Stories by Deni Connor

Only a few wisps of storage news this week from EMC, Virtual Instruments and start-ups Gridstore and Nasuni.

Dell entered the Fibre Channel over Ethernet market last week with OEM deals from Brocade and QLogic and endorsed 10Gigabit Ethernet as a customer's technology of choice.

EMC rolled out this week its much anticipated FAST software, which automatically migrates data between tiers of storage based on policies the storage administrator sets.

Symantec has announced that it has enhanced three of its flagship products – Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server – with support for migrating data into and out of solid state drives and the ability to reclaim unused storage. In addition, the company has enhanced the failover capabilities of Veritas Cluster File System to work with structured data in Oracle, Sybase or IBM DB2 applications.

Cisco, EMC and VMware last week unveiled the much rumored joint venture to sell their products to companies wanting to build internal clouds. Called Acadia (for who knows what reason), the joint venture is a collaboration between the three companies that will launch in 2010 and sell what they call Vblocks, preconfigured packages of Cisco UCS blade servers, EMC storage gear, VMware virtualization software and EMC Ionix management software.

Last week in storage garnered several announcements from SteelEye, 3PAR, Brocade and Thales.

Managing both the hardware and software of rivals has been a standard feature for management software vendors for years. Only recently however, have virtualization vendors begun to follow suit -- offering the ability to manage not only their own virtual server environments, but those of competitors as well.

Virtual-server vendors are following the example of systems-management and physical-server vendors by expanding their management applications to control not only their own virtual server environments, but those of their competitors.

Even as Microsoft rolls out ever-more-refined beta versions of its hypervisor, VMware is emphasizing technical knowledge about virtualization in general and facility with its own products in particular as a way to maintain its market dominance. Its most recent evolution is a certification program designed for the architects behind virtualization deployments, a move that is generally applauded by IT managers.

Diligent Technologies is among the pioneers of data deduplication technology, which helps enterprises reduce redundant copies of data and, in turn, shrink storage requirements and shorten backup times. Neville Yates, Diligent's CTO, talked with Network World Senior Editor Deni Connor about the varying deduplication technologies used with today's virtual tape libraries (VTL).

At Novell's annual BrainShare user conference, CEO and President Ron Hovsepian sat down with Network World Senior Editor Deni Connor to talk about the Novell-Microsoft interoperability agreement and how it's helping Novell attract customers with mixed operating system environments.