Amazon Tipped To Buy webOS
Rackspace Productizes OpenStack
Disk Drive Crisis Worsens
Oracle Bills Solaris 11 as ‘First Cloud OS’
OpSource Offers Oracle Database, SQL Server & SharePoint On-Demand
Azul Stops Being Agnostic, Gets that Old Time ‘Come to Linux’ Call
Adobe To Restructure, Let 750 Go, Can Mobile Flash
Abiquo Figures It’s Got Everybody’s Back
NetApp Teams with Cloudera on Turnkey Storage Device
EC Investigating Samsung for FRAND Abuse
Motorola Mobility Gets Sweeping Injunction against Apple
Cloudera Gets $40 Million
Move Over, Best Buy’s Getting on the Cloud
SCO Wants Its Suit against IBM Revived
Quest Releases Toad for Cloud Databases
Amazon Sets Up Cheaper West Coast Region
Google Appeals To Protect Compromising E-Mail
Fedora 16 Out
The Restless & Impatient Could Make Hostile Bid for Yahoo
AMD Strategy Chief To Leave
Rajaratnam Will Have a Little Less To Come Home To
LC Licenses IV Patents
Samsung Windows 8 Slates Due in 2H12
Apple Ordered To Turn Over its Carrier Contracts to Samsung
MapR Starts Training Academy
ARM President To Retire
Ex-EC Antitrust Chief May Form Emergency Italian Government
Schmidt Not Quite Believable
John Opel, Former IBM CEO, Dead at 86
Headlines – Issue No. 909 (November 14-18, 2011)
Categories: Headlines
| 
No comments
Arm Cracks the Code on 64-Bits
After wrestling with the problem for three years, ARM has completely defined the 64-bit architecture that’s going to make Intel sweat.
Intel hasn’t been able to break ARM’s deadly grip on the lucrative low-power mobile market. Conversely lack of a 64-bit chip has kept ARM out of desktops and servers although HP said Tuesday that it’s going to sell ARM servers based on the 32-bit quad-core silicon that the ARM-backed Texas start-up Calxeda has developed for energy-efficient web servers targeted at social media and the cloud.
ARM maintains that 32-bits is more than sufficient for most microservers.
That limitation, however, is about to disappear. ARM has done what AMD and Intel did with the 32-bit x86 and added 64-bit extensions to its 32-bit design, creating the first ARM architecture to include a 64-bit instruction set along with extended virtual addressing.
It has christened the thing the ARMv8 architecture and dubbed the new instruction set A64.
That means 32-bit code will run in the so-called AArch32 execution state and 64-bit code in the AArch64 execution state, which pushes existing memory limitations past 4GB. Two of the features from the 32-bit ARMv7 architecture that will carry over are TrustZone virtualization and NEON advanced SIMD.
There’s no silicon yet – ARM of course doesn’t make chips itself – it’s fabless – but one of its cloud-targeting OEMs, Applied Micro Circuits, aims to produce samples of a four-core 32-bit backward-compatible 64-bit ARM chip it calls the X-Gene by the second half of next year.
That feat would ostensibly put it ahead of Marvell, which bought Intel’s Xscale ARM business in 2006 and was assumed to have the 64-bit lead.
AppliedMicro will use Taiwan Semiconductor, its usual fabricator, to make its 64-bit ARM SoCs on 40nm and then 28nm processes. Each core will reportedly be good for 3GHZ and have L1 and L2 caches with a shared L3 cache.
The superscalar chip will support quad-issue out-of-order execution and include DDR3 main memory controllers, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, SATA storage and PCI Express controllers. Figure everything on the same die as the cores with each core reportedly requiring only two watts. Also figure the clock rate can be turbo-boosted and server makers will be able to tweak power and clock speed as needed.
The Register says X-Gene can be set up as a “baby symmetric multiprocessing server inside of a single chip” and that SMP can be extended across multiple X-Genes gluelessly so no extra chips are needed.
Until AppliedMicro materializes the chip, it will make a board simulating 128 ARMv8 cores crafted out of seven Xilinx Virtex FPGAs available to software developers starting in January so they can port data center software to the dingus.
The pre-silicon emulator reportedly runs the LAMP stack and responds to a C compiler. By January AppliedMicro is also promising to have a full suite of cloud computing applications driving various target workloads such as web, Memcached, Hadoop and web server along with tools and debuggers.
