Start-up unveils storage platform for large-scale Web applications

A storage company emerged from stealth mode this week with software designed to efficiently manage the file serving needs of Internet applications such as social networks, online ad serving and software-as-a-service.  Nine data storage companies to watch MaxiScale announced the Flex Software Platform, which is installed on commodity gear, such as a bank of Apache Web servers. Retrieving a small file with the MaxiScale system requires just one I/O operation, a feature that eliminates bottlenecks caused by systems that require multiple I/O operations for each small file retrieval, says IDC storage analyst Noemi Greyzdorf. "They built a very interesting file system that handles small files – files that are one megabyte or smaller – incredibly efficiently," Greyzdorf says Configurations start with as few as four nodes but can scale up to 50,000 servers, the company says. The goal is to improve performance and reduce cost, space and power requirements for Web companies that have to deal with large numbers of small files. "We think people deploying Web applications have been paying too much money and we're out to change that," says Gary Orenstein, vice president of marketing for MaxiScale.

Instead of using expensive storage boxes with interconnects like InfiniBand or Fibre Channel, MaxiScale recommends using Flex with 2TB SATA drives and says the Flex system relies on IP and Ethernet connections. "We're using standards-based, commodity hardware for everything," Orenstein says. Maxiscale's first publicly named customer is AdMob, a mobile advertising marketplace that has served more than 110 billion ad impressions in the last three years. Flex uses a patent-pending Peer Set architecture that replicates file data and metadata across SATA drives, allowing for load balancing and resiliency to multiple hardware failures. Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., and founded in 2007, MaxiScale has $17 million in venture financing from investors NEA, El Dorado Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. Flex software is available now and pricing starts at $6,000 for four nodes allowing up to 32TB of storage.

MaxiScale was co-founded by CEO Gianluca Rattazzi, who previously founded Meridian Data, Parallan, P-Com and BlueArc; and CTO Francesco Lacapra, who previously held executive roles at Olivetti, Quantum and BlueArc. Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter.

Why Microsoft kept Exchange 2007 SP2 off latest Windows Server

Microsoft, reacting to a slew of questions from end-users, says timing issues and technical considerations kept it from supporting Exchange 2007 SP2 on the new Windows Server 2008 R2. 5 things we love/hate about Win7/Windows Server 2008 R2Exchange 2010 beta sneak peek test On the Exchange team blog, Nino Bilic, a member of the Exchange product quality team at Microsoft, wrote that there are two primary technical considerations for not supporting the messaging server on the new server OS. Users have been peppering Microsoft with questions over the past few months and the vendor chose Monday to explain its decision as it prepares to put the final touches on Exchange 2010, which aligns with other new infrastructure, namely Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 and Office 2010.  "Two primary technical points drove our decision to not support Windows Server 2008 R2," Bilic wrote. "First, Windows Server 2008 R2, while an incremental OS upgrade, creates significant testing requirements for Exchange 2007. Because the Exchange 2007 SP2 engineering preceded the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, Exchange 2007 SP2 would have had to be delayed significantly to align testing schedules." Bilic said the second point involves not supporting the upgrade of a server OS underneath an existing Exchange server. "The primary need is to support Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controllers in an existing Exchange 2007 deployment, which we have done." Exchange 2007 SP2 can work against those domain controllers because no part of the Exchange infrastructure is running on the domain controller. Exchange 2010 is expected to ship in November. "We felt that thoroughly validating the combination of Exchange 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 allowed us to focus on delivering great solutions which would be fully tested and would support the features of Windows Server 2008 R2," Bilic wrote. "This is a hard trade-off to make, but we believe it is the right one and a good balance between serving existing customers and driving innovation." The new Exchange 2010 server includes a number of new features, including high-availability and cross-domain integration using techniques such as pairing the server with Windows Server 2008 clustering technology and directory federation features. What users are missing is the ability to run any Exchange 2007 R2 components on the new server, including administrative tools on Windows Server 2008 R2. Bilic said the level of testing that would have been required to ensure only a "minimum level" of compatibility would have been significant and still denied users many of the features of the new server OS. In addition, he said the work likely would have altered the delivery schedule for Exchange 2010. Bilic said that fact drove Microsoft to conclude the best decision was to release Exchange 2010 as close as possible to Windows Server 2008 R2, which is now available. The server also includes new archiving features. "We recognize that there are some downstream impacts to this decision related to administration-only installs," Bilic wrote. "The technical problem for us is that an administration install of Exchange is almost identical to a full Exchange server installation." An administration install is when only the administrative interface, used to manage server properties and other features, is loaded on the server OS. Lee Dumas, the director of architecture at managed Exchange service provider Azaleos and a former Microsoft employee on the Exchange team, noted that Exchange 2007 SP2 contains the schema updates that are part of Exchange 2010. "So deploying SP2 prepares you for Exchange 2010. The earlier they can release SP2 the more customers will be prepared for 2010 so that might have had something to do with this as well," he said.

