoft Demo Hybrid Hard Drive
SEOUL,
Korea - April 21, 2005 - Samsung today announced that its OneNAND Flash
memory has been incorporated into the design of Microsoft's prototype
Hybrid Hard Drive, the first fully functional disk drive to combine NAND-based
Flash with rotating storage media.
The
hybrid drive,
designed to work with the next version of the Windows operating system is being
exhibited for the first time at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in
Seattle. The hybrid hard drive will eliminate costly inefficiencies caused by
the need for the hard disk drive to continue to spin whenever the computer is
on. While the cost of
hybrid disk drives
may slightly increase with the addition of OneNAND, any increase will be
mitigated by several factors, including lower maintenance costs, 95% power
savings when the disk is not spinning, faster boot time and substantially
increased reliability.
...Samsung profile
WD Reduces Dependence on Desktop PCs
LAKE
FOREST, Calif. - April 21, 2005 - Western Digital Corp. today reported
revenue of $920 million on shipments of approximately 15.3 million units, and
net income of $70.8 million for its third fiscal quarter ended April 1st.
These results represented strong year-over-year performance,
including 23% growth in revenue compared to the year ago period and 48%
growth in net income. WD indicated that 23% of its Q3 revenue was derived from
non-desktop PC sources including consumer electronics, enterprise applications,
notebook
PCs and retail sales. 77% of the company's Q3 revenue came from hard drives
configured into desktop PCs. This compares with a mix in the year-ago quarter of
14% non-desktop PC revenue, 86% desktop PC revenue.
...Western Digital
profile
Editor's comments:- this has been a good quarter for
leading hard disk makers.
A few days ago
Seagate reported $1.97
billion revenue - an increase of
42%.
Silicon Image's Web Server Disk Full Error
SUNNYVALE,
Calif. - April 21, 2005 - Silicon Image, Inc. today announced the
appointment of Darrel Slack to the position of chief financial officer.
Reporting to Silicon Image President and CEO Steve Tirado, Slack
will be responsible for the company's finance, accounting, investor relations
and information systems/information technology and facilities activities.
Speaking on his new appointment, Slack stated, "I am excited about joining
Silicon Image and contributing to the implementation of its secure digital
content delivery strategy. I believe this strategy positions us for future
growth and profitability."
...Silicon Image
profile
Editor's comments:- when I clicked on the link above to
see the detailed press release on Silicon Image's web site - I saw an
interesting error message - "Server Error - There is not enough space on
the disk." It's the first time I've seen a disk space error message on the
web site of a storage technology company. Maybe they might have fixed it by the
time you read this. Or maybe not.
Emulex Reports 4% Growth
COSTA MESA,
Calif. - April 21, 2005 - Emulex Corp today announced results for its
third fiscal quarter ended March 27, 2005.
Third quarter
revenues, essentially all of which were comprised of Fibre Channel products,
rose 12% sequentially from the second fiscal quarter and 4% from a year
ago to a record $102.6 million. Emulex's InSpeed storage switching solutions
continued to gain momentum in the market as the company expanded its installed
base to 5 million ports, up from 4 million ports at the end of the second
quarter, complementing its installed base of nearly 2 million Emulex HBAs.
...Emulex profile
AppIQ Leads SNIA-Conformance
BURLINGTON,
MA - April 20, 2005 - AppIQ, Inc. today announced that its software
outscored all other solutions in the first SNIA Conformance Testing
Program for storage management applications.
The SNIA-CTP testing
process validates how well each management solution conforms to SNIA's Storage
Management Initiative Specification version 1.0.2, the industry standard that
enables enterprises to deploy and manage highly interoperable, multi-vendor
storage infrastructure.
...AppIQ profile,
Industry trade associations
M-Systems Reports 51% Growth
KFAR-SABA,
Israel - April 20, 2005 - M-Systems today announced financial results
for the first quarter ended March 31, 2005.
For the first
quarter of 2005, revenues were $95.9 million 51% higher than in the
first quarter of 2004. M-Systems also reported a net profit for the quarter
ended March 31, 2005 of $6.1 million, or $0.16 per share. Dov Moran, President
and CEO of M-Systems, said: "With the different elements of our business
coming together... we believe we have a solid foundation for significant growth
and success. For the full year of 2005, we are reiterating our projections for
revenues of at least $450 million and earnings per share at or above $1.00."
