Storage sees healthy rise

Research firm IDC reveals the global IT market staged a healthy comeback last year, with expenditure on IT products and services rising 8% from 2009 to more than $1.5 trillion, reports The Economic Times.

The market research firm's 2010 report indicated that the IT industry registered its fastest growth rate since 2007 during the year.

The demand for new hardware such as storage drove the 2010 rebound, as hardware equipment spending rose by 16% to reach $611 billion.

Experts claim the growing use of virtualisation is a major reason why organisations need more performance from storage subsystems, states IT Wire.

The demand for increased storage performance "is really driven by hypervisors," says Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer at Hitachi Data Systems.

The company's approach is to use solid state drives or to stripe data across a larger number of hard drives than would otherwise be required. The company says it also uses automatic load balancing to deliver the necessary performance.

Oracle has unveiled a cloud-based storage system, dubbed 'Cloud File System', which it claims will ease the path for businesses to shift their IT operations to the cloud, says Internet News.com.

"There are two components, the volume manager sits on top of the file manager, so it looks like any industry standard file system," explains Bob Thome, Oracle's director of product management.

Oracle is billing the new product as a tool to help enterprises bring their applications, databases and storage to the cloud.