Follow John on Twitter. Dumas noted that releasing planned schema updates with a previous version of Exchange is something new for Microsoft.

Oracle breaks silence on Sun plans in ad

Oracle Corp. ended it silence Thursday on its post-merger plans for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Unix systems in an advertisement aimed at Sun customers to keep them from leaving the Sparc and Solaris platforms. Ever since Oracle announced in April its plans to acquire Sun, its competitors - notably IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. - have been relentlessly pursuing Sun's core customer base, its Sparc and Solaris users. Oracle's ad to "Sun customers," makes a number of promises that includes spending more "than Sun does now," on developing Sparc and Solaris, as well as boosting service and support by having "more than twice as many hardware specialists than Sun does now." Analysts see Oracle's ad as a defensive move that doesn't answer some of the big questions ahead of the $7.4 billion merger with Sun . In fact, there may be a lot of room for skepticism and parsing of Oracle's claims, despite their apparent black and white assertions. Among the top hardware makers, Sun registered the biggest decline in server revenue in the second quarter, offering evidence that this protracted merger may be eroding Sun's value.

Europe is allowing until mid-January to sort this out, which keeps the merger in limbo for another quarter. Oracle wanted the acquisition completed by now but the European Commission this month said it would delay its antitrust review because of "serious concerns" about its impact on the database market. Analysts point out that Oracle's plans to spend more "than Sun does now," may be a little hallow because Sun's spending on developing Sparc and Solaris is probably at a low. "The ad sounds convincing - but perhaps being a word nitpicker, the Sun does now' might not mean much if Sun has drastically cut back due to plummeting sales," Rich Partridge, an analyst at Ideas International Ltd., said in an e-mail. "I think someone at Oracle suddenly realized that Sun was bleeding so badly that what would be left when Oracle finally got control would be worth a small fraction of what they paid and no one would buy the hardware unit," Rob Enderle, an independent analyst, said in an e-mail. But Enderle said the ad's claims do not preclude Oracle from selling its hardware division, and says the company "will have to support the unit for a short time after taking control; during that short time they can easily outspend Sun's nearly non-existent budgets." Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc., said if it was Oracle's plan to start on day one of the merger to shop the Sparc processor around, "would they have put this ad out? Taken at face value, the ad seems to indicate that Oracle will keep Sun's hardware and microprocessor capability and not spin it off, as some analysts believe possible.

Probably not," he said. "Does it preclude Oracle from changing their mind? Indeed, Oracle's major competitive concern was indicated in the ad in a quote by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: "IBM, we're looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business." No. Companies change their mind all the time." An erosion of Sun's customer also hurts Oracle, because a lot of Sun customers are also Oracle customers, and Oracle doesn't want its existing customer to go to IBM and move away from Oracle's platform, Haff said.