...M-Systems profile,
Solid State Disks
Nexsan & Diligent Partner on Virtual Tape
WOODLAND HILLS,
Calif. - April 20, 2005 - Nexsan Technologies and Diligent
Technologies today announced the availability of a joint enterprise-class
virtual tape library which appears to backup applications as one or many actual
tape libraries.
The backup application accesses drives, robotics
and cartridges with Diligent's VTF Open solution as it would a physical tape
library. Through its intelligent use of disk in the backup process, this
solution eliminates much of the burden, complexity and difficulty of using tape
for backups and restores. Because the data actually resides on Nexsan ATA-based
disk, users experience dramatic improvements to the backup and recovery
operation. Additionally, VTF Open provides 2:1 compression, reducing storage
needs by half and significantly improving the total cost.
...Nexsan profile,
...Diligent profile,
Disk to disk backup
New CEO at Silverback Systems
Campbell,
Calif., - April 19, 2005 - Silverback Systems, Inc., has named Ahmet
Houssein, as its new president and CEO, starting immediately.
Mr.
Houssein was most recently with
Adaptec as VP and
general manager of their Storage Solutions Group, where he implemented the
company's end-to-end, storage solutions strategy, including the industry's
first, serial-attached,
SCSI RAID and I/O products. Mr. Houssein's experience and achievement at
the systems and chip level is expected to be instrumental in further enhancing
Silverback's market position with their family of IP-based, storage network
access processors, iSNAP.
...Silverback
Systems profile, Storage
People, Storage processors
SSDs Help Compliance with Patriot Act
Editor:-
April 19, 2005 - Dynamic Solutions International has published a new
case study which shows how they used a solid state disk accelerator to help a
financial institution cope with the requirements of the USA Patriot Act.
Campus USA Credit Union, with 70,000 members, had a VMS mainframe
which could take upto 30 minutes to answer detailed customer queries. To
comply with the Patriot Act and speed up real-time customer identification
they turned to a
solid state disk
accelerator from DSI. As a result, mundane queries that previously used to
take 3 minutes to run on the old system, now take about 8 seconds, while longer
queries that used to take more than 30 minutes, now can be processed in five or
six minutes. ...read
the article (pdf)
EMC Reports 20% Growth
Hopkinton,
Mass. - April 19, 2005 - EMC Corp today reported financial results
for the first quarter of 2005.
Total consolidated revenue for
EMC's first quarter was $2.24 billion, 20% higher than the $1.87 billion
reported for the first quarter of 2004. Net income for the quarter was $270
million or $.11 per diluted share, 93% higher than the first quarter of 2004.
Systems revenue grew 15% in the first quarter, compared with the
year-ago quarter, to $1.03 billion, driven by strong, double-digit growth from
the EMC CLARiiON, Celerra NAS and Centera platforms. Strong performances across
each of EMC's software businesses grew software license and maintenance revenues
26% to $832 million in the first quarter, now representing 37% of total EMC
revenues. Professional services, systems maintenance and other services revenue
grew 26% to $375 million during the quarter, as customers around the globe
turned to EMC to help manage the growing complexity of their information
infrastructures.
...EMC profile
Editor's
comments:- it looks like EMC's revenue growth has slowed down from the 35%
peak it reached last year. It will take another quarter before we can reliably
measure how the fastest
growing storage companies are doing in 2005 and whether EMC will once again
be in that elite set.
XOsoft Announces 30% Growth
Waltham, MA - April 18,
2005 - XOsoft today announced its 9th straight quarter of growth.
In the first quarter of 2005, XOsoft grew revenues by more than 30% and
added nearly two hundred new customers including US Army Corp of Engineers,
Mitsubishi, Bloomberg, COMSTAR Federal Credit Union, Cox Media, American Red
Cross, Occidental Petroleum and North Island Credit Union among many others
which now represent implementations in 21 countries. Demand for XOsoft's
products remains high as businesses continue to see the value of continuous
availability technology. Research firm IDC forecasts a 35% jump in backup,
archiving, and replication software market revenues from $4.3 billion in 2004 to
$6.58 billion in 2008.
...XOsoft profile
Arkeia Certified with MySQL Network Program
SANTA CLARA,
CA. - April 18, 2005 Arkeia Corp announced today the full
certification of its MySQL hot backup plug-in with the MySQL Network Silver
Certified Partner program.
