storage

Last week, Rackspace announced the acquisition of two companies - VPS provider Slicehost and cloud storage service Jungle Disk. While both acquisitions are indicative of Rackspace's new cloud hosting strategy, Jungle Disk is an interesting case, being a cloud storage/backup service originally based on Amazon S3. JungleDisk uses Amazon's global cloud service to allow the sharing of an unlimited amount of information through a secure, mountable network drive and automatic backup. The pricing model is also innovative -- users pay only for the amount of data they store, per gigabyte, without additional setup and support fees.

Mac OS X v.10.6, codenamed Snow Leopard (rawr!), will feature the innovative ZFS file system among its line up of extras. ZFS was developed by Sun Microsystems and offers numerous performance improvements over NTFS and ext3.

From the official website: "For business-critical server deployments, Snow Leopard Server adds read and write support for the high-performance, 128-bit ZFS file system, which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots."

Sun is aiming for a leadership position in the Solid State Drives (SSD) arena, by announcing new product lines of flash drives and backing them with significant developments on the software side. The company claims it is the first major systems vendor to add an end-to-end Flash-based disk product line to its portfolio, giving customers 3x better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of spinning disk drive offerings.