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Amazon Goes To Court
Amazon is suing Daniel Powers, its ex VP in charge of global sales for Amazon Web Services because he joined Google in a cloud role.
Taking the new job, asserts Amazon, violates Powers’ non-compete agreement with Amazon, which let Powers go this summer with a reasonable severance package.
There is a risk that Powers could take important information that he learned about the Amazon web services business to its rival, Google, and that is what the firm is seeking to stop.
According to Geekwire Amazon wants an injunction against Powers to prevent him from “engaging in any activities that directly or indirectly support any aspect of Google’s cloud computing business”.
A court filing claims that Amazon has an agreement with Powers that says he will not join a rival for a “limited time following the termination of his employment”.
Powers, it warns, is a veteran who knows the cloud business from “top to bottom”, adding that he has “acquired and currently possesses extensive knowledge of Amazon’s trade secrets and its highly confidential information”.
The complaint says that he has extensive and detailed information about Amazon Web Services’ prospects, business, potential business partners, pricing strategies and goals.
Amazon has not provided us with further comment.
Is A Cyber Warfare On The Horizon?
F-secure’s chief security researcher, Mikko Hypponen, has warned that we are entering into a cyber warfare revolution, and that governments will soon attempt to outdo each other based on their computer weapons’ prowess.
The internet security expert said-any future crisis between technically advanced nations will involve cyber elements.
His comments came after hearing last week that China and the US have been engaging in “war games” simulations.
“I wasn’t expecting [war games] so soon,” Hypponen said.
“I’m surprised and I think it is a good move because everybody is worried about escalation. The way to fight unnecessary escalations is that you know more about how the perceived enemy would act if there would be an escalation. War games are exactly that.”
It was Hypponen’s observations on the war games which led him to remark that we must look at “the bigger picture”.
“We’ve seen a revolution in defence technology and in technology generally over the past 60 to 70 years and I believe we are right now seeing the beginning of the next revolution: a cyber warfare revolution, which is going to as big as the revolutions we’ve seen so far in technology becoming part of defence, and part of wars,” he added.
Hypponen also predicted that it won’t be long before the world sees its first cyber arms race, including cyber war rehearsals to prove how strong countries are and boasting about their cyber skills to make other countries pay attention.
“Like nuclear in the sixties, cyber attacks are a deterrent and deterrents only work if your perceived enemies know that you have it,” he said.
Rackspace Goes Openstack
Rackspace has finally deployed an Openstack based cloud, playing down claims that it benefits the most from the alliance.
Rackspace is one of the leaders of the Openstack alliance, an open source cloud initiative that aims to break Amazon’s stranglehold on the industry by offering open application programmable interfaces (APIs). Until now Openstack has largely been all talk, but Rackspace has deployed a production Openstack cloud that the firm claims will help it sell Openstack to the enterprise.
Fabio Torlini, VP of cloud at Rackspace said the firm has been “going flat out to make the code production ready”. Torlini said Rackspace’s decision to deploy an Openstack based cloud could be a tipping point in deployment. “It’s going to be the catalyst for many other companies deploying Openstack,” said Torlini.
Rackspace has been the largest contributor to Openstack and the fact that it has the first major Openstack deployment support claims that Rackspace is getting the most out of Openstack.
However Torlini said, “For us, we’re able to be the first one to launch a large scale Openstack compute platform because, yes, we are one of the main providers of the original code and we are a founder of Openstack, so we have tried to develop Openstack as a neutral foundation and it is a foundation to provide a service to all its members. But we’re lucky enough to be one of the founder members, to be able to drive it, and get there [deployment] first.”
Torlini defended Rackspace’s role in the Openstack alliance, claiming the strong leadership shown by the firm is good for the community. Torlini said, “Openstack is beneficial to the product itself but that’s the whole point. The whole idea of many more providers going onto Openstack helping develop the Openstack cloud, helping advance the actual products and code is the whole point of Openstack. On the counter side of that argument is if it’s beneficial for us it is just as beneficial for any other member of Openstack because they have access to the same code and they are able to provide.”
Torlini admitted that Openstack and the community is an advantage for the firm but claimed it wasn’t possible for Rackspace to dominate. “You have companies in Openstack that are far larger than Rackspace enabled to put much more resources into Openstack as well, it’s impossible for us to dominate Openstack – it’s an independent foundation. Is it advantageous from a product perspective? I should damn well hope so,” said Torlini.
Are Cloud Services A Risk?
Security experts have warned that the cloud could suffer the same kind of collapses that plague the financial system. Bryan Ford at Yale University in New Haven says that the full risks of this migration have yet to be explored. Complex systems, such as the Cloud, can fail in many unexpected ways and outlines various simple scenarios in which a cloud could come unstuck.
He said that a cloud could experience a full meltdown that could threaten any business. Ford said that while individual systems on a cloud might play nice, if you have other application providers in the same cause problems for another. He came up with a scenario were two conflicting load balancing programs operate with the same refresh period and when these periods coincide, the control loops start sending the load back and forth between the virtual servers in a positive feedback loop.
