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Storage news

2006, September week 2, storage news archive

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

See also:-

Squeak! - Venture funds in storage
article:- Adding Trust to Storage Drives
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:- September 2000, Sept 2001, Sept 2002, Sept 2003, Sept 2004, Sept 2005
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PARSIPPANY, N.J. - September 13, 2006 - PNY Technologies, Inc. today announced the availability of its latest MaxFile Attaché, a USB 2.0 micro hard drive with 12GB of storage space. It includes Migo backup software so users can sync everything from their e-mail, documents, favorites and settings wherever they go. MSRP is $169. ...PNY Technologies profile


SIMI VALLEY, Calif. - September 13, 2006 - Qualstar Corp today reported financial results for the fiscal year ended June 30. For the full year Qualstar's revenue declined 13% to $21.7 million and net loss was $1.7 million. In the 4th quarter revenue declined 26% (compared to the year ago period) to $4.9 million This (quarter's) decrease was due primarily to an approximate $1.9 million decline in sales of tape libraries and tape drives incorporating AIT, SAIT, DLT and LTO tape technology. ...Qualstar profile


SANTA ANA, Calif. - September 13, 2006 - SimpleTech, Inc today announced a joint effort with AMD to define registers and modules for a DDR3 SDRAM Registered Dual-Inline Memory Module. DDR3 RDIMM modules are planned as the natural evolution over today's DDR2-based solutions and designed to deliver the increased performance and energy efficiency required for future commercial servers and workstations. Densities are designed to range from 512MB to 32GB. Initialization scheme, parity function as well as control registers were approved by JEDEC in March. Validation is under way, testing is expected to begin in 2007 and full production is planned by 2008. ...AMD profile, ...SimpleTech profile, RAM, storage chips


San Jose, Calif - September 13, 2006 - today at DISKCON - Xyratex announced the release of its X700 high-speed media test automation system. It delivers 700 disks per hour throughput, in a small footprint, fully self-contained, third-party certified class 10 enclosure. In traditional approaches, clean room space is consumed with floor mounted robotic systems that load and unload disks onto spindles for the test process. The X700 saves expensive clean room space while maintaining disk output. ...Xyratex profile, Storage Testers & Analyzers


Editor:- September 13, 2006 - STORAGEsearch.com reports that in August pageviews and readership both grew 11% compared to the year before period. Compared to earlier years pageviews in August 2006 were 54% up on 2004, and 300% the level in 2001.

The top 3 subjects viewed by readers in August (out of 70 storage categories on our home page) were once again:- Hard disk drives, Solid state disks and NAS.

The biggest change in storage searches in August was the rapid ascent of Disk to disk backup to the #4 slot (up from #15 in July). STORAGEsearch has had a dedicated directory page for D2d since April 2002.

Changes of this magnitude, following many years of steady incremental growth reflect significant changes in buyer perceptions and future buying plans. Recent months have seen a spate of mergers and revenue attrition in the tape backup market - and the sharp increase in D2d content may signal that users no longer give credence to all the brave bullish talk they've been hearing from tape backup companies.

For more information on the top subjects, articles etc see Market research


IRVINE, Calif. - September 12, 2006 - Toshiba announced today it is shipping a "short" version of its 1.8 inch hard disk drive family. The drives have a 10% smaller footprint (than previous 1.8" drives) and have up to 80GB capacity. The 4,200 RPM disks have a 15 mS seek time and max data transfer rate of 356.8 Mbps. IDC says that Toshiba had 86% market share in the 1.8" HDD category in Q206. ...Toshiba profile, Hard disk drives


