SysManBlog

Conference planning is like cat juggling

2009-05-08T07:49:00.000-07:00

“Good Lord - I've heard about this - cat juggling! Stop! Stop! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! How could there be a god that would let this happen?” -- Steve Martin, in "The Jerk"

Sometimes, that's what it has felt like putting the conference schedule together for Boston's June 22-24 SPTechCon. One speaker finds he can no longer make it, and you try to move another into that slot, but there's a conflict with a flight out, so that won't work. You end up having to move around six speakers to accommodate the one move, and no matter what you try, you end getting scratched or bitten. I believe planning out the architecture for an enterprise-wide SharePoint implementation is less complicated than this. (Probably not, but you see where I'm coming from!)

It all works out in the end, though, and I'm excited to say we've added some outstanding new sessions, which I'll be highlighting in the coming days. Three will be presented by Microsoft technical directors and a fourth brings back one of the most popular sessions from January's SPTechCon in Burlingame.

As if that's not reason enough to register right now, an early-bird discount expires Friday, May 8. That's today. Sign up for the conference now and save $330 off the price.

-- David

Microsoft Cloud May Exceed 200k Servers

2008-08-12T09:04:00.000-07:00

A video produced by Microsoft’s Environmental Sustainability group may have revealed how much weight the company is throwing behind its cloud computing initiative.

Long Zheng posted an item on his
I Started Something blog that allegedly disclosed Microsoft’s data center numbers and corresponding power consumption. With an eagle eye, Zheng took screen captures from the video of a status console that listed Microsoft’s servers from Amsterdam to Tukwila, Washington.

If Zheng’s report is accurate, Microsoft was running 15 data centers worldwide hosting 148,357 servers on 17,406 racks and consuming 72,500KW of power as of January. Roughly half of those servers were churning for Live Search, followed by Hotmail, and “other.”

Reports indicate that Microsoft is adding servers at a rate of 10,000 per month; the company may by now have installed its 200,000th server. That’s one big cloud.

-- David Worthington

More on Midori: Security

2008-08-05T09:46:00.000-07:00

The final piece of SD Times reporter David Worthington's exclusive, groundbreaking coverage of Microsoft's "Midori" operating system has been posted on sdtimes.com. The focus is security, and looks at how Microsoft is using memory access control to protect against privilege elevation attacks. Worthington was able to examine internal Microsoft documents on the operating system, which is conceived for a post-Windows world of high connectivity and cloud computing. The first part of his coverage looked at the technical features of Midori, while the second piece discusses a migration path from Windows platforms to the new Midori OS. There is great depth to the reporting, as SD Times is the only news organization to have seen the documentation. In this world of Internet journalism, every site has a Midori story up, but SD Times is the only site to have first-hand, in-depth knowledge of the project. It's fascinating reading.
-- David Rubinstein

http://www.sdtimes.com/link/32662

Rackspace IPO Will Be a Good Test

2008-08-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

Next Friday will be the first day that Rackspace shows up on the New York Stock Exchange. The company is expecting to raise around US$ 2 billion in its IPO, and most of that money is likely to be spent on expanding the company's already massive datacenters. The Rackspace IPO will be a very interesting bellwether for this troubled economy, and depending on how the stock ends its day next Friday, we'll see a great indicator for how the market feels about technology.
When VMware went public last year, it was the darling of tech. Today, it's still flying high, with 90 percent stakeholder EMC turning in big numbers. But the VMware IPO came in a very different economy. Today, we have crumbling housing markets, an oil price crisis, escalating inflation and a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Does that bode well for launching a tech company into the stock market? The truth is, no one really knows.
There are many ways the IPO could go. With share prices expected to be around $16, the company is not entering the game like Google or Amazon did back in the day. Rackspace's share prices probably won't inflate into triple digits, as tech stocks were wont to do in the late 90's. On the other side of the coin, Rackspace won't be using this newfound capital to install swimming pools and golden parachutes: the management of the company is only taking around 300,000 shares. That's because Rackspace has repeatedly reminded Wall Street that it's only coming to town for the investment, not the fame and fortune.
With Rackspace having built around $500 million in yearly revenues on just over $40 million worth of investment, it's exciting to think what the company could accomplish with $2 billion under its belt. It is very likely that Rackspace could become the name most synonymous with server hosting, just as Google has done with search and VMware has done with virtualization.
With all that dough coming in, one thing is for sure: whoever is selling servers and switches to Rackspace is going to be very happy in the coming months.
-- Alex Handy

