Lucas Mearian

Some of the world

European Union banks said they were pleased with the 12-nation conversion to the new euro currency last week. But experts suggested that the real test remains ahead for accounting applications, databases, spreadsheets and other business systems.

Many attendees at a recent banking conference expressed concern over the lack of standards to tie together disparate, back-end database systems.

Brokerage house Edward Jones & Co. is deploying what may be the first storage-over-IP network of its scale. It will replicate up to 90TB of data from its main data centre near St. Louis to a fully redundant facility in Tempe, Ariz.

When storage-area networks began to take hold in large companies more than a year ago, vendors touted serverless backup as the killer application for SANs. The technology still has a few kinks that need to be worked out, experts say.

Chicago-based Bank One is planning to add 600 IT workers during the next three months in an effort to move the bank holding company away from outsourcing.

Bank One Corp. has announced that it's planning the largest IT employee hiring spree in its history in an effort to speed up and expand internal technology projects aimed at moving the US$270 billion bank holding company away from outsourcing initiatives.

Compaq and EMC are opening their programming interfaces to each other to make it easier for IT managers to integrate their rival disk arrays on storage networks.