Channel Register

The Week’s Headlines

  1. Thursday, 9 February 2012arrow down

    IBM stuffs XIV array with flash tech

    Big Blue puts pedal to the metal

    IBM has pressed the gas pedal to the floor with its third generation XIV array and given it up to 6TB of solid state drive cache storage. The XIV array is a single tier device and this is a flash cache, an SSD Caching option, not a separate tier of storage. IBM provides no performance boost numbers, saying instead: "The …

    Ingram Micro CEO outlines growth plan as 2011 profits falter

    Weak Euro consumer biz and challenged Oz operation blamed

    Ingram Micro's new chief exec has set out three strategic priorities as he gets to grips with the challenges facing the world's largest distributor and looks to bolster bottom line goodness. Alan Monie, who returned to Ingram as COO in November and was made top dog last month, outlined the imperatives on a Q4 conference call …

    What downturn? Lenovo stuffs pockets with 54% extra profit

    World's number 2 PC maker buoyed by China performance

    Lenovo Group is one of the few PC makers still in the pink, beating market expectations with a fat third-quarter net profit. The Chinese firm's profit jumped 54 per cent to $153.46m in the three months to December last year, up from $99.65m in the same period the year before. Despite the downturn in the global economy and the …

    IBM UK's channel queen abdicates, long live the king

    Richard Potts takes the biz partner hot seat from Jacqui Davey

    IBM has crowned popular channel figure Richard Potts as veep of business partner and mid-market sales for the UK and Ireland, and named Mark Hennessey as worldwide partner boss. Potts, who helped to turn around Big Blue's volume server biz in the UK as director of the System X unit replaces Jacqueline Davey, who is moving to …

    Timico Technology Group gobbles Redwood

    ISP and MSP get together

    ISP Timico Technology Group (TTG) has devoured unified comms minnow Redwood Telecommunication for an undisclosed sum. London-based Avaya and Mitel reseller Redwood employs 28 staff and counts Jimmy Choo and Broadgate Estates among its customer list. Tim Radford, chairman at TTG, said the IP telephony and UC services that …

    Hitachi GST pushes out boosted SSD

    Intel's new NAND

    Hitachi GST has birthed a boosted Ultrastar SSD using Intel's latest 25nm NAND. Intel launched its own 520 just a few days ago. In these frenetic days of flash hyper-awareness, close attention will be paid to the performance of new flash drives to see if suppliers are keeping up with the pace or slipping behind. The Ultrastar …

    AON: Give us cash, we'll emit 10TB holographic cube

    They do it with mirrors

    Access Optical Networks says it has developed a 1.2TB holographic storage cube that can transfer data at 155MB/sec and last longer than 50 years. Oh, and it's done using mirrors – but no smoke. The storage medium is a 1cm cube of photorefractive lithium niobate crystalline material and the claimed cost/GB is $0.11 in 1,000 …

    Oracle inhales Taleo for $1.9bn

    Blows it onto the Fusion app cloud

    Only two months ago, Taleo, the seller of online talent management software, was saying that it intended to remain independent despite the cloud software feeding frenzy. But today, Larry Ellison, CEO and co-founder of Oracle, made Taleo CEO Mike Gregoire an offer he couldn't refuse: $1.9bn. That price, net of cash and debts, …

    Teradata surfs big data wave in Q4

    Big data = big bucks

    Data warehousing pioneer and big data playa Teradata has just turned in the best fourth quarter and full year in the company's 33 year history, thanks to the big data wave and a number of key acquisitions that the company that have moved it beyond its core data warehousing biz. In a conference call with Wall Street analysts …

    IBM does financing deals for Power, storage kit

    Low or no interest rates

    It's a new year and a new first quarter and a new and somewhat challenging economy in North America, and therefore IBM is offering financing deals in the United States and Canada. Last week, Big Blue rolled out a zero per cent financing program called Fast Start Financing that, as the name suggests and as the company has done …