Phoenix, AZ - September 12, 2006 - White Electronic Designs Corp today introduced its 4Gb (512MB) DDR SDRAM PBGA Multi-Chip Package. The SDRAM is organized as 64M x 72, packaged in a 25 x 32mm, 800mm2 , 219 plastic ball grid array. This package is suitable for high-reliability applications and is available at data rates of 200, 250, 266 and 333 Mbs in commercial, industrial and military temperature ranges. Benefits include a 66% space savings versus a comparable density using thin small-outline packages, 55% I/O reduction versus TSOP, reduced trace lengths for lower parasitic capacitance and reduced part count. It delivers high density for increased performance. WEDC's new DDR SDRAM MCP features internal pipelined DDR architecture enabling two data accesses per clock cycle. The new SDRAM will be available in Q406 priced at $400 each in volumes of 1,000 pieces. ...White Electronic Designs profile, storage reliability


ALISO VIEJO, Calif. - September 12, 2006 - SiliconSystems, Inc. today announced a strategic Series C investment by Samsung Ventures. Samsung Ventures invests in leading technology companies related to the business activities of the Samsung Group, including Samsung Electronics, SiliconSystems' primary supplier of storage components. SiliconSystems intends to use the Series C financing to expand R&D and global sales and marketing programs.

"Samsung invests in highly innovative market leaders and SiliconSystems is an outstanding performer by every metric," said Bill Byun, Investment Principal, Samsung Ventures. "We view SiliconSystems as a key market enabler in the rapidly developing solid-state storage market and we intend to strongly promote the excellent relationship between our two organizations." ...SiliconSystems profile

Editor's comments:- the solid state storage market (RAM and flash) exceeded the hard disk and tape market in revenue in 2005. But most of this solid state revenue was in semiconductor components or small modules.

In the next few years as solid state disks become more commonly used as subsystems in notebooks and servers the market opportunity will rapidly head past $10 billion per annum. The crown jewels in the SSD market are the controller technologies which transform commodity memory chip technology into easy to use reliable, secure and fast storage systems products. That's why SanDisk announced its acquisition of M-Systems in July and why you can expect to see more SSD technology deals and mergers in the next 6 months.



Sunnyvale, Calif. - September 12, 2006 - M-Systems today announced that it has started mass production of its mDOC H3 embedded flash drive (in densities up to 1GB). The new products are approximately twice as fast as forecast in initial announcements. Actual speeds are:- write speeds of up to 7MBps and read speeds as high as 25MBps. The 2GB mDOC H3 is slated for availability within the next 2 months. ...M-Systems profile


Toronto, Canada - September 12, 2006 - Asigra today announced the addition of agentless Continuous Data Protection functionality for its Televaulting software. This provides event-based real-time backup of changed data for Windows, Linux, and Exchange environments. Asigra says its Televaulting is the first remote office/branch office distributed backup software to add agentless CDP functionality and to do so without charging users any additional licensing. Televaulting pricing is based on a 'pay as you grow' model where users only pay for the actual amount of compressed data stored in the repository. ...Asigra profile


Editor:- September 12, 2006 - STORAGEsearch.com today published the 4th annual edition of the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide. The earlier edition was the #1 most popular article viewed by our readers in August. Some of the main predictions made from our 2004 SSD survey have proven to be exactly correct - which shows that our readers are on the leading edge of this technology wave. ...read the article, solid state disks


Amsterdam, Netherlands - September 11, 2006 - at IBC today Mitsubishi Kagaku Media, Memory Tech Corp and Plasmon announced an alliance to manufacture and promote a new optical storage format called Ultra Density Optical – Digital Master Disk. UDO-DMD has been designed specifically for the secure distribution and long-term storage of high value HD DVD content between authoring studios and disc mastering facilities.

