News Blog

From Jason Boche's blog:

Today at the Minneapolis VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting, VMware employees disclosed to a group of 150+ attendees the new name for the next generation of Virtual Infrastructure many have been referring to as VI4 or VI.next. The new name is VMware vSphere. I value and respect the various relationships I have with VMware and thus before posting this news, I checked with authoritative sources inside VMware. VMware Marketing has endorsed the release of this information to the public. VMware also released a few new configuration maximum details on vSphere but for now I am keeping that information to myself. Other audience members in attendance may decide to break this news.

Why does this matter to cloud computing fans, you ask?

VMWare's vCloud vision depends greatly on the upcoming features that expand the scale in which VMWare's core products can operate; expanding beyond the server to the data center as a whole and beyond. Rumors of features such as over-WAN migration of virtual machines in VI4 are key to the vision of federated VMWare-based clouds becoming a reality. So, create a Google Alert for vSphere, sit back and watch the show.

Dell shares rose as high as 4.5 percent Wednesday, following reports that founder Michael Dell acquired nearly $100 million in shares in the computer maker.

Dell climbed as high as $23.18 a share in intraday trading, before closing out the session at $22.70 a share, up 2.34 percent.

Dell's founder, according to a report in MarketWatch, purchased 4.5 million shares between June 27 and July 1 at an average price of $22.14 a share.

Dell's buying spree comes after the company reported respectable first-quarter results, which came off a challenging 2007 when it was feeling the effects of missing out on some big industry trends.

During the first quarter, Dell told analysts, the company's unit shipments grew 22 percent, while the industry rose by 14 percent. And Dell's notebook revenue climbed 22 percent over the past year.

Michael Dell's stock purchase not only marked the largest he's ever made of the computer maker's shares, but also puts him at the top of conducting the largest purchase ever at the company by an insider, according to MarketWatch's report.

As part of its latest reorganization, Yahoo created a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, which is chartered with developing computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness, according to the press release. It could also lead to Yahoo getting into the business of selling pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure to developers and companies.

Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh

(Credit: Dan Farber)

Yahoo has been building massive scale infrastructure (now known as cloud computing) for years, but the intent of the new organization is to streamline development by bringing the various people and teams working on the core technologies into a single group, according to Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh, who reports to CEO Jerry Yang.

"The primary focus for the new group is internal," Balogh said. "But much like Amazon and Google, when you have something at scale and integrated, there are opportunities to offer services." Microsoft is also expected to go down a similar path.

Balogh thinks that Yahoo can leapfrog Google and Amazon with its cloud-based, infrastructure services for internal or external use.

"There are some more recent innovations around the cloud and grid. It's a hot topic in research," he said, maintaining that Yahoo is applying newer technology concepts from 2005 to 2007, than competitors.

Balogh mentioned open source, such as Hadoop (software for scalable, distributed computing), and new ways to implement data abstraction as differentiators, as well as "loosening ACID requirements (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability, which are a set of properties that guarantee reliable database transactions).

Balogh said that Yahoo's global fabric foundation will have self-healing capabilities that allow it to "operate at a higher level of availability with fewer people than we understand others have."

Besting Microsoft, Google and Amazon in optimizing cloud computing would be a major and unanticipated win. Raghu Ramakrishnan, one of Yahoo's chief scientists, is working on Yahoo's cloud computing research efforts. Below are the principles guiding Yahoo's platform from a presentation (PDF) Ramakrishnan gave earlier this year.

(Credit: Yahoo Research)

At lunch with Michael Coté from RedMonk on Wednesday, we talked a lot about how open source has really split into "free" and "open source," with the former typically associated with basement developers and Apache licenses, and the latter generally associated with the General Public License and some set of enhanced features.

As I was following Coté's Twitter feedearlier, I started to wonder whether everything really will go to the cloud and all of our open-source musing will go away, as software becomes consumed versus installed.

