ITS News

Filed under: Microsoft

Though he might be upset that he’s the subject of a recent fake interview, Bill Gates can at least take solace in the fact that he’s among some elite company in that regard.

The Microsoft founder joins Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Alan Greenspan, Kofi Anan, and several others in being the “subject” of a fake interview written by ex-ABC News consultant Alexis Debat.

That’s “fake” as in “utterly false.” Not misleading, not out of context, not even an interview with the fake Bill Gates passed off as the real deal, but fake as in completely made up from top to bottom.

The magazine in question, Politique Internationale, has a solid reputation built off 29 years of top-notch reporting — which makes this fake-interview scandal all the juicier. Politique Internationale has scrubbed all of Debat’s articles from its Web site, but a cached copy can be found here (if you don’t parlez-vous the Francais, you’ll want to take that URL to Babelfish for a translation).

As for the content of the phony interview, it’s fairly boilerplate stuff. Plugs for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the importance of vision and perserverence, and so on. There are detours into the world of politics that might have been noteworthy had they actually come from Bill Gates, and the “interview” closes with “Gates” comparing Microsoft and Google to David and Goliath. Curious as to which company is the giant and which is the plucky but determined underdog? Your French may be better than mine, but there’s certainly wisdom to be found in Babelfish’s profound Pidgin English translation: “B.G.: And Google, of course. That made odd be David vis-a-vis Goliath, for once!”

Of course, this isn’t the first time somebody has made up an interview with Gates. Last year, respected Norwegian journalist Bjoern Benkow was accused of faking an encounter with Gates that became the basis of a magazine article.

Filed under: Storage

Striding toward the podium to The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ “Tuff Enuff,” Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell laid down a gauntlet of sorts this morning at a launch event in San Francisco calling out the storage industry for failing to address storage concerns particular to SMBs.

“You can blame the storage vendors in the industry and say they really haven’t met the unique needs of small and medium-sized companies, even as their storage needs have become more complex,” Dell said to a crowd of around one hundred SMB organization representatives.

Describing a bleak low-end storage ecosystem of consumer-focused devices and overpriced enterprise-based solutions stripped down to SMB price points, Dell and Darren Thomas, general manager and vice president of storage at Dell, outlined the company’s strategy for delivering simple, capable, and affordable storage solutions to smaller organizations in the face of the data deluge currently besieging IT.

Dell’s proposed solution, the PowerVault MD3000i, is an iSCSI-based SAN, which Dell believes better suits smaller environments than competing offerings from Hewlett-Packard and IBM, built around the more expensive FC (Fibre Channel).

[For InfoWorld’s full review of Dell’s PowerVault MD3000i, see “Dell bulks up storage appliance.”]

Putting what the company calls “server family values” to work, Dell hopes to leverage its installed base of PowerEdge server customers by offering a familiar interface and drives that are swappable across server and storage environments.

“If you’ve seen a PowerEdge server, you know what an MD3000i looks like before taking it out of the box,” Thomas said.

According to Dell, the combination of interface familiarity and iSCSI gives the company a unique advantage in both removing the need for dedicated IT people at small organizations and optimizing the performance of the virtualized environments increasingly favored by midsize companies.

Coupled by Dell’s PowerConnect series of switches, the PowerEdge/PowerVault combination presumably gives Dell the ability to offer SMBs a one-stop datacenter solution.

Dell’s recently launched Vostro brand of notebooks and desktops, complete with support services, are also part of what appears to be a larger makeover of Dell since Michael Dell resumed the role of CEO earlier this year.

Dell has been aggressive in repositioning the company as a services and solutions provider, a strategy clearly targeted at the growing SMB market.

Whether this transition proves compelling depends in large part on the company convincing SMBs that widespread complaints about its customer service have been addressed — and that it has put a year marred by safety recalls behind it.

In other words, can Dell, as The Fabulous Thunderbirds crooned, “put out a burning building / With a shovel and dirt / And not even worry / About getting hurt”?

Filed under: Microsoft

Today’s Capgemini announcement that it will support Google Apps, following on the heels of last week’s Office 2.0 Conference, is another milestone in the relentless march from the desktop to the Web.

No, Google Apps isn’t going to replace Office anytime soon, at least not among ordinary cubicle dwellers. Even when Web apps gain offline capability, as Google Apps rival Zoho Office already has, power Office users will turn up their collective noses.

Yet the Enterprise 2.0 buzz is deafening. Why not incorporate the lightweight, collaborative advantages of Web 2.0 into enterprise desktop computing? Especially when by comparison SharePoint and Lotus Notes/Domino offer such clunky solutions. And especially when (so far, at least) Web-based productivity apps cost nothing or almost nothing, which may be the real reason so many enterprise customers were reportedly lurking at the Office 2.0 show.

I can only imagine the thrashing that must be going on in Redmond right now. Microsoft can’t simply pretend the trend doesn’t exist, which is why the company felt compelled to issue a non-announcement last week about a new installer that would automatically update Windows Live services along with Windows XP and Vista. But it has steadfastly refused to go the Web productivity app route (except for Live Writer, which is not a serious attempt at a Web-based word processor).