Many studios today depend on magnetic tape and RAID systems to transport and archive valuable content. Video content is often lost on tapes because they are fragile for transport and unreliable for long-term storage, and managing rapidly growing data on RAID is insecure and cost prohibitive for archives that must be maintained for many years. By contrast, UDO-DMD provides an extremely stable media housed in a robust cartridge that has a data life of over 50 years. It is immune to damage from magnetic fields and x-ray exposure and can be safely stored in a very wide range of temperature and humidity conditions. ...Mitsubishi Kagaku Media profile, ...Plasmon profile, Removable Storage


NEW YORK - September 11, 2006 - Brocade today introduced more than 20 new and enhanced products and services. For example:- the Brocade SilkWorm 48000 has been enhanced to now support up to 384 ports in a single chassis, a 50% increase in port density. In addition, Brocade today announced enterprise-class iSCSI capabilities for the SilkWorm 48000 via an accessory blade that can support up to 512 low-cost server connections from a single slot in the director. These new enterprise solutions will be available beginning later this calendar year from Brocade OEM Partners.

Brocade has also enhanced its software offerings for SAN environments with a new release of its Data Migration Manager software, which is designed to allow customers to migrate data between two SAN-resident storage devices in an "online" manner - without application downtime. The new offerings will be highlighted and showcased at the Brocade Analyst Day tomorrow. ...Brocade profile


Seoul , Korea - September 11, 2006 - Samsung Electronics announced that it has completed the first working prototype of what is expected to be the main memory device to replace high density NOR flash within the next decade – a Phase-change Random Access Memory.

Other news on this page

PNY Ships 12G Micro Hard Drive

Qualstar's Revenue Declines 26%

SimpleTech and AMD Work on Next Generation SDRAM

Xyratex Shrinks Class 10 Disk Media Tester

Storage Searchers Pay High Attention to Disk to Disk Backup

Toshiba Shrinks 1.8" hard Drives

White's New SDRAM Targets High Reliability Systems

SiliconSystems Announces Investment by Samsung

M-Systems mDOC H3 Embedded Flash in Production

Asigra Integrates Agentless CDP in ROBO Backup

the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide

New for Movie Makers - UDO-DMD

Brocade Announces Over 20 New Products

SAMSUNG Introduces New Nonvolatile Memory - PRAM

EMC Lost the Plot in Storage Software

NovaStor Launches NovaBACKUP 7.5

Ciprico Shows Rugged Shippable RAID Pods at IBC

Hitachi Adds CMO to Hard Drive Exec Team

New Article the Once and Future Hard Disk Drive

last week's news (archive)

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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

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Targa Series 4 - 2.5 inch SCSI flash disk
SCSI, Ethernet, USB
Removable Military Solid State Disks
from Targa Systems
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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
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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.
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the Top 20 Most Popular Storage Search Categories
The top 20 most popular storage categories on STORAGEsearch.com in August 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. Disk to disk backup - new entry to top 20
  5. Serial ATA (SATA) (8)
  6. Flash memory (4)
  7. USB storage (5)
  8. RAID systems (7)
  9. Backup software (6)
  10. Serial Attached SCSI (10)
  11. SAN (9)
  12. Removable Storage (14)
  13. Market research & analysts (12)
  14. iSCSI (11)
  15. Acquired, dead, renamed etc (13)
  16. Boxes & enclosures (15)
  17. Online backup & storage (16)
  18. Data recovery (18)
  19. Storage Software (17)
  20. RAID controllers - new entry to top 20
The company unveiled the 512M-Megabit PRAM device in Seoul today. More scalable than any other memory architecture being researched, PRAM features the fast processing speed of RAM for its operating functions combined with the non-volatile features of flash memory for storage, giving it the nickname "Perfect RAM." news image PRAM
A key advantage in PRAM is its extremely fast performance. Because PRAM can rewrite data without having to first erase data previously accumulated, it is effectively 30 x faster than conventional flash memory. Incredibly durable, PRAM is also expected to have at least 10 x the life span of flash memory.

PRAM will be a highly competitive choice over NOR flash, available beginning sometime in 2008. Samsung designed the cell size of its PRAM to be only half the size of NOR flash. Moreover, it requires 20% fewer process steps to produce than those used in the manufacturing of NOR flash memory. ...Samsung profile, Storage Glossary, article:- Charting the Rise of the Solid State Disk Market

Editor's comments:- I'm getting too old for this shit but if I were a young electronics engineer I'd give serious consideration to the architectural impact a small PRAM write cache could make to a flash based solid state disk.



