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Storage software market soars

By Ilva Pieterse, ITWeb contributor
Johannesburg, 11 Jun 2008

Storage software market soars

The worldwide storage software market generated sales of $2.9 billion in the first quarter of 2008, says VNUNet.

IDC said that the figures mark the 18th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth, and represent a 9.4% increase over the same quarter a year ago.

"Overall market growth was 9.4% year-over-year, driven primarily by the data protection, recovery and storage replication markets," said Michael Margossian, research analyst for storage software at IDC.

Sun to use flash for servers

Sun will release a 32GB flash storage drive this year and make flash storage an option for nearly every server the vendor produces, says Network World.

While flash storage is far more expensive than disk on a per-gigabyte basis, Sun argues that flash is cheaper for high-performance applications that rely on fast IOPS (I/O operations per second) speeds.

"It consumes one-fifth the power and is a hundred times faster [than rotating disk drives]," said John Fowler, the head of Sun's servers and storage division. "The fact that it's not the same dollars per gigabyte is perfectly OK."

HP secures via RFID

Keeping track of data centre assets is a security issue that Hewlett-Packard (HP) says can be addressed through its new radio-frequency identification (RFID) tagging system, says Network World.

With its Factory Express RFID Service, HP is optionally affixing RFID tags to the equipment it ships to customers so the gear can be tracked through the wireless auto-identification sensors.

"The tag can be affixed to the case or the palette," says Frank Lanza, HP's worldwide director for RFID in the technology solutions group. "The RFID tagging service is for blade servers, storage racks, any kind of equipment a customer might use in the data centre."

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