Articles about Pillar
Seagate's flash advice: Don't buy the foundry when you can get the chips for cheap
Analysis
As well as launching several new flash products, Seagate revealed the four pillars of its flash product strategy at the August 9-11 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara.
These were:
Foundry independence
Essential IP for system-wide use of flash
Portfolio expansion
Top-level cloud supplier
Let's have a waltz around the …
Intel mulls sale of Intel Security – reports
Opinion
Intel is reportedly looking to offload its Intel Security arm.
The IT giant is investigating options for Intel Security cyber security business, the FT reports. These options include selling off the security software business formerly known as McAfee that the chip-maker bought for $7.7bn back in August 2010. Intel is yet to …
The rise and rise of Australia's community hacking conferences
Special report
In Australia and New Zealand, hackers are doing it for themselves by creating vibrant security conferences that run on their own terms and actively avoid the corporate-speak and fear-mongering that characterises so many vendor-led events.
These conferences, or "cons", are booming and showcase security skills that rival the …
nbn tries to shift the conversation to future copper upgrades
Reg roadtrip
In the best possible world, all terrestrial internet connections would use fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP). Everything I've learned over years writing about broadband suggests that a fibre optic network has a longer working life and will scale to greater bandwidth than technologies that rely on existing or new twisted pair copper …
Bitcoin's governance bungles stain the blockchain's reputation
Civilisation is an agreement. We agree to pay our tax, obey the laws, and generally avoid berserking around the joint. Where these agreements breaks down you get riots that scale into civil wars, then collapse. That’s less of an issue so long as the problem is over there - so that when a culture soils the sheets you don’t have …
Irish kids get first-person view of 1916 uprising... via Minecraft
Irish schoolchildren will no longer have to experience the Republic’s blood and fire birth through grainy black-and-white pics and film reels - they can experience it through the full colour lumpenly pixelated reality of Minecraft instead.
The Mindrising project is providing teaching materials to help Irish teachers, and other …
EU could force countries to allocate 700 MHz band to mobile by mid-2020
New legislation could force EU countries to make sure the 700 MHz band of spectrum is made exclusively available for mobile services by the middle of 2020.
The European Commission has published proposals to introduce new laws that would require EU countries to “allow the use of the 694-790 MHz frequency band for terrestrial …
The Infamous Eight: 2015's memes, themes and big pieces
Year in review
So, was US Central Command (CENTCOM) hacked, were a LOT of Polish Airlines aircraft cyber breached, and did China block imports of products from Apple and others? The answer in all three cases was a simple “no”.
So what of the multiple cloud outages, and Uber’s ongoing global legislative and driver woes? In a 140-character- …
Confirmed: Turnbull's Innovation Agenda recycles old education programs
When Vulture South read the Australian government's new National Innovation and Science Agenda, especially ”Embracing The Digital Age section on school education's contribution to innovation, we were struck by how some of its tactics seemed familiar.
The nation's Department of Education has now confirmed to us that some parts …
DS5: Vive la différence ... oh, and throw away the Citroën badge
Vulture @ the Wheel
Oh, how car-makers like to mine their archive in the name of style. BMW’s Mini, VW’s Beetle, Fiat’s 500 ... all doff their caps to the style and nomenclature of an imaginary post-war automotive utopia. Citroën got in on the act back in 2010 with the resurrection of the DS marque.
A few months ago to celebrate the DS brand's …
When Michael Dell met Chris Mellor
Profile
This is the way of it: you're sitting there, at a table in a general meeting room at the Dell World event in Austin, talking to a distant colleague about what happened to Don, did I know Liem had moved to such and such an office, when an ordinary-looking guy comes over and sits down at the same table, saying: "How's it going …
Oracle points patching firehose at 154 vulnerabilities
Sysadmins forced by circumstance or folly to support Java can get busy again, with 25 fixes for the product among the Scarlet Letter's regular patch notice.
The good news is that Oracle says none of the vulnerabilities in its mammoth bug-splat had been exploited as of 19 October.
The fixes to Java SE and Java SE Embedded …
NBN's good-to-go dates remain confidential
Bill Morrow, CEO of nbnTM, the organisation building Australia's national broadband network (NBN) has sparked a political storm over patch cables.
