Lucas Mearian

MasterCard International Inc. is in a three-phase storage technology rollout aimed at integrating new storage products based on features and price, while relying on partnering agreements between EMC Corp., its primary storage network vendor, and other vendors for interoperability.

BellSouth Corp. has seen its disk-based storage grow 130 per cent, from 239TB to 550TB, during the past three years, even as its tape-based storage rocketed from 350TB to 2 petabytes.

Early this year, mortgage lender Fannie Mae Corp. went live with a new primary data centre and storage-area network (SAN) to address its sprawling storage needs. Now 1,150 of the company's 1,400 servers are attached to the SAN, which backs up 80TB of data weekly.

Simplifying the process of managing multivendor storage installations is a top priority for many IT managers, and technology vendors are starting to show how they plan to make that happen.

Storage giant EMC Corp. reported recently that its third-quarter sales dropped by US$51 million compared with the second quarter, a slide it predicted earlier this month and attributed to a reluctance by IT managers to spend on new projects.

A low-cost disk drive technology better known in the PC world is on the verge of showing up in the nation's corporate data centers -- if only the technology can shake that PC image.

In its ongoing move to sink its teeth into the midrange array marketplace, EMC Corp. Monday announced the latest in a line of 2Gbps Fibre Channel arrays, a follow-on to its first new midrange array announced in August.

The industry's first switch that supports InfiniBand technology, which is aimed at reducing the complexity of server clustering and increasing I/O throughput speeds, began shipping last month.