Servers and business storage

Who's topping the big data charts?

Thanks to the rise of open-source data analysis tool Hadoop, business intelligence and analytics have reached new levels of interest and hype as the market scrambles to keep up with the volume of data and the need to make sense of it immediately.

In the wake of Yahoo nurturing Hadoop, an ecosystem sprung up among other big Internet companies developing their own tools, in many cases variations of database management systems. Facebook eventually rolled out Cassandra, Google introduced BigTable, and from there variations began to appear among smaller companies and open source foundations.

The majority of these databases rely on … Read more

Next-gen Intel 'Ivy Bridge' chip delayed

It's apparently official. Intel's next-gen Ivy Bridge processor is delayed, according to a report in the Financial Times, citing an Intel executive.

"I think maybe it's June now," Sean Maloney, executive vice-president of Intel and chairman of Intel China, told the Times. Maloney attributes the delay to the manufacturing process, the Times said.

Though Intel had never announced a particular launch date, the chipmaker had indicated "spring." A June launch clearly makes this a delay.

An Intel spokesperson is also cited in the Times article as saying that the company's plans to … Read more

Little startup Infochimps has a platform for big data

Infochimps today announced a scalable platform for big data environments. The Infochimps latform is the first formal product for the company, which, to date, has served primarily as a big data marketplace.

The Austin-based Infochimps initially developed its data system behind the Infochimps Platform as the foundation for its big data marketplace. With the Infochimps Platform, customers will be able to leverage a proven big data system to construct big data projects for less money and optimize them more deftly.

A platform as a service (PaaS) model will heavily reduce costs by facilitating the creation of big data constructs while … Read more

Data mining's adult challenges

Probably no data-mining legend has been more pervasive than the "beer and diapers" story, which apparently dates back to an early 1990s project that data-warehousing pioneer Teradata (then part of NCR) conducted for the Osco Drug retail chain.

As the story goes, they discovered that beer and diapers frequently appeared together in a shopping basket on certain days; the presumed explanation was that fathers picking up diapers bought a six-pack when they were out anyway. This correlation was then used to optimize displays and pricing in the stores.

That's the story anyway. The reality, as best anyone can determine, … Read more

HP readies Windows 8 'X86' products for holiday, says CEO

Hewlett-Packard has a line of products ready to go for Windows 8, CEO Meg Whitman said today during the company's earnings conference call.

"We have a product line lined up in PSG (Personal Systems Group) on Windows on X86. We believe we're going to be well-positioned for holiday on Windows 8 X86," she said. X86 refers to the chip design that Intel and Advanced Micro Devices use.

Whitman made no mention of ARM, the other chip technology that Windows 8 will run on.

"The better Windows 8 is, the better off we are," she … Read more

Intel 'Ivy Bridge' chip delayed, Windows 8 in September, report claims

The next-generation Intel chip destined to populate the upcoming crop of ultrabooks is delayed, an Asia-based report claims.

The delay of the "Ivy Bridge" processor is being reported by DigiTimes, a publication that typically voices the concerns of device makers. Those concerns are just as often opinion as they are fact.

That said, the key point is that volume shipments of Ivy Bridge won't happen until "after June," Digitimes said, citing sources at "first-tier notebook vendors [that] are having trouble digesting their Sandy Bridge notebook inventories due to the weak global economy."

A &… Read more

DDoS attacks spread to vulnerable IPv6 Internet

The idyllic byways of the next-generation IPv6 Internet now suffer an affliction previously limited to the mainstream IPv4 Internet: distributed denial-of-service attacks.

And worse, the still-immature IPv6 network is being caught with its pants down when it comes to repelling the DDoS attacks. That's the conclusion of Arbor Networks' latest annual study on the Internet's operational security, released today.

"This is a significant milestone in the arms race between attackers and defenders," Arbor Networks said. "We believe that the scope and prevalence of IPv6 DDoS attacks will gradually increase over time as IPv6 is more … Read more

What's different about storage for virtual desktops?

It is often said that data center-level server virtualization projects created a renewed demand for networked storage, both NAS and SAN.

If that's true, then efforts to virtualize desktops--aka virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) projects--will create renewed demand for high-performance storage, both network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN).

Storage performance is a major determinant in successful deployments of VDI. Why? VDI is a storage input/output-intensive environment.

When you lift the hood to find out what's going on inside a disk array that's supporting virtual desktops, you see the following:

The typical virtual desktop running Windows … Read more

One year later, IBM Watson goes to work (and the cloud)

What started out as a research project at IBM has become not only an unbeatable "Jeopardy" champion but also a new line of business for Big Blue. And it's coming to the cloud.

IBM's Watson project proved a big hit when it appeared as a contestant on "Jeopardy" one year ago and proved that machines are indeed smarter than man (I for one welcome our robot overlords.)

And now, IBM is taking Watson to the next level, having created a commercial business unit working to offer Watson both on-premise and as a hosted cloud … Read more