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Storage news

2006, August week 4, storage news archive

storage news magazine readers - click here to see Megabyte's storage history archive
Megabyte loved reading news stories
about the storage market

See also:-

Squeak! - Venture funds in storage
Squeak! - the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
Squeak! - the Fastest Growing Storage Companies
Squeak! - the 10 biggest storage companies in 2008?
Squeak! - the Top 10 Storage Software Companies
article:- State of the market for SATA, iSCSI, SAS and InfiniBand
Squeak! - Why are Most Analysts Wrong About Solid State Disks?
current STORAGEsearch - News, last week's storage news, Market research, Articles, Events, iSCSI, RAID controllers, storage OEMs (all)

storage history:- August 2000, August 2001, August 2002, August 2003, August 2004, August 2005
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HOLLYWOOD, Calif. - August 31, 2006 - The Blu-ray Disc Association today announced that Sun Microsystems has joined the consortium's Board of Directors. "Blu-ray Disc offers a compelling, interactive entertainment and gaming platform that leaps substantially past current DVD standards," said Alan Brenner, Vice President, Mobility Group of Sun Microsystems. "We look forward to playing a key role in supporting Blu-ray Disc's inclusion of the Java platform to provide a unique set of interactive capabilities that will create new opportunities for content vendors who use Blu-ray Disc for their movies, games or other content." ...Blu-ray Disc Association, ...Sun profile, Storage Trade Associations


Geneva - August 30,2006 - STMicroelectronics today announced a new and enhanced version of its 32-Mbit Flash memory chip that is intended specifically for the automotive market. The new device uses a state-of-the-art architecture to reduce access times to as low as 45nsec over the full automotive temperature range (-40 degrees C to +125 degrees C for the packaged device, -40 degrees C to +150 degrees C in bare die form).

Other news on this page

Sun Shines on Blu-ray Disc Association

STMicroelectronics Has Secure Flash for Automotive Market

Tandberg Acquires Exabyte

SimpleTech Plans Plant in Malaysia

Emulex Acquires Sierra Logic

Former Electronic News Editor Peter Brown Joins iSuppli

Winbond and Qimonda Announce DRAM Agreement

Silverback Achieves iSCSI Designed for Windows Status

Hitachi Aims SATA HDD at Enterprise Market

Young Minds' Libraries Integrate BridgeHead Compliance

Double-Take Software Honored by Storage Products Guide

AMCC Honored by Brocade

IBM Updates its "Me Too" Storage Line

Fantom Drives Introduces 1.5T Firewire / USB MegaDisk

InfoStore Article on Hard Disk Market in India

last week's news (archive)

JBOD and storage enclosures
Storage Boxes, Enclosures, JBODS
on STORAGEsearch.com
It was easy to recognise a storage box
made by Megabyte the mouse.

NORCO
Norco Technologies, headquartered in
mainland China, with sales locations
in the US, Canada and Germany,
manufactures rackmount JBODs
and RAID storage systems.
.

STORAGEsearch.com is 8 Years Old

Editor:- STORAGEsearch.com was first published in September 1998. Here's the original press release which went out at the time.

September 30, 1998 - ACSL, publisher of the SPARC Product Directory, launched STORAGEsearch.com, a new Web directory for locating computer storage products for all major platforms.

"Our customers in the Sun market have been asking us to produce a cross platform directory like STORAGEsearch.com for many years," said Zsolt Kerekes, publisher of STORAGEsearch.com. "Using the experience from our SPARC Web site, SPARCproductDIRectory.com, we expect to achieve in six months something which took us six years to do in the Sun market. In other words to become the Number One directory in this subject area."

...Later:- For a publisher which had been exclusively focused on the Sun market since 1991, this seemed like a step into the great unknown. But we had already been covering storage products for many years, and our customers had been asking us to do a separate storage publication since the mid 90s.

I launched STORAGEsearch.com with just 4 main product categories:- RAID systems, RAM, SCSI adapter cards and hard drives. The plan was to roll out new categories every month, but make sure that each category was complete as it became visible. So, for example - the 1998 RAID page listed 51 manufacturers. I estimated in 1998 there were about 250 to 300 storage manufacturers.

In 1998 most people didn't think of the storage market as a single market. But within a few years other online storage publications also started to appear as their publishers hoped to cash in on the dotcom advertising boom.

Today STORAGEsearch.com (with over 1 million annual readers) tracks over 1,000 storage companies in a market which was over $150 billion in revenue in 2005.

