MOUNTAIN
VIEW, Calif - October 10, 2007 - Google Inc. today announced a new
version of its search appliance hardware. Search results and security
haven been improved. More than 10,000 companies now rely on
Google
enterprise search appliances. "When we launched the first Google Search Appliance 5 years ago, we had a vision to make search inside of business as simple and effective as searching on Google.com," said Dave Girouard, VP and general manager of Google Enterprise. "By combining Google's deep knowledge in search with more understanding and control for environments behind the firewall, we are helping businesses keep pace with the velocity of information." ...Google profile October 10, 2007 - The U.S. International Trade Commission has voted to institute an investigation of certain hard disk drives. The products at issue in this investigation are hard disk drives made using dissipative ceramic bonding tips, components of such drives, and products containing such drives. The investigation is based on a complaint filed by Steven F. Reiber and Mary L. Reiber of Lincoln, CA, on September 10, 2007. The complaint alleges violations of section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 in the importation into the US of certain hard disk drives, components thereof, and products containing the same that infringe patents owned by the complainants. The ITC has identified the following as respondents in this investigation:- Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, HP and Dell. The ITC has not yet made any decision on the merits of the case. Editor's comments:- stories about storage patents are a yawn for most readers. The difference in this case is that - depending which way the ITC decides - one possible outcome could be a ban on hard drive imports - until a satisfactory licensing deal was done. Chestnut Ridge, NY - October 10, 2007 - LeCroy Corp announces the launch of a new 13 GHz Test Solution for next generation serial data standards. With a bandwidth of 13GHz, a sample rate of 40GS/s, and 100Mpts/ch memory; LeCroy's SDA13000 troubleshoots challenging physical layer problems during developmentand compliance testing of next generation serial data standards such as FB-DIMM, Fibre Channel, SAS, SATA, InfiniBand and PCI-Express. ...LeCroy profile, Storage Analyzers FREMONT, CA - October 9, 2007 - Panasas, Inc. announced the Panasas Tiered Parity Architecture which the company claims is the most significant extension to disk array data reliability since Panasas CTO Garth Gibson's pioneering RAID research at UC-Berkeley in 1988. With the release of the ActiveScale 3.2 operating environment, Panasas will offer an innovative end-to-end Tiered-Parity architecture that addresses the primary causes of storage reliability problems and provides the industry's first end-to-end data integrity checking capability. Traditional RAID implementations protect against disk failures by calculating and storing parity data along with the original data. In the past 10 years, individual disk drives have become approximately 10x more reliable and over 250x denser than those protected by the first generation RAID designs in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, the number of disk media failures expected during each read over the surface of a disk grows proportionately with the massive increase in density and has now become the most common failure mode for RAID. A RAID disk failure can cause loss of all the data in a volume which may be tens of terabytes or more. Recovery of the lost data from tape (assuming that is all backed up) can take days or even weeks. Other storage system vendors recognize this same issue and apply RAID 6, often called double parity RAID, to address this problem. Double parity schemes only treat the symptom of the failure, not the cause, and they carry substantial cost and performance penalties, which will only get worse as disk drive densities continue to increase. Panasas Tiered Parity architecture directly addresses the root cause of the problem, not the symptom. Solving the storage reliability problem caused by these new 1TB and larger disks allows Panasas to build larger and more reliable storage that allows users to get more value from their data and are less expensive for IT to support. "The challenges with storage system reliability today have little to do with overall disk reliability, which is what RAID was designed to address in 1988. The issues that we see today are directly related to disk density and require new approaches. Most secondary disk failures today are the result of media errors, which have become 250x more likely to occur during a RAID failed-disk rebuild over the last 10 years," said Garth Gibson, CTO of Panasas. "Tiered Parity allows us to tackle media errors with an architecture that can counter the effects of increasing disk density. It also solves data path reliability challenges beyond those addressed by traditional RAID and extends parity checking out to the client or server node. Tiered Parity provides the only end-to-end data integrity checking capability in the industry." ...Panasas profile Editor's comments:- the problem of data corruption in large data sets because of obsolete technology assumptions built into hard disks, interface and RAID products has been looming for several years. You can see articles and research about this on the storage reliability page. Is the solution more reliable hard drives? better interfaces? or a smarter storage OS? Users can't wait another 5 years for ideal solutions because the symptoms are there today when you look. The Panasas solution sounds