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Citrix Updates Xen Server
Citrix has released its open source Xen Server 6.2 to go up against VMware’s closed source free Vsphere hypervisor.
Citrix for years has maintained a free, open source version of its Xen hypervisor but it has been losing ground to KVM and in particular VMware’s free Vsphere hypervisor. Now the firm has released Xen Server 6.2 and a community website that the firm hopes will help increase support for its open source hypervisor.
According to Citrix, Xen Server 6.2 supports Cloud Stack, Open Stack and Citrix’s own Cloud Platform. The firm touted support for the latest guest operating systems including Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.
Sameer Dholakia, group VP and GM of Citrix’s Cloud Platforms Group said, “The cloud era has brought a lot of exciting opportunities for data center infrastructure, but the reality is that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to virtualization.
“By empowering our users and partners with a committed open source strategy and community for XenServer – which already powers some of the largest clouds in the world – we are moving the needle in innovation to help customers of all sizes, and at all stages of their cloud strategies, to maximize the benefits they gain from vitualization and the cloud.”
Citrix said its Xen Server 6.2 supports its Xen Desktop software, including Intellicache and Dynamic Memory Control. The firm said it has added Desktop Director alerts so that administrators can be notified of low resources to try to prevent virtual machines from becoming unusuable.
Citrix will be hoping that as firms get used to the free version of Xen Server they will shell out for the full versions that cost up to $3,250. However, Citrix’s continued support of its free, open source Xen Serven means that VMware will have to continue offering a free version of Vsphere if it doesn’t want to leave a gap in the market.
Is This A Mobile First World?
June 3, 2013 by admin
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Judging from the number of people engrossed in activities with their smartphones on the sidewalk, in their cars and in public places, mobile seems to have stolen our attention away from the wired Internet and traditional TV.
However, there is a ways to go before mobile platforms become the primary place where consumers turn for entertainment and getting things done, players at CTIA Wireless trade show said.
Nokia Siemens Networks announced new capabilities in its network software to make video streams run more smoothly over mobile networks. Among other things, the enhancements can reduce video stalling by 90 percent, according to the company. But even Sandro Tavares, head of marketing for NSN’s Mobile Core business, sees “mobile-first” viewing habits as part of the future.
“Now that the networks are providing a better capacity, a better experience with mobile broadband, mobile-first will come,” Tavares said. “Because the experiences they have with the devices are so good, these devices … start to be their preferred screen, their first screen.
“This is a trend, and this is something that will not change,” Tavares said. But he thinks it’s too early to build networks assuming consumers will turn to tablets and phones as their primary sources of entertainment. “Do you have to be prepared for mobile-first now? Probably not. You have to be able to keep the pace.”
For AT&T, mobile-first is a top priority for its own internal apps, ensuring employees can do their jobs wherever they are, said Kris Rinne, the carrier’s senior vice president of network technologies. But to make it possible over the network, a range of new technologies and relationships may have to come together, she said.
For example, giving the best possible performance for streaming video and other uses of mobile may require steering traffic to the right network if both cellular and Wi-Fi are available. AT&T is developing an “intelligent network selection” capability to do this, Rinne said. When AT&T starts to deliver voice over LTE, it will stay on the cellular network — at least in the early days — because the carrier has more control over quality of service on that system, she said.
Other issues raised by mobile-first include security of packets going over the air and rights for content that subscribers are consuming primarily on mobile devices instead of through TV and other traditional channels, Rinne said.
Citrix Goes To The Cloud
Citrix System’s GoToWebcast has become generally available in North America and Europe, offering users a cloud-based webcasting tool for up to 5,000 participants.
The subscription-based GoToWebcast allows users to broadcast unlimited audio and video presentations to live and on-demand audiences that can access them using mobile devices such as Apple’s iPhones and iPads, or Android-based smartphones and tablets.
To simplify administration, GoToWebcast has a five-step wizard that walks users through setting up their event. Users are first asked to schedule the event, including deciding audience size and if the web cast should be available on-demand or live with an archive. Users are then asked to select registration alternatives, multimedia options, choose what content to upload and finally decide on security and email settings.
In addition to audio and video, users can upload presentation documents, chat with attendees, conduct polls and link to social media channels. Citrix didn’t announce any pricing for the new service, only saying that users pay a fixed monthly fee.
The company also released a beta version of GoToWebinar with HDFaces for the 500- and 1,000-attendee plans. HDFaces is a video conferencing technology that lets up to six presenters lead interactive Q&A sessions, host panel discussions, or do demonstrations in high-definition.
The announcement comes after the recently announced availability of HDFaces for up to 100 participants in GoToWebinar and GoToTraining sessions, as Citrix adds high-definition video across its GoTo portfolio.
