The most recent articles from IT Week

CIOs urged to rethink storage management

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-08-07T17:31:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Thursday 7 August 2008 at 17:31:00

Gartner recommends IT invest in information-access technologies

IT chiefs have been urged to go on a storage diet. Analyst firm Gartner recommends that enterprises are better served by the introduction of so-called information-access technologies, rather than the current penchant to splurge on cheap storage.

The fear of litigation combined with falling storage costs has encouraged many chief information officers to store masses of data, resulting in unnecessary business expense, argued Whit Andrew, analyst, Gartner in a new report.

The introduction of information-access technology, such as enterprise search, content classification and categorisation, and clustering would be far more efficacious, he said.

“With information access technology, companies that previously made retention decisions based on intuitive judgements about what was important can now designate critically on more advance approaches for measuring the value of content,” said Andrews.

Information-access technology will pay for itself when organisations do not have to upgrade their storage requirements so quickly, he added.

Vendors are also offering data storage services to help companies sort out what data they need to store, said Steve Murphy, managing director Hitatchi Data systems, a firm that offers such a service.

Hitatchi has begun offering customers two years of free storage upgrades, including the use of technologies such as virtualisation and de-duplication, to ensure companies make better use of their storage infrastructure, Murphy added.

EMC's releases Clariion CX4 Series

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-08-05T13:06:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Tuesday 5 August 2008 at 13:06:00

EMC's latest midrange system promises flash drives and virtual provisioning

Storage heavyweight EMC has confirmed that the latest versions of its Clariion midrange storage systems is ready to ship.

The Clariion CX4 Series will make it easier for customers to rapidly deploy greater volumes of storage capacity. The CX4 range will include EMC's virtual provisioning technology from October, which allows users to present a nominal storage allocation to applications without having to allocate the physical capacity until it is needed.

The new Clariion systems also feature EMC's UltraFlex technology, which supports both dual-protocol Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) connections in the same array. It will also allow users to easily connect to future technologies, such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

The addition of flash drives in October will provide the CX4 Series with up to 10 times the performance the CX3 series contained, EMC claimed.

Flash drives store data using flash memory, unlike conventional hard drives that use mechanically rotating discs.

Drive spin-down that will autonmatically place inactive drives in sleep mode will be available some time in 2009.

"The CLARiiON CX4 Series is unmatched in the industry when it comes to scalability, features, energy efficiency and ease of use," said David Donatelli, president of EMC's storage division in a statement.

Clariion CX4 Series is comprised of four models: 120, 240, 480 and 960. The numbers correspond to the number of disk drives.

The CX4 Series was first unveiled in June at the firm’s annual customer conference, EMC World.

The future of enterprise storage

Daniel Robinson — 2008-07-25T09:57:00.000Z

Daniel Robinson, IT Week, Friday 25 July 2008 at 09:57:00

Virtual storage connected by iSCSI offers datacentre managers the most cost-effective way of coping with ballooning enterprise storage requirements, according to Dell

Enterprises are facing an ever increasing requirement for storage because of data retention policies and growing use of digital media files, according to computer giant Dell. At the same time, recent trends such as the move towards virtual machines are complicating the way storage is utilised, leading to headaches for IT departments trying to manage and stay on top of their storage needs.

Dell believes that storage virtualisation is going to play an important part in addressing this issue, and that a key part of providing this capability will be better storage area network (SAN) technology based on iSCSI. This is not perhaps surprising, as Dell is now the leading global iSCSI supplier, according to figures from analyst firm Gartner, following its acquisition of storage vendor EqualLogic earlier this year.

IT managers are familiar with the fact that the volume of storage required on their network continually grows, especially as there is a need to retain certain kinds of information for future reference as well as regulatory compliance reasons. Digital media files such as photos are also adding to the burden as these tend to be large in size.

Within a corporate environment, three types of information currently tend to occupy the lion’s share of storage allocation, Dell said. Email takes up 26 per cent on average, with files and shared storage using up another 20 per cent, while backup and protection of vital information accounts for a further 11 per cent.

The growth in storage also brings complexity, according to Dell, which estimates that 70 per cent of enterprise investment in storage is going on “just keeping the lights on”, a situation that the company is aiming to address using future products from its EqualLogic storage division.

