Items tagged with SAN
Major corporations have been picking up smaller companies at a really rapid pace these days. Google has been on a buying spree, as has Apple. And now Dell is on the move as well. The computer maker has just agreed on a deal to acquire Compellent, a provider of highly-virtualized storage solutions with automated data management features, including tiering and thin provisioning, for enterprise and cloud-computing environments. It's not hard to imagine why Dell would do a thing like this. Cloud-based solutions are becoming more and more important these days, and enterprise businesses are always important to keep happy. According to Dell, the acquisition is the latest strategic investment by Dell...
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Fusion-io, the company responsible for bringing some of the fastest SSD solutions on the planet to mission-critical applications and affluent consumers, has just landed a new round of funding in order to further dominate the market. Just after launching its ioDrive Duo and naming Steve Wozniak as the firm's Chief Scientist, it has just closed a Series B round of funding worth a rather healthy (especially in this market) $47.5 million. The cash came from a group of investors led by global venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners and joined by Series A investors including New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Dell Ventures and Sumitomo Ventures. Scott Sandell, general partner...
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It's time to face facts, HDD lovers. SSDs are here to stay, like it or not. As we see more and more solid state drives flood out into the consumer market, we're also seeing these durable, pricey and ridiculously quick spinners infiltrate all sorts of other devices. Take Dell's newest EqualLogic PS6000 series of storage arrays, for instance. Starting today, users who need gobs of space for media, web materials or really, really long home videos can get an EqualLogic array with SSDs within. These high-end, enterprise-centric devices offer increased performance, advanced virtualization capabilities and even greater value than previous generations. Of course, Dell has crafted 'em to integrate seamlessly...
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We're all about more options when it comes to solid state drives (not to mention lower prices), but on the same token, we'll take a splash of innovation wherever we can get it. Compellent Technologies has just stepped forward with an innovation of its own, offering up the first solid state storage solution with automated, block-level tiering. In order to do so, it will integrate the STEC Zeus IOPS enterprise SSD into its storage area network (SAN). In order to maximize SSD utilization and efficiency, Compellent's patented software will enable customers to deploy only two SSDs in a "tier 0" configuration, automatically migrating inactive data to less expensive drives. The automated tiered storage...
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NEW YORK (AP) — With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House Inc. announced Monday that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form, including novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the Magic Treehouse children's series. Random House CEO Markus Dohle said in a statement that "more people everyday are enjoying reading in the electronic format and Random House wants to extend our reach to them with more of our books." The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format and will have a digital library of nearly 15,000. The new round of e-books is expected to be completed within months; excerpts...
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SANDISK INTRODUCES ExtremeFFS – NEW FLASH MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR IMPROVING SSD PERFORMANCE AND RELIABILITY SanDisk Also Proposes Two Metrics for End-Users to Measure Performanceand Endurance: virtualRPM (vRPM) and Long-Term Data Endurance (LDE) ExtremeFFS™ greatly accelerates SSD random write speeds and endurance vRPM allows consumers to measure and compare SSD and hard disk drive performance Industry encouraged to adopt a simple endurance metric to determine the lifespan of an SSD LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, Nov. 5, 2008 —SanDisk® Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK) today unveiled an advanced flash file system for solid-state drives (SSDs) that yields dramatic improvement in performance and reliability...
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Remember SanDisk’s new SlotMusic format that we told you about last month? Well, the world’s four largest music companies will begin shipping almost 40 music albums in this format this week. Additional albums are planned for the Christmas season.Although we initially heard prices in the $7 - $10 range, recent news is saying a 1GB microSD memory card containing MP3 files will cost $14.99. Keep in mind, these tunes are DRM-free, so that’s a plus.Best Buy will be getting their albums this week, while Walmart shoppers will have to wait another week or two. These retailers also carry the SanDisk Sansa-branded SlotMusic players, which start at about $20. There will also be artist-branded players that...
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It's no secret that music sales comprised of physical media (i.e. CDs) are down in the face of huge competition from iTunes and other digital distribution channels. At the same time, no one ever said the record labels would give up on physical sales easily. Today SanDisk, along with the four major record labels (Warner Bros., EMI, Sony BMG and Universal Music Group) have announced a new format: slotMusic. slotMusic is essentially a microSD card with an album on it, and the partners plan to roll it out in time for the holiday season.According to the format's official site, Wal-Mart and Best Buy are already lined up to stock the cards.With slotMusic, songs will be loaded onto what are...
