Elevator + Data Storage

choi

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(1) Kathe5rine Rosman, The Most Awkward Meeting; New Elevators Sort Employees, Foiling Manners And Face Time. Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2011.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703509104576331044032063796.html

Quote:

"Elevators now route employees, sometimes according to rank. They can help corporations keep track of who is in the office and who isn't. They can be programmed so that a germophobe can simply wave an ID card in front of a reader and be shuttled to the proper floor without actually touching a button. They can redirect an unsuspecting employee to a different floor at the request of the boss.

"Behind the changes is an increasingly common dispatch system that the two companies that dominate the industry, Otis Elevator Co. and smaller rival Schindler Elevator Corp. have installed in about 200 mid-to-high-rise buildings around the country. Employees select their floor on a keypad in the lobby and are sent to board a specific elevator. The dispatch systems result in fewer people per car and fewer stops, and can be configured to suit a company's particular needs.

"The centralized dispatch systems—which Schindler calls Destination Dispatch and Otis calls Compass Destination Management System—represent the most fundamental upgrade in commercial elevator travel since the late 1950s when automation began to replace manual elevators operated by men in brass-button uniforms.

My comment: There is no need to read the rest, except the chart "By the Numbers."


(2) Scott Kirsner, One firm’s old data is another’s Next Big Thing. Boston Globe, May 15, 2011.
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2011/05/15/two_firms_capitalize_on_storage_boom/

Quote:

"the latest trend in the data storage world: saving copies of corporate data onto what are called “disk-based back-up appliances’’ instead of on magnetic tape, which has been the workhorse storage medium since the dawn of the information age.

"Instead of backing up every file on every laptop, desktop, and Web server that a company owns, they’ve created “deduplication’’ software that hunts for the files that have changed since it last saved a copy, and backs up only those (or even just chunks of the file that have been altered, like a single cell in a spreadsheet). If everyone in your 5,000-employee company receives the same e-mail with the same 10-megabyte video of the CEO giving a progress report, the system just keeps one copy of the video, rather than 5,000.

My comment:
(a) EMC Corporation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMC_Corporation
(founded in 1979; The company’s name, EMC, stands for the initials of the founders [Richard Egan and Roger Marino, both of whom graduated from Northeastern University at Boston], and an unknown third individual who has remained nameless)
(b) For years, EMC has been a leader in sata storage. I do not know why no competitor has dethroned it.


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