Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- Companies ask court to block Beacon payout
- Automation key to HP next-gen strategy
- Datallegro heats up data warehousing
- Pemex Abandons Oil Rigs As Dean Nears

Companies ask court to block Beacon payout
Providence Journal – Aug 21, 2007
One of the plaintiffs in the case, Heritage Healthcare Services of Cranston, for example, would be ineligible for any of the settlement money because the health-care company has not been a Beacon policyholder since 2002. Four of the seven companies named in the 2002 lawsuit have since decided not to go forward with the class action case, Maroney said. Two other plaintiffs who remain active in the class action case are Vito’s Express, a moving and storage company in Johnston, and Swimming Pool Specialists, in Charlestown. The plaintiffs through their counsel declined to comment on the case. In their lawsuit, the companies argue that Beacon’s practices over the last 15 years amounted to a breach of contract, and that they are entitled to “credits and discounts,” “disgorgement of profits and other enrichment” and “restitution of overpayments of premiums. ” “The lower premiums to favored policyholders,” the lawsuit states, “resulted in additional capital to favored policyholders to invest and expand their businesses — all to the detriment of the Plaintiffs and members of their Class. ” The plaintiffs contend that Beacon, which as a nonprofit mutual cannot generate profits, was “hording” the money it generated from premiums by creating hundreds of millions of dollars in bigger and bigger “reserves” and “surpluses.

Automation key to HP next-gen strategy
Australian IT – Aug 21, 2007
"We believe so. " "The Opsware acquisition should allow HP to get to market far more quickly than the company would otherwise and take advantage of the wave of data centre expansion that many believe is inevitable. " At the recent HP Technology Forum and Expo, company officials, including executive vice-president Anne Livermore, talked about moving the company beyond its traditional roots as a hardware provider to offer more software suites, management tools and services. She reiterated her comments at this month’s LinuxWorld, where she told participants that almost all chief executives see the importance of IT to their companies’ success but almost none are satisfied that IT is driving the business outcomes they want. "Every company in the world wants to automate and take out the complexity," she said. According to Livermore, IT management software is a market HP has set its sights on. "You’re going to see us invest like crazy in this area," she said.

Datallegro heats up data warehousing
Computer Business Review – Aug 21, 2007
“It’s natural for us to break up our architecture and it’s simple because of the way our appliances are made up of commodity server and storage components. “Frost said that Datallegro’s appliance, the guts of which include Dell servers, EMC storage, and Cisco switches, is fundamentally built to operate like a grid. “Our server and storage appliances are tied together by an InfiniBand [Server Switch] backplane and we use open source technologies to string together services like provisioning and message passing between them. “”Customers can now build a hub-and-spoke grid of appliances that has an ability to transfer data quickly between linked nodes. “”That wasn’t possible before in traditional federated architectures given the short overnight loading windows. Our appliances overcome that because they’re designed to move terabytes of data around in minutes. “Grid-enablement means that Datallegro can effectively partition off mixed processing requirements across a series of appliance-driven data marts, hubs, federation, and conformed dimensions…
The difference, Frost explained, between grid-enablement and stringing together appliances through standard ODBC interfaces is speed of data throughput and processing. “Our grid integrates multiple appliances through the same high-performance backplane, allowing data marts and hubs to be quickly populated and updated. We’re moving highly compressed data between our appliances in a massively parallel way. “Datallegro is offering offer grid-enabled versions for its multi-rack, single-rack, and encrypted data warehouse appliances. Frost said the company only last week closed a “huge deal” at a large electronics manufacturer for a 270 terabyte capacity system comprising of 8 appliance nodes connected via a grid. According to Frost, that company has built a classic hub-and-spoke architecture with separate hubs for each business region, Asia Pacific, EMEA and North America, with spokes running off them to data marts. Those hubs are tied back to an overall corporate hub that has summaries of the data.

Pemex Abandons Oil Rigs As Dean Nears
Washington Post – Aug 21, 2007
Dean carried winds of 160 mph capable of catastrophic damage Monday night as the first rain and winds began hitting the coasts of Mexico and Belize. Petroleos Mexicanos began evacuating employees from more than 100 rigs in the southern Gulf of Mexico on Sunday. On Monday, the company completed that evacuation, moving a total of 18,000 workers, the company said in a statement Monday night. Battering waves of up to 22 feet were expected to hit the platforms in Campeche Sound, Pemex said. Temporarily closing the 407 undersea wells that feed the rigs in Campeche Sound will mean a production loss of 2. 7 million barrels of oil and 2. 6 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, the company said…
7 million barrels of oil a day is exported from three Gulf ports, where Pemex loaded the final tankers on Monday. On the northern Gulf Coast, Pemex evacuated seven offshore oil platforms _ linked to 32 wells, suspending production of 18,000 more barrels of crude and 130 million cubic feet of natural gas daily. Operations also were being suspended at Pemex’s huge "Floating Production Storage and Offloading" vessel, which can store 2. 2 million barrels of oil. Pemex bought it last year. "This will be the first test of the storm-worthiness" of the vessel, said George Baker, a Houston, Texas-based energy analyst who follows Pemex closely. Pemex produced an average of 3.