FalconStor Unveils A Virtual, Virtual Tape Appliance

FalconStor Software is adding to the slowly-growing number of virtual storage appliances with the introduction this week of its new virtual virtual tape library.
It is one of two new virtual tape libraries the company is introducing this week aimed at bringing down the cost of the technology.

Virtual tape libraries, or VTLs, are disk arrays configured to look to the host server and the backup software as if they are physical tape libraries. Data is streamed to and recovered from the VTL as if it were tape, so no changes are needed to the backup process. However, because they use hard drives, the backup and recover speed is much higher than when using tape drives. Data backed up to a VTL can also be backed up to a physical tape for archiving or off-site storage.

The FalconStor VTL Virtual Appliance is a pre-configured, ready-to-run software application with an operating system that can be downloaded into a virtual machine using VMware, said John Lallier, vice president of product management for the vendor.

FalconStor this week also introduced a new family of low-cost physical VTLs. The primary differences between the virtual and the physical appliances is its price and the fact that the virtual VTL performance is limited compared to the hardware versions.

Both the virtual and the physical VTL appliances include FalconStor's Single Instance Repository de-duplication technology.

De-duplication, also called "de-dupe," removes duplicate information as data is backed up or archived. It can be done on the file level, where duplicate files are replaced with a marker pointing to one copy of the file, and/or at the sub-file or byte level, where duplicate bytes of data are removed, resulting in a significant decrease in storage capacity requirements.

It is only the latest in a handful of virtual storage appliances which do the same function as hardware-based appliances but which run on a virtual machine built using VMware.

FalconStor last month unveiled its first virtual storage appliance, one which does continuous data protection between physical and/or virtual servers. It is aimed at helping customers do LAN-less data backups and archiving as well as build disaster recovery architectures which rely on virtual servers at the remote site.

Last month also saw EMC introduce a virtual data de-duplication appliance using technology it received from its Avamar acquisition.

Steve Bishop, CTO of VeriStor Systems, an Atlanta-based storage solution provider, said he is seeing a number of vendors starting to move to offer virtual storage appliances.

"Customers are asking, can their storage applications be virtualized?" Bishop said. "We're seeing a lot of interest."

Greg Knieriemen, vice president of marketing at Chi, a Cleveland, Ohio-based FalconStor partner which has already had good success with the vendor's virtual CDP appliance, said a virtual VTL could help open the market for replacing tape with disk-based storage.

"We're selling VTLs to SMBs and enterprises, across the board," Knieriemen said. "It's a 50-50 split. But there's a much larger base of SMB customers. The SMB adoption of VTLs is still marginalized. This could really open the door for VTLs in the SMB market."

Both Bishop and Knieriemen said the $8,000 list price for the FalconStor virtual VTL is a good price, when compared to physical VTLs.

However, because of the slower performance of the virtual VTL appliance compared to hardware appliances, the right choice for customers depends on a number of factors, including backup performance requirements, customer size, what virtualization environment is available, how many virtual machines are in use, and what the customer's backup window looks like, Knieriemen said.

"You have to really develop a complete profile of the customer," he said.

Wendy Petty, vice president of sales at FalconStor, said the virtual VTL appliance makes it easy for customers or solution providers to test the vendor's VTL software.

"Just download the VTL appliance, and you can test the software as a proof-of-concept," Petty said. "It's very, very simple. You don't need to send a hardware out to test it."

With their de-dupe capability, the virtual VTL appliances are also good for small remote offices, Petty said. "Partners can offer a solution that saves customers money," she said. "They can take the management from the remote offices, where backups are not normally done anyway. And they can do global de-dupe with our patented replication."

For customers looking for higher performance, FalconStor also unveiled three new VTL hardware appliances.

The VTL-S6 can be configured for up to four different tape libraries with a total of 16 virtual tape drives and 1,024 tapes, for a maximum pre-de-dupe capacity of up to 50 Tbytes. It has a backup speed of 200 Mbytes per second.

The VTL-S12 can be configured for up to eight different tape libraries with a total of 32 virtual tape drives and 2,048 tapes, for a maximum pre-de-dupe capacity of up to 100 Tbytes. It has a backup speed of 250 Mbytes per second.

The VTL-S24 can be configured for up to 16 different tape libraries with a total of 64 virtual tape drives and 4,096 tapes, for a maximum pre-de-dupe capacity of up to 200 Tbytes. It has a backup speed of 300 Mbytes per second.

