Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- Imation Brings Industry-Leading Solid State Drive Technology to…
- Beach to keep name, purpose
- White Box Market Changing but Growing
- Compellent adds disk stroking and app tuning to SAN
- 6 Ways to Thrive During a Recession

Imation Brings Industry-Leading Solid State Drive Technology to…
techwhack.com – Feb 20, 2008
”“Mtron has dedicated itself to advancing SSD technology and delivered the fastest performing products on the market today,” said Steve Jeon, CEO of Mtron. “Imation’s proven data storage leadership makes our strategic relationship a natural fit as together we bring this superior SSD technology to more users worldwide. ”SSD is a data storage technology utilizing solid state memory. Without motors or moving parts, SSDs are faster and more reliable than traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), and also offer lower heat and noise generation while providing greatly improved durability and shock resistance. Imation’s initial offerings will consist of two SSD product lines — Imation SSD MOBI 3000 powered by Mtron for mobile and notebook PC users, and Imation SSD PRO 7000 powered by Mtron for enterprise computing users. The Imation SSD MOBI 3000 provides maximum read speeds of 100MB per second, maximum write speeds of 80MB per second, and random access time of 0. 1ms, making it the fastest SSD product in the consumer market.

Beach to keep name, purpose
Monticello Herald Journal – Feb 20, 2008
, grandson of the park’s founder, Earl Spackman. “With the recent upgrades to many of our accommodations, the forthcoming arrival of Steel Hawg (roller coaster) and now the purchase of by family-owned Morgan RV resorts, the future is brighter than ever. “The parent company, Morgan Management, LLC, started in the Manufactured Home Communities market in the mid-1970s. Its real estate portfolio now includes residential apartment communities, self storage facilities, commercial office buildings and shopping plazas. “The Spackman family has been great for this community,” said County Commissioner John Heimlich, “hopefully things won’t change substantially in the short term, anyway. “Along with the park’s sixth roller coaster, new for 2008 will be an extended operating season, according to a statement by Morgan. “I’m glad that it’s going to be a family owned thing,” said Monticello City Council President Bill Smith, himself an avid RVer…
“With the recent upgrades to many of our accommodations, the forthcoming arrival of Steel Hawg (roller coaster) and now the purchase of by family-owned Morgan RV resorts, the future is brighter than ever. “The parent company, Morgan Management, LLC, started in the Manufactured Home Communities market in the mid-1970s. Its real estate portfolio now includes residential apartment communities, self storage facilities, commercial office buildings and shopping plazas. “The Spackman family has been great for this community,” said County Commissioner John Heimlich, “hopefully things won’t change substantially in the short term, anyway. “Along with the park’s sixth roller coaster, new for 2008 will be an extended operating season, according to a statement by Morgan. “I’m glad that it’s going to be a family owned thing,” said Monticello City Council President Bill Smith, himself an avid RVer. “All we can do is wish them well and hope everything works good for us,” he said.

White Box Market Changing but Growing
Server Watch – Feb 20, 2008
The company has also been working to expand its product range even further. “Storage and blade-type servers are growing rapidly, as is the uni-processor segment (moving up from desktop machines),” said Garrigues. “Network management and virtualization are also rapidly growing segments. ” The Intel Storage Server SSR212MC2, for example can either be used as an application server with its own internal storage or as a dedicated.

Compellent adds disk stroking and app tuning to SAN
Search Storage – Feb 20, 2008
‘s disk short-stroking feature, Fast Track places more frequently accessed blocks on the outer tracks of individual disk drives and less-accessed blocks on the inner part of the disk. StorageCenter SAN users can preselect classes of service for applications, but the SAN handles placement of blocks on the disk tracks in the background, according to Compellent vice president of marketing Bruce Kornfeld. The processing of blocks for the Fast Track and Storage Progression tiered storage features runs once a day, at a time set by the user. Compellent claims that Fast Track will improve disk utilization in existing StorageCenter SANs by 30%, citing lab tests. One Compellent customer said he’s been able to defer disk purchases with the feature in limited deployment and anticipates being able to avoid more costs during an upcoming move to a new data center. The company is moving to a new data center this spring, and Ooi said he expects to be able to save $50,000 to $80,000 on the cost of disk drives by using thin provisioning and the disk-stroking feature to consolidate data…
One Compellent customer said he’s been able to defer disk purchases with the feature in limited deployment and anticipates being able to avoid more costs during an upcoming move to a new data center. The company is moving to a new data center this spring, and Ooi said he expects to be able to save $50,000 to $80,000 on the cost of disk drives by using thin provisioning and the disk-stroking feature to consolidate data. On the downside, Ooi said he’s still waiting for Compellent to add support for SAS drives. Other updates to StorageCenter include Free Space Recovery, which defragments free space in thin-provisioned storage pools, and Thin Import, which is designed to avoid copying empty volumes from legacy disk arrays onto the Compellent system.

6 Ways to Thrive During a Recession
U.S. News & World Report – Feb 20, 2008
In general, these types of devices have lots of moving parts that can easily wear out, or they rely on machinery that’s costly to repair if it breaks, and not worth it. Also, skip newer DVD players in the HD DVD format, which Toshiba has just announced it plans to stop developing. Times are tough enough. Don’t make it worse by investing in obsolescence.