CBL Data Recovery Technologies Inc. of Toronto, a leading provider of emergency computer data recovery services, is now targeting the Caribbean market by opening another global data recovery laboratory in Barbados.
This opening follows openings of four other data recovery labs in Singapore; North Tyneside, United Kingdom; Kaiserslautern, Germany and Beijing, China in recent months. “It doesn’t matter what corner of the world it happens – data loss is just a fact of life that causes serious harm to the well-being of any business,” said CBL’s president Bill Margeson. “When a catastrophic failure hits a company’s data, the costs begin mounting immediately. Now with a presence in the Caribbean on the island of Barbados, we are prepared to apply our specialized data recovery skills within a short time period because hours do count.” Disaster strikes two out of 1,000 company data centres each year with 43 per cent of those companies closing immediately and another 29 per cent gone within two years.
Dell bolsters tape storage options
Dell Computer Corp. has expanded its enterprise storage line with the announcement of two tape libraries that support the Linear-Tape Open industry standard.
The PowerVault 136T and PowerVault 128T tape libraries are designed to help network managers consolidate multiple storage sources to a single tape library and reduce downtime by as much as 75 per cent through redundant fault-tolerant features, the company said. Both tape libraries use the LTO standard, which lets them back up and recover data from any system that uses the LTO specification. The tape drives cost less than .5 cents per megabyte and are compatible with LTO libraries and tape drives from IBM Corp., Hewlett Packard Co., Seagate Technology LLC and other vendors. The PowerVault 136T is designed for large enterprises and supports 14 terabytes of data.
CA unveils BrightStor storage line
Computer Associates International Inc. said it intends to compete head-to-head with Veritas Software Corp. for market share in the enterprise data backup and storage space, a move expected to yield more choices for users in this market. CA said it is consolidating its storage applications under its new BrightStor brand, and releasing its first BrightStor-branded product, BrightStor Enterprise Backup.
BrightStor Enterprise Backup supports a range of platforms, including NAS (network attached storage) and SAN (storage area network) devices running on Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Unix. Its sustained backup throughput capacity has been benchmarked at 1.5 terabytes per hour on Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Solaris 8 operating system and 1 terabyte per hour on Hewlett Packard Co.’s HP-UX 11i system, according to tests audited by analyst firm Doculabs Inc.
Data warehousing finds more uses
Although CRM (customer relationship management) applications continue to be the most common way in which companies uses data warehouses, there are other applications that could prove useful as well. According to NCR Corp.’s Teradata division, fraud detection is becoming a more asked-for feature by companies that have a data warehouse in place.
“For telecommunications firm Far East Tone in Taiwan, one of the first applications they used data warehousing for was the prediction of fraud,” said Geoff Dickson, vice-president of marketing and strategic partnerships of Teradata Asia-Pacific. “They wanted to analyze their customer database and look for key attributes that could indicate if someone had a propensity to create fraud,” he said, adding that once they gained that knowledge, they could use that knowledge to troll the transactions and pick up patterns to act upon potential fraud.
EMC cuts business outlook again
Once again blaming the slowdown in IT spending brought on by softening economy, EMC Corp. has warned that its financial results will fall well short of expectations for the second straight quarter.
The data storage market leader said its Q2 revenue and earnings shortfall will be even more dramatic than the one it reported for the previous three-month period. EMC now expects revenue to total about US$2 billion, 18 per cent lower than the US$2.43 billion that Wall Street analysts had been forecasting. The Hopkinton, Mass.-based company indicated that Q2 profits will likely be only about one-third of what it was expected to deliver. Earnings should total between US$88 million and US$132 million, EMC said – far lower than the US$375 million figure that analysts had predicted.
Sistina enhances Linux global file
Storage management vendor Sistina Software Inc. recently released enhanced file system software that gives Linux server users better performance and updated volume management tools.
Dubbed Global File System (GFS) 4.1.1, the software lets multiple servers on a storage area network share a single file system. GFS also features journaling and fail-over capabilities for clustered Linux servers. Version 4.1.1’s new features include patches for the Linux 2.4.5 kernel, a new I/O fencing method that now uses the APC MasterSwitch and updated initialization scripts. The APC MasterSwitch is a remote power distribution unit used to control the power to attached devices. I/O fencing uses a method called STOMITH, which stands for ‘shoot the other machine in the head.’ It applies to the ability for all machines using the global file system to disable another machine if necessary so that the file system will not be corrupted.
