Drobo has released storage industry predictions for the coming year. These predictions are based on the company’s interactions with thousands of customers, analysts and industry luminaries.

TwinStrata has announced that it is jointly delivering "a highly efficient, cost-effective" solution for the creation and storage of VMware backups with Veeam Software, winner of Best of Show at VMworld 2010. According to the company, TwinStrata's CloudArray software, when used in conjunction with Veeam Backup & Replication, gives organizations easy access to secure, highly scalable, pay-as-you-go Cloud Storage for their VMware backups.

According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced continued gains in the Q2 2010 with revenues of nearly $3.0 billion, representing 3.3% growth over the same quarter one year ago, but a 2.3% decrease from the previous quarter.

SGI, a provider of HPC and data center solutions, today announced the release of SGI InfiniteStorage 5000, a RAID storage system that combines leading edge hardware with a choice of host interfaces and drive technologies in a powerful external storage platform. SGI InfiniteStorage 5000 is SGI’s first storage system to employ 6Gb/s SAS technology.

Our polls for the Biz-News.com “Product of the Year Award 2009” closed on the 15th of February. The winner is a result of the amount of votes they were awarded by readers, all readers where invited to vote for their favourite products or service in the Smartphone, HDTV, Storage and VoIP categories.

According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced another decline in year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09) with revenues of $2.87 billion, representing –7.9% growth over the same quarter one year ago, but a 1.2% growth from the previous quarter (2Q09).

IDC report shows EMC led the overall market with 23.4% revenue share in the third quarter of 2009. Symantec held onto the second position with 17.8% revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 12.2% revenue share.

Symantec announced enhancements to Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server, the heterogeneous storage management and high availability solutions for UNIX, Linux and Windows environments.

Additionally, near instantaneous recovery of applications is now possible with Veritas Cluster File System through tight integration with Oracle, Sybase and IBM DB2 –allowing for “fast failover of structured information and near linear scalability.”

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.

“Datacenter transformation is a stark reality facing most customers in the Asia/Pacific region,” says IDC. Based on its recent datacenter research, the ageing and somewhat inefficient datacenters that were built seven-ten years ago are struggling to keep up with the current technology – leading to high operational costs, poor utilization levels and increasing complexity.

“However – the report says - the current economic environment has led many CxOs to mandate CAPEX restrictions, which has forced CIOs to look for ways they can do more with the same.”

ParaScale introduced ParaScale Cloud Storage software R2.0 - version 2 of its PCS clustered NAS system. The new release targets enterprise storage administrators who must economically scale capacity and performance, and service providers who want to offer a variety of storage cloud services.

This latest release of ParaScale Cloud Storage software reflects the growing realization by global customers that existing approaches to managing their stored data assets prevent them from rapidly delivering a pool of storage that easily scales capacity and performance independently and economically.

Panasas intoroduced the ActiveStor Series 9 parallel storage system, which is believed to be the highest-performance file storage system in the world, as the company claims.

Unlike single-dimensional storage solutions, which offer either high-bandwidth performance or optimized IOPS, the ActiveStor Series 9 uses multiple storage technologies in a synchronized architecture to produce both.

In a frame of the company’s initiative to “Stop Storage Waste” and as a part of its Axiom system, Pillar Data Systems, the provider of Application-Aware storage systems, makes 2 terabyte SATA drives available to the enterprise market.

The new drives push the Axiom’s overall usable capacity to over 1.6 petabytes per system, while driving down overall power consumption by 50 percent and space consumption by 2X.

Spectra Logic has launched what it claims is the industry’s first integrated system for deduplication, remote site replication and automated migration to tape.

nTier Deduplication achieves increased deduplication efficiency by sharing deduplication catalogs among remote sites. Users no longer need to establish multiple policies across numerous sites or purchase separate software to move replicated deduplication data to a tape archive.

LSI has launched a new generation of MegaRAID SATA+SAS RAID controller cards based on 6Gb/s SAS technology.
The storage and networking solution provider has also announced its new channel strategy for worldwide customers.

Seagate reported a loss of USD $81 million on revenue of $2.35 billion for the second quarter of this year.
Despite the poor results, the company said it is seeing signs that the storage market is improving and it is making progress toward returning to sustained GAAP profitability as soon as possible.

