Jackson Rocco

Addressing complaints about slow Windows startup times, Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to introduce a new business desktop PC that comes with a solid-state disk drive (SSD) to speed up Windows 7 and other applications. Available on Oct. 22 - the same day Windows 7 is officially released - the 6005 Pro will also come with a larger conventional hard disk drive connected via SATA interface for storing data and documents, said Martha Rost, worldwide product manager for business PCs at HP. HP calls the combo drive configuration its RapidDrive technology. The 64GB SSD on the HP Compaq 6005 Pro will be used to store and run Windows and commonly-accessed applications. The AMD-based 6005 Pro with RapidDrive costs $774, about $200 more than the $550 starting cost of the 6000 Pro, which lacks an SSD. As for just how rapid the 6005 Pro is, "We didn't run explicit tests.

The SATA-connected PM800 can read data sequentially at a maximum rate of 225.4 MB per second, and write it sequentially at 160 MB per second, HP said. But it boots up pretty quickly," Rost said. "You'll definitely see a difference." She said that the RapidDrive uses the Samsung PM800 SSD based on multi-level cell (MLC) technology. Sequential data rates apply to large files such as movies or songs. However, the PM800's performance - especially when writing small chunks of data - is much less impressive. It is about twice as fast as the zippiest consumer (7,200 RPM) SATA hard disk drives. When doing random reads and writes, the Samsung drive is rated at a maximum of 27.4 MB per second and 4.2 MB per second, respectively, which is far slower than conventional hard drives.

And they inevitably get even slower over time. SSDs are slower than conventional hard drives when recycling old blocks of data and doing other "garbage collection" tasks. Roger Kay, an independent analyst with EndPoint Technology Associates Inc., said this isn't the first time hardware makers have tried technology aimed at speeding up Windows. Intel also introduced a technology called Robson that placed a flash memory cache on notebook motherboards. Samsung and Seagate both introduced hybrid drives for notebooks that combined a conventional spinning disk with a smaller flash SSD that would be used to run Windows and popular apps. Such technologies haven't taken off, in large part because of lack of need.

Microsoft has also tried to speed up Windows. Most laptops can quickly go into sleep or hibernate modes and waking up from suspended modes is much faster than booting a PC. Kay doesn't think RapidDrive, at least in its current form, will spread to laptops, since it requires two drives. A feature introduced in Vista called ReadyBoost allowed users to boot Windows off a flash drive. Microsoft has promised that Windows 7 will boot and run faster than Vista . But performance gains were small, users said.

Sybase is extending its Afaria mobile-device management platform and database software to the Apple iPhone, taking advantage of new enterprise features in Version 3.1 of the iPhone's software to give IT departments more control and capabilities on the popular handset. Going on sale in the middle of this month, Sybase's Afaria 6.5 will finally give administrators the kinds of controls they have had previously for mobile platforms such as Symbian, Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1, Research In Motion BlackBerry and PalmOS. Apple's recent iPhone 3.1 release added the capability to lock down certain settings on a device so the user can't change them using the phone's configuration utility, said Mark Jordan, senior product manager for Afaria. Though many enterprise employees bring iPhones into the office and rely on them for personal communications, the device originally caught on as a consumer gadget for music, Web browsing and entertainment applications, and has only gradually made inroads as a workplace tool. That allowed Sybase to give enterprise IT departments the power to do things such as block applications, define the required password strength and lock down Wi-Fi and VPN (virtual private network) settings.

With the new Afaria, enterprises can make and change settings on employees' iPhones over the air based on overall policies for certain departments, job descriptions and other criteria. Administrators can now establish a trusted relationship between Afaria and the employee's phone using a certificate, he said. Among other capabilities, they can also require device authentication for access to a corporate directory and set up compliance reporting on the employee's use of the phone. Also on Tuesday, it announced tools for the Sybase SQL Anywhere database to be used for synchronization of data between an iPhone application and a back-end database. Sybase announced Afaria's iPhone capabilities on Tuesday at the iPhone Developer Summit in Santa Clara, California.

Using SQL Anywhere, internal developers and software vendors can build in bi-directional synchronization between an on-device app and relational databases including Sybase, Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and MySQL. This frees employees from having to depend on the cellular data connection to get work done while on the road, Jordan said. Also on Tuesday, the company's Sybase 365 subsidiary introduced a turnkey system for mobile banking on the iPhone. There is a beta test program now open for SQL Anywhere for iPhone. With it, banks can allow their customers to check balances, transfer funds among accounts, securely communicate with bank representatives, find branches and automatically dial the bank, Jordan said. The Sybase mBanking 365 iPhone platform is available now and is already deployed by BBVA Compass as the BBVA Compass Mobile application.

This past week's Microsoft-T-Mobile-Sidekick data loss mess is the latest in a string of high profile cloud computing outages that have grabbed headlines over the past couple of years. Here's a short history of cloud computing SNAFUs: Microsoft Danger outage: Contacts, calendar entries, photographs and other personal information of T-Mobile Sidekick users looks to be lost for good following a service disruption at Sidekick provider Danger, a Microsoft subsidiary. Inevitably, the coverage of the initial outage (as well as cloud security breaches) is followed by explanations of why the outage happened (human error, network equipment, hackers, etc.) and analysis stories pointing out the pitfalls of putting your faith in the cloud. The amount of data and number of users affected wasn't disclosed by Microsoft or T-Mobile, but Sidekick support forums were buzzing with pleas from users looking for tips on how to restore their devices or get their data back.