  2. Wednesday, 8 February 2012arrow down

    Laser boffins blast bits onto hard drive at 200Gb/sec

    Superheating drives forego magnetic write heads

    A team of scientists have published a new way of using heat to store data magnetically, which could increase the speed of hard drives over a hundredfold. Conventional drives use electromagnetism to selectively change the polarity of points on a drive, representing a one or a zero. But according to research published in Nature …

    SGI to restructure (again) after fiscal Q2 loss

    Blame Europe, Xeon E5 product transitions

    It is becoming more apparent why supercomputer and server maker Silicon Graphics' former president and CEO Mark Barrenechea decided to exit stage left back in December. While the company was growing gear sales, it was heading deeper into the red ink as old machines came off maintenance and new machines await their ramps this …

    Nokia axes 4,000, shifts smartphone manufacturing East

    Factories hit in cost-cutting drive

    Having reviewed operations at its manufacturing facilities in Hungary, Mexico and Finland, Nokia has decided to halt its assembly lines there. Smartphones will still be customised at the three sites, but the gear itself will be built in Asia. The change will affect 4,000 jobs between the factories – loading custom firmware …

    HP may be going the server flash route

    Company won't confirm it, but the G8 looks pretty flashy

    HP's new G8 servers will sport lots of flash, according to a knowledgeable HP fan. The ProLiant G8 is the successor to the popular G7 servers and will be known as the Gen8 ProLiant. Our information is that it or versions of it will use flash memory to support 50 per cent more transactions and 30 per cent more virtual machines …

    Amazon 'rolling out a retail store in Seattle'

    Apple Store-inspired Kindle-pushing boutique rumoured...

    Amazon could be about to open a bricks-and-mortar store in Seattle aimed at selling the Kindle - according to rumours on blog goodereader. Amazon execs are impressed by Apple's trendy hangouts shops, said the goodereader source, and want to get a piece of the boutique retail pie. The Seattle store would test out the concept …

    Apple's new TV allegedly spotted... in Canadian office

    Will be controlled by Siri, waving, unicorns

    Prototypes of the hotly anticipated Apple TV are sitting in the offices of telcos in Canada, reports newspaper The Globe and Mail. The report adds that the new TVs will feature voice-control through Siri, gesture control and video chat. Apple has sent out the prototypes of its "iTV" device to help it cut deals with local …

    Greenpeace releases meaningless 'Cool IT' rankings

    Analysis Hippies' 'leaderboard' apparently made using dartboard

    International hippie* collective Greenpeace has issued a "Cool IT leaderboard" of apparently randomly selected major firms which it has assigned meaningless self-generated scores intended to indicate how eco-friendly the companies are. The list includes Google (top ranked with a score of 53 out of a possible 100) and other …

    Now HDS joins server flash party

    Still no comment from HP

    Hitachi Data Systems intends to join the server flash storage party, throwing its NAND hat into the ring to speed application I/O and increase the virtual machine population. It is joining EMC, NetApp and possibly HP. Dell has said it is doing something too, leaving IBM as the only unknown. Here is an HDS' statement from …

    Virident flasher claims Oracle database streak record

    Solid disks thrust into willing 80-core NEC box

    Exit Exadata, Fusion-io and Violin Memory - so to speak: the Oracle database random IO speed record has been smashed by an 80-core NEC server fitted with eight Virident flash drives. A single Xeon-based 80-core NEC Express 5800/A1080a GX server, fitted with eight 1.4TB Virident FlashMax solid-state drives (11.2TB of flash …

    Mozilla explains user-tracking proposal for Firefox

    Telemetry has no UUID, Metrics Data Ping might

    In a story published yesterday your humble Reg writer wrongly confused Mozilla's Telemetry project with the open-source outfit's so-called Metrics Data Ping proposal. Mozilla has been in touch to clear things up. The org's global privacy and policy boss Alex Fowler kindly explained the differences between the two systems to us …

    Resellers: Microsoft price hike was 'demanded by Euro country bosses'

