IT NEWS
Microsoft releases virtualization tools, sees gains against VMware
System center virtual machine
manager 2008 works with Microsoft's other management tools and
costs about one-third what VMware's virtual center does.
Four short months after Microsoft
released its new server virtualization technology, the company is
already making significant gains against competitors, and hopes to
add to the momentum with the release of new virtualization
management software to manufacturing.
Microsoft's announcement that it's releasing System Center Virtual
Machine Manager 2008 comes on the heels of an analyst report by
IDC -- underlining how Windows Server's installed base could help
Microsoft dominate the server virtualization market -- that found
Microsoft grabbed 23% of the server virtualization market last
quarter in terms of new deployments. VMWare vigorously disputes
IDC's findings.
The selling points for Microsoft's server virtualization stack are
its low cost and tight integration with the rest of the Microsoft
stack, Zane Adam, Microsoft's senior director of virtualization
strategy, said in an interview. Virtual Machine Manager, for
example, costs about one-third what VMware's VirtualCenter does.
Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor is an included installation option
for Windows Server 2008 and is integrated into Active Directory.
"We've always said virtualization is a feature of the operating
system," Adam said. Virtual Machine Manager 2008 can manage both
Microsoft and VMware virtual environments, and also manages the
physical machines underlying the virtual ones. "Everything we've
heard in the last few years was that the complexity of managing
the physical server and virtual machines separately adds more cost
than not, and it requires different training because you have to
learn different products," Adam said. "When you manage your
environment, you want to manage your environment. It shouldn't be
separate."
Among the important features of Virtual Machine Manager is one
called Performance and Research Optimization, or PRO. It enables
some automated management of both the hardware and software on a
machine, provided the servers are "PRO-enabled." For example, if a
company is running a virtual machine on a new Dell server and the
fan is about to fail, the server can proactively send an alert to
Virtual Machine Manager and react by off-loading the virtual
machine to another physical server.
In terms of momentum, Microsoft has signed up a bunch of new
customers, including Costco, Land O' Lakes, and Saxo Bank. Indiana
University plans to virtualize 90% of its workloads on Hyper-V by
the end of the year. Just yesterday, Adam met with a "very large
customer" that plans to virtualize tens of thousands of servers.
Adam rebuffed a question on VMware's recent Virtual Datacenter
Operating System announcement, essentially a distributed operating
system that relies on both on-premises software and cloud
computing to spread the main features of an operating system
across many servers, and hinted that Microsoft has something
similar or related up its sleeve.
"VMware is on the path where they're going to make virtualization
into an operating system, but the question is whether the world
needs yet another operating system," Adam said. "The idea of a
distributed operating system is something that has merit, and
you'll hear more about this from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer later
this month" at Microsoft's semiannual Professional Developers
Conference.
Though released to manufacturing, Virtual Machine Manager 2008
will be available for purchase Nov. 1 for $1,304, including two
years of Software Assurance, an option that provides upgrades
free. A suite of four System Center products that includes Virtual
Machine Manager also goes on sale in November for only slightly
more: $1,497, including two years of Software Assurance.
What are other companies are doing to make virtualization work?
InformationWeek has published an independent analysis of the
topic.
Source: Information week
Google releases
complete android open source project
Android is viewed as a way to escape the strictures of
more tightly controlled mobile platforms like Apple's iPhone,
Windows Mobile, Symbian, and BlackBerry.
Google recently released the Android Open Source Project, the
complete source code for its mobile phone platform.
"We've all put a lot of effort into the first Android device, and
I'm really happy with the way it turned out," said Google software
engineer Dave Bort in an online post. "But one device is just the
beginning. Android is not a single piece of hardware; it's a
complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work
on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there,
from the boot loader all the way up to the applications. And with
an Android device already on the market, it has proven that it has
what it takes to truly compete in the mobile arena."
Google is making the Android code available just as the first
Android mobile phones reach customers.
T-Mobile plans to begin selling the fist Android-based mobile
phone, the HTC T-Mobile G1, at its 699 Market Street store in San
Francisco on Tuesday at 6 p.m. PDT. Other T-Mobile locations plan
to offer the G1 on Wednesday at 8 a.m. PDT.
