Business News Holding

Tag: storage

  • Western Digital Makes Cut-backs As Demand Weakens


    Western Digital is to cut 2,500 jobs, or about 5 per cent of its global work force, and will reduce executive pay as a result of the global economic situation.

    Citing weakening demand for its products, the hard drive maker the company now expects fiscal second-quarter sales of USD $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion, with a "consequent reduction in operating results."

    Western Digital said demand for the current quarter is "significantly below" what it expected when it issued revenue guidance in October.

    Previously it sales outlook was USD $2.03 billion to $2.15 billion.

    The company plans to reduce compensation by an unspecified amount for its executive officers, board of directors and senior management.

    Manufacturing operations will cease from December 20 through January 1 and manufacturing hours will be reduced by 20 per cent through employee attrition and reduction in the use of temporary workers and overtime shifts.

    It is also closing one of its three hard drive factories in Thailand and will close or sell one of two facilities in Malaysia.

    The measures, expected to be completed by the end of March, are expected to save about USD $150 million a year. Western Digital expects to take related charges of USD $150 million in the fiscal second and third quarters.

  • Nominations Open For The Outstanding Storage Person and Product Of 2008


    With 2008 fast drawing to a close biz-news.com is seeking YOUR help in choosing outstanding candidates for the titles of Man/Woman of the Year and Product/Service of the Year.

    We would like you to nominate an individual and/or product/service that you feel has contributed greatly to the Storage sector over the past 12 months.

    The winner will be selected from the nominations submitted by our readers – professionals and technology enthusiasts in the industry.

    Obviously, as this is a crowd-sourcing survey, we need your participation.

    Spreading word of this survey to friends and colleagues will also ensure a wider participation in the poll and will give a much more accurate result.

    If you have more than one nomination for either category you can make multiple submissions – but you can only vote once for any person or product.

    We will publish the results in early 2009 and share the raw data with the community. (Personal information about contributors will not be disclosed).

    After a year like 2008 there are plenty of good candidates – so please give it some thought and send your Man/Woman and/or Product nominations to us.

  • Blu-ray Storage Capacities To Keep Climbing


    Pioneer has announced plans for a one terabyte (1TB) Blu-ray disc that could be on the market by 2013.

    With a 400GB disc already ready for launch and a half-terabyte disc expected to follow shortly, there may be some questions about how such an abundance of storage can be used.

    One answer may be the advent of upgraded high definition standards that take up even greater amounts of disc space.

    The possibility for progressively increasing to higher densities was a major reason that Blu-ray won over its rivals.

  • Pentadyne Promotes Kalev to CTO


    Flywheel energy storage systems manufacturer Pentadyne Power Corporation has promoted Claude Kalev to the position of Chief Technical Officer.

    Kalev was a co-founder of Pentadyne when the company was incorporated in 1998.

    But he only officially joined the company in 2002, as Vice President, Electrical Engineering.

    Kalev was also a co-founder and Vice President of Engineering at Quadradyne, a company established to provide testing services for high speed rotating machinery, state of the art magnetic bearing development, high vacuum system and molecular drag sleeve design.

    Prior to joining Pentadyne, Kalev was the Vice President of Engineering at Infrared Industries, Inc. where he led the development of a compact, portable 5-gas automotive analyzer.

    He also developed and patented a hand-held, high-speed, 5-gas analyzer for use as an on-board diagnostic and combustion tuning instrument. He also developed a state-of-the-art, automated calibration system for the analyzers.

    Other previous posts include roles at Capstone Turbine Corporation and Rosen Motors.

    Kalev is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Tau Beta Pi, and Golden Key Honor Society. He earned his undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering from the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

  • Kingston USB Stick Reaches 64GB – And Climbing


    It wasn’t THAT long ago that anything over 1GB of Flash storage was considered impressive.

    Now Kingston Technology has launched its new DataTraveler 150, a 64GB USB Flash drive.

    This supercedes last month’s offering – a mere 32GB – as the largest in the outfit’s entire DataTraveler line.

    Jaja Lin, Kingston’s Flash business development manager, said the DataTraveler 150 takes transportable storage to the next level.

    "As file sizes increase with digital media content such as music and photos, the need for USB Flash drives with high capacities will continue to rise," said Lin.

    "The DT150 certainly addresses those needs today."

    The rising storage capacity of USB sticks comes at a time when the number of computers infected with viruses from USB flash memory drives is spreading.

    This has prompted calls for PC users to take precautions when sharing data with others via USB memory sticks.

    Measuring 77.9mm x 22mm x 12.05mm, the DataTraveler 150 comes with a 5-year warranty and works with any system with a spare USB slot, including Windows, OS X, Palm OS and Linux.

