0 Comments
August 28, 2009 :
By Shane Pitman ·
Category : News
Tim Mueting, Product Marketing Manager at AMD, is gearing up for VMworld, the only event completely dedicated to virtualization, which will be held in San Francisco August 31st through September 3rd. In preparation for the event, he’s been spending some time in the labs at AMD, and recently took part in an incredible demo of AMD’s virtualization powerhouse, the Six-Core Opteron 8400 Series processor. Running in an HP DL785 G6 server with VMware ESX 4.0 software they successfully operated 180 virtual machines on one physical server.
The video of Tim in the labs at AMD can be viewed below, as well as on his blog, where you can also find more info on AMD at VMworld.
0 Comments
August 28, 2009 :
By Shane Pitman ·
Category : News
Analysts and financiers have been ever so carefully watching quarterly reports from industry leaders for most of the year in an effort to gauge the economy and its effect on technology markets as a whole. The news has been a veritable see-saw of ups and downs, but for Intel at least, things appear to be on the rise, as their third quarter revenue and gross margin expectations have been raised a half a billion dollars from $8.5 billion to $9.0 billion, down from $10.2 billion reported for the third quarter in 2008.
While this news is positive, it doesn’t hold true across the board for the technology sector. Earlier this week Dell reported drops in quarterly sales and profits, but echoed the sentiments of competitor and world’s largest PC maker, Hewlett-Packard, that the technology markets seemed to be stabilizing.
0 Comments
August 28, 2009 :
By Michael Stanclift ·
Category : News
Cisco announced Tuesday that it would begin selling an enhanced version of its Cisco Aggregation Services Router 9000 Series, which will double the amount of line cards it can hold by introducing new single-slot cards.
The new configuration will allow 16×10 Gigabit Ethernet line cards, delivering over 100 Gbps of bandwidth. Cisco claims that this new configuration leads the industry in density and scalability, unlike some competitors that only can support 50G today.
The 9000 series router is typically used to deliver TV, video on demand, Internet video and other high bandwidth traffic. It is also used by wireless carriers to support their Internet infrastructure.
0 Comments
August 28, 2009 :
By Michael Stanclift ·
Category : News
Apple has released the latest version of their OS X operating system, version 10.6 or “Snow Leopard” for both desktops and servers. Current 10.5 users can upgrade to 10.6 for $29 per machine for the desktop or $499 for the server. 10.6 is only supported on Intel based Macs.
The desktop version features enhanced Exchange support, enabling programs like Mail, iCal and Address Book to communicate directly with our Microsoft Exchange 2007 servers. Both versions also feature enhanced support for x64 based computing, and have a x64 based kernel.
As we reported earlier in the week, 10.6 also includes built in malware scanning, something not mentioned anywhere on the Apple website.
The server version also includes a new SSL based VPN service, as well as new versions of iCal server and Address Book server, as well as updates to the built in Mail server.
Update: Be sure to check the recently published 10.6 application incompatibility chart before upgrading. A few popular anti-virus programs as well as versions of Parallels Desktop are listed as restricted during install. Aperture 2.1.1. is also listed as unable to load after installing.
0 Comments
August 27, 2009 :
By Shane Pitman ·
Category : News
Microsoft has announced the release to manufacturing, RTM, of its System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, and scheduled general availability via volume licensing for October 1. System Center Virtual Machine Manager is a unified, multi-vendor management solution for the virtualized datacenter that helps enable centralized administration of physical and virtual assets, increases server utilization, and provides dynamic resource optimization of virtual IT infrastructure.
The initial VMM 2008 release entered beta in the second quarter of 2008, roughly 8 months after the release of VMM 2007. The initial release of VMM 2008 introduced support for technologies like Hyper-V and VMware ESX. Now, a little over a year later, VMM 2008 R2 extends these capabilities to include:
Live Migration — for moving virtual machines between hosts with no downtime
Additional enhanced migration support for SAN migration in and out of clusters
Multiple virtual machines per LUN using Clustered Share Volumes
Hot add of virtual machine storage
Functionality to migrate storage for running VMs
iSCSI target and SAN-based migration across clusters
Template-based rapid provisioning
Maintenance mode to automate the evacuation of VMs off host machines,
0 Comments
August 27, 2009 :
By Don Smith ·
Category : News
This, more then likely, last major update for Microsoft’s e-mail server comes a week after the final beta on Exchange Server 2010 and is said to provide the foundation for transitioning to the upcoming, final release of the 2010 version.
The Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 can be downloaded from this page for free and includes the following:
Enhanced Auditing – New Exchange auditing events and audit log repository enable Exchange administrators to more easily audit the activities occurring on their Exchange servers. It allows the right balance of granularity, performance, and easy access to audited events via a dedicated audit log repository.
Exchange Volume Snapshot Backup Functionality – A new backup plug-in has been added to the product that will enable customers to create Exchange backups when a backup is invoked through the Windows Server 2008 Backup tool.
Dynamic Active Directory Schema Update and Validation – The dynamic AD schema update and validation feature allows for future schema updates to be dynamic deployed as well as proactively preventing conflicts whenever a new property is added to the AD schema. Once this capability is deployed it will enable easier management of future schema updates and will prevent support issues when adding properties that don’t exist in the AD schema.
