Lucas Mearian

Most financial services firms with online aggregation services should cut their losses and shut them down, because customers' privacy concerns have resulted in slow adoption rates and, in turn, a lack of ROI, industry analysts say.

Veritas Software Corp. has announced new applications to allow storage administrators to cluster their Linux servers and create Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS).

Rivals EMC Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have agreed to expand a cross-licensing agreement for certain storage system application programming interfaces (API), a move that will eventually allow the development of storage management software capable of controlling each other

IBM Corp. will soon be offering new low- and high-end storage arrays aimed at challenging rivals such as Hitachi Ltd. and Dell Computer Corp. with faster devices that provide lower ownership costs.

EMC Corp. today announced the creation of a business unit, Information Solutions Consulting, that it will operate in a five-year partnership pact with Accenture Ltd.

IBM Corp. last week announced that its line of virtual tape storage devices will soon be able to connect disks used in data backup applications to mainframes via Fibre Channel links, potentially increasing data transfer rates by up to 75 per cent.

Sun Microsystems Inc. announced a storage-area network (SAN) suite of hardware and software products that support 2G bit/sec. Fibre Channel networks, doubling the data transfer rates of its current SANs.

Despite an uneven economy, the growth of data from Web services and rich media continues to drive technology spending on storage and the networks required to share stored information across an enterprise. The result: Companies are constantly searching for better technology to manage that information. John Parkinson, chief technology officer at Paris-based Cap Gemini Ernst & Young LLP, spoke with Computerworld last week about information overload and the increased complexity it brings to the enterprise.