September III

Breaking News: IBM to acquire BNT!

September II

Here's a quick roundup of the most interesting headlines in storage since Europe returned from summer vacation about three weeks ago.

The favorite subject of the news press and bloggers these days seems to be Oracle so these are the assorted news:

Mark Hurd leaves HP, joins Oracle.

Sam Palmisano comments on Oracle.

Does Oracle plan to buy Netapp?

Details on Oracle's Exalogic storage.

If you have not heard about the upcoming v4.1 NFS (network file system) here's an excellent summary of why this will be important.

On the networking side, both -Brocade and CISCO- announced new steps towards a converged network for the datacenter:

CISCO announces an advanced data center strategy inlcuding new Nexus converged switches featuring unified ports which support traditional Ethernet as well as Fibre Channel (FC) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

Brocade releases a network monitoring product ("Network Advisor") built to enable control and management for converged networks (IP, Ethernet, Fibre Channel) with one single tool.

IDC adds the tab for us and finds out, that during the first half of 2010 the storage industry returned to a healthy growth in terms of revenue and capacity growth (compared to a weak first half of 2009 of course).

Read the details and rankings here.

Looking into the distant future of storage, IBM Research issued a press release around studies done in their labs about "how long a single atom can hold information". Possible implications of this amazing research are outlined here.

And lastly here's a very funny clip about the daily routine of doing conference calls in a global economy!

Storage Buzz September

Summer is officially over, it's back to the office and end of sleeping in and travelling. Before I left, I came across this article from Steve Duplessie and I could not agree more! So I have tried to focus on really important things the past couple weeks (like holding up redwood trees...).

Here's a summary of what went on in the storage realm while I was gone:

• An increasing amount of signs that the increase of aerial density for magentic discs eventually will hit a ceiling.
• Probably related to that, an increased focus on offline and tape media. In this case Oracle agreeing with IBM on the importance of tape and rolling out the roadmap for their Tape and Library products inherited from Sun and STK.
• Steady progress and advancements in the area of FCoE and 10 Gbit/s Ethernet.
• Most recent acquisition object of desire: 3PAR. It will be interesting to see who ends up at the altar with the company who "invented" thin provisioning.
• And while Isilon is not (yet) being taken over, this company may be one of the future targets of acquisition plans.
• IBM takes over NAS data compression specialist Storwize and announces availability of V2 of its key management product TKLM (Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager) which now supports the KMIP standard.
• Moshe Yanai, the founder and father of XIV off to new endeavors.