Outages Could Give Amazon an Edge

2008-07-31T10:29:00.001-07:00

Amazon.com’s nearly eight-hour outage to its S3 cloud storage service on Sunday, July 20, might have irked some customers and made headlines, but in the end, it may be Amazon having the upper hand.
Analyst James Staten told Systems Management News that outages and issues with cloud computing should be expected because it is in its initial phases.
Staten said the cloud computing growing pain period may take several years, but there likely won’t be an exact point in time where all issues with cloud computing are cured. Maturity will happen on a company-by-company basis, he indicated.
“Amazon, being the first in the market, has the biggest target on their head,” Staten said. “They’ve had the biggest outages, and they’ve been working to address it. I expect they’ll be extremely resilient to these kinds of outages in the next year to year-and-a-half.”
As such, Amazon may have an advantage over other companies in the cloud computing market because they are taking their bumps and bruises right now. They will experience their outages, muck through their cloud computing initiation phase, and should learn from their mistakes to get a better feel for this whole cloud computing idea. When cloud computing becomes everywhere, Amazon will be way ahead of everyone in cloud maturity.
The key for Amazon is to keep making sure that these outages get smaller and smaller as time goes by, and their “emergency” response gets better and better. Smaller companies that are new to the cloud computing market, like Joyent and GridLayer, will also have their own bumps along the way, but don’t have the same exposure and “probably won’t end up in the New York Times,” as Staten said.
However, as the bigger corporations start partaking in cloud initiatives, they could well find themselves playing catch-up with Amazon.
-- Jeff Feinman

Microsoft's Plans for Post-Windows OS Revealed

2008-07-29T12:10:00.000-07:00

Life without Windows? Apparently, even Microsoft can conceive of such a time and place, and SD Times reporter David Worthington got a look at the company's plans to develop an operating system, code-named Midori, for the massively connected, high speed, powerful computing world in which we now live. The plans are detailed in three article; the first -- Microsoft's Plans for a Post-Windows Operating System, is up on the site. The others, which address migrating from the legacy OS to Midori and Microsoft's attention to heightened security, will be posted soon.
-- David Rubinstein

Spammer Slips Out of Slammer

2008-07-24T13:03:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Colorado said that Edward Davidson, known as the "spam king," has escaped from a minimum security federal prison camp. Davidson was serving a 21-month term for sending out large volumes of spam designed to mislead recipients into handing over their information and money. He was convicted of tax evasion and falsifying information in e-mail pitches for "penny" stocks.

Apparently, he lasted only two months in prison before escaping. Prison guards said he escaped when his wife was leaving the prison after visiting him. He somehow made a run for it and drove off with his wife in their car. He has been in “escape” status since Sunday.

-- Michelle Savage

Is Google Digg-ing for Gold?

2008-07-23T12:11:00.000-07:00

Rumors that Google is close to acquiring social voting site Digg have resurfaced, with multiple sources hinting that the companies are close to signing a deal.

The latest buzz is that a letter of intent was signed on a deal that is worth about $200 million. But are the rumors true? Bloggers and analysts have been wagging their tongues about Google buying Digg for over a year. And today’s rumors are based on several unnamed Google insiders—neither Google nor Digg has confirmed the deal.

At this point, there’s little more to do than wait for more concrete evidence that the deal will go down. And, for fun, we can speculate on what Google will do with Digg. The combination of Digg and Google News would be a nifty mix, but any efforts made by Google to combine it with online advertising may be subject to a huge Digg community can of whup-ass.

--Michelle Savage

Defcon 2

2008-07-21T12:36:00.000-07:00

Every year at about this time, we hear about the amazing new exploits and tools that will be shown off at Black Hat. To a lesser extent, there’s discussion of what will be shown at Defcon, though, typically, that show tends to be 15 presentations on how to use Wireshark mixed with political talks about copyright and legal hacking. In years past, we’ve seen Joanna Rutkowska’s introduction of the red pill and blue pill (vitrualization as trojan platform), Greg Hoglund show off his World of Warcraft attacks, and H.D. Moore discussing Metasploit’s many uses.