Speaking to a Senate Estimates hearing yesterday, Morrow also said the company's “ready for service” documents – which tells staff and retailers when individual premises can be …
Dell buys out EMC in mega-super-duper $67 BEEELLLION deal
EMC/Dell deal
Dell has confirmed it is buying storage giant and virtualisation player EMC in a deal valued at $67bn, as we reported earlier today.
Privately-owned Dell is scooping up the publicly listed EMC in the industry’s biggest ever tech buyout.
The buyout breaks the record established by the $25bn Hewlett-Packard-Compaq deal in 2001 …
Spirit of the Ghost: Taking a Rolls-Royce Wraith around France
Vulture at the Wheel
There used to be a tradition on Personal Computer World magazine of writing reviews on the computer you were reviewing. This is being written from the passenger seat of a Rolls-Royce Wraith travelling between Dijon and Reims.
The two-door, four seat Wraith has just become the Rolls-Royce of interest because the company …
Wow, Barcelona really has a problem with tech disruptors. Watch out Airbnb
Fresh from sending the Uber question* to the European Court of Justice, it appears the city of Barcelona is now spoiling for a fight with another tech disruptor – this time lodgings lister Airbnb.
Earlier this week, Airbnb announced it would be collecting tourist tax on behalf of its users in Paris from 1 October, and it …
Velostrata gets you on yer bike to the compute cloud
Interview/Analysis
Velostrata sounds like a bicycle brand. In fact, it's a compute cloud-bursting startup marrying on-premises storage with public cloud compute and has burst onto the scene from its Israeli base, apparently out of nowhere with $14m in A-round funding.
We’ll get to its history later: first the technology. Velostrata claims it …
Want security? Next-gen startups show how old practices don't cut it
Sysadmin Blog
In case you hadn't noticed, IT security sucks. There is a chronic lack of people trained in IT security, people who will listen to IT security, and even a lack of agreement on how best to go about IT security. Fortunately, a new generation of startups are helping to tackle the issues.
No matter how good a sysadmin you think …
India ponders home-baked chips for defence and nuke plants
India is reportedly pondering a new policy that would see only home-baked silicon used in its military, space program and atomic energy industry.
Sources have told the Times of India that government officials have raised the idea with representatives of the three industries mentioned above. Just why is open to speculation. …
Fireworks expected from Oracle at Flash Memory Summit
Comment
Oracle is giving a keynote pitch at the Flash Memory Summit, indicating it's got something NAND-like up its sleeve.
The pitch is being presented by long-time disk man Mike Workman, currently SVP for flash storage systems at Oracle. He was the CEO of Pillar Data – which was acquired by Oracle in 2011 – which built the Axiom line …
Lobbynomics: The EU’s digital dossier that doesn't add up
Analysis
A key pillar of the EU’s “Digital Single Market” strategy has systemic flaws and EU officials should stop using it, say researchers who analysed the dossier.
The IP Growth Index of the Lisbon Council think tank was prepared by council fellow Benjamin Gibert.
But it is “a showcase of methodological blunder”, according to an …
Big Data, OpenStack and object storage: Size matters, people
COMMENT
I’m talking about Big Data, OpenStack and object storage. In the last two days I’ve come across a couple of articles (here and here), which discuss the adoption of these technologies.
Both articles start from surveys that talk about scarce adoption in the enterprise space for these technologies. When talking about them, two …
Don't be stiffed by spies, stand up to Uncle Sam with your proud d**k pics – says Snowden
Vid
One of the more unusual interviews with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden left the fugitive reduced to describing freedom-chilling, globe-spanning spy programs in terms of sexy selfies.
Youtube video
The face-to-face chat was filmed in Moscow with British comedian John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight, and focused on the …
Sound and battery: 20 portable Bluetooth speakers
Product Roundup
The arrival of Bluetooth 4, with its reduced hunger for power and support for audio codecs like aptX and A2DP means that there has been an explosion in the availability of Bluetooth speakers which connect to computers, tablets and smartphones, and are often small enough to be chucked in a bag and taken to the park or beach. …
Oracle refreshes RAM-crammed ZFS array line
After updating its old Pillar Axiom array line with the hybrid FS1 array a few months ago, Oracle has refreshed its ZFS array line with a bigger, faster generation and a quasi in-memory design.
Larry Ellison's company announced the third generation ZS3 appliances back in October last year. Fourteen months later, we have the …
Ford's B-Max: Fiesta-based runaround that goes THUNK
Vulture at the Wheel
This is the most sensible car you can buy. That's not necessarily a good thing. The Ford B-Max takes all the things you’d look for in practicality and turns them up to 11. However, in doing so it turns emotion down to zero.