“We want to change this situation and flip it around,” said Robin Kuepers, head of storage marketing for Dell in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, adding that customers wanted to spend more on innovating, and “want help to slow storage growth”.

Deploying iSCSI is one way to simplify storage, Kuepers said, pointing out that this protocol runs over standard Ethernet infrastructure, something that enterprises already have and are comfortable managing. In contrast, a Fibre Channel SAN requires costly dedicated infrastructure.

While iSCSI is often seen as an entry-level solution, there is increasing corporate interest in the technology because it easily scales up, Kuepers said. He said that because iSCSI boxes typically come with Ethernet ports built in, adding more storage adds bandwidth to the storage array at the same time.

Another trend that will worsen storage management headaches within datacentres is server virtualisation. This is employed to make the most efficient use of modern hardware, which is often capable of handling several virtual servers simultaneously.

However, virtualisation can complicate backup and recovery operations, according to Praveen Asthana, enterprise storage director at Dell.

This is because virtual machines in a SAN-based VMware implementation are typically stored in a VMFS cluster file system configured as a logical unit number (LUN). If a snapshot is taken of the LUN, this creates a backup of all the virtual machines within it, making it difficult to roll back just one of the virtual servers if the need arises.

With iSCSI, data sets can be configured and accessed as individual LUNs, according to Dell, which makes recovery as simple as un-mounting the virtual machine from its disk volume, rolling it back to an earlier snapshot, then re-mounting it.

Forester Research senior analyst Andrew Reichman wrote in a report earlier this year that “iSCSI is inherently more virtualised than Fibre Channel, allowing for more granular addressing, especially important for virtual server environments”.

Another problem that enterprises currently face is that data is distributed here and there around the network, on numerous different servers and often on client systems as well.

“Organisations don’t know exactly how much storage they have. They know where their big databases are, but don’t know how many PCs they have, or what information is on them,” said Tony Lock of analyst firm Freeform Dynamics.

According to John Joseph, Dell vice president of storage marketing, this has led to storage “islands” as new workloads are deployed onto separate physical servers with their own local storage. This situation is inefficient, as most of this local storage is under-utilised and difficult to manage, he explained.

Not surprisingly, Dell believes the solution is for companies to separate servers from their storage and put it onto a SAN, effectively consolidating all storage into the datacentre. Previously, implementing a SAN would have been a costly investment, but Dell claims that iSCSI now makes it possible to build a SAN for less than £5,000.

One of the reasons for this is the falling cost of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), which is increasingly being used for iSCSI storage arrays. Praveen Asthana also said that Ethernet will scale to offer greater bandwidth than rival technologies in future.

“Fibre Channel went from 2G to 4G, and there are plans to offer 8G, while Ethernet is on 10 gigabits today and there are plans for 40,” he said.

Joseph said that with Dell’s EqualLogic kit, companies can build a virtual storage environment, one where administrators can manage a pool of storage instead of individual storage devices. This pool can simply be expanded as necessary by adding extra iSCSI equipment as required.

One existing feature of EqualLogic’s kit is its support for a tiered storage architecture. Logical storage volumes are sliced up and the blocks distributed across the virtual storage array, and can also be moved around as necessary, depending on how often the data in them is accessed.

Joseph said that Dell plans in future to offer the same capability for virtual machine images, but declined to give a timeframe for this move.

“In future, we will be able to move a virtual machine to storage with a better quality of service if necessary,” said Joseph. This means that virtual machines servers or desktops with a heavy workload can be moved automatically to faster storage hardware.

Conversely, virtual machines that are less critical will be migrated by the storage management system to slower storage, according to Joseph, from 15,000RPM disk arrays to 10,000RPM, for example.

“You’ll be able to automatically move less frequently accessed data from $9,000 per terabyte storage to $3,000 per terabyte storage,” he said.

According to Dell, this will take some of the burden of management away from the IT staff, and go some way towards helping tackle the problem of the ongoing growth in storage.

Lock said that this kind of feature will become more prevalent in the future.

“Apart from the biggest organisations, most companies do not have dedicated staff to manage areas such as storage,” Lock said, adding that in future storage will be based on virtualisation and become much more flexible.

