Bryan Betts

Adaptec is targeting pure storage connectivity with a pair of Unified Serial adapter cards, which it said are also designed to get the most out of solid-state disks (SSDs).

The four-port PCI Express host bus adapters (HBAs) support both SAS (serial attached SCSI) and SATA (serial attached ATA) devices, but are cheaper than Adaptec's existing SAS HBAs because they do not include RAID functions.

HP ProCurve plans to use its Colubris wireless networking acquisition to attract customers of other vendors, according to ProCurve executives speaking at a meeting to introduce 802.11n access point plus unified network management software.

"Many customers add wireless after wired, and the Colubris overlay architecture allows you to add wireless to any Ethernet network, whether ProCurve or third-party," said Carl Blume, a former Colubris staffer who is now ProCurve's worldwide director of mobility solutions.

More than 10 percent of the Internet's DNS (Domain Name System) servers are still vulnerable to cache-poisoning attacks, according to a worldwide<a src="http://dns.measurement-factory.com/surveys/200810.html">survey of public-facing Internet nameservers</a>.

That's despite it being several months since the vulnerabilities were disclosed and fixes made available, said DNS expert Cricket Liu, whose company, Infoblox, commissioned the annual survey.

Data protection specialist Double-Take Software is preparing to join the likes of Microsoft, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and IBM in the promising utility data center market, according to Chairman, President and CEO Dean Goodermote.

The company is best known for its real-time data replication and rollback software but has also moved into data migration and the cloning of virtual servers. That move was almost by accident, as customers found they could deploy server replicas for more than just failover and fault tolerance, Goodermote said.

This year's Storage Networking World Europe show focused attention on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). However, while SAN vendors promoted FCoE as a way to extend Fibre Channel's reach and longevity, skeptics described it as unnecessary -- and perhaps even a Cisco-powered Trojan horse intended to wipe out rival networking supplier Brocade Communications.

FCoE is a draft specification for carrying Fibre Channel storage traffic over 10G bps (bits per second) Ethernet cabling. Unlike iSCSI, a rival scheme for carrying storage traffic over Ethernet, FCoE leverages today's Fibre Channel SANs (Storage Area Networks) and administrative tools, so it looks very familiar to storage administrators.

Cloud storage startup ParaScale is targeting enterprises, as well as service providers, with new software that it claims can turn a group of heterogeneous servers and storage arrays into a redundant and self-healing private cloud of storage.

The software is a kind of middleware that can pool a number of file servers, according to ParaScale CEO Sajai Krishnan. It does much the same as NAS (network-attached storage) clustering schemes like F5's Acopia devices or EMC's Rainfinity software, but more cheaply and on general-purpose hardware, he said.

Compliance is about to become as much of an issue for European organizations as it already is for their U.S. counterparts, Fujitsu Siemens Computers has warned.

Users struggling to deal with growing volumes of data -- especially e-mail -- will find their task made even more difficult by the E.U. Directive on auditing and corporate governance, the company said. The directive is sometimes referred to as EuroSOX because of its resemblance to the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act, also called SOX.

Quantum has enhanced and renamed its Vision storage management software, and added a low-end 9T-byte version of its DXi7500 enterprise disk backup device.

Vision manages both disk and tape storage and now provides better capacity monitoring, detailed trending and de-duplication statistics for DXi systems installed around the world, said Gabriel Chaher, Quantum's senior director for international product and field marketing, speaking at Storage Networking World Europe in Frankfurt, Germany.

Toshiba plans to put a polite boot into Apple's hyped Macbook Air with a new version of its Portégé R500 notebook featuring built-in 3G mobile broadband.

The Japanese manufacturer points out that its lightweight laptops are thinner, lighter and more capable than Steve Jobs' new machine, and they cost less as well.