Barker Bites Back
A look at some newsy stuff and interesting bits as well as those hopefully amusing byways of technology.
Friday 9 May 2008, 3:39 PM
Citrix launch faster web delivery controller
Citrix has given something of a boost to the performance of its web application delivery controllers with the addition of two NetScaler MPX controllers. The 17000 and 15000 slot in above the 12000 range and offer what the company is claiming is much improved performance within controllers that, according to Citrix, fit in the same form factors.
The 15000 has four dual-core processors, 16GB of memory (compared to 4GB in the previous top of the range 12000), two times 10 Gigabit Fibre Optic connection as standard (an option only on the 12000) and a performance that allows 340,000 HTTP requests per second and a throughput of 6,000Mbps (when the previous high was 3,000Mbps).
Other performance highlights include a claimed compression throughput of 3,000Mbps, when the previous high in the 12000 was 1,300Mbps.
This sort of performance comes at a price as the 15000 costs $180,000. There is a higher performance MPX 17000 which has more memory (32GB), four 10 Gigabit Fibre Optic connections and a compression throughput of 6,000Mbps. Citrix has not yet released a price for that.
"This is intended for those customers who need the highest possible throughput," Damian Saunders, manager of the Application Networking Group at Citrix in the UK, told ZDNet.co.uk. He thinks that customers looking to install software such as Software as a Service (SaaS) apps and ISVs will be particularly attracted to the new controllers.
"It is all about throughput and moving large quantities of data but it is also about building capacity for expansion," he said. "These applications will grow quickly and the infrastructure has to accommodate that."
Wednesday 16 April 2008, 11:53 AM
Gartner: chip spending to fall 20 percent
Capital spending on semiconductor manufacturing equipment is set to fall by 20 percent this year, according to analysts Gartner.
The analysts say that a weakening US economy and a collapsing dynamic random access memory (DRAM) market will result in worldwide semiconductor capital equipment spending to total $47.5 billion in 2008, a 19.8 per cent decline from 2007.
The semiconductor market is a prime indicator of much of the technology sector since so many products are based on chips, so the news could be taken as an indicator that the promised recession that has begun in the US is perhaps here at last.
But when it comes to microprocessors and other chips, the indicators are more complex than that. While the almost 20 percent drop is expected in capital expenditure this year, in 2009 the market is expected to grow by 7.4 percent and then by 12.5 2010, come down again by -7.2 percent in 2011 and back up again by 8.4 percent in 2012.
Gartner believes the industry has brought the problem on itself. "The expected bursting of the DRAM capital spending bubble has finally happened, as rampant overcapacity in that sector drove unit prices well below cash costs for most manufacturers," said Klaus Rinnen, managing vice president for Gartner's semiconductor manufacturing group.
Worldwide wafer fabrication equipment spending is expected to decline 17.4 per cent in 2008, Gartner said. One small chink of light is that the popularity of mobile devices is expected to prompt a small increase in sales of NAND flash memory.
Monday 14 April 2008, 4:53 PM
Citrix goes virtual with Xen Desktop
Desktop virtualisation promises the ability for corporations to rationalise their huge farms of desktop PCs by switching users into the virtual world. Citrix is hoping that its Xen Desktop product, which it launched on Monday, will do just that.
While server virtualisation is already in use across the industry, desktop virtualisation has been slower to catch on in the entrprise, while, on paper at least, it potentially offers dramatic efficiencies.
IT managers are used to managing masses of desktops that require regular maintenance and software support which comes at a cost.
Virus software has to be regularly updated, as does much other software, and that only adds to the cost.
By virtualising the desktop, companies can remove some of the cost. Updates can be more easily delivered virtually and, potentially, all maintenance becomes a little easier.
Part of the problem is that the world has become used to distributed systems but perhaps there is no reason why it should stay that way.
"Xen Desktop takes the model of this distributed endpoint and puts it right into the data centre," according to Calvin Hsu, senior product manager for Citrix XenDesktop. "This way we can offer storage and systems with cost effective scalability."
There is certainly mass appeal in virtualisation and XenDesktop will potentially get to reach into perhaps millions of desktops, according to Citrix who will be co-marketed its software with Microsoft.
With virtualisation organisations will be able to delivery solution that allows companies to virtualise Windows desktops in the datacentre and deliver them on-demand to office workers in any location. The company says it is a "comprehensive end-to-end desktop delivery system that offers an unparalleled end-user experience, dramatically simplifies desktop management and reduces the cost of traditional desktop computing by up to 40 per cent".
It does take various Citrix components and bring them together into one virtualised solution. It will include such features as provisioning so that desktops can be populated with new software and services easily, the company says, as well as a new way of working for Citrix.
"The desktop delivery system makes this provisioning much easier," Hsu told ZDNet.co.uk. "It talkes all the components [that make up a desktop system] and breaks them down. You then take all those smaller components and provision them as you need them."
The main components are the operating system, the applications and components for personalising a system. By being able to breaks down components in this way, an IT manager can decide which are necessary for which customer and allocate them accordingly.
