In 1969, Chairman Mao commanded the construction of a second Beijing beneath the surface of the original city, designed to accommodate all six million of its then inhabitants, so that if nuclear war did kick off, folk would still have somewhere to hang out and play Mah Jong while the rest of us burnt to [...]

This is an amazing piece of kit! the Dome House is an igloo-shaped structure built from snap-together wall sections made of 100% expanded polystyrene foam (styrofoam). It might seem like an odd choice of material for a house, but the company lists a number of advantages that styrofoam has over traditional materials. Unlike wood and [...]

It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments. Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment – CXV-2 – that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission. [...]

The ST506 hard drive Seagate is celebrating the shipment of its one billionth disk drive after 29 years in biz. The storage giant reckons it will reach its second billion in less than five-years’ time. Seagate said it’s shipped the equivalent of 79 million terabytes of storage since the company made its first hard drive [...]

Hitachi has done an about turn and decided it won’t be selling its struggling hard drive division. The division was formed when Hitachi bought IBM’s disk business in 2002 and has made losses for almost every quarter since. In late 2007 Hitachi was trying to sell the business to private equity group Silver Lake. But, [...]

Big Blue has made yet another storage buy, this time scooping up privately-held Diligent Technologies for an undisclosed sum, although rumors peg the price at $200m. The company, which has in recent months been on a considerable storage spending spree, said today that the Framingham, Massachusetts and Tel Aviv, Israel-based de-duplication software specialist will be [...]

Iomega has dumped its Chinese fiancé and is running away with the richest man in the room. Yes, it’s EMC, which last month interrupted Iomega’s plans to marry a subsidiary of Great Wall Technology, with an unasked for and spurned offer of $178m. EMC returned a few days later with more dough, about $213m cash, [...]

NAS boxes generally too bulky for you? Then how about Buffalo’s new LinkStation Mini? Announced yesterday, the compact server packs in 1TB of storage capacity using a pair of RAID-configured 2.5in hard drives. The 13.3 x 8.1 x 3.9cm device has a Gigabit Ethernet port on the back for network connectivity, and a USB port [...]

Seagate drive in orbit, why not? Seagate has begun shipping what it says is the world’s first 1TB SAS hard drives, as well as the first self-encrypting enterprise-oriented hard drives. The 3.5-inch Barracuda ES.2 HDD series now comes in a serial-attached SCSI interface and 1TB capacity. Seagate estimates the speedier SAS data transfer rate offers [...]

Folks may be tightening their wallets under gray economical times, but the need to keep close tabs on our fellow man is in as great of demand as ever. That’s why EMC rolling out a handful of new services to assist customers in linking storage systems to the video surveillance units, card readers, alarms, intrusion [...]

There’s nothing wrong in theory with a vendor that caters to large corporations having a crack at the consumer market. Yet perhaps in being so dependent on the colossal proportions of Brobdingnag, one loses a true sense of scale for the outside world. Ditching metaphors: data centers are willing to spend a lot on hardware. [...]

Although NetApp fired the first volley in its ZFS lawsuit against Sun Microsystems, Sun has been the aggressor since NetApp’s initial strike. Following NetApp’s lawsuit last September charging that Sun violated several of its patents regarding ZFS, Sun countersued and accused NetApp of violating Sun’s patents. Sun has also asked the U.S. Patents Office to [...]