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Dell’s Cloud Plans Falls Behind Schedule
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Dell announced an aggressive schedule last year to roll out cloud-based application services, but it appears that the schedule was a little too aggressive.
Dell said last August that it planned to launch an online analytics service in the first half of this year for small and midsized businesses, but that service isn’t due now until early next year, a Dell executive said.
“Like a lot of development projects, it can take a bit longer than you think,” Paulette Altmaier, general manager of Dell’s Cloud Business Applications group, said in an interview Thursday.
Dell also said it would launch a platform-as-a-service offering this year based on Microsoft’s Azure platform. On Friday, a Dell spokeswoman said the company no longer has a delivery date for that service.
The delays are a setback for Dell, which is trying to reduce its dependence on PCs and build more profitable businesses in services and software. But a lot of companies are moving slowly to the cloud, so the hold-up isn’t a disaster, said Peter Ffoulkes, an industry analyst with 451 Research Group.
“The move to the cloud is not a fast journey and for most people it is still largely a future. I would not expect a quarter or two to make a big difference in practical terms,” he said.
Dell has also made a string of software acquisitions in the past year that might be causing it to rethink its software-as-a-service strategy. It updated press and analysts on its software plans Thursday.
When it does arrive, the analytics service will offer “cross-app” analytics, meaning customers will be able to import data from one or more applications to a data warehouse that Dell will host for them online, and then perform analysis on that data.
Sharp To Pay Fine In Price Fixing Settlement
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Sharp said on Monday it has agreed to pay Dell and two other firms $198.5 million to settle a lawsuit for fixing LCD panel prices in Europe and North America.
The company agreed to settle the civil lawsuit, which was first filed in November of 2009 against a group of companies including Sharp, Epson, Hitachi and Toshiba for collusion on prices of LCD panels sold to Dell. A Sharp spokeswoman said the company made the decision independent of the other firms involved in the lawsuit, and the payment would settle the suit with Dell. Sharp did not name the two other companies besides Dell.
“After broadly considering factors such as the U.S. civil lawsuit system and the facts of this case, Sharp has determined that agreeing to a settlement is the best policy,” the company said in a statement.
Dell sought damages to recover funds it paid for LCD panels purchased at inflated prices. The lawsuit involved TFT (thin film transistor) panels, widely used in TVs, laptops and handheld gadgets.
Dell Buys Quest Software
Dell is set to buy Quest software for $2.5 billion. The move trumps the bid by Insight Venture Partners and was done on the quiet.
The No. 2 U.S. personal computer maker kept its name out of the limelight when Quest disclosed on Thursday that it had received an offer from a “strategic bidder” of $25.50 per share. Quest’s shares rose more than 9 percent to finish at $26.06 on Thursday.
Dell has been actively buying companies to expand its offerings to business and diversify away from personal computers. It told investors its focus on the hardware and software needs of corporate customers was gaining momentum. Quest could help Dell’s businesses in data management and protection and Windows server management.
AMD Gives Opteron A Boost
AMD has shown there is a little life left in its Bulldozer Opterons by bumping up the clock speed of five Opteron models.
AMD launched its Bulldozer Opteron processors last November amid widespread anticipation that its brand new Bulldozer architecture would once again make it competitive with Intel. Its new architecture failed to impress, but the company has managed to eek out another 100MHz from five Opteron processors in what is likely to be a last hurrah before Piledriver Opterons make their appearance.
AMD bumped up the clocks by 100MHz on the 16-core Opteron 6284 SE and Opteron 6278 to 2.7GHz and 2.4GHz, respectively, while keeping TDPs the same as before, at 140W and 115W, respectively. The firm gave four Opteron 4200 series chips the same 100MHz bump, including the eight-core Opteron 4276HE to 2.6GHz, the six-core Opteron 4240 to 3.4GHz and the Opteron 4230 to 2.9GHz.
AMD was keen to point out that its speed bumped Opteron chips have been picked by Dell and by HP for 11 of its servers. Although the firm has not been able to compete with Intel’s Xeon chips on perfermance, its chips are considerably cheaper, a fact that AMD is using to win customers.
Although AMD’s 100MHz speed bump isn’t going to set the world on fire, every little bit of performance will help the firm as Intel ploughs on with its hugely impressive Sandy Bridge E and Ivy Bridge Xeon chips. AMD’s answer to Intel’s latest Xeon chips is expected to be the Piledriver Opterons.
1 In 5 U.S. PCs Have No Antivirus Protection
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Nearly a fifth of Windows PCs in the U.S. lack any active security protection, an antivirus vendor stated on Wednesday, citing numbers from a year-long project.
“The scale of this is unprecedented,” argued Gary Davis, the director of global consumer product marketing for McAfee, talking about the scope of his company’s sampling of PC security.
McAfee took measurements from scans of more than 280 million PCs over the last 12 months, and found that 19.3% of all U.S. Windows computers browsed the Web sans security software. Owners of those systems downloaded and used McAfee’s free Security Scan Plus, a tool that checks for antivirus programs and enabled firewalls.
Globally, the average rate was 17%, putting the U.S. in the top 5 most-unprotected countries of the 24 represented in the scans.
Of the unprotected PCs in the U.S., 63% had no security software at all, while the remaining 37% had an AV program that was no longer active. The latter were likely trial versions of commercial antivirus software that had expired.
