Devoted to hardware, software, IT issues, and information technology management

Check out Etelos. These guys provide a very open, flexible and powerful platform for provisioning and developing hosted applications (particularly customer relationship management apps, but extending to all kinds of other apps as well -- for example, you could use their stuff as a publishing system as well). Much of their stack is open source, and they are working to provide access to their framework from any language and platform.

Most importantly (and this is the big thing that sets them apart from hosted-only systems such as Salesforce.com), they just provide software licensing and support. They don't force you to host your code and data on their servers (in fact, they don't even provide hosting anymore -- if you need hosting, you can get it through one of their hosting partners). This gets their customers past the biggest objections of hosted applications -- "Can I get access to the data?" "If I use your hosted system, does that mean I'm locked in forever?" and "Is my confidential data secure (even from your own system administrators)?" If you're hosting the code and the data on your own servers, or at least one that isn't managed by the platform provider with the goal of locking you in and restricting what you can do, the answers to these questions become much easier.

The world's fastest ever supercomputer capable of up to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop, called 'Roadrunner', has been developed by IBM for helping the US government to help it conduct nuclear safety tests. Does that mean we won't see any more mushroom clouds in the Nevada desert ? They will have to rewrite the next installment of the “HULK” when it comes out. I'd just wished they would have used this machine for more pressing problems like cleaner water or a cure for HIV.

According to VNUnet :

The computer is being bought by the US Department of Energy (DoE) for use at its National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Los Alamos laboratory, and will be made by IBM. Roadrunner will be the first supercomputer of its kind to use the Cell processor, which was originally designed to be used in the latest generation of video game consoles. It will surpass the world's current fastest computer, BlueGene/L, which was also built by IBM for the US DoE for its Lawrence Livermore laboratory.

HP is set to heat the server market with its new HP's Integrity rx3660 and the rx6600 server. HP's Integrity rx3660 server goes for US$10,531, and the rx6600 starts at US$14,771. Let's hope this time luck is with them since sales of the older Itanium servers were not encouraging. According to research firm Gartner, servers based on the processor accounted for less than one percent of the market nad that's pretty pathetic.

Nonetheless, according to HP marketing manager Don Jenkins, the market should be picking up since application support is not an issue anymore. There was only about 100 in 2003 while there are 9,000 software Itanium-aware applications now.

According to arnnet :

The Integrity rx6600 running Montecito performs close to 350,000 transactions per minute (tmp) -- more than twice the 161,000 tmp of an Integrity running an older version of Itanium -- according to tests by the independent Transaction Processing Performance Council. Montecito is also more cost-efficient, operating at US$2.24 per transaction minute, versus US$3.94 on a previous Itanium chip. The fastest processor tested by TPC is an IBM Power 5, which topped four million transactions per minute with a cost per minute of $2.97, noted Clabby. HP's Jenkins downplayed the significance of IBM's performance numbers, noting that most enterprises only need servers that can perform 150,000 to 300,000 transactions per minute.

Sometimes being second-tier vendors doesn't mean you can't have big notch customers. Take for instance - Open Source Systems. They have big names in their customer list such as NASA and Sony and their Gemini series of servers comes with two distinct two-socket systems in a 1U or 2U rack chassis. Now that's incredible. Check out this article on what the smaller vendor players can offer what HP and IBM can't.

The new server options include a 1U rack server that houses two full systems, 1U rack systems that can wedge in four add-in cards for specialized needs, and a "personal" cluster scaled down to a typical tower configuration. These new models—aimed at the Web and high-performance computing markets—highlight a growing trend among system builders to couple power and cooling know-how with more efficient processors.

Google is coming into your office for free and Microsoft better watch out. Eager to spread their wings into traditional Microsoft territory,

Google is offering a free package of programs for businesses, universities and other organizations called Google Apps for Your Domain. What they plan to include is an email service via Gmail that has their company's domain name, the very useful Google's online calendar for sharing purpose, instant-messaging service, and a Web page builder called Page Creator (whatever is this for since blogs are so easy to install)?

Dave Girouard, VP and general manager of Google Enterprise, a division of Google Inc. says company IT admins can make some customizations on the software "but really, the applications are exactly what you'd experience as a consumer if you use them," and that will make non technical staff more comfortable. Why use Lotus Notes or MS Outlook when using a browser is much more convenient. Bring it on....

