Stories by Chris Mellor

Sun's virtual tape thumper

Sun has quietly released a new virtual tape library using StorageTek software and Thumper, aka X4500, hybrid server hardware.

Cisco announces third-generation data center

Cisco has announced a platform to provision server, storage and network resources as virtualized services in the data center. It is part of its Data Center 3.0 strategy, one aimed at the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application service-levels, efficiency and collaboration.

UK retailer to sell wooden PC

A supposedly zero carbon PC is being developed by U.K. retailer PC World, featuring wood casing for keyboard, screen and mouse. Use of recycled materials and low electricity needs will reduce its carbon footprint to 85 percent of a standard PC.

Disk data loss caused by magnetic avalanches

Scientists have discovered that "avalanche" effects in spinning magnetic fields can cause data loss in disk drives - and are working on changes to recording layer chemistry that should give us more reliable storage.

Eco drive cuts power by 75 percent

An external drive that drops its power down in three stages as inactivity time lengthens has been announced by Kanguru. It is an 80 - 750GB capacity product, connecting to Windows or Mac systems by USB 2.0.

One chip does three memory jobs

Memory system designer SST has combined NAND and NOR-like flash memory with RAM to produce a single chip with three memory applications.

Green scorecard puts IBM top, Apple last

An organic climate change lobby group has issued green ratings for hardware and software-based IT suppliers as well as other businesses. IBM leads the IT pack while Apple, Amazon and eBay are bottom with zero green credentials.

1TB optical disks now in prospect

Manufacturers are being offered the world's highest capacity optical storage technology to license, reportedly, leap-frogging 300GB holographic disks and offering 1TB in a DVD-size disk. But the technology has not been commercialized and product could be three to five years away.

Greenpeace praises Apple

Greenpeace has moved Apple up its green electronics rankings thanks to Steve Job's promises to phase out PVCs and other chemical nasties from its products, but the top spot goes to Nokia.

DDR3 memory standard agreed

The new DDR3 -- Double Data Rate 3 -- standard, gives a big performance improvement and should reduce power compared with to the DDR1 and DDR2 memory schemes, according to the standards group which made it.

Mainframe users get faster remote vaulting

Brocade has introduced pipelining technology for transferring data from a mainframe across a WAN and FICON link to IBM and Sun virtual tape libraries -- claiming to increase backup speed up to 70 percent.

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