Despite the illustrious past of Black Hat and Defcon, this year’s show is shaping up to be one of the most dangerous ever. Between Rutkowska’s updated pills, Dan Kaminsky’s much ballyhooed DNS attacks, and the recent revelation that Kris Kaspersky will be unveiling processor-based attacks sometime in October, this should be one of the most eventful falls in computer security since the Legion of Doom first banged on virtual doors back in the 1980s.

Add to all of this the fact that Firefox 3 just arrived, making it a juicy target for hackers, and that almost every DNS server in the world has been patched within the last month, and you’ve got a recipe for the perfect storm. This fall, there really won’t be anyplace to hide. With the proper application of patches and security policies, it’s entirely possible to avoid all this strife, but the toughest part of staying up to date is keeping on top of the ever changing scene of exploitation. And with this August looking to be rife with new exploits, we’re all in for one hell of a ride.

-- Alex Handy

Google Trumps Microsoft as UK's Top Brand

2008-07-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

Score One for Google!

The 2008 Superbrand survey lists Google as the U.K.’s top brand for the first time, bumping Microsoft—last year’s winner—to second place.

Superbrands Top Ten
1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Mercedes-Benz
4. BBC
5. British Airways
6. Royal Doulton
7. BMW
8. Bosch
9. Nike
10. Sony

Apple came in at #11.

-- Michelle Savage

Apple Wants to Shut Psystar Down

2008-07-17T11:44:00.001-07:00

Apple filed a 16-page lawsuit in federal court demanding that Psystar Corporation, a small computer maker marketing Intel-based systems with Mac OS X preinstalled, recall all the systems it has sold. Why? Because Apple said that Psystar violated numerous copyright, trademark, breach-of-contract and unfair competition laws when they preinstalled Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) on the desktop and server systems they sell (called Open Computer and OpenServ).

“Apple has never authorized Psystar to install, use or sell the Mac OS software on any non-Apple-labeled hardware,” the filing said.

Apple further demanded that Psystar hand over all profits made from selling computers with Leopard, and stop selling the systems immediately. Ouch.

-- Michelle Savage

Live Mesh Moves from Private to Public Beta

2008-07-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

Microsoft yesterday made its software plus services platform, Live Mesh, available to anyone in the United States with a Windows Live ID—no invitation required.

The Live Mesh service allows users to share data among multiple Windows computers, and via the Internet. Users add documents to the “mesh,” which is an online storage facility, and then access them from another computer online. Live Mesh is an example of Microsoft’s Software Plus Services strategy, which combines on-premise software with cloud computing technology.

Since April, Microsoft has reserved Live Mesh registrations for those with an invitation, but now it’s open to anyone who wants to use it in its early stages. Microsoft said there is no waiting list at this time but will restrict the number of public beta testers.

-- Michelle Savage

Sys Admin Gone Wild

2008-07-16T10:34:00.000-07:00

An IT network administrator working for the city of San Francisco was jailed for locking up a multimillion-dollar city computer system that handles sensitive data, and he is now holding the password hostage.

San Francisco police arrested Terry Childs, an employee of the city’s Department of Technology, for improperly tampering with computer systems and causing a denial of service. Now he is the only one who can get into the network. He also set up devices to gain unauthorized access to the system.

Police believe Childs set up a secret password, giving him exclusive access to the city’s new FiberWAN (wide area network), which includes city payroll and law enforcement records. On Sunday, he was arrested and charged with four counts of tampering with a city-owned computer network. Over the course of the past few days, he has given police fake passwords and refuses to give up the real one.

No one knows exactly why Childs locked up the system. However, the kicker on this story is that San Francisco is continuing to pay his $126,000 annual salary, although it is planning to decide whether he will be placed on “unpaid leave” this week. Hmmmm…..Does jail time count as unpaid leave?