AppliedMicro is apparently months, if not years, ahead of ARM itself. ARM said its own v8 reference architecture specifications are now available to partners under license and that it will disclose other processors based on ARMv8 next year, with consumer and enterprise prototype systems expected in 2014, a long way off in Internet time.
ARM said its compiler and Fast Models with ARMv8 support have been made available to key ecosystem partners and that support for a range of open source operating systems, applications and third-party tools is in development.
Microsoft, which is already moving Windows to ARM, apparently has a piece of the action or at least an interest, but it hasn’t committed to porting Windows Server to ARM.
At the same time Intel will be moving to close the power and density gap to defend its precious server monopoly.
ARM chips have historically been made by companies such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung and TI. Apple designs its own and AMD, which appears to have observer status, may break ranks with Intel and join the crew.
Categories: News
| No comments
Headlines – Issue No. 908 (November 7-11, 2011)
Arm Cracks the Code on 64-Bits
AMD To Fire 1,400
HP Starts the Wheels Spinning To Roll Out ARM Servers
Start-Up Turns ARM Chip into a Palm-Sized Server
Cloud Spend Tracker Goes to Open Beta
China Reportedly Develops its Own Processor
ForeScout Intros NAC-as-a-Service Platform for MSPs
All-SSD Cloud Start-Up Gets $25 Million from Some Familiar Faces
Samsung Wants iPhone 4S Source Code
WikiLeaks Founder Ordered Extradited
Lenovo Earnings Up 88%
Apple Loses Android Tablet Tussle to Little Spanish Firm
IBM To Hawk Solar Power for Data Centers
HP Hires Boeing Exec for New Position
If Nothing Else, Yahoo is Sticky
HP’s PC Group Loses its CTO
AWS May Be Bringing in $1 Billion
ITC Finds AMD Unpersuasive
Rajaratnam Scandal To Be Made into a Movie
HDD Prices Looking as Ugly as the Floods
Globalfoundries Gets Permanent CEO
First Ice Cream Sandwich Device Due in Days
Cloudera Founder’s New Start-up is Odiago
Antitrust Complaints against Google Mount
The iPad 3’s Not the iPad 3: Digitimes
Intel Abandons TVs: iSuppli
Categories: Headlines
| No comments
Headlines – Issue No. 907 (October 31 – November 4, 2011)
HP Going with ARM Servers
HP To Keep PC Division
OPC Formalized with a Foundation
Jobs Vowed To Destroy Android
Kindle Fire Burns Amazon
Nexenta Gets into VDI
Facebook To Build Date Center Near Arctic Circle
Oracle Buys RightNow for $1.5 Billion
Half of All Android Licensees Now Paying Off Microsoft
SaaS House Workday Picks Up an $85 Million Round
Oracle-Google Trial Slips into Next Year
Hadoop Start-Up Gets $9.5 Million
Google Eyes Yahoo Again
IBM & Jaspersoft Pair Up on Big Data
WikiLeaks Stops Leaking To Raise Money
HTC Import Ban Now in Doubt
Meg Doesn’t Seem To Have Enough To Do
Galleon Investigators Charge Biggest Cheese Yet
Rim PlayBook Upgrade Delayed Four Months
CFEngine Moves to the US
Android Bites Apple
Apple Rustles Yahoo Datacenter Chief
Siri Co-Founder Leaves Apple
IBM Names New Board Member
Jobs’ Advice to Cook
Dropbox Wooing SMBs
From iPod to Thermostat
Google Underwrites Internet Institute
Samsung Appeal Gets Fast-Tracked in Australia
Categories: Headlines
| No comments
HP & Microsoft Take On Oracle
After getting bounced out of Exadata when Oracle bought Sun, HP has teamed up with Microsoft to bring out a co-engineered pre-configured Exadata-like appliance fitted with SQL Server.
HP paired up with Microsoft earlier this year on the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which runs Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse. This new HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance for SQL Server is its transactional counterpart.
Microsoft describes it as the first out-of-box data consolidation widget good for rapid virtualized private cloud deployment with no software changes.
It should be out next month and is supposed to deploy new database instances in minutes, reduce operating costs by maybe 75%, simplify management, save floor space, energy and infrastructure, and ultimately handle thousands of database instances in a scalable virtualized private cloud environment.
