Cisco Systems plans on Monday to introduce a network switch for corporations grappling with rapidly growing Internet data transfers and the increased use of applications that draw on remote data storage, known as cloud computing.

The switch, called the Nexus 7000, will provide a sharp increase in traffic capacity over the company’s current products, to 15 trillion bits of data a second.

Cisco, of San Jose, Calif., the world’s largest producer of network equipment, offered a range of examples to try to capture the significance of the increase in speed. It said the switch could transfer all 90,000 Netflix movies in 38.4 seconds or send a two-megapixel digital image to every human being on earth in 28 minutes.

Cisco has made a significant bet on the rapidly expanding data demands of the consumer Internet. Its Nexus system, which will eventually replace a product line that represents about a third of its $35 billion business, has required roughly $1 billion in research and development costs and the efforts of more than 500 engineers in the last four years, the company said.

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EMC has launched a new strategy and a product for businesses looking to make use of online storage and backup.

Announced late last week, MozyEnterprise is the first offering to come out of the EMC Fortress strategy. The product will provide subscription-based online backup and recovery services for remote PCs and remote Windows Server environments, according to EMC.

“We’ve introduced EMC Fortress (as) a secure, multitenant, scalable SaaS delivery platform, providing customers with centralized billing, management and metering,” said Tom Heiser, general manager of EMC’s new software-as-a-service (SaaS) business unit.

The pricing shows that, with this service, EMC is making MozyEnterprise affordable even for small and midsize businesses, although the company is pitching it at the enterprise. MozyEnterprise for PC and laptop devices is priced at $5.25 a month, plus 70 cents a month per gigabyte stored, and the server module is priced at $9.25, plus $2.35 per gigabyte stored.

In September, EMC bought on-demand backup specialist Berkeley Data Systems, developers of the Mozy hosted storage/backup service, for $76 million and with it gained a path into the SaaS business.

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Microsoft said Wednesday that another one of its operating system products is vulnerable to a critical vulnerability, first patched two weeks ago.

In an update to its MSO8-001 security bulletin, Microsoft said that the latest release of Windows Small Business Server was also critically at risk from a bug in Windows’ networking software.

The flaw is also considered critical for Windows XP and Vista users. Microsoft did not say why it had initially omitted Small Business Server from its list of critically affected operating systems, but it said that the product’s users were being offered patches via Microsoft’s various automatic update services. “Customers with Windows Small Business Server 2003 Service Pack 2 should apply the update to remain secure,” Microsoft said in its updated bulletin.

The bug lies in the way Windows processes networking traffic that uses IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) and MLD (Multicast Listener Discovery) protocols, which are used to send data to many systems at the same time. Microsoft said that an attacker could send specially crafted packets to a victim’s machine, which could then allow the attacker to run unauthorized code on a system.

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Via Technologies’ upcoming Isaiah processor likely outperforms Intel’s Silverthorne chip designed for mobile computers based on limited information about the chip that’s been made available so far, according to the Isaiah’s chief designer.

“Silverthorne is liable to be a little faster than our current C7 [processor], but the new Isaiah will be substantially faster than that,” said Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology, the Via subsidiary that does processor design for the company.

But don’t look for Isaiah processors to match the performance of Intel’s high-end processors, the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad.

“The Core 2 is going to be faster. Not massively so, but the Core 2 for performance is the fastest architecture in the world. It will be massively hotter too, and of course massively more expensive,” Henry said.

Announced Thursday, Isaiah is a 64-bit processor architecture that is significantly more powerful than the Esther cores used in Via’s current line of C7 processors, while consuming the same amount of power. Single-core chips based on the Isaiah architecture will be available soon, with volume production using a 65-nanometer process expected by the end of June.

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The bidding for a valuable new chunk of wireless airwaves the federal government is selling was expected to raise $15 billion—or more money than any wireless auction in U.S. history. But with stock markets crumbling, expectations for the auction that begins Jan. 24—called Auction 73—are sliding fast, along with the shares of likely bidders.

Since the beginning of the year, AT&T’s (T) market value has tumbled by $29.5 billion, while Verizon’s (VZ) shares are collectively worth $16.5 billion less. The market’s plunge on Jan. 18 may have marked the biggest single-day loss in telecom market value ever, says Blair Levin, an industry analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus. Even Internet search giant Google (GOOG), which has been looking to purchase the spectrum licenses to build a new wireless network that would compete with the established players, has lost 20% of its value since New Year’s.
A Lack of Bidders?