Blackberry Plans New Tablet
April 9, 2013 by admin
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BlackBerry plans to roll out a larger tablet and two phone-tablet combos, or phablets, over the next year, according to a leaked road map presentation slide.
The three devices will run the BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system, which powers the Z10 smartphone and the upcoming Q10, which features a physical qwerty keyboard, according to the slide, which first appeared over the weekend on Twitter as @BB10Leaks.
BlackBerry officials didn’t comment on the road map. However, in comments to analysts last Thursday, CEO Thorstein Heins said repeatedly that the company will introduce more BlackBerry 10 devices this year, though he didn’t indicate what form factors the products would feature.
The three new devices shown in the slide include a BlackBerry 10 tablet with a widescreen aspect ratio, as well as a “U10″ phone-tablet, which some call a phablet, and an “R10″ phablet with a physical qwerty keyboard.
The slide indicates that the B10 tablet will ship in the third or fourth quarter, while the two phablets will be released later, with the U10 shipping at the end of the year and the R10 in spring of 2014.
There are no specifications on the slide, but the devices appear to be shown roughly in proportion to one another, with the phablets appearing to be wider than the existing Z10 and Q10 smartphones.
BlackBerry already has a 7-in. tablet called the PlayBook that is more square in shape than the widescreen look of the B10 in the slide. Some analysts and bloggers said it’s possible that BlackBerry is developing a competitor to the various 9-to-11-in. tablets already on the market, including many Android tablets, as well as the 9.7-in. iPad.
“BlackBerry wants to be a full-line competitor, particularly for business users, so they have to have a full line of products to compete head-on with Apple and Android, primarily Samsung,” said Jack Gold, an analyst at J.Gold Associates. “I would expect any viable competitor to establish a full line of products touching on all the various preferences of the marketplace, which includes smartphones, phablets and tablets.”
Gold couldn’t confirm whether any of the details in the leaked slide were accurate, but he noted that it doesn’t appear to include the mid-priced smartphones that Heins and other executives have hinted that BlackBerry may launch over the next few quarters.
The PlayBook tablet first went on sale in April 2011, running on what BlackBerry then called the BlackBerry Tablet OS, based on QNX. BlackBerry later said it would merge that tablet operating system into BlackBerry 10. The company also released a major update to the PlayBook tablet operating system in February 2012.
The first release of the PlayBook was criticized for not having native email.
Analysts are not sure that BlackBerry can keep up with production demand for so many new devices that depend on a relatively constrained supply chain for displays and other components. But to boost its global smartphone market share, currently at less than 10%, BlackBerry will need a product lineup with a variety of options.
Is Apple Really Security Conscious?
Is Apple proving how clueless it is about security by backing a method of replacing passwords with fingerprint readers?
Just days after a scandal where a South American hospital was staffed by phantom doctors who used silicon fingers of their colleagues to convince administrators’ finger print readers that they were working, Apple has decided that they are the perfect form of security.
Word on the street is that Apple is said to be planning to introduce an iPhone that can be unlocked by the owner’s fingerprint. Speculation about Apple’s plans for fingerprint recognition began last summer when the iPhone maker bought bio-metric security firm AuthenTec for $335 million.
It is believed that the iPhone 5S will have a fingerprint chip under the Home button, to “improve security and usability.” Meanwhile in an engineering journal, two Google security experts outlined plans for an ID ring or smartphone chip that could replace online passwords, which is a lot sexier than fingerprint scanning.
HGST Goes Self-Assembling Molecules
HGST has announced that it has developed self-assembling molecules and nanoimprinting to potentially double data density in hard disk drives.
HGST used to be known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies before Western Digital bought it, and has been working on lithography techniques to boost data density on hard disk platters. Now the firm has announced that it has been able to create patterns of magnetic islands that are 10nm wide, doubling present state of the art data density.
HGST Fellow Tom Albrecht described the self-assembling molecules as block copolymers that are made of segments that repel each other to create segments that are lined up in rows, and said that lab tests show promising read/write performance and data retention. The firm claims it has combined self-assembling molecules, line doubling and nanoimprinting down to the 10nm scale in a circular arrangement.
Albrecht said, “We made our ultra-small features without using any conventional photolithography. With the proper chemistry and surface preparations, we believe this work is extendable to ever-smaller dimensions.”
HGST said self-assembling patterning and nanoimprinting can result in 1.2 trillion dots per inch, which it claims is twice the density of existing hard disk drives. According to the firm, its engineers have been able to create segments only 50 atoms wide.
Although HGST showed off the technology this week at the SPIE Advanced Lithography 2013 conference, the firm said it expects the technology to be cost effective by the end of the decade, that is if solid-state disk drives haven’t eliminated the need for hard disk drives by then.
Will SSDs Make HD’s Obsolete?
