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June 2005 Archives
Thoughts on the Internet and China
In May of this year Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley presented at the Hua Yuan Annual Conference. We highly recommend that you review this presentation as it provides some interesting prespective into the impact of the Internet and the role that the Chinese economy will play in the world Internet economy. Poignant and insightful. Steve Jobs Commencement Speach at Stanford University
I've always admired Steve Jobs. He's one part visionary, two parts rebel. In his commencement speach to the students of Stanford he tells three stories from his life. He speaks from his past, connects the dots to the present and then speaks from his heart. His perspective is refreshing and makes many of us nostalgic for the early days of personal computing. Ellison-Backed Pillar Data Systems Set to Launch
Backed by one of IT's most aggressive and successful visionaries, Pillar Data Systems is set to rattle the cages of large-scale enterprise storage vendors through its data prioritization technology and favorable storage costs. Pillar Data Systems Inc. will officially launch its company and Pillar Axiom storage system next week. Formed in 2001, the storage startup featuring 325 employees has received more than $150 million in private funding from Tako Ventures LLC, the private equity firm of Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp. The fledgling storage company's hardware and software product portfolio is designed to unify and manage SAN (storage area network) and NAS (network attached storage) environments together or separately on a single platform, said Dr. Michael Workman, president and CEO of San Jose, Calif.-based Pillar. Insecurity through obscurity
Security through obscurity is probably one of the oldest tricks in the security book. The basic premise stems from the fact that people are trying to ensure security by hiding certain facts of their software or architecture design from regular users. This is equivalent to someone hiding a house key under a pot of plants in front of his house. However, Auguste Kerckhoffs, a 19th century Flemish cryptographer, said it should be assumed that attackers know the design of the entire security system, except for the keys. This concept, known as Kerckhoffs' law, basically rejected the notion of security through obscurity (your key hidden under your potted plant) and suggested that a system should be secure even if everything's public knowledge, except the key.
IBM a reluctant user of Wine software
IBM's (Profile, Products, Articles) effort to promote Linux as a viable alternative on the company's 350,000 corporate desktops took a step forward last month, when the company's IT organization began supporting the open-source Firefox browser. However, while the move to support a browser that runs on Linux may provide a boost for both Firefox and IBM's internal Linux effort, Big Blue hasn't been nearly so eager to promote a lesser-known piece of software, called Wine, that it has used to advance Linux on the desktop. Like Firefox, Wine is open-source software that provides an important piece of the Linux desktop puzzle. IBM's reluctance to promote Wine underscores some of the complex legal and technical issues surrounding Linux adoption. The Wine software essentially masquerades as the Windows operating system, letting software that was written for Windows run on a Linux desktop. IBM employees have used it internally as a way of running the Lotus Notes desktop client, according to sources familiar with IBM's efforts, who say that Wine and the Notes client are part of the Linux version of IBM's standard desktop client, called the Client for eBusiness. IBM's goal is to have all their internal users running Linux, but they have not publicly said how many users currently run the operating system. IBM Announces X3 Server - 32 Bit, 64 Bit Compatible
IBM is rolling out the latest server based on its X3 architecture, a system that can scale from four to 32 processors. The x460, announced Wednesday, is powered by Intel Corp.'s Xeon processors that can run both 32- and 64-bit applications. The system will enable customers to build the system as their needs grow and to pay only for what they need, said Jay Bretzmann, vice president of eServer products for IBM, of Armonk, N.Y. "It provides complementary technology for customers who want an end-to-end solution," Bretzmann said. IBM in February introduced its X3 architecture, the next generation of its Intel-based xSeries systems, and a chip set code-named Hurricane, designed to bring mainframe technologies such as virtualization and faster I/O to the volume system space. IBM's first X3 system was the x366. The x460 will offer greater scalability with Xeon chips than is offered by Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., Bretzmann said. Dell, of Round Rock, Texas, is focused on one-, two- and four-way systems. HP's largest systems are being standardized on Intel's 64-bit Itanium chips. St. Paul Travelers Insurance Co. Ltd., in Redhill, England, has brought in an x460 for evaluation and expects to get the system into production this month, said Matthew Barlow, infrastructure development manager. St. Paul currently runs an x445 for an environment supporting virtual machines from VMware Inc. Barlow said the ability to grow the system incrementally is attractive to a rapidly expanding company like St. Paul. "This offers a far, far more flexible way to grow our business," Barlow said. "We didn't want to have a lot of eight-ways and then have to jump to a 16-way. We can grow as our business grows." The x460 will be available in the middle of this month
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