EMC has reported a slight increase in revenue last quarter and provided an optimistic forecast for the second half of the year.
The announcement came as it completed the USD $2.1 billion acquisition of data deduplication specialist Data Domain.

STEC has signed an agreement with one of its largest enterprise storage customers for sales of USD $120 million of ZeusIOPS SSDs in the second half of 2009.
With this agreement signed, the company is now forecasting revenue from the sale of its ZeusIOPS drives will exceed USD $220 million in 2009.

BlueArc has launched its Mercury series network storage platform in a bid to address the storage challenges faced by many midsize companies.
Michael Gustafson, president and CEO of BlueArc, said that as the volume of unstructured, file-based data continues to explode, and retention and archiving demands increase, companies of all sizes are struggling to keep pace.

Varisys has added to its range of storage products with two new high performance boards intended for use in harsh environments.
The VTS2 also provides high-density storage in standard form factors. It is now available in a conduction-cooled assembly that provides VME users the ability to add mass storage into a rugged system.

WD has unveiled its newly redesigned My Book World Edition II dual- drive network storage system in capacities of up to 4 TB.
The company said the double protection of two Mirrored (RAID 1) drives and continuous backup software, makes the storage system extra-safe for users to back up and store the data and digital media.

SanDisk is offering a new Extreme SDHC card which it claims is the world's fastest 32GB card - with both the capacity and I/O speed to handle HD video clips.
With a sustained write speed - up to 30 megabits-per-second - the company said it is fast enough to capture a storehouse of up to 160 minutes of full HD (1920x1080) video at a 24Mb/s data transfer rate.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. and the only provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, has introduced unique capabilities across software and services to enable customers to reclaim underutilised storage capacity and increase the return on their assets.
This announcement highlights the company’s strategic Global Services capabilities to further extend the economic and optimisation benefits customers can achieve leveraging Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning technology.

DataSlide, the massively parallel green storage company, has announced their embedded architecture and Partnership Network agreement with Oracle.
Oracle's Berkeley Database embedded onto the DataSlide storage drive enables 3rd party developers the ability to implement next generation Business Intelligence right onto the storage system. This is a significant step for DataSlide as they move towards productizing Hard Rectangular Drives(TM) HRD(TM).

Vijay Karamcheti, CTO, Virident Systems to give Luncheon Address on the "Real World Challenges and Opportunities of Storage Class Memory in the Data Center" at 2009 NVM Conference.
Karamcheti,  who is also Associate Professor of Computer Science at NYU has been invited to give a special luncheon keynote speech on the real world challenges of implementing Storage Class Memories now and for the future.

IT infrastructures tend to become ever more complex as administrators support growth with incremental hardware expansion, which in turn calls for increased real estate, power, cooling, and maintenance. Faced with shrinking budgets, many organizations end up dedicating a majority of their IT spending to simply maintaining data center resources—placing serious constraints on their ability to advance new initiatives.The computing pod is an exciting model for IT infrastructure that helps significantly advance enterprise efficiency. It is defined as a self-contained building block encompassing an optimized power and cooling footprint to facilitate scalability; integrated compute, storage, and network nodes of significant size and processing power; and simplified data center deployment and management to help reduce operational costs. Dell recommends that each pod include the Dell™ PowerEdge™ modular blade enclosure with PowerEdge blade servers; virtualized storage such as Dell EqualLogic™ PS6000 series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) arrays; virtualization software such as the VMware® vSphere™, Microsoft® Hyper-V™, or Citrix® XenServer™ platforms; a management module with software such as the Dell Management Console; and switches with stacking capability such as Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch 3100 series switches. This pod architecture then becomes the basic unit of data center deployment.By elevating data center intelligence through advanced virtualization and software tools in combination with latest-generation server, storage, and network infrastructure, organizations can create highly scalable, self-managing data centers designed to reduce IT infrastructure complexity, simplify management, and increase cost-efficiency. And because this approach can be customized to specific needs, it can provide a flexible computing infrastructure that can quickly and easily adapt to evolving requirements.Also covered: How Dell Business-Ready Configurations can provide a simplified, scalable, resilient architecture for computing pod deployments.