Lucas Mearian

EMC Corp. Monday announced licensing agreements with Microsoft Corp. that will lead to the introduction a new family of Windows-powered network-attached storage (NAS) products as well as a single management interface for both EMC and Microsoft NAS servers.

Relatively inexpensive secondary disk storage is gaining a significant foothold in corporate data centers, according to a survey of more than 1,000 IT managers due to be released next month. But the survey also shows that a majority of data is still backed up and archived the traditional way: on tape devices.

Nortel Networks Corp. announced Tuesday that it has added Fibre Channel storage over synchronous optical networks (SONET) to its product offerings, allowing carriers that use the company's optical switches to offer customers the ability to transmit block-level data over thousands of miles for replication and backup.

In one of the first projects of its kind, a Manitboa-based credit union this month said it has set up a wireless IP network to replicate banking data and other information from its primary data centre to a disaster recovery site dozens of kilometres miles away.

Fidelity Investments next week plans to announce that it's rolling out a packaged storage-area network (SAN) management tool to replace an in-house application used to automatically provision storage space and charge business units for using the capacity.

A credit card transaction processing company last month confirmed that millions of card numbers were stolen recently when someone hacked into its computers. But it defended itself by saying the culprits may not have obtained any useful information.

EMC Corp. Friday announced enhancements to its high-end Symmetrix 8000 series arrays, including native gigabit Ethernet connectivity for remote replication, mainframe support and the addition of 146GB drives that give customers more usable disk space compared with the previous model.

Veritas Software Corp. this week upgraded its flagship data backup technology. But Veritas, the second-largest vendor of storage management tools, is also embarking on an acquisition-fueled strategy to expand into other IT management technologies.