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Japanese government pushes SDN out of data centre
The world's still getting a handle on what software defined networking (SDN) means for the data centre, but Japan would like to take it further. The nation's government is getting together with five of the country's big names in tech to work out what's needed to take SDN to the wide area.
Members of the project include NEC, NTT …
Telstra to DNS-block botnet C&Cs with unknown blacklist
Telstra is preparing to get proactive with malware, announcing that it will be implementing a DNS-based blocker to prevent customer systems from contact known command-and-control servers.
The “malware suppression” tool will will be introduced at no cost for fixed, mobile and NBN customers using domestic broadband and Telstra …
Just how flash is your enterprise storage rig?
Minipoll Enterprise storage is really important. Flash is the hot new storage technology. So surely the use of flash in enterprise storage infrastructures is the hottest, most important issue of the moment?
Well, that’s where we’d like you to help us out. We’ve put together a mini-poll to help us gauge just how much attention Reg readers …
You thought slinging Photoshop into the cloud would fail? Look who's laughing NOW
Despite banking a smaller cash haul than it managed this time last year, Adobe's share price rallied last night - as it crashed through the one million cloud subscriber mark.
The maker of the Creative Cloud added 331,000 more paying people to the internet-served software package, according to its paperwork for its third quarter …
Gorillas, StorageBeers, sexy flash models: It's all here in Speaking in Tech
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
It's another episode of El Reg's podcast, bringing you news, views, and rumours about enterprise kit, hot flash models (the enterprise kind, don't be a perve), consumer baubles, hip-hop gorilla memes, next week's StorageBeers (at London's Lamb and Flag pub from about 17:30 …
Got it taped: The business of tape-based disaster recovery
Feature For many SMEs, tape disappeared from their landscape as a data storage choice ten or more years ago. Domestically, it exists, if at all, as a legacy item with perhaps a car stereo chewing its way through a selection of fondly regarded C-90s. Still, this lack of public visibility by no means indicates that tape has come to the …
Open ZFS wielders kick off 'truly open source' dev group
A bunch of companies that rely on ZFS to power their products have banded together in a new open source cabal that says it will offer a "truly open source" version of the filesystem.
The group revealed itself to the world yesterday, erecting the eponymous open-zfs.org website and announcing an intention to do the following three …
Cloud storage: Is the convenience worth the extra expense?
Sysadmin blog Judging by my inbox, quite a few businesses have taken to heart my warnings about the legal issues that arise when you allow your data to be exposed to US jurisdiction.
Companies outside the US sense a gap in the market and are pouring in. Within a few years I suspect I will be perfectly comfortable with recommending nation- …
NetApp unveils ONTAP cluster-shuffler: Do it with any vendor, in public or private
NetApp is hoping to turn cloud agnostics into ONTAP believers with its new "seamless cloud data management" product, Clustered Data ONTAP.
The new "universal data platform" works across any type of cloud infrastructure with "seamless data portability and management across all clouds – public, private and hybrid."
The Sunnyvale …
Storage players' lovechild VCE flashes fresh flash additions
VCE, the lovechild of Cisco, EMC and VMware, hits the storage world with a trio of announcements: a pair of VNX2 and vSphere 5.5 implants; Oracle-specific Vblock; and a VDI Vblock using XtremIO all-flash array technology.
Vblocks are converged server-storage-and-networking systems made up of Cisco UCS servers and network …
Flash biz Violin plays for $162m shower of notes - will rivals drown it out?
Flash array startup Violin Memory wants to raise $162m in a stock-market debut, according to paperwork filed for its IPO.
Earlier this month rival Pure Storage received $150m in a funding round, which may or may not be significant in Violin's pricing calculations.
Other recent big-bucks flash-array news this month has included …
Is storage kicking servers in the battle of the bundles?
Converged infrastructure products, integrated computing platforms, single-stack solutions, data centre in a box: whatever you call them, the benefit of buying storage, servers and networking in a single, pre-engineered bundle is that, vendor-wise, when something goes wrong, you've only got one butt to kick.
That's not quite how …
NetApp exec veep hands his papers in, shuffles off to mystery startup
NetApp's executive vice president of product operations, Manish Goel, is no longer with the company.
The company filed an 8-K form with the SEC saying Goel would go on September 20 after having tendered his resignation on September 9. Goel was one step down from God, as it were, reporting to CEO Tom Georgens.
According to CRN …
Facebook reveals plan to WIRE THE PLANET
Facebook and fellow internet.org members Qualcomm and Ericsson have released a white paper that offers a blueprint for a massively scaled-up internet.
