StorageNewsletter Censored in People’s Republic of China !?

The top news about us. What’s that? Complacency, self satisfaction? No. We couldn’t believe it.

We have several proofs that our web site StorageNewsletter.com is probably censored in China.

The facts:

• http://www.storagenewsletter.com is not accessible with an Internet connection in the country.
• We have 59 current subscribers in China with the email terminating by .cn but we think that they don’t receive our daily newsletter or can only get the titles, not the content of the news. Google Analytics’ figures show that we have only 8 unique visitors for the last month in China – a country with over 1.3 billion people -, one in Beijing, one in Nanjing and 5 in Shenzhen. Or no more than in Costa Rica or Palestinian Territories… How these 8 Chinese visitors can look at our web site is also a mystery.
• Per comparison, in a country not far from China, Taiwan, we had 1,050 unique visitors for the same period.

Why? We have no idea. Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China is conducted under a wide variety of no specific laws and administrative regulation which the censorship follows. The system blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewalls and proxy servers at the Internet gateways.

Is storage considered there as a key technology to be censored? We doubt, but who knows. If our memory is good enough, we never publish any news attacking the Chinese authorities.

Is PRC a desert in data storage with so few people interested in this subject? Not at all. There is no big Chinese storage manufacturer or software publisher but there are a lot of U.S. vendors’ offices or subsidiaries, a lot of distributors, a lot of manufacturing plants (for example for HDDs and components) a lot of end users and big ones.

The biggest storage project in PRC was GS Magicstor that began to manufacture one-inch hard disk drives but at the worst time, just when the flash technology arrives. Some assets were sold to another Chinese firm, Excelstor, the smallest HDD maker in the world, far behind the top 5. Many small companies also try to produce optical media and flash keys.

The most interesting storage firm we know is Memoright, a start-up established in 2006 that designs with proprietary technologies and manufactures SSDs in Wuhan City, China, even if the company is officially headquartered in Taiwan.

In Chengdu, Huawei Symantec Technologies, a joint venture between Symantec Corp. (49%) and Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (51%), has also launched its own clustered NAS with good specs, as well as SAN and VTLs – resold by Condre Storage and others -, and has designed SSDs based on Samsung flash chips.

Born in 2001, United Information Technology is a strong storage company in China with R&D and sales operations in Shenzhen, Wuhan, the Silicon Valley, and Ireland. It offers iSCSI and FC SAN as well as NAS.