SanDisk has agreed to acquire Pliant Technology, a manufacturer of solid-state drives (SSDs), for $ 327 million, which signifies a significant shift to the enterprise space for the flash-memory maker. While SanDisk has been primarily known for its storage cards and flash drives sold at retail stores, the company has benefited from sales of its memory chips for smartphones, tablets, and digital music players. Now SanDisk takes on a crowded, yet growing SSD market with established companies like Intel, Seagate, Samsung (whose SSD business was acquired by Seagate), and Hitachi.
Network Computing
SanDisk To Acquire SSD Maker Pliant
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Categories: General.
Interop Premieres New Technology; Everyone Wins
One of the coolest displays I saw at Interop was not in Start-up City nor in the Czech Republic zone. It wasn’t the Lamborghini that Securent rolled onto the floor, nor was it the Barracuda Bus. It was the fiber backplane that HP brought out from its R&D facility and had running as a proof of concept, as well as the number of vendors that had products–nearly all proof of concepts–in the InteropNet Openflow lab. Staying awake is hard after sitting through the sixth top-of-rack switch of the day. Showcases like HP’s and Openflow’s should be an important part of any trade show because they remind us why what we do is cool and fun.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Day 19: Google Docs Adds New Features on the Fly
30 Days With…Google Docs: Day 19
Here we are, more than half-way through the 30 Days With…Google Docs project, and we have new features to discuss. One of the advantages of hosting an online productivity solution is that Google can easily introduce new features without having to wait for some major release or update.
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Categories: General.
The Fiction Of MSRP
In my 25 years as a consultant, my clients have tended to straddle the mythical line between small/medium businesses and what vendors like to think of as true enterprises. Working both sides of the line that way has made it painfully obvious that the process of figuring out what some piece of kit will cost my client is very different depending on which market the item I’m specing out is targeted to. While an SME customer buying one or two Dell servers expects to pay the price on the Dell website, saving Dell the cost of a sales call, vendors of products targeted for sale to enterprise openly admit that no one pays list price.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Mac Defender Crashes Apple Security Myth
Mac Defender is turning out to be somewhat of an epidemic that neither Apple, nor Mac users seem prepared for. The Mac malware has caught the Apple ecosystem off guard and threatens to shatter the reality distortion field that Apple thrives on.
Apple, and the Apple faithful would like to pretend that Mac malware doesn’t exist. But, thanks to some awesome investigative reporting by Ed Bott, Jacqui Cheng, and others, we know that AppleCare technicians are seeing an explosion of malware issues, and that Apple has specifically directed support technicians not to get involved.
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Categories: General.
New Relic Delivers ‘Real User Monitoring’ In APM Tool
New Relic, a provider of application performance monitoring (APM) tools, has added a free new feature that delivers real user monitoring to clock the time from when a Web page is requested to when it finishes loading in the browser. The APM tracks multiple metrics including network speed, the performance of the application server, defects in the code and the performance of various browsers to determine where bottlenecks may occur.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Day 18: Google Docs Translations Don’t Make Sense
30 Days With…Google Docs: Day 18
One of the features touted by Google for Google Docs is the ability to easily translate documents into 53 different languages. For day 18 of 30 Days With…Google Docs I decided to put those translations to the test.
I don’t do a lot of work internationally that would require me to have to translate my documents from English to some other language, or to take documents I receive in other languages and translate them into English. So, for the purposes of testing out the translation capabilities of Google Docs I enlisted my Twitter followers to help out.
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Categories: General.
Nexsan Launches High Density Storage Systems
In a series of announcements earlier this month, Nexsan released new storage systems intended to make the company’s products more attractive to the mid-market by providing higher capacity in the same amount of space, as well as by reducing the amount of energy they use. The announcements included support for 1-, 2-, or 3-terabyte Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives with the company’s E18 model of its E-Series storage systems (originally only available with solid-state and Serially Attached Small Computer Systems Interface drives); an expansion chassis that holds up to 60 additional drives; and a dual-port 10-Gb Internet SCSI input/output option.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
IBM’s Spring Storage Announcements
IBM has just made its spring storage-related announcements and, since the company has a very broad and functionally-rich storage portfolio, the enhancements, upgrades, and new products cover a lot of ground. And, unlike Paris spring fashion shows, which are about style, business announcements are about substance, as customers care much more about functionality than they do aesthetics.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.