HD makers can expect to see revenues decline as demand for traditional disk drives falls, according to IHS Isuppli.
Hard drive manufacturers Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba have carved up most of the market, lowering warranties and keeping prices high after the Thai floods in 2011 that shuttered several factories. Now IHS Isuppli claims that the good times have come to an end, with industry revenues expected to drop by 11.8 percent in 2013 and 2014 not expected to show signs of improvement.
While Seagate and Western Digital gouged consumers by keeping prices artificially high even after production recovered to pre-flood levels, solid-state disk (SSD) drive makers aggressively brought prices down. Intel has also been pushing SSDs as part of its ultrabook specification and with Windows 8 tablets using SSDs, the long term prospects for hard drive makers are not looking good.
Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS Isuppli said, “The HDD industry will face myriad challenges in 2013. Shipments for desktop PCs will slip this year, while notebook sales are under pressure as consumers continue to favour smartphones and tablets. The declining price of SSDs also will allow them to take away some share from conventional HDDs. However, HDDs will continue to be the dominant form of storage this year, especially as demand for ultrabooks picks up and hard drives remain essential in business computing.”
IHS Isuppli said Western Digital could overtake Seagate to become the market share leader by the end of 2013, and said that hard drives will see greater use in the enterprise market in cloud and big data use cases.
Hitachi Releases Terabyte SAS Drive
Hitachi has released the first 1.2TB 10,000 RPM Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drive for servers.
Hitachi’s hard drive operation, which is now part of Western Digital, continues to develop server and workstation hard drives while its parent firm concentrates on units pitched at desktop and laptop computers. The firm, which was the first to introduce a 1TB hard drive back in 2007, has now surpassed that barrier with its 10,000 RPM 2.5in Ultrastar C10K1200 SAS drive.
Hitachi slips a 64MB cache in each hard drive and quotes a mean time between failure (MTBF) for the Ultrastar C10K1200 of two million hours, suggesting that the drive will be perfect for those users that do big data analysis. The firm touts connector compatibility with its own Ultrastar solid state disk (SSD) drives and promotes the use of tiered storage for those considering SSDs.
Dell has announced support for Hitachi’s Ultrastar C10K1200 drives in its Poweredge and Powervault servers, with Hitachi saying that other OEMs have also qualified the drive for use in their servers.
Enterprise storage vendors such as Hitachi are pushing tiered storage for those firms that want the performance of SSDs but require the capacity of traditional hard drives. While Hitachi is right in pointing out the need for firms to deploy both SSDs and hard drives, with SSD makers rapidly bringing down prices that mix might become SSD biased within a few years.
Kingston Goes 1TB
January 17, 2013 by admin
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Kingston Technology is claiming the world’s highest capacity USB 3.0 flash drive with the one terabyte (1TB) Datatraveler HyperX Predator 3.0.
Announced by the company’s Kingston Digital Europe affiliate, the Datatraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 is shipping now in a 512GB model, with the 1TB capacity set to be available later in the first quarter.
The new drive is also slated as the fastest USB 3.0 flash drive in the Kingston storage line, with read speeds of up to 240MB/s and write speeds of 160MB/s, according to the firm.
“The large capacity and fast USB 3.0 transfer speeds allow users to save time as they can access, edit and transfer applications or files such as HD movies directly from the drive without any performance lag,” said Ann Keefe, Kingston regional director for the UK and Ireland.
Featuring a casing made of zinc alloy for shock resistance and high-end design, the Datatraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 also comes with a custom Kingston key ring and a HyperX valet keychain.
The new drive is fully certified for Superspeed USB 3.0 operation, while keeping backwards compatibility with USB 2.0 to allow it to be used with older computer hardware.
Broadcom Goes UltraHD
January 16, 2013 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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As TV manufacturers show off UltraHD TVs at CES, communications chip maker Broadcom is introducing the guts of future gateways that will be able to deliver video for those sets into viewers’ homes.
Broadcom’s BCM7445 silicon platform, announced just hours before the show opened on Tuesday morning, will be able to process incoming video from cable, carrier and satellite services that has four times the resolution of typical 1080p video offered today, according to the company.
Like the eye-catching but expensive TVs on the show floor in Las Vegas, the BCM7445 is just one of the first of many steps to consumers watching UltraHD shows at home. New content, displays and delivery technologies will all be required for the new resolution, which is also known as 4K.
Broadcom expects its chip to be in volume production by the middle of next year, in time for mainstream UltraHD TVs that will probably hit the market for the late 2014 holiday season, said Joe Del Rio, associate product line manager at Broadcom. However, service providers, which will probably be the distributors of most of the gateways built with the BCM7445, may take longer to start sending UltraHD video to their subscribers, Del Rio said.