He said that “This simplistic example might be unlikely to occur in exactly this form on real systems—or might be quickly detected and “?xed” during development and testing—but it suggests a general risk.” Ford said that similar problems happened during ?nancial industry crashes.
Do You Trust Data-recovery Providers?
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Data-recovery service providers are tasked with saving important data for you when something goes wrong — a drive crashes or storage device is dropped, and no backup is available. But do you trust them with the important data you let them recover or could they actually be a source for a data breach?
A survey of 769 IT professionals published this week finds those surveyed need to find out more about the third-party data-recovery services their organizations use. For example, according to the survey, 67% felt that encryption they had in place protected their organizations from data loss or theft during the data recovery process. But encryption keys are often handed over to the third-party data recovery service provider as part of the process, according to the study done by Ponemon Institute.
Ponemon’s “Trends in Security of Data Recovery Operations” report says of the 87% of survey respondents who said their organization had at least one data breach in the past two years, “21% say the breach occurred when a drive was in the possession of a third-party data service provider.”
The First PC Had a Birthday
The year was 1981 and IBM introduced its IBM PC model 5150 on August 12th, 30 years ago today.
The first IBM PC wasn’t much by today’s standards. It had an Intel 8088 processor that ran at the blazing speed of 4.77MHz. The base memory configuration was all of 16kB expandable all the way up to 256kB, and it had two 5-1/4in, 160kB capacity floppy disk drives but no hard drive.
A keyboard and 12in monochrome monitor were included, with a colour monitor optional. The 5150 ran IBM BASIC in ROM and came with a PC-DOS boot diskette put out by a previously unknown startup software company based out of Seattle named Microsoft.
IBM priced its initial IBM PC at a whopping $1,565, and that was a relatively steep price in those days, worth about $5,000 today, give or take a few hundred dollars. In the US in 1981 that was about the cost of a decent used car.
Because the IBM PC was meant to be sold to the general public but IBM didn’t have any retail stores, the company sold it through US catalogue retailer Sears & Roebuck stores.
Subsequently IBM released follow-on models through 1986 including the PC/XT, the first with an internal hard drive; the PC/AT with an 80286 chip running at 6MHz then 8MHz; the 6MHz XT/286 with zero wait-state memory that was actually faster than the 8MHz PC/AT and (not very) Portable and Convertible models; as well as the ill-fated XT/370, AT/370, 3270 PC and 3270/AT mainframe terminal emulators, plus the unsuccessful PC Jr.
IBM Debuts Fast Storage System
IBM
With an eye toward helping tomorrow’s data intensive organizations, IBM researchers have developed a super-fast storage system capable of scanning in 10 billion files in 43 minutes.
This system easily bested their previous system, demonstrated at Supercomputing 2007, which scanned 1 billion files in three hours.
Key to the increased performance was the use of speedy flash memory to store the metadata that the storage system uses to locate requested information. Traditionally, metadata repositories reside on disk, access to which slows operations.
“If we have that data on very fast storage, then we can do those operations much more quickly,” said Bruce Hillsberg, director of storage systems at IBM Research Almaden, where the cluster was built. “Being able to use solid-state storage for metadata operations really allows us to do some of these management tasks more quickly than we could ever do if it was all on disk.”
IBM foresees that its customers will be grappling with a lot more information in the years to come.
“As customers have to store and process large amounts of data for large periods of time, they will need efficient ways of managing that data,” Hillsberg said.
For the new demonstration, IBM built a cluster of 10 eight-core servers equipped with a total of 6.8 terabytes of solid-state memory. IBM used four 3205 solid-state Storage Systems from Violin Memory. The resulting system was able to read files at a rate of almost 5 GB/s (gigabytes per second).
nVidia’s Tegra 3 Coming To Smartphones
July 18, 2011 by admin
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It appears as though Nvidia’s next generation quad-core Kal-El (Tegra 3) quad core SoC will also show up on smartphones too. Originally, it was believed that the SoC would only support the ever growing tablet space.
Inside sources have confirmed that projects are already underway and that Tegra 3 aka Kal-El smartphones will be make a debut as well.
Nvidia had hoped to get a lot of play out of Tegra 2, unfortunately the chip was not as embraced as Nvidia had wanted. Even though the Tegra 2 SoC did manage to get a few design wins.
Acer Launches Sandy Bridge Notebooks
Acer updated its Timeline notebook series with Intel’s Sandy Bridge family of CPUs. The Timeline X series will come in three sizes, 13.3-inch, 14-inch and 15.6-inch and they are about an inch thick. Furthermore, the notebooks will be equipped with Acer’s PowerSmart Technology that is supposed to provide battery life of up to nine hours on models with integrated graphics and up to eight hours for those models with discrete graphics.
Tegra 3 Smartphones Being Developed By Motorola
April 27, 2011 by admin
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Many sources around the Internet are a buzz with news that Motorola is apparently developing a couple of smartphones using Nvidia’s Tegra 3 SoC processor.
One of the smart is being called the Bullet which features a 4.3-inch touchscreen, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage with a 12MP camera. The other phone is code named the Jet and is basically rhe same as the Bullet with a 4-inch screen and keyboard. The pair of phones are expected to debut in early 2012.