Is it me, or are we seeing a decided trend lately toward industry consortiums to deal with problems/opportunities/standards/whatever?

I nearly forgot to let you know about all the changes we're working on here at CMP Media! This was some of the most exciting (to me) news of SNW...

First, I want to welcome Byte and Switch to the CMP Media family. They cover storage in ways we don't, so I think there's a perfect fit here.

So that you know, Terry Sweeney and the content of StoragePipeline.com will be moving into Byte and Switch. Wish Terry luck!

To be clear, Storage Pipeline the print product will continue to be produced, it is just the web site that is moving.

Second, we have added Steven "Steve" Hill and Howard Marks to our masthead as Contributing Editors, finally recognizing their astounding contributions to storage at Network Computing and Storage Pipeline. I'm pleased with this turn of events, because they have both done a lot to help keep us the premiere publications that we are. I am working with our publisher John Siefert to get them access to create entries in this blog, should they want to.

The only constant in life is change, so I guarantee that more will be coming, but for now that is it from me.

A look under the covers of Google's proposal to provide free WiFi for San Francisco show the odd mix of above-the-fray, rhetorical idealism, and hard-nosed commercialism that we've come to expect from the search giant. But if Google wins the bid, it'll be its bottom-line orientation, not its high-minded ideals, that wins the day.

Well, I'm about 80% done with SNW, and it's time to check in and let you know about the cool stuff I've seen and heard.

Focused and roaring - Adaptec. They've got a lot coming down the pike, and you'll be pleased with what you find. They are really serious about "we needed to focus" when asked about the storage group, which is cool, it sure seems like they know where they're going.

Cool and growing - Blue Arc. NAS head on a SAN backend with some high-performance implications. We'll be staying in touch with them so we're set to bring you stories when they're set to release (and our lab is up to the task). They make some bold claims, I want to see how well they fulfill them.

Still Friggin' Cool - QLogic. I still like the QLogic personal SAN thing they threw together with Seagate and Studio Network Solutions. Expensive for you and I to throw on your LAN at home, but it is cool. They're coming up with things too, we'll keep you posted. For the most part they seemed to be digesting the Troika acquisition.

Cool, but you don't know it yet - Infortrend. After discsussions with Infortrend, Howard and I decided that they need to spread the word. Cool storage products in a high-volume market, and some OEM wins, but no one has heard of them. They've got a new PR firm, we'll see if they get the word out.

Cool, in that old-school storage company sorta way - Quantum. They're still doing what they hear their customers need, we're going to drag them into the lab and see if they're delivering.

McData and I had a great conversation, but most of it you probably wouldn't consider "cool", so I'll spare you the paragraph :-)

Don.

Last week brought us WS-TX, this week brings us WS-SX.

Members of the OASIS international standards consortium announced plans to define extensions to the WS-Security OASIS Standard that will enable the trusted exchange of multiple SOAP messages and will define security policies that govern the formats and tokens of those messages. The new OASIS Web Services Secure Exchange (WS-SX) Technical Committee brings together users and vendors in an open process to refine and finalize a set of specifications based on three initial contributions, WS-SecureConversation, WS-SecurityPolicy and WS-Trust.

Vendors participating in WS-SX are:

Actional, Adobe, Amberpoint, BMC Software, BEA Systems, Computer Associates, DataPower, Forum Systems, HP, IBM, Infravio, IONA, Microsoft, Nokia, Novell, Oracle, Reactivity, Ricoh, Sarvega, SAP, SOA Software, Sonic Software, Systinet, TIBCO, VeriSign, and webMethods

OASIS WS-SX Technical Committee Online

Microsoft is going to launch a book-scanning project of its own -- and unlike Google, it's doing the right thing. It will only scan and make available books in the public domain, and will work with Yahoo and an industry group on the project.

So, AMD wants to capture at least a third of the server processor market by three years from now. Or maybe even a half, depending on which company official you're listening to. Well, one point of market share at a time, they may just get there.