-- Michelle Savage

The Anti-Virus Scam

2008-07-10T13:51:00.000-07:00

I have a very close friend who relies on me constantly for Windows tech support. Not that I know anything about Windows, or that I like to fix his machine all the time. But as he constantly reminds me, even though I shun Windows and only use the platform for gaming, I still know a lot more about it than he does.
My friend has an iMac that dual boots, thanks to my setting it up that way for him. He really only ever uses the Windows side, and then, only to play Pirates of the Burning Sea, an online role-playing game in which he runs a band of British sailors. My friend is a huge sailing buff, and got out of the army a few years ago, so he's a big fan of being the leader of a squad of other players in the game.
When I first went over to set up his system, I made a point of bookmarking some useful sites for him, after I downloaded Firefox for him. I bookmarked Hulu, Surfthechannel.com, and Youtube so he could watch things online. I bookmarked his bank. And I'm not ashamed to admit that I had a few favorite porn sites in there too. Knowing what a meathead my buddy is, I figured I'd better show him how to find decent porn, and not the sort that demands credit cards or infects your systems.
My bachelor friend was coasting along fine for a while. His graphics card drivers kept going bad, but a quick reinstall of those made everything OK. Then, I got the dreaded phone call.
“I think I have a virus or something. It keeps telling me I am infected.”
After fruitlessly attempting to walk him through a few first solutions, I had to go over to his apartment in the Haight to fix the problem.
What happened? Despite my bookmarking a very simple-to-use porn site, my numbskull friend had clicked on an ad along the right side of the site, where it clearly states “Our Advertisers.” I'm sure one of the ads told him “someone in San Francisco wants to have sex with you!” and he dutifully clicked, hoping for some kind of free love.
The end result was that he downloaded an application. An anti-virus application. Or so he thought. The app is called Advanced Anti-Virus, and it's the digital equivalent of a slap in the face; each time he boots, this horrible program tells him he's infected and he needs to use the program to disinfect. When he runs the “disinfect,” another window comes up asking for a credit card number and some personal information. It says he needs to buy the “Pro” version, which is another way of saying he needs to send his credit card info to some awful scammers in Malaysia.
I looked up the company behind this application. The only thing I could find was a domain registration under the name Cindy Chan, with the following phone number: +1-415-1234567
My friend is now looking into ways to track down these people, knock on their door, and confront them. I am quite inclined to help him in this endeavour, as I think it could be a good business model.
I'm certainly not in favor of the death penalty for bloggers, virus writers and such, as Iran is now proposing.
But I am absolutely in favor of stopping everyone associated with Advanced Anti-Virus. They're not experimenting like a virus writer. They're not political prisoners, or researchers trying to help the world. They're just a bunch of Internet thugs, and they deserve swift and painful justice.

-- Alex Handy

Yahoo Says You're the BOSS

2008-07-10T11:43:00.000-07:00

Yahoo has launched its Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) platform, giving third-party developers and companies a way to create their own Web search engine, using Yahoo’s search infrastructure and technology. Yahoo would require the developers to run their ads along with the search result pages generated through this service.
This seems like an obvious attempt to extend Yahoo’s reach on the Web, and nab a little bit of the market share from Google. BOSS looks a lot like a Google tool that allows Web sites to customize their search engine to deliver results that are more relevant to their users.

-- Michelle Savage

Angry customers

2008-07-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

In the world of journalism, we don't usually talk about customers. We mention subscribers, readers, letter writers and the occasional angry flame sender. But customers are rarely mentioned, primarily because we don't think of our readers as customers. So much of the publishing industry is about building a community of readers, of people interested in the same subject.
But today, something happened that got me thinking about customers from another perspective. I recently wrote, as a freelancer, a piece for a local metropolitan magazine. The piece focused on a local art scene and its use of recycled materials. I interviewed three local artists and told their stories. One of these artists made tables out of salvaged wood.
Now, I write a lot of things every day. Once I've finished something, I generally remove it from my mind, to the point that, unless there is a byline, I sometimes cannot even remember if I wrote the piece I am reading. I finished this art piece about three months ago, so I forgot most of what I put in it.
So when I received an angry e-mail from the table maker today, my first reaction was to expect that I'd goofed up somewhere along the line.
The e-mail accused my article of identifying the table makers as furniture recyclers, and associating them with a local salvage shop. I'm sure there have been far more egregious errors in the history of western civilization, but to this husband and wife table team, this was tantamount to murdering their first born.
I decided not to respond just yet, to wait to hear from my editor. When my editor did get in touch with me, I apologized for the mistake immediately, saying that I thought I'd said they used salvaged wood, not salvaged furniture to make their tables.
My editor responded by telling me that, in fact, the piece did say salvaged wood, and was 100 percent factually correct. What the table makers were upset about was the picture the magazine's photographer had taken of them outside a local salvage shop, with which they had no affiliation.
These people stood out there for the pictures and said nothing about how inappropriate the setting was for the image.
And yet, here I've spent all morning fretting over an error that wasn't my fault. I suddenly understood exactly what it feels like to be the head of IT support when an executive comes rushing down to scream about a lack of a floppy drive in his machine.