Look familiar? The Ford B-MAX is based on its Fiesta
Look familiar? The Ford B-MAX is based on its …
'Internet Freedom Panel' to keep web overlord ICANN out of Russian hands – new proposal
A seemingly independent panel with authority over domain name system overseer ICANN has been proposed in a new US law bill.
The Defending Internet Freedom Act [PDF], put forward by Congressman Mike Kelly (R-PA), would see the creation of a board made up of techies and reps from the domain name world, as well as a new …
Kingston's aviation empire: From industry firsts to Airfix heroes
Geek's Guide to Britain
He learned to fly aged 22, set up his first aircraft factory aged 24 and by 30 his fighters dominated the skies over the Western Front.
Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith - later, Sir – founded the Sopwith Aircraft Company in 1912, turning out aeroplanes from a Edwardian roller-skating rink in Kingston upon Thames. Yes, the …
Oracle crashes all-flash bash: Behold, our hybrid FS1 arrays
Welcome back to SAN array land, Oracle. Larry Ellison's company has reinvented its Pillar Axiom 600 SAN array as a hybrid flash/disk array, the FS1-2, with auto-tiering and noisy neighbours sorted.
It is a general-purpose hybrid array but tuned for Oracle software. Calling its new storage box the Flash Storage System (FS1), …
EMC, HP blockbuster 'merger' shocker comes a cropper
+Comment
EMC has been holding secret merger talks with HP that have since stalled, according to industry sources.
The negotiations are said to have lasted almost 12 months, during which Dell executives mulled buying parts of EMC. But at the heart of the discussion was a proposed $132bn merger of the storage giant and HP, according to …
Stalwart hatchback gets a plug-in: Volkswagen e-Golf
Review
Of all the electric cars I've driven, the latest eco-friendly VW Golf is the one that feels most like a normal auto – that just so happens to be silent and has a stack of batteries where the spare wheel would go.
Volkswagen e-Golf
Goodbye GTI, hello Volkswagen e-Golf
While the vast majority of electric cars make a feature …
Activist investor plans to de-federate EMC: report
Activist investors have taken a billion-dollar stake in EMC in order to break apart its federation and spin out VMware, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Quoting folks familiar with the matter, The Journal says Elliot Management Corporation, an outfit financial rating service Hoovers describes as a hedge fund that "takes an …
Hamas hacks Israeli TV sat channel to broadcast pics of Gaza wounded
Gaza leaders Hamas took over an Israeli satellite channel for few minutes on Monday to broadcast pictures of Gaza wounded.
Viewers who tuned into Israeli Channel 10 reported seeing images of people wounded from Israeli airstrikes on Gaza as well as propaganda messages promising more rocket strikes on Israel from Hamas' military …
How Microsoft's cloud aims to cover the world
Microsoft has a vision for the cloud. Anyone who has watched this session by the legendary Rick Claus from last year’s AUTechEd already has a basic idea of what this entails.
Microsoft’s plan, dubbed the Cloud OS platform, rests on three pillars. These create a unified strategy that is changing the game and positioning the …
Slippery Google greases up, aims to squirm out of EU privacy grasp
Special Report
Google is wriggling desperately to escape new European privacy rules that could force it to take some responsibility for what information it republishes in response to a given search – in particular a search of someone's name.
The European Parliament voted in favour of data protection reforms in March, which the EU's press …
New HDS array: It's a G1000 Jim, but not as we know it*
HDS has updated its 2010 vintage high-end VSP array with the VSP G1000 and a new operating system, together providing the "highest performance and most available unified storage system in the industry," and claiming it's "the most reliable hardware on the planet."
There are three mainstream high-end enterprise arrays; EMC's …
Gartner: Array makers. Think performance counts? WRONG
A Gartner report looking at high-end enterprise storage arrays published this month has concluded that because of SSDs, an array's performance is no longer a differentiator in its own right.
“Critical Capabilities for General-Purpose, High-End Storage Array” was published on 7 March. It put HDS kit out front for "Best Overall …
Democrats introduce net neutrality legislation in Senate and House
In a coordinated move, Congressional Democrats have introduced legislation in the Senate and House of Representatives to enshrine network neutrality principles in law until the Federal Communications Commission rules on the matter.
