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Tag: data

  • Will GPS-enabled Smartphones Avoid Handset Slowdown?


    Demand for GPS-enabled mobile phones will slow in 2009 but will avoid the fall in shipments expected to affect handsets generally.

    At least that’s what ABI Research is predicting. It forecasts that feature-rich smartphones will post year-to-year unit growth through the current economic downturn.

    For 2009 that translates into a climb in shipments GPS-enabled phones to 240 million units, an increase of 6.4 per cent over 2008.

    This contrasts with a drop of 4—5 per cent for global handset shipments generally in 2009, according to a study by the researchers.

    For the period through to 2014, the analysts suggest demand for smartphones will increase at an average annual unit shipment rate of 19 per cent.

    ABI says this "surprising performance" will be driven by the ongoing demand for feature-rich smartphones, including the Apple iPhone 3G, RIM’s BlackBerry devices and Nokia N series phones among a growing list.

    During the period, the report says GPS chipsets will continue to penetrate this segment; nine of every ten smartphones will contain GPS ICs in 2014, compared with one in three in 2008.

    George Perros, senior analyst with ABI Research, said that falling component prices and increasing consumer awareness of handset locationcapabilities will keep demand for GPS-enabled phones healthy, in spite of the slumping global economic picture.

    Other factors that will continue the trend toward the inclusion of GPS functionality in handsets include the spread of open source operating systems such as Google’s Android.

    It provides application specific interfaces (APIs) that allow software developers to create location-based content for mobile devices.
    The report also highlights the continuing emergence of navigation and map-based applications for handsets.

    "As the quality of positioning technology in handsets improves and the cost of including it declines, GPS location technology will approach the status of a standard device feature," said Perros.

    "We are approaching the point where location awareness will be synonymous with smart devices, a point where personal navigation, social spatial knowledge, and location-specific contextual information will be assumed handset capabilities."

    If accurate, the report’s predictions will certainly be welcomed by smartphone manufacturers.

    We’d be interested in hearing your view on the figures.

  • Troubled Seagate Offers Free Firmware Upgrade


    Seagate is to provide a free firmware upgrade for customers whose 1TB Barracuda drives have failed.

    The storage company said it has isolated a "potential firmware issue" that is believed to be responsible for a high rate of drive failure globally.

    A free data recover serviceis also to be offered to those affected.

    Seagate said in a statement that the firmware problem affects "some" Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives and "related drive families based on this product platform".

    It notes that "in some circumstances, the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on".

    Consumers are being advised to contact Seagate’s support site, its call center or to send an email.

    While the company insists the firmware problem should not cause data loss it is offering to help in the event that it has been.

    "There is no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive," said the statement.

    "But if you are unable to access your data due to this issue, Seagate will provide free data recovery services."

    Last week Seagate announced that it was laying off 10 per cent of its worldwide staff and that long-serving chief executive, Bill Watkins, had resigned.

    Company chairman, Stephen Luczo, is to replace Watkins as CEO.

    Seagate is to report its results on 21 January.

  • Pioneer 400GB Blu-ray discs will play on PS3


    There are undoubtedly pros and cons to having a single disc that can pack in 400GB of data – movies, music…whatever you can throw at it.

    Pioneer is preparing for release a 16-layer Blu-ray disc that not only offers this colossal storage capacity but will play back on most current standalone Blu-ray players, including the Sony PlayStation 3.

    The manufacturer insists that the read-only disc will be backwards compatible with existing players because the specifications of the pick-up head (PUH) of the disc are the same as those for blank BD discs.

    Currently, Blu-ray discs are either single layer 25GB discs or 50GB dual-layer discs.

    The new multi-layer disc is based on current Blu-ray discs but made from a new material of reflective layers of Dielectric.

    It is read-only (ROM) but there are plans for rewritable discs by 2010-2012.

    What is still not clear is whether current players will be able to read all 16 layers of the 400GB disc, rather than just the first two.

    The company also added that it will begin manufacturing 40-layer 1TB discs in 2013.