My personal domain and email is hosted by the Verio hosting company. Bad move --- the hurricane killed all my email from yesterday until this morning, and Verio's technical support team seems to have absconded to South America. What's wrong with this company?

Every CIO and IT manager knows what the $64,000 question is when evaluating a new technology: Can I run mission-critical apps on it? If the answer isn't a firm, 100% "Yes," then you're testing it for a long time first or simply walking away from it.

Earlier this month, very quietly, Oracle acquired OSS database vendor Innobase, producers of InnoDB which, just so you know, ships as a component to MySQL. Interesting, ain't it?

This announcement from Oracle indicates that Oracle expects to renegotiate the contract between Innobase and MySQL, which comes up for renewal next year.

Let's hope so.

Gossip says Oracle isn't the only one shopping for open source databases. Rumors say Sun is also shopping around and could acquire PostgreSQL. Hmmm...interesting, would they just acquire the assets for PostgreSQL or would they acquire Pervasive Software who offers Postgres as the commerically supported alternative to its open source offering, PostgreSQL. Hmmm....

In other fun and exiciting news, a little company called Scientego has made a claim based on a couple of patents it owns, namely No. 6393426 and No. 5842213 which cover the "transfer of data in a neutral format". Hmmm...the lawsuits filed by Scientego and the patents discuss non-hierarchal data, so that leaves us stumped as to the nature of its claims since XML is most certainly hierarchal in nature. More to come on this one, we're sure, but likely just more poking fun at this little company playing barrater.

For the past week our Class C has been routing off into the ether. Our ISP, ChoiceOne, has been unable to determine why our Class C suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth.

I don't know why either, but I know it shouldn't take you a WEEK to figure it out. Our connectivity has been gone for a week, the trouble ticket escalated twice, and every time I called I was told "the" technician was busy, could he call me back?

Sure, if he's really going to, because thus far "the" tech must be on permanent vacation because I've not heard boo from him.

C'mon, ChoiceOne, figure it out. Either that or hire a second technician so "the" tech can answer my damn calls.

The Voice over IP Security Alliance (VoIPSA) took the first major step today to combat VoIP dangers --- and it's long overdue. VoIP security is IP telephony's Achilles Heel, and until now, no one has taken it seriously.

So QLogic bought Troika Networks. I've digested this for a few days, and have a couple of observations.

First, this is good for Troika. They were struggling in a market dominated by a channel, QLogic brings them that channel.

The benefit to QLogic is more questionable, in my opinion. I'm guessing they have some deals already lined up, because it doesn't seem to make sense that someone without even a director class switch would buy an Intelligent Switch solution. I hope they get what they expect out of it.

Of course, there is one thing that really bothers me, these two experienced companies, with intelligent staff members, bought into the whole "Virtualization is Intelligence" thing that some vendors are trying to shove down our throats.

Sad, truly sad. It provides an indication of what QLogic is hoping to gain from the purchase. They stressed that Troika was a Virtualization solution, but it is a programmable platform - that's not just virtualization, it is a whole lot more. Unless QLogic decides to only use it for virtualization, then maybe they have the right name after all. That would be a waste, but would fit with the FUD currently in the market, making them reactionary to other vendor's claims.

A trend I've noticed among political blogs is some lighter Friday action; for instance, my fellow Philadelphian Atrios posts pics of his lazy cats on Fridays. Others do orchids, trees, and the like.

An FCC order requiring that VoIP companies comply with traditional telephone wiretapping rules could end up crippling Skype and other peer-to-peer VoIP companies -- and stifle innovation to boot.

As you know, each December we proudly present to you our Survivor's Guide for the coming year -- what you need to know and how you can prepare for the next 365 days in the world of IT, networking, security, wireless and other technology categories.

As you're also aware, each Survivor's Guide issue features a heroic band of adventurers who grace the cover, braving dangerous obstacles in each of the technology categories.

In the past years, they've braved dense jungles and crossed frozen tundras. This year, our heroes are sailing the ocean blue. But before they can cast off, they need your help.

