Oracle Updates NoSQL

Oracle has announced the availability of the latest edition of its NoSQL datatabase.

NoSQL is Oracle’s distributed key-value database. Now in it’s third version, the enhancements this time are heavily centred around security and business continuity.

Oracle NoSQL 3.0 features improvements in security with cluster-wide password based user authentication and integration with Oracle Wallet. Session level Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption and network port restriction are also included.

For disaster recovery and prevention, there’s automatic fail-over to metro-area secondary data centres, while secondary server zones can be used to offload read-only workloads to take the pressure off primary servers under stress.

For developers, there is added support for tabular data models that Oracle claims will simplify application design and improve integration with SQL based applications, while secondary indexing improves query performance.

“Oracle NoSQL 3.0 helps organisations fill the gap in skills, security and performance by delivering […] enterprise-class NoSQL database that empowers database developers and DBAs to easily, intuitively and securely build and deploy next generation applications,” said Oracle’s EVP of Database Server Technologies, Andrew Mendelsohn.

It’s already been a big week for the SQL community with NoSQL arriving on MariaDB for the first time, courtesy of a tie-up between SkySQL, Google and IBM on Tuesday, while yesterday Fusion-IO announced the use of Non-volatile memory (NVM) compression in MySQL to increase the capacity of SSD storage.

Both the community and enterprise versions of Oracle NoSQL Database 3.0 are available for download now from the Oracle Technology Network.

Source

Target Makes Information Security Changes

Target Corp announced an overhaul of its information security processes and the departure of its chief information officer as the retailer tries to re-gain customers and investors after a massive data breach late last year.

CIO Beth Jacob is the first high-level executive to leave the company following the breach, which led to the theft of about 40 million credit and debit card records and 70 million other records of customer details.

Jacob, who comes from a sales background and has been CIO since 2008, will be replaced by an external hire, according to sources at Target.

“It’s a decision that should have been made by the CEO on January 1, not through the resignation of an employee that overlooked critical weakness in the operating model,” Belus Capital Advisors CEO Brian Sozzi said.

The breach at Target was the second largest at a U.S. retailer, after the theft of more than 90 million credit cards over about 18 months was uncovered in 2007 at TJX Cos Inc, operator of the T.J. Maxx and Marshalls chains.

Hacking has become a major concern for retailers in the United States. In the latest reported breach, beauty products retailer and distributor Sally Beauty Holdings Inc said on Wednesday its network had been hacked but no card or customer data appeared to have been stolen.

Target Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel said the company would elevate the role of chief information security officer as part of its plan to tighten its security.

The company will also look externally to fill that position as well as the new position of chief compliance officer.

Steinhafel said Target would be advised by security consultant Promontory Financial Group as it evaluates its technology, structure, processes and talent.

“I believe this is definitely a measure in restoring faith and really showing that they are taking the breach seriously,” Heather Bearfield, who runs the cybersecurity practice for accounting firm Marcum LLP, told Reuters.

Target, the third-largest U.S. retailer, said last week customer traffic had started to improve this year after falling significantly toward the end of the holiday shopping season when news of the cyber attack spooked shoppers.

Source

Qualcomm Acquires Patents From HP

Chip making giant Qualcomm Inc has purchased a patent portfolio from Hewlett-Packard Co, including those of Palm Inc and its iPaq smartphone, in a move that will bulk up HP’s offerings to handset makers and other licensees.

The portfolio comprises about 1,400 granted patents and pending patent applications from the United States and about 1,000 granted patents and pending patent applications from other countries, including China, England, Germany, Japan and South Korea.

The San Diego-based chipmaker did not say how much it paid for the patents.

The majority of Qualcomm’s profits come from licensing patents for its ubiquitous CDMA cellphone technology and other technology related to mobile devices. Instead of licensing patents individually, handset vendors, carriers and other licensees pay royalties to Qualcomm in return for access to a broad portfolio of intellectual property.

The patents bought from HP, announced in a release on Thursday, cover technologies that include fundamental mobile operating system techniques.