The virtual VTL appliance, model VTL-V3, can be configured for up to 4 different tape libraries with a total of 16 virtual tape drives and 1,024 tapes, for a maximum pre-de-dupe capacity of up to 40 Tbytes. It has a backup speed of 60 Mbytes per second.

All four VTLs are available. The VTL-V3 is priced at $8,000, while the VTL-6 is priced at about $20,000. Replication software is available as an option for $3,000 to $8,000, depending on capacity. A Fibre Channel connectivity option is available for the three hardware appliances with a price of $3,000 to $8,000.

Technorati : Virtual Tape Appliance

Broadcom unveils integrated 3G chip,

Broadcom Corp (BRCM.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Monday it had developed an integrated third-generation (3G) high-speed wireless cell phone chip ahead of bigger rivals Texas Instruments Inc (TXN.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O: Quote, Profile, Research), sending Broadcom shares up as much as 3 percent.

Shares of Texas Instruments and Qualcomm both fell about 2 percent after Broadcom said it developed a single chip with a baseband -- the cell phone's main processor -- and a radio receiver as well as FM radio and Bluetooth, a short-range technology used for wirelessly linking handsets to headsets

Chipmaker Broadcom said Monday that it has developed a new processor that integrates all key 3G cellular and mobile technologies onto a single chip.

The processor that operates at extremely low powers will enable cell phone makers to build new 3G phones in more compact form factors with very long battery lives at a fraction of what it costs today, the company said.

The new 3G "Phone on a Chip" supports the four next-generation cellular technologies used throughout the world: HSUPA (High-Speed Uplink Packet Access), HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access), and EDGE (enhanced data for GSM evolution). It also can transmit and receive FM radio for playing music on a car stereo. And it supports Bluetooth technology and processing capability for a 5-megapixel camera.

Broadcom claims it is at least a year ahead of competitors, such as Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, in terms of integrating so much functionality into a single chip. The company also said the chip is already available to a select group of Broadcom customers.

In 2006, Broadcom had only about 1.4 percent of the cell phone chip market. By contrast, TI and Qualcomm each had about 20 percent of the 2006 mobile phone chip market, according to iSuppli.

The new chip could help boost Broadcom's market share against these competitors, especially in Asia where operators are rolling out faster networks much more quickly than they are here in the U.S. market. Broadcom has been aggressively trying to get a greater share of the cell phone market for the past few years. And as a result, the company has been embroiled in a series of legal fights with rival Qualcomm.

Broadcom won an important battle earlier this year, when the U.S. government banned Qualcomm and its partners from importing devices that use Qualcomm's 3G technology, because part of the technology has been found to infringe on patents held by Broadcom.

Technorati : Cellular chip

The ecosystem of the mobile phone and iPhone,

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Just 74 days after launching its iPhone, Apple announced it had already sold 1 million of the things - a milestone that its previous blockbuster product, the iPod, took almost two years to reach.

And yet, to judge by the industry's chatter, the iPhone is already old news. More excitement swirls around rumours that Google, the Web-search giant that is Apple's neighbour in Silicon Valley, could enter the market with its own "gPhone." Google's boss, Eric Schmidt, has already said that the firm plans to bid for a prime slice of the wireless spectrum in a forthcoming auction, something Apple is also said to be considering.

In short, both mobile operators and handset-makers could soon be confronted with two of the world's sexiest brands as direct rivals. Publicly, Apple and Google are being diplomatic.

The industry is a stool with three legs - network service, devices, and the software and content that goes on them - and "I don't think any player in the ecosystem trying to glue it all together will be very successful," says Dipchand Nishar, who leads Google's mobile-phone strategy.

By this he may simply be conceding the obvious, which is that Google would not build hardware, even if it made the other two legs.

But Google seems to be up to something. It bought a company called Android in 2005 that specializes in mobile-phone software. It has Google Talk, a free Internet-calling service. In July it bought GrandCentral Communications, a firm that gives users one single phone number for life. And it recently filed a patent application for a new mobile-payment technology.

It would certainly be tempting to tie all these bits together into a new software "platform" for mobile phones and offer it to handset-makers as an alternative to existing smart-phone operating systems such as Symbian, Palm or Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

Naturally, Google's search, email and document services would be tightly integrated, along with its advertising technologies, which might pave the way for mobile service that is partly or wholly subsidized by advertising.

As a strategy, this might be just different enough from Apple's to assure harmony with its ally.

It would suit neither firm to open hostilities. So Google may concentrate on software for cheaper, mass-market devices, leaving Apple to make elegant, high-end hardware.

