Servers and business storage

Box is poised to go public as soon as next year, following in the footsteps of other recent and successful Wall Street debuts for enterprise software companies.

The company's co-founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, told Bloomberg in an interview that Box is aiming to declare an initial public offering in 2014. He hinted that 2013 is still a possibility, but he described it as a "long shot."

Levie added that Box will "have to go public" as company leaders have no intention to be acquired by a larger competitor, perhaps Google or even Microsoft.

Expectations … Read more

The talks, which would take the computer hardware maker private, are still preliminary and could fall apart because the firms may not be able to line up financing or resolve how to exit the investment in the future, Bloomberg said, citing two people with knowledge of the matter. One of the people told the publication that several large banks have been contacted about financing a buyout.

A Dell spokesman told CNET that the company doesn't comment on rumor and speculation.

Dell, which has long been … Read more

Micron Technology today announced a terabyte-class solid-state drive for under $600.

The 2.5-inch 960GB Crucial M500 SSD will be initially priced under $600, Micron said today.

The M500 solid-state drive uses a SATA 6-gigabit-per-second controller to deliver up to 80,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS).

The drive's sequential read and write speeds reach up to 500 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 400 MB/s, respectively.

Drives in the 2.5-inch form factor will be available in 120GB, 240GB, 480GB and 960GB capacities. The smaller M.2 and mSATA form factors will be available in 120GB, … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Nvidia took the wraps off Nvidia Grid, the company's first fully integrated system to enable customers to access their games via the cloud.

Launched tonight at CES, Nvidia Grid pushes the limits of cloud gaming in a server stack that's designed to optimize computer graphics. In the works for five years, the stacks, which are packed full of GPUs, or graphics processing units, enable 3D gaming that can render graphics directly to the cloud.

The upshot is that you'll be able to start playing a game on one device, like a tablet, and pick it up … Read more

Already considered a potential threat to U.S. national security, Huawei is again finding itself under scrutiny, linked to an offer to sell embargoed computer equipment to Iran.

A major partner of the Chinese telecommunications gear maker offered to provide 1.3 million euros ($1.7 million) of Hewlett-Packard computer equipment to Iran in 2010, according to documents reviewed by Reuters. However, Huawei says neither it nor Hong Kong-based Skycom, its privately owned partner, provided the equipment to Mobile Telecommunication Co of Iran, known as MCI.

The proposal focused on expanding MCI's subscriber billing system and included at least … Read more

Samsung Electronics has agreed to purchase storage software firm Nvelo.

The Korean firm announced the purchase of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvelo on Friday. The company develops next-generation SSD storage solutions, and works to manage and optimize the use of solid state drives within subsystems. This kind of "SSD caching" is used in both consumer and enterprise platforms, increasing the speed of retrieving data in a number of devices, including desktops and smartphones, from both hard drives and SSDs.

The acquisition of 2-year-old Nvelo, albeit low-key, means that Samsung will increase its storage space portfolio, and will potentially … Read more

IBM has advanced the technology of silicon photonics, fabricating a microchip that has built-in components to send and receive data over optical links.

Researchers have built optical data links into chips before, but IBM's move is notable because it uses conventional chipmaking equipment geared for chips with 90-nanometer features. Today's chips use metal wires to exchange data, but optical links offer the potential of higher transfer speeds over longer distances.

The chip can include several optical components including wavelength division multiplexers that let the chip send and receive signals with multiple frequencies of light, an approach that lets … Read more

Following its recent announcement of the availability of a new 4TB hard drive, Western Digital today announced that its RAID-capable NAS server, the My Book Live Duo, now offers up to 8TB of storage space.

The My Book Live Duo is the dual-bay version of the single-volume My Book Live and originally had a storage cap of 6TB.

The server houses two user-serviceable 3.5-inch hard drives and supports both RAID 1 and RAID 0 configurations. The top 8TB capacity is available only in the RAID 0 setup, which is fast but provides no redundancy. If you want data safety, … Read more

LAS VEGAS -- Just minutes ago, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likened Amazon Web Services to everything from Toyota's lean manufacturing methods to something slightly closer to home: the Kindle Fire business model.

Bezos took to the stage with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels here at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference, acknowledging that retail is a low-margin business and insisting that he's sticking to that game plan with AWS. "High margins cover a lot of sins," Bezos said. "We wouldn't know how to do a high-margin business. Low margins keep you aligned with … Read more