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The third ad in Microsoft's massive ad campaign designed to enhance the image of the company and Windows has hit the web. If you remember, the first ad featured Jerry Seinfeld stumbling upon Bill Gates shopping in a Shoe Circus store for some discount shoes. The second ad also featured Bill and Jerry, but this time as houseguests trying to connect with an ordinary family.The first couple of ads didn't resonate well with the general populace, however, and Seinfeld has been nixed--at least for now... This latest ad (finally) directly addresses Apple's "Get a Mac" ads, and features a myriad of Windows users saying that they're PCs, and talking about what they do with their systems. The ad isn't...
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Here at the HotHardware labs, we like to make use of SiSoftware's Sandra benchmarks for quick and dirty measurements on relative performance of a product versus another in its class. While the benchmark suite is virtually all synthetic testing, we've found that results and measurements generally scale pretty well with real-world performance in many cases. Regardless, this release nearly sneaked past us yesterday but it appears SiSoftware has launched Sandra 2009 and this time, they've stepped up to 3D graphics and GPGPU benchmarking as well. London, UK, September 1st 2008 - We are pleased to launch SiSoftware Sandra 2009, the latest version...
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Solid-State drives (SSDs) have had a lot of coverage lately, mostly negative. Battery life, performance, reliability, those sorts of things have been under close scrutiny of late. Monday, in Sandisk's earnings call, Sandisk placed the blame for at least one of those issues squarely on Microsoft's shoulders. Eli Harari, Chairman and CEO of Sandisk, when asked about how his company plans to increase adoption rates of SSDs, said (emphasis ours):As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for Flash memory solid state disk. And the next generation controllers needs to basically compensate for...
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Uwe Boll has been involved in numerous game to movie adaptations, none of them a success in any measure other than stirring up fans into a frenzy of hatred. Thus far he his movie-manglings of various franchises has garnered him a 200,000+ signature petition requesting that he exit the movie industry entirely and never return.So what did Boll do when he heard that the most successful MMO in the world (of Warcraft…) was going to get a big screen adaptation? We’ll let him tell you:“I got in contact with Paul Sams of Blizzard, and he said, ‘We will not sell the movie rights, not to you…especially not to you,’” Boll revealed. “Because it’s such a big online game success, maybe a bad movie would...
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Global warming got you down? Concerned about rising gas prices and our over-dependency on fossil fuels? Before you declare that the sky is falling and reach for your favorite tree to hug in what some call the last few days of earth's existence, remember there are some pretty smart cookies and valiant visionaries still working on some of heavy lifting that will provide solutions for ensuring mankind doesn't strip the earth down to a baron wasteland... "IwamotoScott envisions the city as Hydro-Net, using “Geothermal Mushroom” structures to extract heat and water from deep in the earth, and whimsical “Fog Flowers” to render moisture from the air and grow algae, which would then be turned...
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For those of you who use devices with SDHC support such as the Eee PC, it appears that SanDisk has a late Christmas gift for you: 32GB SDHC cards.“Giving photo enthusiasts the freedom to take more pictures and shoot more video, SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) today increased both capacities and speeds in its SanDisk Ultra® II line with the introduction of 32- and 16-gigabyte (GB)1 SDHC™ cards and an 8GB SDHC Plus card. The announcement was made at the photo industry’s PMA 08 International Convention here.Ideal for today’s camcorders and point-and-shoot digital cameras that can record both video and still images, the cards offer faster read and write speeds of 15 megabytes per second2...
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I have a rule of thumb. Whenever I read anything about alternative energy of any kind, I simply skip over everything and look for the one thing that matters: Is it cheaper than oil and coal? Nothing else matters, really. Burning coal and oil to make energy to produce goods and services to tax to redistribute as subsidies to alternative energy producers is a colossal waste of time. I've read thousands of articles about solar power over the years, all missing that essential ingredient. So no one was more surprised than I when I read the following in an article about Nanosolar, a startup in Silicon Valley that's pioneering an inexpensive manufacturing process for solar panels:Nanosolar’s founder...
