Around the Web

Computerworld - The rise of SAN consulting
As IT managers struggle to put together storage area networks with products from different vendors, many are turning to SAN consulting services, according to this report from Byte and Switch. While the big players, EMC, Storage Tek, Veritas and Legato, are leading the market in SAN services, smaller companies, such as GlassHouse Technologies and Adexis, are working their way in.

Making storage resource management work for you
That's the title of the next Webcast in the Aberdeen Online Conference Series scheduled for Jan. 15 from 1 to 2 p.m. Eastern. Storage resource management will play a bigger role as companies attempt to deal with the increased complexity of managed storage, Aberdeen says. Representatives from Veritas Software, Tivoli and Astrum Software will participate on a panel. Click on Aberdeen's Web site to register.

EMC co-founder resigns Ireland ambassadorship
Richard J. Egan, the billionaire co-founder of EMC Corp., has submitted his resignation as U.S. ambassador to Ireland. Egan ( the "E" in EMC) quit for "personal reasons" and has returned to his home in Hopkinton, Mass., which is also the home base of EMC. Check out Computerworld's article.

HP's enterprise systems group faces challenges
After the merger of HP and Compaq, the company now faces the task of making its many divisions profitable. And one of the most difficult units for achieving this goal , according to the Contra Costa Times, is "the enterprise systems group, which sells computer servers and data storage to big corporations." The article, which was picked up by IT Toolbox, noted that this division had the most overlap when the companies merged. The division lost $912 million in the last fiscal year, but HP CEO Carly Fiorina promised analysts it would be profitable this year. Time will tell.

Storage in miniature: The current trend in storage is in miniaturizing, which is why nanotechnology, among others, is getting a lot of attention. So says Charles Milligan, manager of advanced technology for StorageTek, in a wide-ranging interview with Enterprise Storage Forum. Milligan also predicted that miniaturization and commoditization will be the biggest shakers in the storage industry over the next five years.

Hitachi enters modular storage market: Hitachi Data Systems is taking on the modular storage market with the Thunder 9500 V Series of virtualized storage systems, according to this article from VNUNET. Offering "more performance, more disk, more scalability in a smaller size," the 9500 V series is an example of the trend toward miniaturization. One analyst notes that the specs look