They include those that HP acquired when it bought Palm Inc, an early player in mobile devices, in 2010 and Bitfone in 2006. HP tablets made using Palm’s webOS operating system failed to catch on.

“There’s nothing left at Palm that HP could get any use out of so it’s better to sell the patents, which are always valuable to Qualcomm,” said Ed Snyder, an analyst with Charter Equity Research. “They have to keep that bucket full.”

The new patents will not lead to increased royalty rates for existing Qualcomm licensees, a Qualcomm spokeswoman said.

Last year, HP sold webOS, which it received as part of the $1.2 billion Palm acquisition, to South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc.

Source

Is Acer Doomed?

Taiwanese PC maker Acer reported worse-than-expected quarterly loss. Actually, it had been expected to be bad, but no one had predicted it would be this bad.

For the fourth quarter, the world’s No.4 PC vendor reported a net loss of $254 million. The company had posted a worse-than-expected net loss of $446 million in the third quarter and a $112.31 million loss in the same quarter of 2012. In short, its troubles have been getting worse for more than two years.

At the end of last year the company named former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co sales executive Jason Chen as its new CEO and launched a new initiative to integrate hardware, software and cloud services. It will be a while before the new broom can sweep out two years of doom, so many are expecting more doom to emerge. Acer relied too heavily on making low-end laptops, which weakened its brand, it also missed the shift to mobile.

Acer’s senior executives are taking a 30 per cent voluntary salary cut starting January, the company said in a statement.

Source

ZTE Attempts To Double Marketshare

China’s ZTE Corp, the world’s seventh-largest smartphone maker, wants to nearly double its U.S. market share in the next three years by increasing spending on marketing.

ZTE, which trails nearby rival Huawei Technologies Co Ltd in selling both smartphones and telecoms equipment, wants more share of the fat profit margins promised by sales of high-end phones in the United States.

But the company needs to first work on its image. Its mainstay telecom equipment business was essentially shut out of the U.S. and other markets after government officials flagged security concerns about Chinese-made equipment.

ZTE targets a U.S. market share of 10 percent by 2017 from 6 percent in 2013, Lv Qianhao, global marketing director of mobile devices, told Reuters at a company event on Thursday.

That would place it a distant third behind Apple Inc with 41 percent and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd with 26 percent, according to September-November data from researcher comScore.

To that end, ZTE will increase its U.S. marketing budget by at least 120 percent this year from last, Lv said without elaborating. Like other Chinese handset makers, ZTE is grappling with low brand awareness in the world’s second-largest smartphone market and perceptions of inferior quality.

Samsung Electronics, which earns around two-thirds of its operating profit from its mobile division, spent $597 million on marketing in the United States in 2012, according to researcher AdAge.

Last year, ZTE signed a deal with the Houston Rockets basketball team and released a Rockets-branded phone.

“We want young U.S. consumers to participate in our marketing activities, so we will have more NBA (National Basketball Association) stores and channels that sell our products,” Lv said.

Globally, ZTE aims to ship around 60 million smartphones this year compared with about 40 million smartphones last year, said Senior Vice President Zhang Renjun.

The company sees much of that growth in developed markets – including Russia and China- which accounted for 68 percent of mobile device revenue last year compared with 35 percent in 2007, said Lv.

ZTE’s mobile device business sells feature phones as well as smartphones. It was the fifth-biggest mobile phone vendor in July-September, according to researcher Gartner, though it fell out of the top five smartphone sellers list in the same period.

ZTE expects to have swung to a profit for last year having booked its first-ever loss as a public company in 2012.

It based its turnaround on cutting costs, signing fewer low-margin contracts, and winning contracts to build fourth generation telecommunication networks.

The company expects global investment in 4G to reach $100 billion this year, Zhang said.

Source

Will Businesses Accept The Chromebook?

Sales of Chromebooks enjoyed rapid growth,going from basically nothing in 2012 to more than 20 percent of the U.S. commercial PC market, analyst firm NPD reported, while Windows PCs and Macs remained flat at best.

