Posted 11/18/09 at 07:03:26 AM by Paul Lilly

While Oracle's been busy trying to win the blessing of the European Union in its attempted takeover deal with Sun Microsystems, Sun has been focusing on upping its storage ante, The company on Tuesday announced upgrades to its Sun Storage 7000 family of disk arrays that purports to double both the performance and capacity from a maximum of 288TB to 576TB in a 4U space.

Sun said it outfitted its Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System with four six-core AMD Opteron processors, double the amount of DRAM cache as before (up to 512GB), and new 2TB capacity drives. The end result is significantly improved performance, the company claims.

"Sun server, storage, and networking contniue to fuel world record HPC performance and provide the building blocks for dozens of new Sun Constellation System deployments around the globe," said John Fowler, executive vice president, System Group, Sun. "Corporations and scientists alike are using Sun server and storage innovation to gain competitive advantage and tackle the world's most complex problems."

In addition to storage upgrades, Sun also announced a pair of InfiniBand switches, the Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 72 and Switch 36.

More details and specs here.

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Posted 11/13/09 at 07:14:25 AM by Paul Lilly

Motorola has put the word out that it wants to sell off its "Home and Network Mobility" unit. The unit, which makes equipment for cable and wireless companies, is Motorola's largest division, Businessweek.com reports.

According to the latest tech chatter, a deal worth $4.5 billion could be on the table. It's unknown exactly who the potential buyer(s) might be, but the most likely bet would include private-equity firms and makers of telecommunications equipment, like Samsung, the Wall Street Journal speculated.

Should Motorola find a buyer, it would be left with two other divisions: Mobile Devices, which makes cell phones, and Enterprise Mobility, with makes bar code scanners and other equipment for corporate use,

Motorola had no comment on the rumor.

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Posted 11/12/09 at 07:06:11 AM by Paul Lilly

Linux certainly has its advantages, and if Ubuntu 8.04 LTS happens to be your distro of choice, you'll be able to take advantage of Arkeia Software's Network Backup version 8 at no cost, Arkeia announced.

"Arkeia Network Backup is a proven network backup solution with broad platform support and a robust enterprise feature-set," said Steve George, vice president of sales and product management, corporate services at Canonical. "With the Arkeia Network Backup Enterprise Edition for Ubuntu, Arkeia Software makes a significant commitment to the Ubuntu user community and supports Ubuntu’s ongoing growth in the enterprise."

The fully licensed backup solution can be downloaded from the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS repository by using the Synaptic Package Manager or by typing the "apt-get install arkeia" command. The license is not time limited and includes one backup server running on Ubuntu, up to 250GB capacity for backup to disk, support of any single drive, tape, or disk, and 2 client agents to backup different types of client machines, including Windows workstations and desktops, most Linux setups, Mac OS X, and BSD computers.

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Posted 11/11/09 at 07:34:07 AM by Paul Lilly

By now you've probably seen one of Verizon's ads taking shots at AT&T's comparatively dismal 3G network coverage. Even if you didn't, AT&T has, and the wireless carrier has accused Verizon of not telling the whole story and misleading the public.

AT&T contends it's unfair to show 3G coverage maps from the two carriers side by side because it makes it look like AT&T doesn't have service in most areas. The maps only depict 3G zones, ignoring AT&T's existing 2.5G network, which is sufficient for email and other tasks portrayed in the commercials. The bottom line is, the ads are accurate in terms of 3G, but neglect to tell the whole story. Is that misleading?

AT&T thinks so, and as we previously reported, the wireless carrier has dropped a lawsuit on Verizon's lap. How that plays out will be for the courts to decide. In the meantime, expect the ads to keep rolling, especially with Verizon's Droid attracting so much attention.

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Posted 11/04/09 at 12:00:00 PM by David Murphy

The recent announcement of Skype turning quote-unquote open source has me twirling a finger with delicious glee. It's not that I dislike Skype. And it's not that I'm about to get into one of my 1,500-word debates on the differences between the definition of "free" and "open-source," I promise. This is nevertheless an important premise of Skype's entire move, as some Internet commenters are crying foul that Skype is only half-opening its popular application to the crowd. The GUI code will be yours to play with as you please. The underlying Skype protocol... nope!

To them I say: Duh.

I don't want to put words where they don't exist, but I'm willing to bet that Skype's sudden shift toward open-source waters has more to do with applying a giant, universal band-aid to staggered Linux development. It's not quite an altruistic gift to the community so much as it is a package and a bow with the phrase, "you fix it" written on the label. And that's fine. Let the community create the functional GUIs for Skype. It would be suicide for the company to release its heavily encrypted voice protocols for common use.

So what, then, is Skype up to?

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Posted 11/03/09 at 07:51:49 PM by Ryan Whitwam

This certainly isn’t the kind of publicity the fourth place cell carrier in the US wants. As of now, the entire nationwide T-Mobile network is down. Complaints began flooding twitter and forums this afternoon from all over the country. Users are reporting that their phones show the expected signal, but no calls or data are available. Curiously, calls routed through Google Voice are working as expected.

When the complaints reached a fever pitch shortly ago, T-Mobile released a statement. “T-Mobile customers may be experiencing service disruptions impacting voice and data. Our rapid response teams have been mobilized to restore service as quickly as possible. We will provide updates as more information is available,” said a T-Mobile representative.

We at MaximumPC have confirmed for ourselves by ringing a few associates on T-Mobile. Sure enough, the angelic voices of our friends and neighbors were replaced by a busy signal every time. This matches reports from elsewhere. Hopefully details will emerge later on the exact cause. If you’re a T-Mobile user, can you confirm you have no service?

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Posted 09/10/09 at 08:21:52 AM by Paul Lilly

iPhone owners and anyone else using AT&T's cellular network can look forward to faster WiFi, as the telco on Wednesday announced plans to rollout High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) 7.2 technology to boost its 3G network.

"Our deployment of HSPA 7.2 and supporting backhaul connectivity will enable our customers to continue to ride the leading edge of emerging devices and thousands of mobile applications," said John Stankey, president and CEO, AT&T Operations.

AT&T says it will begin deployment of HSPA 7.2 in six major cities, including Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Miami, all of which should see upgraded service by the end of the year. By the end of 2010, AT&T expects that list to include 25 of the nation's 30 largest markets (sorry Booger Hollow, Arkansas).

Coinciding with the rollout of HSPA 7.2 will be multiple compatible handsets and devices, including at least six new smartphones and two new LaptopConnect cards.

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Posted 08/24/09 at 09:52:31 AM by Paul Lilly

Good news today for Terry Childs, a former network administrator accused of hijacking San Francisco's computer network he designed and maintained. A judge has dropped three tampering charges against Childs, leaving just the sole charge of denying city authorities access to the network.

Childs, who has been in custody since July 2008, was working at San Francisco's Department of Telecommunication Information Services for five years before allegedly being disciplined for poor performance. Superiors also accused him of electronically spying on his supervisors and their attempt to fire him. Among the allegations, Childs is said to have refused to surrender secret codes that would allow access to the system, but ultimately coughed them up to San Francisco Mayer Gavin Newsom in a secret meeting after spending a week in jail.

According to Child's attorney, his client was only trying to protect the network from incompetent city officials who were trying to force him out of a job and that there was no malice involved. Childs is currently being held on $5 million bail.

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