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Intel Partners With WMware
Intel has teamed up with Microsoft’s rival VMware to deliver a platform for “trusted cloud.”
The technology will mix Intel’s Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and VMware’s vSphere 5.1, platform for building cloud infrastructures. Intel said its hardware-enhanced security capabilities integrated directly into the processor combined with vSphere 5.1 would provide a hardened and high-integrity platform to run business-critical applications in private and public cloud environments.
Intel thinks that the biggest barrier to cloud adoption is the fact that companies are worried about security. Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel’s Cloud Infrastructure Group, in a statement that Intel TXT provides hardware enforcement to help overcome some of the most challenging aspects of cloud security, including detection and prevention of bios attacks and evolving forms of stealthy malware, such as rootkits.
Is Nokia Sitting On A Gold Mine?
August 31, 2012 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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Mobile phone company Nokia might be suffering, but the big technology companies are hoping that it does not wake up to the fact it is sitting on a troll’s gold mine.
Recently Nokia flexed its muscles and orderied Apple to pay Nokia a royalty fee for each iPhone sold. Logically it could clean up if it hit Google with something similar over its Android operating system. According to IP expert Florian Mueller, Nokia holds the most patents relating to the cutting-edge 4G/LTE technology.
This puts it in a position similar to what Microsoft had with its 2G/3G technology which allowed them to collect half of all the profits of each Android device sold. This gave Microsoft more than $3.2 billion per year so this indicates that Nokia will make triple this amount in the future. Nokia has sued HTC, RIM and View-sonic and their defence against Nokia is weak.
To make matters worse Nokia signed a 2010 cross-licensing agreement with Motorola which precludes Google from transferring the numerous patents it recently acquired from Motorola Mobility. This means that any protection that Google might have gained from owning Motorola Mobility are not counted. But this is only the tip of any iceburg and indicates how the entire mobile phone industry can be stuffed up by patents.
Recently a Google executive claimed that a standard smartphone contains more than 250,000 separate patented technologies. All of these have to be paid before a product can be released. What is worrying is that Nokia own a vast majority of this patented technology.
Dell Names Chief As Sales Tank
Dell has snagged a former Hewlett-Packard executive to head up its server, networking and storage division, a critical area for Dell as it tries to expand its data center business and reduce its dependence on PCs.
Marius Haas was head of HP’s networking business before leaving two years ago to join an investment firm. On Tuesday he was named president of Dell’s enterprise solutions business, where he’ll oversee the engineering, development and marketing of Dell’s enterprise products.
Haas replaces Brad Anderson, who ran Dell’s enterprise division since 2005 and is now leaving the company.
Dell announced the news on the same day it reported financial results for its second quarter, which closed Aug. 3. Its profit for the period declined 18 percent from a year earlier, to US$732 million, while revenue fell 8 percent to $14.48 billion, Dell said.
Its server and networking sales were among the highlights for the quarter, up 14 percent from last year, while sales of storage products were down 13 percent. Together, the three product categories account for about one-fifth of Dell’s overall business.
Chase Building 1/2 Billion Dollar Data Center
August 24, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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The enthusiastic backer of Enron and serial over charger of mortgage payers, JPMorgan Chase has just splashed out on a new $500 million data center.
CEO Jamie Dimon announced the move which practically everyone in the IT industry finds a bit strange. While Chase is the US’s largest bank, the new facilities are a little big by anyone’s standard. It is about the same about of money that Google and Microsoft in their largest data centres for their cloud networks.
Dimon cited the figure as one of the advantages of being a big size. It can afford to invest cash in this way. Size lets Chase build a $500 million data centre that speeds up transactions and invest billions of dollars in products like ATMs and apps that allow your iPhone to deposit cheques, he enthused.
JPMorgan Chase operates two large data centres in Delaware and a 400,000 square foot facility. It also acquired data centres in its deals for distressed rivals Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual in the early days of the 2008 financial crisis. So why it needs a huge new one is anyone’s guess.
HP Wants The Court To Bully Oracle
HP has asked California Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg to order Oracle to continue developing software for its Itanium servers.
HP and Oracle have been locked in a bitter legal dispute over Oracle’s decision to stop supporting Intel’s IA-64 architecture used in Itanium processors. Now HP has asked Judge Kleinberg to order Oracle to continue developing software for its Itanium servers until it stops selling them or the contract term expires.
Oracle claims its decision to stop developing for Intel’s IA-64 architecture was spurred on by Intel having made it clear that it intended to focus on its x86 Xeon processors. Intel has said that its Xeon processors are being edged into the market presently occupied by its Itanic chips.
HP disputed Oracle’s claims of Itanium reaching the end of its life and it emerged that HP had a contract with Intel to support the chip. However, and perhaps most damaging for HP, was a release of emails between Intel and HP that seemed to suggest that Intel had enough of Itanium and that HP was having to all but strong-arm Intel into continuing to produce Itanium processors.