We'd like you to name the the ship that will appear on the cover of this year's "Survivor's Guide" issue. Just submit your IT-centric name for our seafaring vessel in the form below. We'll christen the ship with the best pick.

In addition, the winner will score an 'NWC Treasure Chest' which includes:

• an NWC cell phone hands free headset
• an NWC mint tin
• an NWC stylus-pen combo
• an NWC pen

I call them IT's Greatest Generation -- the folks who ran the mainframes and high-end servers of an earlier time and opened the door for an unprecedented expansion of what IT could bring to businesses and their bottom lines.

eBay CEO Meg Whitman had some startling news for stock analysts yesterday: In the future, all phone calls will be free, thanks to VoIP. She sees Skype as the nail in the coffin of Big Telecom.

The other shoe has finally dropped -- the Association of American Publishers is suing Google to halt the Google book-scanning project. The Google project scans and makes available copyrighted books without copyright holder approval. The publishers call Google's actions "willful infringement to further its own commercial purposes." They're absolutely right --- it's nothing more than intellectual piracy.

The FCC's incompetence is on the front-burner again. This time, congressional investigators have found its oversight of the E-Rate program to get schools and libraries online has led to millions of dollars in waste. Is it time to heed the advice of a Columbia Law School Professor who says it's time to dismantle the FCC?

This story pretty much speaks for itself.

I'll meet you at the bar afterwards. First round's on you.

This one's not even cold off the press. IBM just acquired Web services security and acceleration vendor, DataPower.

IBM acquisition of DataPower

IBM expects that the acquisition will smooth implementation of SOAs using its WebSphere technology, as well as improving security, performance and management of business processes. IBM will continue to offer DataPower's products (our latest review including DataPower's XS40) and, we assume, will integrate DataPower technology into its SOA strategy - specifically its ESB story - as a complementary component of its architecture, likely with specific tweaks in the WebSphere line to harness the power of DataPower's accelerated XML parsing and tranformation capabilities.

This is an odd move for IBM, given that DataPower is a hardware based solution and IBM's hardware is server focused, not networking focused. The announcement comes on the heels of Intel's recent acquisition of Sarvega, though it does not appear that the Intel acquisition was a driver behind the IBM acquisition. Instead, there is speculation that this is perhaps a slap at Cisco's AON technology, which has yet to see the light of day.

Google just revamped its privacy policy, and while overall it's a good one, it still has some serious holes that need to be plugged.

Okay, every market has a certain amount of FUD in it, generally introduced by companies who know that their product is inferior or not what the market needs, so they attempt to confuse issues.

Storage is no exception, as a matter of fact, with the competition in every space for the enterprise dollars that are taking more and more of IT's infrastructure budget, I'd say storage is worse than most markets right now.

Never fear, Network Computing is here! There are some egregious lines that you're hearing or will soon hear, so before we all pack up for SNW, here is your list of FUD to know. Of course, we'll post more as we hear them...

1. Backing up files, and only files disk to disk is CDP.
- We say crap. Honestly, just because you are a big-name vendor doesn't mean you can put out inferior products and then claim no one else is doing what you are. Simply put, there are a lot of products out there that support databases and email, you would think that the vendors who wrote those database and email programs would support them. All business runs on databases and email, if you don't support them, then you are not enterprise class.

2. Products that do only Storage Virtualization are in fact Intelligent Fiber Channel Switches.
- We call you a liar. And we call any writer or analyst that backs up your ridiculous claim an idiot.
Intelligent Switching is typified - and has been from day one - by expandability, the ability to purchase it for one use today and add to the functionality in the future. Building a Virtualization appliance and plugging it into a switch is not Intelligence. Nor does it imply intelligence if you declare such a solution an "Intelligent Switch". We're sorry you wish it was, but please stop confusing our readers, and your potential customers.

