See W. Curtis Preston’s Backup Central Live!

Last week, after the Exec Event in Palo Alto, I joined my friend W. Curtis Preston for his first Backup Central Live! event. Curtis has spent years educating IT pros about data protection, this was the first week of a new series of self-produced events. And let me tell you, although I’ve seen him present dozens of times, Curtis was really in his element here. He held the packed room enthralled, and the vendor sponsors I talked to were very pleased about the event!

Overland Snaps Up MaxiScale to Scale Up Snap

Overland Storage is showing intriguing signs of life. Once relegated to OEM tape library duty, Overland received an injection of cash and (more importantly) talent this year. Now the company is stepping up the technology behind their SnapServer NAS array by acquiring scale-out file storage company, MaxiScale. They intend to bring the scalable capacity and performance normally associated with enterprise and high-performance computing systems to the mass market.

EMC Takes On NetApp For Data Domain’s Affections

EMC (NYSE:EMC) started a gunfight in the storage world today by offering an astonishing $1.8 billion for data deduplication sweetheart, Data Domain (NASDAQ:DDUP). This $30 per share offer one-ups rival NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) by $5 per share, which looked to have sealed the deal with a solid $1.5 billion offer on May 20. EMC’s offer is all-cash, while NetApp had mixed cash and stock.

Bigger Blue?

IBM were always going to go acquisitive this year and it’s no surprise to me that the first target appears to be Sun. As other commentators have already pointed out, this is not a reaction to Cisco’s announcement on Monday but more a strike against HP. This is about being Number 1 again!

Reacting to the 2008 Storage Products of the Year

TechTarget's annual Storage Product of the Year awards have been announced!

The mainstream media is still digesting the Oscar awards, but we in storage had our own announcement this week: TechTarget’s (now non-PDF?) Storage magazine announced their Storage Products of the Year award for 2008. Without further ado, the awards and my reaction!