Author: Eva Glass

Eva Glass first rose to prominence in The INQUIRER. She continues to work behind the scenes to dig out the best stories.

Hitachi Data Systems targets telco big data

Posted on March 2, 2015 by - News

server-racksThe IT division of Hitachi said it has started to sell an analytics package aimed at telecom service providers.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) said that its Live Insight for Telecom is aimed at giving providers real time information into networks, services and application level performance.

This, HDS claims, will let them predict network activity using both real time and historical data in parallel

Analytics is big business now – for example IBM is betting the farm on big data and the cloud.

So companies like HDS are claiming their products will reduce subscriber “churn”, lower the operational costs and give them new sources of revenue.

HDS claims that are close to seven billion mobile subscribers worldwide, with 78 percent of households in the developed world connected to the web.

But, it continues, even though telco providers can access tens o

Google retreats on Blogger smut

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

330ogleEarlier this week, Google’s Blogger service warned people that on the 23rd of March it would cull adult content from its users’ web pages.

But now Google has changed its mind after it said, it had received feedback that had convinced it to backtrack.

Google had said it would mark blogs that contained sexually explicit material as private.

Instead, it will now ask people to mark their web sites as “adult”, a flag which will mean a warning page pops up before redirecting people to the particular site.

A Blogger rep posted a message which said: “We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities. So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.”

No other changes need be made than for people to mark their sexually explicit pages as “adult”

China irritates tech firms

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

chinaflagA law set to be passed by Chinese authorities would make tech vendors provide the government with encryption keys and put backdoors in systems.

According to Reuters, the law relates to counter terrorism and the legislation is likely to be passed into law in the near future.

Other elements of the counter terrorism law include a reqirement for companies to locate their servers and user data in China, as well as forcing vendors to censor content that China believes is related to terrorism.

China already forces banks to buy from home grown vendors, rather than buying abroad.

Reuters said that the implications of this new piece of legislation would be to forbid secure VPNs, to send financial information securely, and to hide any detail of a commercial business.

Google might find itself thanking its lucky stars that it doesn’t do business in mainland China, but other vendors including Apple, Intel and Microsoft will certainly be hit by the legislation.

Ericsson sues Apple

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

EricssonSwedish company Ericsson has taken Apple to court and also complained to the US International Trade Commission (ITC), it said today.

Ericsson claims that Apple refused its offer to have a court decide fair licensing terms that would be binding on both companies. And because of that, it has filed a complaint with the ITC seeking to exclude its products for infringing patents directly linked to 2G and 4G LTE standards.

It filed a second complaint with a Eastern district Court in Texas asking for damages and injunctions for “infringement of patents that are critical to many other aspects of Apple’s devices”.

This second instance related to 41 patents which Ericsson claims covers not only 2G and 4G/LTE standards, but other patents related to semiconductors, user interface software, location services and application and the iOS operating system.

Ericsson claims that by refusing its reasonable licensing offer used in both Apple smartphones and tablets, “Apple harms the entire market”.

Apple’s global licence agreement for Ericsson mobile technology apparently expired last month.

HP joins the Internet of Things bandwagon

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

HPMajor vendors have convinced themselves that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big thing, and the latest to join the band is Hewlett Packard.

HP said its own version of IoT will allow organisations to manage different sets of IoT sensors, analyse data and use vertical applications on machine to machine devices.

It also claimed to have introduced the first vertical application called the HP Energy Management Pack.

The packages are aimed at communications service providers (CSPs) and is essentially remote management to discover devices, configure the devices and control IoT traffic.

The HP Energy Management Pack is intended to allow the CSPs to give secure home automation and energy control to people, to industries and to councils.

For example, Oxford City Council might want to remotely manage public lights based on profiles, emergencies and on weather conditions. And the pack might let “smart cities” manage parking using sensors.

 

Flash drives still have problems

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

flash_gordon (1)Kroll Ontrack, a company which specialises in data recovery, claimed that while nearly 90 percent of the people they surveyed used solid state drives (SSD), a third claimed they had some malfunctions.

