Techworld - the UK's infrastructure and network knowledge centre
  • Networking
  • Storage
  • Security
  • Mobility and Wireless
  • Applications
  • OS and Servers
  • Mid-sized Business

blogs 


For the love of lawsuits

June 14, 2006

The lawyers have been earning their keep at Israeli-founded security company, Finjan in recent weeks. The company alleges that rival Secure Computing has infringed on a number of fundamental patents that lie at the heart of its web-filtering appliances.

Secure Computing denies the accusation, of course, though in legally conservative terms that make it hard to grasp whether they believe their case.

Write Once, Read Many | John E. Dunn | Read more...


Suckered by "free" FTP software

June 13, 2006

Last week Techworld ran a story about a new “free” tool from Tumbleweed for analysing unauthorised FTP traffic for security risks, the FTP Analyzer.

More fool us (or me, to be exact). It turns out that the product doesn’t actually exist at all in any accepted sense of the word. It can be used for a single month, the so-called trial period. Once the month is up, you can’t then actually buy it, even if you want to.

Write Once, Read Many | John E. Dunn | Read more...


Just another day in EMC land...

June 13, 2006

To give an indication of how complex the range of EMC's activites are here are just three ongoing events. EMC bought an Israeli-founded technology company, nLayers, to better map entity relationships in networks of computers. Small change these days. It gave $1,000,000 to help digitise the John F Kennedy Kennedy Presidential Museum in Boston. That moves it a notch up the corporate worthiness and good citizen scale. It also announced plans to sell off 144 acres of unwanted land 25 miles south of its headquarters in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. This land had been ear-marked for a large campus. No more. So, like any good land bank owner, it wants to divide the land into smaller lots and sell it off to property developers.

Enter local town officials in Bellingham, who fear the town budget will have to bear road improvement and allied costs for all these mini-developments if the plan goes ahead. As reported in the Milford Daily News via bizjournals.com, EMC "came in with the lousiest possible plan and said 'take it or leave it,'" said Roland Laprade, a Bellingham Planning Board member.

Storing up Trouble | Chris Mellor | Read more...


Paradigm paralysis

June 9, 2006

Paradigm paralysis

Are the two pillars crumbling?

Storing up Trouble | Chris Mellor | Read more...


Sun's Thumper is no rabbit

June 8, 2006

In his blog Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote: "... we will build all products at Sun from Java, Solaris, StorageTek and from our newly unified SPARC and x64 SunFire platforms. I'd like to briefly point to three products that represent the future of such systems innovations. The recently unveiled Niagara servers, the StorageTek Titanium archive platform; and lastly, an upcoming extension to our NAS offerings, code named Thumper."

What is Thumper? "... arguably the best example of the alignment of Sun's systems innovation is a project we'll be announcing in late June - code name Thumper. Thumper is a SunFire server, running Solaris and its 128-bit ZFS file system, that packs 24 Terabytes of storage into a miniature package - allowing Solaris and Java applications to run directly on the storage device at breathtaking speed and price points. It's a perfect example of combining our software and hardware expertise, with an existing supply chain, to deliver a broader market, greater margins, and new customers - leveraging common IP, over a broader opportunity. We'll be announcing complete details at the end of June."

Storing up Trouble | Chris Mellor | Read more...


The second generation of multimedia is here

May 30, 2006

If you've got any involvement in e-learning, take a look at the British Film Institute's latest project. It's an online guide to the work of Ealing Studios, introduced and narrated by Jonathan Ross, and the interesting thing is that it's non-linear.

For the BFI, it's part of its mission to provide wider access to the greatest archive of moving film in the world. It can't digitise it all - there's just too much, and anyway it doesn't have the rights to all of it. But it can take excerpts and try to make them interesting to everyone from film buffs to the MTV generation.

Casting the Net | Bryan Betts | Read more...


SOA 2.0? We need to know what 1.0 means first

May 24, 2006

If you thought the constant repetition of Web 2.0 was bad enough, here's it's little sister SOA 2.0. It seems that marketing has decided our attention span is so reduced these days that we can't take a message into our heads unless it has been 'rebranded' appropriately...preferably with something totally meaningless.

The talk of SOA 2.0 misses the point, there are plenty of people within the IT industry who are confused about what it means: if you ask two people to explain it, you'll get two different answers. Hang on, perhaps that's what the 2.0 means ...