Realistically, there is a vast array of software that really can't move outside the enterprise in the foreseeable future. Consider, for example, banking and stock-trading systems, or telecommunications infrastructure. On the other hand, consider pretty much everything else. Even when you take into account the complexities of back-office systems, odds are that in a green-field situation, you could find a software-as-a-service application to solve your problems.

So here's the paradox that I think about: Let's consider a company like Google, which writes, buys, and installs a lot of software. Some is unique to its business and isn't available as an online service. Other products are packaged applications. Yet it wants the rest of the world to stop buying software, instead just consuming it from Google.

I'm not seeing a way that on-premise software disappears forever...

Mosso, the cloud computing division of hosting provider Rackspace, has added a new Web-based control panel and a behind-the-scenes provisioning system to its Hosting Cloud service.

The company said Wednesday the control panel makes it easier for users to set up and manage hosted applications. It includes a new Web-based file manager that gives users access to stored data so that they can create and decompress archives and change access permissions more easily.

The Mosso control panel includes a new Web-based file manager.

A snapshot tool, within the control panel, lets users access and reinstate previous versions of files in the case of accidental overwrite, the company said.

The provisioning system--used to deploy applications--shrinks the time needed to get an application up and running. The company built the new system using Apache's ServiceMix, according to co-founder Todd Morey. "We wrote our initial provisioning system in Java. As we have grown, we started to see some real strain on that system. The new provisioning system is a competitive advantage versus Amazon EC2, for example. We do a lot of the hard work for (the customer)."

Mosso's service, along with a hosted storage offering called CloudFS now in beta testing, competes against services from Amazon and others. Morey says Mosso's selling point versus competitors is that it is easy to set up and run. "Our key differentiator is that we're tightly integrated and easy to use."

The Hosting Cloud service is priced from $100 per month. "You pay for what you use--as you expand, your bandwidth expands," said Morey.

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

Updated 12:00 p.m. Thursday with additional Trusted computing Group comment.

Early this decade, Microsoft weathered unrelenting criticism over a controversial set of technologies known as Palladium, which the company envisioned as creating a kind of secure vault to store passwords or medical records.

Academics warned it could "support remote censorship" and blacklists, likening Palladium to the Soviet Union's efforts to register typewriters and fax machines. Privacy activists predicted it would hand Microsoft "an unprecedented level of control" over the world, and free software doyen Richard Stallman solemnly dubbed it "treacherous computing."

It worked, kind of. Microsoft retreated by doing what any large bureaucracy tends to do in response to such a kerfuffle: it gave its problem a new name. Palladium became the awkwardly-titled Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, or NGSCB, (and the group Microsoft coalesced around the initiative changed its name from Trusted Computing Platform Alliance to Trusted Computing Group) and critics mostly moved on to worry about the recording industry and other threats to digital liberties instead.

Since then, the NGSCB--once derided as "nagscab"--has existed in an odd kind of technological purgatory. One report in 2004 said that Microsoft has "killed" NGSCB, which the company quickly denied later the same day. CNET News.com published a story in 2005 quoting Microsoft as saying NGSCB was "still coming."

After six years, the supposed world-striding colossus of a technology that once sparked so much fuss (one reviewer said it might become "either Santa or Satan") is much diminished. NGSCB never did live up to its early promise--or what critics would have said was its early threat as a digital rights management tool that would restrict how people consume content on their PCs and lock them into one vendor.

"It has changed from something that was very revolutionary and grandiose into something much more modest," said Andrew Jaquith, a senior analyst at Yankee Group.

And then came BitLocker
NGSCB does live on, manifesting itself in a Microsoft technology called BitLocker, a Microsoft spokesman confirmed.

BitLocker, Microsoft's only product to come from the Trusted Computing effort, is a feature in Windows Vista Enterprise, Vista Ultimate, and Windows Server 2008 that encrypts the disk drive to protect against data theft or exposure if the computer is lost or stolen. (Trusted Computing should not be confused with Trustworthy Computing, which is Microsoft's effort to improve the security of its own products and is largely considered to be successful.)