Arkeia made the announcement at the
MySQL Users Conference. Arkeia has
worked closely with MySQL for more than three years, keeping pace with the
continuing development of this popular open source database. The Arkeia hot
backup plug-in is compatible with versions of MySQL starting from 3.21 through
version 4.x. It functions with all table formats. Arkeia products are compatible
with a variety of operating systems including Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac OS X,
AIX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Irix, Novell Netware and others. solutions ...Arkeia profile,
Storage Events
Seagate Expands Notebook Disk Line
SCOTTS
VALLEY, Calif. - April 18, 2005 - Seagate Technology is expanding its
Momentus line of notebook hard disk drives.
Highlighting Seagate's
2.5" notebook disk line are 7,200 and 5,400 RPM models that provide
high capacity - 100GB and 120GB, respectively. Seagate offers
SATA as an option.
"As notebook PCs displace desktop PCs in the workplace, end users
increasingly will demand desktop PC capabilities in notebooks," said John
Buttress, IDC's research manager for hard drives. "Currently, the market
for 7,200 RPM notebook drives is a niche market, but it is growing, and the
market for 5,400 RPM drives already is growing rapidly."
Momentus features a tough design that also makes the drives ideal for
CE devices, printers, copiers, non-mission critical blade servers, external
storage arrays and other environments where systems are jostled or subject to
high levels of vibration. Momentus drives can withstand up to 900 Gs of
non-operating shock and 250 Gs of operating shock to safeguard drive data.
Momentus hard drives are power efficient and are virtually inaudible thanks
to fluid-dynamic bearing motors.
...Seagate profile
SmartDisk Introduces Portable DVR
Fort
Myers, FL - April 18, 2005 - SmartDisk Corp today introduced FlashTrax
XT, a handheld portable device for storing, playing and sharing digital images,
video and music. |
| FlashTrax is being demonstrated
in Booth SL5828 at NAB. FlashTrax
XT, a palm-sized, portable multimedia player and video recorder, stores
high-resolution images transferred from any flash memory card or video device
and displays them on its 3.6" LCD screen, on a TV or a projector. In
addition, the user can enjoy music from a personal collection, listen to the
built-in FM tuner, or watch slide shows while listening to music. With transfer
speeds of up to 480MBps, FlashTrax XT can also serve as an external hard drive
to transfer, store and access data. |
 |
"FlashTrax
XT is an extension of our popular FlashTrax device and incorporates broader
support of digital video," says Charles Klinker, Vice President-Marketing
for SmartDisk. "The desire to record, store and play back your multimedia
content wherever you go is a growing trend among consumers."
Suggested retail price for FlashTrax XT is $399.99 for the 40GB version and
$499.99 for the 80GB version. It will be available in early May.
...SmartDisk profile
RAID & Tape Testing in SCSItoolbox V6.0
LITTLETON,
COLORADO - April 18, 2005 - SCSI Toolbox, LLC has added test
capabilities for RAID and Tape Storage Devices in SCSItoolbox Suite V6.0.
Each drive, on up to 16 host bus adapters, has its own independent test thread
for the highest data throughput and least interaction with other devices under
test. A simple point-and-click interface allows complex sequences of tests to
be assembled in minutes, and with many pre-defined test sequences included, test
lines can be up and running quickly.
...SCSI Toolbox
profile, Storage Testers,
Tape drives,
RAID controller cards
Intransa in DVD Publishing Demo at NAB
LAS
VEGAS, NV - April 18, 2005 - Intransa today announced it is
partnering with Pulse Digital and Rimage and will demonstrate an
IP-SAN DVD authoring solution this week at NAB on NewWave's
booth #SL3960.
"Today, DVD projects are authored by
multiple users at multiple sites, resulting in complex authoring workflows. Our
unique automated DVD authoring solution, coupled with Intransa's IP-SAN, will
greatly improve the ability of media and DVD publishing firms to simplify their
production workflows, improve product quality and shorten delivery schedules for
their projects," noted Mark Hirsch, CTO, Pulse Digital.
...Intransa profile,
...Rimage profile,
DVD drives,
Storage Events & trade
shows
Exanet Announces Key Industry Partnerships
LAS
VEGAS, NV - April 16, 2005 - Exanet has entered into formal
relationships with Ardendo, SGL and Telestream, to
enhance the award-winning storage solutions it provides to the broadcast and
post production industry.
"SGL is delighted to be partnering
with Exanet," said Steve Atkinson, Vice President, Sales, U.S. for SGL. "Integrated
with SGL FlashNet, Exanet's network attached storage system is a key,
easy-to-manage and cost-efficient solution for broadcasters worldwide who are
making the transition to an all-digital workflow environment. SGL's Migration
Manager can be used to seamlessly move content from the ExaStore NAS solution to
tape environments and vice versa, allowing for a highly flexible mixed storage
environment."
