September – 2009 – TechVirtuoso

HP StorageWorks Tech Day 2009, Day 1 includes HP Total Care expansion announcements

September 29th, 2009 at 10:08 AM 1 Comment Shane Pitman

During their StorageWorks Tech Day 2009 event being held in Colorado, HP announced the details of several new additions that expand the HP Total Care solution line. HP Total Care provides a host of resources offered by HP Authorized Partners, and includes services, tips and tools such as financing, drivers & downloads, free online classes, support, and recycling, all focused on promoting growth and management resources to SMB’s.

“By investing in new IT solutions now, SMBs will be in a stronger position to seize growth opportunities and thrive as the economy rebounds,” said Kathy Chou, vice president, Worldwide Small and Midsize Business Strategy, HP. “With today’s announcement, HP continues to enrich its Total Care offerings to meet the evolving needs of our SMB customers.”

“AMI has surveyed thousands of SMBs in over a dozen countries over the last four quarters, and noted that the current economy has greatly changed the way they purchase technology products and services,” said Anil Miglani, senior vice president, AMI-Partners. “As we exit the global recession, SMBs will try to protect their existing technology investments while making new investments to grow their business and strengthen customer relationships. HP is well-prepared to help SMB customers achieve this balanced growth through its comprehensive Total Care portfolio.”

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Intel aims to change the future of I/O with Light Peak optical cables

September 24th, 2009 at 1:37 PM 1 Comment Shane Pitman

During his keynote address at the Intel Developer Conference forum in San Francisco, David Perlmutter, Intel executive vice president and general manager, Intel Architecture Group, revealed a new a new optical cable technology that could eliminate the copper wiring traditionally used to connect many of today’s electronics and components. Codenamed “Light Peak,” this technology could vastly change the landscape of input output (I/O) performance on everything from connecting consumer electronic devices, to how we connect external devices to PC’s and servers.

Initially, Light Peak cables will be able to deliver 10GB/s of bandwidth (fast enough to transfer a full Blu-Ray movie in less than 30 seconds), with the potential ability to scale to 100GB/s over the next decade. Optical technology also allows for smaller connectors and longer, thinner, and more flexible cables than currently possible. Light Peak also has the ability to run multiple protocols simultaneously over a single cable, enabling the technology to connect devices such as peripherals, workstations, displays, disk drives, docking stations, and more.

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Intel reveals latest Core i7 mobile CPU’s, details on future chips

September 24th, 2009 at 12:53 PM 1 Comment Shane Pitman

Intel has unveiled their latest Core i7 processors for laptops, and also announced details of upcoming mobile technologies, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, California. During the keynote address by David (Dadi) Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager, Intel Architecture Group, the newest Core i7 processors were presented as being focused towards the most demanding PC users who create digital video, play intense games or run compute-intensive business applications. These new quad core processors and chipset are based on Intel’s Nehalem platform, and include Intel’s Turbo Boost, and Hyper-Threading technologies.

“Staying connected on an increasingly broad array of mobile devices has become the most exciting and quickly evolving part of technology,” said Perlmutter. “Intel is delivering the total mobile experience on each device, offering different levels of performance and power in sleek form factors coupled with compatibility, a superior mobile Internet experience and embedded WiMAX wireless broadband. We’re truly taking mobility to the next level of cool.”

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Google Sync now supports push mail sync

September 22nd, 2009 at 9:49 PM 1 Comment Frank Owen

One of the problems that Google has faced with the fight to pull users from their Exchange environment to Google Apps was the ability to Sync Email, Contacts and Calendar appointments to a user’s Windows Mobile Phone.

Google released Google Sync (http://www.google.com/mobile/products/sync.html) earlier in the year but it only supported Calendar and Contacts. They have now released an update that will also support pushing Email to any device that supports the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol. With this addition to their arsenal of features the Google Apps solution may turn into more of a threat to other well established enterprise email solutions.

Yahoo Webmail Security Vulnerability

September 22nd, 2009 at 2:12 PM 1 Comment Don Smith

Users of Yahoo’s mail service are warned that a vulnerability in the service could be allowing hackers to easily access their accounts and steal their information.

Director of application security research at Breach Security Corp, Ryan Barnett, said that the problem starts with a web application that is designed to automate the login process for the service. Unfortunately the application does not adhere to the same security checks that the login page itself uses creating what Barnett describes as “some sort of water tunnel that the bad guys are walking right through.”

Hackers are using the application to carry out brute force attacks on user accounts, which is not being registered and blocked as most pages would do so.

Backend applications are a key factor in the increasing success of account hijacking cases targeting social networks and portal sites. Once hacked, the accounts can be used to send out spam and malware, or hackers may also choose to use the account details to try to access banking accounts, as many people use the same or similar passwords on multiple accounts.

Yahoo is said to be investigating.

IBM announces industry’s densest, fastest on-chip 32 nanometer dynamic memory

September 20th, 2009 at 6:17 PM 2 Comments Shane Pitman

IBM has developed a prototype of what could become the industry’s smallest, densest, and fastest on-chip dynamic memory device, in the form of 32 nanometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, promising improvements in speed, power savings, and reliability for a wide range of products.

