Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- Lock It Up adding 700 storage units in Davis, Weber counties
- Atrato aims storage system at cable operators, government security
- Open source: It’s time to get down to business
- Sun/CDW Government agreement fills needs for both companies in the…

Lock It Up adding 700 storage units in Davis, Weber counties
highbeam.com – Mar 24, 2008
find The Enterprise articles. Lock It Up Self Storage has started construction on a new three-building storage facility in Farmington that will add 70.

Atrato aims storage system at cable operators, government security
EETimes.com – Mar 24, 2008
— A storage startup, Atrato Inc. , is debuting a “Self-maintining Array of Independent Disks” (SAID) for the cable-TV operator and government security markets. Atrato debuted as Sherwood Information Systems, designing a new storage array that allows multiple video streams to be accessed from a 3U platform. Atrato CEO Dan McCormick said the industry had speculated that Atrato would rely on flash drives or other caching technology. In general, he said, data is not predictive enough to improve real-time performance by improving caching on its own…
The standard encryption package uses the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard. Atrato’s software, controlled through a Web-based GUI, manages such functions as SAN load balancing, VLUN configuration, and health and status monitoring. The company already has shipped systems to cable operators. This week, Atrato will announce the supply of SAID systems to SRC Computing, another company founded by Seymour Cray, which will provide secure, high-performance computing and storage subsystems to an unnamed government agency.

Open source: It’s time to get down to business
InfoWorld – Mar 24, 2008
– a traditional IT vendor, albeit one that has fully embraced the open-source process in recent years. Sun’s acquisition of MySQL AB last month is the biggest in a series of steps that vendors have taken to try to improve the open-source experience for corporate users. That’s becoming a pressing need as more companies adopt open-source software — and as vendors push hard to increase the adoption rate even further. But there’s still a long way to go to soothe user concerns over issues such as the timely delivery of new features and bug fixes, the need for more predictable product road maps, and the lack of IT workers with open-source skills and experience. At SmugMug, for example, MacAskill is still waiting for fixes to a scalability problem that led him to write in a January blog post that he was “seriously considering” not renewing the company’s MySQL Enterprise support contract when it expires later this year. As SmugMug adds more processor cores to its MySQL servers, performance isn’t increasing like it should, MacAskill said. The problem stems from concurrency problems between MySQL and InnoDB, the most widely used storage engine for the database…
in Fort Smith, Ark. , has been running its SAP applications on an IBM mainframe with SUSE Linux for the past three years. Mark Shackelford, Baldor’s vice president of information services, was skeptical at first about moving the SAP applications to Linux. “But it’s more stable than any proprietary Unix that we had,” he said. SmugMug’s MacAskill is counting on Sun to bring some stability and better scalability to MySQL, even though he hasn’t seen any changes yet. “I think it’s a new phase of MySQL’s life,” he said. “It’s fascinating watching this, really.

Sun/CDW Government agreement fills needs for both companies in the…
Washington Technology – Mar 24, 2008
The federalprocurement process made that partnershipmore time-consuming and complex to initiatethan the commercial side, he added. CDW-G plans to offer Sun products underits Electronic Commodity Store III and Solutionsfor Enterprisewide Procurement contracts,said Andy Lausch, senior director offederal sales at CDW-G. Sun has been moving into the high-volumesales space with products that agencies oftenbuy in large numbers, Vass said, such asservers and software. Resellers are the idealconduit for those products, he added. “We’re taking them up to the midrange class”of hardware products, he said. “We’re not currently planning tosell volume on the high end. Those are generallyhighly customized implementations thattake a lot of hand-holding to get installed…
havewalked away from GSA. “All of the companies that have left or havethreatened to leave the GSA schedules [program]are such large suppliers to the feds,with an embedded product base, that the governmenthas to have reasonable access totheir offerings,” said Larry Allen, president ofthe Coalition for Government Procurement. Government customers are using dealer networksand other contracts to getthe products they want, he added. “Sun has always had multipleschedule contractors, so the lossof its own schedule contractprobably made little differenceexcept for those situations wherethe government really wanted tocontract directly with Sun,” saidSteve Charles, a WashingtonTechnology columnist and cofounderof immixGroup. Lausch said CDW-G sees thepartnership as a way to broadenthe range of solutions it can offer. Agencies have been asking whether theycould buy Sun products through CDW-G foryears, and now they can, he said.