  • Storage-as-a-service Market Rife With Opportunity


    Storage-as-a-service is more than just a viable alternative, according to two new IDC multi-client studies.

    An IDC survey of 812 firms reveals that demand for online storage services is very strong in small, mid-size, and large firms that are facing budgetary and IT staffing pressures.

    These companies are evaluating online services for backup/disaster recovery, long-term record retention, business continuity, and availability.

    On the consumer front, the storage-as-a-service opportunity is exploding as individuals need to store fast growing volumes of digital data.

    They are increasingly considering online services, as an alternative to a product purchase, for backing up, sharing, and preserving data long term.

    In both the commercial and consumer segments, the availability of storage-as-a-service is disrupting traditional storage software markets as it changes how individuals and firms access storage capacity and procure software functions.

    But, more importantly, storage-as-a-service is a precursor to the longer term cloud storage and cloud computing opportunity, IDC reveals.

    Brad Nisbet, program manager for Storage and Data Management Services at IDC, said that as consumers and business organizations continue to generate vast amounts of data and seek optimum methods to store and protect them, the growth of storage capacities delivered through storage-as-a-service offerings will outpace traditional storage architectures.

    "With storage-as-a-service capacity growing over 65 per cent from 174 petabytes in 2007 to over 2.1 exabytes in 2012, the market is rife with opportunity," he said.

    Laura DuBois, program director for Storage Software at IDC, said that today, in the commercial context, online backup and archiving services are the immediate manifestation of the longer term opportunity for a series of cloud-based services which will impact the storage industry.

    "Storage-as-a-service will take place in two phases: first as a way to enable protection, recovery, long-term retention, and business continuity, and second as a by-product of larger cloud computing initiatives," she said.

    Among the key survey results on the commercial side are:

    • Suppliers that offer a breadth of services to satisfy a range of use cases for storage-as-a-service will be a step ahead.
    • Storage-as-a-service is of interest as a lower cost alternative to on-premise solutions and secondarily in support of limited IT staff.
    • Firms show a preference for suppliers whose focus is on online services and for those that have a strong technical background.

    Among the key survey findings on the consumer side are:

    • Suppliers that understand the differences between the large population of consumers merely aware of online backup and those considering it will be at an advantage.
    • Motivators for early adoption of online backup have been for recovery, but individuals currently evaluating are motivated by anywhere files accessibility.
    • Consumers indicated a clear preference to get an online backup service from a dedicated online backup company, rather than from an IT supplier, phone company, or the like.

  • Researchers Opt For COPAN's Fast Access and Security


    One of the world’s leading life science research institutes announced today that it has chosen a COPAN Systems-based storage solution to meet its demanding data storage needs.

    The Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) has a strong record of innovation in the molecular biology of disease.

    Researching, developing, testing and delivering these medical breakthroughs require generating, analyzing and retaining huge quantities of data.

    This critical data is not necessarily accessed regularly but must be kept instantly available at all times for crucial analysis.

    Friedrich Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland

    Dean Flanders, head of informatics at FMI, said no other company on the market could match the COPAN Systems solution in such a demanding environment.

    “Our competitive review found that no other system could provide this kind of high performance, scalability and cost-effectiveness to meet our persistent data needs," he said.

    "This means we can provide fast access to a vast amount of data in a very small footprint.”

    Located in Basel, Switzerland, a large proportion of FMI’s life science data is generated from microscopy, but new projects led the institute to seek a storage solution to support a wider range of data.

    A single new piece of laboratory equipment can radically alter the organization’s storage needs.

    For example, two new Illumina Genome Analyzers are each capable of producing up to two terabytes of data per week.

    In this environment, FMI sought a cost-effective solution for backing up and restoring multi-terabyte file systems while coping with limited power, cooling and space resources.

    The institute, part of the Novartis Research Foundation, needed to innovate beyond a traditional file server system which leaves too much persistent data on expensive tier one storage, straining existing infrastructure.

