Chris Mellor

Data growth and disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) are driving archive planning much more than regulatory compliance. The second annual Bridgehead Software information lifecycle management audit showed that little more than half the respondents -- 58 percent -- see regulatory compliance as the main driver.

Storage area network (SAN) switch vendor Brocade is buying rival McData for US$713 million in shares. Brocade aims to save $100 million a year through headcount reductions and other cost-savings. Both company boards have approved the acquisition.

Crosswalk, the data protection management vendor, has introduced its grid storage product. The iGrid 5100 comes as two to eight nodes sitting between Fibre Channel-connected storage and gigabit Ethernet-connected servers.

One of the justifications for an increase in the number of days a terrorist suspect can be held in the U.K. without charge, from 14 to 90, is the time it takes to decipher what is on a suspect's computer hard drive. Assistant commissioner at the Met Police, Andy Hayman, has claimed the extra time is needed in order to make sure that all the evidence from a seized PC is located before someone is released. The question is: why does it take so long?

Sun is falling behind in the storage market, according to the latest market report from Gartner. In an external controller-based market that has grown 11 percent in the past 12 months, Sun's share has dived by 17.4 percent.

Samsung Corp. is set to introduce the world's fastest memory for multimedia applications. The company claimed that workstations and servers using its 256MB XDR DRAM would cut through applications faster than existing RAM. It said that XDR (eXtreme Data Rate) memory is ten times faster than DDR 400 memory and five times faster than RDRAM (PC800).

The European Union (E.U.) is planning to bring in new legislation that will force telcos to retain traffic data for 12 months, ostensibly in a bid to fight terrorism.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. (HGST) is winding its main 332-acre San Jose manufacturing plant site in the U.S. in preference to a state-of-the-art facility in China.