hardware

Forrester Research’s report Trends – e-commerce 2005–2010, forecasts e-commerce sales will account for significant percentages of total retail sales by 2010; for example:

Luxury products – especially cosmetics/fragrances
24% of total retail (US$3.7 billion) and jewellery 14% (US$6.1 billion).

Fashion – accessories 24% (US$3 billion), footwear 18% (US$5.5 billion) and general apparel 9% (US$17.4 billion).

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a provider of Application Optimized Storage solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd, today launched a suite of new solutions designed to address the growing storage requirements of medium-sized companies around the world.

Continuing on the company’s laser focus to bring leading enterprise capabilities to a broader set of customers, Hitachi’s powerful suite of solutions delivers enterprise-grade data protection, storage consolidation, and improved management of Microsoft Windows and SQL Server environments at a mid-market price.

Microsoft-based solutions

Many mid-sized companies that depend on the Microsoft platform for mission-critical applications are faced with challenges such as managing availability, scaling quickly to keep pace with growth, meeting tight backup windows, ensuring that Microsoft applications co-exist reliably with other software platforms and protecting critical systems from attacks on privacy, security and integrity.

Hitachi Solutions for Microsoft Environments provide fully integrated, high-performance methods to quickly lower the costs of managing Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server environments.

Data protection and disaster recovery solutions

Business continuity, regulatory compliance and data recovery can be expensive and resource-intensive requirements for mid-sized organizations today. Hitachi Solutions for Data Protection and Disaster Recovery, which are easy to install and manage on a limited budget, can simplify administration of sophisticated cross-platform data protection strategies and significantly reduce overall administrative time to ensure lower total cost of ownership.

Simplification and consolidation solutions

Exponential data growth in mid-sized organizations often leads to unwieldy proliferation of servers, operating systems, and storage solutions requiring multiple management tools and interfaces. Storage administrators are faced with challenges such as hard-to-manage “islands” of underutilized equipment, poor backup and restore performance, excessive staffing requirements and both scheduled and unscheduled downtime.

Hitachi’s Solutions for Storage Consolidation simplify and centralize data storage, providing easy, cost-effective ways to deploy, maintain and scale storage configurations to accommodate increasingly complex business needs.

"Hitachi Data Systems' new suite of solutions provides great benefits to the partners as well as the customers they are serving," said Janet Waxman, vice president, Hardware Channels Research, IDC Research. "All data is critical and customers are not willing to let go, or in some cases not allowed to let go of any of it, therefore the partner opportunity to bring simplification to data management for customers in the mid-market is a tremendous growth opportunity for these partners. This allows the partner to leverage Hitachi's offering as a tool from which the partner can add services for a completely integrated solution."

A Markable growth in the Indian Hardware market..

The third quarter of 2006 recorded an impressive growth in terms of unit shipments - the Indian Client PC market grew 24 per cent over Q3 2005, to exceed the 1.4 million shipments-mark in a single quarter, according to IDC's India Quarterly PC Market Tracker, Q3 2006, November 2006 release.

“With the impact of Intel chip price cuts getting clearer, the Small and Medium Business (SMB) segment registered a strong double-digit year-on-year growth in PC shipments.

Advanced Micro Devices has pulled the plug on its Personal Internet Communicator, once envisioned as a low-cost computer for the developing world.

The PIC was introduced in 2004 as part of AMD's 50x15 project, in which the company has pledged to help bring Internet access to half the world's population by 2015. The device cost $185 and came with one of AMD's Geode processors.

AMD's silicon design team will use the new systems for electronic design automation applications

AMD has purchased several HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades powered by AMD Opteron processors to support the development of its chip designs, HP said today.

AMD’s silicon design team will use the new systems for electronic design automation applications.

“HP’s Linux-based BladeSystem solution’s integrated consoles and power control help us to manage more servers without increasing our staff,” said Mike Lowe, director, Chipset Engineering, AMD in a statement.

Inaugurates its fourth customer contact center in India at Gurgaon

Dell will start manufacturing all its products including desktops and laptops in India by the second half of 2007, the company said

Speaking at the inauguration of its fourth customer contact center in India at Gurgaon (Haryana) today, Dick Hunter, vice-president, customer experience and customer support at Dell, said the products would be manufactured at Sriperumbudur near Chennai.

Launch of New Processor By INTEL.
Intel Corporation launched its latest offering, Quad Core processors, to deliver immense speed and responsiveness for general-purpose servers, workstations, digital media creation, high-end gaming and other market segments that demand better performance.

While Quad Core Intel Xeon 5300, addresses the server platforms, Intel Core-2 Extreme processors are targeted at the desktops. Both the versions have been built with four computing ‘brains’ inside a single microprocessor.

HP acquires VoodooPC, a high-end Gaming PC Provider
By Tom Krazit
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Hewlett Packard has acquired VoodooPC, a high-end gaming PC provider based in Canada. This acquisition, which was effective since November 1 will definitely strengthen Hewlett Packard’s gaming market portfolio by bringing together the high-end expertise of VoodooPC with HP’s Research & Development and global distribution capabilities.

Intel Corp. will start shipping 45-nanometer versions of its latest microprocessors for servers, laptops and desktop PCs in the second half of next year, company executives said Monday.
The company is only shrinking the processors, not releasing a new microarchitecture, said Tom Kilroy, general manager of the digital entertainment group at Intel, during a media briefing at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei.