The storage industry has been a hot bed for innovation and debate with discussion on local storage versus cloud storage, and the pros and cons of each. "I believe most company will end up using a combination of both, physical on premise and cloud," said Robert Peglar, VP of Technology for Xiotech, in an interview with Biz-news.com.

Many companies find it hard to understand storage and for some the learning curve is too high. Xiotech says they provide simplicity in accessing and integrating into their own company's growth.

"Chrome OS is ideal for ‘smartbooks’ and will lead consumers further into cloud computing," says Canalys in its recent Notebook Pulse Report.

Canalys therefore expects that devices running chrome OS will be bundled with mobile data contracts, and support for ARM-based processors will make it an ideal ‘smartbook’ OS.

Although global shipments of blade servers are set to decline in 2009, the market is expected to return to robust double-digit growth during the following years as global economic conditions improve, according to iSuppli.

Blade server shipments will amount to 1.04 million units in 2009, down 9 percent from 1.14 million in 2008. This contrasts sharply with the 31.1 percent increase in 2008.

The cloud has been a popular computing term for 2009 and going into 2010 will likely see the rise of that term as content become more accessible from multiple location as opposed to being locked down by local storage.

Intercept is a virtualization company within the UK specializing in desktop virtualization, server virtualization, application virtualization and storage virtualization. A very large part of their business is based in the cloud. Majority of our clients seek virtual hosting for their enterprise computers. They  basically help develop a system allowing generic access, via the cloud, to any application that a company has.

Vordel, a provider of governance products for Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), released the Vordel Cloud Service Broker that aggregates and manages multi-domain services.

The Multi-Domain Registry (MDRR) aggregates together services across domains. These domains include not only Cloud providers such as Amazon and Google, but also local on-premises services, and business partner services. In this way, all of the services on which a business depends are managed in one place.

Significant findings of AFCOM’s 2009/2010 Data Center Trends survey reveal that though threat of cyber terrorism is real, it is not being adequately addressed by the world's keepers of the most confidential financial, military and personal data.

Survey also reveals that despite hype around cloud computing, only 14.9 percent of data centers have deployed cloud solutions to date - and it shines a new light on the fate of mainframes.

Sandisk expects increased demand for its mobile storage products as a result of continued growth in the smartphone, MIDs and notebooks sectors.
The flash memory provider said demand for its mobile solutions was actually increasing - as were prices.

A survey by Infosecurity Europe of 470 organisations has found that 75 per cent intend to reallocate or increase budgets to secure cloud computing and software as a service within the next 12 months.
However, interviews conducted with a panel of 20 chief information Security Officers (CISOs) of large enterprises also found concerns about availability and security aspects of software services in the cloud.

Cloud computing - including cloud storage - will transform the industry and become the predominant way in which IT is consumed.
That's the prediction of Sajai Krishnan, CEO of Silicon Valley start-up ParaScale.
He said there has been a rapid heightening of interest recently in all things cloud - applications, computing and storage.

Data center software provider, Cassatt Corporation, has announced new service and technology offerings to help companies safely realize "internal cloud computing".
Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corp, said this was an IT approach that delivers the benefits of cloud computing using the resources that organizations already have inside their data centers.