Storage Industry Trends

Sun comes out with VTL Prime, a virtual tape library with FalconStor's data deduplication; Attune gets into file archiving; and SGI, Fujitsu, Dot Hill launch storage systems.

Symantec and Microsoft settle Veritas lawsuit, EMC ships consumer NAS storage to China, and Google bundles in email archiving with Apps Premier.

Clustered storage vendor vows to continue to spend on product development, sales and marketing, despite losing nearly $27 million in the first year as public company.

Storage startup Ocarina claims a tenfold reduction of file data on primary storage with a split-band appliance and maintains it can work with files that before were not reducible.

Nimbus Data expands 10 Gigabit Ethernet capability and adds solid-state drives to IP storage systems that support iSCSI, NFS and CIFS.

Packeteer rejects an offer from hedge fund investors and adopts a poison pill while negotiating with other potential acquirers. But the original suitor still wants to make a deal.

The first refresh of Novus' SERP broadens its support for heterogeneous SRM tools, but it keeps customers waiting for better backup reporting support from IBM.

Citrix and NetApp have co-developed a free adapter module for XenServer 4.1 to manage and provision NetApp storage systems from the Xen management console.

The car-theft prevention system is under the covers of Fujifilm's new tape tracker, which tracks the location and status of removable media cartridges in transit.

The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society consolidates email disaster recovery and access for thousands of mailboxes in 103 locations using Fortiva's hosted service.

Silver Peak says its WAN optimization product has fewer problems deduplicating AutoCAD 2007 files than Riverbed's, but more testing will be needed to validate the comparison.

Usually iSCSI is billed as the easiest networked storage protocol to use with VMware, but an IT manager at NetApp shop AutoTrader.com says that NFS will be even simpler.

Startup Atrato Inc. is basing its new disk array on a concept called SAID (Sealed Array of Identical Disks) to bridge the gap between performance and high capacity. The idea is to offer an array that can run for the duration of a three- to five-year lease period without requiring any maintenance.

Like businesses in the private sector, the focus for school districts trying to meet compliance regulations has been on archiving email. But many public school districts are running into roadblocks related to e-discovery and data compliance with records retention laws.