Obviously Kroll has something of an axe to grind here, but it has surveyed over 2,000 people in the survey.

Of the SSDs which showed a malfunction, over 60 percent lost data and less than 20 percent managed to recover their data.

The reason it’s difficult to recover data is because it’s scattered on the drive, compared to hard disk drives, where the information is stored linearly, according to Paul Le Messier, operations manager at Kroll.

SSDs, however, are steadily become more popular both for enterprises and individuals. Of those surveyed, three quarters use flash drives in laptops and mobiles, 60 percent in desktop PCs, and 20 percent in servers.

The main attractions are performance and speed.

With the increasing usage of SDDs however, Kroll has averaged a 100 percent increase in recovery requests year on year from 2011 to 2014.

 

Juniper extends deal with Canonical

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

Pic Mike MageeUbuntu provider Canonical and Juniper Networks said they have extended their relationship to provide OpenStack based cloud offerings.

The deal is intended for use by the telecommunications industry.

The OpenStack software lets service providers virtualise core networks and network functions and is claimed to give better performance, scale and reliability.

Juniper said it will also provide complete service support for Canonical’s Ubuntu server operating system.

OpenStack is an open source cloud management platform with a large community of users, developers and founders, and Jupiter said over half of OpenStack instances run Ubuntu.

Both Juniper and Canonical have created Contral Cloud Platform which is a carrier grade OpenStack offering. Both companies will work on joint product development and marketing, and will work with their customers to include service provider needs in the cloud.

Healthcare systems are subject to hacking

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

wargames-hackerHospitals, clinics, trusts and insurers are under a barrage of cyberattacks but the healthcare section does not seem to be spending enough money to protect itself.

According to ABI Research, cybersecurity for healthcare protection will only be worth $10 billion by 2020, while other sectors such as financial and defence are coping.

ABI said “the healthcare industry is drowning” because of attacks from malicious online agents and a lot of companies and organisations in the sector are failing to modernise to take account of current threats.

Michelle Menting, a practice director at ABI, said: “Cybersecurity for healthcare is still a small fragmented market but the potential opportunities for expansion are large and will continue to grow as healthcare organisations increasingly come under cyberfire.”

She said a few startups such as TrueVault and FireHost are targeting the healthcare sector and building a niche for themselves. There are also managed services and cloud apps from companies like NetFortris and ID Experts.

Hardcopy peripherals value grew

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

HPA report from IDC said that values of hardcopy peripherals worldwide increased in the fourth quarter by 1.7 percent, bringing in revenues of $15.2 billion.

But although the value figure was up, unit shipments fell by 2.6 percent during the quarter, amounting to 30.8 million inits.

The laser segment grew for the whole year by 0.8 percent, and colour laser shipments grew, at the expense of monochrome lasers, where shipments fell.

Canon was number one during the fourth quarter, with most of its shipment growth coming from the US, Canada, Japan and Western Europe.

HP also saw shipments grow in the Canadian and Western European regions.

When the market is divided out, the fourth quarter shows that inkjet printers fell by 3.9 percent, while laser shipments increased by 0.2 percent.

A4 printers remain the dominant type with 78.4 percent unit share, compared to A3 printers with 21.6 percent unit share.

Lenovo gets hacked

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

lenovo-logoA cyberattack by a hacking group called Lizard Squad brought down Lenovo’s web site yesterday.

That’s following the revelation that Lenovo shipped adware called Superfish on some of its notebook devices.

Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for downing the Sony site at the end of last year.

Lenovo managed to get its site up and running after people that went to its site were redirected to other web sites.

Lenovo has stopped including Superfish shipping on its machine and offered people that had encountered it a software fix to remove it.

Lizard Squad managed to use a vulnerability to Lenovo’s name registrar to divert people away from the Lenovo web site.

 

Dell sells web scale converged devices

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

Dell logoDell said it has introduced the second series of of its XC Series web scale converged devices.

The units are aimed at data centre customers and Dell claimed they have now over 50 percent more storage capacity and twice the rack densities.