Intel Buys Patents
Intel on Monday spent US$375 million to purchase nearly 1,700 wireless networking patents from subsidiaries of digital communications company Interdigital.
Intel will get patents that cover a range of 3G, LTE and Wi-Fi technologies from Interdigital. The patents should boost Intel’s product mobile product portfolio as the company establishes a presence in the smartphone and tablet markets, which is currently ruled by ARM.
Intel has said it will integrate 3G and 4G LTE capabilities along with its Atom microprocessor in devices like smartphones and tablets. Intel made its first entry into the smartphone market earlier this year with its Atom chip code-named Medfield, which is being used in handsets from Lenovo, Orange and Lava International.
Intel later this year will release a dual-core Atom Z2580 processor with 3G, 4G and LTE capabilities. Intel’s upcoming Atom chip for tablets, code-named Clover Trail, will also come with mobile broadband options.
Intel started building its wireless business following the acquisition of Infineon Wireless for $1.4 billion, which was completed last year.
Wireless is a fast-changing market, and the company is making this investment to support the business, according to Chuck Mulloy, an Intel spokesman.
“This was an opportunity to add some value to our patent portfolio. That’s over and above what we have,” Mulloy said.
Cisco Lends A Hand In Fighting Fraud
Cisco released an API at the Interop 2012 Conference this week for its branch routers designed to enable third-party developers to write applications to beef up the security of phone calls over the router network.
The Cisco UC Gateway Services API is a Web-based programming interface that allows customers and developers access to call information over a Cisco ISR G2 router at the edge of a voice network, such as signaling and media. This information can be used to detect and help prevent malicious activity such as social engineering and identity theft scams, contact center account takeover fraud, unauthorized network and service use, and denial-of-service attacks.
Applications written to the API can then apply appropriate action to terminate, redirect or record the call.
Cisco, citing data from the Communications Fraud Control Association, says global telecom fraud losses are estimated to be $40 billion annually.
Cars May Come With nVidia’s Tegra
January 23, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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One of the things that we keep hearing as a big business opportunity for ARM manufacturers is to get their chips in cars. We heard this before, but this time we are not talking about navigation / entertainment systems.
The idea behind the concept is that more and more cars will come with collision detection mechanisms, road tracking that can keep your car stay in the high way lane. It gets better, the car can now lock on the car in front of you and accelerate and decelerate with it, so called adaptive cruise control with some manufacturers.
Fancier cars today come with elaborate stability assistance systems and many other features that might put such processors to good use, for something far more useful than just navigation and playing music.
Qualcomm Releases New S4 Processors
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Qualcomm has announced a slew of Krait-based Snapdragon system-on-chips (SoC) processors to fit in its S1 and S4 performance classes.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon range of SoC chips have proven to be extremely popular in smartphones and tablets, however the firm is facing a growing challenge from Texas Instruments and Nvidia. Coming little over a week after Nvidia revealed its quad-core Tegra 3 processor, Qualcomm has announced eight Snapdragon S4 processors and four Snapdragon S1 processors.
Since Qualcomm showed off the Krait architecture in February with three chips, the firm has not extended its headline S4 range of processors. Now it has added eight SKUs, with models including the MSM8660A, MSM8260A, MSM8630, MSM8230, MSM8627, MSM8227, APQ8060A and APQ8030. Qualcomm was cagey about when devices sporting these chips will appear, only mentioning an early 2012 timeframe.
Perhaps more important for Qualcomm’s sales figures are its entry level Snapdragon S1 chips. The four new chips in this category are the MSM7225A, MSM7625A, MSM7227A and MSM7627A models, with the firm claiming that they have been optimised for those OEM customers that are making the transition from 2G to 3G devices.
Will Help Desks Become Extinct?
Tom Soderstrom, CTO at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), views everything through the clouds.
NASA’s JPL uses 10 public or private clouds to store everything from photos of Mars for public purview to top-secret data.
Pretty soon, Soderstrom told attendees of Computerworld‘s SNW conference, data stored by large enterprises like NASA will be measured in Exabytes; one Exabyte is equal to 1.5 billion CDs or a million terabytes.
And, he noted, the only place to store Exabytes of data is on public and private clouds.
The good news is that with data in the cloud, people will be able to “work with anyone, from anywhere, with any data, using any device at any time,” he said.
And the not-so-bad news is that IT help desks, as we know them, will become a thing of the past, and IT workers in general will have to rethink how they approach application development and security.
“Now the workforce and consumers of IT are becoming mobile. Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it. If you can’t get the answer there, you ask your kids. If you can’t get your answer there, you ask your friends who are like you. For us, that’s the workgroup,” Soderstrom said.