Storage Execs Come Home; CDs Spin Faster

I have a long Storage Bytes today because I didn't do one last week. I got lots of excuses, if you need them. Let me know.

What goes 'round, comes 'round, especially at Exabyte, which this week got a new president and CEO. Juan Rodriguez, the man with that honor, was a co-founder of Exabyte and also co-founded StorageTek and Ecrix. He was with Ecrix until that company was acquired by Exabyte in November and now becomes boss of his old company once again with the resignation of William L. Marriner as chairman, president and CEO.

Got it? Rodriguez went from StorageTek to Exabyte to Ecrix to Exabyte.

Also coming home is Bob Blair, who this week was appointed vice president of investor relations for Western Digital. Blair had been vice president of investor relations at the Lake Forest, Calif.-based hard-drive vendor until 2000. For the last couple of years he headed up Bob Blair Associates, an investor relations counseling firm.

Meanwhile, Overland Data, San Diego, this week appointed Darin Richins as vice president of worldwide marketing. Richins was at Novell for the past 10 years, most recently as vice president of corporate marketing.

I used to think my 2X CD-ROM drive was fast. I still do. I have to--my wife won't let me buy another one until the old one dies and I spend at least six months trying to fix it.

Fremont, Calif.-based Plextor isn't waiting for me, that's for sure. The company is now selling a CD-RW drive with 40X CD-R, 12X CD-RW, and 40X read speeds. The drive can burn a 650-Mbyte disk faster than I can boot up my PC. The internal PlexWriter 40/12/40A CD-RW drive with E-IDE interface is shipping to distributors and solution providers now with an MSP of $209.

Computer Associates certified Emulex's 2.0-GBps LightPulse fibre channel host bus adapters as "CA smart "with its BrightStor storage management software.

StorageTek certified Emulex's 2.0-GBps LightPulse fibre Channel host bus adapters for use with its 2.0-GBps tape libraries under Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Windows.

Am I boring you?

EMC qualified QLogic's SANblade CompactPCI Fibre Channel host bus adapter as "E-Lab Tested" with its Symmetrix arrays under Solaris. Note that's "E-Lab (not eLab) Tested." EMC would not want to be confused with one of those silly dot-bomb companies that had to put an "e" in front of eEverything.

StorageTek is now reselling LSI Logic Storage Systems's hard-drive arrays to its clients and channel partners. This includes LSI's D178 array and SANtricity Storage Manager 8.0, which was enhanced to work with StorageTek's D-series disk products. Both products are currently available.

Sony Electronics is now selling its branded Advanced Intelligent Tape (AIT-3) drives to distributors and solution providers. The internal and external tape drives put up to 100 Gbytes of native and 260 Gbytes of compressed data onto a 3.5-inch form factor at 12-Mbyte native throughput. They are fully read and write backward compatible with AIT-1 and AIT-2 media. The internal drive with a cartridge, mounting kit and software carries an estimated selling price of $3,985. The internal model is priced at $4,225.

Nexsan Technologies, Woodland Hills, Calif., this week unveiled new versions of its InfiniSAN ATAboy scalable eight-drive and 14-drive arrays with capacity upgrades of 60 percent, thanks to the use of 120-Gbyte hard drives. For the mathematically disinclined, that's up to 1.68 Tbytes in a 3U rack-mount unit. That's a lot of MP3 files. Prices start under 1 cent per Mbyte.

On the software side, EVault, a Walnut Creek, Calif.-based provider of online data backup and recovery solutions, now offers technology that allows organizations to manage all enterprise data backup and recovery operations remotely from a single location. Other enhancements to the company's software include new support services for Solaris, Red Hat Linux and Windows operating systems, as well as high-speed backup capabilities for companies with over 100,000 files.

DataCore Software, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., is now shipping version 5.0 of its SANsymphony storage management software. SANsymphony 5.0 now allows consolidation of space allocation and data protection across the entire enterprise, makes use of underutilized storage capacity by dynamically allocating it as needed, and automates control of quality of service and security to help in chargebacks and billing.