NetApp

Google is the second best company to work for across the world, at least in the opinion of CNNMoney.

Ranking the top 25 global workplaces, CNNMoney praised Google for its coaching services. The company offers a "CareerGuru" program in which 43 of its senior leaders provide career coaching to employees. These gurus are available in 14 offices around the world.

Google engineers can also discuss issues and concerns with senior engineers known as "EngAdvisors." More than 900 engineers have taken advantage of this program since it launched in 2009, CNNMoney said.

Currently, Google gets 61 times … Read more

Google topped Fortune magazine's list of Best Companies to Work For 2012, knocking the nearly paternalist SAS Institute from the top perch.

The Web giant claimed the top spot on the strength of both its financial performance-- revenue, profits and share price all climbed--and employee gratitude for its corporate culture. Fortune noted that Google employees have access to bocce courts, bowling alleys, and, of course, free food.

Each year, Fortune compiles the list of large companies that treat their employees well, generally by granting perks that the rest of us wish we had. SAS, which came in third this … Read more

After nearly 25 years of relative consistency and market dominance by the likes of EMC and NetApp, there's been a recent flurry of activity in the storage industry. In the past few weeks, Fusion-io was valued at nearly $1.95 billion after its first day of public trading and next-generation storage start-ups Pure Storage and Tintri each closed sizable new funding rounds ($28 million for Pure Storage, $18 million for Tintri).

Spurred by the rise of technological innovations like cloud computing and virtualization, storage is undergoing a major transition--the likes of which it hasn't experienced since the rise … Read more

EMC today rolled out its largest launch ever with 40 new storage technologies and products aimed directly at undercutting NetApp's footing.

Among EMC's announcements, the most notable item is a new family of systems called VNXe, aimed at small and midsize businesses as well as remote offices. The VNXe system prices will range from below the $10,000 mark to $40,000. The VNXe family is basically the heart of EMC's midtier storage lineup and takes the company into a niche that it couldn't hit with its Iomega unit, which sells systems in the $5,000 … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Philips is adding on-demand Web content and Internet apps to its line of Blu-ray players and also adding the same functionality to a set of home theater systems. All of the devices allow access to services like Netflix, Vudu, Facebook, and Twitter.

The 3D BDP7506 ($220, April) and BDP5506 ($200, March) feature touch-screen controls and the full line of Philips services like MediaConnect (PC to TV); the BDP7506 also allows for DLNA playback.

These two top-of-the-line players are followed by the BDP3506 ($170, February, with 3D, NetApps, video-on-demand), BDP3306 ($150, February, with NetApps, video-on-demand), and the BDP3006 ($130, February, … Read more

Last year, storage vendors were all about cloud. They saw major-league opportunities in the private, public, hybrid, and federated versions. No cloud was too big or too small. In fact, because clouds were "infinitely scalable," there was no limit to the number of yotta bytes they could sell.

Storage users and data center storage administrators in particular were decidedly more sanguine. You say cloud is a new services delivery model? Hey storage vendors, where have you been lately? We've been all about services delivery for some time now. Tell us something about cloud we don't know. … Read more

EMC and NetApp gained share in the first quarter as these pure-play storage makers shined, according to IDC data.

EMC's market share ticked up to 24.6 percent in the first quarter, year over year. NetApp has a virtual tie with IBM for the No. 2 spot. NetApp had first quarter share of 11.1 percent compared with IBM's 11.7 percent. A year ago, NetApp had first quarter market share of 8.8 percent.

Overall, the global storage sector is bouncing back, said IDC. Factory revenue surged 17.1 percent in the first quarter to $5 billion … Read more

Enterprise IT tends to see waves of interest and productivity related to new technologies that ebb and flow with interest from users and developers. Cloud computing in a variety of forms--compute power, storage, etc.--has been the recent poster child for reducing cost and complexity.

There is little question that users want to make their technology life easier, which is why cloud services have been embraced so heartily to date. And because users are interested in the cloud, large enterprise vendors are looking to capitalize on the interest and adoption.

This obviously makes sense. Corporations exist to make money. And … Read more

NetApp's new CEO is Tom Georgens. Georgens steps in as Dan Warmenhoven, NetApp's CEO since 1994, moves on to the position of chairman of the board and a partnership development role under the direction of Georgens.

Warmenhoven's accomplishments were many, but he may be remembered most for turning the small niche-market opportunity that NAS once was as a dedicated file server attached to a LAN into the major networked storage platform NAS has become. Along the way, he built NetApp up to a 3.4 billion dollar company with 8,000-plus employees focused on storage.

NetApp co-founder … Read more