HP announced that HP Integrity customers will gain the advantages of Intel’s latest quad-core processor, enabling them to enhance business results and maximize their technology infrastructure investments for the future. The Intel Itanium 9300 processor, formerly known as Tukwila, brings significantly increased performance along with a range of new reliability, scalability and virtualization features. By incorporating this processor into the next generation of HP Integrity servers, HP is positioned to deliver innovations in resiliency, flexibility and automation through a Converged Infrastructure.
 
Combined with the advanced virtualization, business continuity and automation capabilities of the HP-UX 11i operating environment, the features of the new processor will allow customers to quickly address changing mission-critical demands to drive business growth.

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Hitachi Data Systems Corporation announced the Storage Capacity Reclamation Guarantee program. The program offers customers around the world the ability to reduce their storage capacity by 50 percent or more by using Hitachi virtualization technologies.

By reducing storage capacity, Hitachi Data Systems lowers customers’ operational costs through simpler storage management, more efficient use of resources and space, reduced power and cooling costs and avoided purchase of unnecessary frames and drives. As the leader in storage virtualization and thin provisioning, Hitachi Data Systems offers Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software to help customers reclaim storage that is stranded due to traditional thick provisioning processes. Hitachi Data Systems has helped customers realize more than 65 percent reduction in storage capacity by applying best practices in cost savings.

Hitachi Data Systems is demonstrating its commitment to help customers reduce operational and capital costs with a money back guarantee in its Storage Capacity Reclamation Guarantee Program. To increase value to their business, organizations are establishing scalable storage infrastructure by leveraging current investments, increasing return on assets (ROA) and lowering operational costs. Hitachi Data Systems hardware, software and services for storage reclamation, dynamic provisioning and virtualization have a combined economic impact that drastically reduces the operating costs of a customer’s storage environment. Virtualization improves operational efficiency by helping customers reclaim and optimize use of storage assets to better align to business requirements.

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Sanovi Technologies announced the availability of “Recovery Readiness Index(RRI)” assessment on its website www.sanovi.com. RRI is a quantitative measure of practices, process and technologies that help organizations measure and improve their recovery readiness.

Sanovi’s DR experts, with wide experience in Disaster Recovery Management, help customers meet their business recovery objectives. Based on their study of organizations that were confident and successful about their IT recovery, a common theme appeared. Sanovi RRI assessment employs these findings to look at the disaster recovery preparedness of an organization.

Sanovi RRI assessment helps an organization to benchmark its current recovery readiness against the industry best. It helps determine what to do next to improve the organization’s recovery readiness. Sanovi RRI assessment is also a measure to communicate with top management on how the organization stacks against the rest of the industry.

The Sanovi RRI assessment should be taken by any responsible individual in the organization that has an overview of the organizations business goals and IT practices. The person taking the assessment should be either able to have all information on his fingertips or be in a position to get the required information to complete the assessment. Typically, IT & DR managers, CIO and senior IT administrators have taken and used the assessment successfully. The assessment is designed to take under 10 minutes to complete.

The procedure is very simple. One needs to get to the Sanovi site: www.sanovi.com and then click on the resources button. On the right side navigation buttons click on Recovery Readiness Index. Alternately, one can directly go to the following web address: http://sanovi.com/RRI_assessment.html

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LSI Corporation announced collaboration with Seagate Technology to deliver robust, PCI Express based solid-state storage (SSS) solutions for data center and cloud computing environments. Through this joint effort, LSI is expected to deliver board-level products that integrate LSIT SAS and PCIe technology with Seagate solid-state drive (SSD) technology. The products are designed to provide enterprise OEMs and channel partners with new levels of performance, reliability and ease of use while addressing architectural challenges that have limited SSS adoption. Product samples are expected to be available to OEM customers in the second quarter of this year.

"IT professionals want server and storage solutions that can deliver the performance and efficiency benefits of solid-state technology without impacting system resources or further complicating already complex enterprise storage environments," said David Mosley, executive vice president, Sales, Marketing, and Product Line Management, Seagate. "These new LSI products will accelerate enterprise application processing and help reduce I/O latency by using standards-based interfaces and protocols to minimize the impact to existing end user enterprise infrastructures. The collaboration extends Seagate's enterprise solid-state strategy, which is focused on delivering the best-fit solutions for IT using both traditional hard disk drives and solid-state storage."

LSI and Seagate bring decades of enterprise-level experience in the design, manufacture and support of storage products for critical applications. Having two experienced leaders with proven engineering capabilities and the global scale to commit resources toward the development of PCIe-based SSS solutions will help pave the way to market maturity and broad enterprise adoption.