Technorati : ecosystem

Silicon Storage Technology’s gets a boost,

24hoursnewsThursday, September 13th, 2007 at 3:38 pm in Silicon Storage Technology.

You have to forgive Silicon Storage Technology (ticker:SSTI) if it's feeling a bit down in the dumps lately. The Sunnyvale maker of flash storage products for consumer devices could use a friend right about now. It's struggling to sort out its potential backdated options problems, it's fighting delisting by Nasdaq because it hasn't filed financial statements in about a year, and its stock price has been hovering around $3 per share for the past few months.

On Thursday, SST got a big hug, but not necessarily the kind it wanted.

Los Angeles-based Riley Investment Partners filed a schedule 13-D indicating it now held about 6.1 percent of the company's stock after going on a stock buying binge starting in late July. At the end, the fund attached a love letter of sorts explaining its interests:

"RIM believes the shares of the Issuer to be significantly undervalued…In fact, when one backs out cash and investments, the market is valuing SST's NOR flash business, product pipeline and licensing revenue stream at only $60 million-which RIM believes to be an extremely low valuation by any measure."

We all would like to hear we're worth more than everyone thinks, right? But this love is not unconditional:

"RIM has communicated this view to the Issuer's management… RIM's desire, at this point in time, is to work assiduously and aggressively with the current management team on behalf of all shareholders."

And here's the catch:

"RIM's sincere hope is that management and the Board of Directors share its sense of urgency…If they do not, it will force RIM to take a more proactive approach, one which will include, among other things, the nomination of new directors…communicating with other stockholders, making proposals to the Issuer concerning the capitalization and operations of the Issuer."

more from Silicon Storage Technology,>>

SST (Silicon Storage Technology, Inc., NASDAQ: SSTI), a leader in flash memory technology, today announced a new addition to the company's popular SuperFlash-based FlashFlex family of 8-bit, 8051-compatible microcontrollers, the SST89V54RD-33-C-QIF. Leveraging the company's innovative packaging technology, the new SST89V54RD is available in a 6mm x 6mm WQFN package, making it the smallest 8051-based microcontroller currently on the market. The device's miniature size and low power consumption are ideal for small form factor mobile applications, such as notebook PCs, MP3 players and GPS systems, as well as home entertainment devices including HDMI products. Additionally, the SST89V54RD supports in-system programming (ISP) and in-application programming (IAP), which provide a variety of benefits to device manufacturers and consumers alike.

"As the sophistication of mobile devices increases, size reduction and low power consumption become even larger issues for product design teams," said Paul Lui, senior vice president of the Standard and Special Product Group at SST and president of SST China. "The new thin and powerful SST89V54RD was designed to help our customers meet the size, power and performance requirements of next-generation portable consumer electronic devices."

In addition to a tiny 6mm x 6mm footprint, the WQFN package offers an extremely low-profile nominal package height of only 0.7mm (maximum total thickness of 0.8mm), making the new SST89V54RD well suited for height-constrained mobile applications.

In-Field Re-Programmability Through IAP and ISP
Like all of SST's FlashFlex microcontrollers, the SST89V54RD supports both IAP and ISP, enabling the user to update the flash device in the field or in an application. Both IAP and ISP lower cost and improve time-to-market for manufacturers, while bringing enhanced user experiences and convenience to consumers. These re-programming features also have a significant role in enabling increased functionality, such as remote diagnostics and product monitoring, in network- or Internet-enabled devices.

Pricing and Availability
Samples of the SST89V54RD-33-C-QIF FlashFlex microcontroller are available now. Pricing starts at $1.20 in 10K unit quantities. For more information about this or other SST products, please contact an SST sales representative, or visit the company's Web site at http://www.sst.com.

About Silicon Storage Technology, Inc.
Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, SST designs, manufactures and markets a diversified range of memory and non-memory products for high volume applications in the digital consumer, networking, wireless communications and Internet computing markets. Leveraging its proprietary, patented SuperFlash technology, SST is a leading provider of nonvolatile memory solutions with product families that include various densities of high functionality flash memory components and flash mass storage products. The Company also offers its SuperFlash technology for embedded applications through its broad network of world-class manufacturing partners and technology licensees, including TSMC, which offers it under its trademark Emb-FLASH. SST's non-memory products include NAND controller-based products, smart card ICs, flash microcontroller and radio frequency ICs and modules. Further information on SST can be found on the company's Web site at http://www.sst.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
Except for the historical information contained herein, this news release contains forward-looking statements regarding flash memory and non-memory market conditions, SST's future financial performance, the performance of new products and SST's ability to bring new products to market that involve risks and uncertainties. These risks may include timely development, acceptance and pricing of new products, the terms and conditions associated with licensees' royalty payments, the impact of competitive products and pricing, and general economic conditions as they affect SST's customers, as well as other risks detailed from time to time in the SST's SEC reports, including the Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2005 and on Form 10-Q for the quarters ended March 31, June 30 and September 30, 2006.