-- Alex Handy

A Digg-y-back Ride

2008-07-08T12:25:00.000-07:00

My colleague Alex Handy has written an interesting look at Digg, the news site on which readers decide the stories that gain prominence. Well, the people who have Digg-ed (dugg?) Alex's story on Digg must have noticed that it was a pretty popular read, because in the comments section, they are posting links to other articles -- some taking a contrarian point of view, and others that have little or nothing to do with the topic itself.
Let it now be known forever that the practice of riding the popularity of a story on Digg to promote another story shall be known as "Diggy-backing."

-- David Rubinstein

Microsoft Backs Icahn's Call for New Yahoo Board

2008-07-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

Just when we thought the dust had settled, the Microsoft-Yahoo drama continues.

A lot happened today.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn revealed that he is in talks with Microsoft about the potential acquisition of Yahoo if its current board is ousted at the upcoming Aug. 1 annual meeting.

Microsoft released a statement supporting Icahn's effort to unseat Yahoo!'s board and replace CEO Jerry Yang.

And Yahoo retaliated with a statement of its own, saying that it strongly opposes the Microsoft—Icahn plan of action.

In Icahn’s letter, he said that he and Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer have met several times to discuss "a transaction to purchase the Search function with large financial guarantees or, in the alternative, the whole company." By replacing the current board with members who are open to negotiations with Microsoft, Icahn said the Microsoft deal would move along smoothly, as it would prevent Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang from being able to "botch up" future negotiations.

Microsoft confirmed that the deal could move forward if the board is replaced. “We confirm, however, that after the shareholder election Microsoft would be interested in discussing with a new board a major transaction with Yahoo!, such as either a transaction to purchase the “Search” function with large financial guarantees or, in the alternative, purchasing the whole company,” said the company in a statement.

Yahoo said today: "Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Icahn have teamed up in an apparent effort to force Yahoo! into selling to Microsoft its search business at a price to be determined in a future 'negotiation' between Mr. Icahn's directors and Microsoft's management. We feel very strongly that this would not lead to an outcome that would be in the best interests of Yahoo!'s stockholders. If Microsoft and Mr. Ballmer really want to purchase Yahoo!, we again invite them to make a proposal immediately. And if Mr. Icahn has an actual plan for Yahoo! beyond hoping that Microsoft might actually consummate a deal which they have repeatedly walked away from, we would be very interested in hearing it."

Microsoft said it was "premature" to discuss details of any future negotiation for Yahoo.

-- Michelle Savage

David Caminer, World's First Systems Analyst Dies at 92

2008-07-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

David Caminer, who first discovered how use a computer for business purposes, died on June 19 in London at the ripe age of 92.

In 1951, before IBM was even an idea, Caminer was one of the brains behind LEO (short for Lyons Electronic Office), the world’s first business computer, a distinction certified by Guinness World Records. It was 16 feet long with 6,000 valves and could store more than 2,000 words. Yes, this was a big deal back then. In fact, it was a major breakthrough in business practice, and he was promoted to director of LEO computers. New Scientist best summed up this accomplishment: “In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet.”

As his career advanced in the 1970s, he lived in Luxembourg as project director for the installation of a computer and communications system for the European Community.

Caminer was widely respected as a pioneer of business computing and will forever be remembered as the world’s first systems analyst.