Public Folder Quota Management – SP2 enables a consistent way to manage quotas by improving the current PowerShell cmdlets to perform quota management tasks.
Centralized Organizational Settings – SP2 introduces new PowerShell option that enable centralized management of many of the Exchange organization settings.
Named Properties cmdlets – SP2 enables Exchange administrators to monitor their named property usage per database.
New User Interface for Managing Diagnostic Logging – SP2 enables Exchange administrators to easily configure and manage diagnostic logging from within the Exchange Management Console.
0 Comments
August 27, 2009 :
By Michael Stanclift ·
Category : News
Microsoft has begun pushing out Windows Internet Explorer 8 via Windows Server Update Services, as it announced back in June that it would start doing. The package is published as an update rollup, so WSUS administrators who have their systems set to automatically approve such packages will want to be careful after synchronizing if they’re not ready for a full IE8 deployment.
Only systems with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 will be able to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. Systems still running Windows 2000 will be stuck on Internet Explorer 6.
Internet Explorer 8 was released to the general public in March 2009.
0 Comments
August 26, 2009 :
By Shane Pitman ·
Category : News
The fourth in a series of “CIO Real Talk” webcasts is scheduled to take place this coming Thursday, August 27th.
“Deploying a Cloud Computing Infrastructure” will explore how cloud computing is delivering reduced technology infrastructure costs and complexity while enabling new business opportunities. The panelists will discuss goals and challenges, as well as share best practices for leveraging cloud computing architectures to grow a business. The distinguished panel includes:
Joe Crawford, executive director, product management and development for Verizon Business, a global leader in communications and IT solutions for business and government.
Doug Howard, president at USA.NET, a leading provider of email hosting that delivers messaging, collaboration, mobility and archiving.
Christopher Rence, chief information officer at FICO, a leading supplier of business analytics software and decision technology.
0 Comments
August 26, 2009 :
By Michael Stanclift ·
Category : News
According to a report from The Mac Security Blog, a previously undocumented feature of Apple OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” is that it includes a built-in anti-malware scanner. While there are few details on exactly how this works, ZDNet seems to think that it has entered into some type of agreement with a commercial anti-virus company, as they have confirmed that it is not using the open-source ClamAV engine.
Currently the Security page on the Apple website makes no mention of the feature directly, but it does highlight some of the other security measures in place for Snow Leopard, and anti-phishing technologies built into Safari. At the bottom of the page Apple does acknowledge that “since no system can be 100 percent immune from every threat, antivirus software may offer additional protection.”
OS X 10.6 will be shipping this Friday, August 28.
0 Comments
August 26, 2009 :
By Michael Stanclift ·
Category : News
If you thought Office 2010 was more than just ribbon improvements, you’re in for a surprise.
Microsoft has released, through the PowerPoint Team Blog, a new video and some details about some of the updates PowerPoint 2010 will be receiving. The team says this will be the biggest visual update to the product in the last 10 years. PowerPoint’s graphics engine has been rebuilt to take advantage of 3D accelerated graphics cards by using DirectX. Through hardware acceleration, they’re able to add new transition and animation effects. They’ve also added a new timelines UI, animations choreography and painter.
Another feature which was highlighted last week, is a new Protected View, which allows PowerPoint and other Office applications to run in a sandbox when downloading and opening presentations from the Internet. This allows potential malicious code to be isolated and contained within the file. More information on that feature can be found over at the Office 2010 Engineering Blog.
Marshalus: @ynnoj I need to stay on AT&T, and they have no serious Android offering, so back to iOS it is.
29 Jul 2010
Marshalus: @ynnoj wanted to use. And throw on top that now was the time to sell and get more than it's worth since Google just cut everyone off
29 Jul 2010
Marshalus: @ynnoj in short it was the upfront cost of the device w/ no subsidy from AT&T, and having a lot of apps I'd paid for I couldn't use but want
29 Jul 2010
Marshalus: @paulbeattie I agree, it was actually a hard decision to leave it, having a little sellers remorse
29 Jul 2010
Marshalus: I submitted a ticket about it, hopefully they'll fix it soon.
29 Jul 2010
Marshalus: If you're using @Seesmic Web to update Facebook, avoid using & in your messages as it'll get cut off anything after that from the update.
29 Jul 2010
Marshalus: Testing a bug with Seesmic Web relating to & getting cutoff on Facebook posts.
29 Jul 2010
Marshalus: @ynnoj I still really like Android :P
29 Jul 2010
Analysts and financiers have been ever so carefully watching quarterly reports from industry leaders for most of the year in an effort to gauge the economy and its effect on technology markets as a whole. The news has been a veritable see-saw of ups and downs, but 
Apple has released the latest version of their OS X operating system, version 10.6 or “Snow Leopard” for both desktops and servers. Current 10.5 users can upgrade to 10.6 for $29 per machine for the desktop or $499 for the server. 10.6 is only supported on Intel based Macs.
The fourth in a series of “CIO Real Talk” webcasts is scheduled to take place this coming Thursday, August 27th.