NPD estimated that, throughout all of 2013, 14.4 million desktops, notebooks, and tablets were sold through U.S. commercial channels, typically resellers. That compares to 16.4 million PCs, overall, sold in the U.S. during the third quarter alone–excluding tablets, according to IDC. All told, about 46.2 million PCs have been sold in the U.S. during 2013, IDC found.

Within that segment, however, NPD reported some intriguing findings. Chromebooks, once largely the province of Acer and Samsung, have been embraced by Dell, HP, and others–not the least of which are paying customers. In 2012, Chromebook sales were “negligible,” NPD reported. But in the space of a single year, they climbed to 21 percent, NPD found, helping push overall notebook PC growth up by 28.9 percent.

Windows notebooks, however, contributed nothing to that, as NPD found that growth was flat. Worse still, Macs actually declined, with combined sales of desktops and notebooks falling by 7 percent. Windows tablet sales tripled, albeit off what NPD called “a very small base”.

The message? Businesses are turning to the Web, which Chromebooks almost exclusively run. And those low-cost, Net-focused devices are becoming engines of productivity. As a result, they’re receiving validation from traditional PC vendors including Acer, Asus, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard, plus Google’s own Pixel.

“The market for personal computing devices in commercial markets continues to shift and change,” saidA Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD, in a statement.A “New products like Chromebooks, and reimagined items like Windows tablets, are now supplementing the revitalization that iPads started in personal computing devices. It is no accident that we are seeing the fruits of this change in the commercial markets as business and institutional buyers exploit the flexibility inherent in the new range of choices now open to them.”

Naturally, tablet sales continued to explode, capturing 22 percent(or about 3.16 million units) of all the computing device sales sold through the U.S. channel. Of all tablets sold commercially, iPads dominated with 59 percent of all unit sales, leaving the rest to Android (which grew more than 160 percent) and Windows.

Baker said that diversity will be key to the future success of hardware makers, a signpost for what vendors might release at 2014 and the weeks and months following.

Source

IBM To Become Cloud Broker

IBM is in the throes of developing software that will allow organizations to use multiple cloud storage services interchangeably, reducing dependence on any single cloud vendor and ensuring that data remains available even during service outages.

Although the software, called InterCloud Storage (ICStore), is still in development, IBM is inviting its customers to test it. Over time, the company will fold the software into its enterprise storage portfolio, where it can back up data to the cloud. The current test iteration requires an IBM Storewize storage system to operate.

ICStore was developed in response to customer inquiries, said Thomas Weigold, who leads the IBM storage systems research team in IBM’s Zurich, Switzerland, research facility, where the software was created. Customers are interested in cloud storage services but are worried about trusting data with third party providers, both in terms of security and the reliability of the service, he said.

The software provides a single interface that administrators can use to spread data across multiple cloud vendors. Administrators can specify which cloud providers to use through a point-and-click interface. Both file and block storage is supported, though not object storage. The software contains mechanisms for encrypting data so that it remains secure as it crosses the network and resides on the external storage services.

A number of software vendors offer similar cloud storage broker capabilities, all in various stages of completion, notably Red Hat’s DeltaCloud and Hewlett Packard’s Public Cloud.

ICStore is more “flexible,” than other approaches, said Alessandro Sorniotti, an IBM security and cloud system researcher who also worked on the project. “We give customers the ability to select what goes where, depending on the sensitivity and relevance of data,” he said. Customers can store one copy of their data on one provider and a backup copy on another provider.

ICStore supports a number of cloud storage providers, including IBM’s SoftLayer, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Rackspace, Microsoft Windows Azure and private instances of the OpenStack Swift storage service. More storage providers will be added as the software goes into production mode.

“Say, you are using SoftLayer and Amazon, and if Amazon suffers an outage, then the backup cloud provider kicks in and allows you to retrieve data,” from SoftLayer, Sorniotti said.