-- Michelle Savage

Heads in the Clouds

2008-06-25T14:15:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended Cloud Camp, an impromptu conference in San Francisco that focused on cloud computing. The event was thrown together in three weeks and took advantage of a large number of Web admins, developers, movers and shakers being in town for other shows. This was an unconference, a term coined years back at BarCamp, a collaborative get together that was created to show up O’Reilly’s exclusive Foo Camp. That means there were no scheduled talks or keynotes, only a big paper grid, some sharpies, and lots of enthusiastic folks to talk and ask questions.

When the attendees had announced their proposed sessions and placed them in the grid of times and meeting spaces, the 300 or so attendees filed out and went to chat about what exactly cloud computing is. And the resounding conclusion reached by most was that Cloud is the new SOA. And that’s not a good thing.

The first talk I attended was supposed to be about cloud architecture. Hurrah, I thought, let’s hear about how you open an account with Dell and get those servers into the grid 10 minutes after you unbox them. But, no, the talk ended up being a lengthy product pitch, veiled in a thin smear of “what’s in a cloud stack.” It quickly descended into the leader extolling the benefits of a cloud-based markup language used to describe system stacks. Of course, this was the lead engineer behind said markup language, and it was also the primary product of his startup.

Strike one.

Next, I attended a talk on using Ruby in the cloud, though the talk was ostensibly about reaching 1 billion page-views a month. This discussion focused on the success LinkedIn had using Joyent to host its Facebook application. All I got from this discussion, aside from some excellent Ruby speed tips, was the distinct feeling that I’m missing out on the gold rush taking place inside Facebook applications.

Strike two.

The most interesting part of the evening for me wasn’t the talks, though I hear Google’s Kevin Marks actually managed to spark up a good session, and that Amazon’s Web Services guys were there to listen to complaints. My night was capped off by a lengthy discussion with an unabashed, unashamed venture capitalist. We chatted for a long time about where the money could be made in the cloud. His conclusion was that there would eventually be big roles for middle-men. I called them integrators, but he wasn’t so confident in that term.

Foul tip, just down the third base line.

The trouble with the cloud, right now, is that it’s being used to describe a number of different types of systems. There’s the Google-Amazon system, where you build a non-critical application and host it inside the massive grid of computers at these Web companies. That’s what Cloud is supposed to mean. The other cloud, however, is the internal cloud. It’s a term used to describe a massive grid inside a company, where individual applications are provisioned, allocated, and dynamically resized to take advantage of a slice of this big grid. It’s a commodity in the basement that’s squeezed into injection-molded case scenarios.

Hmmm, sounds an awful lot like service-oriented architecture, doesn’t it? SOA can mean internal systems, connecting and chatting like we always wanted them to, but were never able to accomplish. Or, SOA can mean bringing in SaaS and tools from outside and tying them to internal systems. They’re almost exact opposites. But then, they aren’t at all. They just vie for the same resources, attention and standards. Yet making the Subversion server talk to the change management server is almost entirely unlike making Salesforce.com talk to your company’s exchange server.

And yet, they’re very similar. As similar as, say, two clouds. Shapes and forms, speeds and purposes aren’t the real meat of a cloud. The meat is in the viewer. What do you see in that cloud? Oh, Winnie the Pooh! And that one? A rain storm.

If my new VC friend is right, the clouds will soon be filling up with folks who can fill in the mortar between applications, servers and cloud hosts. Not unlike the wildly large ecosystem of SOA tools and products that sprouted up over the last three years, cloud computing will likely become a super buzz word, if it hasn’t already. It’ll be the place where we start to find new standards, new innovations, and new three-letter acronyms.

Let’s just hope that this time, there’s fewer standards involved. The last thing we need right now is a new set of WS*.

-- Alex Handy

Top 10 Reasons for Continuous Data Protection

2008-06-23T14:21:00.000-07:00

At last week's HP confab in Las Vegas, FalconStor executive Peter Eicher gave a talk called "Ten Reasons You Need Continuous Data Protection."

FalconStor sells a solution in this area, and a few of the tips were product-centric, such as the flexibility to use any storage device or protocol you choose. Others, however, were more general in nature and address some issues regarding data backup and recovery.

