Storage giant EMC has announced its first cloud infrastructure offering, EMC Atmos, a multi-petabyte information management solution designed for rich, unstructured data and to deliver cloud-based services and applications, including Web 2.0 and video. EMC Atmos allows administrators to define policies that determine how information is distributed and handled on a global basis.

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Sun Microsystems has introduced the Sun Storage 7000 family (aka Amber Road), which combine physical disk storage with solid state disk (SSD) Flash storage for read and write caching, all managed by Solaris 10’s ZFS file system. As well as high performance, the storage systems are designed to lower power consumption significantly.

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Virtualisation specialist Virtual Iron Software is expanding its business relationship with Storage Area Network vendor LeftHand Networks, by joining LeftHand’s Technology Alliance Program. The move comes as HP - a partner of rival VMware - is moving towards completion of its acquisition of LeftHand.

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Texas Memory Systems has introduced the RamSan-5000 solid state disk system, offering what it claims is a “groundbreaking” one million inputs/outputs per second (IOPS). The disk system provides up to 20 terabytes of RAID-protected Flash memory with a “Turbo” RAM cache of up to 640 gigabytes, and a less than one-millisecond response time. Both Fibre Channel and InfiniBand interfaces are supported, with up to 20 gigabytes per second bandwidth.

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IBM has announced solidDB Universal Cache, a relational, in-memory database technology that works not only with IBM’s own DB2 and Informix Dynamic Server databases, but also with competitive offerings from Microsoft, Oracle and Sybase. The cache can increase database performance up to ten times, the company claims, supporting more than 120,000 transactions per second with predictable response times measured in microseconds.

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Microsoft used its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week to announce Windows Azure, a cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform, designed to allow developers build applications that will span cloud and enterprise data centre deployment, and deliver them to PCs, the web and mobile devices. Dell stands to gain as Azure takes off, since it’s supplying infrastructure to run Microsoft’s cloud data centres.

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This week, it’s all about Sun Microsystems. It reported some gloomy financials, had a private investment fund take a big stake and suggest the company is now a software play, and lost a co-founder (the same person for the second time). Oh, it introduced some new products too, including its first storage blade (which is, errr, hardware).

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Rackable Systems has released the C2005 server, designed for flexibility and configurability. The C2005 couples half-depth design and efficient power supplies with a range of Intel and AMD-based board options, low-voltage processors and low-power hard drives (including solid-state disks - SSDs).

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Sun Microsystems has introduced the Sun Blade 6000 Disk Module, Sun’s first storage blade, offering up to 1.2TB of storage capacity, and providing a fast and easy way to add additional local storage capacity on the fly, through front-accessible drives. Up to five storage blades can fit into a 10U Sun Blade 6000 rack system, which can also support a mix of Intel, AMD and Sun SPARC server blades. Also new is the UltraSPARC T2 Plus-based Sun Blade T6340 server module and the Sun Blade X6240 server module, based on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor.

Check out Amr’s blog. He used to work at Yahoo and now has a new company called Cloudera, which he is founding along with people from Google, Facebook and Oracle. It’s a kind of Red Hat for Hadoop. Hadoop is an Apache project focused on developing open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing, with a focus on storage.

Intel has begun shipping the 32GB X-25E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive, aimed at increasing server, workstation and storage systems performance by up to 100X. A 64GB version is expected to ship in the first quarter of 2009. Sun Microsystems, Rackable Systems and Verari Systems all expect to incorporate Intel’s SSDs into their server and storage products.

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Storage vendor EMC has introduced the Connectrix NEX-5020, its first Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) switch to enable transfer data between physical and virtual servers and storage systems over high speed, lossless 10 Gb/s Ethernet networks. EMC also certified FCoE network adaptors from Emulex and QLogic. Separately, NetApp also certified the Emulex adaptors.

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HP has launched a set of new and enhanced products - blade servers, storage and software - that it is positioning as “designed” to host virtualised environments. The company has also enhanced its business and IT service management offerings to incorporate support for virtualisation, and has a new development agreement with Red Hat to simplify the management and monitoring of virtualised data centres.

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Verari Systems has introduced the SB5168XL DataServer, combining an Intel Xeon 3000 series processor and 10G Ethernet connectivity with the high density storage. The system is being pitched at Web 2.0 and Cloud applications.

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