ICStore will also allow multiple copies of the software to work together within an enterprise, using a set of IBM patent-pending algorithms developed for data sharing. This ensures that the organization will not run into any upper limits on how much data can be stored.

IBM has about 1,400 patents that relate to cloud computing, according to the company.

Source

HP Retakes Server Lead

Hewlett-Packard reclaimed its server crown from IBM last quarter as the overall market contracted and Taiwanese vendors made big gains selling directly to Internet giants like Google and Facebook, according to an IDC report.

HP expanded its share of the market only modestly from a year earlier but IBM’s portion declined 4.5 points despite solid mainframe sales, to leave HP in the top spot. HP finished the third quarter with 28.1% of worldwide server revenue to IBM’s 23.4%, IDC said.

But the strongest growth was for the “ODM direct” segment which IDC broke out for the first time this quarter. It stands for original design manufacturers, which are Taiwanese firms like Quanta Computer, Wistron Group, Inventec and Compal, which sell partial and fully-built servers to the big cloud providers.

It’s a growing segment and one that threatens the incumbents. ODM’s accounted for 6.5% of server revenue last quarter, up 45.2% from a year earlier, IDC said. If the ODM category were a single vendor, it would be the third largest ahead of Dell.

Almost 80% of the ODM’s server revenue came from the U.S., primarily from sales to Google, Amazon, Facebook and Rackspace.

Overall, the server market declined 3.7% from a year earlier to $12.1 billion. It was the third consecutive quarter of declining revenue but IDC predicts improvement with a refresh cycle early next year. In terms of units shipped, volumes were about flat year over year, meaning average selling prices dropped.

Volume systems — mostly x86 servers — picked up slightly from last year, with 3.5% revenue growth. But sales of midrange and high-end systems dropped 17.8% and 22.5%, respectively, IDC said.

IBM fared worst of the top 5 vendors, with revenue down 19.4% due to “soft demand for System x and Power Systems,” IDC said. Dell retained third place with 16.2% of revenue, about flat from last year, while Cisco Systems and Oracle tied for fourth.

Cisco saw the most growth of the top vendors, with a nearly 43% revenue jump, IDC said.

Source

App Stores For Supercomputers Enroute

A major problem facing supercomputing is that the firms that could benefit most from the technology, aren’t using it. It is a dilemma.

Supercomputer-based visualization and simulation tools could allow a company to create, test and prototype products in virtual environments. Couple this virtualization capability with a 3-D printer, and a company would revolutionize its manufacturing.

But licensing fees for the software needed to simulate wind tunnels, ovens, welds and other processes are expensive, and the tools require large multicore systems and skilled engineers to use them.

One possible solution: taking an HPC process and converting it into an app.

This is how it might work: A manufacturer designing a part to reduce drag on an 18-wheel truck could upload a CAD file, plug in some parameters, hit start and let it use 128 cores of the Ohio Supercomputer Center’s (OSC) 8,500 core system. The cost would likely be anywhere from $200 to $500 for a 6,000 CPU hour run, or about 48 hours, to simulate the process and package the results up in a report.

Testing that 18-wheeler in a physical wind tunnel could cost as much $100,000.

Alan Chalker, the director of the OSC’s AweSim program, uses that example to explain what his organization is trying to do. The new group has some $6.5 million from government and private groups, including consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, to find ways to bring HPC to manufacturers via an app store.

The app store is slated to open at the end of the first quarter of next year, with one app and several tools that have been ported for the Web. The plan is to eventually spin-off AweSim into a private firm, and populate the app store with thousands of apps.

Tom Lange, director of modeling and simulation in P&G’s corporate R&D group, said he hopes that AweSim’s tools will be used for the company’s supply chain.

The software industry model is based on selling licenses, which for an HPC application can cost $50,000 a year, said Lange. That price is well out of the reach of small manufacturers interested in fixing just one problem. “What they really want is an app,” he said.

Lange said P&G has worked with supply chain partners on HPC issues, but it can be difficult because of the complexities of the relationship.