"This bill ensures that consumers, not their Internet service provider, are in the driver's seat …
Management tools lead VMware through $5bn annual revenue barrier
VMware has cracked the $US5bn barrier for the first time on the back of 17 per cent year-on-year revenue growth it says it can repeat again during 2014.
The company also reported Q4 revenue of $1.48bn, up 15 per cent from 2012's fourth quarter.
Virtzilla's current hero is its management and automation software. Just about …
UK channel firms rabbit-punch recession in Q4: Sales are HUGE
Blighty is again the largest tech sales territory in the European channels* after distributors reported a near double-digit growth spurt in Q4, fuelled by mobility, software and er... desktops.
Numbers are in from Context, which tracks all major wholesalers' sales-out data - the kit that customers are actually buying - showing …
French drug dealers regretfully announce 'temporary closure'
A bunch of French drug dealers demonstrated a touch of Gallic narcohumour earlier this week by announcing the "temporary closure" of their regular public point of sale.
According to local paper Le Dauphiné Libéré, a poster taped to a concrete pillar under a block of flats in Grenoble's rue Albert-Thomas informed punters: " …
Bring us your baffled Backup Exec biz bods, beg Axcient, Zetta
Axcient and Zetta have seized the moment and are offering migration services to Backup Exec Cloud users facing being left out in the unprotected cold by Symantec's withdrawal from the Backup Exec Cloud offering.
Symantec has announced it is shuttering its Backup Exec Cloud service, leaving users to make alternative arrangements …
Meet the man who'll TAKE OVER if UK faces CYBER ATTACK
The delayed launch of the national Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is getting back on track with the appointment of its new director, Chris Gibson. This comes after the project was delayed until next year.
The organisation was due to be up and running this year but recruitment and other issues meant its launch was put …
ULTIMATE ELECTRIC driving machine? Yes, it’s the BMW i3 e-car
First Drive
People can sometimes behave like sheep. They will go somewhere, do something or buy a certain product simply because other people are doing so or because they recognise the brand. Call it consumer herd mentality. It’s one reason why the Toyota Prius sells so well in the States.
BMW i3
Brands Hatch bound: the BMW i3
Here in …
'Burning platform' Elop: I'd SLASH and BURN stuff at Microsoft, TOO
What kind of company would Microsoft be under Stephen Elop, we asked. We have an answer... of sorts.
Elop would kill Bing and Xbox as a Microsoft chief executive and go "all business" by developing Office for as many non-Windows devices as possible.
Nokia’s CEO is reported by Bloomberg be considering the strategy should he …
Micron tears away cloak to reveal its Gen3 Hybrid Memory Cube
SMC
Micron has revealed some of the goals – and the manufacturing challenges it faces – for the development of its next-generation "all silicon" Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC).
Micron's current HMC Gen2, engineering samples of which having been released this September, stacks up layers of memory cells, each on an organic laminate …
Larry Ellison hands back $575m from Oracle's Pillar slurp
Oracle chief exec Larry Ellison has agreed to waive a potential payout of $575m to clear up accusations of a conflict of interest over Oracle's acquisition of Pillar Data Systems, a company Ellison owned.
Ellison agreed to hand back over 95 per cent of an "earn-out" payday he got when Oracle slurped Pillar in 2011, after two …
EMC pinches top Oracle engineer and Microsoft bod for Isilon
EMC's scale-out filer shipper Isilon is scaling up its organisation; Oracle's top storage SVP, Phil Bullinger, is moving from the Redwood Shores-headquartered firm to EMC subsidiary Isilon, and a Microsoftie is coming aboard as Isilon's COO.
Bullinger is joining EMC's Isilon unit as its senior veep for engineering and …
Oracle's Sun rises over ZFS and Pillar
Oracle says version 12c of its database works better with Oracle's own Sun ZFS and Pillar Axiom storage, with better performance, easier storage config, and faster test and development set-up. But the ZFS product seems preferred over the Axiom.
Oracle shoots out the following claims:
The Sun ZFS Storage Appliances and Pillar …
Salesforce buys into cloud marketing with ExactTarget
Salesforce is a acquiring ExactTarget as the digital CRM company tries to do to marketing what it has done to CRM.
The $2.5bn acquisition was announced by Salesforce on Tuesday, and will see the company make a tender offer of $33.75 per share in cash for all outstanding shares of ExactTarget – a substantial premium above the $22 …