It can ultimately fill 10 racks, up from an entry-level half-rack. A single rack offers 192 logical processors, 2TB of memory and 59TB of storage.
Microsoft claims zero downtime live migration, and real-time database VM load balancing as well as high availability.
Pricing has yet to be disclosed but the ROI should be in two years.
There’s also a new HP VirtualSystem for Microsoft, launched Tuesday based on the same architecture as HP’s all-in-one CloudSystem and optimized for virtualized Microsoft Hyper-V applications. It will eventually scale to 6,000 virtual machines and also go on sale in November.
It’s meant to consolidate Microsoft workloads such as SharePoint, Exchange and SQL Server and includes Microsoft System Center, HP Insights and HP Converged Infrastructure software.
The widgetry employs HP x86 server and BladeSystems, HP FlexFabric networking and Lefthand Networks arrays or 3PAR storage.
The pair is chasing primarily mid- to large accounts with the machine but it will also be proposed to small account against Dell’s vStart appliance that supports less than 100 VMs.
It’ll cost around $175,000 to start without the Microsoft software.
The VS1 model supports 750 VMs and VS2 is supposed to be good for 2,500. The VS1 widgetry involves two ProLiant machines with two six-core Xeons, 96GBs of memory, two 146GB disks and two 10GB Ethernet ports. The VS2 uses two-socket six-core Xeon BladeSystems each with 48GB of main memory and two 146GB disks, which should support 535 VMs to start and cost $425,000.
HP already has VirtualSystems that support 750-6,000 VMware VMs, but the reportedly cheaper Microsoft widgetry is supposed to compete with vBlock systems from the Cisco-EMC-VMware combine.
Next month HP plans to release Itanium-based HP-UX-run VirtualSystems for Superdome 2 to compensate for Oracle refusing to support Itanium anymore. They’re supposed to run CRM, ERP and financial apps. No pricing yet.
Categories: Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Oracle
| No comments
Headlines – Issue No. 906 (October 24-28, 2011)
HP & Microsoft Take On Oracle
It’s All Over Between Dell & EMC
HP Dumps Robison
The Great Oracle v Google Android Trial Postponed Indefinitely
Android Phones & Tablets Get Common OS
Disk Drive Supplies Threatened by Thai Floods
Fooled Ya, Fooled Ya: Intel
Oracle To Buy Endeca
Microsoft Hangs in There
Dropbox Gets Cloud-Size $250 Million B Round
Apple Did Just Fine; It’s Wall Street That Flubbed
New RIM OS Debuts
VMware Expects a Rocky 2012
Gates To Be Called in Novell Antitrust Suit against Microsoft
HTC Loses ITC Case against Apple
IBM Revenues Short
Samsung Tries To Stop iPhone 4S Sales in Oz & Japan
AMD Names Mark Papermaster CTO
Gemini Joins OpenStack
Canonical Distributing Centrify
Microsoft Reportedly Teaming for Another Run at Yahoo
Otellini Was as Stunned as the Rest of Us
Start-Up Putting Android Apps on Windows Gets Strategic Funding
Vertica To Tempt with Free Community Edition
eEye Claims First Vulnerability Management Solution for Virtualized Apps
‘Magical Thinking’ May Have Killed Steve Jobs
Alibaba Figures It’s Got the Money To Buy Yahoo
AMD Claims It Owns S3 Patents
iPads To Be Made in Brazil
Apotheker’s PR Guy Leaves HP
Dennis Ritchie Dies
Categories: Headlines
| No comments
IBM Fluffs its Cloud
IBM Wednesday started pasting smiley faces on the cloud and telling fraidy-cat companies it’s okay to go sky diving ’cause it’s got a Big Blue safety net that’ll provide the control and security users want. They don’t have to swipe a credit card, cross their fingers and trust that won’t get lost in an Amazon jungle, risking their revenues, reputations and supply chains.
IBM wants 200 million users on its cloud widgetry by the end of next year. It has to get to them before Oracle, HP or Dell do. It projects $7 billion in revenue from cloud computing hardware, software and services by 2015.
To advance its ambition it’s unveiled a new “simplified” enterprise-grade public cloud PaaS it calls SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS) that will ride on its SmartCloud Enterprise and Enterprise+ IaaS, which won’t be deployed globally until the end of next year. Initially it’ll be US-only.
