Earlier this week we joined several other sites at HP’s Cupertino, California campus for HP’s Superdome Tech Day. One of the scheduled events focused on some of the configuration and management of an HP Superdome solution in an adaptive infrastructure. HP solutions architect Richard Warham took us through several scenarios including how to rapidly scale up an application server in the event of a sudden surge in transaction volumes, and how to maintain service availability in the event of a server failure.
HP Superdome Tech Day – 10 years in mission critical enterprise
HP Superdome, the name “Superdome” alone invokes a sense of something enormous, powerful, and coming from HP, one can only envision a system at the top end of the power and capability scale. In fact, that’s just what the HP Superdome systems aim to be. For the last decade, HP has developed the Superdome platform to provide mission critical solutions for datacenter environments where down time can not only be costly but disastrous. HP Superdome provides the uptime demanded by services like emergency call centers, major financial centers, and online ordering systems, as well as mission critical infrastructures for major corporations around the world.
Over the last decade, HP has developed the Superdome platform to provide mainframe performance and stability. According to a 2008 Dataquest Insight survey, the cost of downtime within large organizations (2,500+ users) has jumped from $40,000 in 2005 as the average cost per hour of downtime of mission critical business systems to $128,000 in 2008, an increase of 120%. These same companies reported that the amount of downtime they had experienced during the 2005-2008 time frame had also increased 69%. With statistics like that, it becomes painfully obvious that IT downtime downtime directly affects the bottom line. Throughout the growth of the HP Superdome platform, features like redundant cell board components, double chip spare memory, and hot swap I/O have been developed to provide resiliency and to prevent downtime, all with the goal of providing near perfect availability.
Wi-Fi Alliance launches updated 802.11n certification program
Following the ratification of the 802.11n standard, the Wi-Fi Alliance has kicked off the Wi-Fi Certified n program, an updated version of the Wi-Fi Certified 802.11n draft 2.0 program. The ‘new’ program keeps all the draft 2.0 requirements and adds testing for optional features like:
- Simultaneous transmission of up to three spatial streams
- Packet aggregation (A-MPDU), to make data transfers more efficient
- Space-time Block Coding (STBC), a multiple-antenna encoding technique to improve reliability in some environments
- Channel coexistence measures for “good neighbor” behavior when using 40 MHz operation in the 2.4 GHz band
“Wi-Fi Certified n builds on the success of our draft-n certification program and marks a point of maturity in 802.11n technology,” said Wi-Fi Alliance executive director Edgar Figueroa. “Our expanded testing and branding program helps ensure the best user experience in the context of the Wi-Fi industry’s continued innovation and the evolving landscape of products implementing next-generation Wi-Fi.”
More info about the Wi-Fi Certified programs can be found here.
HP StorageWorks Tech Day 2009, Day 1 includes HP Total Care expansion announcements
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.”
Intel aims to change the future of I/O with Light Peak optical cables
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.
Intel reveals latest Core i7 mobile CPU’s, details on future chips
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.”
Google Sync now supports push mail sync
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
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
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.
MIT team finds a way to combine two chips in to one
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.