    A traditional HSM system was out of the question since the high volume and file size of FMI’s life science data meant a tape system would present slow access rates, data integrity issues and no online access.

    FMI was also concerned about pressure on space, power and cooling resources as their data production grows and their system scales.

    To meet these challenges, FMI selected COPAN Systems’ disk-based Virtual Tape Library, because of its fast access times with the security and reliability of disk.

    The new highly scalable tiered file system has almost no impact to the existing cooling and power infrastructure.

    By migrating persistent data to the new COPAN Systems solution, FMI frees up more expensive tier one storage for its original purpose – modifying and storing quickly changing transactional data.

    Some of the key benefits of the new system for FMI are:

    • Scalability: The system currently holds 40 terabytes of data but can scale in one rack to 896 terabytes without redesigning or changing cooling requirements.
    • Simplicity: By writing a file to FMI’s HSM file system within a defined period of time, the file can be automatically copied to the COPAN Systems MAID platform and another copy created to tape in a remote location as required.
    • Efficiency: COPAN Systems’ ultra-dense disk configurations are enhanced using Enterprise MAID technology. COPAN Systems powers off disks that have no outstanding IO requests, thus reducing power consumption by around 85 percent.

  • Enterprises Failing To Properly Encrypt Backup Data


    Backup tapes are being neglected by administrators, according to a study conducted jointly by security vendor Thales Group and Trust Catalyst.

    The results of the survey of 330 large enterprises worldwide showed that 35 per cent don’t know if they will encrypt their backup tapes.

    Failure to have a backup tape encryption plan could place an organization’s data at risk, leading it into a breach of compliance – and possible heavy financial losses.

    Kevin Bocek, director of product marketing at Thales, said storage departments were often more concerned with the cost and speed of data recovery than with encryption.

    Enterprises also felt they lacked access to technology adequate for enterprise-grade tape encryption.

    "Traditionally, storage has been a domain in and of itself, and IT security has been focusing on front-facing business applications, so they don’t pay that much attention to security," he said.

    "Previously, tape encryption technology used to be bolted on or would be an application used for general backup, and some didn’t trust those to encrypt their tapes for backup."

    The situation is changing, as more and more applications come with built-in encryption. However, a new problem then emerges – managing the encryption keys.

    If these are lost, then so is the data.

    The Thales study found that most people do not know where to store their encryption keys. More than 40 per cent of the survey’s respondents answered that they didn’t know where to store keys for seven out of 13 encryption apps.

    Most of the remainder stored their encryption keys in software or on a disk, while very few stored the keys in a dedicated appliance.

    Key management issues would continue to be an issue for backup media, according to Bocek.

  • There's No Such Thing As Too Much Storage

    As demand for mobile data storage keeps rising, the hard drive industry needs to work harder at adapting its technology and products to keep pace.


    Storage.biz-news.com spoke to Daniel Mauerhofer, of storage giant Western Digital, to find out more about this evolving market.

    Desktop computing remains the largest market for hard drives but the young upstart – consumer electronics – is the fastest growing.

    Demand for data storage is soaring in everything from PDAs, navigation systems and automotive applications to handheld devices that store music, books, news content, movies and television programs.

    In parallel with this is the need for portable data collection devices, something storage giant Western Digital (WD) has been quick to pick up on.

    It recently launched My Passport, a 500 GB capacity portable USB drive that is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

    Not so long ago it would have been inconceiveable to imagine how most consumers would use that amount of storage capacity – let alone in a mobile format.

    Yet Daniel Mauerhofer, senior PR manager EMEA for WD, said that since storage space was now quickly eaten up by even modest amounts of photo, video and music files, finding a use for half a Terabyte of storage wasn’t that difficult.

    He said the advent of compact cameras with the capacity for ever-larger resolution meant even just storing photographs required a great deal of memory space.

    “There’s no such thing as too much storage these days,” he said.

    WD was founded in Lake Forest, California in 1970 and has been manufacturing internal hard drives since 1990. It moved into the external drive market four years ago.

