Storage

Big news in enterprise land today: sometime-rivals Salesforce.com and Oracle announced Tuesday morning a nine-year partnership to integrate their clouds.

The deal encompasses all three tiers of cloud computing: applications, platform, and infrastructure.

For Salesforce.com's part, the company plans to standardize on the Oracle Linux operating system, Exadata engineered systems, the Oracle Database and Java Middleware Platform.

For Oracle's part, the company plans to integrate Salesforce.com with Oracle's Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud, as well as provide the core technology to power Salesforce.com's applications and platform. Salesforce.com will also implement Oracle'… Read more

Shooting a lot of photos and/or videos? Ripping a lot of Blu-ray movies? Recording a lot of TV shows? Activities like these require a lot of storage -- the more, the better.

Through tomorrow, or until they sell out, Newegg has the Western Digital My Book 3TB external USB 3.0 hard drive for $79.99 shipped. That's after applying coupon code 72HRSL066 at checkout. (Note that you must be a registered Newegg user in order to use the code.)

Update: Well, folks, the universe has conspired against me once again. I promise you I tested that code … Read more

Apple's new MacBook Air has adopted faster solid-state drives made by Samsung. But Apple won't be the only beneficiary.

Samsung announced Monday that it has started mass-producing new PCIe solid-state drives aimed at the next generation of ultrabooks. SSDs that use a PCIe connection offer faster speeds than those outfitted with SATA (Serial ATA) connections.

As one example, Samsung's XP941 SSD can read data sequentially at 1,400 megabytes (1.4 gigabytes) per second, the highest speed offered by a PCIe 2.0 interface. In the real world, that means the drive can read 500GB of data … Read more

This is an update of a deal I wrote about earlier this year.

Need a last-minute Father's Day gift for Dad? Nothing says, "Thanks for being such a great guy" like unlimited online storage.

Through Sunday, you can get a one-year Bitcasa Infinite subscription for $79 when you apply coupon code JUSTFORDAD at checkout. That's not quite as sweet a deal as it was last time out (the subscription was $10 less), but it's still a very good price for Bitcasa's unique brand of no-limit cloud hold-'em.

The service supports all the major … Read more

It may look the same outside, but the MacBook Air got overhauled on the inside.

In the case of the solid-state drive (SSD) and graphics, it's a major overhaul.

SSD: Apple appears to be one of the first to stick a PCI Express (PCIe) SSD in a thin laptop. And that makes a huge difference, according to Anand Shimpi of Anandtech.

"This is a huge deal, totally the future. And pretty much all other notebooks announced at Computex still use [Serial ATA]. Apple did the right thing here," Anand said in response to an e-mail query.

Running … Read more

Intel today introduced the DC S3500 series solid-state drive, which brings enterprise performance at a cost that general consumers can afford. The new drive is optimized for read performance, which is important for data centers, or storage servers.

The new drive supports the SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard and is available in both 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch designs. The former is available in 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 240GB, 300GB, 480GB, 600GB, and 800GB capacities, while the latter is available in 80GB, 240GB, 400GB, and 800GB capacities. Both designs are 7mm thick.

Intel says the new SSD uses its 20nm NAND flash … Read more

Enterprise storage company Box will pay its third-party developers for users that help grow the platform, the company announced Thursday.

The company's new developer program, which launches with 10 developers but will expand to all developers within a month or two, will pay app creators based on user activity.

The focus is on users who not only spend a lot of time on the productivity apps provided by Box's OneCloud platform, but also draw in others by sharing files with people who are not Box users yet. Box already tracks how customers use various apps, so it's … Read more

IT spending is likely to be even lower this year than initially expected but should start to revive in 2014, according to JPMorgan Chase.

An new estimate in a report released Thursday by JPMorgan Chase analyst Mark Moskowitz calls for growth in IT spending of just 0.6 percent this year. That's down from the previous forecast of 1.2 percent.

Moskowitz expects businesses to spend less on IT hardware, which accounts for a huge part of the lower estimate. Companies have been shifting more of their cash away from traditional computers toward mobile devices.

Moskowitz now expects spending … Read more

The other day I asked if it still made sense to buy a mammoth hard drive. For my money, the smarter buy is a compact, portable, smaller-capacity drive that's fast, affordable, and USB-powered.

Like this one: While supplies last, TigerDirect has the Western Digital Elements SE 1TB USB 3.0 hard drive for $59.99, plus around $4 for shipping. That's after redeeming a $10 mail-in rebate (PDF). It sells elsewhere (Newegg, Staples, etc.) for at least $80.

Compatible with Windows and Mac systems alike (though you'll need to reformat it for use with the latter), the … Read more