like a pragmatic tactical approach for some customers - but the industry is a long way from a better storage reliability mousetrap. SAN JOSE, Calif - October 9, 2007 - Quantum Corp today announced the Quantum Encryption Key Manager. Available for use with Quantum's Scalar tape libraries Q-EKM simply and cost-effectively centralizes key management for backup, restore and disaster recovery processes. Q-EKM is a Java software program that generates, protects, stores and manages encryption keys. By generating encryption keys out of the data path or "out of band," Q-EKM does not impact backup performance and is application agnostic, ensuring easier and faster decryption of data from LTO-4 media. In contrast, solutions that utilize an application-based key manager may transmit "in band," using backup resources, or may require the same system that wrote the data to be used in the event of a restore. As a result, these solutions can be especially problematic in distributed enterprise environments running multiple backup applications and tape libraries. ...Quantum profile Cambridge, Mass - October 9, 2007 - According to a recent market survey conducted by Dataupia Corp and the Business Intelligence Network, when it comes to data warehouse platforms, today's enterprises favor incremental augmentation over rip and replace solutions. 75% of those polled said it would take more than a year to revamp their infrastructure and implement a new data warehouse solution. Approximately half (53%) estimated it could take 1 to 3 years to gain budget approval for such a project. While nearly half (46%) reported that the cost would fall between $1 and $3 million. The thought of revamping a data warehouse infrastructure was so daunting to enterprises that when asked the likelihood of their organization approving a new platform, respondents reported that only 20% would be likely to do so even if a good business case could be made. ...Dataupia profile Diamond Bar, Calif - October 8, 2007 - Advanced Media, Inc. announces its new 32GB SATA flash solid state disk drive. The new Ridata brand SSD offers performance that is almost twice as fast a conventional hard disk and uses half as much power. A 64GB version of this 2.5" SATA drive is promised in late November. The data transfer rates are 60MB/s for maximum sequential read and 48MB/s for maximum sequential write. MTBF is quoted as more than 4,000,000 hours and write endurance is more than 2,000,000 cycles. ...Advanced Media profile Editor's comments:- there are 27 manufacturers of 2.5" SSDs and this new product, which is aimed at the notebook market, is unremarkable in capacity or performance. "Me-too" products like this have to compete on price and availability - which is good news for oems and their customers. TAIPEI, TAIWAN - October 8, 2007 - Silicon Storage Technology, Inc. and Insyde Software Corp. today announced the joint development of FlashMate technology - a new access mode for notebook PCs. FlashMate uses a fully integrated hardware, firmware and software architecture to provide alternative hybrid-drive functionality to notebooks and total access to hard disk drive content even while the CPU is off. By managing the peripherals, FlashMate enables a wide range of new applications while the main system is either in pre-boot, standby, hibernate or completely shut down. FlashMate enhances the functionality of Microsoft Windows Vista SideShow and other 3rd party applications by giving notebook users access to hard-disk data and various applications via the notebook's USB interface without having to engage the CPU. "Current hybrid-drive products available on the market, either as nonvolatile cache embedded in the hard disk drive or integrated on the motherboard, have enhanced some of the capabilities of notebook computers, but these solutions only scratch the surface of what is possible," said Bing Yeh, president and CEO, SST. "Our FlashMate technology expands beyond hybrid-drive functionality by enabling notebook users to conveniently perform tasks without having to turn on the computer, such as transferring files from an external memory, getting contact information from an Outlook address book, listening to MP3 music or checking flight arrival times. FlashMate marks a new and exciting market opportunity for SST..." ...SST profile Mountain View, Calif., and Armonk, N.Y. - October 8, 2007 - Google and IBM today announced an initiative to promote new software development methods which will help students and researchers address the challenges of internet-scale applications in the future. For this project, the 2 companies have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects. The University of Washington was the first to join the initiative. ...Google profile, ...IBM profile SANTA CLARA, Calif - October 8, 2007 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the formation of the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group to bring together global leaders in government, broadcasting, education, and library services to share best practices for digital archiving. PASIG will help provide support for organizations challenged with preserving and archiving important research and cultural heritage materials. Founding members include The Alberta Library, The British Library, Johns Hopkins University, University of Oxford, Stanford University, The Texas Digital Library, and other leading global libraries and universities. ...Sun Microsystems profile, ...PASIG , Storage ORGS, article:- PR Strategies: Remember, the web has no memory!, The Internet Archive. |
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