Virginia outage still affecting data access

Several Virginia state agencies continue to experience problems with data access due to an outage related to problems in a storage area network that began last week in a data centre run by outsourcer Northrop Grumman, says Reuters.

An automated phone message from the Virginia Information Technologies Agency (Vita) says that as many as seven key bureaus, including the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Social Services, are having problems accessing applications, shared folders and other data stored on servers in the commonwealth's enterprise solutions centre in Richmond.

Vita has offered updates on its attempts to repair the outage on its Web site. It stated that repairs to the storage system's hardware are complete, and all but three or possibly four agencies out of the 26 agency systems have been restored.

Liverpool IT firm Aimes Grid Services is to invest £100 000 to support the development of new services, writes Liverpool Daily Post.

The injection of funds will cover the cost of new networking equipment, servers and secure power supplies for the company's business continuity and cloud computing services.

The company is to add £50 000 of its own money to a £50 000 enterprise finance guarantee loan through NatWest.

Avnet Technology Solutions, and Syncsort, extreme performance data integration and data protection software provider, are providing Avnet's reseller partners in the US and Canada with BEX data protection software, reports e-Channel Line.

The distributor says this agreement will allow Avnet's community of NetApp reseller partners to leverage a combined offering featuring integrated backup capabilities from Syncsort and NetApp's storage products.

New partners to Avnet's Syncsort programme are said to have an opportunity to help customers solve their most pressing backup and disaster recovery challenges while simultaneously maximising revenue opportunities.