By insulating transistors against electrical leakage, IBM’s SOI technology is able to boast performance increases of up to 30 percent while reducing power consumption by 40 percent over conventional silicon technologies. This has allowed them to produce sample embedded dynamic random access memory (eDRAM) chips that have the smallest memory cell in the industry, while offering density, speed, and capacity surpassing that of conventional on-chip static random access memory (SRAM) in either 32 nanometer or 22 nanometer technologies, and closer to that of 15 nanometer SRAM technology. With latency and cycle times of less than 2 nanoseconds, IBM’s 32 nanometer SOI eDRAM is the fastest embedded memory announced to date.

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MIT team finds a way to combine two chips in to one

September 20th, 2009 at 5:12 PM 5 Comments Shane Pitman

Silicon has been the standard material for semiconductor construction for decades, but that could soon change. While producing ever faster technologies, the physical dimensions of chips have decreased over the years, and engineers have known that they would eventually reach physical limitations in trying to make ever smaller and faster chips based on silicon. “We won’t be able to continue improving silicon by scaling it down for long,” says Tomas Palacios, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. “It’s very difficult to make them a lot smaller.”

Of course silicon isn’t the end-all-be-all of transistor material when it comes to speed. “There are several semiconductor materials that offer better performance than silicon,” Palacios says. “The problem is, even though they allow for very fast transistors, they cannot compete with silicon in terms of integration and scalability.” Companies have spent decades and billions of dollars developing technologies based on silicon, and to make a total jump to another material would be neither practical nor profitable.

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Palm drops Windows Mobile in favor of webOS

September 18th, 2009 at 11:29 AM 6 Comments Michael Stanclift

palm-pre-webos-lg Palm has announced that they will no longer be incorporating Microsoft Windows Mobile onto new devices, stating a commitment to the future of their new webOS platform, present on the recently released Palm Pre. Windows Mobile was first released on a Palm device back in 2006 with the Palm Treo 700w, later followed up by the 700Wx, 750 and Treo Pro. 8xkqt5hwir

“We’re making significant process with Palm’s transformation, and our culture of innovation is stronger than ever. We’re launching more great Palm webOS products with more carriers and turning our sights toward growth,” said Jon Rubinstein, chairman and CEO.

This move comes as a blow to Microsoft, which is struggling against up and coming smartphone OS providers in the business sector like Palm webOS, Google Android, Apple iPhone and the continued fight against Research in Motion’s Blackberry.

According to Garner, at the end of 2008, the estimated market share for Windows Mobile, worldwide, in the smartphone market was 12.4% — currently many of the those phones are made by Taiwan based HTC, however they’ve began releasing many of their new phones with Google’s Android platform, so it remains to be seen what their continued commitment to Windows Mobile will be.

However, the move could backfire on Palm, as some businesses continue to see devices like the Pre as more of a consumer oriented device and will opt for Windows Mobile and Blackberry which provide better support for Exchange and more enhanced and native device security.

Yesterday Palm, together with Sprint, revealed they’d only sold around 810,000 Pre devices in the last quarter. (In comparison the iPhone 3GS sold over 1 million units in the first week and over 5 million in the quarter.) Palm also announced yesterday losses for the quarter reached $164.5 million, compared to a loss of only $41.9 million last year. However, this did beat industry expectations for the company. Palm says they expect revenues for the next quarter to be even lower than their last.

Qwest rolling out new fiber for cellular providers

September 18th, 2009 at 11:06 AM No Comments Michael Stanclift

quest_logo Qwest Communications has announced the launch of its new fiber-based, Ethernet backhaul service designed for wireless service providers, allowing providers to run fiber directly to cellular tower sites to accommodate for increasing bandwidth demands being places on them by more advanced smartphones, netbooks and other bandwidth-demanding systems.

“Wireless users seem to have an insatiable appetite for bandwidth, whether they’re watching videos, sending pictures to friends, playing games online – you name it,” said Roland Thorton, executive vice president for Qwest Wholesale.

Qwest says this new infrastructure is ideal for providers looking to migrate from existing SONET based services due to greater flexibility.

The new service will allow scalable bandwidth, enabling providers to increase capacity to sites on an incremental and as-needed basis. The bandwidth is managed by software, rather than hardware so the time required to perform provisioning of increased speed is reduced and operations are simplified.

Microsoft to drop support for Windows 2000 next July

September 17th, 2009 at 11:01 PM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

Windows_2000_logo Windows administrators, mark your calendar for the drop dead date to get those old servers upgraded. Microsoft has outlined July 13, 2010 as the date Windows 2000 will no longer be supported by Microsoft. There are already a variety of security threats in the wild where Microsoft has said they will not be releasing updates to protect Windows 2000 because they say it is not feasible. After next July, no support or new updates (except for online self-help) will be available.

These changes were posted by Crissy House, the Windows Server operations manager, on their team’s blog.

House also announced that there would be no more service packs for Windows 2003 or Windows 2003 R2. Both 2003 releases will move to extended-support on July 13, 2010, which means only security updates will be published for these operating systems. Non-security hotfixes developed during this phase will be provided only to customers who enroll in Extended Hotfix Support (EHS).

Microsoft released Windows Server 2000 in February 2000, Windows Server 2003 was released in April 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 was released in February 2006. In February 2008, Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 which was developed along side Windows Vista, but will quickly supplant it with Windows Server 2008 R2 which was developed along side Windows 7 and will be released along side the client OS on October 22, 2009.

Windows Server 2008 R2 will only be avaliable in x86-64 and Itanium editions, so administrators needing to run 32-bit implementations of 2008 will need to use the original 2008 release.

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