For more information about SST and the company's comprehensive list of product offerings, please call 1-888/SST-CHIP. Information can also be requested via email to literature@sst.com or through SST's Web site at http://www.sst.com. SST's head office is located at 1171 Sonora Court, Sunnyvale, Calif.; telephone: 408/735-9110; fax: 408/735-9036.

Technorati : Silicon

AMD with quad-core processor -Intel new invention

24hoursnews : Intel is aiming to extend its performance lead over AMD with the introduction of the industry's first quad-core processors designed for multi-processor servers.
The chip giant has rolled out six quad-core Xeon 7300 series processors, which deliver more than twice the overall performance and more than three times the performance per watt of its previous generation of dual-core server chips. The chips are the last to be converted to Intel's Core micro-architecture, a process that has been under way since 2006.
The 7300 series are more energy efficient than previous chips. It comprises chips that run at clock speeds of up to 2.93GHz at 130W, several 80W processors and a 1.8GHz, 50W version that is targeted specifically at four-socket blade servers.
In addition to having twice as many cores, the 7300 chips come with up to four times the memory capacity of the dual-core multi-processor platforms, which Intel maintained will allow businesses to consolidate their server environments to reduce space, power and running costs.
"Intel Xeon-based multi-processor servers are the backbone of the enterprise," said Tom Kilroy, Intel vice president and co-general manager of the digital enterprise group.
"With the Xeon 7300 series, Intel is delivering new levels of performance and performance per watt, and is driving the Intel Core micro-architecture into such innovative systems as four-socket, 16-core blades that use less energy than our older models."
The Xeon 7300 series means IT managers can pool their single, dual- and quad-core Core-based servers into a dynamic virtual server infrastructure that allows for live, virtual machine migration. This should improve situations including failover, load balancing, disaster recovery and server maintenance.
Brian Byun, VMware's vice president of global partners and solutions, said: "VMware and Intel have worked together to optimise VMware ESX Server on the Xeon 7300. Our partners and customers benefit from increased platform choice and performance headroom from the quad-core four-socket server systems."
Intel said that the 7300 series running the VMmark benchmark designed for measuring virtualisation performance, achieved the highest single server result so far. Results from key server manufacturers testing the 7300 series are also proving encouraging.
HP has proclaimed world-record results for a ProLiant DL580 G5 server running the TPC-C benchmark for database performance, while IBM claimed its 7300-based, System x3850 M2 server using the SPECint*_rate_base2006 benchmark for integer throughout, also set a new world record.
Intel claims silicon crown despite AMD Barcelonaa.

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AMD's Barcelona Chip to Get Speed Boost This Year.

On the same day that Advanced Micro Devices Inc. officially released its Barcelona server processor, the company said it would have a faster version of the quad-core Opteron device out by year's end.

Initially, the top clock speed on the quad-core chip is 2 GHz. But Randy Allen, vice president and general manager of AMD's server and workstation division, said at the Barcelona launch event here Monday evening that the company will have a 2.5-GHz version ready for shipment in December.

The confirmation of the planned speed bump may have been the most significant bit of news out of the product launch, which was held at the Letterman Digital Arts Center on the grounds of the Presidio, a former U.S. Army base that now is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

The announcement mostly featured a long list of executives from hardware vendors offering support and praise for AMD without taking any shots at its main processor rival, Intel Corp. That was left to AMD officials, but even they rarely if at all mentioned Intel by name.

Hector Ruiz, AMD's chairman and CEO, said the company's initial development in 2003 of an x86-compatible Opteron that could run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications raised the bar "for what an industry should expect from a processor company."

Ruiz claimed that the new Opteron would have "a similarly profound effect on computing," even though Intel turned the tables on AMD and beat it to market with quad-core processors by 10 months. Last week, Intel released a new Xeon 7300 line of quad-core chips with clock speeds of up to 2.93 GHz.

