Posts Tagged ‘data storage’

New Hard Disk Drive Research Facility Thursday, June 10th, 2010

A new international research hub at ANSIN, Queens University Belfast, has received £7.5 million worth of equipment from Seagate Technologies. Seagate will partner the hub in developing new levels of information and data storage, and the hub also expects to attract a variety of international companies who will do research in the areas of new medical sensors, security devices and many other applications.

The facility will be based in the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s. The ANSIN facility will enable working with materials from micron scale, i.e. 50 times smaller than the width of human hair, down to layers a few atoms thick.

The first IBM PC/XTs had bulky hard disks that had a capacity of 10MB. At the time writing this, news comes about Hitachi releasing 320GB 7mm high 2.5-inch hard disks. With further advances, you might soon be able to carry a whole library of reading, listening and viewing material in your pocket!

Advances like these require new materials and using them in ways that people have not yet thought of. That is the kind of research the ANSIN facility hopes to make possible. The equipment provided by Seagate can be used by other companies joining the research effort. ANSIN hopes this will bring in new ideas and produce great new inventions.

Read the news release at SiliconRepublic.

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Posted in information technology, nanomaterials, nanotechnology | No Comments »

Security of Cloud Technologies Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Google and others are promoting cloud computing, under which applications and data are stored on the Internet cloud. For clients of cloud computing such as users of Google Apps, this provides the opportunity to focus on their core business instead of worrying over information technology incidentals such as installing and configuring software, upgrading it and attending to data security and backup issues.

Cloud computing service providers will attend to all the incidental issues. Users simply start using the application they want, which can be in as quick as a few minutes. Users can also access the applications and data from anywhere with an Internet connection.

However, users have not yet got all that comfortable with entrusting their data to the cloud service providers. A recent Data Management Healthcheck 2010 survey by BridgeHead Software reports that only 6.5% of the respondents reported having used the cloud to store their data.

The healthcare industry will have to cope with huge volumes of data as it adopts IT more aggressively. Cloud storage of the data can save huge amount of headache typically associated with managing such data volumes. The data must be stored safe from unauthorized access, backed up regularly to ensure that a copy is available in case the original is lost and quickly reconstructed in case a data loss incident occurs.

The major concern of survey respondents about cloud storage was regarding the security and availaibility of the data. The data generated by the industry is highly confidential and the companies are committed to protecting patient data.

Despite such concerns, experts anticipate that the cloud will increasingly be the preferred destination for data storage, backup and archiving. Read the story at: eHealthServer.

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Posted in cloud computing, healthcare, information technology, trends | No Comments »