Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- Seagate Sues Emerging Rival
- … Drives Enter New Habitat — Self-Encrypting Hard Drives for…
- Contested billboard in Cascade to come down in 2010
- Racetrack a winner in data storage

Seagate Sues Emerging Rival
Forbes – Apr 15, 2008
At issue are patents related to sophisticated, arcane technology such as “surface mount stacking method and device,” “hardware assisted memory backup system and method,” and “method and system for host programmable data storage device self-testing. “”It’s a pretty big deal,” said Joseph Unsworth, a research director at Gartner. “Seagate is a formidable company and a leader in hard drives. If Seagate is victorious, this suit will stifle innovation. Seagate (nyse:…
“STEC infringes on a number of Seagate’s patents which are important to the entire industry. We thought they would have to learn how to do storage differently to avoid our patents, but they decided to go ahead and violate them. It is incredulous [ sic]. “In a statement, STEC dismissed the Seagate lawsuit as “completely without merit. ” In addition, the company statement noted, “STEC believes that Seagate’s action is a desperate move to disrupt how aggressively customers are embracing STEC’s Zeus-IOPS technology and changing the balance of power in enterprise storage. “”We have spent $7 billion over the last 10 years to optimize how our disks work,” added Watkins.

… Drives Enter New Habitat — Self-Encrypting Hard Drives for…
Al-Bawaba – Apr 15, 2008
About Seagate Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of hard disc drives and storage solutions, providing products for a wide-range of applications, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Branded Solutions. Seagates business model leverages technology leadership and world-class manufacturing to deliver industry-leading innovation and quality to its global customers, with the goal of being the time-to-market leader in all markets in which it participates. The company is committed to providing award-winning products, customer support and reliability to meet the worlds growing demand for information storage. Seagate can be found around the globe and at.

Contested billboard in Cascade to come down in 2010
mlive.com – Apr 15, 2008
“It’s a good settlement for the community,” Township Supervisor Michael Julien said. He noted that although the agreement lets the billboard stand for two more years, if the township had rejected the mediation, it could have led to appeals and further delays while the sign remained in place. The case started in 1999 when William Barnett, who then owned the property at 3908 Thornapple River Drive, asked for a variance to expand a self-storage business, according to Township Manager Bill Cousins. As part of the variance agreement, Barnett agreed to take down one of three billboards on the property at the end of its existing lease, in May 2006. But by then, Disselkoen had bought the easement and the sign, and had leased the sign to CBS Outdoor. Disselkoen and CBS Outdoor sued the township in 2006, saying that the agreement between the township and Barnett was not valid. The township later sued Barnett, who had agreed as part of the variance to pay fees the township incurred in the lawsuit with Disselkoen…
District Court for the Western District of Michigan ruled in favor of the township, but decided that the question of how to compensate CBS for the value of the sign and pole and the cost of its removal should be decided at mediation. CBS had argued that the sign was worth $400,000 to $700,000, and that taking it down would cost about $35,000, according to Cousins. By allowing the company to keep the sign for an additional two years, the township is covering the compensation costs.

Racetrack a winner in data storage
Australian IT – Apr 15, 2008
Hard drives are slower and less rugged than flash memory because they have moving parts. While flash memory retrieves data quickly it typically has less capacity than disk drives, and even flash wears out after a few thousand uses. Racetrack, which has no moving parts, uses the spin of the electron to store data on a circular microscopic wire, similar to a track. It won’t wear out the way conventional memory does, Parkin says. He expects Racetrack to lead to the creation of three-dimensional memory products, which would give the devices another dimension to boost storage, rather than just relying on squeezing more data into 2D planes, he says. "Racetrack memory could lead to an entirely new market for IBM, or we could licence the technology," IBM spokeswoman Jenny Hunter says. IBM has led the world in US patents for 15 straight years.