See also:- storage history

Squeak! - Animal Brands and Metaphors in the Storage Market

.
low cost 3U 12 bay eSATA rackmount JBOD / RAID storage
low cost
12 bay 3U eSATA JBOD / RAID
from Norco Technologies
.
State of the storage market review

iSCSI, SAS, SATA and InfiniBand
In June 2006, five years after STORAGEsearch.com launched the storage industry's first web directories dedicated to the four new storage interfaces above, we went back to see how successful they'd been in the market compared to their original promise. ...read the article, iSCSI, Serial SCSI, SATA, InfiniBand read the article - State of the market review  iSCSI, SAS, SATA and InfiniBand
.
UBIC is Japan's leading distributor of disk duplicators
UBIC is Japan's leading distributor of hard
disk duplicators, disk sanitizers and forensic
disk data capture products.
.
the Top 20 Most Popular Storage Search Categories
The top 20 most popular storage categories on STORAGEsearch.com in July 2006 were as follows... Figures in brackets (n) indicate rank the month before.
  1. Hard drives (1)
  2. Solid state disks (2)
  3. NAS (3)
  4. Flash memory (4)
  5. USB storage (6)
  6. Backup software (5)
  7. RAID systems (7)
  8. Serial ATA (SATA) (9)
  9. SAN (8)
  10. Serial Attached SCSI (12)
  11. iSCSI (10)
  12. Market research & analysts (11)
  13. Acquired, dead, renamed etc (15)
  14. Removable Storage (14)
  15. Boxes & enclosures (18)
  16. Online backup & storage (16)
  17. Storage Software (17)
  18. Data recovery - new entry to top 20
  19. RAM (19)
  20. Disk Sanitizers - new entry to top 20
The M58BW32F features a wide 32-bit data bus and operates on a nominal 3.3V memory core supply.

For security, each die embeds a unique device ID to allow the use of cryptographic algorithms to protect against illegal software modifications.
news image STMicro automotive flash
Pricing for the M58BW32F is US$5.50 per device. ...STMicroelectronics profile, Flash Storage, Storage News in Pictures


Oslo, Norway - August 30, 2006 - Tandberg Data today announced the acquisition of Exabyte Corp for $28 million. The merged company will have an expected revenue of $215 million for 2006. ...Exabyte profile, ...Tandberg Data profile

Editor's comments:- Exabyte has been slowly sliding towards this for over 5 years, and since long before its November 2001 merger with Ecrix which was not the magic bullet it had hoped for. After the Ecrix merger (but as early as January 22, 2002) I described Exabyte as "a sinking ship". Although the company struggled on for many years - its problem was its exclusive focus on tape backup against a structural shift in the market to disk to disk backup.

See also:- Acquired, dead, renamed, merged & gone away storage companies



SANTA ANA, Calif. - August 30, 2006 - SimpleTech, Inc. today announced its plan to build a manufacturing facility in Penang, Malaysia. The company expects that the facility, which will be approximately 200,000 square feet in size, will be operational in the first quarter of 2008. The company estimates that its investment in land, facilities and capital equipment will approximate $28 million during the next five years. ...SimpleTech profile


COSTA MESA, Calif. and ROSEVILLE, Calif. - August 29, 2006 - Emulex Corp and Sierra Logic, Inc. announced today a definitive agreement whereby Emulex will acquire Sierra Logic, Inc. for approximately $180 million.

"This acquisition... extends Emulex's addressable market for embedded storage components to more than $800 million, and the Company's total available market to $2.7 billion by 2009," said Paul Folino, Chairman and CEO of Emulex. "Further, it builds upon our prior acquisition of embedded switch supplier, Vixel, as well as our joint development efforts with Intel. Together, Emulex and Sierra Logic will provide our OEM customers with embedded solutions for the full range of enterprise server and storage systems." Emulex, Sierra Logic


El Segundo, Calif. - August 29, 2006 - iSuppli Corp. is pleased to announce that Peter Brown, an established journalist with more than a decade of experience, has joined the market research firm in the position of editorial manager. Brown will be responsible for expanding and improving the exposure of iSuppli in the global media as well as migrating iSuppli content to RSS format to provide easier access to through the Internet. Furthermore, Brown will increase the coverage and frequency of iSuppli white papers as well as help beef up content for the iSuppli Market Watch newsletter. Brown was most recently a staff writer for the San Francisco Examiner.

Brown spent nearly seven years at the trade publication Electronic News where he began as an associate editor, worked his way up to senior editor and eventually held the title of managing editor. After performing contract work for the Semiconductor Reporter Web site and Semiconductor Magazine, Brown joined the San Francisco Examiner in August 2003 where he launched the daily newspaper's Business section and brought new content into the publication including health, technology, development, science, space and biotech coverage. ...iSuppli profile, storage market analysts, Storage People


Hsinchu, Taiwan - August 29, 2006 - Winbond Electronics Corp and Qimonda AG today announced a technology agreement. Winbond will adopt Qimonda's 80nm DRAM process technology for its 12-fab at Central Taiwan Science Park and will provide DRAM production capacity to Qimonda in the future. Winbond currently provides part of the production capacity for Qimonda, and the two companies share the profits as well. The mutually beneficial relationships of technology and production capacity cooperation agreement are a win-win situation for both sides. ...Qimonda profile, ...Winbond Electronics profile, RAM, storage chips