    Insiders say UK channel exploited weak pound to fuel deals on continent

    Microsoft's planned overhaul of volume-licensing prices was in response to cries of frustration from its European country managers unhappy their UK counterpart were benefiting from the regional disparity to win biz on the continent, channel sources claim. As The Register recently revealed, the software giant is aligning …

    Cray puts super stake in the big data ground

    Crunch this

    Big data may or may not pan out for the users, but it is a bit of a boom for IT vendors, who are scrambling to prove their data analytics chops and go for the easiest money in the market these days. And to that end, supercomputer maker Cray is setting up a dedicated division to chase big data biz. The division, called YarcData …

    Nekkid Tech: The Great Backup Industry SMACKDOWN

    Podcast Plus, adopt a needy cloud

    Last week, Greg Knieriemen turned the heat up on Marc Farley, StorageIO's Greg Schulz and the legendary StorageZilla. This time, Greg hosts special guest Jim McNiel, CEO of FalconStor Software (@jimmcniel), who gives us the skinny on the future of tape, back-up software lock-ins and cloudy convergence. This week we discuss …

    Toshiba may be getting excess WD disk biz

    Rumour mill spits out Tosh as buyer

    We are hearing that Toshiba is buying Western Digital's "excess" 3.5-inch disk drive business, clearing the way to the completion of the WD's acquisition of Hitachi GST . The Hitachi GST acquisition has been blocked by EU and Chinese regulators due to competition concerns. The EU has required WD to offload some 3.5-inch hard …

    Cisco stabilizes switching and routing in Q2

    Raises dividend, remains cautious

    Networking - and some would say data center bellwether - Cisco Systems turned in a better-than-expected fiscal Q2 ended in January, with revenues up 10.8 per cent to $11.53bn and net income up a very good 43.5 per cent to $2.18bn. "We are moving ahead of our competitors and our industry peers," proclaimed Cisco CEO John …

  3. Tuesday, 7 February 2012arrow down

    Suppliers get a shot at £4bn worth of gov hardware deals

    From tablets to servers and storage

    The Government Procurement Service has advertised for suppliers to join a wide-ranging £4bn ICT framework. The framework will be open to public sector organisations for two years, according to a notice in the Official Journal of the European Union, and covers the following lots: Desktop client devices: which will include …

    N Korea mobile phone subscribers top 1 million

    No need to be lonely in hardline communist state

    Axis of evil North Korea now has a whopping one million mobile phone users some four years after the technology was first introduced in the repressive state. Egyptian telco Orascom Telecom, which helped to launch a 3G service in the Democratic People’s Republic in 2008, reportedly revealed the figures in a regulatory filing. …

    HTC wants a hug after glum Q1 estimates

    Under-pressure biz seeks 'emotional connection' with punters

    HTC could be in for a spot of bother in 2012 after its Q1 outlook missed analysts’ estimates. Commentators suggest the firm may struggle to compete with Apple, Samsung and the wealth of handset manufacturers crowding this increasingly competitive space. The Taiwanese hardware manufacturer forecast revenue of about NT$65bn to …

    High Street chains vow to play fair on warranties

    Dixons, Comet and Argos pulled over by OFT

    UK retailers have offered a number of concessions after the Office of Fair Trading had a word about their extended warranties on electrical goods. Dixons, Comet and Argos have all told the OFT, which was worried about unfair competition, that they will set up a warranty comparison website and provide punters with more …

    UK.gov's mega-cloud VIP biz list kept under wraps

    Suppliers find out if they're in the G-Cloud club

    Scores of IT suppliers and consultancy firms have made it onto the G-Cloud framework, but government officials are keeping schtum about the names and numbers until a two-week cooling off period passes. A Cabinet Office spokesman told El Reg that 600 firms applied to be involved in Blighty's public sector mega-cloud system, and …

    Blighty's PC market fell to its knees in Q4

    Consumer and biz sales slide, Apple posts growth

    The UK PC market shrank by nearly one fifth in the Christmas quarter, suffering the worst decline in half a decade. PC shipments in Q4 slumped by 19.6 per cent to 2.95 million units, with every major vendor apart from Apple posting negative growth. "PC vendors vendors face a long, uphill struggle to regain the interest of …