“Tiered storage is going to happen, but there’s a desperate need for data discovery tools, and automatic classification of data,” he said.

OnStor sets Cougar loose

Dave Bailey — 2008-07-15T11:55:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Tuesday 15 July 2008 at 11:55:00

New NAS gateway smoothes path to storage virtualisation

Storage vendor OnStor has launched its latest network attached storage (NAS) gateway platform, the Cougar 6000 series, targeting large enterprises looking to virtualise their storage systems.

The Cougar platform represents a "big enhancement" over its previous Bobcat system, said OnStor co-founder and chief designer Brian Stark.

"It uses an active-active configuration, and now has field-replaceable fans, power supplies and blades, which means the system doesn't have to be powered down for hardware failures or software upgrades," he told IT Week.

ONStor has added two quad-core processors on each motherboard and another core responsible for system management through its Linux operating system.

The 2U chassis contains 18 processors, up from just six in the Bobcat system, and will be offered in two Cougar models: the 6720 and the 6520. The main difference in the models is the number of cores that the OnStor software has turned on, said Stark. The 6520 uses 12 cores and the 6720 uses 14. "We'll still have over a fifth of the processing power in reserve for performance upgrades further down the road," added Stark.

Cougar's system memory has increased to 16GB and the platform can potentially address up to 4 Petabytes of storage. Cougar also promises far better network connectivity.

The system has four gigabit Ethernet ports per blade, which the user can specify as copper or fibre. It also has four 4Gbit/s fibre channel ports per balde – and with its PCI Express expansion capability it could potentially support 10 gigabit Ethernet connections in the future.

Demand for storage virtualisation was being driven by the large increase in unstructured data that firms needed to deal with, said ONStor's chief executive Bob Miller. "Digital media, geophysical data acquisition, human genomics and many other fields need more storage, and we're having to continually reassess our predictions about what firms will require," said Miller.

Stark said that ONStor had also increased the power efficiency of Cougar by increasing performance, but keeping a similar power consumption to the earlier Bobcat system.

Sun adds to open storage range

Gareth Morgan — 2008-07-10T10:50:00.000Z

Gareth Morgan, IT Week, Thursday 10 July 2008 at 10:50:00

Sun promises unparalleled price-performance from new open storage range

Sun Microsystems has launched a new line of storage arrays, the J4000 range, based on its open storage portfolio, along with a new high-performance storage server Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper" line.

Sun claimed its J4000 range offer unparalleled price-performance – prices start at £1,500 ($3,000).

“These new building blocks deliver impressive density and capacity while empowering customers to take advantage of the efficiencies of general purpose storage powered by open source software," said John Fowler, executive vice-president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems in a statement.

The Sata-based Sun Fire X4540 runs Solaris OS and Solaris Zettabyte File System – and can deliver up to 50 per cent savings on power and cooling at lower cost, Sun claimed.

Prices for the the Sun Fire X4500 storage server family start at $22,000, with the X4540 pencilled to ship later this month.

Archive tool takes care of SharePoint data

Daniel Robinson — 2008-07-08T16:38:00.000Z

Daniel Robinson, IT Week, Tuesday 8 July 2008 at 16:38:00

BridgeHead Software's ShareStore could cut SharePoint data volumes by 70 per cent

BridgeHead Software has released an archive tool to help businesses manage the increasing volume of data associated with Microsoft SharePoint Server resources. It cuts the amount of data held on tier 1 storage, with the knock-on effect of speeding backup and restore operations, according to the firm.

BH ShareStore, available immediately, can automatically move inactive SharePoint data from primary storage systems onto a variety of secondary media. However, it does this transparently, so that users still have access to archived information.

"As much as 70 per cent of the content of a typical SharePoint system can consist of rarely accessed older items, including early versions of documents that quickly pile up as teams of users collaborate on document creation," said BridgeHead Software chief executive Tony Cotterill.

BH ShareStore contains a policy engine that lets IT department set rules governing when data should be archived, and whether archived data is simply deleted or replaced with a placeholder so that it can be retrieved again at a later date. Policies can also be defined to meet corporate governance and compliance regulations.