And next year, Sprint is expected to offer an Android mobile phone
and Motorola plans to make at least one. Among supporters of open
source software, Android is viewed as a way to escape the
strictures of more tightly controlled mobile platforms like
Apple's iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and BlackBerry. As one
person posting on the Google Android Developers forum on Google
Groups put it, "Today is a great day for developers who enjoy
freedom and developing with freedom in mind."
A report released earlier this month by ABI Research, titled "Smartphone
And OS Markets," argues that the Android platform could help
standardize smartphones and increase smartphone market share
beyond the current 14%. Google and members of the Open Handset
Alliance, a group of carriers, handset makers, and other vendors
committed to the Android platform, stand to benefit if more people
move from using phones primarily for voice and text communication
to browsing the Internet and using mobile-oriented applications.
Google has reported that iPhone users generate many times more
mobile search traffic than users of other phones and it foresees a
promising revenue stream from mobile search ads and application
use. Its hope is that Android phones, with a host of newly
developed mobile applications, will be a part of that future.
Source:
Information Week
IBM’s Next-Gen web
collaboration
The company unveiled its OpusUna
Web-conferencing platform at AJAXWorld; also, Sun touted the
upcoming JSF spec.
IBM is working on a Web-conferencing platform dubbed OpusUna,
which offers all participants the ability to collaborate using the
same Web pages and features audio and video. The AJAX-based
technology was discussed by IBM officials during a briefing at the
AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in San Jose, Calif. "Really, what
we're looking at is how I extend the whole concept of AJAX to
allow multiple-user interactions," said David Boloker, CTO in the
IBM Emerging Internet Technology Software Group.
"It's all about a next-generation collaboration capability where
you're really looking at how people interact with one another in a
very different way," Boloker said.
OpusUna enables participants to collaborate and communicate from
within the same browser space, incorporating widgets, audio, and
video cameras to display themselves on the screen. IBM envisions,
for example, collaboration on patient care via sharing of medical
images. Financial traders also could collaborate from around the
world.
The difference between OpusUna and other collaboration platforms
is with OpusUna, all participants can contribute content as
opposed to having one person serving as a presenter, IBM said.
Cooperative meetings can be held. The OpusUna software, which IBM
has deployed on a Linux system, pulls together the various parts
of a collaboration. It leverages HTML, JavaScript, and CSS; Flash
and Silverlight content could be brought in via a wrapped widget.
IBM is currently working with the Safari browser, but plans call
for extending the software to Internet Explorer and Mozilla
Firefox in the first quarter of 2009.
IBM plans to show OpusUna to customers in early 2009 before
deciding on how to proceed with the technology. The technology
arose out of the company's QEDWiki mashup project, providing a
next step that incorporates audio and video. OpusUna is so named
for a Latin expression for "work together" or "work as one,"
Boloker said. Also at AJAXWorld on Tuesday, the next generation of
JSF (JavaServer Faces), which is version 2.0, was noted. Due out
at the end of this year, JSF 2.0 features accommodations for AJAX
as well as other improvements, said Roger Kitain, staff engineer
for Java EE Engineering at Sun. An early draft review of JSF 2.0
is under way.
JSF features server-side components for building Web applications.
It offers client device independence. Developers can use various
render kits with JSF to determine, for example, how the
applications will render in a browser.
Featured in version 2.0 is AJAX standardization, Kitain said.
There are a lot of JSF AJAX frameworks, and each tries to solve
the same problem in different ways. "We'd like to standardize on
some common features in the specification," said Kitain.
A standard JavaScript API is being pondered for interaction with
JSF over AJAX. JSF and AJAX are being paired because JSF offers
server-side robustness, while AJAX offers rich Web application
capabilities, said Kitain. JSF proponents would like for
components developed in different JSF-AJAX frameworks, such as
Dynamic Faces and Ajax4jsf, to be more compatible, he said.
Developers could use multiple components within different
frameworks within the same Web application, Kitain said.
Version 2.0 also seeks to make it easier to develop custom
components by moving away from JavaServer Pages as JSF's view
technology and moving toward Facelets, Kitain said. Facelets, he
said, is more of a lightweight technology closer to HTML
syntax.Also planned for JSF 2.0 is use of Java annotations to ease
the burden of XML configurations; improved performance for the JSF
state-saving mechanism, which saves the state of the UI, is
another improvement.