    Oracle demands retrial in SAP slurp spat

    Snubs paltry $272m payout, wants full $1.3bn in damages

    Oracle has filed for a retrial in its SAP spat over illegal file downloading, moaning that the reduced damages awarded just aren't enough. Oracle originally won a whopping $1.3bn in damages in its suit against SAP over the German enterprise software biz's subsidiary TomorrowNow illegally slurping Oracle software and support …

    Acer sues ex-boss Lanci for shacking up with Lenovo

    Update Contract's non-compete clause in question

    Acer has sued former president and CEO Gianfranco Lanci amid claims that he breached a non-compete clause by joining rival Lenovo. The lawsuit was lodged in a Milanese court today, according to a notification Acer made to the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The PC giant will seek to ascertain whether Lanci violated the "non-compete …

    Channel body count hits dotcom implosion high

    Reseller bloodbath in 2011

    The channel body count in 2011 reached a high not seen since the dotcom bubble burst, stats from credit reference agency Graydon UK reveal. In Q4 88 firms collapsed, up nearly 30 per cent year-on-year, which took the tally for the whole of 2011 to 356, up by almost one third on reseller fatalities in the previous twelve months …

    Cloud proves that OldSQL is still cool

    Open... and Shut Relational lives to fight on

    As the IT world scrambles pell mell into the cloud, veteran vendors like Oracle are having to figure out how to make money in an IT market that is increasingly turning its back on traditional software licensing. While Oracle has faced down challenges to its core database business before from open source, the cloud presents an …

    Rambus drops $35m for Unity Semiconductor

    Cash for CMOX

    Rambus is spending $35m (£22.13m) in cash to buy Unity Semiconductor and get into the post-NAND memory business. Unity is involved with CMOX resistive RAM technology, said to combine DRAM speed and NAND non-volatility. It hopes to produce a 1 terabit chip by 2014. Unity's people will be joining Rambus, putting an end to any …

    NetApp slaps down Lightning with multi-card flash flush

    Supports vMotion and DRS

    NetApp is developing a server flash storage offering that will include beefy NetApp steak and not just EMC Lightning sizzle, according to insiders in the company. Our understanding, from people close to the action, is that NetApp server flash software will work with any server PCIe-connected flash memory card, and with …

    HP readies next-gen servers for launch

    Looks like Xeon E5 boxes

    Server juggernaut Hewlett-Packard is hosting a shindig in Las Vegas next week with the bigwigs in its server unit, and the speculation is that the company will preview its forthcoming ProLiant G8 servers sporting Intel's "Sandy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5 processors. The invite to the event, which is being hosted at The Cosmopolitan on …

    Stratus ruggedizes VMware clouds

    Fault tolerant appliance for vCenter control freak

    Clouds have a single point of failure, and Stratus Technologies thinks it can make it some dough fixing it. Stratus and its peers NEC and Hewlett-Packard, which sell fault-tolerant servers, would love for you to be so freaked out by the mission-critical nature of your applications that you would get out a big ole check and buy …

    Will Apple set up shop in Walmart warehouses?

    Sets sights on middle America

    The contrast between Apple's prestige city-centre stores and the Sam's Club warehouse chain – where budget goods are sold straight from the pallet – is sharp. But that's where Apple wants to set up mini stores to sell its gadgets. There are about 600 Sam's Club retail warehouses across America selling everything from exercise …

  4. Monday, 6 February 2012arrow down

    EMC crashes the server flash party

    Lightning strike with thunder to follow

    The perfect server flash storm hitting storage arrays has generated EMC's well-signalled Lightning strike; VFCache has arrived, extending FAST technology from the array to the server. Project Thunder is following close behind, promising an EMC server-networked flash array. This is a major announcement and we are covering it in …

    MYSTERY as QLogic hurls InfiniBand from train

    Comment Reg storage desk baffled in the case of the fibre fracas

    Storage networking and InfiniBand supplier is giving up on InfiniBand and selling that business line to Intel for $125 million. QLogic is in a seemingly permanent duel with Emulex, from which it was spun-out in 1994, for dominance in the Fibre Channel host bus adapter (HBA) market and also the so far un-dynamic Fibre Channel …

    Huawei-Symantec sneaks out of US back door

    Has it been booted out?

