The coming robot revolution
Robots, from mechanical dogs that can learn new tricks to automated vacuum cleaners that avoid furniture, are steadily becoming a part of everyday life. But the real robot boom lies just ahead, experts say.
Robots, from mechanical dogs that can learn new tricks to automated vacuum cleaners that avoid furniture, are steadily becoming a part of everyday life. But the real robot boom lies just ahead, experts say.
EMC Monday announced the latest version of its flagship storage management software, which it said offers "more complete support" for competing products such as arrays from Hewlett-Packard (HP), Hitachi Data Systems and IBM, as well as Linux servers.
Hitachi Data Systems will announce plans to mix Fibre Channel and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) disk drives in its midrange arrays -- a move that puts a different twist on the emerging trend to support different types of drives in a single enclosure.
Massive arrays of idle disks are giving a boost to disk-based backup systems, which could replace tape libraries for some applications. Lucas Mearian reports.
For the first time in its history, EMC has decided to offer an enterprise-class tape library as part of its product line and will begin reselling Advanced Digital Information's tape libraries next month.
Sun Microsystems has announced its first near-line arrays based on Serial Advanced Technology Attachment disk drives, which it claims will offer 70 per cent more storage capacity than similarly priced Fibre Channel-based disk arrays.
Network Appliance recently posted fourth-quarter and year-end financial results showing a 39 percent increase in quarterly earnings over the same period last year -- and a 31 percent increase over 2003 as a whole. NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven spoke with Computerworld about the company's financial results, the competition from vendors embracing the Windows Storage Server 2003 NAS operating system and when the company's global distributed files system would be ready.
EMC has announced its lowest-priced NAS gateway device targeted at enterprise remote office data backup and recovery.
EMC this week announced at its annual users conference that it plans to begin beta testing by next quarter of an enterprise-class "storage router" that will be able to pool storage capacity and migrate data seemlessly between boxes without impacting business applications.
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced last week that more than 100 products from 14 leading storage vendors have been qualified on a new interoperability standard. But members of a user group were skeptical that their multivendor storage-area networks could be easily managed through a single software interface.
Storage networking equipment vendors are preparing a slew of new Fibre Channel switches and host bus adapters that can effectively double the speed of current storage-area networks (SAN) to 4Gbit/sec. Products based on the 4Gbit standard, first advocated by chip makers last year and approved by the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) and the American National Standards Institute last June, are slated to roll out this year. The technology could serve as an interim migration step to products based on the 10Gbit/sec.
IBM on Tuesday announced a new storage software suite that it said at least partially fulfills a utility computing strategy allowing storage servers and networking devices to be monitored and allocated on demand based on preset policies.
EMC has announced upgrades of all of its disk arrays and network-attached storage (NAS) devices, as well as some of its key storage management applications.
A variety of storage vendors are testing products that could double the throughput of Fibre Channel storage-area networks (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) devices from the current 2Gbit/sec. rate.
IBM has announced that it has signed a five-year agreement to resell an InfiniBand switch as a high-speed I/O interconnect for its servers and storage, a move one analyst called the beginning of a "broad-based push" by vendors for the nascent high-speed interconnect technology.