Once JSF 2.0 is released, its proponents hope the new
specification is used both in applications and tools. There are
already two major implementations: Sun's Mojarra and Apache
MyFaces, Kitain said.
Source:
CIO
TRENDS
Security spending
to grow, will differ by region
Despite grim predictions for IT spending overall, spending on
security will continue to grow through 2009 across most industry
sectors, according to the Institute for Applied Network Security (IANS).
However, security needs and expenditures will differ between
geographic regions in the United States. These findings resulted
from two information security forums held by IANS in Boston and
Texas recently, for high-level security professionals and security
solution providers.
Many differences in security needs and expenditures "result from
organization maturation and market sector demands," IANS
co-founder Jack Phillips said. "For example a rail company in the
Southwest often conservative in nature and typically not an early
adopter -- has very different security concerns than leading
financial institutions, academia, or medical research
organizations in the Northeast."
IANS information security forums are about tactics and theory, and
real life experience, and are designed to let attendees learn more
about the security issues facing their peers. Generally, IANS
found that compliance remains a hot button for many organizations
across the country. Another is virtualization and its related
security concerns.
Overall, data protection remains the top priority, and most
organizations deploy encryption, which is the easiest approach to
data protection. Data loss prevention (DLP) is one area where
geographical differences emerge. "In the middle of the country,
most organizations are just now considering DLP technology, but,
on the East Coast, most organizations are now asking if they still
need it after making an initial purchase," Phillips said.
Intrusion detection and protection systems have been widely
adopted, and vendors have added so much functionality that IT
security executives, particularly in the Northeast, "wonder if
they can get away without spending money on DLP," Phillips said.
Source: Internet news
Where
will IT be in 2015?
You're ready to tackle the IT challenges of the next year, but
what's going to happen in the longer term? Researchers foresee the
technology in 2015 and Technobyte takes a look!
Hydrogen buses, robot-driven tanks, automatic speed control in
your car talking to intelligent traffic systems and cross-rail
might finally be taking commuters to work. Technology will have
changed a lot by 2015, and business technology will have changed
with it.
IT will be powering business and providing competitive advantage
but the really successful businesses will be the ones where IT
doesn't come from an IT team.
If you're getting a job in 2015 at the age of 21, you will have
been using the web and instant messaging since you could first
read text on screen, so the way you work will be different from
people who grew up with newspapers and handwritten letters. And
because you're happier working in a coffee bar than at a desk, you
might never squeeze onto a crowded hydrogen bus or into a
cross-rail carriage. The barriers between home and work will carry
on breaking down.
"In 2015, we won't see the end of spam and other attacks," says
Graham Cluley of Sophos, "because fundamentally it's not a
technology problem. The sad truth is that the weak link is the
human element. Humans can't be upgraded like operating systems, or
download patches, and will continue to make mistakes in 2015.
Indeed, threats like identity theft and fraud will still be
occurring hundreds of years into the future because of human
mistakes."
But we will have security that's a long way from passwords and
firewalls, according to Henrik Kiertzner, Associate Director for
Security and Risk Consulting, Arup. "We'll see the death of
in-house IT security. There is no way of protecting your data from
the key-ring multi-TB data stick, there is no way of preventing
access by the really determined across firewalls; hence, we'll
have private spaces with no external interfaces, tightly locked
down, for truly confidential information. Some private spaces will
be shared between communities of interest, and they'll be
invisible to the unauthorised. Instead of passwords we'll have
device and message-level encryption and security with more or less
real-time decryption and very robust authentication structures,
biometrically-based."
More mobile users, more collaboration, identity services, software
as a service; network demand is set to increase significantly.
Email volumes will carry on increasing, but other forms of
communication will grow too. "People under 25 don't send email,
they text or IM," says Peter Glock, Head of Solutions Development,
Orange Business Services.
Voice will still be significant, but most of it will be VOIP and
much of that will be on mobile networks. According to telecoms
research company analysis, nearly a quarter of all fixed and
mobile calls will go over mobile VOIP by 2015; these will be
premium services that include presence information and the ability
to send instant messages and multimedia as part of a voice
conversation.
Voice will also be an interface both to devices and to network
services, believes Alistair McKinnon, Senior Product Manager for
IP Multimedia, NTL Telewest Business. "We already have speech
recognition for dialing numbers in companies and on some mobile
phones, but by 2015 this will become far more like talking and
listening to a human. It will be the norm for speech to be used as
a control for all forms of man/machine interface in the home
controlling the TV, video, lights and the heating and in the
office voice will control the PC, PDA and mobile."