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The adoption of virtualization and outsourcing of infrastructure to managed hosting and cloud providers is driving demand for high performance and increased scale in the data center network. Extreme Networks has responded with next-generation data center products to enable the migration to virtualized data centers and new infrastructure solutions that feature market-leading scalability, performance and simplicity.

Hosting companies and enterprises alike are scaling their data centers to realize the benefits of a virtualized infrastructure and cloud-based applications and systems. This new architecture enables resources to be dynamically managed and deployed and therefore delivers great organizational flexibility, agility and scale. 

The physical network – providing essential interconnect and backbone within and between Data Centers globally- is the foundation for the new virtualized architecture and topologies. It is therefore essential that the network technology and systems be highly scalable, deliver powerful performance, capacity and capabilities to support large data center implementations. Whether these deployments are based upon Layer 2 or Layer 3 designs, the network must support a rapidly expanding number of virtual machines and a very large numbers of users within a limited power and physical footprint. 

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F5 Networks announced the expansion of its industry-leading application delivery services portfolio. Building on the recent announcements of BIG-IP v10.1’s unique web security capabilities and functionality supporting the intelligent scaling of mobile infrastructures, F5 is introducing additional advanced Application Delivery Controller services and products designed to support enterprises’ efforts to move toward a more dynamic data center, reduce infrastructure costs, enhance workforce efficiency, and simplify access policy enforcement.

The powerful new BIG-IP release offers a rich set of advanced services providing unparalleled control and compelling cost savings for enterprises, as well as service and cloud providers. BIG-IP v10.1 enables organizations to: (1) Reduce CapEx and OpEx through centralized, granular access control using the new BIG-IP Access Policy Manager product module; (2) Improve end-user experience and enhance security by creating policies based on user location with IP geolocation services integrated into the TMOS platform; (3) Reduce bandwidth costs and improve disaster recovery through accelerated data transfers with the new BIG-IP WAN Optimization Module (4) Deploy applications faster by leveraging new Application Ready Templates for SAP and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.

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Brocade announced that it has combined the best of two technical support portfolios and created a comprehensive new offering that gives all Brocade customers, whether they operate SAN or IP networks, more value, flexibility and choice. In addition to providing a variety of hardware and software service level agreement (SLA) options, the integrated technical support portfolio offers valuable residency support services for mission-critical networking environments. It also enables greater consistency across the entire networking infrastructure, helping customers streamline their support operations and escalation activities, as well as simplify their contract management processes.

Technical support services are available for all Brocade SAN and IP/Ethernet networking products. Options range from remote support services or return-to-factory repair to onsite parts and labor with a 4-hour response window. For mission-critical networking environments, customers can select Brocade Premier Support, which includes a Brocade Support Account Manager, quarterly support reviews, annual infrastructure health checks and more. Brocade also offers onsite residency services for customers who need assistance with day-to-day maintenance activities such as fine-tuning of equipment, assisting with software upgrades and coordination of change activities.

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CA and NetApp announced an extension of their multi-year solutions partnership to develop management solutions for public and private cloud environments. As a result, the companies are integrating CA’s virtualization, automation and service assurance offerings with NetApp’s storage management solutions. The unified solutions will further help customers drive operational efficiencies through improved business agility, productivity and service quality, while also helping to lower costs and reduce risks that are associated with virtualization and cloud-based infrastructures.

Integrating CA Spectrum Automation Manager with NetApp Provisioning Manager would enable customers to automate their cloud infrastructure end-to-end. It would streamline the provisioning process for faster deployment times and support improved utilization of critical resources through NetApp Provisioning Manager’s storage policy and efficiency options. The integration would also allow the storage to be automated alongside the server, network and applications in an orchestrated fashion.

CA Spectrum Service Assurance analyzes information from infrastructure and application performance management tools to indicate how network, physical and virtual systems, database, and application problems impact business service quality. It also determines the root cause of any problems so fixes can be implemented prior to business service impact. The integration of CA Spectrum Service Assurance with the NetApp SANscreen® suite would extend the CA solution’s business service modeling capability into the storage domain and provide users with valuable new insight into how storage status impacts specific business services or puts them at risk.

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Trend Micro and Iomega announced that Trend Micro’s powerful and easy-to-use security products will be added to Iomega’s industry-leading Protection Suite, which is bundled with Iomega hard drives shipped worldwide. With the addition of Trend Micro Internet Security software solutions, consumers, small businesses and creative professionals purchasing Iomega portable and desktop hard drives will be able to choose between a complimentary subscription to Trend Micro Internet Security for PCs or a complimentary subscription to Trend Smart Surfing for Mac.

By adding Trend Micro Internet Security solutions to its Protection Suite, Iomega delivers a superior combination of virus protection and physical drive durability that addresses the most common consumer concerns for the safety of their digital data stored on an external portable or desktop hard drive.