    While its principal markets – desktop and notebook computing – are expected to continue growing strongly, the launch of the My Passport portable series positions it strongly in the consumer electronics sector.

    This hard drive market, which today accounts for sales of 81 million units worth more than USD $6 billion, is expected to grow to 220 million units in 2010 – a compound annual growth rate of 29 per cent.

    Mauerhofer said external drives generated very little revenue for WD three years ago.

    “Now they represent a fifth of our turnover. It’s a billion dollar business now,” he said. “People are spending considerable time on the internet and its penetration is getting better, so people are downloading more and more. We do not see that stopping.”

    For this reason, the consumer rather than corporate user is seen as being the principal buyer of My Passport portable drives.

    This is borne out by the sleek design and color choices for the drives – a far step from the customary image of external drives as functional “blocks”.

    Technology is evolving to cope with the ever-increasing demand for portable storage

    Mauerhofer said the industry currently used Perpindicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), which still had potential for greater capacity.
    So much so that he predicted that within the next 18 months a 1 Terabyte storage drive would become available.

    “There is a big need in the B2B enterprise space for huge capacity coupled with small form factor and it’s a safe bet to say you will find them in our portable products as well,” he said.

    However, Mauerhofer said there would come a point when even the PMR technology reached a capacity limit. This would open up the market to replacement technology such as Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording.

    The consumers’ appetite for storage appears insatiable – but technology has managed to keep ahead of the game. Can it continue to do so?

  • Creativity the Key to Secure Data Backup

    Guus Leeuw jr, president & CEO of ITPassion Ltd, urges creativity in the way data is stored.

    Any piece of electronic information needs to be stored somewhere and somehow. This should guarantee access to that piece of information over the years.

    You want that information backed up, in case a disaster strikes, so that you can restore and access it again. For some information, a need exists to keep it for a long period of time, three or seven years.

    Let’s focus on backup and restore for a moment. Often, a system or its data is backed up for disaster recovery purposes.

    Tapes are then eventually sent off-site for safe storage. Such tapes must be re-introduced to a restore environment. What happens with the tape while it is in secure storage is often unknown to the Enterprise.

    A tape that is sent for off-site storage contains some form of catalogue to identify the tape and its contents.
    This catalogue, in extreme cases, must hold enough information to retrieve the stored data, even if one had to re-install a new backup environment due to disaster.

    Backup solutions conforming to the NDMP standard could utilise a pre-described recipe to store the data on the tape, in form of well-quantified storage records. Anybody with a conforming reader application could then retrieve the data off the tape and try to inspect it.

    This is a potential security risk, especially in light of recent events of lost data and the concern that that caused with the general public. It would be good if the backups were duly encrypted so that even a good hacker cannot crack the contents of the tape, which is supposedly important, considering that a lot of Government Agencies deal with private data.

    Equally important is the fraud that we hear about so often in the news lately: Thrown-away computers that get shipped to some far-away location, where the hard disks are inspected for private data such as credit card and other “useful” information. It would be good if a PC had a little program that wipes all data securely off the disk, before people turn it off one last time.

    Governments have done what it takes to support this kind of security: Air Force System Security Instructions 5020, CESG, German VSITR, just to name a few. Tools are not hard to find, however they are generally not for free, and in my opinion, Governments can do more to publish the availability of this type of product.

    Talking of storage, let’s focus on the part of the storage infrastructure that is mostly “forgotten”, but very critical: the fibre optical network between the server equipment and the actual storage equipment.

    With the current trend to reduce carbon footprint and hence save the planet, there is another aspect of virtualisation that is actually more critical to business than the reduction of carbon footprint alone. That aspect is cost savings. Did you know that you can slash your annual IT cost by at least 40 per cent when opting for virtualised server environments alone: You need less hardware, which is the biggest cost, and overall you would spend less on power and cooling.

    As these virtualised environments support more and more guest environments, simply because the underlying physical layer gets more powerful, a faster and better access to the back-end storage systems is required.