Yes, I understand Redmond’s aversion to cannibalizing its Office cash cow, but the fact is that Redmond could own this new space if it wanted to. All it would need to do is push interoperability and integration between lightweight Web versions of Office applications and its desktop fatware. Advanced features would be absent from the lightweight versions, but the company could ensure any Office doc would load on the Web — whatever new desktop service packs and upgrades might appear — and online document management could be integrated with Windows for offline access.

Of course, Microsoft may already be laboring mightily to make something like this work. Knowing the complexity of the company’s licensing schemes, maybe it’s crunching the numbers right now - the free version, the not-so-free version, the doodads for a onetime fee, and so on. The recent report by The Burton Group, which claimed that swapping Microsoft Office for Google Apps would be “a career-limiting move,” is right on target. On the other hand, if Microsoft fails to act decisively much longer, some Redmond careers might be shortened, too.

Filed under: Offshoring

In a new twist to an overly familiar IT staffing model, Indian outsourcer Wipro has announced plans to open a software development center in the U.S, according to a report yesterday on NPR’s Morning Edition.

Wipro’s proposed Atlanta-based programming depot will hire 500 U.S. developers over the course of three years, Wipro officials said.

The announcement comes on the heels of Wipro’s acquisition of U.S. services provider Infocrossing last month, as the company seeks to diversify its offerings and attain the market privileges of a greater global footprint.

In addition to providing the local presence that many potential outsourcing customers are demanding these days, Wipro believes that having American software developers on staff will improve the company’s ability to deliver top-notch products to U.S. companies.

The announcement not only provides further evidence that Indian outsourcing firms are no longer content with the back-office status of years past but also indicates a potential shift in the mind-set of outsourcers seeking to expand their customer bases.

“Are you competing on a cost point of view?” asks Raja Viraswami, head of international HR at Wipro. “Or are you competing on an all-over perspective completely?”

Viraswami, who says American developers receive on average 10 times more pay than their Indian counterparts, believes States-based coders will provide Wipro with the cultural insights and intangibles necessary to satisfy U.S. companies’ needs.

Moreover, the company, which employs developers in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and India, will be better positioned to take on U.S. government projects, as many — mainly defense-related initiatives — require the work not leave the country.

Filed under: The lighter side

Despite a seemingly multimillion-dollar ad campaign to convince the world that its mere presence can frost away the heat, Coors Light came in distant last in what amounts to the world’s first International Beer CPU Coolant Competition hosted by the ever-curious folks at Tom’s Hardware.

For those late to the beer-as-CPU-coolant craze, Shelton Romhanyi and company pitted Molson’s Canadian Beer against three industry-leading CPU coolants and a diluted solution of antifreeze to determine the best means possible for cooling an overclocked CPU. Shocking to some, the flat, warm libation from the Great White North took home second place.

Not to be outpaced de facto by their Canadian co-workers, the folks at Tom’s sites in Germany, Ireland, and the United States proferred their own quaffable contenders to attempt to knock Molson’s off the block as the world’s best beer CPU coolant.

Guiness, Franziskaner Hefe-weissbier, and Coors Light were put through the beer-bong-tubing CPU-cooling ringer to varying efficacy.

Viscosity may have played a role in Guiness’s pasting of the pathetic showing of the American frost-brewed light. And the unfiltered yeast present in the Hefe-weissbier may very well have proved the key cooling ingredient in Franziskaner’s tipping the CPU temperature scale further to the cool end of the spectrum than Guiness did.

And yet at the end of this installment, nothing cooled to the extent of the original, as Molson’s remained the top beer for whisking CPU heat away.

Filed under: Application Development

The OpenAjax Hub, providing interoperability between AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) components made with different AJAX toolkits, is expected to be available this fall, an official with the OpenAjax Alliance said on Thursday at The 2007 Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose, Calif.

“OpenAjax Hub is a publish and subscribe engine, very small, which allows components to talk to each other on the same Web page,” said Jon Ferraiolo, a Web architect at IBM who has been managing operations at the alliance. Featured in the alliance have been major vendors such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle and IBM.

“The main thing that [the hub] allows you to do is develop components in different toolkits,” such as Dojo or Google Web Toolkit, Ferraiolo said. The technology is important for mashup widgets, he said.

The hub has been described as JavaScript functionality that would be integrated into AJAX toolkits.

Filed under: Storage

Trend toward server virtualization pushes storage software into VMs

In yet another move aimed at extending business-conscious storage management capabilities to customers capitalizing on the virtualization trend, EMC today announced plans to virtualize data de-duplication technology it brought on board with its November 2006 Avamar acquisition.

Whereas yesterday FalconStor proposed virtualized CDP (continuout data protection) as the less-muss means for preventing data loss in the event of server failure, EMC is betting that its Avamar Virtual Edition for VMware will provide significant cost savings to VMware-based enterprises by virtualizing backup and recovery.

The marriage of Avamar de-duplication functionality with the virtualization capabilities of VMware likely comes as little surprise to those attempting to make sense of EMC’s spate of acquisitions in recent years. Worth noting, however, is what EMC’s move to port Avamar technology to ESX Server may say about enterprise interest in supporting remote branches by fully virtualizing them.

