Analysis: Adaptec

This is an ongoing series of posts looking at storage companies and their investment potential. ** DISCLAIMER: This and related blog entries are for fun only and do not represent investment advice. You should make your own opinions on investments or consult a financial adviser ** Background Adaptec...

November 27th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Using Windows Shrink

I’ve been messing about recently with the “shrink” option which is now available on Windows Vista under Disk Management. This allows a partition to be reduced in size, subject to there being sufficient free space available. I wanted to reduce the size of my “C:” drive...

November 26th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Revenue and Customs in records blunder

The Revenue and Customs (IRS equivalent) in the UK have managed to lose two CDs containing the details of 25 million UK citizens (adults and children) who claim child benefit. For those who don’t know, Child Benefit is an allowance paid to all children in the UK irrespective of their parents’...

November 21st, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Brocade Update

Since I wrote about Brocade shares on 7th November, the share price has dropped from $9.28 to $7.74, or 16.6%. That changes the P/E ratio from 17.19 to 14.33. Does that make them more investable? Perhaps. In August the shares dropped as low as $6. In the last 52 weeks, the lowest price has been...

November 19th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

3Par float

3Par finally floated on Friday this week. You can read the official announcement here. 7.5 million shares were released at a target price of $14 (about £7 in real money). In total, there are 60,015,700 shares of common stock now outstanding, valuing the company at a shade over $840 million. This...

November 17th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Analysis: Brocade

This is the next of a series of posts on storage companies. ** DISCLAIMER: This and related blog entries are for fun only and do not represent investment advice. You should make your own opinions on investments or consult a financial adviser ** Background Brocade Communication Systems Inc is one of...

November 7th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Equallogic gets Bought

Dell have announced their intention to purchase Equallogic, an iSCSI hardware vendor. The purchase price is $1.4 billion in cash but the deal doesn’t complete for some time, late 2008 or 2009. Is this an attempt for Dell to move on their storage business? I’ve never taken them seriously...

November 6th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

USP-V does SATA

So the rumours (here and here) are true. Here’s the announcement to prove it. HDS are going to support 750GB SATA II drives in the USP. This is an interesting position HDS are taking as thin provisioning will be able to take use of the enhanced drive capacity making the USP-V even more efficient...

November 5th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

The Case of Decimal v. Binary

We all know that disk drive manufacturers have been conning us for years with their definition of what constitutes a gigabyte. There are two schools of thought; the binary GB, which is 1024×1024x1024 or 1,073,741,824 bytes and the decimal GB which is quoted as 1000×1000x1000 or 1 billion...