Servers and business storage

Samsung acquires Nvelo, maker of SSD tech

Samsung Electronics has agreed to purchase storage software firm Nvelo.

The Korean firm announced the purchase of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvelo on Friday. The company develops next-generation SSD storage solutions, and works to manage and optimize the use of solid state drives within subsystems. This kind of "SSD caching" is used in both consumer and enterprise platforms, increasing the speed of retrieving data in a number of devices, including desktops and smartphones, from both hard drives and SSDs.

The acquisition of 2-year-old Nvelo, albeit low-key, means that Samsung will increase its storage space portfolio, and will potentially … Read more

IBM pushes silicon photonics with on-chip optics

IBM has advanced the technology of silicon photonics, fabricating a microchip that has built-in components to send and receive data over optical links.

Researchers have built optical data links into chips before, but IBM's move is notable because it uses conventional chipmaking equipment geared for chips with 90-nanometer features. Today's chips use metal wires to exchange data, but optical links offer the potential of higher transfer speeds over longer distances.

The chip can include several optical components including wavelength division multiplexers that let the chip send and receive signals with multiple frequencies of light, an approach that lets … Read more

WD ships 8TB My Book Live Duo NAS server

Following its recent announcement of the availability of a new 4TB hard drive, Western Digital today announced that its RAID-capable NAS server, the My Book Live Duo, now offers up to 8TB of storage space.

The My Book Live Duo is the dual-bay version of the single-volume My Book Live and originally had a storage cap of 6TB.

The server houses two user-serviceable 3.5-inch hard drives and supports both RAID 1 and RAID 0 configurations. The top 8TB capacity is available only in the RAID 0 setup, which is fast but provides no redundancy. If you want data safety, … Read more

Bezos: Amazon Web Services is lean manufacturing for IT

LAS VEGAS -- Just minutes ago, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likened Amazon Web Services to everything from Toyota's lean manufacturing methods to something slightly closer to home: the Kindle Fire business model.

Bezos took to the stage with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels here at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference, acknowledging that retail is a low-margin business and insisting that he's sticking to that game plan with AWS. "High margins cover a lot of sins," Bezos said. "We wouldn't know how to do a high-margin business. Low margins keep you aligned with … Read more

Amazon-Google cloud price war heats up

The cloud pricing wars are heating up, and today it's Google -- again -- putting on the pressure.

The search giant, which has been growing its rentable cloud offerings, today said in a blog post that it's lowering cloud pricing by an additional 10 percent on top of the over 20 percent cut it unveiled earlier this week. In case math is a little tough for any of you, that brings the total price reduction to over 30 percent. Not too shabby.

What could have motivated the additional cut today? Could a 24 percent to 27 percent price … Read more

Salesforce posts strong Q3 earnings, beats Street

Aiming to be the first cloud computing company to hit a $4 billion annual run rate, Salesforce.com is on the right track as it beat Wall Street expectations for the third quarter.

The social enterprise giant reported a third quarter net loss of $220 million, or $1.55 per share (statement). Non-GAAP earnings were 33 cents a share on a revenue of $788 million, up 35 percent annually.

Wall Street was expecting Salesforce to report third-quarter earnings of 32 cents a share on revenue of $776.5 million.

But Salesforce seems interested in discussing future quarters, as CEO Marc … Read more

Cisco kicks off fiscal year with strong earnings

Cisco shares rose by 6.8 percent on Tuesday after the bell as the networking giant published a rather solid earnings report for the first fiscal quarter of 2013.

The San Jose, Calif., based corporation reported a net income of $2.1 billion, or 39 cents a share (statement). Non-GAAP earnings were 48 cents a share on a revenue of $11.9 billion -- up by 6 percent on an annual basis.Wall Street was expecting Cisco to report first quarter earnings of 46 cents per share on revenue of $11.78 billion.Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers asserted … Read more

Dropbox passes 100-million-user mark

Cloud storage company Dropbox has reached 100 million users, and to celebrate it's giving away gigabytes.

The company, now five years old, announced the milestone today in a blog entry written by founder Drew Houston.

"Once upon a time, Dropbox had its humble beginnings in a Boston train station when I forgot my USB stick at home," he wrote. "We're still unsure if it was fate or fluke, but one thing's stayed the same all these years: each of us has a unique reason for using Dropbox."

Houston told The New York Times … Read more

Intel's 60-core chip ships; elites like Hawking get it first

Intel's first 60-core chip is here, but only elite institutions like Cambridge University will get early access.

The chip, generally called Phi, isn't your typical Intel processor. It's less like a central processing unit (CPU) -- which is the chipmaker's bread and butter -- and more akin to a graphics processing unit (GPU) that works in conjunction with the CPU.

In fact, Intel tried to bring out a consumer GPU card called "Larrabee" based on the technology but canceled the project in 2009.

But the company still needs the technology to compete with Nvidia … Read more