Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- It’s The Jungle out there
- Mimosa Systems Exceeds 2006 Goals for Customer Growth &…
- CarMax slated on Manheim Pike.
- Hedge fund virtualizes 200 TB with Incipient
- Exelon CEO says market competition, carbon rules key in 2007
- What’s a Web Hosting Company’s Core Competency?

It’s The Jungle out there
Prague Post – Jan 24, 2007
Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation picked up where Sinclair left off, though Schlosser based his book on the role that modern fast food has played in maintaining the grim conditions of animal slaughter in America. He also explored fast food's impact upon the culture at large, from urban planning (or the lack thereof) to the way Americans eat. Reducing all of this important book into a fictional film narrative was a brave act, though one that finally defeated Schlosser and his co-writer, director Richard Linklater. They adopted a multi-storied structure in which, as in 2005's Crash, individual characters collide and create a cohesive cultural picture. Strangely, Schlosser and Linklater never succeed in having the various strands of their narrative mesh. This might have been purposeful, as the landscape of modern America — that "geography of nowhere," in the words of writer James Howard Kunstler — has bred such dire anomie and isolation that people cannot really connect anymore. If that's the case, it's an interesting approach, yet one that doesn't yield much in the way of narrative drive… Particularly good are Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as Amber's mother and uncle. The industrialized agriscape of middle America is marvelously captured by Linklater. In a flyover of a vast expanse of cattle-feed lots, all set out in a grid, one can see the same design at play among the nearby acres of self-storage tract houses and the attendant strips of chain-driven commercial squalor that serve the houses' inhabitants. But this is also one of the film's flaws. That we are all willfully blinkered to the murder that's tidily packaged on the supermarket meat aisle and have fallen into a consensual trance before the depredations of American capitalism is a given in Fast Food Nation. We have accepted the values of machines as our own. So now what?If Blood Diamond insists on the pretty ruse of ultimate justice, Fast Food Nation delivers such a portrait of moral paralysis and human weakness that the very urge to act is nullified as too little, too late.

Mimosa Systems Exceeds 2006 Goals for Customer Growth &…
Free with registration – Business Wire – AccessMyLibrary.com – Jan 24, 2007
(Company overview) International Expansion & Innovative New Products Planned for 2007 SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Mimosa Systems[TM], a leader in unified information management solutions for enterprise content, today announced that the company ended its first full year of revenues by exceeding corporate goals for new customers, market recognition and product delivery. The company also outlined growth plans for 2007 that include international expansion and innovative new products to address critical customer requirements around unstructured information management. In 2006, its first full year of revenue, Mimosa added 93 new customers across several key vertical market segments. Key customer wins in the enterprise were augmented by sizable numbers of customers in the commercial and mid-market segments. New Mimosa customers during the year included, Affiliated Computer Services, Baptist Health South Florida, Bloomsburg University, California Department of Industrial Relations, City of Chula Vista, Consolidated Container Company, Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Halifax Medical Center, Lutheran Medical Center, Pinnacle Financial, Space Gateway Support, State Auto Insurance Co. , The Bank of Holland, The Philadelphia Phillies Baseball Club.

CarMax slated on Manheim Pike.
Free with registration – Lancaster New Era – AccessMyLibrary.com – Jan 24, 2007
Byline: Ad Crable Jan. 24–CarMax, the nation’s largest retailer of used cars, plans to build its first auto superstore in Pennsylvania along Manheim Pike as part of a 14-acre brownfields environmental cleanup project. Jack Treier Moving and Storage and the former Lancaster Building Supply buildings are among those to be demolished to make way for the CarMax complex in Manheim Township. The project includes part of the site where a shopping center was proposed in 2003 by a New York City developer, but never materialized. Horst Realty plans to spend $11.

Hedge fund virtualizes 200 TB with Incipient
Search Storage – Jan 24, 2007
, has a new customer to report: a hedge fund based in Stamford, Conn. , that is getting ready to take the plunge with the Incipient Networked Storage Platform (iNSP). The fund, which director of systems architecture Bart McDonough said he is not at liberty to identify, has some 300 terabytes (TB) of data spread across three data centers — two a few hundred yards apart at Connecticut headquarters and at a disaster recovery hot site 70 miles away. The headquarters data centers each have the bulk of production data spread evenly between them, with 100 TB at each, and the disaster recovery hot site has another 100 TB of data… “So if all goes well, the RAM SAN will boost database read performance better than if it’s handling all the database data,” McDonough said. “And if the RAM SAN blows up, I’ll have this highly intelligent, highly available pool of arrays sitting right next to it. ” Proceeding with cautionMcDonough said that at this point he is gung ho about moving forward with the virtualization plan, but that most of last year was taken up with very careful testing of Incipient’s product, as well as evaluation of its competitors. McDonough admitted he didn’t do the kinds of hands-on testing with other virtualization products such, as IBM’s SVC or EMC Corp. ‘s Invista, but that he did do extensive research and saw product demonstations from both companies. The hedge fund also evaluated replication software from Double-Take Software Inc. ‘s host-based products and replication software from Sanovi Technologies Corp.

Exelon CEO says market competition, carbon rules key in 2007
MarketWatch – Jan 24, 2007
Exelon has proposed building a nuclear plant in Texas. Asked if he was worried about losing out to other companies that are proceeding with new nuclear plants in the state while Exelon waits to resolve the waste issue, Rowe said: “I would stand by with great cheer if there are those who are braver than I. ”

While public sentiment is shifting strongly in favor of regulating carbon dioxide emissions, it’s arguably moving the other way on the issue of electricity market competition. “Increasingly, we hear a chorus of naysayers,” Rowe acknowledged, but he pledged to defend the competitive model against action by states and potentially by courts to overturn laws and regulations that make the competitive markets possible. “We will redouble our advocacy for the competitive model, both at the federal level and at the states,” he said. The issue of whether there ought to be a competitive market for electricity became controversial in 2006. Soaring electricity prices in states that recently completed their transition to deregulated electricity service caused a public outcry and legislative action to block these increases… -based Public Service Enterprise Group (PEG) after an impasse with New Jersey regulators. State officials worried that the combined company would own so many power plants in and around New Jersey that it could raise prices without fear of competition. This concern has been reflected in deregulated states across the country by critics who say that a true competitive market for electricity hasn’t developed. Now that Democrats control Congress, they may be more inclined to take action to address these concerns. Consumer advocacy groups that are critical of deregulation say they are discussing the issue with congressional committees. In addition, the U.

What’s a Web Hosting Company’s Core Competency?
Article Central – Jan 24, 2007
Photobucket, YouTube, Live Journal, etc are software companies. They live and die by the ingenuity of their software developers – not the content storage which they happen to provide as one of many features. The two blog posts I’ve most enjoyed writing were about the evolution of.