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Enterprise Storage
Will IBM Shift Its NAS Line to Linux?
IBM Corp. may be planning to discontinue its line of Windows-based network-attached storage (NAS) units in order to focus on higher-end products, including an upcoming file server that will run Linux, according to sources quoted in a Computerworld report. The story said IBM this month plans to announce that it will stop making its TotalStorage NAS 100 and NAS 200 filers, which were aimed at departmental, workgroup and low-end corporate applications. The boxes offer storage capacities of 480GB and 7 terabytes, respectively. Pushan Rinnen, an analyst at Gartner Inc. said sales of IBMs low-end NAS line havent taken off in any big way. NAS 100 sales totaled $3.4 million last year, only 3 percent of the entry-level NAS market, according to Gartners figures. “The volume is not high enough [for IBM] to be a strategic player,” Rinnen said. IBM officials declined to comment, describing the information about its plans as “speculation.”
Read the full story on:Computerworld
Via South Bridge Chips Support Serial ATA and Raid Storage in Mainstream PCs
Via Technologies Inc. last week introduced a south bridge chipset for PC applications that supports Serial ATA and a RAID controller. The new VT8237 chipset brings native Serial ATA and RAID support to the table, providing RAID levels 0, 1 and 0+1. Since the VT8237 only provides two Serial ATA channels, logic board makers wanting to offer RAID 0+1 will need to add a secondary interface chip, such as VIAs SATAlite.
Read the full story on:The Register
Personal Storage
Consortium Preps High-Definition Digital Video Tape Format
Sony Corp. and three other Japanese electronics companies will collaborate to develop a high-definition digital video format compatible with cassette tapes now in use, the companies said last week. The group, which includes Canon, Sharp Corp. and Victor Co. of Japan, expects to complete the technology by September. Products in the new format can use the same product parts as the old format because they use the same DV and Mini-DV cassettes.
Read the full story on:Yahoo! News
Storage Business
Western Digital Surprised By Early SATA Success
Western Digital Corp. doubled itsRaptor Serial-ATA hard drive quarterly production plans due to unexpectedly high demand. “We sold a lot—we have been very pleased how it came out,” said Ian Keene, the disk makers SATA business development manager for Europe. The company also recently added a 250GB SATA drive to its Caviar family, but Keene points out that this uses a 7,200 RPM desktop IDE mechanism designed for a 30 percent duty cycle, whereas Raptor is a 10,000 RPM drive intended for 24-by-7 server usage.
Read the full story on:Techworld.com