Dell to buy 3Par

Dell has revealed a $1.15 billion deal to buy 3PAR, a firm specialising in storage and data management, reports AFP.

Dell plans to keep 3PAR operations in the Northern California city of Fremont and integrate the 11 year-old firm's technology into Dell data storage products.

The computer manufacturer says that 3PAR cuts hardware and energy costs for data storage by using virtualisation technology, which propels maximum performance from machines.

Toshiba has revealed what it calls a breakthrough in magnetic storage - bit-patterned media - which the company claims will result in massive storage improvements for future hard drives, states Bit-Tech.

The reason for the company's efforts is that current magnetic media tops out at a data density of around 541GB per square inch, but the bit-patterned prototype is already achieving densities equivalent to 2.5TB per square inch, which is five times greater.

Should Toshiba succeed in commercialising the technology, it will have a head-start in producing ultra-high-capacity storage drives for those who need terabytes of data.

Intel has tweaked a pair of Atom processors meant for storage applications, giving them more cycles and support for newer memory, says The Register.

The D410 and D510 single and dual core Atom processors were released in the first quarter of this year and featured a 1.66 GHz clock and DDR2 667/800 memory support.

Now Intel has upped the clock speed to 1.8 GHz with the D425 and D525 single and dual-core processors and given them support for DDR3 memory.