ReadWriteWeb

The "G" in its name used to stand for "Graphics." A few decades ago, the most delightful room for one to be in during a computer conference was the one where Silicon Graphics was showing a demo. It was like one of those dreams where you knew you weren't really on-board the Starship Enterprise, but you forced yourself to ignore that fact and look at the pretty lights and colors. When SGI ceased to be a company unto itself in April 2009, most folks wrote off the SGI brand as an historical remnant.

Wrong. It's wonderful to see a brand that never says die. Ever since Rackable Systems adopted the SGI name, it's been lucky. It's finding its way back as a high-density storage provider. This afternoon, the company is introducing a very high density storage server platform designed, its engineers tell us, to pack the maximum number of terabytes into a 19-inch rack while staying cool.

Today, Tuesday, September 20 at 10:00 a.m. PST, we'll be holding our first live chat on The Changing Nature of Storage Virtualization. We had a lively discussion on Twitter with yesterday's RWW Big Question. Now If you want to continue the conversation interactively on our live text chat, just come back to this post at 10:00 and join in the conversation.

The discussion will be led by our very own David Strom with three experts from our partner NetApp - Jean Banko, Vaughn Stewart and Julian Cates - and Wen Yu from VMware.

Ever wondered which industries use the most data? How much data storage has grown since the late 80's? If you're obsessed with data (aren't we all?) this infographic posted on the Rackspace blog will put things in perspective.

Data backup service Mozy (owned by EMC and managed by ReadWriteCloud sponsor VMware) is running an interesting infographic about data storage that looks into how much data there is in the world, what media that data is stored on and where the largest (in square feet) data centers in the world are.

Just last Tuesday Oracle acquired CMS company FatWire and data quality software vendor Datanomic.

Today Oracle bought Pillar Data, a SAN storage company majority owned by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

In the era of cheap hard disks, clusters of commodity hardware, cloud computing, in-memory analytics and solid state hard drives, it's easy to forget how much of the world's data is still stored on tape. And on tape much of it shall remain. In a blog post at Storage Switzerland, analyst George Crump makes the case that "The reality is that putting all data online is not a viable solution for most businesses from a cost perspective."

As an alternative, he recommends using an "active archive" for dealing with big data analysis.

EMC World is taking place in Las Vegas today. In addition to the announcement of EMC's own Apache Hadoop appliance and distribution, several other companies have announced new products ranging from software integration tools to storage appliances.

We've covered the increasing competition and innovation in the Hadoop market, and those trends show no signs of slowing down.

Red Hat today announced JBoss Enterprise Data Grid 6, which it calls "a cloud-ready, highly scalable distributed data cache." Cameron Purdy defines a data grid as "a system composed of multiple servers that work together to manage information and related operations - such as computations - in a distributed environment."

Like Apache Cassandra and Riak, Red Hat's data grid is influenced by Amazon's distributed data store Dynamo. The product will cache data in-memory and distribute among multiple servers, which will be useful for cloud computing.

Yesterday Dropbox, the popular file storage Web application that enables users to easily sync a folder from their local computer with the the cloud, made a small change to its terms of service. Dropbox made it clear that it would decrypt and hand-over files if the U.S. government requested it.

The issue is not so much that Dropbox is willing to hand over user data to the feds if requested - as RedMonk co-founder and analyst James Governor points out, the company doesn't have much choice: "given I understand it runs on Amazon Web Services, which would give up the data if asked anyway."

The real issue, it seems, is that Dropbox has the ability to snoop on your encrypted files at all.

The launch of Amazon's Cloud Drive may not have seemed like an innovative move as more consumers are opting to stream rather than download their music. But it was a disruption enough to cause some record labels to bark back at Amazon and chastise the company for not getting their permission to launch a cloud-based storage and music player. Their permission, and of course, their licensing.

But Billboard reports that Amazon has responded to some of these music industry complaints with a letter contending that since the launch of Cloud Drive two weeks ago, that MP3 sales are up.