For now, there is a free edition of Apps for Your Domain where storage for users is capped at 2GB but a paid version is slated by the end of the year that offers more storage and bang for your buck.

When you think of Cray super computers, you think of huge vacumn powered CPUs filling up an entire warehouse. With the advent of new technologies in microprocessers and the Cray XT3 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory reaching 54 teraflops, or 54 trillion mathematical calculations per second, it is now among the most powerful open scientific systems in the world. Lets just hope this is one step ahead for human kind to solve a lot more of the world's problems.

With the new upgrade, the Cray machined dubbed “The Jaguar” now features more than 10,400 processing cores and a whopping 21 terabytes of memory.

The computer, dubbed Jaguar, is the largest in the Department of Energy's Office of Science and is the major computing resource for DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program. The system is available to all scientific researchers and research organizations, including industry, through an annual call for proposals. Three of the four companies -- Boeing, DreamWorks Animation and General Atomics -- awarded INCITE grants for 2006 are doing their work at ORNL.

IBM has come out with four-core processing versions of its System p5 Unix servers that's real value for data centres when compared with x86-based servers.. For example, a System p5 model 510 Express server with a single-core processor carries a base price of about US$4,200 while the same model with a four-core processor will go for just $5,500.

On Wednesday, the company unveiled a new quad-core system, the System p5 505Q Express, which IBM is billing as its first 1U system – that’s 4.4 centimetres thick - with four processor cores. IBM also announced processor upgrades to its dual-core and quad-core Express systems. The company is also offering special pricing on pre-configured "Solution Edition" AIX servers when they are paired with popular enterprise software such as that from Oracle or SAP.

Full press release here

 Looks like dot-bust affected Sun Microsystems has turn tables around and gained server market share two quarters in a row. Now that's good news as I was afraid they might be resorting to layoffs like IBM did in 2005. Here are the numbers provided by Betanews and IDC :

Overall, revenue grew .6 percent to $12.3 billion in the second quarter, the first time since the third quarter of 2005, with demand in the US and the Asia-Pacific regions excluding Japan contributing to this growth. Volume server revenue grew 6.2 percent year over year, while the mid-and high-range enterprise server market shrank 3.5 and 6.9 percent, respectively.

Why did SUN do well ?

IDC credited Sun's resurgence to a number of factors. "The clear majority of Sun's server revenue is generated from UltraSPARC-based systems, but the growth in the company's Opteron-based products are having a positive impact," IDC enterprise server research director Steve Josselyn said.

 

Today’s launch of MailS@fe from Techne-Comm is been touted as the Market's First MS Outlook Integrated Email Indexing and Archiving Solution. Can this be true ? With so many legal regulations abound, companies are finding various ways to archive their daily emails for easier future retrieval in an efficient way. If you want an automated way for this archiving process, then check out MailS@fe from Techne-Comm or else follow the manual way. Pricing for MailS@fe goes for £20 to £35 per mailbox, which is a small price to pay for proving legality.

 

Some tech specs of MailS@fe from Techne-Comm :

 

1. It will index and archive emails to a central SQL server database and tagging them into projects, groups and departments categories.
2. Uses the latest Microsoft .NET technology.
3. MailS@fe encrypts and archives every email sent and received to a SQL server.
4. MailS@fe solves the usual quota problems with Exchange and PST files.
5. Powerful search tools to quickly find both current and 'old' e-mails.
6. MailS@fe will automatically capture all of the header information from each email ie Date, Time, From, To, CC, BCC, Subject as well as OCR’ing the email content.

 

IBM has released the Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager (UAM), which allows IT departments Managers and outsourcing vendors to measure usage costs in a virtualised environment and break down the reporting for easy reporting in a organisation’s accounting tool by segments of application, business unit, division, department, cost centre, or project.

The great thing about Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager (UAM) is that it collects information from databases, operating systems, networks, storage systems, applications and virtualised environments and “understands” which organisation department consumes these resources, enabling IT administrators to bill the appropriate department.

IBM Usage and Accounting Manager’s GUI on Windows, Linux, and VMware computing environments can enable changes to be easily made in real time and often automatically. This is a good reporting tool for companies that have separate departments acting as profit centres eg banks.