Tapping client-based agents, EMC Avamar Virtual Edition de-dupes data at the source, cutting down the resources required to back up guests and systems. And by making this technology available to VMware ESX Servers as a virtual machine, EMC enables VMware-based organizations to tap the benefits of data de-duplication at remote sites without impacting their existing infrastructures and — more importantly, for some — without requiring dedicated branch-office IT staff, according to the company.

“Encapsulating the Avamar server in a virtual machine so it can sit on the same shared server and storage infrastructure that’s deployed at remote branch offices allows you to completely eliminate the need to have separate management and hardware for backup and recovery,” said Jed Yueh, founder of Avamar and now vice president of product management at EMC.

Although Yueh noted that this model would free enterprises from having to ship tapes from site to site for disaster recovery, it is more likely that the trend toward server consolidation already under way at many organizations is what will drive the demand for storage software delivered in virtual iterations.

EMC Avamar Virtual Edition is slated for general availability in November.

Filed under: Storage

Company unveils VMware ESX version of its continuous data protection technology to stave off fallout of crashed guests and systems

More than just a means for reducing costs in the datacenter, virtualization is fast proving a force in redirecting the course of software delivery. Today FalconStor lent further credence to the growing industry mandate to support VMware by announcing a virtualized iteration of its IPStor product, thereby cutting down the cost and complexity of CDP (continuous data protection) in hybrid environments considerably.

Pre-built and pre-configured, FalconStor CDP Virtual Appliance for VMware installs as a virtual instance on an ESX Server in less than 10 minutes, according to the company. Supporting as many as 16 connections per virtual node, the solution brings the cost of deploying CDP below $10,000, company officials said.

Moreover, by virtualizing IPStor and mirroring both physical and virtual data sources, FalconStor believes its solution provides a means for eliminating mandatory restores, enabling backup devices to act temporarily as primary sources in the event of server or guest failure, and doing so without a hit to performance or loss of data.

The solution employs DiskSafe, an agent-based technology for backing up Windows environments, to automatically allocate resources on the Virtual Appliance equivalent in size to the primary source. DiskSafe then takes point-in-time snapshots as scheduled by the administrator and mirrors incremental block-level changes in real time to the Virtual Appliance. In the event of failure, the DiskSafe mirror can be assigned to a new virtual machine to restore services instantly, thereby providing continuous data availability, according to the company.

“Because we’re doing this at the block level, we give you not only the data but the system data. So you can have a failure on a server — physical or virtual — and actually restore that entire server from the product, including all system-state information,” said Diamond Lauffin, technology evangelist at FalconStor. “And because we monitor transactions down to the I/O level, you can snap back to a point-in-time snapshot and then roll forward up to an actual transaction, which could be down to a nanosecond.”

By providing continuous data availability in a virtualized environment, the solution eases P2V (physical-to-virtual) conversions and eliminates the need to perform mandatory restores, according to the company.

“You can now use what would be considered your backup or CDP device as a primary device temporarily while you are repairing either a physical failure of a primary or a corrupted position on a primary device,” Lauffin said.

Public demonstrations of FalconStor CDP Virtual Appliance for VMware will be performed at VMworld 2007, which will be held from Sept. 11-13 in San Francisco.

The release, which comes on the heels of VMware’s recent IPO, may suggest that customers are pushing software vendors to support the VMware platform as their own virtualization initiatives take hold.

According to a report filed today on Newsday.com, company CEO and Chairman ReiJane Huai sold 12.5 percent of his FalconStor shares last Thursday, garnering $3.27 million. The report also notes that FalconStor Vice President Wayne Lam took home $1.45 million selling shares and exercising options last month, and that Bernard Wu, vice president of business development, netted $301,000 by selling 28,000 shares.

Filed under: Apple

Mac fans, Lego is shaking a leg again. After rolling out a Intel-Mac version of Lego Mindstorms NXT robotics invention system, another Mac-fanboy move was made by PodBrix, which has delivered the Young Woz and Jobs Playset in Lego.

Get those orders in, if a must-have. PodBrix says the Young Woz and Jobs Playset is “a 300-unit limited numbered edition and features meticulous detail.” There is no “sold out” sign for it today on the PodBrix site. It was released on 8/29/07.

Filed under: Web Services

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Tuesday issued what it described as a critical Web standard for extending Web services features and SOA applications.

The Web Services Policy (WS-Policy) 1.5 standard enables developers to meet requirements for secure transactions, reliable messaging, addressing of metadata and other scenarios in a modular fashion, W3C said. SOA developers can enable extensions to a service without disrupting or requiring changes to lower-level service descriptions. Extensions are defined by other specifications.

Now an official W3C Recommendation, or standard, WS-Policy 1.5 connects core Web services standards - SOAP 1.2, WSDL 2.0 and XML Schema - to a set of extensions.

The Web Services Policy Working Group, which oversees WS-Policy 1.5, features companies such as Adobe Systems, BEA systems, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

The WS-Policy 1.5 - Framework document can be accessed here.