    Huawei-Symantec, the joint venture between Huawei and Symantec, has effectively stopped trading and is leaving the United States. This follows the US government's blockade of several of its acquisitions, including parent Huawei's deal to snap up 3Leaf Systems, which it sought to acquire in May 2010 for $2m and its attempted …

    EMC server flash rival slams VFCache

    Fusion-io thinks Lightning misses target

    EMC's VFCache server cache doesn't quite hit the mark. Although it validates server flash use, caching is not enough. That's the view of Fusion-io chairman, CEO and co-founder David Flynn. Fusion-io leads the server PCIe flash market and its boss appears to think EMC's approach misses the target. Flynn said he welcomed the …

    IT budgets plunge in North America, Europe

    Rise in the East and Latin America

    If you were expecting for IT spending to go up this year and for new projects to get going – and perhaps to get a pay raise – the consensus is building that this is not going to happen. That's the bad news. The good news would seem to be that instead of being asked to do more with less, IT shops will be asked to do a lot more …

    Micron grabs almost-retired COO for chief

    Mark Durcan will take over as CEO after death of Steve Appleton

    Chip-maker Micron Technology has named a new CEO following the death of Steve Appleton on Friday in a plane crash. Micron named former chief operating officer Mark Durcan, who had been standing in as chief following the accident, as the new CEO for the firm. Just two weeks ago, Micron had said that Durcan was planning to …

    Schools IT supplier RM swings to full year loss after sales dive

    We knew about gov budget cuts but we didn't really get it...

    Ailing specialist education IT supplier RM has admitted it reacted too slowly to government budget cuts in schools after revealing massive losses in fiscal 2011 ended 30 November. The firm posted a loss before tax of £23.4m for the 14 months to nOVEMBER 2011 – including restructuring costs and excess property provisions. This …

    Resellers smack down Microsoft's 'single-digit' price rise claim

    Channel sources: Volume licensing lift will be closer to 20 per cent

    Microsoft says that a planned overhaul of volume licensing pricing due in the summer will be capped at single digit percentage rises. Redmond said that Open, Select and Select Plus agreements struck in the UK after 1 July would be aligned to euro prices and charged based on the exchange rate with sterling. "Based on the …

    Cisco recalls suicidal UCS blade servers

    Goodness gracious, great MOSFETs afire

    Cisco Systems warns that its high-end B440 blades for its "California" Unified Computing System have a potentially disastrous defect that could result in one or more board failures, and emit a flash of light that could perhaps give system administrators heart attacks. Last week, Cisco put out a field notice to customers using …

    Symantec: 'NetBackup 7.5 speeds backup 100X'

    Cuts 25-hour chore down to 15 minutes

    Symantec says backup is a multi-point product mess, with big data blowing backup-window timing out of the water, and so it has souped up both BackupExec and NetBackup to cover more backup and restore use cases. The sexy news – well, as sexy as backup news can be – is that the latest release of NetBackup is said to be 100 times …

    Shrunken Intel process boosts SSD performance

    The new 520 Series more than doubles 510's IOPS

    Intel has announced a boosted follow-on to its 510 SSD: the 520 Series, with more than double the IOPS performance and a top-end model with almost twice the capacity. The 2.5-inch 520 is a client or PC SSD, and is built from 25nm 2-bit MLC NAND; the 510 used a 34nm process. Like the 510, it has a 6Gb/s SATA interface, but its …

    Chip sales definitely not down – but almost – in 2011

    Semis take a December dive

    The chip biz didn't do as badly as many had feared it might last summer, closing out 2011 with $299.5bn in worldwide sales, up four-tenths of a per cent from the record $298.3bn revenue level set in 2010. All the news was not good, however, since global semiconductor sales took a big hit in December, according to stats …

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