£140 netbooks from ARM and Freescale

Freescale, the globally renowned chipset manufacturer revealed its plan of producing low-cost netbooks based on i.MX515 processor design which makes use of ARM’s Cortex-A8 chipset architecture. Read more

Virtualisation is hackers’ next target

Hackers are on their new mission of attacking Virtualisation, which is being adopted by the businesses at a rapid pace. The worrying fact is that not many businesses are aware of the risks or acting adequately to protect from the hackers, noted the market observers.

According to Ovum’s principal analyst Graham Titterington, threats to virtual machines are increasing significantly as virtualisation is getting more and more global prominence. While acknowledging that there was little evidence of foundation layers of virtualisation environment having been attacked yet, he said that strong possibility of attacks did exist and businesses needed to be extra vigilant.

Titterington added attackers could take down many virtual machines in a single attack with the help of virtualisation itself. If the hypervisor security of virtual machines, sharing same physical platform was broken, the information held on machines could also get attacked.

Titterington’ assessment was concurred by Symantec’s manager for systems engineering, Ronnie Ng, looking after Indonesia and Singapore operations. He remarked that although hypervisor breaches were rare, threat of compromising hypervisor layer was quite high, and it could put all virtual servers running business applications at risk.

Secure Computing’s managing director of Asia South, Benjamin Low stated that it would be just matter of time before hackers attack unprotected vulnerabilities of technology and warned that virtualisation could become next frontier for hackers’ attacks.

Satyam to close £1bn of outsourcing deals in the UK

Outsourcing giant, Satyam, looking for new business opportunities in the credit-crunch-hit financial sector is set to clinch up to £1bn of outsourcing deals in the UK.

Satyam will be clinching 10 deals worth £20m to £100m each, claiming that it was making headway in manufacturing, telecom and retail markets.

Satyam’s European business head, Dr. Keshab Panda, told that deals were countering the slowdown in financial sector where businesses were postponing outsourcing agreements.

Panda ruled out a reduction of staff adding that its UK headcount had doubled in the past 2 years and it provided employment to 5,200 new workers during the first 6 months of financial year 2008/09.

Satyam’s second-quarter financial results for the current year showed jump of 38.8% year on year to £338m (28.8bn rupees) and 7.6% on last quarter.

Panda predicted tough third quarter for the company with revenue remaining flat between 29.4bn and 30.3bn rupees.

According to Panda, financial and banking services were larger segment for Satyam’s business. He claimed that quarter 3 was always a difficult period for business worldwide and Satyam had predicted flat quarter 3 but it clinched 10 deals at this time in the UK. Panda added that many customers were interested in doing outsourcing to reduce costs.

Panda informed that EU market was growing faster than the US accounting for 21% of Satyam’s business. Of 21%, 52% accounted for the UK and 48% for Europe.

Novell to acquire business-services management firm

Open-source company Novell is buying data centre management services firm Managed Objects.

Novell will be adding data and workload monitoring tools to its portfolio by acquiring Managed Objects.

According to Novell’s senior vice president systems and resource management, Joe Wagner, Managed Objects’s products were complementary to Novell’s virtualisation and management capabilities and the acquisition was an extension of its approach in making IT work as one in data centre.

Senior analyst Andy Buss at Canalys opined that the deal made sense for Novell especially in the backdrop of its licensing deal with Microsoft. It would take Novell to the services-based model where it desperately wanted to go. The Microsoft partnership would provide Novell access to a wide data centre install base where heterogeneous environment are being run by the people, said Buss.

He felt that Novell’s entry into business-service management (BSM) would enhance its competitiveness with companies like IBM and CA, big players in the same market. It is more critical since businesses were moving into virtualisation and cloud computing.

The acquisition is likely to conclude in first fiscal quarter of 2009, if approved by the regulatory. Though the cost of buying Managed Objects was not made public, Novell confirmed that it would use current cash for acquisition.

Dutch researchers make public Oyster travel smartcard-hack details

Dutch researchers have released vulnerability details of London’s Oyster travel smartcard’s chipset at the Esorics security conference held in Malaga on Monday.

An academic paper highlighting cryptographic vulnerabilities details was also released on Radboud University Nijmegen website.

Professor of computer security Bart Jacobs at Radboud University, who headed the research team, claimed that security of the Mifare Classic chipset was completely ineffectual. The chipset is part of the Oyster card and the Dutch OV- Chipcaart travel cards.

Jacob informed that the chip was fundamentally broken and could only be strengthened with additional security measures and by improving overnight checks. He urged people involved with high value assets to migrate to other chips urgently.

The researchers claimed that Mifare Classic smartcard’s Cryptol encryption algorithm allowed easy retrieval of a 48-bit cryptographic key.

According to the University’s website researchers were able to intercept part of communication between Mifare reader and smartcard, and successfully computed and decrypted cryptographic key. After the decryption of the key it was quite easy to copy and clone the card.

Jacob informed that the publication of the hack details undermined public confidence in Oyster travel cards and criminals could easily clone new cards everyday.

However, Transport for London (TfL) claimed that additional safeguards had already been put in place in consultation with Royal Holloway Information Security Group’s academic team.

VMware chief laughs off Microsoft’s guerrilla marketing

VMware is unfazed by the bizarre guerilla marketing campaign launched by Microsoft. VMware chief executive Paul Maritz laughed off the attempts by the Microsoft staff while addressing a global conference in Las Vegas.

Microsoft employees distributed one-dollar poker chips to the delegates of VMware who arrived on day one to attend the worldwide conference. These employees had announced the release of Microsoft Hyper-V last week as a challenge to VMware’s software virtualisation dominance.