They’re intended to support many different kinds of workloads including private cloud, big data and virtual desktop infrastructures.

The appliances are based on Dell PowerEdge server technology with Nutanix software and bundled with Dell global services and support.

The appliances now offer additional drive options including for both flash and conventional hard drives. Each rack unit can support up to 16 terabytes per rack unit, and a number of options for multiple drives, memory and microprocessors.

Dell is now offering a compact 1U form factor with the XC630 model, while the XC730xd will support up to 32 terabytes of memory.

The units will be up for sale in early March.

 

Tablets slow right down

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

cheap-tabletsOnly 221.4 million tablets will ship worldwide this year – a drop of 11.9 percent compared to 2014.

That’s according to Digitimes Research (DR), which predicts that Apple will continue to take the lead, managing to ship over 54 million units this year. While this sounds healthy, that’s a predicted decline of 16/6 percent.

The so-called “white box” market will see the biggest decline, with a drop of 20 percent. Margins on these products are super slim.

DR gives estimates for the different vendors’ shares of the market – with Apple accounting for 24.5 percent, Samsung 16.3 percent, Lenovo 5.3 percent, Asustek 4.2 percent, Google 1.7 percent, Acer 1.7 percent, and Amazon only 1.6 percent.

Meanwhile, a report in Chinese language Economic Daily News said that Amazon has cut orders of tablets, sourced by Compal and Quanta by as much as 30 percent.

Compaq has the lion’s share of Amazon tablet business, churning out 80 percent of them compared to Quanta’s 20 percent, the Economic Daily News said.

 

Virtual reality market set to soar

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-02-25 at 14.19.20While virtual reality (VR) has been around for a good old while, a market research firm now predicts massive growth in the marketplace.

ABI Research said it expects to see three million VR units ship this year, but that will soar to 55 million by 2020.

It believes that head mounted displays will be the winning form factor for both augmented reality (AR) and VR.

The reason for the growth is that mobile reliant devices such as the Samsung Gear VR will be successful, while “tethered defices” and stand alone devices are likely to need more time to mature.

One of the reasons is that existing software, like CAD (computer aided design) software, can be easily modified to support VR devices.

Sports networks and video makers will also start supporting these type of devices.

ABI believes that it won’t be until next year before this market really starts to fly.

IBM strikes further deals with Juniper

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

Juniper and IBM have decided to work together in a bid to provide customers with improved mobile facilities, look at Internet of Things (IoT) applications and plumb the world of big data.

IBM said that the two companies will work together to deliver high performance network analytics to speed up enterprises, reduce costs, and provide better end user applications.

IBM logoIBM and Juniper have worked together for a while, but are now devising the integration of Juniper’s MX Router Service Control Gateway with IBM Now Factory analytics.

Other future developments will include providing visibility of subscribers and the ability of CSPs offer automated services based on data. Juniper will use IBM Analytics to understand data flows and self configure and optimise network operations.

Juniper will also integrate IBM Analytics features into its own Cloud Analytic Engine.

Bob Picciano, a senior VP at IBM, said: “Integrating predictive analytics directly into the stream of data processing – and embedding into the network of CSPs – will help to ensure the reliability of the network.”

 

Banks offer data centre storage

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-02-25 at 14.02.45After Santander said a couple of weeks ago that it would offer its data centre for storage, IDC is speculating whether this is going to become a trend.

According to Lawrence Freeborn, a senior research analyst at IDC, this could be the start of a trend, as banks have already invested money in their data centres.

But he does wonder if it’s likely. Banks, he said, have so far only offered storage to ordinary people rather than businesses, although one or two banks offer online cloud storage using Dropbox, or Google Drive and the like.

Banks, he said, are tending to drop safe box products while Barclays provides storage of paper documents rather than safe boxes.

Barclays already offers personal and business customers a cloud storage service for documents such as deeds and the like.

Freeborn said: “Focusing on delivering core offerings well… rather than moving into essentially unrelated services, should always be the guiding principle of any bank. This is the surest way to ensure that a bank can protect its business from the tech companies that are looking to move into banking: much better than trying to move the other way.”