As virtualization technology gains in popularity, it may bring with it new risks, said Don Simard, commercial solutions director at the U.S. National Security Agency, the electronic intelligence and cryptographic agency once so secret its very existence was a secret.

At the same time, virtualization technology may bring new protections, he noted.

One of the NSA’s roles is to work with technology providers to help them make their wares more secure, both to help government agencies using them and to reduce threats that could affect the commercial sector and thus the national economy. Sometimes, the NSA also wants to ensure it has back-door access to commercial systems.

In the case of virtualization, the NSA has worked with EMC’s VMware unit, IBM, AMD, Trusted Computing Group, and others for several years to identify potential threats and suggest workarounds. Later this year, chips from AMD and Intel will include technology that the NSA has helped develop.

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Information Support Concepts (ISC) has discontinued the monthly product special. Since we are now running weekly specials with much deeper discounts, it made sense for the monthly special to be replaced. We will now have a featured product each month, and direct our customers back to the weekly special for discounted items.

You can click on this link to see the current weekly product special!

This month we will highlight the value of keyboard/monitor drawers. Click here

RKP117, RKP1017 and RKP7 series keyboard/monitor drawers

The units pictured are some of the RKP series units. All units can be equipped with built-in KVM switches (see article below), and those switches can be USB, PS/2 or Cat5 capable. Keyboard/Monitor drawers provide outstanding features while only occupying 1U in a rack or cabinet. The RKP is the light duty unit while the N series is more solidly built and able to meet many of the standards associated with Mil-Spec.

As always, ISC personnel are ready to answer your questions, and can confirm what product will work for your specific application. If you have a question, just call us at 800-458-6255.

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Evidence that the U.S. economic slump is taking a toll on chipmakers came on Mar. 10 with a forecast of a sales-and-profit shortfall at Texas Instruments and news of a jump in stockpiles of unsold semiconductors.

Texas Instruments (TXN) said its first-quarter revenue and earnings won’t be as high as previously expected, citing disappointing wireless demand. That followed a Gartner Group (IT) report showing that semiconductor inventories rose to their highest level in two years in the last three months of 2007. “We started hearing rumors of a recession and indicators of a weak fourth quarter during the middle of 2007,” says Gartner analyst Gerald Van Horn. In the second half of last year, “we saw [inventories] rise on exuberant hopes for a strong holiday season. But the strong fourth quarter didn’t materialize.”

As a result, Gartner’s inventory index, which measures inventory throughout the chip industry’s supply chain, rose to 1.16 in the fourth quarter. According to the researcher, 0.95 indicates a slight shortage amid heavy demand, while 1.10 suggests slackening demand with a slight excess inventory. A higher reading falls into what Gartner calls the “caution zone,” where chipmakers should seriously consider cutting their inventory.

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Fewer global delivery centers were opened in India by the United Kingdom’s 20 largest IT services suppliers than in each of the three countries over the last year.

The competitive Indian labor market is driving companies to alternative destinations, say Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) in its report.

The 20 largest U.K. companies analyzed in the report included Accenture, BT Global Services, Capgemini, Capita, CSC, EDS, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Logica.

Of the 21 centers opened since January 2007 by the big 20, only two were in India, while four were in China, with three were Eastern Europe and Morocco respectively.

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Chip-maker Intel Corp.’s CEO, Paul Otellini, vowed Wednesday to shore up the company’s defenses against steep drops in memory chip prices that forced it to lower its profit forecast for the current quarter.

Price erosion for NAND flash memory has been much steeper in the first quarter than Intel expected, Otellini said.

Otellini, speaking at an investor conference at the company’s Santa Clara headquarters, said the company plans to move aggressively this year into new markets to better insulate itself against plunging prices for a type of memory called NAND flash. One new market for NAND flash memory is solid-state computer drives, which store data on memory chips instead of spinning disks.

Despite the memory-market woes, Otellini says Intel’s core computing business is firing on all cylinders. Otellini said Intel is making rapid progress in shipping chips based on a new chip-making process.

The company is also re-evaluating how quickly it wants to increase its investment in NAND flash, Otellini said. Intel started making NAND flash in 2006 under a joint venture with Micron Technology Inc.

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It’s a snowy February day at IBM’s office in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and John E. Kelly III drops by a cramped conference room to talk about his plans for IBM Research. The organization is already considered one of the world’s best corporate research labs. Yet Kelly, a 27-year IBM veteran who took over as research director in July, is planning surprisingly dramatic changes. “We have to do bolder things, bigger things,” he says, speaking about his plans publicly for the first time. “If we don’t fail a third of the time, we’re not stretching enough. On the other hand, when we win, we need to win big.”