Campbell, Calif. - August 29, 2006 - Silverback Systems, Inc. today announced that its latest iSNAP2110 HBA drivers have been qualified to carry Microsoft's iSCSI Designed for Windows logo. This is awarded to products that integrate seamlessly with Windows Server 2003 applications. Silverback's iSNAP2110 dual-port gigabit HBA is capable of delivering up to 440MB/s throughput and up to 60K iSCSI IOPS. The iSNAP2110 also includes initiator support for Red Hat Linux, and SUSE Linux. ...Silverback Systems profile, iSCSI


SAN JOSE, Calif. - August 28, 2006 - Hitachi has repositioned its 3.5-inch Deskstar 7K500 SATA hard disk drive to an enterprise-class rating with 1 million hours MTBF. "The Deskstar E7K500 delivers field-proven reliability and performance for a range of nearline enterprise applications that require the right mix of functionality at a low cost per gigabyte," said Jose Antelo, vice president and general manager, business management, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "We have implemented a five-year warranty with the enterprise customer in mind, providing them with the reliability safeguards they've come to expect with enterprise-class hard disk drives." ...Hitachi profile, SATA


Woburn, MA - August 24, 2006 - Young Minds, Inc. today announced that BridgeHead Software's suite of compliance and data protection solutions has been integrated with YMi's DVD library products. The 'removable' characteristic of DVD archive media and YMi's standards compliance also makes DVD particularly effective as part of a wider disaster recovery strategy. It is ideal in hostile environments such as heat, cold, sand or damp, where other media such as disk or tape are vulnerable to rapid physical degradation. ...BridgeHead Software profile, ...Young Minds profile


Southborough, MA - August 23, 2006 - Double-Take Software today announced that Storage Products Guide has named Double-Take for Virtual Systems the winner of the Global Product Excellence - Customer Trust 2006 Award in Data Protection. ...Double-Take Software profile, ...Storage Products Guide, Backup Software

Editor's comments:- I only mention this news item because I'd never heard of this publication before - but then there are so many Storage publications that we have a directory of them too.

The press release goes on to say that "Storage Products Guide (is) the world's leading publication on storage-related products and technologies." That's impressive for a publication whose domain name (according to Network Solutions) is barely 10 months old - and for which Google has few listed links. You'd be surprised at some of the nonsense claims that many vendors make in their PR too. I mostly strip out these posturing positioning statements (world's leading company etc) unless they are an important part of the story.



SUNNYVALE, Calif. - August 23, 2006 - AMCC today announced the company has recently received two awards from Brocade. These were:- Outstanding Customer Support and Outstanding Engineering Support, for its close collaboration in supporting the integration of AMCC's PowerPC product line in Brocade's SilkWorm family of SAN connectivity platforms. The awards were presented to AMCC's President and CEO, Kambiz Hooshmand, by Brocade's Vice President of Operations, Luc Moyen, at Brocade's headquarters in San Jose, Calif. last month. ...AMCC profile, ...Brocade profile, storage chips

Editor's comments:- earlier this year Intel terminated its decades old Intel Inside branding campaign. I've seen reports that Intel is only #3 in high end 64 bit server processors (behind AMD and Sun so you can't reliably guess what's inside any box anymore.



Editor:- August 22, 2006 - IBM today announced what it claims is "one of the single largest expansions of its storage portfolio". But when you look at the detail it's more evolution than revolution (4Gbps support for FICON, and 15% faster DS8000 for example). The announcements read more like a catching up exercise from a me-too storage company rather than the head turning technologies we see from storage innovators. ...IBM profile


TORRANCE, CA - August 22, 2006 - Fantom Drives today introduced the MegaDisk Firewire800 & USB 2.0 combo disk drive with upto 1.5 terabytes storage capacity. The MegaDisk combo is an affordable, high-performance external hard disk drive that combines the latest SATA drive technology and high-speed Firewire800 and USB 2.0 external interfaces. The MegaDisk has a rugged aluminum design and Firewire 800 bus speeds of 80MB/Sec. No software installation is required for Windows XP and Mac OS X users. ...Fantom Drives profile


Editor:- August 22, 2006 - a recent article in InfoStore about the hard disk market in India contains a useful factoid about how SMBs and consumers are using removable hard drives. According to Iomega's APAC business manager Dr Baskaran - who spoke about how his customers were using REV drives - about one third are using them as their first backup device, another third are replacing tape backup, and the rest are replacing other devices such as optical. ...read the article, Storage publications, Removable Disk Drives
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storage history (1949 till last week) STORAGEsearch SPARC Product Directory ACSL - the publisher