FRAMINGHAM, Mass. - September 11, 2006 - According to IDC the worldwide storage software market grew 8.6% year-over-year to $2.5 billion in the second quarter of 2006, marking 11 consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth. In the second quarter, the storage replication segment demonstrated 13.2% year-over-year growth. In addition, the smaller but fast-growing archive and hierarchical storage management (HSM) market posted 32.0% year-over-year growth.

EMC's software revenue declined 3.2% in Q206 compared to Q205 , but despite that it held the #1 slot with 26.4% revenue share. Three out of the top 5 vendors (Network Appliance, IBM, and CA) posted robust results for the quarter with more than 25% year-over-year revenue growth each. ...IDC profile, Storage Software


Simi Valley, CA - September 8, 2006 - NovaStor Software launches version 7.5 of NovaBACKUP. The software includes new Copy & Mirror technology that is also distributed as stand-alone solution. Other new features include a new interface for enhanced data security. ...NovaStor profile, Storage Security


Amsterdam, Netherlands - September 8, 2006 - Ciprico Inc. introduced the MediaVault 4440 - at IBC. The MediaVault 4440 is designed for portable digital media applications including editing, real-time 2K and 4K film playback, uncompressed HD capture to disk, and digital intermediate.

The unit is configured with 4 removable Video Pods, each containing its own 4Gb Fibre Channel controller and 10 2.5" SATA disk drives, for a total of 4 channels and 40 drives, resulting in a combined data transfer rate of over 1GB/s and a total capacity up to 6.4TB. Each vPOD is designed to function as a self contained RAID unit which can be used remotely when inserted into another 4440 enclosure. The benefit will be evident to users who travel for location shooting, remote editing or post production and need to be able to transport content securely, compactly and easily. The use of 2.5" disk drives is instrumental to the portability feature as these drives are designed for use in the ultimate portable environment - laptop computers.

Ciprico also offers customized, high impact shipping containers specifically designed for shipping the canisters or the entire 4440.

Increased reliability and fault tolerance is delivered with the availability of RAID 6 technology within each vPOD, ensuring both data integrity and read/write performance even in the event of any 2 disk drive failures. This means the 4440 subsystem can sustain up to 8 failed disk drives and still continue to serve the application with maximum read and write throughput. An additional security feature is provided through hardware data encryption so valuable data can be transported without concern of loss or theft. ...Ciprico profile, RAID systems, Storage Events


SAN JOSE, Calif. - September 8, 2006 - Hitachi Global Storage Technologies today named Shinjiro Iwata as Chief Marketing Officer. The CMO position is a newly-created executive seat at HGST. Mr. Iwata replaces Bill Healy who is retiring. Before joining HGST, Mr. Iwata served as CMO for Hitachi's Information and Telco Systems Group. Prior to that he was the CEO at Hitachi Data Systems. Mr. Iwata began his career with Hitachi in 1972. ...Hitachi profile, Storage People


Editor:- September 8, 2006 - a new article written by Thomas Coughlin, President Coughlin Associates, and published today on the Entertainment Storage Alliance web site - provides an interesting vision of the past and future history of the Hard Disk Drive. The Once and Future Hard Disk Drive article also includes graphs of HDD media density (covering the period 1956 to 2010) and shows the main technology inflection points. Coughlin says "Original copy personal and commercial storage in an average tech-savvy home could approach 4.5 TB by 2010 and we expect that personal content will greatly exceed commercial content by 2020 driving enormous growth in personal and home storage requirements." ...read the article, ...Coughlin Associates profile, Entertainment Storage Alliance, Hard disk drives, Storage publications

See also:- book:- the Once and Future King - about King Arthur - which strangely omits any mention of Megabyte's famous ancestor Sir Squeaks-a-Bit
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storage history (1949 till last week) STORAGEsearch SPARC Product Directory ACSL - the publisher