SCAS is supposed to be safe enough for new and traditional mission-critical enterprise applications development and deployment. IBM promises cloud-based economics along with enterprise-grade security and governance, open Java and “cross-platform support with no vendor lock-in.”
It’s to beta later this quarter with what IBM calls “business-centric” SLAs. What they are exactly isn’t clear.
Among Blue’s offerings is a new SmartCloud for SAP Applications service for automating the most common labor-intensive tasks associated with managing SAP environments in the cloud. The widgetry will put all databases on the cloud IBM said.
IBM’s also got software called SmartCloud Foundation that will let users deploy a private cloud inside their own firewalls. IBM wants to make the process easy for SME beginners so it’s developed a self-service pre-packaged cloud starter kit called SmartCloud Entry with simplified cloud administration and standardized virtual machines. As one might expect it supposed to be optimized for IBM Power and System x hardware.
Somewhere in this potpourri is IBM’s Cast Iron acquisition which should connect private clouds and public clouds.
In addition, IBM’s got a provisioning engine called logically enough SmartCloud Provisioning that’s supposed to be able spin out 4,000 virtual machines in less than an hour and some cloud-based monitoring software.
That leaves the SmartCloud Ecosystem. IBM can’t make its numbers without rallying its resellers, ISVs and SPs to penetrate SMBs with both private and public clouds that can carry white labels.
SugarCRM is provocatively chucking in its cloud-ified open source applications to move things along. It will give users access to sales reports and data, as well as analytical tools to evaluate sales performance.
What any of this will cost is still a mystery. Early customers for IBM’s cloud platform include Kaiser, ING, Citi and Lockheed Martin.
IBM says the cloud is still a nascent technology. It took a survey and found only 33% had nothing more going than a cloud pilot, but figures the number will more then double in the next three years. It figures customers see the cloud’s value proposition they just need someone patting their hand. It could be worth $150 billion soon.
Categories: IBM
| No comments
Headlines – Issue No. 905 (October 17-21, 2011)
IBM Fluffs its Cloud
HP Reportedly Backtracking on PC Spin-Out
Apple Australian Victory Looks Fatal for All Android Widgets
Hortonworks & Microsoft Tie Up
Quanta To Pay Microsoft’s Android Tax
Citrix Buys ShareFile
Google Tries Making App Engine More Appealing to the Enterprise
Rajaratnam Gets 11 Years
HP PCs UP, Lenovo Moves to No 2 Position
IBM OEMs Nirvanix Cloud Storage
Cisco & Citrix Extend Their Alliance
Box.net Raises Another $81 Million
IBM Buys Platform Computing
Glitterati To Testify If Oracle v Google Trial Ever Comes Off
UK Cloud Services Start-Up Kicks Offs on $94 Million
Jobs’ Death Halts Android Rollout
Initial Orders for iPhone 4S Top a Million
Google Puts Out Early Dart Preview
Apple Enters the Hybrid Mail Business
Myriad Claims To Span Android & iOS
Steve Jobs’ Death Certificate Made Public
Google Adds Database to its Cloud
HP To Use Ubuntu on OpenStack
Intel Shuts Digital Home Group
Eucalyptus Opens EMEA Office
Amazon Gets Protective
1,000 Apple Engineers Reportedly Working on Chips
Alibaba Reportedly Wants Out of Yahoo Entanglement
TwinStrata Brings in $8 Million
iPad Mini Rumored
Oracle Takes a Breather
Categories: Headlines
| No comments
Oracle Goes Cloud
Larry Ellison, who once famously called cloud computing “water vapor” and “complete gibberish,” capitulated this week and announced the coming of an Oracle Public Cloud at Oracle OpenWorld.
Untroubled by any inconsistency, Ellison basically shrugged and said, “Everyone’s got a cloud. We need a cloud.”
Users are meant to run Oracle’s cloud-ified Java-based Fusion Applications and BPEL-based Fusion Middleware, as-is Oracle databases and existing custom-built Java EE apps on a resource-intensive subscription-based Oracle-managed, -hosted and -supported single-tenant infrastructure that Oracle is building out of its own (Xen?) virtualized Sun hardware that will give them instant provisioning and elasticity on-demand.