Titled “A Focus on Efficiency” and available here as a PDF, the paper's premise is that internet.org members want to make sure the five billion folks currently offline get the …
Juniper open sources Contrail SDN software stack
Switch and router maker Juniper Networks snapped up Contrail Systems, a startup maker of software-defined networking (SDN) software, back in December 2012 for $176m just before Contrail was to uncloak from stealth mode. Juniper outlined its SDN plans a month later, and in May released the code for beta testing. Now, the code is …
Exploring our way to the source of EMC's mighty VNX Nile
Blocks and Files EMC, we have a problem. Your Project Nile has exabyte-plus capacity and is built from EMC's ViPR control/data plane software and VNX arrays. Yet, the biggest VNX is the 8000 at 4.5PB capacity, about 223 times too small. What gives?
EMC COO and president David Goulden said in Milan that Project Nile will use ViPR and VNX to …
Memory muddle muddies Intel's Exascale ambitions
IDF13 Intel's lofty attempt to make a supercomputer capable of an exaflop by 2020 while consuming a mere 20 megawatts of power is running into major problems due to the pesky laws of physics.
When Intel announced its exaflop goal back in 2011, the chipmaking giant talked up a variety of technologies it was bringing to bear on the …
Server hack heads up the stack for a new challenge
It has been five years to the day since I started working at The Register, and for once, just that once right there, I will use the proper name of the publication that has supported myself and my family, and give it the respect it deserves.
I came to El Reg as the Great Recession was opening its gaping maw, and was offered a …
The future of PCIe: Get small, speed up, think outside the box
IDF13 The near-ubiquitous PCI Express interconnect – aka PCIe – is finding its way into mobile devices, working its way into cabling, and is on schedule to double its throughput in 2015 to a jaw-dropping 64 gigabytes per second in 16-lane configurations.
So said Ramin Neshati, the Marketing Workgroup Chair of the PCI-SIG, when The Reg …
Teen buys WikiLeaks server for $33,000 – with dad's eBay account
The eBay auction of a server formerly used by WikiLeaks has ended with a closing bid of more than $30,000, but the 17-year-old winner will not receive his goods because he bid on the equipment using his father's eBay account without his permission.
The youth, whose name has been withheld, bid eight times during the ten-day …
What's in it for server buyers now that Intel's Xeon E5-2600 v2 is here?
Autumn is on its way and Intel has released the "Ivy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5-2600 v2 server processors just in time to get in line for a chunk of the remaining 2013 IT budget at the data centers of the world. So how are these new processors going to stack up to the existing "Sandy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5-2600 v1 chips, and what can …
New head for disk drive array upstart: Coraid moves CEO to board
Ethernet storage biz Coraid has moved Kevin Brown from the CEO seat to its board and installed David Kresse as its new chief exec.
Coraid builds EtherDrive arrays using commodity hardware, which are accessed via the lightweight ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) protocol devised and patented by company founder Brantley Coile.
Kevin Brown …
Canonical adds ARM servers to Landscape control freak
Commercial Linux distributor Canonical is jumping out ahead of the pack again, and has updated its Landscape management tool for its Ubuntu Server distribution so it can manage instances of Linux running on ARM-based systems as well as the X86 iron it already supports.
With Landscape support, Canonical is getting into position …
Tape's NOT dead. WHOMP: This 8.5TB Oracle drive proves it
Oracle has introduced the world's highest capacity tape drive, all raw 8.5TB of it, and the fastest too.
The StorageTek T10000D transfers uncompressed data at 252MB/sec and 756MB/sec with 3:1 compression running. Its 252MB/sec data rate is 57.5 per cent faster than LTO-6's 160MB/sec, and LTO-6 only stores 2.5TB raw, less than …
Shrinking market doesn't scare the NASty boys of storage
The network-attached storage market appears to have shrunk slightly, but it seems that Buffalo, Seagate and Overland think the market's set to grow soon.
There has been quite a bit of NAS action of late, with Buffalo pushing out a new product, Seagate spinning out a pair of rackmount NAS shelves, and Overland introducing one …
Storage rage: Like getting a nice steak and being told to only eat 80% of it
Storagebod Despite compression, dedupe and other ways people try to reduce and manage the amount of data that they store, it still seems that many storage infrastructure managers tend to waste many thousands of pounds just by using it according to the vendor’s best practice.
I spend a lot of my time with clustered file-systems of one type …
Object storage: The blob creeping from niche to mainstream
Storage dull? Dry? Uninteresting? Not a bit. Everybody and everything uses data storage. Without we'd be lost. And thanks in part to the growth of cloud computing and big data, storage has risen up the agenda.
In the big data universe, things are changing. Our methods of naming, storing and retrieving filesystems need to be …
Data-centre biz Phoenix NAP's storage takes a nap, service goes titsup
Faulty hardware at data-centre operator Phoenix NAP has knackered storage systems for customers' virtual machines.