The poker chips were inscribed with “Looking for your best bet? You won’t find it with VMware” and web address-vmwarecostswaytoomuch.com. The inscription was shown leading to a site which compared VMware’s ESX flagship product with Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

Maritz, claiming to be an old hand at such tactics, claimed that Microsoft’s effort flattered him; since he believed that guerrilla marketing campaigns were deployed by the followers and not by the leaders. He further hit back by saying that guerrilla marketing was used when you were distant second with the competitor and sought attention.

Maritz, who appeared hitting quite hard termed Microsoft’s attempt as indirect flattery to VMware for the fact that mighty Microsoft was forced to come down to the conference and dish out chochkhas (meaning cheap souvenirs) to VMware customers.

Microsoft still quite ahead of Apple in best-brand survey

The reigning king of consumer gadgets, Apple is still failing to climb to the top ten positions in the list of most valued brands of the world.

The iPhone maker is far behind rival Microsoft, occupying 24th place against Microsoft’s prestigious third place in the Best Global Brands 2008 survey by Interbrand, a well known market-research organisation. In contrast, Google recorded an impressive jump to 10th spot from 20th last year. It joined the top 10 group for the first time.

Though Coca Cola topped the list, the top ten places witnessed dominance of tech companies with IBM and Microsoft occupying 2nd and 3rd position respectively. Nokia stood at 5th position, Intel at 8th and Google at 10th place.

Value of the brand, as per the Interbrand logic determined on the basis of revenue forecast, bank risk and market research analysis and criterion like customer loyalty.

According to Interbrand’s criterion Apple’s value has increased by 24% to $13.7bn while Google registered 43% increase to $25.6bn in last 12 months.

Chief executive Jez Frampton of Interbrand remarked that despite low positioning, Apple’s rise in the ranking had been quite significant. Interbrand report pointed out that ability in defining new customer needs and delivering beautifully simple and desirable products was Apple’s main strength.

Google’s success was attributed to innovations like Google Book Search, Google Docs and spreadsheets and Google Mobile by the Interbrand report.

Intel experiment proves fresh air can replace air conditioning in datacenters

Intel, in an experiment conducted in the New Mexico desert has discovered that fresh air could save millions in cooling costs for datacenters.

A research paper published by Intel claimed that it saved huge power costs by replacing air conditioning with the piped fresh air without much increase in the server failure rates. The research revealed that neither major temperature changes nor heavy dust, considered to be detrimental for datacenter, affected any equipment.

During the experiment servers were subjected to large variations in temperature and humidity using poor quality of air, but no significant rise was observed in the server failures.

Intel proposes to use this approach for its future high-density datacentres if the results could get confirmed in further investigations.

It is estimated that a 500kW datacenter could be able to save approximately £79,000 ($143,000) annually, considering electricity cost of 8 cents per kWh.

Intel’s experiment made use of normal air filters which could filter only coarse particles but not fine dust out of the fresh air. Without controlling the monitored humidity, server failure rate was observed to be 4.46% compared with 3.83% observed at Intel’s main datacenter during the same period. However lot of dust got accumulated on 32 servers and racks that were involved in the experiment.

Intel conducted experiment for 10 months with a premise that air cooling in desert regions could be feasible since servers were designed to give optimal performance up to 37ºC temperature.

The experiment was part of the ‘Intel IT’s Eight-Year Datacenter Efficiency Strategy’ aimed at reduction of costs.

Red Hat signs a deal with virtualisation player Qumranet

Red Hat is set to compete with VMware Citrix and Microsoft with its takeover of Qumranet for £60m.
Under the deal, Red Hat would pick up Qumranet’s server along with virtualisation portfolio, team of developers and support staff.

Qumranet is an Israel-based company which maintains KMV, a leading open-source hypervisor. It supplies SolidICE and virtualisation desktop infrastructure (VDI) products. It uses their own proprietary thin-client protocol which imparts high speed to remote desktops.

The deal has enriched Red Hat with high expertise in backing the virtualisation strategy which it had been evolving for the past 2 years. It would enable close integration of virtualisation with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Red Hat would be able to compete more aggressively with virtualisation specialists Microsoft and VMware.

According to Paul Cormier, vice president of tools and technologies, Red Hat would be only the second company in the world, after Microsoft, acquiring comprehensive virtualisation portfolio. Red Hat is building an embedded Linux hypervisor which would allow running of major operating systems on Red Hat servers.

It would support Xen until 2014. It intends to insulate customers from infrastructure component changes for which it has evolved an open virtualisation management standard. The customers and ISVs would be able to build virtualisation configurations, processes and applications independent of virtualisation technology.

IBM designs blades to tackle security issues

IBM has designed the BladeCenter PN41 to specifically tackle various security problems. The company informed that while it designed many blades to tackle IT issues such as storage, PN41 was the first ever blade designed exclusively for security. The blade server would be using CloudShield’s deep packet inspection software. CloudShield is the provider of network management and security services.

The BladeCenter PN41 is expected to minimise security threats, including denial-of-service attack and viruses. It would do so by diverting malicious traffic by performing network activity analysis. The blade would also help communication carriers in prioritising and managing network activities such as web traffic and video sharing.

The blade server is aligned with IBM’s TISS (Telecom Integrated Solution for Security). The other components of TISS include IBM Tivoli Security Operations Manager and IBM Proventia Intrusion Prevention. The BladeCenter PN41 can also support applications by Check Point, a security software company. Its head of American services, Michael Anderson, acknowledged that the BladeCenter PN41 has already accelerated security application performance.

Anderson further added that combining of Check Point’s CoreXL and SecureXL technologies with IBM hardware would facilitate handling a greater number of customer connections. The blade prices are not yet declared, though IBM announced that blade will be available in October 2008.

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