Data Storage

India is really cleaning house now as its government officials tell all communications providers that they have just two months to open up their data.

At the minute, this mainly applies to VoIP provider Skype and internet giant Google – RIM’s BlackBerry has already been dealt with and subdued.

All telcos and communications providers need to build a server in India and let the authorities scrutinise private data storage the officials have said. And after seeing a good result from RIM’s capitulation, India is no doubt expecting a swift acquiescence from Google and Skype. I have two words for them – not likely.

The bidding war between Hewlett-Packard and Dell, which we predicted last week, has reached new heights as HP swiftly counters any offer made by Dell for the 3PAR data storage company.

After HP made a counter offer for 3PAR, Dell came back with an offer of $1.6 billion (around £1.03 billion) to which HP swiftly countered with an offer of $1.8 billion (around £1.16 billion) which equates to around $27 per share.

HP is the bigger company so it’s easy to see which way this bidding war is going to go. However, both companies are extremely hungry for the high-end data storage company, a company that will help HP or Dell with the popular cloud computing.

Dell and Hewlett-Packard Co could be starting a bidding war over data storage company 3PAR Inc. 3PAR Inc is a company that offers high-end data storage that covers a niche in the data storage market. This means that buyers are likely to pay over what the company is worth in order to acquire it.

Dell made the first move, putting in a bid for the company. Then Hewlett-Packard came in with a surprise offer of $1.6 billion (around £1.03 billion) for the company, topping Dell’s offer by a third. As of yet Dell hasn’t retaliated but there’s a good chance that a bidding war could develop between the two companies.

Cable & Wireless, the recently demerged telecoms company, has announced that it is beginning an early adopters programme (EAP) for cloud computing. The EAP will begin in July and is aimed at promoting and testing the new cloud computing product from Cable & Wireless.

The EAP will help give companies a clear set of instructions on how to implement the cloud technologies, migration strategies and also how to make cloud computing meet the needs of their business. At the minute Cable & Wireless has 15 companies in the EAP but it is still looking for a couple more to get accurate feedback on any issues before the release of the product.

The UK is under orders to improve the powers of the Information Commissioners Office. The European Commission has ordered the UK government to improve these powers a few times over the years since 2004 because of the Data Protection Directive.

The European Commission wants the Information Commissioners Office to be granted powers to randomly check companies. This is to ensure that companies are in compliance with data storage and data protection laws. The Commission has said that it will take legal action against the government if they fail to do this and force them to grant the powers.

Verizon Business, a telecoms company, has announced a new set of services, designed to enhance its portfolio and get in on the cloud computing boom before it takes off. Verizon Business will now be offering cloud data storage, data retention consulting and hosted storage management services.

Verizon Business will launch the services on July 1^st as pay-as-you-go services – which should be popular seeing as most companies are once again tightening their belts in the tough economic climate. As well as offering data storage and cloud computing services, Verizon Business will help companies access and manage their service.

According to a new survey by IT security company AVG, many people across the UK are using data storage with no backup – in other words, they’re storing valuable data on their PCs with no security and no backup.

About 31% of people in the AVG poll had lost information they couldn’t replace that was stored on their PCs. The main causes of losing data were;
-PC malfunction

-Virus

-Human error

-Computer damage

-Power cut

Looking after your computer, getting the experts in should it malfunction and using antivirus software are all measures that may just save your data.

The next-generation search infrastructure called ‘Caffeine’ is ready to roll according to its creator Google. Caffeine is an indexing system overhaul that Google has designed to make the search results fresher than they were with the old system.

After testing the Caffeine system in a single data storage centre, Google is now to roll the search infrastructure out over all of its data centres worldwide – so Caffeine is now powering all of Google search.

Rather than splitting the index into layers, as Google previously did, Caffeine instead continuously updates the whole index.