December

In the northern hemisphere, December is a month without lots of daylight - so a great time to read and learn about light: twisted light, that is!

As Hu Yoshida writes in his blog:
"...a group of British and Chinese researchers have developed a microchip that is capable of emitting photons with a property known as orbital or angular momentum. Each wavelength can carry an infinite number of values of orbital angular momentum, so this ”twisted” light could dramatically increase data transfer rates over optical fiber communications links. Researchers have already sent data at speeds of up to 2.5 terabits per second."
Read the details here.

Then, as always an indication where the market is heading, Brocade and NetApp have recently issued their quarterly numbers.
Overall 3Q industry numbers will be out in the next couple days I presume and I will certainly post them here!

And lastly, the industry has started to ship the next generation LTO: LTO-6 provides 2.5 TB native capacity (6.25 TB compressed) and 160 MB/s data rate!
Nicely keeping up with the very first 4 TB HDDs hitting the market!