Former NASA CTO launches cloud appliance
The former CTO of NASA and co-founder of OpenStack unveiled on Wednesday a new appliance designed to make it easy for enterprises to build private clouds.
The idea is to eliminate the customization required to build most private clouds, said Chris Kemp, CEO and founder of Nebula, the company offering the appliance. "In order to see enterprises adopt private clouds, it has to be turnkey. They can't be in a position where they have to spin up a huge consulting effort and develop a customized cloud," he said.
Nebula has loaded OpenStack onto an appliance, adding security and management features aimed at making the appliance work well with existing compliance and security procedures in enterprises. It's designed to work with the cheapest available servers. Each appliance has a 10GB switch and 48 ports, so 24 2U servers can connect to it, Kemp said. Read more...
Google Maps gives SAP’s business intelligence a new direction
SAP and Google have teamed up to bring Google Maps and Google Earth to SAP's business intelligence software.
The idea behind the tie-in is to allow large volumes of data to be presented visually, helping users make quicker decisions based on real-time information.
If businesses know the geographical context of their information, SAP believes they can better understand local, regional and global business trends and how different approaches work in different places. Read more...
Microsoft pushes Windows Phone Mango out to Japan
The next version of Windows Phone, codenamed Mango, is with device manufacturers and looks like it will hit Japanese shelves in September, with the rest of the world having to wait a little longer.
Version 7.5 of Windows Phone is being touted as a proper version 1, a grown-up version that finally brings multi-tasking to the platform as well as some interface improvements and integrated services. Mango was officially released to manufacturers on Tuesday, according to the Microsoft blog, and KDDI wasted no time announcing that it would be launching the first Mango handset in Japan by September. Read more...
HP’s fondle-slab dilemma: What to do when you’re No 2
After just one year, the iPad is making more revenue than Apple's 30-year-old personal computer division. It's almost bringing in as much as Dell brings in from PCs. This is a huge business, already. And nobody can quite say what their iPad is good for. If ever a computer was a means to an end, then the iPad is it – rather than doing anything uniquely iPad-ish, it takes lots of "ends" a laptop (or Kindle, or smartphone) gets you to, and just gets you there slightly more conveniently. PCs are going to be around a long time; the iPad will be right there alongside them.
I've had a long weekend with HP's rival, which is probably the best of the challengers. Our Reg Hardware review hits several nails firmly on the head – I won't repeat too much of it below.
But what a dilemma the iPad poses for its rivals. Read more...
IEEE sets standard for ‘white spaces’ networking at up to 22 Mbps
A just-published standard for using the abandoned "white spaces" between TV channels could offer wireless networking at speeds of as much as 22 Mbps over distances as great as 62 miles.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers announced on Wednesday that it has published the IEEE 802.22 standard, which defines the unlicensed use of frequencies between TV channels in the VHF and UHF bands.
The IEEE 802.22 Working Group began its standards effort after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission started exploring the use of these frequencies by unlicensed devices. But the group said its standard could be used around the world, especially in rural areas and developing countries where there tend to be more vacant TV channels. Read more...
Sony reports Q1 loss, cuts full-year outlook
Sony reported a net loss for the three month period from April to June as the company dealt with unfavorable exchange rates, cut-throat competition in the consumer electronics business, and a hacking attack on its online gaming network.
The consumer electronics giant posted a net loss of ¥15.5 billion (US$191 million) for the quarter against a profit of ¥25.7 billion in the same period of 2010. Sales and operating revenue dropped 10 percent to just under ¥1.5 trillion.
Sales in Sony's two primary business units slumped and the company downgraded its outlook for the year to March 2012.
The consumer products and services division, which includes Sony's Bravia LCD TV and Vaio laptop computer operations, registered an 18 percent drop in sales compared to the same period in 2010, while the professional devices division, which includes Sony's components business, saw sales fall 16.5 percent. Read more...
Hands on: The Google+ Android app is a winner
If you're a Google+ user with an Android smartphone or tablet, here's a simple piece of advice: Download the Google+ Android app right now. It's so well-designed, simple and straightforward to use, you would have thought that Google+ was designed to be a mobile service from the beginning.
(iPhone and iPad users now have their own app as well; check out "Google+ iPhone app: 5 things you need to know").
The home screen offers icons for all the most important parts of the service: Stream, Huddle, Photos, Profile and Circles. (Huddle is an extra that's not included in Google+'s Web interface; more about that in a moment.) Unfortunately, there is no Hangouts videoconferencing feature, which Google should consider adding in an upcoming version -- especially considering that many Android tablets and an increasing number of Android smartphones include a forward-facing camera for mobile videoconferencing. Read more...
Year-old OpenStack’s cloud future looks rosy
Rackspace's backing of OpenStack shouldn't be too surprising, given that the company developed the platform jointly with NASA. Still, Rackspace has signaled a deep commitment: The company recently revealed it plans to deploy the open source software across its entire cloud infrastructure. Specifically, the company is replacing its Cloud Servers VM-provisioning software with OpenStack starting this year.
Citrix, meanwhile, has also made a commitment to OpenStack in the form of a commercialized version of the platform dubbed Project Olympus. Project Olympus, according to Citrix, is a combination of a certified version of the open source bits of OpenStack that Citrix will bring down, test, certify, QA, package, and support, and a bundled cloud-optimized version of the company's hypervisor platform, Citrix XenServer. Due out by the end of this year, Project Olympus also promises tighter integration with Citrix's XenApp, XenDesktop, and NetScaler offerings. Read more...
SAP co-CEO McDermott talks up HANA, mobility, and SaaS
SAP has seen software sales rebound steadily after a dip during the global recession, and is hoping to supercharge its business with forays into in-memory computing, SaaS (software as a service), and mobile applications, a business it entered with last year's acquisition of Sybase.
While the bulk of SAP's revenues still come from its core business of on-premises ERP (enterprise resource planning) and BI (business intelligence) software, along with associated maintenance fees, it's betting that these new initiatives will transform the company. In an interview with Wednesday before a conference call on SAP's second-quarter earnings report, co-CEO Bill McDermott discussed how the vendor is no longer "the old SAP." Read more...
‘IPv6 brokenness’ problem appears fixed
The Internet's biggest content providers -- including Yahoo, Facebook, and Google -- are reporting a significant decline in their measurements of "IPv6 brokenness," a term that describes end users with misconfigured systems that can't access websites supporting the next-generation Internet protocol called IPv6.
Worries about IPv6 brokenness have been a major stumbling block for content providers wanting to deploy IPv6, an emerging standard that solves the looming address shortage with the Internet's current standard known as IPv4.
Some of the Internet's most popular websites shared details about their latest IPv6 brokenness measurements at a meeting of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) held here this week.
Experts say the IPv6 brokenness problem is lessening for two reasons: Browsers like Google's Chrome have enabled a new feature called "fast fallback,'' which identifies users suffering from IPv6 brokenness and automatically reconfigures their access to IPv4. Read more...