A message on the cloud-hosting biz's status page blamed the outage on equipment at its data centre in Amsterdam. The service fell over at 5pm MST, or midnight UK time, on Tuesday.
Amsterdam is one of three Phoenix …
In London on 25 Sept? Join us in the pub: It's time for storagebeers
Storagebod So as the evenings draw in, what could be nicer than a decent pint of beer with great company?
Well, this isn’t that. It’s a #storagebeers to be held in London on 25 September. There’s a few storage events around this date and we thought that it would be an ideal opportunity to bring the storage community together.
So if you …
Seagate REJECTED buyout offer for Virident – analyst
Hard drive supremos Seagate had first refusal on buying out enterprise flash startup Virident – and turned it down, leaving WD free to snap it up for $685m.
This little bombshell burst forth from a report on a Seagate Analyst Day by Stifel Nicolaus' chief, Aaron Rakers. A second juicy nugget was that Rakers thinks there were …
Unisys cranks Xeon mainframe oomph above legacy CMOS iron
Mainframe maker Unisys has finally done it, pushing the performance of its Xeon-based mainframes in the ClearPath Libra family, which runs its MCP operating system, above the CMOS-based legacy Libra machines, and it won't be long before its Dorado family of OS 2200 mainframes are faster on Xeon iron than on native CMOS …
Parallels pledges roll-back fix after silent 'trojan' freebie install triggers punter outrage
Parallels has promised to change the registration process of its virtualisation software for Macs after users complained that the technology introduced a "trojan-like" update functionality, intended to push a six month freebie trial of its new Access product.
The release of Parallels Desktop 9 for Mac, the latest version of the …
Speaking in Tech: 'I'm not a pimp just because I wear a fedora'
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
It's another episode of El Reg's weekly Wednesday tech news cast, giving you the run-down on everything worth knowing about in the enterprise and consumer tech world this week. This week, co-hosts Greg Knieriemen and Sarah Vela are slacking off while Ed Saipetch flies solo …
The numbers are in: EMC still ruling storage LIKE A BOSS
It's that time again: another round of IDC's quarterly storage tracker figures. The total disk storage market has gone down 5 per cent on an annual compare, dragged down by falling server sales.
The external storage (networked disk array) market has gone down just 0.8 per cent, showing the effect of server drag on direct-attach …
Flash floggers whip out flash cards, SSDs, unleash frantic flood of updates
While Pure Storage's $150m funding round and the WD/Virident and Cisco/Whiptail acquisitions take centre stage at the flash fairground thee's lots going on at the side stalls with Fusion-io, Intel, OCZ and sTec.
Fusion-io ioFX cards Fusion-io ioFX workstation flash card
HP customers can optionally use Fusion-io's ioFX flash …
'800lb Fibre Channel gorilla' Brocade axes 300 staffers worldwide
SAN fabric leader and Ethernet networking wannabee Brocade is going to fire 300 people to cut costs as it realigns its resources towards data centres and software-defined networking.
The pink slip news was slipped out in an SEC 8-K filing (PDF) on 10 September. This should take its headcount from 4,180, to 3,880.
Stifel …
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 operations …
Fujitsu femto boost promises to double LTE speeds
Japanese computing giant Fujitsu has taken the wraps off new capabilities designed to combat radio interference and boost the speed of its LTE femtocells by as much as double.
Femtocells are often advanced as a way to improve the reach of mobile networks, as by placing the small cells in homes or businesses wired backhaul can …
IBM forges NextScale servers for HPC and hyperscale cheapskates
IDF13 Concurrent with Intel's launch of the "Ivy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors in San Francisco today, Big Blue trotted out its most vanity-free machines to date, the NextScale line.
The new systems are designed specifically to compete with low-cost, stripped down alternatives from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Silicon Graphics, and …
Intel carves up Xeon E5-2600 v2 chips for two-socket boxes
IDF13 Companies with workloads that like to ride on lots of threads and cores are going to be able to get a lot more bang for a two-socket box thanks to the launch of the "Ivy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors by Intel.
Those with pesky applications that like faster clocks to get more work done, well, the process shrink is giving …
Storage firms, tremble: MASSIVE tech beast Cisco has just spaffed $415m on Whiptail
Cisco intends to buy all-flash array startup Whiptail for the huge cash sum of $415m, catapulting the networking giant full tilt into the storage market and threatening its close relationship with EMC.
John Chambers' networking giant declares: "Whiptail will strengthen Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) strategy and enhance …
WD's billion-dollar flash slurps: All this tech, and STILL no deal with chip-fryers
Analysis WD has splashed or intends to spend a whopping $1.1bn on building its flash technology and products portfolio, in the most aggressive series of moves yet by a hard disk drive vendor into flash, and yet it still hasn't inked a long-term chip supply deal with a flash foundry.
Just yesterday it paid $685m for Virident. So what are …
