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Google doesn't talk about its server operations very often; most of what we know boils down to one word: "big." The company lifted the lid ever-so-slightly yesterday (no April Fool),
and gave the world a peek inside a data center that's normally locked up tighter than Fort Knox. The results (and the company's focus) might surprise you.
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At a press conference in New York this morning, two industrial powerhouses announced an agreement to join forces in a focus on healthcare. Neither GE nor Intel is a newcomer to the healthcare market, and they are hardly the first companies to get excited about healthcare now that the prospect for both systemic reform and stimulus money is in the air. But most of the focus so far has been on electronic medical records, which are considered the frontrunners when it comes to stimulus spending. But both of these companies are hardware-focused, and their announcement involved a decidedly different take on how to modernize the medical system.
Both companies have had medical initiatives for years. GE is recognized as a major player in the world of high-end medical imaging and specialized devices, while Intel has been developing a series of small devices for remote monitoring and telemedicine. Software is an essential part of these—both specialized hardware control and general data monitoring capabilities are needed to make these initiatives work—but the focus clearly remains on the hardware itself, which is in keeping with the wider focus of these companies. As such, the press conference provided a very different take on healthcare than you would get if you listened to say, a talk on Google's efforts.
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Polycom has licensed the right to distribute Microsoft RoundTable, originally launched by the software giant in October 2007. As of April 13, 2009, Microsoft will no longer be selling RoundTable, and instead the product will be available as the Polycom CX5000 Unified Conference Station. Microsoft will continue to support all RoundTable devices already sold, and Polycom will support all Polycom CX5000s.
Polycom is known as a leader in telepresence, video, and voice communications solutions. This, along with the fact that the company's portfolio offers a full suite of devices that integrate with Office Communications Server 2007, makes Microsoft's choice of Polycom unsurprising. Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president in the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft, elaborates upon this decision with the following statement:
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In recent months, most of the news about Google focused on the cutbacks it has made to both staff and experimental projects. On Monday, however, the search giant announced a major expansion, a venture capital fund with full Google branding: Google Ventures. In contrast to some of the efforts of Google.org, these investments will be all about profit, and the company is taking great pains to ensure potential investees that the money will come with no strings attached. Those assurances, however, come in a message that's fairly mixed.
This is not Google's first foray into investing, but the company's past efforts were placed under its charitable arm, Google.org. These investments were mixed with grants, and had a clear focus on things like alternative energy and emerging diseases. Google Ventures, in contrast, doesn't appear to have any specific goals beyond "making money from the investment." There is the possibility that there will be some overlap—areas of interest highlighted by the announcement include clean tech, biotech, and health care—but those investments will be made alongside those in software, consumer Internet, and other businesses. Google promises that its ventures will borrow "the best practices of top-tier, financially focused venture capital firms."
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The clock is ticking down towards Conficker.C's reported April 1 launch date, but an 11th-hour discovery by Team White Hat may substantially improve an IT shop's chance of catching the
bug early and stomping on it. The full technical details on the Conficker scanner are being witheld for roughly 24 hours (we'll link the paper when it arrives). If the scanner works as
advertised, the security industry will be able to track the spread of Conficker much more effectively than before and neutralize it that much faster.
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One of the pleasures of reading the The Server Room is taking part in various threads on the theme of "lessons learned." So when we hit upon the idea of distilling the collective wisdom of the Ars forums into an article on virtualization for a broader audience, the first thing we thought of was, "let's ask everyone to share their biggest virtualization deployment mistakes." The results so far are worth checking out for anyone who's about to make the jump to a virtualized server room.
I'll summarize just one of the issues highlighted so far, to give you a sense of the discussion.
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The global economic downturn has compelled a growing number of companies to search for ways to reduce IT costs. Uptake of open source software is climbing in this environment, which means more opportunities for the companies that have built their businesses around the open source Linux platform.
Red Hat, one of the most prominent commercial Linux vendors, reported its quarterly earnings Thursday and revealed that its total annual revenue was $652 million, an increase of 25 percent over the previous year. Subscriptions to Red Hat's commercial support service, which accounts for $541 million of that revenue, were up 20 percent. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, a former Delta Airlines COO who joined Red Hat in 2007, cites the recession as a factor that has contributed to the company's success.
