Top Twenty Stories

AON: Give us cash, we'll emit 10TB holographic cube

They do it with mirrors

Access Optical Networks says it has developed a 1.2TB holographic storage cube that can transfer data at 155MB/sec and last longer than 50 years. Oh, and it's done using mirrors – but no smoke. The storage medium is a 1cm cube of photorefractive lithium niobate crystalline material and the claimed cost/GB is $0.11 in 1,000 …
Hitachi GST pushes out boosted SSD

Intel's new NAND

Hitachi GST has birthed a boosted Ultrastar SSD using Intel's latest 25nm NAND. Intel launched its own 520 just a few days ago. In these frenetic days of flash hyper-awareness, close attention will be paid to the performance of new flash drives to see if suppliers are keeping up with the pace or slipping behind. The Ultrastar …
IBM stuffs XIV array with flash tech

Big Blue puts pedal to the metal

IBM has pressed the gas pedal to the floor with its third generation XIV array and given it up to 6TB of solid state drive cache storage. The XIV array is a single tier device and this is a flash cache, an SSD Caching option, not a separate tier of storage. IBM provides no performance boost numbers, saying instead: "The …
Oracle inhales Taleo for $1.9bn

Blows it onto the Fusion app cloud

Only two months ago, Taleo, the seller of online talent management software, was saying that it intended to remain independent despite the cloud software feeding frenzy. But today, Larry Ellison, CEO and co-founder of Oracle, made Taleo CEO Mike Gregoire an offer he couldn't refuse: $1.9bn. That price, net of cash and debts, …
What downturn? Lenovo stuffs pockets with 54% extra profit

World's number 2 PC maker buoyed by China performance

Lenovo Group is one of the few PC makers still in the pink, beating market expectations with a fat third-quarter net profit. The Chinese firm's profit jumped 54 per cent to $153.46m in the three months to December last year, up from $99.65m in the same period the year before. Despite the downturn in the global economy and the …
IBM does financing deals for Power, storage kit

Low or no interest rates

It's a new year and a new first quarter and a new and somewhat challenging economy in North America, and therefore IBM is offering financing deals in the United States and Canada. Last week, Big Blue rolled out a zero per cent financing program called Fast Start Financing that, as the name suggests and as the company has done …
Teradata surfs big data wave in Q4

Big data = big bucks

Data warehousing pioneer and big data playa Teradata has just turned in the best fourth quarter and full year in the company's 33 year history, thanks to the big data wave and a number of key acquisitions that the company that have moved it beyond its core data warehousing biz. In a conference call with Wall Street analysts …
Ingram Micro CEO outlines growth plan as 2011 profits falter

Weak Euro consumer biz and challenged Oz operation blamed

Ingram Micro's new chief exec has set out three strategic priorities as he gets to grips with the challenges facing the world's largest distributor and looks to bolster bottom line goodness. Alan Monie, who returned to Ingram as COO in November and was made top dog last month, outlined the imperatives on a Q4 conference call …
Are Oracle's Exadata racks fluffing Apple's iCloud?

Larry rains on Big Blue's Power parade

Oracle did not have a good fiscal Q2, as El Reg reported on Tuesday after the market closed. Server sales plummeted and new software license sales did not grow anywhere near what Ellison & Co expected. But the Exadata and Exalogic lines of machinery were a bright spot, and may well be fluffing up Apple's iCloud. Well, at …
IBM UK's channel queen abdicates, long live the king

Richard Potts takes the biz partner hot seat from Jacqui Davey

IBM has crowned popular channel figure Richard Potts as veep of business partner and mid-market sales for the UK and Ireland, and named Mark Hennessey as worldwide partner boss. Potts, who helped to turn around Big Blue's volume server biz in the UK as director of the System X unit replaces Jacqueline Davey, who is moving to …
Cisco stabilizes switching and routing in Q2

Raises dividend, remains cautious

Networking - and some would say data center bellwether - Cisco Systems turned in a better-than-expected fiscal Q2 ended in January, with revenues up 10.8 per cent to $11.53bn and net income up a very good 43.5 per cent to $2.18bn. "We are moving ahead of our competitors and our industry peers," proclaimed Cisco CEO John …
Timico Technology Group gobbles Redwood

ISP and MSP get together

ISP Timico Technology Group (TTG) has devoured unified comms minnow Redwood Telecommunication for an undisclosed sum. London-based Avaya and Mitel reseller Redwood employs 28 staff and counts Jimmy Choo and Broadgate Estates among its customer list. Tim Radford, chairman at TTG, said the IP telephony and UC services that …
Red Hat RHEV 3.0 to launch this Wednesday?

We're virtually sure...

Commercial Linux and Java development tool distributor Red Hat has big aspirations in the server virtualization and cloud computing arenas, and it looks like the company is getting ready to bust out the 3.0 version of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor – RHEV for short. Red Hat has cooked up an all-day event for …
Flasher macs popular among data centre nerds

FlashMax will give server apps a fright

FlashMax sounds like a used car salesman from Essex. It's actually Virident's latest server flash card to replace the TachION and comes as Virident pockets $21m in extra funding from VCs keen to invest in the hottest flash market of them all. Fusion-io opened the door to the booming server flash market and tons of would-be …
RIM demos PlayBook OS2

CES 2012 Finally, native email... a month from now

PlayBook owners should be getting native email next month, but as RIM's tablet gains independence it's also shifting away from the infrastructure which has served RIM so well. RIM has been demonstrating the latest version of its PlayBook OS at CES, and has finally got native PIM applications running on the tablet – including …
Peeking up the skirt of Microsoft's hardy ReFS

Getting under the skin of Windows 8's new server filesystem

As reported this past fortnight, Microsoft's new Storage Spaces for Windows 8 is only half the story; the operating system builder is also throwing in a new Resilient File System (ReFS) while retaining most NTFS features and semantics. Storage Spaces is a Windows 8 feature that enables a PC user to aggregate physical disk …
OnLive sneaks Windows 7 into the iPad

We're not playing games now

Tablet fondlers can finally get some work done thanks to streaming cloud supplier OnLive, which now pipes the full Windows 7 experience from its data centres to punters' palms. Right now the free app doesn't maintain any settings between sessions, but does provide a working Win 7 desktop, and copy of Microsoft Office, which …
'My product is driPhone, not iPhone'

QotW Ballmer, Jobs dolls and Nuclear Annihilation

Gadgets were launched, people said stupid things and journalists trudged up and down writing stories about ultrabooks, this week was CES and it sent the tech press into a LED-dazzled headspin. There was less media attention, from US TV anyway, on the threat to web freedoms of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), under …
Virident flasher claims Oracle database streak record

Solid disks thrust into willing 80-core NEC box

Exit Exadata, Fusion-io and Violin Memory - so to speak: the Oracle database random IO speed record has been smashed by an 80-core NEC server fitted with eight Virident flash drives. A single Xeon-based 80-core NEC Express 5800/A1080a GX server, fitted with eight 1.4TB Virident FlashMax solid-state drives (11.2TB of flash …
Citrix stretches XenServer 6.0 to cover bigger iron

Chubbier VMs for heftier apps

Citrix Systems doesn't make a lot of noise about server virtualization these days, now that the two founders of the Xen project have left to start Bromium. But the company, and the open source Xen project that it sponsors, continues to hammer out code to make Xen a credible alternative to VMware's ESXi, Microsoft's Hyper-V, and …