March, 2008

Are storage vendors squeezing dedupe?

As the first vendor to make data deduplication a key piece of the backup picture, Data Domain has benefitted most from the dedupe craze. And now it has the most at stake when deduplication becomes mainstream. If all the major storage vendors offer deduplication, there goes at least part of Data...

EMC Centera exec leaves for CAS startup

EMC's Centera has been something of a question mark for many in the industry over the last 6-8 months. Rumors seem to continually swirl around a major overhaul or replacement for the first content-addressed storage (CAS) system to hit the market. Those rumors and speculation persist even after...

QLogic president quietly slips away

QLogic opened last week by declaring it has 8-Gbit/s HBAs and switches available, and ended the week by quietly disclosing the resignation of its president and COO Jeff Benck.

The connection between the two pieces of news isn't yet clear, but until Friday both 8-gig and Benck were...

Interesting tidbits from around the storage blogosphere

The storage market is a vibrant one right now, and as social networking concepts like blogs become more popular in the corporate world, the storage industry has a lively, varied blogosphere to match. Below are examples of some of the more interesting commentary I've seen lately, in case you missed...

NetApp’s messaging and users’ experiences

NetApp has been on the radar screen more than usual this week, with the announcement of its rebranding campaign followed by its Analyst Day 24 hourse later.

When I've written about NetApp over the past few months, I've received feedback from its customers talking about the...

What’s your digital footprint?

The other day I blogged about an update to the "Digital Universe" report EMC sponsored with IDC, which amended estimates of the size of said digital universe...

8-gig era officially begins

QLogic this week became the third vendor to claim it is the first to ship 8 Gbit/sg Fibre Channel equipment. QLogic says its 8Gb PCI-Express HBAs and 8-gig switches are available as a Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit  and from QLogic distributors. Although other vendors...

Email archiving: focus or experience?

Last week I was briefed by Internet security software company Trend Micro on its new email archive offering, dubbed the Trend Micro Message Archiver, which was launched Monday.

The product, from a storage geek's point of view, is about as bleeding-edge as its name. It has the usual...

VMware vs. Partners: chatter about conflict increases

Our friends at Homeland Security are known to use the term "chatter" to refer to the level of terrorist communications they're intercepting at any given time. Any large consortium of humans will have its own chatter, with its own quirky patterns and trends, and the storage market is no...

EMC/IDC report: in storage, corporations are getting personal

EMC and IDC have published an update to their Digital Universe report, which met with skepticism when it was originally published last March. We're generally skeptical of...