Voice recognition might happen on the device, but there will be
network services like real-time language translation, he said.
"You'll have natural speech recognition, translation and synthesis
into the target language and this could be packaged into a
Bluetooth-style earpiece." Social networks will be used for
finding experts and colleagues within business, and for sharing
information automatically. They may also help with what Arup's
Kiertzner calls "the massive handicap of a basically post-literate
population, largely unable to express selves verbally."
The 2015 equivalent of emoticons will try to convey tone and
emotional content, perhaps with animated avatars of your face
showing your mood and he suggests virtual worlds could move from
entertainment to business and training tools. A considerable
increase in business use of video will contribute to the 15
exabytes of data a month. Video will become one of the standard
ways of communicating information within the business for
visualising data sets, for training and for collaboration, with
high definition video conferencing and tele-presence.
Business users will be expecting high definition video at work,
because they'll be used to it at home. Consumer technology will
mean more experienced users but it will also set expectations.
Laptop screens won't be enough for the video people will be using;
Neilds believes that the 50" plasma screen, projector or active
wallpaper that will be common in the home will reach the office,
too.
By then, the processors in one's PC will have many cores, some of
them running standard PC programmes the way a dual-core CPU does
today, but the others will be dedicated cores for networking, VOIP,
media processing, 3D graphics rendering, physics processing,
handwriting and speech recognition, XML processing, security and
reliability scanning, encryption accelerators and other
specialized functions.
Expect fewer cores for desktop and mobile systems and far more on
the server. There will be a gigabyte or more memory on the chip,
acting as system memory and cache as necessary. Another billion
transistors in the CPU do nothing but manage the rest of the chip
to detect hardware failures and shift the work to another core.
The first optical interconnects within the chip speed this up.
The first indium antimonide transistors will be available in 2015,
using a tenth of the power of transistors in 2008, but they won't
have changed the power equation yet. A CPU will still use around
100W of power but with each core only getting a few watts. More
cores won't speed up existing applications the way faster
processors have done for years so software development will have
to shift from single threaded applications and memory locks to
speculative multi-threading and message passing.
IT is going to be a commodity, it will be seen like a light
switch, like a sealed off box you can't get into it.
Source: ITPRO
STUDIES
IT spending growing despite economy
Global IT spending is still growing, especially in emerging
markets, a report has shown.
Doom and gloom about an economic downturn is yet to hit global IT
spending, according to a new market report.
Around the world, the IT market will grow by 5.2 per cent to
€963.5 billion (£766.7 billion) this year, according to data from
the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO), a research
group supported by UK trade body Intellect.
Growth will continue next year, as the group predicted a rate of
5.6 per cent – which would push global turnover for computers,
services and software over the trillion euro mark for the first
time ever. “The weakening trend in the world economy has hardly
affected turnover in the high-tech sector,” said EITO’s Chairman
Bruno Lamborghini in a statement. Globally, services and software
will have higher growth than hardware - above six per cent for
both.
That split is echoed in the UK. This year, the UK will see an
increase in spending on overall IT by just 1.4 per cent to £59.3
billion. But it can expect stronger growth in software and
services, at 4.4 per cent and five per cent respectively.
“The UK ICT market is showing robust growth figures even in this
uncertain economic period,” said Carrie Hartnell, transformational
business programme manager at Intellect. She said that the 1992
downturn lead to IT budget cuts, but noted that this time around,
IT is being used to help drive efficiencies.
John Higgins, director general of Intellect, agreed: “The
technology industry enables other sectors of the economy to
deliver a better performance in a time of belt tightening.
Business are realising that technology-enabled processes can be a
lifejacket in choppy waters, not a weight around their ankles.”
While the UK is keeping its head above water, emerging markets are
booming. China, India and Russia can expect IT market growth rates
between 17 and 18 per cent, EITO said, noting that their overall
market size was still significantly smaller, with China maxing out
at €39.1 billion, and Russia and India both under half that size.