"You would typically want to keep access to older information in SharePoint, but perhaps not if it is older than the tenth or eleventh version of a document, " Cotterill said. With this redundant information removed, IT departments have less live information on the SharePoint Server to worry about backing up.

Archived data can be moved to any secondary storage that looks like a disk, according to Cotterill, enabling the standard edition of BH ShareStore to be used as a simple point solution.

However, the Enterprise version of the software comes with BridgeHead's Data Repository tool which manages access to secondary storage. This can store the data on other devices such as tape and optical media, and can also maintain multiple copies across different media for redundancy.

BH ShareStore is licensed according to the number of SharePoint users, and costs approximately £25 per seat, which falls to about £10 per seat for 1,000 users, according to Cotterill.

Pioneering research ramps optical disc size to 400GB

Dave Bailey — 2008-07-07T15:31:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Monday 7 July 2008 at 15:31:00

Pioneer showcases potential Blu-Ray replacement discs

Japanese electronics giant Pioneer claims to have developed a 16-layer optical disc capable of storing 400 gigabytes of data.

The new system can hold as much information – roughly 25GB – in each layer as Blu-Ray optical disc, Pioneer said. This new storage technology will greatly reduce the number of discs firms use, it added.

The problems associated with multilayer optical discs, such as the difficulty in obtaining good signal-to-noise ratio from the different recording layers, has been solved though using an innovative disc structure. This helps reduce crosstalk from adjacent layers. Pioneer also employed a light-receiving element that can read out weak signals at a high signal-to-noise ratio in the optical pick-up mechanism, the company said.

The objective lens used in the new system has similar specifications to those used in Blu-Ray discs, so it is possible to maintain compatibility between the new 16-layer optical disc and the BD discs, said Pioneer.

Pioneer will present further details of its research at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2008 from 13 July in Waikoloa, Hawaii.

Do UK firms need better offline information retrieval?

Dave Bailey — 2008-07-02T12:02:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Wednesday 2 July 2008 at 12:02:00

Information retrieval problems are costing UK firms five weeks productivity per year says survey

A new survey by HP has identified problems with the way that UK firms are storing and retrieving information. HP said that by changing their practices firms could save up to five weeks a year in employee time.

The survey polled 350 UK IT managers and 350 associated employees. Although two-thirds of respondents said that they were backing up data on a daily basis, over a fifth said it was done only weekly, and over 40 per cent said it was backed up using paper, CD or DVDs.

Over half of the IT managers polled said that they frequently got requests from users wishing to access archived information, and when asked how many hours a week employees spent searching for electronic information, 63 per cent said up to two hours, while 22 per cent said they spent up to four hours per week.

HP StorageWorks business director Adam Thew said that, “It’s clear that IT managers face major challenges, because the raw data level is doubling every 18 months. Making data quality better and more available should give businesses a significant advantage, since it allows staff to find the right data quickly so they can spend time doing more valuable tasks.”

Plasmon protects archived data

Dave Bailey — 2008-06-30T18:10:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Monday 30 June 2008 at 18:10:00

Plasmon's NetArchive platform uses NetApp RAID hardware and WORM appliance to archive data

Archiving solution provider Plasmon has announced NetArchive, an enterprise-class archiving system, which blends online and long-term storage architectures with data management software to give enhanced data integrity, longevity and disaster recovery, according to the vendor.

The system allows customers to let employees move data between NetApp's RAID hardware and the archive appliance using automated policy management software to link data transfer between the two sets of hardware. This reduces the cost and complexity of managing archives, Plasmon said.

Plasmon chief executive Steven Murphy said that NetArchive was "a key step toward the realisation of Plasmon’s strategy to simplify the archive process through virtualisation, which delivers an intelligence-based system behind a single storage node".

Murphy added, "NetArchive leverages appropriate storage technologies to balance capacity, performance and storage costs against the legal and business value of data and improves operational efficiencies while meeting customer requirements for a robust disaster recovery strategy."

NetArchive creates a tiered storage system, which migrates infrequently accessed data off NetApp's RAID hardware onto Plasmon's write-once, ready-many (WORM) Archive Appliance.

