In brief: Patent Office grants Rad patent

Plus: Hitachi beefs up storage management; IBM bolsters on-demand with VMware.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last week gave Rad Data Communications apatent for its TDM-over-IP technology, which the vendor has sold to companies and carriers since 1999. TDM over IP works by encapsulating segments of a TDM voice stream and sending them across a network as User Datagram Protocol/IP packets. A TDM-over-IP gateway on the receiving end gets the packets, synchronizes with the TDM time slot of the sending device and reassembles the voice stream.

Rad Data says it has more than 20,000 TDM-over-IP gateways and module cards for PBXs installed.

Hitachi Data Systems recently announced a new high-end storage array and enhancements to its HiCommand management software. The Hitachi Thunder 9585V is the company’s largest midrange storage array. It can store up to 64T bytes of data and can attach to as many as 1,024 servers.

Hitachi also introduced HiCommand Path Provisioning, which provides end-to-end provisioning of storage resources, and HiCommand QoS for Sybase, which ties storage resources and availability to the popular application. HiCommand Path provisioning starts at $6,000; HiCommand QoS for Sybase starts at $5,000; a Thunder 9585V with seven 146G-byte drives starts at $100,000.

IBM is using VMware’s virtual machine technology as a key part of its on-demand computing push for its x86-based systems, including blade servers. The two companies last week announced they were extending an alliance that began in 2002.

VMware, now owned by EMC, says the deal calls for IBM to offer its virtualization technology on its servers through 2007. VMware will provide partitioning capabilities on the x86 machines as part of IBM’s Virtualization Engine, which Big Blue announced last month to tie together server virtualization, management and provisioning. IBM uses its own partitioning technology on its RISC-based servers.