Across the European Union, IT spending will grow by 4.2 per cent
to €311.1 billion, with growth lead by Poland, the Czech Republic
and Romania. Mature markets such as Japan and the US are still
stable, with spending increasing by four per cent and 3.7 per cent
respectively, and expectations for more momentum next year.
A report earlier this year from Gartner suggested IT budgets would
hold steady at 3.3 per cent this year, while a survey of IT
leaders showed they're not worried about a recession hitting their
business.
Source: itpro.co.uk
Virtualization tops Gartner's 10
strategic technologies for 2009
Fresh from Garner’s symposium ITxpo the company’s annual
rankings of the top 10 strategic technologies for the year ahead.
Not surprisingly, cloud computing makes an appearance
Gartner Inc. has ranked virtualization as the No. 1 strategic
technology for next year, not for its "tremendously obvious"
ability to virtualize servers, but for its increasing capability
to virtualize just about everything else in a data center.
Much of what's on this annual list, released at the Gartner
Symposium ITxpo here, is familiar from last year. But Gartner has
tweaked the rankings as it looked at the progress of these
technologies, and weighed its client and research feedback. The
technologies on the list have the "potential to be disruptive to
your environment or market in some way," said Gartner analyst
David Cearley.
Here's Gartner's list for 2009:
1. Virtualization. (Ranked No. 5 last year) In forecasting the
impact of the economy on IT spending, Gartner put virtualization
near the top of must-have technologies. But to make the strategic
technology list, it had to have other characteristics as well,
namely a Swiss Army Knife-like capability to be applied beyond
servers. Gartner analyst Carl Claunch said that in storage, for
instance, virtualization allows users to "to combine different
kinds and generations of storage technology." That gives them the
freedom to mix and match storage technologies based on competitive
bids, he said.
2. Cloud computing. (New to the list) If there was a technology
hype list, cloud computing would have been the top choice, said
Cearley. He got some audience chuckles with this line: "You can't
swing a dead cat without hitting somebody that's talking about
cloud computing these days."
But Gartner sees cloud computing as having a massive game-changing
role, not only as the platform for software as a service, but as a
computing and storage infrastructure provider, as well as a
platform for information and business processes.
3. Computing fabrics. (No. 8 last year.) Server technology is
evolving to a point where you buy the physical resource you need,
whether that is memory, I/O or processor, and fashion them
together to create resource pools. A computing fabric "combines
those [resources] as you need them," said Claunch. IT shops will,
potentially, be able to dispense with their separate pools of
small, medium and large servers under this model. Blade servers
have some of this capability -- the ability to move memory and
processor capability -- but it's limited to what's inside the
chassis, he said.
4. Web-oriented architecture. (New but similar to "the Web
platform" -- No. 7 last year) Gartner talked last year about how
the Web will be the model for services delivery. This year, it
discussed in terms of an architectural approach, how Web models
will influence service-oriented architectures. The architecture,
as the name implies, uses Web standards, identifiers, formats and
protocols.
5. Enterprise mashups. (No. 6 last year ) Mashups, a fun word, are
becoming a serious enterprise tool, allowing users to use public
APIs to combine various services and capabilities quickly. The
content aggregation tools give business users the flexibility to
combine data inside and outside the enterprise.
6. Specialized systems. (New to the list) A Cisco router is an
obvious example, but there are specialized appliances for Java,
data warehousing and other processes. It's an approach that could
lead to some cost savings, and "could be wide open" as an emerging
trend, said Claunch.
7. Social software and social networking. (No. 10 last year) The
tools offer "the ability to work across the organization in
dynamic fashion," said Claunch.
8. Unified communications. (No. 2 last year) Gartner said that
over the next five year, "the number of different communications
vendors companies may be reduced by at least 50%," thanks to
unified communications.
9. Business intelligence. (New) This is hardly new to enterprises,
but increases in computing power is giving companies the means to
expand business intelligence capabilities, such as applying BI
analytics directly into business processes.
10. Green IT. (No. 1 last year) Already a strategic technology
that will not melt away, Green IT has not diminished in
importance. For IT, green is everything, and that includes
anything that can help cut the energy bill and reduce fuel use.
One attendee, John Layok, vice president of applications for an
insurance company he asked to not be named, said all 10
technologies in Gartner's list were "right on," especially
business intelligence. It's both hard work and an easy concept,
and moving analytics into a business process is "exactly where we
need to go."
Source:
CIO