Firms fail to exploit document management software's full potential

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-06-25T17:24:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Wednesday 25 June 2008 at 17:24:00

New Butler Group study suggests companies could derive more business value from document and records management technology

Firms anxious to comply with governance regulations are missing an opportunity to build potentially valuable archives of unstructured data by rushing their deployments of document and records management (DRM) systems, according to a new report by the Butler Group.

Organisations need to look beyond compliance and explore how DRM systems can be used to save unstructured information in a central repository. Then emails and instant messages containing important information can be stored, accessed and shared to increase business efficiency, the report argued.

Report author Sue Clarke said, “Frequently businesses don’t look at how DRM systems can deliver business benefits and this means they have no end-user buy-in.” She added that the lack of planning means users often do not know how to use the system, cannot derive the information they need from it and cannot work the system’s search capabilities.

Clarke said the report’s findings were based on a mixture of end-user meetings and surveys.

Dell launches storage consulting services

Dave Bailey — 2008-06-25T16:08:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Wednesday 25 June 2008 at 16:08:00

The vendor will offer guidance on backup, restore and disaster recovery issues

Dell has launched new storage consulting services aimed at businesses of all sizes.

Dell's storage alliances manager for global infrastructure consulting services, Stephen Davies, said, "What we're launching today is consulting for tiered storage offerings, backup, restore and stabilisation systems, and also for creating a well-designed disaster recovery plan. We're also offering a managed remote backup service, built on the backup and restore offering."

The new consulting services stem from Dell's acquisition of UK-based The Networked Storage Company last year, and the partnership it formed with GlassHouse Technologies in March.

"Where we think there is a clear advantage is in the lower end corporate accounts and SMB sector, where a lot of people want to do this stuff, but haven't been able to do it properly," Davies said.

LSI showcases new HPC storage system

Dave Bailey — 2008-06-18T14:46:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Wednesday 18 June 2008 at 14:46:00

LSI's XBB2 promises ultra-high levels of data availability

Network and storage vendor LSI unveiled its latest storage system for high-performance computing (HPC) environments at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden.

LSI said its seventh-generation XBB2 architecture, gives a bandwidth on sustained reads and writes of 6.4GB/s and 5.4GB/s respectively.

The system also has fully redundant components and data paths, automated failover, drive health monitoring, controller cache mirroring and hardware-assisted redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) 6. RAID 6 is important for high availability storage systems, since it allows the array to keep going even in the event of two drives failing.

LSI's senior director for HPC Steve Hochberg said “In HPC environments, it is no longer enough to provide storage with high bandwidth alone. Firms need storage delivering the highest levels of data availability."

The initial release will allow firms to scale the system to 256 fibre channel (FC) or serial ATA (SATA) drives, with further RAID options being levels 0, 1,3,5 and 10. Engenio also offers field-replaceable host interface options, including 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel (FC) and 20Gbit/s InfiniBand connectivity.

As well as allowing customers to mix host interfaces, RAID levels and drive types in a single system, LSI are also touting the Engenio's ability to adapt to future HPC advances, saying that subsequent releases can scale to 480 drives and will support 8Gbit/s FC and 40Gbit/s InfiniBand connectivity.

Engenio's 7900 HPC storage system is available now through selected LSI OEM partners.

Dell unveils small SAS enclosure

Gareth Morgan — 2008-06-17T11:13:00.000Z

Gareth Morgan, IT Week, Tuesday 17 June 2008 at 11:13:00

Promises improved performance for lower power using 2.5-inch SAS drives

Dell has released a new external storage enclosure based on small form factor disk drives, which it claims can help improve data access times while reducing power consumption.

The Dell PowerVault MD1120 is the computer makers first external enclosure based on 2.5-inch serial attached SCSI (SAS) drives. The 24 that are packed into the 2U MD1120 deliver a system that takes up 70 per cent less space than an equivalent unit based on 3.5-inch drives, while needing 50 per cent less power, Dell claimed.

"The PowerVault MD1120 delivers on Dell’s focus to provide data centre solutions that are effective, versatile and, above all, simple to use," said Robin Kuepers, head of storage, Dell in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in a statement.

The MD1120 is ideal for organisations that need extra storage for data-intensive applications, or as an entry-level enclosure for supporting business critical applications such as email, database and online transaction processing, he added.

