Nokia has lit up a trans-Atlantic fibre for Facebook, in a field trial that showed off 200 Gbps and 250 Gbps wavelengths on a 5,500 km link. According to Nokia, applying a technique from Bell Labs called probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS) yielded a 2.5x increase in the rated capacity of the New York-Ireland cable used …

Seagate is playing catch-up in the enterprise space with its announcement of two new 3.5-inch drives for 24x7 operations and a new 2.5-inch Savvio drive optimised for performance and power-efficiency. The 3.5-inchers are Constellation drives, positioned as an enterprise value drive, the Constellation CS, and an enterprise …

All change on the Barracuda front: despite the disastrous floods in Thailand, Seagate will ship its terabyte-per-platter Barracuda desktop drives this month. At the same time it's phasing out its slower rotating Barracuda Green drives and says it will transition the Barracuda XT to hybrid flash and hard disk technology. Back …

Has a Seagate Middle East sales guy just let slip that 5TB drives will be here in three months? He's identified on a video uploaded to YouTube as "Christian from Seagate", and his video interview has been mentioned on Twitter. The Tbreak video, below, records an interview at GITEX '11, a technology event in Dubai. …

Seagate has extended its enterprise disk and solid state storage products in a comprehensive announcement following hard on the heels of Western Digital buying Hitachi GST. Second generation Pulsar solid state drives (SSD) have been announced with a 2-bit, multi-level cell Pulsar.2 and a higher-performance single level cell …

Western Digital has doubled the capacity of its 2.5-inch enterprise SAS drive and introduced a full size, 3.5-inch version with up to 2TB of capacity. The second generation S25 drive holds up to 600GB of data, while maintaining the 10,000rpm spin speed of the previous model. It is a new design with three platters, meaning …

Some online disk drive sites are listing a 1TB 2.5-inch Seagate Constellation drive, which shouldn't exist. Seagate certainly has 1 and 1.5TB small form factor (SFF) drives inside its FreeAgent GoFlex external drives but has not announced such capacities for internally-mounted SFF drive product. Span lists a drive with a …

Neil Armstrong has renewed his criticism of Barack Obama's space vision, insisting that the president's decision to scrap Constellation and head off to Mars was "poorly advised". Speaking yesterday to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Armstrong said: "I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense …

NASA lacks a clear vision for the future of US human spaceflight, US Senators told the space agency's chief on Wednesday. A Senate science subcommittee clashed with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden over President Barack Obama's proposed 2011 budget, which effectively kills the previous administration's goal of returning to …

President Barack Obama is calling on NASA to cancel its plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 and instead focus on developing "building blocks" for future deep space exploration as well as partnerships with private industry. The canned lunar program, called Constellation, "was over budget, behind schedule, and lacking …

US President Barack Obama will ask Congress to jettison NASA's plans to develop its next-generation Ares I crew launch vehicle and increase funds for the "simpler" Ares V heavy lift rocket to replace the space shuttle fleet. The revised direction for US human space flight was decided Wednesday at a White House meeting with …

Members of the US Congress are preparing to battle Obama's White House over control of NASA's Constellation moon-rocket program. The House of Representatives on Thursday passed a major 2010 spending bill that would effectively tie Obama's hands if he attempts to make changes to the current Constellation program. The 2010 …

NASA chiefs in charge of the agency's next-generation rocket program said on Thursday that their $445 million Ares I-X test flight was a success in proving the launch vehicle's design. After poring over preliminary data, project manager of Ares I-X test flight Bob Ess said during a conference call with reporters that the …

NASA's Ares I-X finally got off launchpad 39B at Kennedy Space Centre at 15:30 GMT today. The launch of the Ares I-X. Pic: NASA TV Following a scrubbed launch yesterday, and overnight thunderstorms, the Constellation programme trailblazer lifted off en route to an Atlantic splashdown at the end of a flight intended to "test …

NASA's Ares I-X test rocket is currently trundling towards Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Centre ahead of a slated 27 October first test flight. The Ares I-X trundles towards the launchpad. Pic: NASA The vehicle, described by NASA as the "essential core of a safe, reliable, cost-effective space transportation system" and …

NASA has announced a successful test of its "Max Launch Abort System" (MLAS), essentially a rocket ejector seat writ large and applied to an entire space capsule. The system is designed to let astronauts escape and parachute to safety in the event of a launcher stack crackup. The Max Launch Abort System tested at Wallops …

While this week saw NASA successfully launch its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite missions to the Moon - designed as an exploratory prelude to a human return to our satellite - a senior NASA official claimed on Wednesday that existing plans to venture beyond low-Earth orbit were …

French server maker Bull might be the prime contractor on the 200 teraflops Juropa2 massively parallel supercomputer installed at the government-sponsored Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ), but beleaguered server maker Sun Microsystems wants everyone to know that the box that was turned on last Friday is comprised of its InfiniBand …