Week in Google: Wave makes splash, Gmail gets new threat

Here's a look back at a busy week in Google news stories:   IBM aims at Google, Microsoft with new Webmail  IBM introduced LotusLive iNotes, an on-demand e-mail, calendaring and contact management system meant to compete with the likes of Gmail and Microsoft Exchange. Similar to a bulletin board system, Google Wave, the brainchild of a pair of twins, lets users create shared, ongoing, real-time conversations called Waves. Pricing starts at $3 per user per month, undercutting Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 per user per year.   Google Wave invite-only preview sets off Google Wave mania Google on Wednesday sent out more than 100,000 invitations to developers to preview Google Wave, a new communications and collaboration tool that Google plans to release next year. The application makes it easy for users to share videos, photos and maps.

Google removed the site's home page from its search results in response to a complaint it received under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And big applications vendors like SAP and Salesforce.com are already rallying around it.   Google removes The Pirate Bay home page from search results File-sharing site The Pirate Bay was once again in the crosshairs of copyright owners. A search for "The Pirate Bay" Friday turned up a message at the bottom of the first search-results page that said: "In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 7 result(s) from this page. Textscape alleges Google is violating a patent that covers a method for managing a body of text on a computer that was granted to the company in 1998. Textscape says Google's Chrome's browser improperly uses the innovation.   Google celebrates 11th birthday PC World writes: "Google has come a long way in its eleven-year history, from its humble beginning as a Stanford University research project in 1998, to the global, multi-billion dollar online presence Google enjoys today."   Google eyeing Firefox with Chrome Frame plug-in? If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org."   Google, Adobe sued by Textscape over patents  Google and Adobe Systems have been sued by a New Jersey company for allegedly violating patents used for processing text, according to recent court filings.

Computerworld reports that Mozilla's chief engineer says Google might build a Chrome Frame plug-in for the Firefox browser. Features include an equations editor and a language translator. Separately, Computerworld reported that Mozilla officials said Chrome Frame for Microsoft IE could result in "browser soup."    Google Apps takes aim at students Google hired interns to help it figure out how to make Google Apps more appealing to young people, according to PC World. Google expands search control with new options Google is adding new functionality to a side panel that could provide quicker access to relevant search results. The side panel can be activated by clicking the "show options" button on the search results page.

The company is adding options to filter search results by blog and news items to the side panel accompanying search results. These options will provide users quick access to more relevant sources, said Nundu Janakiram, product manager for search at Google. IDG News Service, PC World and Computerworld contributed to this roundup For more on Google, visit Network World's Google Subnet, an independent Google community.

HP abandons EDS brand

HP Wednesday announced it would leave the EDS brand behind and rename its IT services provider business HP Enterprise Services. The name change comes a year after HP acquired the market-leading outsourcer for $13.9 billion in a deal that shot HP to the top of the IT services market, right behind its largest competitor IBM. HP is also renaming its Technology Solutions Group to HP Enterprise Business, a portfolio that includes servers, storage, software, networking and technology services. All eyes on HP-EDS integration plan FAQ: What does the HP-EDS deal really mean? The company reported the groups comprising the now HP Enterprise Business accounted for 47% of the HP's revenue and 60% of its non-GAAP operating profit in the third quarter of the company's fiscal 2009. According to HP executives, the brand changes reflect HP's technology strength going forward. "We are combining the strong services brand equity that EDS has built over the last 47 years with HP's technology leadership to become the leading IT services provider," said Joe Eazor, senior vice president and general manager of HP Enterprise Services.