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IT news might be bad in almost every corner of the industry, but one industry segment seems better fit to ride out the recession than most. Sales of security appliances to various business
sectors in Western Europe grew revenue a total of 14.4 percent in 2008 as compared to 2007, but that growth slacked off a bit in the fourth quarter; sales rose only 10.1 percent. Those are solid numbers in any economic climate, and particularly in this one.
The increase in total revenue was not spread evenly across the top five vendors. Fortinet reported 29.5
percent revenue growth from 2007-2008, followed by Cisco (20.5 percent) and "other" (18.7 percent). Nokia and Secure Computing eked out smaller gains of 6.6 percent and 2.3 percent,
respectively, while Juniper fell off a cliff. Company revenue dropped 17 percent year-on-year, which helps explain why everyone else grew at such a high rate.
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If you've got even a passing interest in the subject, you're undoubtedly aware that true progress in general-purpose x86 multicore programming has been slow and uncertain. Intel and AMD may
have made the technology affordable—a quad-core system could easily have cost thousands of dollars just five years ago, compared to the low hundreds today—but software development has
lagged well behind the pace with which we've seen new multicore chips.
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White hats nationwide have ramped up their efforts to create a defense against Conficker.C as the worm's April 1 activation date approaches. This is not an easy task—as we've
previously described, Conficker.C sacrifices some of .B's infection vectors but replaces them with code designed to make the worm harder to track, block, or remove.
If Conficker.A was an
annoying relative with an old house key that somehow still worked, and Conficker.B a family member who thought you were so nice that he needed to meet everyone in your entire
neighborhood, then Conficker.C is everyone's nightmare house guest. He sleeps on the couch, can't be bothered with minor details (like pants), sucks down cell phone minutes and
bandwidth caps like bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and has an absolutely uncanny ability to vanish every time you show up brandishing a fresh stack of bills and a "you have
to go" attitude.
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For a product whose success determines whether AMD lives or dies, there's been surprisingly little said about Shanghai of late. Granted, there has been no shortage of semiconductor news,
economic blues, various lawsuits, and the company's self-division to occupy the digital press, but when all is said and done, AMD's future rests significantly on Shanghai's ability to
compete in the server market. Server processors typically carry much higher premiums than their desktop counterparts; the revenue-per-CPU that AMD derives in this market is extremely
important to the company's bottom line. With Nehalem-EP on the way, and Shanghai now established and available, what's the consenus on the core?
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A pair of Argentinean researchers has demonstrated a BIOS-level exploit that allowed the duo to potentially run a great deal of invisible code—which could remain installed even if the hard drive
was wiped. Much has been made of this last bit, but malware attacks against the Basic Input Output System are anything but new.
The CIH (Chernobyl) virus that first appeared in 1998 was
capable of bricking a system by rewriting critical boot information in the computer's BIOS with garbage output. Even if you dodged this bullet, CIH's primary payload rewrote the first 1MB
of the hard drive. If Chernoybl successfully activated on D-day, the best outcome a user could hope for was an apparently wiped hard drive. At worst, system repair involved physically
pulling the BIOS chip and installing another.
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They may be advertised as speeding deterrents to city councils and safety tools to worried parents, but according to another school of thought, red-light cameras are all about making
money. It's not clear whether the systems are always pitched as profit generators from day one or if the city government, confronted with a sudden jump in ticket revenue, makes its own
decision to shorten yellow lights. The correlations, however, are there. There's weak evidence that the red-light cameras reduce accidents at certain intersections (though the severity
of those accidents may actually rise), but there's no doubt that they provide a major source of revenue at a time when cities are hurting for funds.
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The Mac's ease of use is often cited as a reason for the platform's popularity in small businesses and home offices. Apple is now offering a new seminar for those businesses not familiar with the platform but looking to use Macs for their computing needs. Titled "Your business on a Mac. A better bottom line," the seminars are being held around the US starting this week.
The three and a half hour-long seminar is intended to for business owners considering Macs, as well as existing Mac users hoping to use a Mac in an existing Windows environment. It covers the basics of Mac OS X, connecting to existing networks—including Windows-based workgroups, basic networking and file sharing, and using iWork and iLife for business purposes.
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