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Never mind waiting for the face of Jesus to appear on your toast and make you an e*bay thousandaire. Now a company in Italy will let you have the face of a saint appear on your cellphone screen, in the form of a digital "holy card" or santino.A company in Italy started offering the service on Tuesday but ran into opposition from some Catholic Church leaders who think the idea is crass and commercial."We found a need and filled it," Barbara Labate, who came up with the idea with her business partner in a cellphone services company based in Milan, told Reuters by telephone.Many taxis, private cars and trucks in Italy have a small picture of a saint -- known as a "santino" or little saint...
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If you live in Germany or plan on moving there soon, you're going to want to kiss German Vodafone CEO Friedrich Joussen when you're there. He and his company just obtained a court order that forces rival, T-Mobile, to sell iPhones without contract to those that want it.“For its part, Vodafone -- which at one time was in the running for its own exclusive contract to sell iPhone to parts of Europe -- claims that it took the matter to court out of fears that other handset makers may follow Apple's example and begin tying their handsets to specific providers, further shredding the German wireless market.Vodafone Germany chief executive Friedrich Joussen in a statement said his firm's goal is...
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The digital grassy knoll set's collective head is about to explode. Apple is collecting iPhone usage data, linked to the user's specific personal information. Apple gathers that personal information when you sign up for an iPhone, and may be doing something or nothing with it after associating it with your usage data. People's opinions on this seem to depend on the ratio of Apple fanboy to paranoid privacy nut you are. If you're 100% both, this is bad news:From this information, Apple could build a profile on users. Where they travel, where they spend their free time, where they work, where they invest their money, what they browse, etc etc. Obviously most users would like to...
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Nifty, nifty, nifty. SanDisk, the inventor of flash storage cards, is out with a PCI Express compatible module for both laptops and desktops, that supplies from 8 to 16 gigabytes of sweet, sweet flash, to serve up frequently used files almost instantly. It lets you basically turn your whirling hard drive into nothing more than dedicated bulk storage for your prOn... um, files. I meant files. They call it the Vaulter Disk.SanDisk Vaulter Disk accelerates performance by pre-controlling the distribution of storage data between itself and a high-capacity hard drive. This parallel activity increases overall user responsiveness over a hard drive-only configuration.“SanDisk Vaulter Disk consistently...
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Today Sandisk filed a lawsuit against 25 other flash memory vendors, aiming to erase some of their profits.The roll call of the companies is a long one, but here goes: ACP-EP Memory, A-Data, Apacer, Behavior Computer, Buffalo, Chipsbank, Corsair Memory, Dane-Elec, Edge, Imation/Memorex, Interactive Media, Kaser, Kingston, LG Electronics, Phison Electronics, PNY, PQI, Silicon Motion, Skymedi, Transcend, TSR, USBest, Verbatim, Welldone Company and Zotek/Zodata. SanDisk says it's just enforcing its patents to be "fair" to the companies that already license its technology for flash storage devices.Quite a few of those names are well-known, such as Apacer, Buffalo, PNY, PQI and Corsair. SanDisk...
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On October 22nd, innovative memory chipmaker SanDisk is rolling out its TakeTV, a big ole flash memory drive that loads television shows or movies from your computer and plays them on your television. It uses a cradle for their drive that you hook up to your television, and allows you to simply scroll through a menu of available files to play them. It's offering content, too, through a video download service they call Fanfare. For David Poltrack, president of CBS Vision, the TV broadcaster's research division, it's a matter of getting the networks' programming in places that consumers will use it. "When we tested the SanDisk product it clearly resonated with consumers," Poltrack says. "There...
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A U.S. Grand Jury has issued subpoenas to Toshiba and their U.S. partner, San Disk, in regards to claims of price-fixing. While these two are both very well known brands here in the U.S., they are only part of the investigation which covers more than 20 companies:“The filing said 23 other companies were also sued for the same reason.NAND flash memory is used in digital cameras and music players such as Apple Inc's iPod.”It does seem a bit far-fetched that a group of 23 businessmen from different corporations would be able to collude long enough to fix prices without shareholders or financial analysts catching on. Add to that the various bitter rivalries in some corners of the tech industry...
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