Hitachi loads 1 TB drive
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced the first terabyte
(TB) SATA hard drive, aimed initially for the retail market. The
Deskstar 7K1000 will begin shipping to retail customers in the
first quarter of 2007 at a suggested retail price of $399, or 40
cents per gigabyte. An enterprise version of the drive is expected
in the second quarter of the year. Along with the Deskstar 7K1000
for the retail market, Hitachi is also announcing its CinemaStar
version 1 TB hard drive, which provides capabilities specifically
designed for digital video recording (DVR) applications. Meanwhile,
Seagate said its 1 TB drive will ship the first half of 2007.
BakBone inks new deal with Sun
BakBone Software Inc. announced a worldwide technology licensing
and distribution agreement with Sun Microsystems Inc., under which
Sun will resell BakBone's NetVault Backup products through its
direct salesforce, as well as its network of distributors and
value-added resellers (VARs). The companies said they share a
customer base that includes 550 of the Fortune 1000.
Indian bank deploys Riverbed
Riverbed Technology Inc. announced that the Tamilnad Mercantile
Bank Ltd.(TMB), India, has deployed Riverbed's Steelhead wide-area
data services (WDS) appliances in its Chennai data center and in
its Bangalore disaster recovery center. TMB is a private-sector
bank headquartered in Thoothukudi, with seven regional offices and
173 branches across India. During peak business hours, TMB
generates a 100 MB log file every five minutes, which it replicates
from Chennai to Bangalore. Prior to installing Riverbed's Steelhead
appliances, replication of this file using Oracle's Data Guard
application took more than 10 minutes. Following installation of
the Steelhead appliances, the replication window dropped from over
10 minutes to two minutes.
Seagate primes channel for EVault
Seagate Technology announced it has extended its Seagate Recovery
Services programs to a network of 14,000 channel partners in North
America. Seagate Recovery Services will provide collateral and
support, as well as offer the flexibility to allow partners to
continue to work directly with their own customers or through
referral. Three levels of recovery services will be available:
Critical Response On-Site, In-Lab and Software Recovery. Seagate
announced its intention to purchase online storage service provider
EVault Inc. (See
Seagate to acquire Evault for $185M,
Dec. 21.)
NetApp plans new digs
Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp) entered into a $65 million
financing, construction and leasing arrangement with BNP Paribas
LLC for approximately 189,500 square feet of office space and
parking structure to be on land currently owned by the company in
Sunnyvale, Calif. Construction is expected to finish in 2009.
Incipient ships virtualization software
Incipient Inc. announced that its Incipient Network Storage
Platform (iNSP) split-path storage virtualization product achieved
general availability on Dec. 21, 2006. INSP is software, which is
embedded on Cisco's MDS 9000 director-class intelligent Fibre
Channel switches. Incipient has certified iNSP's interoperability
with arrays from storage vendors, including EMC, Hewlett-Packard,
Hitachi Data Systems and IBM.
SanDisk aims to replace laptop disks with memory
SanDisk Corp. introduced a 32 GB 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD)
as a drop-in replacement for the standard mechanical hard disk
drive in laptops. Memory and hard drives have both been frequent
topics of discussion in storage news lately. Consortiums headed by
IBM and Seagate are currently researching in this area (See
IBM, Seagate plan to rethink hard drives and
memory, Dec. 22.)
Toshiba, LaCie beef up consumer storage
Toshiba Storage Device Division (SDD) announced a new line of USB
2.0 portable external hard drives in 100 GB, 120 GB and 160 GB
capacities. Meanwhile, French consumer storage company LaCie kicked
off the year by announcing five new storage products. New products
include a Blu-ray drive for Windows/Mac; a quadruple-interface
(USB, Firewire 400 and 800e, and eSATA) external hard drive bundled
with EMC Retrospect Express backup software for Windows/Mac; a
biometric access encrypted external hard drive; Ethernet disk; and
Ethernet disk RAID. The new LaCie products will make their debut at
Macworld Expo Jan. 9-12.
DVS puts Xyratex in movies
Xyratex Ltd. announced that DVS Digital Video Systems GmbH will
integrate Xyratex's F5402E FC-SAS/SATA RAID system into products
from its line of Film/HD Post Production storage systems.