Trend Micro Internet Security and Trend Smart Surfing for Mac will be part of the Iomega Protection Suite that is bundled with Iomega hard drive products, including the Iomega® Prestige and Iomega® eGo™ portable hard drives, as well as the Iomega Prestige, Iomega eGo and Iomega® UltraMax™ desktop hard drives.

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IBM researchers announced they have demonstrated a world record in areal data density on linear magnetic tape - a significant update to one of the computer industry's most resilient, reliable and affordable data storage technologies.

This breakthrough proves that tape technology can increase capacity for years to come, which has important implications, as tape storage systems are more energy efficient and cost-effective than hard disk drive storage systems. As the physical world becomes increasingly networked with sensors, vast amounts of data are amassed in various formats from medical images to security camera feeds to supply chain sensors to financial records. All of this data needs to be archived, replicated for disaster recovery, and/or retained or regulatory compliance.

The scientists at IBM Research - Zurich, in cooperation with the FUJIFILM Corporation of Japan, recorded data onto an advanced prototype tape, at a density of 29.5 billion bits per square inch - about 39 times the areal data density of today's most popular industry-standard magnetic tape product*. To achieve this feat, IBM Research has developed several new critical technologies, and for the past three years worked closely with FUJIFILM to optimize its next-generation dual-coat magnetic tape based on barium ferrite (BaFe) particles.

"This exciting achievement shows that tape storage is alive and strong and will continue to provide users reliable data protection, while maintaining a cost advantage over other storage technologies, including hard disk drives and flash," said, IBM Tape and Archive Storage Systems. 

These new technologies are estimated to enable cartridge capacities that could hold up to 35 trillion bytes (terabytes) of uncompressed data. This is about 44 times the capacity of today's IBM LTO Generation 4 cartridge. A capacity of 35 terabytes of data is sufficient to store the text of 35 million books, which would require 248 miles (399 km) of bookshelves. 

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WD and NEC Electronics Corporation announced that the companies have collaborated to promote the new SuperSpeed Universal Serial Bus (USB) 3.0 standard, a next-generation interface to be used in a wide range of electronic devices including PCs, PC peripherals, and digital appliances. 

USB 3.0 is capable of supporting data transfer rates of up to 5 gigabits per second (Gbps), which is 10 times faster than the previous high-speed USB 2.0 transfer speeds. With its higher speeds and enhanced power efficiency, external hard disk drives are the first SuperSpeed USB 3.0 devices to appear on the market.

As the first step toward WD's and NEC Electronics' goal to promote the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 standard, the companies plan to develop a USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) driver to deliver hard drives with very high performance, mass-storage capacity. UASP is a new industry-standard, high-performance mass-storage protocol being developed for SuperSpeed USB 3.0 to overcome the performance boundaries of the Bulk Only Transfer (BOT) protocol, which has been used for traditional USB 2.0 speeds. The new UASP driver will be used with NEC Electronics' USB 3.0 xHCI (eXtensible Host Controller Interface) host controller (part number µPD720200), which appeared on the market as the world's first USB 3.0 host controller in June 2009.

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Intel Corporation and Micron Technology announced the world's first 25-nanometer (nm) NAND technology, which provides a more cost-effective path for increasing storage capacity in such popular consumer gadgets as smartphones, personal music and media players (PMPs), as well as the new high-performance class of solid-state drives (SSDs).

Manufactured by IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), Intel and Micron's NAND flash joint venture, the 25nm process produces 8 gigabytes (GB) of storage in a single NAND device, creating a high-capacity storage solution for today's tiny consumer gadgets. It measures just 167mm2 -- small enough to fit through the hole in the middle of a compact disc (CD), yet packs more than 10 times the data capacity of that CD (a standard CD holds 700 megabytes of data).

With a committed focus and investment in NAND research and development, Intel and Micron have doubled NAND density roughly every 18 months, which leads to smaller, more cost-efficient and higher capacity products. Intel and Micron formed IMFT in 2006, starting production with a 50nm process, followed by a 34nm process in 2008. With today's 25nm process, the companies are extending their process and fabrication leadership further with the introduction of the smallest semiconductor lithography available in the industry.

The 25nm, 8GB device is sampling now and is expected to enter mass production in the second quarter of 2010. For consumer electronics manufacturers, the device provides the highest-density in a single 2 bits-per-cell multi-level cell (MLC) die that will fit an industry-standard, thin small-outline package (TSOP). Multiple 8GB devices can be stacked in a package to increase storage capacity. The new 25nm 8GB device reduces chip count by 50 percent compared to previous process generations, allowing for smaller, yet higher density designs and greater cost efficiencies. For example, a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD) can now be enabled with just 32 of these devices (versus 64 previously), a 32GB smartphone needs just four, and a 16GB flash card requires only two.

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