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For years companies have been deploying Massive Arrays of Idle Disks technologies to reduce data-storage energy costs. The on/off or spin/no spin approaches reduce energy consumption by putting power-hungry disk drives to sleep when they are not being used.

What Sun Microsystems lacks in size as a storage vendor it is trying to make up for with innovation, as it rolls out a series of appliances that include advanced management software and SSDs (solid-state drives).

Size doesn't matter, or so the old adage goes. Yet obviously it does matter -- or else we wouldn't have both towering desktop PCs and petite portable netbooks. But how about something like a network-attached storage (NAS) device, which is basically a box that sits on a shelf or a desk and never travels, never moves -- does size matter there?

Hitachi Data Systems has added three new models to its Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) range, introducing support for SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) disks and a new dynamic load-balancing system with two active controllers.

While RAID 5 isn't exactly the Holy Grail of desktop NAS, it is a very attractive option that combines the speed of striped RAID 0 and sufficient data protection without a humongous loss of storage capacity (as with RAID 1) in the trade. That's what makes Western Digital's ShareSpace NAS array an attractive option. Still you'll need to dig a little deeper to ferret out all that makes up ShareSpace and whether or not it's right for you.

Oracle saved the biggest news for last at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. CEO Larry Ellison took the stage Wednesday afternoon to announce two hardware products developed with Hewlett-Packard that are designed to provide very high performance for data warehousing applications.

Brocade Communications Systems is painting itself as the alternative to Cisco Systems that IT administrators have been looking for.

IBM this week announced it has spent US$2 billion boosting its storage offerings through acquisitions, research and development over the past three years.

Sun Microsystems will introduce a storage appliance based on its FISHworks software package by the end of this year and later extend the technology to other types of products through partnerships.

EMC Tuesday announced a further move down market with the latest iteration of its Celerra network-attacked storage (NAS) server. The Celerra NX4 Unified Storage System, which is based on EMC's entry-level Clariion AX4 storage array, is aimed at the small and midsize business market, EMC said.

We don't have Olympic Games for file server systems but the SPEC SFS (System File Server) benchmark serves as the next best thing, providing a comparable rank of file server performance. If you sifted through all of the SPEC SFS results published to the SPEC Web site, you'd find that the fastest NAS systems are from NetApp, BlueArc, and EMC, who take what in Beijing would have been a gold, a silver, and a bronze medal, in that order.