Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- In the Garage, a Marketing Tool
- EHarmony stores plenty of romance
- RIM Explains, BlackBerry Users Struggle to Accept

In the Garage, a Marketing Tool
Washington Post – Apr 20, 2007
For one, many Americans are accumulating an increasingly large amount of stuff and are looking for ways to store and keep track of all of it. The study points to the growth in the storage-facility industry as evidence. According to the Self Storage Association, 9 percent of U. households rented a self-storage unit in 2005, a 50 percent increase from 1995 figures. Gross revenue in the self-storage-facility industry totaled about $23 billion in 2006, the association said…
Marty Riskam of Potomac, who had his garage furnished with Gladiator products, said he appreciates its order when he gets out of the car and doesn’t trip over things. His garage has insulated walls, a painted ceiling, installed floors, a car vacuum cleaner and a freezer for the family to store perishables in bulk. He hired a company, Potomac Garage Solutions, to install the elements and help organize. “I had a friend of mine say to me, ‘Your garage looks nicer than my living room,’ ” he said. Prices for organization products and services range widely. Do-it-yourselfers can clean things up with a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of shelving components. But upscale garage cabinets that Smallin recently considered had a price tag of about $20,000.

EHarmony stores plenty of romance
ARNnet – Apr 20, 2007
com continues to amass scores of data to fuel its online relationship service for 15 million registered users. The company 18 months ago deployed clustered storage systems to handle the photos, images, logs and other content types it has added to the online profiles it stores for its users. In an interview this week at the Computerworld Storage Networking World conference in San Diego, Mark Douglas, vice-president of technology at eHarmony, talked about the company’s use of storage clusters, how he chooses storage vendors, why the company is phasing out tape backup, and about new projects planned to keep online dating rolling along. What makes up eHarmony’s IT storage environment? We use two key vendors. For storage arrays, we use 3PAR Data. We have Oracle database servers fiber-attached directly to those arrays for all TP, database access and data warehousing.

RIM Explains, BlackBerry Users Struggle to Accept
TechNewsWorld – Apr 20, 2007
However, because the feature was not thoroughly tested, RIM did not realize that introducing it would trigger interaction errors between its operational database and cache. The company also alluded to why it took so long to deliver an explanation for the malfunction. “RIM’s first priority during any service interruption is always to restore service and then establish, monitor and maintain stability,” it said. “Proper analysis can take several days or longer, and RIM’s commitment is to provide the most accurate and complete information possible in such situations.