Researchers at IBM say they have created smart software that that translates text between English and 11 other languages including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Arabic.
Hosted as an internal IBM service since August 2008, n.Fluent offers a secure real-time translation tool that translates text in web pages, electronic documents, Sametime instant message chats, and provides a BlackBerry mobile translation application. Read more
CA entered the key management market this week, joining others such as HP, IBM, EMC/RSA, PGP and Thales. CA's announcement was relatively quiet but it is still significant because:
1. CA joins the KMIP initiative. CA becomes another leading technology vendor to joint the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) group within OASIS. The group hopes to have a specification ratified soon and working product next year. CA's engineers will focus on application key management as part of a holistic key management architecture.
It was a busy week for the folks at Juniper Networks (JNPR). First, the company announced its quarterly earnings, beating Wall Street estimates for revenue and EPS. Next Juniper announced a new relationship with Dell (DELL) in which Dell will brand Juniper Networking Equipment as its own.
These events stand out on their own but to top it off, Juniper held a high-brow event with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) yesterday to highlight a flurry of announcements featuring:
Big Rigs have a problem: Big trucks use more than 20% of transportation energy, they produce 40 % of the nitrous oxide emissions but they represent only 8 % of the vehicle market. Read more
Every now and then I get a bit nostalgic for the days when my workaday computer had a nearly instantaneous response time.
That would be when that computer was a 6 MHz IBM PC/AT.
How could it have an instantaneous response time when it was several hundred times slower that the machine I’m using to write this blog entry? Because the software was designed to be fast and efficient. If I wanted a directory of files in a folder, it appeared like lightning. (Even faster when I hot-rodded that AT to run at 8 MHz with a faster crystal on the motherboard. ) Read more
IBM rolled out on Thursday the DS8700 storage array, which performs 2.5 times faster than the DS8300 and is 50% more energy efficient. The DS8700 is based on the Power6 processor and is backward compatible to previous DS arrays. The array incorporates solid state drives and uses software that automatically migrates data from Fibre Channel drives. The DS8700 starts at $290,000. Read more
Quantum on Wednesday rolled out a new family of deduplication appliances for network-attached storage devices. The DXi6500 family deduplicates files and ranges from 3T to 30TB of primary data. Targeted at midsize customers, the DXi6500 supports most backup software, including NetBackup and Symantec's OpenStorage API. The DXi6500 starts at $64,000 and is expected to be available in November. Read more
A smart people smack-down is set to start next week where thousands of university computer researchers will pit their brains and machines in a grueling battle of logic, strategy, and mental endurance. Read more
IBM's mainframe business has over the years been somewhat of a steamroller, rarely slowing down to take a look at the little things in its way it may have Read more
At EMA, we spend a lot of time talking about how to shift gears into a more proactive, preventative approach to manage the IT infrastructure. Whether you are looking at the lower layers of the stack and device health or up the stack at how well applications and services are being delivered, a common challenge is making the most out of what sources of management data are available. And while harvesting of device performance metrics and collection of NetFlow (or equivalents) are becoming commonplace, the use of IPSLA as a supporting set of measurements is not nearly as prevalent. Read more
Okay, I am as sick of the hype around cloud computing as anyone else but I also belive that cloud computing architecture is a very exciting future technology with a few existing proofpoints like Amazon, Google, DISA, Microsoft, IBM System z, etc.
One of the underpinnings of cloud computing is a technology called Apache Hadoop. The Apache Hadoop website describes the technology as follows:
"The Apache Hadoop project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing."
Okay, I'm sold on the cloud vision but there are far more technical hurdles to jump over than the tech industry is willing to admit. That said, the IBM System z (the great-great grand child of the 360 if I'm correct) may be far more technically suitable for cloud computing in the near-term.
I believe that this is true because the mainframe architecture already supports:
Some industry observers still like to kick dents in the mainframe saying it's not the corporate platform of the future but the Big Iron seemingly takes the licks and keeps on ticking. Read more
ESG recently surveyed 179 security professionals about database security in their organization. Survey respondents came from North American organizations with 1,000 employees or more.
The quest to mimic the best parts of human brain function on a highly intelligent computer to decypher tons of data quickly is heating up.
IBM this week got $16.1 million to kick up its part of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency research program aimed at rapidly and efficiently put brain-like senses into actual hardware and software so that computers can process and understand data more rapidly. Read more
A mashup is a lightweight web application created by transforming, merging, and mixing capabilities or information from existing data sources to deliver useful new functionality or dashboard-like aggregations. The broader insights or "big pictures," created by combining the unstructured data found on the Web, with structured data, obtained by secure, custom connectors from legacy applications and databases, are often compelling. Read more
Last month, IBM announced the creation of a security "tiger team" with limited detail on the team itself, its role, or its makeup. I decided to ask IBM for a bit more specifics and I'm glad I did as I came away quite impressed.
To summarize, the security tiger team was created to:
1. Articulate and sell IBM security solutions to "C-level" executives. In other words, align security solutions to business initiatives.
Governance, compliance and new electronic business processes are radically changing the security landscape in a multitude of ways. One of the most profound of these changes is a lot more integration between identity and security.
Yes, these two disciplines have always been complementary, but large organizations now want to align security policies with specific users, roles, and business initiatives. This demands technology integration that aligns access and security policies with networks, applications, and data.
Google takes the beta tag off its apps, and suddenly it's going after everyone. You know about the escalation against Microsoft, but today the company made its intentions against IBM clearer with a migration tool that helps you move away from Lotus Notes. Read more
IBM briefed Storage Strategies NOW on its first major enhancement to its XIV storage system since its acquisition of the company in January 2008. The company revealed some interesting statistics about XIV – 80% of XIV sales are to customers who have not bought IBM storage before, 20% of XIV customers have never bought anything from IBM before and 75% of XIV storage is attached to non-IBM server customers. IBM also claims that there are more than 1,000 XIV modules installed at customer sites such as Navisite and VCU Medical Center. Read more
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