3. FC disks are still a bargain.
- When I can RAID my data across multiple disks, even using complete copy RAID, and it is cheaper than FC, there is very little reason for me to buy FC disks And SAS is going to accelerate the trend, so quit trying to convince us just because you make more off of FC disks, okay?

Of course, I don't expect the vendors to listen, but now you, the reader, have some good points to bring up with their sales people, right?

Reactivity has just released the latest version of its XML optimized operating system, XOS 4.3. Some of the cool new features include the ability to support Integrated Windows Authentication, which means single sign on capabilities - even when web services managed by Reactivity's gateways are called from Office documents such as Excel.

XOS 4.3 also adds WS-Trust, Kerberos and RADIUS support to the SAML, X.509, username/password and basic authentication support Reactivity Gateways already offer as well as compression/decompression capabilities through PKZIP and support for leading anti-virus scanning of XML attachments from companies such as Symantec.

Reactivity XOS 4.3 is available now for the Reactivity Gateway 2400 Series family including the XML Security Gateway, SOA Gateway, Manager and Gateway-D.

Reactivity web site
Our latest review of XML/Web Services Gateways

Don't miss a nifty piece of reporting from my InformationWeek brethren Aaron Ricadela and Thomas Claburn on the next generation of the Web, built mainly around their attendance at the recent Web 2.0 conference.

Plumtree, recently acquired by BEA, has annonuced the availability of a new version of its portal suite along with some nearly vertical versions of the same, targeting specific audiences such as communities and application developers.

Plumtree's G6 Suites come in three flavors:

• Portal Solution Suite. Traditional portal.


• Community Solution Suite. Built for collaborative environments with support for projects and teams.


• Application Solution Suite. A development oriented suite with an eye on composite application implementation.

Some of the newest features include integration of Fuego's BPM (Business Process Management) technology. (For more about BPM and Fuego's offering, read our most recent review).

The only downer is that Plumtree is not committed to tripping gaily down the UDDI Registry path for application composition. Yet. But the integration of BPM and the offering of targeted suites make this latest release of Plumtree's portal a sweet deal.

We'll be reviewing portals again in 2006, so ya'll come back, ya hear?

Members of the OASIS international standards consortium announced plans to define a set of protocols for coordinating the outcome of distributed application actions. The new OASIS Web Services Transaction(WS-TX) Technical Committee brings together users and vendors in an open process to refine and finalize a set of specifications based on three initial contributions, Web Services Coordination (WS-Coordination), Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction), and Business Activity Framework (WS-BusinessActivity). Other contributions and changes to these input documents will be accepted for consideration without prejudice or restriction and evaluated based on technical merit.

The Committee plans to begin its work by focusing on the underlying specification, WS-Coordination. It will then proceed to advance WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity.

Organizations involved in defining this standard:

• Actional


• Adobe


• BEA Systems


• Cast Iron Systems


• DataPower


• Fujitsu


• Hitachi


• IBM


• IONA


• Microsoft


• Oracle


• Reactivity


• Ricoh


• SAP


• SOA Software


• Sonic Software


• Systinet


• TIBCO


• webMethods

Today's Friday Freebie is an odd one. It's a recently open-sourced Automated Data Collection (ADC) transaction set from DataMax. You may recognize the company better if I say it's the provider of RfGen.

Ahhh.. yes.

DataMax has open-sourced a collection of ADC transactions for JD Edwards and JD Edwards One World. These pre-defined transactions for warehousing and manufacturing can be downloaded, with source, for free from DataMax and incorporated into your supply-chain management architecture for free.

This is the first open-sourcing of any type of previously proprietary ERP solution, so it will be interesting to see where this goes in the next few months.

Vonage has reportedly turned down a buyout offer of $1.5 billion. Here's my advice to the VoIP company: Take the money and run. The VoIP bubble won't last.

No, not body odor. Business Objects.

I just finished up a review of Business Intelligence suites.

As expected, Business Objects, although invited, refused to participate. Business Objects "doesn't do reviews". I did this same review a few years ago and guess what, Business Objects did not participate then either. But they were invited last time, and again this time. They chose not to participate. I'll invite them the next time, and they're likely to decline again.