What does Kelly have in mind? For starters, he’s focusing on four top research priorities, rather than spreading investments too thin. The four bets are enormous, though. Each of the projects will get $100 million over the next two to three years, in hopes of generating at least $1 billion, each, in new revenue. The projects: inventing a successor to today’s semiconductor, designing computers that process data much more efficiently, using math to solve complex business problems, and building massive clusters of computers that operate like a single machine—an approach called “cloud” computing. Central to the effort will be even more emphasis on basic scientific research, such as physics, chemistry, and math.

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The mainframe, the aged yet surprisingly resilient survivor of computing, is getting a face-lift. A model called the I.B.M. z10, which is being introduced Tuesday, is far faster and has three times the data-juggling memory of its three-year-old predecessor, the z9.

But the significance of the new machine, analysts say, is that it is a big step in a broad campaign by I.B.M. to make the mainframe computer a high-performance, energy-efficient engine for running all kinds of nonmainframe software.

The goal, according to I.B.M. executives and analysts, is to recast the mainframe as a nimble supercomputer in corporate and government data centers, running Web-based programs, Linux, advanced data mining and business intelligence software.

To do that, I.B.M. has refined its mainframe hardware and come up with new software tools, as part of a five-year, $1.5-billion overhaul.

“The mainframe’s ability to survive is only as good as its ability to innovate and compete for these new computing workloads of the future,” an analyst at Forrester Research, Brad Day, said. “And I.B.M. is starting to succeed at that.”

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Security researchers have uncovered “critical” security flaws in a version of the Linux kernel used by a large number of popular distributions.

The three bugs allow unauthorized users to read or write to kernel memory locations or to access certain resources in certain servers, according to a SecurityFocus advisory.

They could be exploited by malicious local users to cause denial-of-service attacks, disclose potentially sensitive information or gain “root” privileges, according to security experts.

The bug affects all versions of the Linux kernel up to Version 2.6.24.1, which contains a patch. Distributions such as Ubuntu, TurboLinux, SUSE, Red Hat, Mandriva, Debian and others are affected.

The problems are within three functions in the system call fs/splice.c, according to an advisory from Secunia APS.

“In the 2.6.23 kernel, the system call functionality has been further extended resulting in … critical vulnerabilities,” said iSEC Security Research in an advisory.

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At Google’s (GOOG) offices in Tokyo, they talk about “John’s magic.” That refers to the Internet search giant’s dealmaking frenzy in Japan since John Lagerling joined the company more than a year ago as manager for strategic partner development. To the astonishment of many insiders, the trim, blond 31-year-old Swede has finessed tieups with Japan’s two biggest wireless carriers, giving Google’s search technology top billing on the tiny screens of as many as 82 million mobile subscribers.

Even Yahoo Japan, which boasts the country’s most popular Web portal, lags far behind. Fewer than 18 million mobile subscribers whose service is with wireless operator and Yahoo Japan owner Softbank own handsets that go directly to Yahoo’s search page.

Last month’s deal with NTT DoCoMo (DCM) adds to Google’s edge in the fast-growing Net search and advertising business in one of the world’s most sophisticated wireless markets. Now, the first thing DoCoMo mobile subscribers see when they go online from their handsets is the carrier’s site featuring a search box and the phrase “enhanced by Google.” Ditto for KDDI users. That means someone in Tokyo’s Shibuya shopping district who wants to find a store selling vinyl records no longer has to type in Google on a numerical keypad to gain access to the company’s search engine.

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Dell is revamping its support-services offering as the company continues to battle shrinking growth in PC and server sales.

The overhaul will see the introduction of two services, Dell ProSupport for IT and ProSupport for End-Users, aimed at improving local support for enterprise customers by improving turnaround times and offering the ability to fast-track requests.

With ProSupport for IT, for example, IT personnel at customer sites will be able to directly access the relevant support staff rather than pick their way through Dell’s support escalation process. Non-IT end users, meanwhile, will be able to access application and configuration assistance for their machines.

Dell would not clarify the number of people it has employed for the revamped service. Brian Goff, Dell Australia’s enterprise technical manager, said only that there are “more staff than last year,” citing the company’s upcoming profit report on February 28 as a reason for holding back the details. The company is currently recruiting technical staff to fill vacant roles.

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