Weekly compilation of storage news:
IDC says archiving drove software demand
According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced its 16th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2007 with revenues of US$2.8 billion, a 9.8% increase over the same quarter one year ago. EMC was tops in market share with 27.6%. Symantec followed with a 16.6% share, followed by IBM with 11.7%, NetApp with 9.1%, Hewlett-Packard (HP) with 4.7% and CA with 4.5%.
Vendors update storage features for virtual servers
Storage features for server virtualisation environments got a boost this week with the general availability of VMware's Infrastructure 3.5. VMware rival Virtual Iron Software brought out version 4.2 of its virtual machine, which includes the ability to dynamically increase disk groups and virtual disks for storage on demand, multipathing features for high availability and disaster recovery, and hot snapshot capabilities. Meanwhile, storage vendors continued to rally around VMware. QLogic has N_Port_ID Virtualisation (NPIV) ready to go for the newest release of VMware in its SANblade HBAs. Remote Backup Systems (RBS) announced that its RBackup remote backup software is now compatible with VMware ESX Server.
NetApp gets FIPS certified
NetApp received Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 Level 3 certification for the storage encryption processor used in the Decru DataFort and Lifetime Key Management (LKM) appliances. FIPS certification is focused on physically tamper-proofing data security devices and was NeoScale's claim to fame for its encryption products before its assets were snapped up this week by nCipher for US$1.9 million.
Eze Castle Integration teams with Iron Mountain Digital
Eze Castle Integration has forged a partnership with Iron Mountain Digital resulting in an Eze Vault powered by Iron Mountain services. The new service combines Eze Castle's IT management services with Iron Mountain Digital's data backup and recovery infrastructure.
Stockholders sue Isilon
Law firm Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll has filed a lawsuit on behalf of purchasers of Isilon common stock during the period between last Dec. 14 and Oct. 4. The complaint charges Isilon and some of its officers and directors made positive but false statements about its business that caused the stock to rise in price after its initial public offering, only to crash after disappointing results for the third quarter of 2007.