Combined with the credit crunch, these rapidly shrinking stock values are severely crimping the sector’s financing options for big spectrum purchases in the Federal Communications Commission’s auction. Many potential bidders may now be unwilling, or unable, to bid as much as they’d intended previously

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More than 300 companies representing 2.8 million employees began migrating to Microsoft Corp.’s collaboration and content management system in the last six months of 2007, Microsoft announced on Monday.

The number of users adopting Microsoft Outlook, Exchange Server and SharePoint Server is up 164% from the prior year, said Microsoft, which claimed many of them are former users of IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino communication and collaboration software from IBM.

New customers for Microsoft include Colliers International Property Consultants Inc., Westinghouse Electric Corp., Coinstar Inc. and Siemens AG.

IBM did not respond to a request for comment.

Microsoft also said that its free suite of tools for helping companies migrate from Notes/Domino to Outlook/Exchange/SharePoint has been improved with features aimed at companies with hundreds of thousands of users.

For several years, Microsoft has offered free software to help companies and their IT consultants move employees off IBM’s products its own.

Microsoft has tended to announce or release such software around Lotusphere for maximum competitive effect.

Outlook and Exchange pulled ahead of Notes and Domino more than half a decade ago.

About 101 million corporate mailboxes run Notes today. That should grow to 112 million by 2011, according to predictions from The Radicati Group Inc. But 304 million e-mail boxes will run Outlook and Exchange by that time, according to the analyst firm.

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IBM is developing a new, “one-stop-shop” product offering, Lotus Foundations, aimed at companies with five to 500 employees, it said Monday.

Lotus Foundations will consist of on-premise software servers sold primarily through partners. IBM is also developing a set of accompanying Web-hosted services, now available in a beta version.

The company plans to bundle Lotus Domino, file management, directory services, firewall, backup and productivity tools in the initial offering of Lotus Foundations. Customers who need more power will be able to bring on additional servers, according to IBM. The company’s partner community will also be able to integrate their own applications into the core platform.

The server software sold under Foundations will be autonomic or “self-healing,” and therefore appropriate for small companies without paid IT staffers, IBM said.

Foundations will be the home of technology IBM acquired through its purchase last week of Net Integration Technologies. That deal is set to close later this year.

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Your Success Story

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Many thanks again…

Best Regards,

Mark Rayburn
President

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HP is launching four rack-mount servers for small and medium-sized businesses. The 1U HP ProLiant DL160 G5 and 2U ProLiant DL 180 G5 are sister products to the enterprise-level DL360 and the DL380, according to HP’s server and storage VP Paul Miller. These are Intel-powered boxes, with the accompanying DL165 G5 and DL185 G5 housing AMD chips.

According to HP, the servers include tools that guide users through system configuration for a fast installation.

The DL160 for small businesses costs from £699 (US$1400) and houses a pair of quad-Core 5400 sequence Xeon processors, up to 32GB of RAM, and an internal storage capacity of up to 3.0TB, with four 750GB hot-plug SATA, 3.5-inch drives. It includes two PCI-Express x16 2.0 slots and HP’s Lights Out 100i Advanced and Select remote management boards. HP said the management board enables users to manage entry-level ProLiant G5 servers remotely, install or update software over the Internet or the LAN, and monitor hardware health such as fan, temperature and power supplies.

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Amazon is probably the biggest name in the emerging online storage market, but new competition is coming from a startup named Nirvanix Inc. that built a storage service to accommodate vast increases in digital media content fueled by the growing popularity of Web 2.0 applications.

Nirvanix was founded one year ago and made its Storage Delivery Service generally available in October.

“The box model is dead,” claims founder and CEO Patrick Harr. Harr admits that storage giants like EMC still make a good buck, but he predicts that customers will increasingly see there’s little competitive advantage to operating storage in-house when you can do it “in the cloud.”

Nirvanix is backed by Intel’s capital investment arm and several other venture capital firms.

“Nirvanix has clearly targeted Amazon’s S3 [Simple Storage Service] for competition,” analyst Deni Connor, a former Network World writer who recently started the analyst firm Storage Strategies NOW, wrote in an e-mail. “Both companies focus on developers and businesses at procuring secure storage for their Web applications and content. Whether Nirvanix will be able to compete with Amazon’s S3 remains to be seen, but Storage 2.0 Web companies like Nirvanix stand a real chance in the industry of doing something great — providing scalable and secure storage without the capital expense of buying it.”

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