...Exanet profile,
...SGL profile |
current
STORAGEsearch - News |
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| Nibble:-
Good New Ideas in Storage Marketing? |
It's as rare to find
good new ideas in IT marketing as it is to find gold coins when you dig in the
garden.
Most IT marketers in the past few decades have rarely stepped
outside the smaller! faster! cheaper! school of thinking. Something new was
added to these formulaic mantras in the last decade when vendors started
advertising on the internet, but that too has become simply a me-too way of
sales, which some do well, and most do badly.
The key to the
innovation treasure chest, it seems, has been locked securely in the research
and development department. If storage marketers have ever sought to come up
with new good ways of enticing customers (as opposed to stupid gimicky ideas
which insult your intelligence) these worthy new ideas have rarely come to
light. Maybe it's just too hard for marketers - like solving the code to the
cryptex in Dan Brown's novel
the Da Vinci
Code.
But despite it being a rare event, some lucky people do
indeed find gold coins when digging in their garden. (Although most just find
worms and get backache.)
Two new good ideas in storage marketing have
appeared in these storage news pages in recent months. If you missed them, here
they are again.
In the
Backup Software market,
Arkeia announced a new
pricing scheme in which users can buy their enterprise backup software and pay a
price that depends on the volume of data which they back up instead of the
number or type of servers.
Now, some detractors might say here, that
this isn't innovative, because
web backup companies
have been doing this all along. But this is the first time this ASP model has
been applied to a piece of enterprise backup software which you own. Arkeia's
pricing model enables fast growing organisations, which maybe don't need or
can't afford the overpriced enterprise bloatware from Veritas or IBM today, to
standardise on a product which does offer enterprise functions at a cost of
ownership which is scalable to their needs.
In the
Solid State Disk market,
Texas Memory Systems
announced a bunch of performance guarantees.
You'll have to see their
web site for the details, but these guarantees mean, in effect, that if you tell
them that you're expecting a given percentage speed up for your enterprise
server application, and they agree, but you don't get it, then you'll get your
money back. They also guarantee to be faster than any other storage system in
the market, by the way.
I don't see many server makers who guarantee
that their system will give you a named application speedup. They imply it. But
in the server market the risk is always down to the user. Sometimes the new
servers don't deliver the expected speedup, and other factors are blamed.
The
difference in the Texas Memory Systems' guarantee is that whatever your server
environment, or applications, if they agree an overall speedup then you will get
it or your money back. The company has decades of experience in speeding up
applications for the government and has been in effect making these performance
promises quietly to prospective customers for years. The reason they're going
public now is that users say they are more likely to try solid state disk
technology (as an alternative to more servers or CPUs) if there's a risk free
way of trying it out.
These new marketing moves make it easier for
users to dip their toes into the muddy waters of new technologies and new
suppliers.
Enterprise systems are so complicated nowadays that it's
difficult enough just keeping them running reliably. Most users don't have the
spare time or resources to investigate new products and ideas which might make
their systems run better or faster. And sometimes even the experts get it wrong
by predicting improvements which fail to be achieved in practise. But the
alternative:- the seemingly low risk, incremental upgrade route of just buying
more of the same from current suppliers doesn't always fit the budget or doesn't
always deliver the expected benefits either.
Some parts of the $70
billion / year storage market are getting
very complicated with
multiple technologies promising to be the answer to backup and archiving for
example. They can't all be right, and they won't all last the full term.
Vendors
who can offer attractive switching services which migrate users data to a new
platform with a credible guarantee that everything can be switched back if the
new system doesn't deliver the promised benefits - will help new technology fly
off the shelf faster.
Technologies like
iSCSI, which typically
offer 5 times the performance of NAS when using the same network infrastructure,
have been languishing in the small market swamp for years because vendors
haven't been able to offer attractive marketing packages which tell users what
the benefits really are, and take away the risk of new technology adoption.
Good
New Ideas in Storage Marketing should be aimed at addressing the real anxieties
and needs of users - like "what do I do if my online backup company goes
bust?", or "what if I picked a server technology which looked good a
few years ago (for example
HP's Alpha)
which has now been end-of -lifed by the original manufacturer and I don't have
the budget to replace everything and start all over?"
I'll be
writing more about this subject of new marketing ideas in storage later. If
vendors think they have brilliant new ideas which also deserve a mention just
copy me by email on the details.
See also:-
MarketingViews,
Record breaking
storage | |
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