On the heels of #VMworld2013, we want to catch you up with a quick storage recap for the week. Software-defined, or software-led are both terms that are becoming synonymous with the next evolution of technology. Software and silicon are making more things possible and more things obtainable. Big Data aka or lots-and-lots-and-lots of more data analyzed and acted on…is making the Internet as we know it an Internet of Things as much as an Internet of connected people. Here is a quick recap of storage related news from this week:

PMC Unveils Series 8 12Gbit/s RAID Adapters

 
PMC has its targets set on rapid enterprise adoption of solid-state drives (SSDs). In accordance with that goal, PMC unveiled its Adaptec Series 8 12Gb/s SAS RAID Adapters. As reported on EnterpriseStorageForum.com, Series 8 delivers greater than 700,000 4k random read RAID I/Os per second, a 60 percent improvement over the prior product. This speed boost enables the full potential of 12Gb/s SAS SSDs, which are twice as fast as 6Gb/s SAS SSDs and exponentially faster than traditional hard drives. The data center of today is heterogeneous with interoperability as an essential first step. PMC wants to help companies handle large pools of data quickly — whether Big Data, cloud computing or database related — the network needs to be faster, plain and simple.

Software Defined Data Center(SDDC) Market Expected 5.41 Billion by 2018

 
The report Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) Market (Software Defined Storage (SDS); Software Defined Networking (SDN), Software Defined Compute/Server, Network Virtualization Security) – Global Advancements, Market Forecasts and Analysis (2013 – 2018) states that the global SDDC market is estimated at $396.1 million in 2013 and expected to grow to $5.41 billion in 2018. This represents an estimated CAGR of 68.7% from 2013 to 2018. The future adoption of SDDC is expected to be in heterogeneous environments and hybrid clouds, with a heavier focus on software-defined security. Prominent vendors in the SDDC space will continue to include VMware, HP, EMC, and IBM.

Ventana and EMC Join Forces to Take Digital Pathology Into the World of Big Data

 
Ventana Medical Systems, Inc. (Ventana), a member of the Roche Group, announced on Wednesday that it has entered into an agreement with EMC Corporation (EMC) to offer a highly scalable and flexible solution to store and archive medical images. The agreement creates a turnkey scanning and storage solution for labs of all shapes and sizes. Today’s pathologists increasingly rely on digital images scanned from patient slides, and it is imperative that those images be of the highest possible resolution. As digital pathology becomes the global standard, a central storage solution for medical imaging becomes a need for pathology labs. Healthcare and Big Data are going to continue to be a very hot topic over the next five years.

UPMC Beefs Up IT Infrastructure to Meet Burgeoning Data Storage Needs

 
It was less than a year ago that the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) health system launched its enterprise analytics initiative, a five-year plan that it says will foster personalized medicine. The UPMC is already having to make a change to that five-year plan, in order to better support its data storage needs. Version two of the plans call for virtualization and moving to a hybrid cloud environment. A significant part of the new plan calls for building an enterprise data warehouse for the 20-plus hospital system that will bring together various types of data that so far have been difficult to integrate and analyze. Read this news as healthcare wanting to get smarter and more efficient with your medical data. A win for patients.