For all you readers who want to know why BO wasn't included, it's because they chose not to participate. You'd be doing me a big favor if you wrote to BO and let them know YOU'D like them to participate the next time I do this review, because otherwise, they aren't likely to agree to let me play with their toys.

Seriously. Let them know you want to see them reviewed against the competition. I know I'd like to see them participate, and from the amount of e-mail I've gotten already - and am likely to get over the next few months - on this subject, you'd like to see it too.

In what can be mildly termed a significant 'variation' in the IEEE standards process, 27 companies including chipset vendors Atheros, Broadcom, Intel and Marvell announced Monday the official formation of the Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC) in an effort to speed up the IEEE 802.11n standards process. This announcement comes only three months after these firms publicly committed to developing a joint proposal to the IEEE task group.

The IEEE 802.11n task group has been mandated to create a wireless standard with a throughput of at least 100 Mbps, which is at least three to four times the speed of the current standards-based 802.11a and g. The foundation of the standard is MIMO (multiple in, multiple out), technology created and developed by Airgo Networks. Although the market leader in MIMO-based technologies--the company is already in its third generation of hardware--Atheros and Ruckus Wireless (formerly Video54), which have developed similar technologies, have challenged Airgo's success.

One question left unanswered in the Google-Comcast bid to buy a stake in AOL: Will AOL's AIM network be part of the deal? If so, it would be a tremendous boost for Google's sagging Google Talk, and Google's ultimate VoIP strategy.

The announcement that Microsoft and Yahoo IM programs will interoperate is driven by one thing, and one thing alone: VoIP.

Okay, so today if I need more storage, I can:

- Add more disks to my SAN or NAS array.
- Add more arrays to my network.
- Move to a vendor that handles more disks.
- Increase disk sizes to half a Gigabyte.

Seriously, at this point how much more do we need?

I can pick up a terabyte of SOHO NAS for 1 thousand dollars. Most SOHOs don't have anywhere near a terabyte of data, so what is the point?

Same is true with the Uber-SANs. There is an incredibly small market that needs multiple petabytes of data, the rest of us, even the insurance and utilities crowd, can live with multiple terabytes.

Double the requirements for replication. There you go. Most organizations don't need more than twenty terabytes or so, and we've technologically caught up with the current rate of growth.

The real growth areas are broadcasting and home users. USB drives and End User NAS arrays are going to get big as people store more pictures, video, and music on their network.

But they're not going to be that big. Lori and I have had nearly all of our 600 CDs on our network for years (we were an early AudioTron customer), and they don't take up 80 Gigabytes. That says it all. I have a USB drive that would hold those 600 CDs and still leave me room to save all of my writing on it.

At some point, this industry will suffer a shakeup based on storage growth. Bigger disks win, meaning large arrays and stuff aren't going to be unless some new storage requirements come up pretty soon.

Just my thoughts.

Last week's spat between Internet providers Cogent and Level 3 that made possibly tens of millions of IP addresses unreachable brings up the question --- Is it time for the feds to take control of the Internet backbone?

Last week's Sprint Nextel patent infringement suit against VoIP providers Vonage and Voiceglo make one thing clear: VoIP is killing off Big Telecom. The courts are always the last refuge of a dying industry.

It happened sooner than I thought: We're already seeing the first implementation of the IBM Cell microprocessor in a server environment. That even beats the Cell's higher-profile rollout as the guts of Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3 gaming console, which is how most of the world will experience this chip.

This week's Friday Freebies are all about VoIP, as Don and I have spent some time this week checking out alternatives to Skype due to its limitations on conferencing in friends.

The first free VoIP tool we tried was Ventrilo. Runs on Linux, client on Windows, easy to set up and run. Some tooling around the net tells me that a lot of gamers are using Ventrilo and claim the voice quality is better than that of our second Friday Freebie, but even on our internal network we had some issues getting it to sound good. Now, we're not using headsets and needed a solution that would handle use of an external mic and speakers, and from what I've read in forum posts around the net about Ventrilo this is probably the cause of our particular problems.