    The memory sticks come with a five-year warranty and are priced at USD $132 and $177.

  • Virtualization Heads Gartner's Strategic Technology List


    Virtualization     is the technology with the potential for having the most “significant impact” on enterprises over the next three years, according to Gartner.

    Every year the analyst firm highlights the top 10 technologies and trends it predicts will be strategic for most organizations.

    Virtualization, which ranked fifth on Gartner’s list last year, has moved to the top slot for 2009.

    Gartner defines "significant impact" as including factors such as high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

    David Cearley, vice president at Gartner, said strategic technologies affect, run, grow and transform the business initiatives of an organization.

    "Companies should look at these 10 opportunities and evaluate where these technologies can add value to their business services and solutions, as well as develop a process for detecting and evaluating the business value of new technologies as they enter the market," he said.

    Cloud computing ranked second in the list, while servers came third.

  • HP Boosts Virtualization Options With Purchase Of LeftHand Networks


    Hewlett-Packard is to spend USD $360 million in cash to buy storage virtualization company LeftHand Networks.

    The company covers two areas currently receiving a lot of attention – allocating storage for virtualized servers and the using Ethernet for storage networks.

    LeftHand Networks’ solutions enable midsize companies and remote offices or branches of large corporations to easily and cost-effectively protect critical business data.

    The company’s software allows a user to create a storage “cloud” connected via iSCSI, an Ethernet standard rather than the proprietary Fibre Channel networking that dominates the storage industry.

    The software could run on IBM and HP servers.

    Founded in 1999, LeftHand Networks is privately held and headquartered in Boulder, Colorado.

    It has 215 employees and more than 500 resellers and distributors worldwide. The company has more than 11,000 installations across 3,000 different customers.

    Dave Roberson, senior vice president and general manager, StorageWorks Division, HP, said the acquisition of LeftHand Networks significantly expanded HP’s storage portfolio.

    "Customers need a faster, less complex and more economical route to storage networking to better protect their critical business data,” he said.

    The transaction is subject to certain closing conditions and is expected to be completed in HP’s first fiscal quarter of 2009.

    Following completion, the business will be integrated into the HP StorageWorks division within the Technology Solutions Group at HP.

  • 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?

  • Pivot3 Demonstrates Serverless Computing Platform

    Innovative Platform Eliminates Dedicated NVR Servers to Save Power, Reduce Rack Space, and Lower Costs

    High-Definition Storage experts, Pivot3, have announced the first public demonstration of its Serverless Computing platform at ASIS International 2008 in Atlanta, Georgia.

    The new platform, which runs NVR software on the storage node rather than requiring its own dedicated server, will be demonstrated in three locations at the show at the World Congress Convention Center.

    The company also disclosed that five NVR companies and four channel partners had joined its newly formed Serverless Computing Certification Program (SCCP) for NVR to speed adoption of the technology in the video surveillance market.

    Companies such as Exacq, Genetec, Lenel, Milestone, and OnSSI have already joined the program.

    Also joining SCCP are integrators who install and support Pivot3 solutions in the field, including Southwest Surveillance Systems, Connections IT, Aware Digital Inc, and Broadcast Technologies.

    The Pivot3 Serverless Computing platform allows surveillance directors to run video surveillance applications such as video recording, access control and video analytic software directly on the Pivot3 clustered storage platform.

    Using this approach, users can eliminate the physical NVR server hardware required in a conventional solution to realize hard savings in cost, rack space, power and cooling.

    A customer with 500 cameras, for example, can realize savings of 44 per cent in power and cooling costs, 51 per cent in rack-space usage and 22 per cent in cost savings by eliminating 15 physical servers and 5 physical failover storage RAIDs.

    Dilip Sarangan, research analyst with Frost and Sullivan, said: “On average, storage solutions account for an estimated 50 per cent of all acquisition costs for video surveillance systems.

    “With Serverless Computing, these costs can be reduced dramatically with all savings transferred directly to end users.”

    The Pivot3 Serverless Computing Certification Partner Program is designed to help users simplify the deployment and speed the adoption of video surveillance solutions running partner software applications on the Pivot3 Serverless Computing platform.

    The program is open to software leaders who are working with Pivot3 on joint sales opportunities and who are committed to providing world-class support for open-systems to their joint customers.

    Pivot3 offers the following benefits to SCCP members:

    * Pre- and post-sales support for qualified joint opportunities, including configuration assistance, demo systems loaners, and joint sales calls

    * Joint marketing and lead-sharing activities, including joint PR, collateral, webinars, and local seminars

    * Access to the Pivot3 High-Definition Video Simulator Tool, which allows partners to simulate large video workloads for performance assessments

    * Access to the Pivot3 video lab and a team of dedicated engineers