LSI announced the acquisition of the leading provider of flash storage processors for enterprise and client flash solutions and solid state drives (SSDs) SandForce for nearly $322 million. The acquisition greatly enhances LSI’s competitive position in the fast-growing server and storage PCIe flash adapter market, where the WarpDrive family of products from LSI already uses SandForce flash storage processors. Read More…

Disaster recovery and data protection solutions provider, Acronis recently introduced new professional education programmes to bolster channel enablement. The first of the new initiatives is the Acronis Sales Professional Certification, an extension of the courses currently provided under Acronis Academy. The new certification provides sales professionals within resellers with guidance on how to sell Acronis products to make more revenue. Read More…

HP announced its new services and solutions based on HP Converged Infrastructure that empower service providers and enterprises to rapidly deliver cloud services while leveraging existing investments, minimising risk and lowering costs. Organisations are under increasing pressure to deliver IT resources on demand to gain agility, increase competitive advantage and meet customer expectations. Legacy data centers, rigid IT architectures and technology sprawl are key barriers to implementing new delivery models such as IT as a Service and cloud computing. Read More…

Brocade is organising an seminar titled ‘Fabric 101: Essentials of Ethernet Fabric’. The event will take place in Dubai on the 22nd of November 2011, at the Address Hotel in Dubai Marina from 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
The seminar will focus on the deployment of an Ethernet fabric-based infrastructure in their company’s data centre. Seminar will cover various topics like the market and technology factors driving the fabric evolution in the data centre, the inner workings and key components of an Ethernet fabric, the integration of Ethernet fabrics into the traditional Ethernet network. It will also highlight the Standards, terminology, and technologies including TRILL, convergence and Spanning tree.
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Hitachi Data Systems plans to acquire Shoden Data Systems (Shoden), a leading provider of data center technology solutions in South Africa and across the sub-Saharan African continent subjected to approval from respective authorities in the African countries in which Hitachi Data Systems and Shoden conduct operations. “We are very excited about the prospect of joining the Hitachi Data Systems family,” said Marc Trevenen, managing director, Shoden Data Systems.
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Global leader in flash memory storage solutions, SanDisk unveiled the 64GB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I Card as part of a comprehensive new suite of retail products. With this SanDisk doubles the performance and capacity of its professional-grade imaging lineup to create a new SD card based on the latest SD 3.0 specification’s Ultra High Speed (UHS) bus architecture. The card offers the fastest write performance of any SD card in the world to date and is ideal for imaging enthusiasts using UHS-enabled cameras. Read More…

Iomega expanded its portfolio of Network Storage products with the introduction of Iomega StorCenter PX Series in the Middle East region and it will also demonstrate StorCenter PX series at GITEX 2011 at its stand 401 in hall 4. The StorCenter PX Series is powered by world class EMC storage technology, which features four-bay and six-bay desktop models and a four-bay rackmount model, each available in scalable configurations at competitive prices. Read More…

Aptec added extra value to its VMWare business by becoming the first Authorized Training Center for VMWare in the Middle East region. The first training center will be opened by Aptec at its UAE regional head office in Dubai Internet City by end of October 2011 with the KSA and Egypt to follow soon. Mario Veljovic, General Manager of Advanced Technology Services (ATS), a professional services subsidiary within the Aptec Group, said the company is delighted at this partnership with VMware and is looking forward to work with the vendor in providing virtualization solutions training to channel partners in the region.Read More…

Greg White is a storage specialist and is expert on subjects like Data Management, Data Protection, Data Backup and Recovery. Greg works with the leading storage solutions provider CommVault Systems as Senior Manager of Product Marketing. It’s no secret that today’s unprecedented data growth, datacentre consolidation and server virtualisation is wreaking havoc with conventional approaches to backup and recovery. Read More…

Western Digital recently introduced its 2 new mobile apps WD 2go and WD 2go Pro for My Book Live personal cloud storage solution. WD’s My Book Live drive connects to the home network creating shared storage that users can access within and outside the home. Secure remote access to the My Book Live is available on any computer through www.WD2go.com, while the WD 2go apps provide mobile access to files stored on the drive using an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch or Android compatible mobile device. Read More…

After decades of using mainframe technology, National Bank of Kuwait wanted a scalable server infrastructure that the IT department could rely on to deliver services to employees and customers. However, because of power capacity issues, it was not feasible for the bank to use hundreds of physical servers. In 2008, National Bank of Kuwait implemented Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V technology, in addition to the Microsoft System Center family of products. It virtualised 75 percent of a portion of its infrastructure (30 physical hosts with 125 virtual machines) and developed a private cloud infrastructure. The bank’s virtualised infrastructure costs 40 percent less than a physical infrastructure, and the licensing costs are 20 percent less. The bank improved its agility and ability to respond to business needs, and it now has an infrastructure that will help support the bank’s growth.Read More…

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) announced the acquisition of its partner BlueArc Corporation, a leader in scalable, high performance network storage. With this acquisition, Hitachi is executing on its strategy to transform traditional data centers into information centers – where customers can seamlessly store and access all data, content and information. Information that is available and searchable from anywhere and at any time. Information that is independent of the infrastructure, independent of the application and can be securely and cost-effectively accessed, searched, managed and governed forever.Read More…