“The small supplier doesn’t want to be beholden to P&G,” said Lange. “They have an independent business and they want to be independent and they should be.”

That’s one of the reasons he likes AweSim.

AweSim will use some open source HPC tools in its apps, and are also working on agreements with major HPC software vendors to make parts of their tools available through an app.

Chalker said software vendors are interested in working with AweSim because it’s a way to get to a market that’s inaccessible today. The vendors could get some licensing fees for an app and a potential customer for larger, more expensive apps in the future.

AweSim is an outgrowth of the Blue Collar Computing initiative that started at OSC in the mid-2000s with goals similar to AweSim’s. But that program required that users purchase a lot of costly consulting work. The app store’s approach is to minimize cost, and the need for consulting help, as much as possible.

Chalker has a half dozen apps already built, including one used in the truck example. The OSC is building a software development kit to make it possible for others to build them as well. One goal is to eventually enable other supercomputing centers to provide compute capacity for the apps.

AweSim will charge users a fixed rate for CPUs, covering just the costs, and will provide consulting expertise where it is needed. Consulting fees may raise the bill for users, but Chalker said it usually wouldn’t be more than a few thousand dollars, a lot less than hiring a full-time computer scientist.

The AweSim team expects that many app users, a mechanical engineer for instance, will know enough to work with an app without the help of a computational fluid dynamics expert.

Lange says that manufacturers understand that producing domestically rather than overseas requires making products better, being innovative and not wasting resources. “You have to be committed to innovate what you make, and you have to commit to innovating how you make it,” said Lange, who sees HPC as a path to get there.

Source

Can Acer Go High-End?

Most popular for its low-cost laptops, Acer doesn’t really inspire thoughts of premium products. But building high-end hardware could be the Taiwanese vendor’s best chance as it looks for a way to rescue its struggling business.

With consumers flocking to tablets and smartphones, Acer’s once-thriving PC business has been left in the dust. Quarterly financial losses have become routine at the company and its PC shipments declined more sharply in the past year than at any other major vendor, according to IDC.

The grim situation forced CEO J.T. Wang to resign from his post last Tuesday. Acer will also cut 7 percent of its global workforce and has assembled an advisory committee to come up with a new strategy, the company announced.

Bright spots are hard to find. The Wintel model that propelled Acer for years and helped it become the second-largest PC vendor in 2009 has been falling apart amid the demand for mobile gadgets. And Windows 8 and Intel’s Ultrabook strategy have failed to resuscitate the market.

It hasn’t helped that Acer is so reliant on sales to consumers, said IDC analyst Bryan Ma. The entire PC industry has been hurt by tablets, but Dell and Hewlett-Packard have at least managed to find cover selling PCs to businesses, which are still buying them. And Lenovo has capitalized on its position in China, now the world’s largest PC market.

“Acer didn’t really have the commercial PC business to protect themselves. That’s why they were hit harder,” Ma said.

Acer — whether to its benefit or detriment — has instead gained a reputation for low-priced PCs. Even in tablets it has tried to undercut rivals — its Iconia W4, an 8-inch Windows 8.1 tablet, starts at US$329.99, while its Iconia B Android tablet goes for $129.99. The low prices have helped keep the company on consumers’ radar, but at the expense of profits.

One option for Acer is to build a brand as a higher-end PC player. It took a step in that direction last year with the Aspire S7, a Windows laptop with a slender, aluminum chassis that sells for $1,200 and up. That product and its successors have had some success for the company, with sales of 2,000 to 3,000 units per month, said James Wang, an analyst with research firm Canalys.

“I think Acer has started to learn they are able to sell some expensive products,” he said.

Selling higher-end PCs could help stop the bleeding in Acer’s finances, but with the overall PC market still shrinking it’s unlikely to help it expand in any meaningful way. “You can’t really expect vendors in desktops and notebooks to find growth,” Wang said. “You win in the market by not falling in shipments.”

Source

« Previous Page — Next Page »