    Speeds of up to 8Gbps are not unheard of in the industry for your storage network. Even storage devices start supporting 8Gbps connection speeds. Do you need it? Not always. If you’re supporting several I/O-intensive guest servers, you might be surprised how much more throughput you can achieve over 8Gbps bandwidth versus over 4Gpbs bandwidth.

    Implementing Microsoft Exchange environments on virtualised hardware becomes very possible. Especially if you can achieve end-to-end, virtual server to storage, guaranteed data paths as if your virtual environment were a physical environment.

    Hosting for multiple Government Agencies starts to wander into the realm of the possible as well. If all Agencies in a County were to put their IT together, great things can happen to the overall cost of running IT at the Government.

    Sharing knowledge and space wherever possible would seem a good strategy to follow up on, especially now that the public is intense on reducing Government Expenditure, increasing the success of Government IT Projects, and, last but least, enforcing the reduction of carbon footprint, which is also supported by the Government itself.

    Overall a good many ways exist to increase the capabilities of storage, backup and restore, and archiving. It is time that the IT industry becomes creative in this area.

  • New High Speed Camera Memory Stick

    Sony model ideal upgrade for high performance digital cameras and HD camcorders

    As files get bigger, so the pressure for flash memory grows.

    The latest offering from Sony Recording Media & Energy is one solution for users needing high capacity and high speed data transfer.
    The Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo HX comes with 4GB or 8GB capacity and a read speed of 20MB/second (15MB/second write).

    This makes it more than capable of coping even with the strain of HD video.

    When used with the supplied USB adaptor for maximum speed, it can shorten data transfer time by one-third compared to Sony’s Memory Stick PRO Duo (Mark 2).

    The provision of a USB adaptor as a standard accessory also makes it very simple to transfer data onto a PC or notebook.

    Also useful is the free, downloadable Memory Stick Data Rescue Service which can quickly recover deleted photographs and files.

    The Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo HX uses an 8-bit parallel interface to achieve this level of performance and comes with a 10 year warranty.

    It will be available from October 2008.

  • Mobile software set for rapid growth as inexpensive smartphones ring changes


    The mobile software market will be worth an estimated US$ 67.3 billion in 2013 – up from US$ 17.9 in 2007 – as the number of mobile devices grows and minutes of use increases steadily.
    This revenue growth will be fuelled by mobile carriers’ willingness to carry data apart from voice and the introduction of third-generation (3G) smartphones.
    That’s the conclusion of analysts at Frost & Sullivan in their report “World Next-Generation Mobile Software Market”.
    They say that with the expansion of memory, an increase in processor speed and the availability of better networks that allow for faster data transfer, mobile software is in for exponential growth.
    Daniel Longfield, research analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said there was a mass move towards mobile devices as people used them for tasks that a few years ago were performed on a desktop computer, a laptop, a MP3 player, an electronic gaming platform, or a digital camera.
    He said mobile software was key to placing mobile devices at the forefront of consumer habits by incorporating the applications and capabilities of other electronic devices into mobile devices.
    This, in turn, will benefit all members of the mobile value chain.
    “Over the next decade, the cycle of software development, where many mobile software products and applications were developed originally for other types of devices, will reverse,” said Longfield.
    “This reversal is likely because the number of mobile devices manufactured is expected to continue to outpace all other types of personal electronics and also due to smartphones possessing more processing speed and memory.”
    The report predicts that the mobile software market will grow at a faster rate than the total software market, thereby increasing its segment size.
    But it warns that as mobile carriers are extremely cautious about spending, mobile software vendors will have to prove the value proposition and return on investment of their products before clinching deals.
    Going forward, the mobile software market expects to witness greater standardisation, technological advances, and competitive changes. All these will further increase the mobile software market size.
    “Mobile software vendors are poised to receive large revenue increases from carriers and other mobile market value chain members,” said Longfield.
    “However, these spoils will not come without great effort to patch endless gaps in the current carrier service infrastructure and business models.”