The IT Evolution | Maxwell Cooter | Read more...


Two worlds: inventors and adopters

May 24, 2006

There are two worlds in storage and suppliers generally fit in one or the other. The large established players have invented and developed their starting offering and then internal product creativity withers. With size and success comes stifling caution and creeping fear of cannibalising their own products.

The startups invent, think 'out of the box', 'off the wall', and bring radical new products to market. Some succeed, many fail. The successful ones either grow big, like Mr. Dyson and his bagless vacuum cleaners, or else get bought and acquire trousers with deep, deep pockets for the millions of dollars their founders earn.

Storing up Trouble | Chris Mellor | Read more...


State identity theft

May 22, 2006

Identity theft is so easy we are told. Destroy personal bills, cut-up credit cards, only give your personal details to valid agencies. don't trust e-mailed requests for identity details. etc. But then what defences do we have against the state when its agencies steal our identity? The UK Criminal Records Bureau (CRB)has done exactly that to over 2,700 people.

It appeared to have their details on its database and listed them as having criminal convictions. When they applied for jobs which required a CRB identity check on applicants they were turned down because the CRB said they had criminal records. Actually they were records of other people but the idiotic systems and processes at the CRB confused them with innocent job applicants for childrens' charity positions and such like.

Storing up Trouble | Chris Mellor | Read more...


Why ditch Windows now?

May 19, 2006

Symantec’s CEO John Thompson has delighted Mac fans this week by saying (in a form of words) he thinks people should buy Macs instead of Windows PCs.

Why shouldn’t we believe a word of this nonsense? Well, just for a start, his company makes a fortune protecting PCs, so if people really did stop using Windows PCs on any scale that would disrupt the company business model.

Write Once, Read Many | John E. Dunn | Read more...


Zetera's highly reliable UDP data delivery

May 19, 2006

In an SOIP feature I suggested that, because UDP datagram delivery was unreliable, Zetera Z-SAN data delivery could be compromised. Not so. Here is a response, a correction, from Ryan Malone, Zetera's senior director of marketing:

"UDP does not concern itself with guaranteed data delivery, leaving that responsibility to the application that sits above the UDP port. Zetera's Z-SAN technology absolutely guarantees delivery of each and every transfer in an atomic fashion. There is an ACK response for every transfer."

Storing up Trouble | Chris Mellor | Read more...


Hybrid hard drives

May 18, 2006

Back in the days of the BBC Computer and Acorn - remember Acorn? It spun out Acorn Risc Machines or ARM, the small RISC chip designer with resulted in the StrongARM processor. ARM chips are to be found in many mobile phones and similar devices because they are small, powerful and use little power. Anyway Acorn's hardware expertise also extended to putting the machine's operating system and main applications in memory chips, ROM, instead of on hard drives. This meant that the little beauties booted up very quickly, not like the Windows monsters of today which can take minutes to load Windows bloatware into half a gigabyte or more of PC RAM.

Now Samsung is about ready to show its hybrid hard drive technology. Hard drives get 128 or 256MB of NAND flash memory cache added to them. Microsoft has added capabilities to Windows Vista to take advantage of it. Notebook computers need only spin their hard drive when cache is full or needs replenishing. Boot time is quicker. Resume time is quicker. Notebook battery life is extended.

Storing up Trouble | Chris Mellor | Read more...


Apple peeled open

May 17, 2006

The company famed for the world’s second most insecure operating system (Ok, a long way behind Windows) released a whopping 43 security fixes for its software last week. This was mostly to do with holes in the Quicktime media player, with some of the holes being cross-platform just to add a nice twist.

That’s a heavy list of vulnerabilities, and will take up valuable time to download that could be better spent just hanging out and being “cool”. Not fixing them would have been worse, however, even if it would have preserved the smug expression on the faces of Apple’s fundamentalists.

Write Once, Read Many | John E. Dunn | Read more...


Toigo talked -

May 17, 2006

I had the pleasure, and it was a pleasure, of meeting and listening to Jon Toigo at a Microsoft IT Executive summit a few days ago. How that man can talk! He took his presentation slot and lengthened it by 50 percent and he could still have said more - and people would still have listened.

