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Tag: data-storage

  • Duracell Ventures into the Lucrative Cloud Storage Market

    Duracell, the battery maker and a subsidiary of Gillette is now offering cloud storage services. The service is offered at an intriguing monthly rate of $US199 for 2TB storage. There is a vast difference between batteries and cloud storage batteries and many people are wondering why Duracell has taken up this venture.

    A dig through the cloud storage service by Duracell indicates that it is not entirely in the business. It mentions Condre, a value added reseller as well as cloud facilitators offering the backup as a service. The facilitators of Condre also offer NAS/cloud storage functions.

    It has not been established whether Duracell is fronting Condre or whether Condre is using the name of Duracell. However, pundits are of the view that Duracell is poised to deliver on its claims of being 250-1000 times quicker than its rivals in the cloud storage service. The cloud storage service also includes the share n sync functions for shuttling data amongst mobile devices and PCs. This is done through the cloud backup as well as a web portal to enable access of data.

    The Duracell’s suite indicates collaboration with StorZon, which is a trademark that is held by Condre. It is said to offer cloud storage services that are Geodiverse including two data centers. Duracell indicates that the data will be stored twice on the premises and twice on the cloud. For now, the service looks to be US only.

  • EMC Q2 Results Better Than Expected, Completes Data Domain Acquisition


    EMC has reported a slight increase in revenue last quarter and provided an optimistic forecast for the second half of the year.

    The announcement came as it completed the USD $2.1 billion acquisition of data deduplication specialist Data Domain.

    The company said that IT budgets have stabilized and customers are more confident about their visibility.

    It reported net income of USD $205.2 million on revenue of USD $3.26 billion, down 11 per cent from a year ago.

    On the revenue front, EMC now projects 2009 sales of USD $13.8 billion compared with previous estimates of $13.5 billion.

    Data Domain, whose acquisition closed today, will contribute USD $200 million in revenue for 2009 and will be neutral to non-GAAP earnings.

    Meanwhile, third quarter revenue is expected to rise 2 to 3 per cent sequentially excluding Data Domain results. Data Domain’s inclusion results in sequential growth of four to five per cent.

    EMC CEO, Joe Tucci, said that EMC expects the company to generate double-digit revenue growth rates.

    "when IT markets resume to a more normal spending rate," he added.

    Meanwhile, the fate of EMC’s current data deduplication partner, Quantum Corp., remains unclear after EMC executives avoided mentioning the firm during the earnings call.

    To most industry watchers, the writing seems to be on the wall for Quantum.

  • Phoenix Introduces Fastest, Most Versatile SSD VME Mass Storage Module


    Phoenix International has unveiled its new VS1-250-SSD Serial Attache SCSI (SAS) or Serial ATA (SATA) based VME data storage plug-in blade.

    The VS1-250-SSD delivers high capacity, high performance data storage – with burst data transfer rate to 300MB/sec and sustained data transfer to 120MB/sec.

    The 6 U module can hold one or two SAS or SATA SSDs with a total capacity up to 512GB.

    It can be interfaced through its front panel connector or its P2 connector.

    The module is intended for military, aerospace and industrial applications requiring rugged, secure and durable mass data storage.

    Other major features of the Phoenix VS1-250-SSD Solid State Disk Module include:

    • Operational temperature from -40o to 85o C
    • Individual point-to-point device connectivity
    • Low power consumption
    • 1,300,000 MTBF
    • Integrated SLC NAND Flash
    • Meets military and IRIG 106-07 declassification standards
    • Advanced flash management for enhanced reliability and durability
    • 80,000 feet operational altitude
    • 50g, 11 ms operational shock
    • 16g rms, 10-2000Hz random vibration

    No information has been released on pricing and availability.

  • Kroll Survey: Employees Are "Wildcard" In Data Storage Practices


    While implementing data storage policies that mandate where company files are to be stored is a popular data-protection measure, employees are not necessarily complying.

    This is leaving organizations vulnerable to data loss, according to a survey.

    Kroll Ontrack found that 40 per cent of individuals surveyed said their companies had a policy regarding where data should be stored.