While the name change was expected as a logical next step in HP's integration plans by industry watchers, Mayo says the event should still be viewed as marking the end of an era. HP still trails IBM in the services market, but the company's confidence in its own brand in part drove the decision to drop the EDS brand, analysts say. "This is a fairly significant bet for HP. They are continuing the integration plan to bring EDS into the HP culture but also taking a bet that the HP brand will be better at bringing in business than the legacy EDS name," says Mark Mayo, partner and president of global resources management at TPI, a global outsourcing industry research firm. "HP is betting this will be a positive move, and it's too hard to tell yet if it is a brilliant or a bad move to leave the EDS brand behind. EDS was founded in 1962 and in a sense established what became known as the IT services market, dominating for 25 years, Mayo explains, alongside IBM and CSC. Then in the late 1990s and early 2000s, global outsourcing emerged and players from India and Europe changed the IT services landscape. It's all an evolution, but EDS pretty much founded the outsourcing industry and that name is very well known. Now with companies such as Dell acquiring Perot Systems and other industry consolidation, Mayo says the EDS name change is "truly a watershed event." "If you take a step back and look at how the marketplace has changed, the loss of the EDS name is indicative of the whole global play that today's outsourcers must tackle," Mayo says. "The market is consolidating and Dell's news is part of that greater trend.

It's definitely a loss." Do you Tweet? Follow Denise Dubie on Twitter here. https://twitter.com/DDubie

MIT creates nanotube process that could shrink, speed chips

Researchers at MIT have found a way to grow the carbon nanotubes that manufacturers need to build smaller, faster computer chips. A key issue that must be resolved: dealing with the tiny copper wires that connect transistors in a processor. As chipmakers like Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices inc. work endlessly to find ways to build smaller and smaller chips , they often run into a multitude of problems.

As the chips shrink in size, so do the wires, making it increasingly difficult for them to maintain the level of current needed to meet performance requirements. Using carbon nanotubes is an interesting idea." The question engineers have faced to date, he added, is "how do you do it?" Gilbert Nessim , a researcher at MIT, said that chip manufacturers have consistently run into trouble by trying to build the nanotubes on a metal surface, which is needed to ensure an electrical contact. That's where the nanotubes come into play. "When we shrink chip features, the interconnections between the transistors get smaller - just like everything else," said Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat. "And when they shrink, the performance isn't the same. Efforts to build carbon nanotubes on metal can face significant problems due to the heat required in the manufacturing process. The MIT scientists used a combination of techniques to create a new process for using nanotubes.

The excess heat, for example, could cause the metals to form alloys that are not conducive to nanotube growth. The techniques included vaporizing the metals tantalum and iron, which settle in layers on a silicon wafer. The researchers also pump ethylene gas into the tube. Then they placed the coated wafer at one end of a quartz tube, which was inserted into a furnace. The gas decomposes at high temperatures and the iron on the wafer catalyzed the formation of carbon nanotubes. Intel, long looking to create the next generation of chips, is an underwriter of the MIT research.

Nessim noted that the technique is based on processes already commonly used in the semiconductor industry. which should make them eaasier - and cheaper - for manufacturers to adopt. Nessim said the semiconductor industry has been interested in finding ways to replace copper wires with nanotubes, but has been slowed by the effort to find a reasonable way to deal with the metal issues. "I hope this [research] may revise that enthusiasm to some point," he said. "At some point, they'll be stuck with copper that does not work and they'll have to find an alternative. He noted that the shift would would entail some reworking of the manufacturing process. "We won't go the way of carbon nanotubes until we've depleted current techniques," he said. "You don't go to something brand new and make a huge investment until you have to. We hope that our insights ... have eased a little bit of some fabrication issues and hope this will match the requirements that they have." Intel, in a statement responding to questions from Computerworld , said they hope such research breakthroughs can help the company switch copper wires to nanotubes by some time after 2015. McGregor suggested that a transition from copper to nanotubes could be some 15 years away. We don't move at revolutionary steps.

Replacing the transistors with nanotubes would be the next step along that line. "You won't replace the connections without looking to replace the transistors," he added. "The first step would be to replace the connections with nanotechnology. We move at evolutionary steps." But McGregor did say that he thinks replacing the copper connectors with nanotubes would just be the beginning for the technology in chipmaking. The second step is to replace the transistors." The transisto r, which acts as a switch, is the building block for the processor. It's even been called the most important invention in the 20th century.