For us Brits it was quite an experience to be pontificated to so energetically and so boldly by a pony-tailed, suit-wearing American. It was like listening to an analyst-cum-rockstar. There was a lot of implicit and explicit criticism of storage suppliers known by three letter acronyms and of others too, whose names are made of six letters in their shortened form, also of analysts. My, he does not like analyst firms.

Storing up Trouble | Chris Mellor | Read more...


Data storage industry Wiki

May 16, 2006

A new storage industry resource has sprung up, courtesy of a self-proclaimed web-geek at HDS, Jeremiah Owyang. It is a resource listing other resources and is editable, just like Wikipedia. The name (and location) is the Data Storage Industry Wiki

The list of categories it includes is: Home; Bloggers; Forums; Syndicated Feeds; News Pages; Podcasts; Events; Glossary and Education; Research and Analysis; User Groups; Career and Job; and Vendors and Resellers.

Storing up Trouble | Chris Mellor | Read more...


45Mbit/s ought to be enough for anyone - right?

May 16, 2006

On a related note to the previous item, Expand has been back in touch following Silver Peak's comments in our story last week about the need to support 155Mbit/s WAN links for data centre consolidation.

Expand argues that most customers will use multiple units for redundancy, and in any case will be consolidating from multiple remote sites, so that in most cases "45Mbit/s is perfectly sufficient" and "155Mbit/s is pointless and of no value to the customer".

Casting the Net | Bryan Betts, Techworld | Read more...


Acceleration consolidates, as Expand buys DiskSites

May 16, 2006

Last week, Packeteer announced that it was buying Tacit Networks, a suppliers of WAFS devices, and this week it is the turn of Expand Networks to pick up DiskSites, which develops WAFS software.

The surprise is not that the acquisitions took place, but that they took so long to happen - and that Tacit and DiskSites managed to hang on to independent existences as long as they did. After all, Packeteer first signed up to sell Tacit boxes in September last year.

Casting the Net | Bryan Betts | Read more...


The application-storage boundary

May 8, 2006

In the early days applications talked to files on disk. The application processed the data in the files and the storage subsystem stored the files and the operating system provided access to them. Then along came databases. A database management system (DBMS) took over some of the responsibility of an application - finding data and sorting it and reporting on it - and some of the responsibility of the operating system - organising data within files - to produce a storage-focused application. A DBMS on its own was useless. You had to have applications written that used the DBMS to store data and find it for you.

A backup application is another storage-focused application and it delivered specialised backup container files to tape. Tape media is generally invisible to an operating system's filesystem. The O/S has tape driver software but this is low-level stuff like starting and stopping. Only the backup application knows about the actual data stored on the tape and how it is laid out. Unlike a DBMS backup software does not need another application to drive it. End users can do that.

Storing up Trouble | Chris Mellor | Read more...


New Sun NAS line coming

May 4, 2006

According to Daily Tech Sun is going to bring out a new NAS line replacing the existing 5000 family. The latest member of that family, the 5320, was launched on May 2nd. Existing 5000 users should be able to upgrade to the new NAS range.

Sun may move its NAS line upwards and provide much greater capacity and performance headroom. It may decide to use serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drive technology and it may cluster NAS systems together for greater performance and reliability. Think BlueArc and Isilon and Montilio performance levels perhaps? Also Sun may be thinking about NAS virtualisation.

Storing up Trouble | Chris Mellor | Read more...


Sun rains on Dot Hill's parade

May 2, 2006

Sun has decided not to proceed with a low-end, entry-level storage project that Dot Hill was working on. Instead, according to Dot Hill, it is awarding the project to another party. That sounds like Engenio or Xyratex. Paul Giroux, VP and GM of Sun's Disk Business Unit, said: "Dot Hill remains a strategic partner of Sun Microsystems and we look forward to working together on the existing products and potentially other initiatives in the future.". Existing products include the Sun StorEdge 3000 disk array product family.

Dot Hill mentioned this thought in a previous release: "Sun's next generation offering will provide customers with an entry-level price-point solution while incorporating emerging storage technologies. Key applications that are prime targets for Sun's next generation offering include: Grid computing, web and e-commerce, education, retail, manufacturing and service providers."

Storing up Trouble | Chris Mellor | Read more...