World's largest capacity disc created

Pioneer has developed an optical disc that can hold up to 400GB of data, easily surpassing previously announced prototypes, reports Computer World.

The new disc manages to pack 16 layers, each with a 25GB capacity, into a conventional 12cm diameter optical disc.

The new discs are similar to Blu-ray Disc technology and slight changes to the hardware on a Blu-ray drive would allow the new Pioneer discs to be used on one.

According to researchers from NetApp, statistically speaking, most data on enterprise networks rarely gets accessed after it is written to network storage, says Washington Technology.

Andrew Leung, a computer science researcher at the University of California, presented the findings at the June USENIX conference in Boston.

Given those results, organisations might want to consider moving much of their data to slower but less expensive storage units since it rarely gets accessed, he said.

ONStor, a provider of clustered NAS solutions, recently discovered via survey, that there is a substantial market opportunity for virtualised storage solutions in virtualised server environments, says eChannel Online.

Seventy-three percent of survey respondents reported that they currently operate a virtualised server environment, and 67% answered that they were considering deploying virtualised storage in their data centres.

Only 35% already deployed a virtualised storage solution. The survey also revealed that 81% of IT decision makers understand that storage virtualisation could improve data availability.