Storage power costs to reach $2bn

According to Computer World, IDC has found that businesses last year spent approximately $1.3 billion to make sure that spinning hard disk drives did not overheat and kept running despite being squeezed to near-capacity limits.

In a report released last week, IDC forecasts that IT spending required to cool and power spinning disk drives will reach $1.8 billion by year-end and over $2 billion in 2009.

IDC estimated that more than 49 million hard disk drives in external storage arrays were in use by businesses around the world last year to keep up with exploding enterprise data storage demands.

Google partner SMS Management and Technology has emerged as the leading bidder to supply Australia's New South Wales Department of Education with 1.5 million student e-mail services, says Australian IT.

It's understood that the contract will be one the largest private deployments of Gmail in the world.

The education department's Gmail roll-out will increase current e-mail storage allocated to students by a multiple of 170 times from 35MB to 6GB.

Parascale has raised $11.37 million in Series A venture funding from Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures, the latest in a string of cloud computing investments, says CNet.

Parascale says it plans to use the money to develop and market its upcoming Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS).

PCS is an application that "aggregates disk storage on multiple standard Linux servers providing one highly scalable storage cloud," according to the company.