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…

Leading South African distributor, Drive Control Corporation (DCC) recently introduced the new range of Scorpio Black and Scorpio Blue hard disk drives for Notebooks from Western Digital’s stable. WD Scorpio Black is a 2.5-inch SATA hard drive combines the class-leading 7200 RPM spin speed and 16 MB cache to deliver maximum notebook performance. Now available in capacities of up to 750 GB, the WD Scorpio Black hard drives provide creative professionals, gamers and PC enthusiasts with additional capacity they need to get their job done. Using Advanced Format (AF) technology, the WD Scorpio Black 750 GB hard drives also incorporate a variety of data-protection features to actively monitor and protect valuable data.Read More…

According to the latest Worldwide Storage Software Qview by IDC, the storage software market grew in the second quarter of 2011, with a total market valuation of $3.4 billion during the quarter, up 11.3% over the same period last year. And, EMC cornered nearly 25% market share followed by Symantec, and IBM with 15.8% and 14.1% market shares respectively. Whereas, Hitachi clocked the highest percentage growth followed by HP.Read More…

Drobo, makers of award-winning data storage products for businesses and professionals, today announced that it has collaborated with Veeam Software, innovative provider of VMware data protection, disaster recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual datacenter environments, to deliver a simple and affordable data protection solution for small and medium businesses (SMBs).Read More…

The two studies, from the Enterprise Strategy Group and The Clipper Group, evaluated the costs of long-term storage for various scenarios that included tape and disk as the primary storage medium. In each case, the studies found that tape had considerable long-term cost advantages when compared to a scenario that relied on a disk-only solution. The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program Technology Provider Companies, HP, IBM and Quantum, announced that two recently-released separate studies found that tape had significant total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits over disk, including lower cost per GB, lower operating expenses and lower energy costs.Read More…

Imation today announced that it has acquired the ProStor Systems. The acquisition includes the much celebrated unique storage solution InfiniVault among others products in ProStor’s product portfolio. The InfiniVault software will enable Imation to deliver future tiered storage solutions using RDX and other hard disk, optical, magnetic and solid state storage. The software helps strengthen the Imation RDX portfolio and the InfiniVault offering.Read More…

According to recent report from Gartner, Worldwide server shipments in the second quarter of 2011 grew 8% year on year, while revenue moved upward 19.5% year on year. From a geographic standpoint, the Asia/Pacific region grew the most in shipments with a 25.6% increase. Japan posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 59.5% for the period. HP lead the worldwide server market based on revenue. The company posted over $3.9bn in server vendor revenue, accounting for 29.8% of the server market based on revenue. This share was down 2.2% year on year.Read More…

EMC introduced its new EMC Symmetrix VMAXe storage system, innovative storage technology designed for virtualized cloud and mission critical IT environments. The VMAXe system enables IT organizations to accelerate their journey to cloud computing. Symmetrix VMAXe is based on the industry leading Virtual Matrix Architecture and innovative software as larger Symmetrix VMAX systems used in the world’s largest data centers. Read More…

Samsung announced the new High-performance 512GB SSDs with Ultra-fast SATA Revision 3.0 Interface with data transmissions at six gigabits per second (6Gb/s) which are expected to replace SATA 3Gb/s-based SSDs by year-end.
The SATA 6Gb/s SSD shortens system boot-up time to about 10 seconds, while its high-performance allows users to download up to five DVD video files in less than a minute.Read More…

Avnet Technology Solutions, the leading Value Added Distributor in the Middle East and Africa region recently launched a special promotional offer for summer months to rewards its channel partners on every sale of selected HP P4000-Series Units for storage and HP D2D Systems for backup storage solutions. Venkat Raman, Sales Director, Gulf & Levant, Avnet Technology Solutions, said “This hot summer promotional offer from Avnet Technology Solutions for HP Storage products is one of its kind in the region.Read More…

Saudi Arabia based leading ICT solutions provider MATCO IT, recently achieved VMware’s highest partnership level to become a Premier Partner. VMware recognised MATCO IT’s proactive approach to promoting VMware solutions besides acknowledging its technical skills and experience obtained from successfully deploying virtualization technology by awarding MATCO a Premier Partner status. Toni Prince, General Manager of MATCO IT, said, “Achieving the VMware Premier Partner status is consistent with our policy in reaching the highest partnership levels with our strategic vendors’
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