it - "data storage"

The Belgian Post Office collaborated with NetApp for its data backup and archival. To manage this data, the post office is switching to a virtual infrastructure developed by NetApp in combination with conventional physical tape. In doing this, the post office is keeping pace with the current trend of virtualization in the storage environment, minimizing risk, and maximizing its return on investment in IT spend.

Akorri announced a set of new features that help enable cross-domain ITIL process management as part of the company's flagship BalancePoint 2.0 software platform. BalancePoint delivers the infrastructure performance, cross-domain troubleshooting, and capacity management to support ITIL best practices in Service Level, Problem and Incident, Availability, Capacity, and Continuity Management. This new toolset includes Best Practice Analysis, Chargeback Analysis and storage Capacity Forecasting, and is included in the standard BalancePoint product at no additional charge.

The problem with products such as EMC's NetWorker, Symantec's NetBackup and IBM's Tivoli storage Manager, is that their origins go back almost two decades to when enterprises protected far fewer servers, the primary backup target was tape and enterprises had time to set up, configure and manage these products. Today's data centers are very different.

Hitachi said its first PMR drive with 450GB capacity is targeted at mission-critical server and storage applications, such as online transaction processing, intensive database queries and other multiuser applications.

IBM has scooped up data de-duplication vendor Diligent Technologies for an undisclosed sum.

Mellanox announced the availability of Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) in its ConnectX' server and storage adapter products. VPI enables I/O infrastructure flexibility and future-proofing for data centers and computing environments. VPI-enabled adapters facilitate any standard networking, clustering, storage, and management protocol to operate over any converged network with the same software infrastructure. VPI also supports port auto-sensing of the fabric (InfiniBand, Ethernet or data Center Ethernet) and configures the adapter in the appropriate mode easing deployments in both rack and blade environments.

Hewlett-Packard said its new online storage service will protect your data 'whether your hardware fails, your computer is lost or catastrophe strikes.'

IBM has acquired privately held storage software provider Diligent Technologies. The financial terms were not disclosed. Diligent's deduplication software substantially reduces the amount and cost of physical storage required in data centers while maintaining the integrity of the data, noted Andy Monshaw, general manager of IBM System storage. 'Exceptionally suited for midrange and enterprise clients,' the newly acquired technology is designed 'to eliminate redundant data and streamline the infrastructure required to support their businesses, which can result in dramatic improvements in data-center efficiency,' Monshaw said. A Good Fit'For IBM, Diligent is a good fit,' noted Forrester Research analyst Stephanie Balaouras. 'The company offers both mainframe and open systems virtual tape libraries and they are a pioneer of deduplication,' she said. Deduplication is important because storage capacities are growing 50 percent or more a year and most of the information that we