Wednesday 08 September 2010
IceWEB™, Inc. , www.iceweb.com, a leading provider of Unified Data Storage and building blocks for cloud storage networks, sees favorable trends in merger and acquisition activity in the data storage market.
John R. Signorello, Chairman and CEO of IceWEB, Inc., commented, “We are seeing some very exciting activity in the data storage market over the past few years. The recent bidding war for data storage provider 3PAR between Hewlett-Packard and Dell has triggered a great deal of attention to the sector.”
On Monday, August 23, 2010, Hewlett-Packard Co. launched a bidding war for data-storage provider 3PAR Inc., making a $1.8 billion bid that is one-third higher than what rival Dell Inc. agreed to pay for the company. On Friday, August 27, Dell matched HP’s offer of $1.8 billion, only to be countered again by HP offering $2 billion for the company. On Thursday, September 2, after a two-week bidding war between the technology giants, HP offered $33 per share putting the final price tag at $2.35 billion and Dell threw in the towel.
Both PC makers were looking at 3PAR as a way to build up their “cloud computing” businesses, delivering software, data storage and other services to customers via the Internet. 3PAR could also help them cut data storage expenses.
The offer from HP comes as technology companies appear to be increasing merger and acquisition activity as cash levels sit at record levels, highlighted by the $7.68 billion deal between Intel Corp. and McAfee Inc. The all-cash deal announced Thursday, August 19, 2010, marks the biggest acquisition in Intel’s 42-year history. It is the sixth biggest deal globally between two technology companies over the past 3 1/2 years, according to Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor’s.
In 2009, EMC acquired all of the outstanding shares of Data Domain common stock for $33.50 per share in cash.
In 2008, HP Acquired LeftHand Networks for $360 million. Also in 2008, Dell acquired EqualLogic for $1.4 billion.
The most attractive acquisition candidates offer something innovative that no other company offers. For example, the software 3PAR offers is designed to maximize available space on data storage hardware — a cost-cutting step — by using a technique called “thin provisioning,” by which extra capacity can be added as needed.
According to Senior Analyst, James E Bagley, of Storage Strategies NOW, IceWEB’s Unified Storage, “Has a combination of technologies to maximize the capacity efficiency of the storage infrastructure. Built in compression ensures that highly compressible files are stored efficiently. Thin Provisioning means that blocks are not allocated until written to, meaning the administrators can assign arbitrarily large volumes to servers without paying the penalty of a lot of wasted space. The most significant advantage is inline deduplication. Similar files used by multiple servers or virtual desktops are stored as single images within the storage pool. This can result in efficiencies as high as 95% in environments with many similar servers. This combination of features is unprecedented and together means that the overall cost per usable terabyte is one of the best in the industry.”
About IceWEB, Inc.
Headquartered just outside of Washington, D.C., IceWEB manufactures and markets data storage products. For more information, please visit www.IceWEB.com.
With the growing popularity of cloud computing services, companies seeking to gain a foothold in the industry are increasingly jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon. But presence does not equal proficiency, and some companies are simply unprepared to provide reliable service to customers for the long term. Knowledge Center contributor David Barley offers recommendations for selecting a stable and trustworthy cloud computing vendor. Cloud computing may sound like a pie-in-the-sky phenomenon but despite any initial impressions you may have about it, the technology is one phenomenon that has not only landed but has also firmly staked its claim in the future of computer technology. After all, what industry exists that does not employ some form of cloud computing-be it software as a service (SAAS) applications, basic e-mail, or data storage and archiving services? Indeed, cloud computing is here to stay.
This general kind of cloud—for example, services provided online by Amazon EC2, Google Apps and Salesforce.com—is known as a “public” cloud because any business or individual can subscribe. Private cloud computing is a different take on the mainstream version, in that smaller cloudlike IT systems within a firewall offer similar services, but to a closed internal network. Cloud computing serves up computing power, data storage or applications from one data center location over a grid to thousands or millions of users on a subscription basis. This network may include corporate or division offices, other companies that are also business partners, raw-material suppliers, resellers, production-chain entities, and other organizations intimately connected with a corporate mother ship. Public or private, cloud computing is getting the IT industry excited. Gartner analysts in March 2009 said global cloud services revenue could move beyond $56.3 billion this year—from $46.4 billion in 2008—and grow to $150.1 billion in 2013. IBM Vice President of Cloud Services Ric Telford offers eWEEK readers his take in the following slide show.
Andreas Bechtolsheim, 53, co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc. where he still consults — knows a thing or two about cloud computing. He’s chief development officer for Arista Networks Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up that supplies networking equipment used to build these massive arrays of computer servers.
Although most have never heard of cloud computing, many do it every day. By uploading photos to Facebook, sending messages via Gmail or playing Club Penguin online, users are accessing programs and software files that are kept far away in cavernous, climate-controlled rooms containing thousands of computers. He also was one of the first people to invest in Google in 1998 when the company was just two Stanford geeks with a laptop. His $100,000 investment in the company started by Sergey Brin and Larry Page helped turn the Birkenstock-wearing engineer into a billionaire. Hollywood uses high-performance clusters to render movies. The advantage of the cloud is that it’s always running and not idle. They get much better utilization.
These computer farms can simulate car crashes, render movies. Facebook also does an enormous amount of computing behind the scenes to generate relevant content to you. That’s what is going on inside the cloud farms. What you see is just what is relevant to you. You get convenience. You don’t have to deal with servers, data storage or big expensive computers. The laptop accesses everything. You don’t have to worry about backup or security; it’s all being handled by the company that manages the cloud.
So people built these dark pages behind the Web page to game the system. As a result, the search results became useless, and doing a high-quality search was impossible. I was just interested in getting better search results. After I heard from Larry and Sergey about their idea, I rushed out to my car to get my checkbook. The company didn’t exist yet. So I wrote them a check and said, “Here’s a check to get you started.”
Its cloud entries include one product which streamlines the technology used by corporate software developers and testers, which can consume 30 percent or more of a company’s technology resources. Other offerings coming later include clouds fine-tuned for data storage and clouds for business analytics.
I.B.M. knows how to do all of those things,” Frank Gens, chief analyst for IDC, a technology research firm, told the New York Times. “Its strategy is all about making cloud computing safe for enterprise customers.” The newspaper reported that Big Blue is taking a “tailored approach,” promoting the cloud for computing workloads in business.