Continuous data protection gives multiple recovery points, and moves away from the once-a-day practice of backing up data. "It's the single overriding reason" people adopt CDP, Eicher said. But there is the issue of data integrity to consider. Using what Eicher termed "full CDP," users are continually capturing data, so in the event of a disaster, nothing is lost. However, recovery time can be quite long. "Near CDP," he said, allows for snapshots of the data at regular intervals, making recovery quicker, but introducing the possibility of data loss, if something was written to the server between the last snapshot and the failure. "How bad is it if you miss a few transactions? If each order is for a million dollars, you don't want to miss any," he said.

Eicher also spoke about the benefits of server virutalization beyond simple consolidation, and how the technology can aid in backup and recovery. If you're running 10 virtual machines on one physical machine, you can issues at backup of CPU, memory and I/O capacity. FalconStor's approach to CDP lets users back up at the disk level, not the host level, so the impact is greatly reduced. And, from a recovery standpoint, you can have one VM standing in for 100 physical servers, and each can recover boot images from the CDP device. No longer is data recovery a one-to-one deal, Eicher noted.

CDP, he said, also helps organizations get rid of tape at remote offices, where the person in charge of changing tapes is usually not an IT worker, where tapes often get jammed, or can get lost in shipment back to headquarters, or he goes on vacation and no backup is done while he's gone. Using CDP, the data is kept on the box and replicated back to the data center, where it can then be transferred to tape storage.

At the conference, Eicher said he heard a unique use of CDP – one company was doing CDP for virus scanning. "Live scanning slows down the e-mail server a lot," he said. "By taking a snapshot of the e-mail server and running the virus scan against it, there's no impact to the live server. If a virus is found in one mailbox, you go right to it, without having to scan every mailbox. I thought that was a pretty interesting application of CDP."

-- David Rubinstein

Meep! Meep! IBM's Roadrunner Most Powerful Supercomputer

2008-06-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

The TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was released at the International Supercomputing Conference this week. And IBM hogged the top slots. The chipmaker claimed first place. And second. And third.

IBM's "Roadrunner" supercomputer won the title of the world's most powerful supercomputer. The Roadrunner, which is installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, achieved a peak performance of 1.026 petaFLOPS, running past IBM's BlueGene L and P systems to claim first place.

Roadrunner is a hybrid processor that combines Cell Broadband Engine with AMD's Opteron dual-core processors, making it one of the most energy-efficient on the list.

The former holder of the title, Blue Gene/L at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory, came in second this year with a performance of 478.2 teraFLOPS. IBM also grabbed third place with the Team Blue Gene/P system at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Lab in Chicago.

Also at the top of list were Sun's SunBlade x6420 "Ranger" system at the University of Texas, and the Cray Xt4 "Jaguar" system at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee.

While IBM claimed the top slots, Intel continued to dominate the list, with Intel processors now found in 75 percent of the TOP500 supercomputers, up from 70.8 percent of the 30th list released last year.
-- Michelle Savage

Mozilla: Firefox Downloads Surpass 8 Million

2008-06-19T10:23:00.000-07:00

Mozilla claimed a new download record for the release of Firefox 3.0 yesterday. It said that the newest version of the Firefox Web browser was downloaded more than 8 million times in the first 24 hours it was available.
Firefox devotees united in an attempt to set a world record for most software downloads in a single day. The category is new, and not yet certified by Guinness World Records, but it is expected to be approved this week.
The Tuesday release was delayed more than an hour as eager users checking for the new release overloaded Firefox's Web servers. To further complicate things, the site was slow or unreachable for about two hours just before the scheduled release time. Fortunately, the servers recovered and users were able to download nearly on schedule.
And download they did! During peak periods, servers were accommodating more than 9,000 downloads per minute. Within 24 hours, Firefox 3.0 was downloaded 8.3 million times, beating Mozilla’s prediction of 5 million downloads.
So what’s the big deal with this release? It includes enhancements to help users organize their favorite Web sites and block access to sites known to distribute malicious software. It also allows Yahoo mail users to use Firefox 3 to send e-mail by clicking a "mailto" link they might come across when clicking on a name, or a "contact us" link on a Web page. Before, these links could only open a standalone, desktop e-mail program. Firefox 3 also offers new design and speed improvements.