Executives from IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Dell Inc. appeared at AMD's launch event in person or via video to announce plans to add the Barcelona chip to their server product lines, with shipments scheduled to begin as early as next month. Among them was Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell, who said his company intends to double its lineup of AMD-based systems by year's end.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and CEO, said his company is aiming to use the quad-core Opteron to double its AMD-based server business. However, Sun in January announced a deal with Intel to develop a full of line of Xeon-based servers and workstations. That ended a two-year-old strategy under which Sun had exclusively used Opterons in its x86 systems.

Technorati : AMD, quad-core

Linux will be on a Third of Smart Phones in 2012

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By 2012, Linux will be running on nearly 31 percent of all smart devices, thanks to a growth rate faster than Windows Mobile and Symbian, according to predictions from a research firm.

Linux smartphones will grow at more than 75 percent per year, according to ABI Research, and will be running on 331 million devices by 2012.

"Serious initiatives from the likes of Intel and Access are gathering pace and momentum, whilst the carrier community continues to identify Linux as one of the few operating systems that it intends to support in its long-term plans," said ABI research director Stuart Carlaw.

Symbian won't be too pleased with the figures, as it claims to currently have 72 percent of the smartphone market. However, Symbian's figures are very regional: it has around 90 percent of the Europe and "rest of the world" sectors, but it hasn't cracked the U.S. (it has less than ten percent there) and is only around 65 percent of the market in China and Japan, according to Canalys figures that Symbian quotes.

In China and Japan, Linux smartphones already have more than 30 percent market share, having grown massively since 2004 as earlier Canalys graphs show.

Access, which owns the Palm operating system, has created the Access Linux Platform (ALP). It is also planning a move to Linux for the Palm OS. Intel, meanwhile is supporting Linux in its ultra-mobile platform.

"Linux is benefiting from growing support in the handset OEM community, most notably Motorola, but also Nokia with less traditional types of devices aimed at mobile broadband applications," said Carlaw.

Motorola has revealed plans to have Linux on 60 percent of its handsets within the next two years, and founded the LiMo group.

Nokia, meanwhile is heavily committed to Symbian, but has put Linux on its N800 Internet tablet .

The other wild card is Google. The company's entry into the phone hardware market is still rumor but most of the latest rumors suggest a Linux-based phone.

Technorati : Smart Phones

Intel Releases Quad-Core Processors Early

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Originally slated for January 2007, Intel today announced the availability of two dual-core processor families with the release of the Intel Xeon 5300 and Intel Core 2 Extreme.

The Core 2 Extreme processors are primarily for desktop clients and users that have multimedia editing or high-end gaming requirements, while the Xeons target server implementations. And judging from the early reviews, these two-socket chips represent the fastest silicon you can currently buy.

The release of these processors comes ahead of AMD who doesn't expect to release their four-way quad-core ("4x4") offering until mid-2007. Being first to market gives back some of the edge AMD won when they released dual-core processors ahead of Intel. AMD's dual-core Opteron has been credited in helping the company make significant market gains in the last year.

Intel's quad-core market advantage may have come at the expense of engineering time. One criticism of the Intel quad-core design, dubbed "Clovertown," is that it is just two dual-core chips from the same die "sandwiched" together.

That engineering decision may be a moot point until AMD releases their own quad-core processor when you consider that Inte's Core 2 chips under 2.66 GHz are pulling only 80 watts of power compared to the 120 watts of AMD's latest dual-core Opteron. The balance of performance versus power is what has given the Opteron a leg up over Intel's Itanium for some time and it looks as if the pendulum just swung the other way. And for multimedia processing, you are unlikely to find a faster chip out there than the Core 2 right now. Obviously not every application is going to be so well optimized but if you're encoding video, Core 2 Extreme is a good bet.

Systems vendors have quickly lined up, betting that IT buyers are ready to make jump. IBM, HP, SGI, Apple and Dell have all announced the availability of servers and clients based on Intel's new chips.

The one surprise here is Dell, who beat nearly everyone to the punch announcing they would offer Intel-based quad-core machines last week. Dell isn't one to jump on trends early -- it was only this year that the company began offering AMD-based clients and servers -- and this timely buy-in could be considered either a technology endorsement, a way for Dell to shake things up after a couple of bad quarters, or both.

Users looking to capitalized on the super-fast chips shouldn't expect any early discounts. The 2.66GHz Xeon X5355 will set you back $1172 while the 2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is priced at $999.

Technorati : Early, Intel, Processors, Quad-Core, Releases