Dell said that the MD1120 can scale up to six enclosures, housing 144 drives, when connected to its PowerEdge RAID Controller.

Vendor video Q&A: IBM

2008-06-09T11:17:00.000Z

IT Week, Monday 9 June 2008 at 11:17:00

Madeline Bennett, editor of IT Week, is joined by IBM's Steve Horobin to discuss the growing challenge of storage management

Madeline Bennett, editor of IT Week, is joined by IBM's Steve Horobin to discuss the growing challenge of storage management

EMC sets great store by virtualisation

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-06-09T10:43:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Monday 9 June 2008 at 10:43:00

The vendor is to extend de-dupe and virtual provisioning across its portfolio

Last month’s EMC user conference in Las Vegas saw the launch of several new products for the storage market, while the firm said it would extend virtual provisioning across its entire backup and recovery portfolio. It also plans to unveil a new datacentre in Dublin, which it expects will bring benefits for UK customers.

During the event, EMC announced virtual provisioning for its network storage product Clariion. Dave Donatelli, president of the firm’s storage division, said EMC plans to bring more and more virtual provisioning capabilities into the file environment.

Donatelli said this feature will soon be extended across EMC’s backup and recovery portfolio, and that de-duplication capabilities will also be added to the firm’s storage offerings. He also hinted that the Networker backup and recovery software may be made available as a hosted service.

Virtual provisioning allows customers to expand storage capacity more easily than the thin provisioning alternative, according to EMC, because it increases storage capacity automatically as required, preventing the over-allocation of storage capacity as well as reducing costs.

So far, EMC has added virtual provisioning to its Celerra and Symmetrix offerings, and will at some point introduce it to its Connectrix range. However, the Centera product family will not make use of the technology because it is an object-based archive system, not file-based.

The company also used its Las Vegas event to detail plans to extend de-duplication technologies featured in EMC backup and recovery systems to other lines. “We will move the capabilities into the storage arrays over time,” said Donatelli.

De-duplication allows firms to minimise the volume of data stored by recognising redundancies, such as a duplicated file, and only storing these once.

EMC announced a number of new virtual-disk libraries featuring data de-duplication technology, including the EMC DL 3D 1500 and 3000, and the DL 4000, which adds a spin-down capability to reduce power.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group, said the announcements around de-duplication will keep EMC at the forefront of the networked storage field.

“Instead of allowing [software companies] to displace it, EMC is using its own expertise in the field. It will do wonderful things for its bottom line because software is such a high margin business in comparison with hardware,” Enderle explained.

EMC also announced it is using experience gained from the consumer market to make its storage products easier to use. Its LifeLine software, for example, allows network-attached storage appliances to be delivered to the consumer market and is available for licensing by other vendors.

As evidence of its ease of use, the firm said that customers now have the ability to do their own Clariion installations, as well as perform their own software upgrades on Celerra products without any on-site support. EMC is also offering a free upgrade to its Symmetrix Management Console, which it said will make storage easier and faster to manage.

However, Enderle warned that EMC faces increased competition from both IBM and HP, especially given the latter’s merger with EDS. “IBM is moving back into the storage space after letting its business languish in the 1990s, and EMC should be greatly concerned with anything IBM does,” he said.

On the subject of HP’s pending acquisition of EDS, EMC chief executive Joe Tucci was optimistic. “EDS is an important partner, and they would probably say we are one of their cornerstones,” he said. “It takes a long time to get the benefits of an al liance and I don’t think that EDS will abandon it very quickly.”

But Enderle disagreed with Tucci’s positive assessment. “HP and EDS will offer a cloud-based outsourcing model that is very aggressive and well ahead in the industry. Over time, EMC will realise the affinity EDS has with HP,” he said.

Meanwhile, some attendees at the conference were hoping to hear if EMC planned to offer its Networker backup and recovery tool as a managed service.

Donatelli conceded that such a move might be on the cards, but declined to elaborate or offer any definite timeframe.

Meanwhile, Vance Checketts, chief operating officer of Mozy, EMC’s software-as-a-service backup operation, revealed that the firm will unveil its first international datacentre within the next two months, and said this will benefit UK customers in particular.

“From a UK customer’s perspective, they will feel more secure knowing their data will be residing in Europe,” he said.