-- Michelle Savage

Noise on the Game Networks

2008-06-18T18:00:00.000-07:00

As a video game enthusiast who landed a PlayStation 3 last Christmas, it’s been great to finally play games on the PlayStation Network. No longer do I have to stick with my PC for all my online gaming. It’s great to play a few rounds of Call of Duty 4 or Grand Theft Auto IV instead of being forced to rotate between DOTA and Day of Defeat.

Playing on the PSN is also my third major exposure to in-game voice chat, but the first time facing the notorious, oft-reported world of profane people (often children) heckling and cursing you out when playing them.

This is not news at all to anyone who’s ever played online, but I find it a hilarious phenomenon anyway. Before PSN, it was rare for me to encounter a chatter who would explode or otherwise disrupt the in-game voice chats by spamming noise so that nobody else could be heard. Usually, if anyone got out of hand, an admin could just step in and mute their Vent/Steam voice chat, and that would be that.

The servers I played on, which tended to be large and well organized, could be counted on to police that kind of behavior effectively. As such, the worst I ever encountered was someone playing their Casio keyboard into their mic, which brought back fond memories of my youth and my own keyboard. I wish I could remember that fellow’s name…

Anyway, the PSN is quite different. There are no admins and there are no organized servers; it’s just you and whoever else is out there randomly thrown together. I haven’t encountered too many voice chatters in GTAIV yet, but CoD4 provided a lot of material.

It’s probably not rocket science to figure out that the reason this kind of behavior is pervasive is because of anonymity. When you’re a 24-year-old playing in your own home, who is really going to discipline you for cracking racist jokes while waiting for a game to start? Who is really going to care, for that matter? Gamers have gone past the point where hearing a 10-year-old fling every curse in the book at you is anything special. It’s part of the landscape, and I think many of us find it fun.

So, if some kid in Tekonsha, Mich. wants to throw every slur up on the wall in Madden or NCAA Football, I say fire away, son.

-- Adam LoBelia

Coffee break-ing news

2008-06-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

While the Internet has made journalism a lot easier--thanks to e-mail, information repositories and endless streams of PDF formatted research reports--it's also made writing about something unique more difficult. Take, for example, my desire to write a new blog posting today on something I found on the BugTraq mailing list. When Craig Wright, manager for risk advisory services at BDO Kendalls Pty. Ltd., sent out a message to the ubiquitous BugTraq yesterday, stating that he could hack his coffee maker, I was naturally intrigued.
The run-down is as follows: The Jura Impressa F90 is a super high-end coffee machine that offers an optional Internet connection kit. Wright, naturally, threw some attacks at the thing and discovered that it ran Windows XP. He also discovered that he could take over the OS with remote attacks. What can you do with a hacked coffee machine? Well, you can make it spit out more water than the cup will hold, making a black puddle nearby. Or, you can spin the dials on all the coffee maker settings so that it essentially crashes when trying to make a cup of joe.
Oh, and there's no way to patch the thing to prevent these vulnerabilities.
Naturally, this is the sort of exciting story we here at Systems Management News would love to report on, just for giggles. It would even be worth getting ahold of Mr. Wright for an interview.
Unfortunately, because this is the Internet, the story has already been posted on Slashdot, Digg, Boingboing, and a host of other sites around the Web. Therefore, I felt that it would be relatively pointless for me to even mention the thing here.
Of course, I just did. It's hard not to get all reportery, when people go plugging their kitchen appliances into the Internet. Up until now, the only Internet-connected appliances I've ever seen were a refrigerator at Microsoft's headquarters (A strange and out-of-place steel affair sitting in a visitor center, alone in the waiting area), and the NetBSD project's seminal toaster. Anyone who's been to a conference where NetBSD had a booth has seen this thing: It's a red multi-slice toaster with an LED screen pasted onto the side. The fact that this contraption actually ran NetBSD really made no difference to the toaster: it still toasted in the normal fashion. But the fundamental point of that kitchen appliance was to prove that NetBSD can, in fact, run on just about anything.
So, now that we've cleared all this up, I'm off to make some good old-fashioned tea by putting water inside of a metal pot and placing it on top of an open flame. And while I may still have to worry about finding original stories to report in this competitive news industry, at least I won't have to worry about someone hitting up my beverage with a buffer overflow.

-- Alex Handy