Citrix uses a "golden image" system which basically works by defining an ideal system that will fit the most number of users. Once the "golden image" has been defined the company/IT manager should be able to deploy to the most number of systems. The exceptions, those users with special requirements, can be dealt with using differenct variations which all use the "golden image" as the start point.
According to Hsu, Citrix is expecting Xen Desktop to sell in vast numbers when it is available and he talked of interest from companies already in 30,000 to 40,000 seat editions. It is available now as a public Beta and will be available in its full version on May 20. Pricing for the standard edition is $75 with the enterprise edition and platinum editions costs $175 and $275. The top two editions are the only ones with the full range of new provisioning services. Pricing is per concurrent user.
Thursday 10 April 2008, 4:16 PM
Gartner: Innovation and accountability
Organisations that hope to prosper despite any recession, need to implement a formal IT strategy. And if they haven’t started on one already, they need to move fast.
This was perhaps a key message to come out of Gartner’s Symposium and IT Expo taking place this week in Las Vegas.
The analysts believe that the only way forward for all companies is through innovation and part of that, they made clear, was a formal strategy of developing innovation using technology as the tool to achieve the right result.
“Integrating emerging technologies is an important source of innovation for the business,” said Jackie Fenn, Gartner vice president on Monday.
“Innovation initiatives may emerge from ideas generated by the business or from research areas, such as the IT organization's Emerging Technologies Group (ETG),” said Fenn. “Organizations should exploit both idea channels and map clear links between their business goals, business projects and emerging technology planning.”
Fenn stressed the importance of an organisations emerging technology group (ETG) which would be a group of individuals from across the business, brought together to help identify promising new ideas. These ideas could be developed into products or business strategies. Many IT companies, such as HP and Cisco have ETG’s helping to drive their research.
“Although the ETG is responsible for delivering a strategy for emerging trends and technologies, the extended team needs diversity in background, current role or responsibility, business or IT orientation and generational knowledge,” Fenn said.
Perhaps one of here key messages was accountability. Who was responsible for what?
It was crucial to work out the accountability for thinking up ideas, developing them and implementing them, she said. Too often the accountability rested solely with IT, she thought, when it should be part of the business.
But according to Gartner research, only “a few organisations are beginning to place the direct accountability with business units”. Overall, Gartner believes that two thirds (66 percent) of the largest organisations (those in the Global 1000) believe that they will have a form technology innovation process in place by 2010.
This suggest that the road to the innovative company of the future promises to be long and hard one for many. But as we know from examples like Google, some companies find it a lot easier.
Tuesday 8 April 2008, 11:15 PM
Gartner: If there's one thing you should do
The analysts at Gartner gathered together some of the IT industry’s finest brains for a keynote on Tuesday at the Gartner Symposium and IT Expo in Las Vegas to look into some of the future innovations we should look out for. In a wide ranging session, researchers from Sun Microsystems, HP, Cisco and Xerox talked about the projects their labs are working on.
Xerox, as you would expect, are doing amazing things with paper, especially re-usable paper. They have come up with one idea based on “similar technology to that which allows your glasses to go darker in sunlight”. By giving paper the same treatment, it is possible to re-use the paper 1,000 times, according to Steve Hoover who is a vice-president at Xerox research. Since paper costs 100 times the price of the ink that is printed on it, according to Hoover, and will cost only three times more than regular paper when being used in this process, it a is fine idea. However, it is a technology that has been written about before, and the labs at Xerox are still working on it, Hoover said. Still, when paper is, on average, only used for one day before being thrown out, according to Xerox, in these greener days it must be an idea worth pursuing to the end.
Sun Microsystems is working on an idea that could mean that future processors are much more powerful than today’s processors but are crammed into even less space and with less use of power. Cisco continues to work on perfecting telepresence while HP is exploiting the move to provide the same easy to use tools that people have become used to at home (thanks to their kids) such as IM and other ways of communicating other than email, and bringing them to the enterprise.
I hope to writed about the debate properly in the next few daysm but can give you the chairman's last question. It was a good one. "What do you think is the single most important thing your company needs to drive innovation forward”.
For HP’s Richard Friedrich, the company’s director for Open Innovation, it was “strong leadership to drive innovation forward” and he praised the company’s chief executive, Mark Hurd. Ity was not the most robust answer he could have given and might even be regarded in some quarters as a blatant effor to talk the boss into more budget. Well, on second thoughts, for a man in research there is probable no harm in that.
Friedrich did also highlight the fact that the majority of projects that got cancelled were over-budget. Storing leadership of projects was part of the key, he felt.
Sun Labs’ David Douglas followed on the argument, by pointing out that Sun Microsystems’ Labs undertook ambitious, high-risk investments such as research into advanced processor design. At some point, the company would have to make the call on whether a project was to be developed or canned. Strong management was of vital importance in making these calls, he thought.
Guido Jouret, chief technology officer for the Cisco Emerging Technology Group, thought it was that while there were many things occupying the IT managers attention, from green IT to compliance, these were not too difficult to understand or to work out strategies to deal with them. The key issue, he felt, was finding ways to get the right structures in place to exploit “the real, business transforming technology innovations”.
For Xerox’s Hoover the key point was much simpler than any of that. “The simplest advice I can give them (IT managers) is the oldest advice. Know your business and know your customers.”.
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