    However, the survey results also revealed that 61 per cent of respondents "usually" save to a local drive instead of a company network.

    While the risks associated with saving to a local drive could be minimized with an external backup drive or backup software, 44 per cent of respondents said that their preferred storage location was not backed up.

    Jeff Pederson, manager of operations for Ontrack Data Recovery, said saving to a local hard drive on a desktop or laptop more often than not contradicts data storage policies.

    He said regulations usually require employees to save to a network folder.

    "With the majority of employees saving to unprotected, local drives, companies could be at risk for losing anything from project plans and spreadsheets to customer data and financial information," he said.

    Pederson added that having guidelines to save documents to a network better ensures employee data is regularly backed up in accordance with company data retention procedures – and reduces the chance of data loss.

    Brian Lapidus, chief operating officer of Kroll’s Fraud Solutions, a practice of the Background Screening division, said the survey results confirmed its findings.

    "Employees are the wild cards in policies and procedures, he said.

    "Companies must ensure that employees receive ongoing education to understand the risk of actions that do not follow the plan."

    To help businesses avoid losing critical data, Ontrack Data Recovery specialists recommend that companies have a clear, well communicated data storage policy in place for their employees.

    Companies should also ensure that data recovery is included in their overall disaster recovery or business continuity plan.

    To this end, they should identify and partner with a data recovery provider that is able to quickly respond to any type of data loss scenario.

    Pederson said the survey showed that data storage polices do not necessarily safeguard a vast quantity of critical company data.

    "This fact, coupled with the vast number of information-oriented regulations that have been enacted reinforces that companies need to be prepared to respond to data loss at the individual-employee level," he said.

  • Storage To Buck General Drop in IT Hardware Spending


    Spending on storage is the only area of IT hardware that will avoid a drop-off in 2009 as a result of the global financial crisis.

    A newly revised forecast from IDC suggests worldwide investment in information technology will slow significantly next year.

    It will grow 2.6 per cent year over year in 2009, down from IDC’s pre-crisis forecast of 5.9 per cent growth.

    In the United States, IT spending growth is expected to be 0.9 per cent in 2009, much lower than the 4.2 per cent growth forecast in August.

    On a sector basis, software and services will enjoy solid growth while hardware spending, with the exception of storage, is expected to decline in 2009.

    On a regional basis, spending growth in Japan, Western Europe, and the United States will hover around 1 per cent in 2009.

    In contrast, the emerging economies of Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America will continue to experience healthy growth, but at levels notably lower than the double-digit gains previously forecast.

    John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC, said although all the economic forecasts went from up slightly to down drastically in a matter of days, the good news was that IT was in a better position to resist the downward pull of a slowing economy.

    "Technology is already deeply embedded in many mission-critical operations and remains critical to achieving further efficiency and productivity gains," he said. "As a result, IDC expects worldwide IT spending will continue to grow in 2009, albeit at a slower pace."

    Looking beyond 2009, IDC expects IT spending to make a full recovery by the end of the forecast period with growth rates approaching 6.0 per cent in 2012.

    Despite these gains, IDC estimates that more than USD $300 billion in industry revenues will have been lost due to slower spending over the next four years.

  • Internal Cloud Computing Option Avoids Outsourcing Concerns


    Data center software provider, Cassatt Corporation, has announced new service and technology offerings to help companies safely realize "internal cloud computing".

    Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corp, said this was an IT approach that delivers the benefits of cloud computing using the resources that organizations already have inside their data centers.

    He said cloud computing offers great promise by having third parties deliver the computing resources needed to run applications as an on-demand service, with a lot of the IT infrastructure invisible to the user.

    "However, at this point most IT professionals are not comfortable outsourcing Relevant Products/Services the mission-critical parts of their sensitive internal applications to an external cloud provider," he said.

    "They are concerned about availability, vendor lock-in, not having the control they need, and having to rebuild these applications from scratch with proprietary tools running on provider-specific platforms."

    To directly address these problems, the updated Cassatt offerings help customers implement cloud-style computing environments using their existing systems, inside the firewalls of their data centers without having to modify their current hardware or software.