The second Friday Freebie is TeamSpeak and it is also used by a ton of gamers. Also runs on Linux/Windows and has clients for both operating systems. I set up the server on Linux for a quick test and we've been playing with it ever since, having friends from around the country call in and test it out. Again, headsets are what this proggy was designed for, and with an open mic and speakers we're hearing feedback and echoes that we just don't get with Skype in a similar configuration, but we've been able to work around that a bit by strategically placing the mic behind a box of Cheese Nips. Really. The only problem with TeamSpeak appears to be getting the client. It doesn't download properly off the TeamSpeak site, nor off about a hundred different servers I tried - just this one.

Both apps are free, and both overcome the 5 person conference limitation of Skype, so check 'em out if you're in need of a voice chat app that lets you conference in more than 4 friends or family.

Just in case you thought that Google didn't have grand ambitions, consider this: Yahoo and Microsoft aren't big enough targets for the search giant. Now it has the federal government in its cross-hairs.

If it seems to you as if IBM has been concentrating on the small and midsized business market lately, no need to check yourself in the mirror -- that is indeed the case, at both the top end and the entry level. A $30 billion market sector will generally have that effect on companies...

Why have universities been let off the hook in the author suit against Google for its unauthorized scanning of countless copyrighted books without permission? After, all they're as much to blame as Google.

You can't really blame the proponents of WiMAX, including the WiMAX Forum, for the relentless hype that has surrounded this emerging wireless technology. Marketing professionals are hired to create buzz, to search for a sweet spot where consumers of information technology feel hungry yet unfulfilled. It's not their fault that some journalist with limited technical knowledge labeled it "Wi-Fi on Steroids." Still, there's mounting pressure on the WiMAX industry to deliver on some of the promise, and it won't be easy.

Last week, I moderated a panel presentation on the evolution of WiMAX at the Next Generation Networks (NGN) conference in Washington, DC. The session was well attended and included presenters from Alcatel, Alvarion, Cisco and Towerstream. For the most part, the presentations were informative and largely grounded in reality. Even Mohammad Shakouri of Alvarion, who was speaking as chair of the WiMAX Forum marketing working group, avoided the temptation to fuel the flames of enthusiasm, choosing instead to provide a rational view of the likely evolution of WiMAX in the coming years. In private conversations, he expressed concern that market expectations for WiMAX need to be better managed.

The Yahoo-led project to scan books and library material and make them available online is on target, unlike the wrong-headed Google initiative that will lead to massive copyright violations. Despite a few minor problems with the Yahoo program, Google should learn from its competitor and follow the same rules.

So we recently ran a review of high-end iSCSI products in which the device EMC submitted, with the servers we were running, had performance problems that they were not seeing reported in the field.

Steven Hill, the author of the piece, worked with them for long hours, running a risk of making his review late, but to no avail.

So we loaned them one of the servers we were testing with because it was in your best interests to help them resolve this problem before it did show up in one of your data centers.

EMC notified us this week that they have discovered the problem, and that it was only reproducable with our white box server.

Now I have to tell you that we haven't tested this solution, but EMC gains nothing by telling us the problem has been fixed if it has not.

The official statement from EMC says:
"Since Network Computing completed the test last Spring, EMC has since made the product generally available. As the result of extensive testing by Network Computing and EMC, the iometer issue experienced during testing has been resolved. Users are advised to reference EMC's support matrix to ensure system and component compatibility."

Since we find it highly unlikely that you are running white-box servers in your data center, perhaps this will not be an issue for you, but for the sake of completeness, we felt compelled to inform you of this resolution.

We look forward to taking another look at EMC's iSCSI solution the next time we take on high-end iSCSI.

VIA Technologies wrote me a couple of weeks ago and asked if I was interested in looking at their newest development board - a sleek little 17 cm by 17 cm (t