Customers will be able to decide how big and how powerful their separate if standard virtual machines should be. No shared data stores here and, unlike other models, the VMs, not the apps, will be secure.
The Oracle Cloud is also supposed to be good for test and dev. The widgetry supports multiple Java IDEs, including Oracle JDeveloper, NetBeans and Eclipse.
Ellison claimed the Oracle Public Cloud is different from other public cloud because it’s “both a platform-as-a-service and applications-as-a-service.” And since it’s based on standards like Java, SQL and XML – not to mention, SQL, SOA, Groovy, Web Services et al – users should be able to interoperate with rival clouds such as Amazon as well as move back and forth to their own on-premise data center.
The Fusion Apps Oracle has in mind for users to run initially are Fusion CRM and Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) integrated with a newfangled Chatter- or Facebook-style Social Network, suggesting that Oracle’s targeting Salesforce.com which it’s not compatible with.
Ellison called Salesforce the “roach motel of clouds” – the “ultimate vendor lock-in” – “you can check in, but you can’t check out” because of its proprietary APEX programming language. He also condemned it as inelastic and insecure because of its data-commingling multi-tenant architecture that was “state-of-the-art 15 years ago.”
Repeating a Salesforce mantra warning of “false clouds,” Ellison said, referring to standards, “That is such good advice. I could not have said it better myself.”
Note that Salesforce, which Ellison helped get off the ground, is threatening to have $2 billion in revenues this year.
And maybe because he was publicly critical of Larry’s keynote, a funny thing happened to Salesforce CEO and sometime drama queen Marc Benioff on the way to his own OpenWorld keyboard, which Saleforce paid a million dollars for.
Oracle moved it into a blind spot Thursday morning at the crack of dawn after a concert Wednesday night featuring Sting and Tom Petty so only party poopers would be up and out early, making the rescheduling tantamount to a cancellation. Oracle lamely claimed the shift was due “overwhelming attendance.” So Benioff moved his speech across the street to a restaurant in the St Regis because, as he tweeted, “The show must go on!”
Anyway, Oracle’s Social Network includes document sharing, information feeds and web conferencing.
Oracle claims its Public Cloud is the only public cloud to offer customers a “complete range of business applications and technology solutions, avoiding the problems of data and business process fragmentation when customers use multiple silo’d public clouds.”
Users will be able to run the same applications on-premise as well as in the cloud and purchase each service independently of the others. All Oracle Public Cloud services have a unified self-service user interface for provisioning, monitoring and managing all services.
It’s still unclear when Oracle Public Cloud will go live or what it will cost but it’s expected to cost more than Amazon.
Oracle also announced an Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine and a Linux-based Apache Hadoop Big Data Appliance using an Oracle NoSQL Database at OpenWorld.
The Exalytics box, which will run Oracle’s Times Ten and Essbase databases, is supposed to analyze quantities of unstructured and structured data stored in its terabyte of main memory at the “speed of thought,” instead of pulling it off slower disk drives.
The widgets should compete with HP and its new Autonomy acquisition, but more importantly with IBM and SAP.
See http://cloud.oracle.com.
Categories: Oracle
| No comments
Headlines – Issue No. 904 (October 10-14, 2011)
Oracle Goes Cloud
OpenStack To Move to its Own Foundation
Whitman Promises Decision on HP PC Unit This Month
Apple Tells Samsung Australia To Stuff It
HP Takes Over Autonomy
Red Hat’s Buying Gluster & Moving into Storage
Oracle v Google Trial Date May Slip
Adobe’s Building a Cloud
Now Intellectual Ventures Sues MMI
IBM Buys Q1 Labs
Amazon Reportedly Negotiating for webOS
Amazon’s $199 Fire Tablet Costs $209.63 To Make: iSuppli
Google Dabbles with Retail
Alibaba Wants Yahoo
India’s $35 Android Tablet
Oracle To Pay Big Fine
Apple Counts iPads
Google To Build State-of-the-Art Data Center in Dublin
HP To Pay Meg a Dollar a Year
Hitachi-LG Data Storage Fined for Price-Fixing
HP Names New Networking Chief
EMC Said To Buy Zettapoint
Big Switch Networks Joins OpenStack
Lane Watch
Jobs Biography Moved Up
Categories: Headlines
| No comments