    Coleman said the resulting "internal cloud" can provide the same operational efficiency, fault tolerance, and energy Relevant Products/Services savings promised by external clouds, but without the worries over security Relevant Products/Services, compliance, lack of control, or the need or delay required to change or replace their current applications.

  • IT Decision Makers Unclear About Unified Storage

    Unified storage has yet to make an impact on IT decision makers, with few even able to define what it stands for and even less aware of the business benefits of implementation, according to a survey.

    The study was conducted by Gartner and ONStor among 1600 IT and business decision makers from four continents and over 37 countries who attended the recent Gartner Data Center Summit and SNW Europe.

    It found that only 58 per cent of those questioned were familiar with the term unified storage.

    Unified storage has been defined as a single integrated storage infrastructure that functions as a unification engine to simultaneously support Fibre Channel, IP Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) data formats.

    Despite this, of the 50 per cent who said they could define it, 43 per cent thought it referred to virtualised storage and 56 per cent believed it was a combination of back up and storage.

    Narayan Venkat, vice president of corporate marketing at ONStor, said more had to be done to ensure IT professional were better briefed about unified storage.

    “What is absolutely clear from these top line survey findings is that the market needs more education on the benefits of unified storage, and that is where the vendor community needs to join forces with analysts to drive this message home," he said.

    Other key findings highlighted:

    • 21 per cent of the same who had heard of unified storage believed it would deliver a lower total cost of ownership

    • A further 21 per cent believed it would provide a more flexible network moving forward

    • The ability to protect the current investment in infrastructure was only cited by 8 per cent and only 6 per cent felt it would reduce operating costs and capital expenditure

  • IT Managers Pushed To Cut Carbon Emissions


    Almost two-thirds of IT managers are being pressured to reduce their carbon footprints, according to a survey.

    The results show that 61 per cent are being directed to cut down on their energy usage and 60 per cent plan to reduce their carbon footprint within the next 18 months.

    The poll, commissioned by VAR Zycko among IT managers in the UK, also found that 70 per cent already have some green measures in place.

    These range from measures such as remote working and video conferencing facilities to reducing the need for employees to travel.

    The survey into green IT issues currently faced by medium to large UK businesses also identified major hurdles on the way to reducing carbon emissions.

    Almost two thirds (67%) of IT managers are unaware of how much power their data centre draws and less than half (45%) currently enforce shutting down of computers at night and on weekends.

    Six per cent have no policies in place at all.

    Lack of IT resources and cost were cited as the biggest barriers to becoming green (52%), with 23 per cent claiming they simply do not know what their options are. When asked where they get their information on environmental issues, 39 per cent claimed they rely on their suppliers.

  • London Council Gives Virtualisation Green Light


    Faced with 100 per cent year-on-year data growth, the London council of Hillingdon’s IT team has decided to virtualise its servers.

    With a population of almost a quarter of a million, Hillingdon is one of London’s largest local authorities.

    It has responsibility for running schools, social services, waste collection and roads within the borough.

    Now the council has created a sustainable IT environment by replacing its disparate array of servers and storage hardware with a greener virtual environment using Compellent and VMware.

    It took the virtualisation decision after being faced with the rapid growth of employees’ e-mail boxes, the need to retain documents such as benefits assessments records, and the increased use of digital images in planning applications and property and highway inspections.

    Roger Bearpark, assistant head of ICT for the Borough of Hillingdon, said they were looking for a new storage solution that could automatically manage data and drive down the cost per TB of stored data over the life of the SAN.

    “It had to provide us with affordable system resilience and also contribute to a greener IT infrastructure,” he said.

    Virtualising the servers with VMware and the storage with Compellent enabled Hillingdon to reduce 94 production servers to just three, and to reduce the number of server rooms it had from three to two.

    The subsequent power reduction from 34kW to 1.1kW led directly to Hillingdon saving GBP £20,000 on its annual energy bill.
    The green IT initiative enabled it to reduce its carbon footprint by 20 per cent over 18 months.