Storage

Overheard: Is CNet - CBS marriage the beginning of a trend?

This deal raises the question of whether any CBS competitors will decide to get into the game of buying Internet content companies. Peter Cohan, CBS to buy CNet: Who’s next?

Peter offers three possible targets:

• TheStreet.com (NASDAQ: TSCM) - This provider of business, investment and ratings content has $65 million in sales and a market cap of $236 million.
• TechTarget (NASDAQ: TTGT) - This provider of online content for buyers and sellers of corporate information technology (IT) products has $95 million in sales and a $531 million market cap.
• WebMD Health Corp (NASDAQ: WBMD) - This provider health information services to consumers, physicians and other healthcare professionals, employers and health plans has $332 million in sales and it’s market capitalization is $1.7 billion’

The Associated Press reports that CBS  is buying CNet  for $1.75 billion.

Overheard: New Internet on its way — thanks again to CERN

“We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.” Tony Doyle as quoted in Coming soon: superfast internet

Yes, that’s right folks. The Internet could soon be made obsolete by a new “grid” system that’s going to transfer data 10,000 times faster than our current broadband Internet connections. Think of it — 10,000 times faster!!!

The Grid’s main purpose is to track the data associated with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider “big bang project” — although the Grid will also be made available to some researchers. Current thinking is that CERN is reinventing the Internet and no matter what you think about CERN messing with sub-atomic particles, the idea of a new Internet is intriguing — especially with recent predictions of our “using up” the Internet we have by 2010.

The new Grid has routing centers, dedicated fiber optic cables and over 50,000 servers — and the potential to offer everything from HD video telephony to the transmission of holographic images.

Overheard: Memristor is ultimate unifying storage technology

The Memristor is the [so called] fourth basic circuit device after the capacitor, the resistor and the inductor. Like the capacitor, the Memristor has a memory; it remembers the amount of charge that goes through it and will change its resistance according to the amount of charge that flowed through it… Desire Athow, HP boffins design Memristor device; could replace DRAM technology one day

The technology called Memory Resistor or Memristor could bring forth a new generation of computer which would power-on instantly [no boot required] and could be used to process information in a similar fashion as the human brain. More importantly, it could mean that HP has discovered the ultimate, “unifying” storage technology, which combines DRAM and Magnetic storage properties.

Overheard: InPhase Tapestry is just a WORM optical drive

Essentially, the InPhase guys have built yet another WORM (write once, read many) optical drive. Yes, the 1.6 TB capacity is impressive, considering that the only recently has the new Blu-ray DVD-like format made it to market and the proposed dual-layer Blu-ray disks top out at ~50 GB. However, modern 52X CD-ROM drives have a random seek of ~90 milliseconds, significantly faster than the InPhase spec. for their drive. Dossy, InPhase Technologies to publically demonstrate “Tapestry” holographic data storage drive

When I saw that Ivy had picked holographic disk drive as today’s Word of the Day, I got all excited. Then Dossy brought me back to earth.

Video: Recovering data from solid-state hardware

Scott Moulton explains how he recovers data from flash drives.  

Overheard:Blade servers good for disaster recovery plans

Since blade servers are densely packed, the companies offering blade chassis solutions have put a great deal of time and effort into creating highly efficient power distribution systems and cooling capabilities within the chassis. On average, a blade chassis uses 30% less power than the same number of 1U or 2U servers. Each watt saved in power equals a watt of cooling saved. Anne Skamarock, Blade servers well-suited for disaster recovery plans

Overheard: EMC enters the cloud

Going with “SaaS”, as it’s called, is a major switch if you’re a hardware company, since it entails hosting your proprietary applications and/or your customers’ data on your own machines, providing access via the broadband Web, and charging for a subscription to the service, rather than for big iron. Wade Roush, EMC Gets Serious About Software-as-a-Service

The company announced today that it has created a new business unit, EMC Software as a Service, with “MozyEnterprise” as the first product offering.

MozyEnterprise is a version of the existing Mozy Pro service that’s been hardened for major organizations based on Mozy’s experience working with 10,000 existing business customers—including General Electric, which turned to Mozy to back up all 350,000 of its desktops and laptops.

The new software installs itself on company-owned desktops, laptops, and remote Windows servers, then copies encrypted versions of each machine’s files to servers at EMC data centers over broadband connections. IT managers can oversee the backup process using a Web-based administrative console.

Overheard: External SATA devices won’t need separate power connection

Its fast transfer rate and efficient protocol makes eSATA the highest performing external mainstream storage connection, Enhancing eSATA with power delivery will provide a new level of convenience to the designer and the end user. By eliminating the need for a separate power connection, customers can more easily expand their storage, making Serial ATA an even more attractive solution for mainstream storage applications. Knut Grimsrud, SATA-IO president and Intel Fellow Quoted in New eSATA technology to cut off the power cable

Overheard: EMC to educate customers about using flash SSDs for big-iron storage arrays

SSDs have been around for decades while disk sales have surged. Using flash makes them more compact and power efficient than the older RAM-based models, but the concept is no different and the performance actually worse than RAM. What is different is that a major storage company is now going to actually educate their risk-averse corporate customers about the benefits of SSDs. Robin Harris, High-end flash drive goes mainstream

Tour: CNBC’s graphics SAN