Rain on Storage Networking World?

Despite low attendance there were some interesting announcements of products at SNW

Developments of the week in storage

Storage Networking World (SNW) happened last week in Orlando, or did it? Attendance, which was flagging and blamed on the economy, seemed to be about half of previous years. Despite a lack of users - most of those attending looked to be from Florida and a close drive from Mickey - there were some interesting announcements of products.

Brocade held the one and only press conference at SNW to introduce two converged network adapters and a switch that speak to the new and hot Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocols. All to be available after original storage manufacturer qualifications are finished in the next few months.

Solid state drive on an adapter company Fusion-io announced that it had hauled in a whopping $47.5 million in funding. The company has introduced SSD on an adapter to boost I/O performance between servers and storage and an I/O appliance called the ioSAN. The company demo'ed 768 DVD-quality video streams from a single SSD on a video wall made up of 12 50-inch HDTVs.

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Storage Networking World (SNW) happened last week in Orlando, or did it? Attendance, which was flagging and blamed on the economy, seemed to be about half of previous years. Despite a lack of users - most of those attending looked to be from Florida and a close drive from Mickey - there were some interesting announcements of products.

Brocade held the one and only press conference at SNW to introduce two converged network adapters and a switch that speak to the new and hot Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocols. All to be available after original storage manufacturer qualifications are finished in the next few months.

Solid state drive on an adapter company Fusion-io announced that it had hauled in a whopping $47.5 million in funding. The company has introduced SSD on an adapter to boost I/O performance between servers and storage and an I/O appliance called the ioSAN. The company demo'ed 768 DVD-quality video streams from a single SSD on a video wall made up of 12 50-inch HDTVs.

Finally, on the trade show circuit, watch out for EMC World May 18-21 in Orlando; Compellent's C-Drive conference May 3-7; and for the anti-SNW, The BD Event June 8-10 in Boston, sponsored by Greg Duplessie, who as everyone knows is Steve's little brother.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.