Apple Computer Inc. completed its shifting to Intel Corp. microprocessors and previewed its next-generation operating system on Monday. CEO Steve Jobs, speaking to thousands of engineers at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference, showed off Intel-based Macs for professional users and servers for businesses and so ends the realms of PowerPC chips built by IBM Corp. and Freescale Semiconductor Inc. Steve also previewed the upcoming Mac OS X release, dubbed "Leopard," slated for spring 2007 and this should give delayed Vista a run for the hills.

The Intel Xeon Core 2 (Woodcrest) based Mac Pro features two of the newest Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors. 2GHz, 2.66GHz, and the 3GHz version, goes up to 2x faster than the Power Mac G5 Quad.

The fastest Mac Pro ever made has memory storage that goes up to 16GB of RAM, slots for 2 SuperDrives, four PCI Express slots, and more I/O ports than a hardware shop.

Apple unveils Intel-based Macs and Leopard at Worldwide Developer Conference source

The new Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta Build 8.0.0924 is now available for download, but you have to sign up for the Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta on ideas.live.com before you can access it.

Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta Build 8.0.0924 is a great improvement compared to the last Build and I hope you will enjoy it. Do send me some comments if it does not live up to your expectation.

To sign up and download Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta Build 8.0.0924, follow the following procedures:

• Go to http://ideas.live.com
• Find the tile for “Windows Live Mail Desktop beta”
• Click on “sign up” (if you’re NOT signed in with your Passport email address)
• Click on “download” (if you ARE signed in with your Passport email address)
• Walk through the beta agreement and accept.
• Download and you’re done!
• Be sure to sign into Mail Desktop with the Passport email address you used in step 3 and 4.

 

There's a new product called the Cell Accelerator Board (CAB) coming out from the stables of Mercury Computer Systems and it goes on a high price of $7,000.

This is a PCIe plug-in adaptor (pci express) that fits in current standard motherboards and cases, as it is also part of the multi-billion project named Cell BE renowned because of Sony's upcoming and already well-known gaming system - the Playstation 3, informs Daily Tech.

The hardware component has been already tested on Linux and the Mercury MultiCore Plus Advantage software libraries. However, Mercury representatives recently claimed that the company's latest CAB provides approximately 180 GFLOPS, even if they also asserted that the CAB has been developed especially for video and render processing.

The Cell used in the Mercury is based on the small 90nm design process, but the Cell group (IBM, Toshiba and Sony) have already announced the Cell processor is moving to the 65nm process by next year.  The idea of plug-in accelerators has certainly picked up steam in the last three months with AMD's backing for this project.  Clearspeed also introduced a co-processor earlier this year for PCI-X acceleration, but Mercury's CAB is the first to use PCIe and the first to use Cell.

Mercury's Cell PCIe Plug-in Accelerator source

The new Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Beta 2 is out and CRN engineers have had a field day with the new featuresl like Unified Messaging and better Outlook Web Access support for mobile devices.

Administrators thinking of moving to Exchange Server 2007 should take a hard look at this beta 2 version to understand the impact of the platform’s many new features and not just jump in. Exchange 2007 Beta 2 is expected to ship in its final form at the end of 2006 or the beginning of 2007.

Exchange arrives with greatly improved Outlook Web Access (OWA) support, including better access on mobile based devices that use Exchange's ActiveSync technology. Exchange provides flexible collaboration features for OWA users.

A Unified Messaging Exchange server can connect to either legacy voicemail PBX infrastructure or more directly to IPBX systems, which provide VoIP access. On this release, voice messages are searchable only if users attach notes to individual messages.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Beta 2 source

Conventional IT architecture assumes a one-to-one mapping between a server and an application: "This is our database server. Over there is our data warehouse, and that one is our CRM server." Each environment is sized for a peak load that may be a single end-of-month run. Not surprisingly, IT studies have shown that the average server utilization rate is an incredibly low 20-35%. Wouldn't it be an interesting approach to break down the physical barriers, pool the resources, and share any excess capacity between applications as they need it? That is exactly what HP does with virtualization.

The HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) for HP Integrity and HP 9000 servers helps you achieve a greater return on your IT investments and gives you flexible capacity by optimizing server resource utilization in real time based on business priorities. The HP Virtual Server Environment provides a pool of virtual servers that can grow or shrink based on service level objectives and business needs.

The HP Virtual Server Environment source