Symantec begins job cuts

Symantec begins job cuts According to reports from ZDNet Asia and ITNews Australia, Symantec Corp. has begun issuing...

pink slips to employees in Asia-Pacific this week as part of a plan to cut $200 million out of its budget. The plan was announced in January after a disappointing fourth quarter in 2006 for the company, but had yet to take effect. The layoffs could affect up to 5% of Symantec's global workforce this year.

Thought Equity adds Sun T10000 drives
Sun Microsystems Inc. announced that digital video licensing company Thought Equity Motion Inc. has added Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drives to its existing Sun storage environment, which serves digitized video clips through the company's Web site using SAM-FS and a StorageTek SL8500 tape silo.

Agami, Adaptec announce hybrid products
Agami Systems announced the latest Agami Information Server (AIS) will include support for iSCSI, as well as network attached storage (NAS). Agami is also adding a feature to its AgamiFS file system to enable iSCSI snapshots, replication and high availability for block-level data. The product will be generally available by the end of March 2007. Support for iSCSI is included as part of the standard pricing and configuration for both the AIS 3000 and AIS 6000 series, which range from $24,995 to $99,995.

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Google adjusts retention periods for privacy
Google Inc. said Wednesday, amid growing pressure from privacy advocates, that it will "anonymize" data it keeps in order to target ads on the surfing habits of Web users after 18-to-24 months. "Previously, we kept this data for as long as it was useful," Google officials said in an official statement. "Unless we're legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymize our server logs after a limited period of time."

NetApp certifies email archiving appliances
Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp) announced certification of Artec IT Solutions' email archiving appliances -- the EMA S40 and S400 -- with NetApp SnapLock software with WORM volumes. Certification with NetApp SnapLock software means that customers' emails are time and date stamped and then encrypted. SnapLock then "locks down" the emails once they are automatically archived so they cannot be altered.

Norwich Public Schools signs contract with Xiotech
Xiotech Corp. announced that Connecticut's Norwich Public Schools, Connecticut's largest public school district, signed a seven-year contract in January for Xiotech's Archive Management hosted service, which will scan, manage and store the school district's student records electronically.

German insurance provider picks DataCore for disaster recovery
German insurance company Basler Insurance has deployed DataCore's virtualization and remote site Asynchronous IP Mirroring (AIM) software, according to a press release from DataCore. The replication software is being used to send data to a remote site 300 miles away from the company's headquarters. The storage pool being virtualized by DataCore consists of two HDS TagmaStore AMS 200s, as well as several terabytes of SATA secondary disk storage used as a target device for snapshots. At the remote site, DataCore's SANmelody and AIM are layered over another TagmaStore system as a target for the asynchronous mirroring, storing data from servers running Novell Netware, a DB2-based insurance application; a main data warehouse system, based on SAS; and the human resource system, based on an Oracle database.

CMS combines backup, bare metal
CMS Products Inc. announced it has released a new version of its BounceBack software, which backs up data from workstations, PCs, laptop computers and remote servers. The new version will now also back up the operating system, applications, formatting, partitioning and boot sector information on a USB external hard drive. All data identified by the backup administrator as critical to the enterprise is saved in a central storage device.