US govt looks to the cloud

US Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has called for the government to be more efficient by placing programmes on the Web; paving the way for Microsoft and Google to win business, states BusinessWeek.

The US government wants to put data such as healthcare pricing information on Internet-based systems as they grow more secure.

Kundra says this would curb storage costs and will help to slash expenses after previous US governments spent more than $500 billion on data centres and other technology initiatives in the past decade.

Global revenue from hard disc drives (HDDs) and optical disc drives (ODDs) is expected to increase this year, driven mostly by rising shipments of PCs in the improving economy, a market research firm says, according to InformationWeek

Worldwide revenue from shipments of HDDs is expected to reach $27.7 billion this year, up 18.4% from $23.4 billion last year, iSuppli said in releasing preliminary figures last week. Revenue from computer-oriented optical drives is expected to increase to $14.8 billion, up 7.6% from $13.7 billion in 2009.

"The 2010 economic recovery will bring rising sales of PCs," iSuppli analyst Fang Zhang said in a statement. "The notebook sector is expected to be particularly strong, with shipments outgrowing those of desktops. This will drive the robust increase in HDD shipments."

Chip giant Intel won first place in a ranking of flash memory-based solid state drives (SSDs), in which the researcher, DRAMeXchange Technology, pilloried the industry over the wide disparity of quality among the storage devices, says Computerworld.

Intel took first place in two categories, one for its Intel X25-M 160GB SSD and the other with its 80GB Intel X25-M SSD. DRAMeXchange praised the chip maker for speedy boot-up times on the SSDs.

Beyond the rankings, the Taiwanese market researcher blamed controller chips, flash memory storage chips, and firmware for a wide disparity of quality among SSDs.