emc

EMC and NetApp gained share in the first quarter as these pure-play storage makers shined, according to IDC data.

EMC's market share ticked up to 24.6 percent in the first quarter, year over year. NetApp has a virtual tie with IBM for the No. 2 spot. NetApp had first quarter share of 11.1 percent compared with IBM's 11.7 percent. A year ago, NetApp had first quarter market share of 8.8 percent.

Overall, the global storage sector is bouncing back, said IDC. Factory revenue surged 17.1 percent in the first quarter to $5 billion … Read more

EMC's Mozy online backup service just got a lot more compelling--because it's not just online anymore.

Version 2.0 of the cloud backup service, released late Monday, adds a very useful option to store your data on an external hard drive, too. Storing data remotely is well and good, but a local backup is easier if you need to restore files, and setting it up was as easy as plugging in a drive and telling the software to use it. External USB drives are economical these days--less than $100 for 1TB--and it's nice not having to configure … Read more

Compellent's C-Drive event last week drew about 300 storage administrators and IT generalists to downtown Minneapolis one week before EMC World. While that's small show by EMCWorld standards, it was a big event for Compellent customers.

I have yet to meet a more evangelistic group of storage users. Compellent's architecture creates a unique storage management environment. While the architecture supports a variety of RAID levels and RAID-based array configurations, one has to leave pre-conceived notions regarding management and functioning of traditional RAID arrays at the door. These people behave as if they had seen the light and … Read more

Michael Capellas, former CEO of Compaq, MCI, and First Data, has a new gig: front man for the Virtual Computing Environment coalition.

Capellas, who is 55, has also been appointed to the "complementary role" of CEO of Acadia, a joint venture of Cisco Systems and EMC with investment from Intel and VMware, the companies said Wednesday. Acadia has been created to support the coalition.

In a nutshell, Acadia is aimed at next-generation data centers designed to deliver private cloud infrastructure. The goal is to give customers the advantages of one throat to choke in terms of support without … Read more

EMC's first-quarter earnings were strong and the company raised its 2010 outlook as enterprise spending on data centers picks up.

The company, which provides enterprise storage and software services, reported first-quarter earnings of $373 million, or 17 cents a share, on revenue of $3.9 billion, up 23 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 26 cents a share, two cents ahead of Wall Street estimates. Wall Street was looking for revenue of $3.7 billion.

EMC's strong quarter wasn't totally unexpected given that VMware reported better-than-expected results. Since EMC is the majority owner of VMware, … Read more

Pat Gelsinger, EMC's COO for Information Infrastructure Products, recently imparted a new vision for the future of IT to a group of analysts gathered in Hopkinton, Mass.

Gelsinger, who now manages some of the company's crown jewels like the storage products division and is EMC's executive sponsor for VMware, said EMC is out to change the structure, technology, and possibly the behavior of the IT community.

That's a tall order to fill even for someone as obviously energetic and experienced as Gelsinger, and so if you react to that statement with a measure of skepticism, you'… Read more

Virtualization first hit the big time because it let users consolidate many system images onto a single physical server, thereby reducing the amount of hardware they needed to buy. However, as time has passed, the mobility of virtual machines, the ability to move them from one server to another at the click of a button, has come to be seen as a big win as well. Going by names such as VMotion (in VMware's case), mobility enables system maintenance and workload balancing without interrupting users. And, ultimately, it underpins visions of more dynamic computing environments where workloads transparently and … Read more

EMC's fourth quarter closed strong as both earnings and revenue came in ahead of expectations. The company also raised its outlook for 2010.

The storage giant reported fourth quarter net income of $426.5 million, or 20 cents a share, on revenue of $4.1 billion, up 2 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings in the fourth quarter were $695.5 million, or 33 cents a share.

Wall Street was expecting earnings of 30 cents a share on revenue of $4.02 billion. For 2009, EMC reported net income of $1.1 billion, or 55 cents a share, … Read more

EMC hasn't exactly kept its fully automated storage tiering (FAST) a secret. The company has talked about the technology at analyst events and its global marketing CTO, Chuck Hollis, has blogged on the topic.

But now version 1 has officially launched, despite earlier reports that it wouldn't arrive until 2010. I'll get to why there have probably been some mixed signals about availability in a bit, but first let's look at what FAST is.

Different types of storage associated with computers perform relatively better or worse. Faster is usually better of course. But faster also tends … Read more