Various explanations have been served up by the vendor, from routing errors to server maintenance issues. Google Gmail fails…again:  When Google's Gmail faltered on Sept. 24, it wasn't down for more than a couple of hours, but it was the second outage during the month and the latest in a disturbing string of outages for Google's cloud-based offerings, including Google search, Google News and Google Apps over the past 18 months. Some have come to Google's defense, saying that even though the company has had its share of outages, we are talking about mainly free services (you get what you pay for, in other words). Twitter goes down…and yes, that's news:  While Twitter had been keeping its Fail Whale in hiding more often than not, a big Twitter outage that lasted throughout the morning and into early afternoon in early August had social networking types fuming. eBay's PayPal crashes: The PayPal online payments system failed a couple of times in August, leaving millions of customers unable to complete transactions. A denial-of-service attack was blamed for the problem. A network hardware issue was fingered as the culprit for the outage, which lasted for between 1 and 4.5 hours, depending on how you look at it.

Rackspace pays up:  Rackspace was forced to pay out between $2.5 million and $3.5 million in service credits to customers in the wake of a power outage that hit its Dallas data center in late June. It cost PayPal millions of dollars in lost business; it's unclear how much it cost merchants. Rackspace, which offers a variety of hosting and cloud services for enterprise customers, suffered power generator failures on June 29 that caused customer servers to go down for part of the day. This was only a test release of Azure, so observers noted that this obviously wasn't as big a deal as a production service outage. More disruptions followed and Rackspace kept customers up to date via its blog.  Windows Azure test release goes down:  Early adopters of Microsoft's cloud-computing network Windows Azure suffered an overnight outage over a weekend in mid-March during which their applications being hosted on the network weren't available.

Separately, Microsoft also suffered a Hotmail messaging system outage in March.  Salesforce.com kicks off the Year of the Cloud Outage:  As CIO.com's Thomas Wailgum reported in January, Salesforce.com suffered a service disruption for about an hour on Jan. 6 due to a core network device failing because of memory allocation errors. IDG News Service contributed to this story. Amazon S3 storage service knocked out:  We actually have to go back to summer of 2008 to find coverage of the last major Amazon S3 cloud network outage, which lasted for 7 to 8 hours and followed another outage earlier last year caused by too many authentication requests.

If SAS Institute CEO Jim Goodnight is feeling pressured by IBM's recent US$1.2 billion purchase of rival predictive analytics vendor SPSS, he's not showing it. "I haven't noticed much difference, really, since IBM bought them," he said in an interview Tuesday at SAS' Cary, North Carolina, campus. "We have competed with SPSS for 35 years. Nothing really new competitively has taken place as far as we're concerned." SAS bills itself as the world's largest privately held software company, reporting $2.26 billion in sales during 2008. It has seen heightened competition of late, as vendors such as IBM, Oracle and SAP aggressively flesh out their BI (business intelligence) strategies. We've competed with IBM that same amount of time.

IBM's SPSS purchase particularly seemed aimed at SAS, given the latter's long track record in predictive analytics, which center on modeling future outcomes and conducting "what-if" scenarios, rather than generating reports from historical data stores. IBM is hoping to boost predictive analytics projects with a new 4,000-strong services arm it formed earlier this year. "I hope they can find work for all of them," Goodnight said. "Analytics is big, it's certainly the next wave, but I'm not sure it can grow as rapidly as IBM thinks it can." Meanwhile, SAS is planning to showcase its predictive analytics wares during a customer event in Las Vegas Wednesday. Forrester Research has predicted further consolidation in the predictive analytics space, which includes a range of smaller vendors as well as open-source projects, in the wake of IBM's move. One SAS package is supposed to help debt-collection operations. For example, companies could use it to make sure live collections agents focus on people who are the most likely to actually pay back some money, given the expense of running a call center. It can be used to develop customer models showing which means of contact is best for various types of debtors.

The National Hockey League's Carolina Hurricanes are using another "optimization" software application from SAS to determine how to price game tickets, said Bill Nowicki, director of ticket operations, during a panel discussion Tuesday at SAS headquarters. "On an annual basis, our executive team gets together and tries to determine, based on the previous sales cycle, what the optimal base price will be," he said. "[We've looked] at our promotions we've run previously, and seen how well they fared." But the team lacked a "scientific model" that could look at those past sales, analyze them and come up with a price that would boost sales but also keep the team competitive with other entertainment options, he said. "We had to figure out a better way to do that than gut instinct," he added. Companies should use technology to systematically detect fraud because "fraudsters" behave like a network, said Chris Swecker, a former assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's criminal investigative division and corporate security director for Bank of America, who now works as an independent consultant. SAS is also planning to discuss a new application, SAS Enterprise Case Management, which helps fraud investigators document ongoing cases and assists with making required regulatory filings. By addressing fraud in a "one-off" fashion, companies end up playing a frustrating game of "whack-a-mole," he said, referring to the carnival game where players try to smack a plastic mole with a mallet as it rapidly and randomly pops out of holes. The FBI transferred 2,500 agents to counterterrorism efforts some years back, he said. "That's a lot of agents when you consider there's only 11,000. That meant we had to set higher thresholds. Another persistent problem is that few fraudsters ever get prosecuted, he said.

We would not investigate a [fraud] case under $500,000. So, most of these singular fraud cases will never get prosecuted. ... The universe of fraudsters out there is not diminishing. It's a very low-risk environment for them to operate." Beyond constrained law enforcement resources, other problems include complex multi-jurisdictional cases and the vagaries of international law, Swecker added.