Antivirus trials are a fact of life in the Windows world. Most new machines come with security software that runs for a limited time. Some new Dell PCs, for example, come with a 30-day trial of McAfee’s Security Center program.
Dell Intros Ivy Bridge Xeon Servers
Dell has become the first to announce servers using Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge Xeon E3 processors.
Intel launched its single socket Ivy Bridge Xeon E3 processors a month after it wowed everyone with its dual-core Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 processors, and it has taken Dell only another month to announce the first servers to make use of Intel’s latest nearline server chip. Dell’s Poweredge C5220 microserver uses Xeon E3 1200 series processors that have thermal design power (TDP) down to 17W.
Dell is pitching its Poweredge C5220 servers towards high performance computing, cloud deployments and content delivery networks. While Dell calls the Poweredge C5220 a microserver, that really isn’t a reference to its size or density, but rather the fact that it is a single socket server.
Dell offers the Poweredge C5220 with either 17W or 45W TDP Intel processors supporting DDR3-1600 memory. The firm claims close to double the performance over previous generation single socket servers, mainly due to a 50 per cent increase in density.
Android Apps To Run On Windows
Software firm Bluestacks is on a mission to close the gap between Microsoft’s Windows and Google’s Android OS with its App Player application, which was released in beta earlier this week.
App Player is an emulator that allows Android applications to run on Windows 7, Vista and XP OSes. Users can install the software in Windows and then run around 450,000 Android applications, including Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, the company said in a statement.
Beyond PCs, the App Player could also allow Windows tablets such as Hewlett-Packard’s Slate 2 and Dell’s Latitude ST to run Android applications. Bluestacks made headlines at last year’s Computex trade show in Taipei when Advanced Micro Devices showed off an x86 tablet with Android running on top of the Windows 7 software stack. Android applications are mostly written for the ARM instruction set, but the x86 tablet was able to switch between Android and Windows without any problems.
The emulator has new Layercake technology, which exploits hardware accelerators to improve the performance of Android games in Windows. The layer was not included in the previous Bluestacks alpha version. Android applications typically use hardware accelerators found in ARM’s Mali, Nvidia’s Tegra or Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR graphics cores, but Layercake is able to take advantage of hardware accelerators from companies like AMD found in x86 chips.
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AMD Aims For The Cloud
Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday is expected to announce new Opteron 3200 series chips for low-end servers, which the company believes will give it a competitive edge over Intel in the cloud server arena.
The three Opteron 3200 chips are for use in single-socket servers for Web hosting and cloud applications, according to a company presentation. The chips have up to eight processor cores, clock speeds of up to 3GHz, and draw between 45 watts and 65 watts of power.
The new chips are based on the Bulldozer processor architecture, which is also in the Opteron 6200 16-core processors and FX-series gaming chips. The Opteron 3200 launch comes after AMD in late February announced it would pay US$334 million to acquire SeaMicro, which offers dense and power-efficient servers for cloud computing environments.
AMD’s chips will likely compete against Intel’s Xeon E3 series chips, which are used in SeaMicro’s SM10000-XE server. Intel worked with SeaMicro on the server, but analysts have said that AMD will ultimately swap Intel’s chips with its own chips.
AMD is pitching the Opteron 3200 as a “low-cost-per-core” product. The chips are priced between US$99 and $129, while Intel’s E3 chips are priced between $189 and $885. MSI, Tyan, Fujitsu and Dell are expected to launch Web servers and dense systems based on the chips.
AMD’s expanded product line provides an entry point to new markets, said Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat.
But the Opteron 3200 could be a misfit in servers if competing on price versus performance-per-watt, McGregor said. There is a growing interest in deploying low-power servers in data centers to cut energy costs, but the Opteron 3200 chips are comparatively power-hungry for such installations.
Corporate America Prefers iPads
March 19, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Corporate customers who are planning tablet purchases next quarter overwhelmingly picked Apple’s iPad, a research firm said Tuesday.
Of the 1,000 business IT buyers surveyed last month by ChangeWave Research who said they would purchase tablets for their firms in the coming quarter, 84% named the iPad as an intended selection.
That number was more than ten times the nearest competitor and was a record for Apple.
“The percentage reporting they’ll buy Apple iPads has jumped to the highest level of corporate iPad demand ever seen in a ChangeWave survey,” the company said in a blog post.
Apple’s share of future business purchases has never been lower than 77% in any ChangeWave survey, which go back to November 2010.
Just over a fifth of all IT buyers — 22% — confirmed that they would be purchasing tablets for employees in the April-June quarter, ChangeWave said.
While Apple’s stock among corporate buyers rose by seven percentage points from the 77% that tapped the iPad as their preferred device last November, all other tablet makers’ numbers dropped in the most recent survey.
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Hitachi-LG Executives Plead Guilty
December 19, 2011 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Three executives at Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) have agreed to plead guilty and serve prison time in the U.S. for their participation in a number of conspiracies to rig bids and fix the prices of optical disk drives sold to large computer manufacturers, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.
Young Keun Park, Sang Hun Kim and Sik “Daniel” Hur conspired with others to suppress competition by rigging bids for optical disk drives sold to Dell and Hewlett-Packard and to fix prices for optical disk drives sold to Microsoft, the DOJ said. The conspiracies happened at various times between November 2005 and September 2009, the DOJ said.
Under a plea agreement in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Park and Kim each have agreed to serve eight months in prison and Hur has agreed to serve seven months in prison. Each has also agreed to pay a US$25,000 fine.
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