Storage News & Articles

It's been described as the "Wild West of Cloud Computing" -- no slick "urban" services like Amazon provides, but HP is in beta with its cloud services, and the time is ripe to make your land grab with free real estate (for now) hosted by the world's second-largest PC maker, looking to move into Web services in a big way.

Dropbox has launched a service for enterprise and business users, Dropbox for Teams. The enterprise-grade cloud-based storage service offers a terabyte of space -- perfect for exchanging big items like high-definition videos, encrypted State Department cables and even the kitchen sink.

Dropbox traces its early beginnings to a frat-house type development environment and all-nighter coding sessions amid sweltering summer heat. But all that effort has paid off for founder Drew Houston, as the company raises US$ 250 million in venture funding, bringing up valuation to US$ 4 billion. Next in Houston's sights: World domination.

If security is one of the concerns of enterprises looking at moving to cloud-- whether private or public -- data access and storage is the other main concern. Recently, Oracle (news, site) continued to facilitate private cloud deployments for medium-sized companies with the release of its Oracle Cloud File System.

With only two months left to run in 2010, the first slew of predictions of the top technologies named by Gartner have arrived. While social computing, cloud computing and mobile applications make the list, so do the less glamorous areas of storage and analytics.

Despite persistent global economic difficulties, a recent survey from technology consultancy IDC (news, site) shows that the world-wide storage software market continues to hold its own with 6.3% growth between Q3 and Q4 last year.

However, while the combined market for all top vendors increased by 0.5% in Q4 last year compared with Q4 in 2008, the overall picture is gloomier with a total contraction of the market year-on-year of 4.7%.

Using the Cloud is getting cheaper all the time. And it should get cheaper with the announcement by Softlayer (news, site), a provider of on-demand virtual data center services, as it starts to deploy Isilon’s (news, site) scale-out NAS to power its cloud infrastructure.

Back in April, ZL Technologies estimated that 90% of large enterprise archiving projects fail. This month, ZL continues to help companies overcome eDiscovery challenges by releasing its seventh major upgrade to its flagship product, ZL Unified Archive.

What does in-house eDiscovery really mean and it is necessary? That’s exactly what we asked when we sat down with Kon Leong, CEO of ZL Technologies.

AvePoint (news, site), is a well known provider of SharePoint administration and management solutions. Their flagship product line, DocAve, has recently been updated to include the beta release of a new suite to support storage, intelligent archiving and migration-free content attachments for both SharePoint 2007 and the upcoming SharePoint 2010.

Infrastructure giant EMC (news, site) expands its activities in India with a tripling of its investment in the next five years.

Texas-based SoftLayer (news, site), a provider of on-demand virtual data center services, has just announced that it now offers Parallel’s (news, site) Plesk Panel as an option with its CloudLayer platform -- cloud package for storage, computing and content delivery.

With this new offering, SoftLayer says it has only got its customers interests at heart by offering them more control over their IT environments, but what they're also doing is cutting an even bigger slice of that great big pie in the cloud.

Last October, open source Enterprise CMS provider Alfresco (news, site) and content software provider Caringo (news, site) announced that they had developed an interface that would support the use of Caringo’s CAStor as an Alfresco content archive and repository.

At the time, it was inevitable that tighter integration between the two was on the way, and yesterday they formally announced the launch of the Alfresco2CAStor connector between the two platforms.

CloudBerry's (news, site) freeware browser for Amazon S3 has been a big hit since its launch back in March. Now the company is bringing new features and offering extra peace of mind.

SoftLayer (news, site) offers a range of server-based systems from plain storage to dedicated multi-processor servers. Now, it adds a CloudLayer to offer a wide-ranging cloud package to the enterprise.

According to a document management study that was commissioned by Iron Mountain, UK firms are more likely to trust others with the task of records management than German and French firms. Interestingly, most firms decide to keep active records stored on-site. Is our information safe?