While it is useful, BitLocker hasn't taken the computing world by storm yet, or even been enough to justify upgrades to Vista, said Rob Helm of Directions on Microsoft.

"BitLocker hasn't been the rage anybody expected, although there is a strong case for using that feature on laptops," he said. In addition, plenty of third-party products--many offering whole disk encryption--exist.

Bruce Schneier, crypto researcher, author, and chief security technology officer of BT, was one of the more vocal critics when Microsoft first unveiled its Trusted Computing plans in 2002. In 2005, he was still beating the drum, writing that Microsoft was attempting to stall, and possibly get Vista exempted from a best practices document for the Trusted Computing Group that addressed many of the critics' concerns.

The Best Practices Principles (PDF), which was written in 2003 and eventually published in 2005, gives consumers some control over disabling the functionality, allows devices to support multiple users, adds privacy protections, and calls for interoperability and portability of data.

"We were concerned that users were able to opt in and not be controlled from above," said Susan Landau, a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems who worked on the Best Practices document after Sun joined the Trusted Computing Group. Sun was not a member of the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance.

"The public criticism certainly created pressure," especially when it conflicted with consumer privacy guidelines in Europe and elsewhere, she said.

"I think it's interesting that the (Trusted Computing Group) technology is continuing, but the big DRM push, so far, has not happened," Landau said.

Putting trust in a module
The centerpiece of the Trusted Computing Group is the Trusted Platform Module, a microcontroller that stores keys, passwords, and digital certificates in a secure, isolated area. They are widely distributed in computers from Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lenovo, Toshiba, and others, but most people don't even know they are there. BitLocker makes use of the Trusted Platform Module.

Microsoft has "convinced a lot of hardware manufacturers to put the chips in computers and they're in a lot of computers, but they're not doing anything," Schneier said. "The question is what are they going to do with the chips? How is Dell feeling these days?"

A Dell spokesman did not return a call seeking comment. Even Scott Rotondo, president of the Trusted Computing Group, acknowledges that the Trusted Platform Modules need more applications.

"A lot of them haven't been utilized fully and in some cases not at all," said Rotondo, who works as a senior staff engineer in Solaris Security Technologies at Sun. "The supporting infrastructure has been slow to materialize."

"It stands to reason that there might be frustration on the part of hardware manufacturers," Rotondo said, likening it to a "chicken and egg situation."

"We need to really make use of these things before the hardware manufacturers get tired and take them away," he added.

Trusted Platform Modules "have not yet fulfilled their potential, but Microsoft and other companies are working on it," the Microsoft representative said.

A Trusted Computing Group spokeswoman said on Wednesday that the organization is not focused on DRM and that applications that use the TPM include secure e-mail, multifactor authentication, password management, and single sign-on. The group is also working to extend the concepts of hardware-based security to storage, network security, and mobile devices, she said.

While initial concerns about misuse of the technologies slowed down the group's efforts, people see legitimate uses for the technology, and digital rights management could be among them, Rotondo said. However, any digital rights management systems would have to maintain a proper balance between the rights of the content owner and the rights of the consumer, he said.

Where Microsoft failed in doing that, Apple has succeeded, according to Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley-based technology forecaster.

"The biggest thing that has changed in the last five years is iTunes and the iPhone," he said. "The companies got their protection and the consumers got the right to purchase individual songs at a price that was less than the cost of the album."

Don't discount Microsoft just yet, warns Ross Anderson, a security engineering professor at the University of Cambridge's Computer Lab and an early critic of the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance.

Asked if the world has been spared a Microsoft digital rights management machine, Anderson responded in an e-mail: "Wrong--WMP (Windows Media Player) and the surrounding stuff that MS hopes will enable it to do to the HDTV market what Apple did for MP3s."

Saffo joked: "It's like a horror movie; they'll be back."

(CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.)

I've been using the tag line "information security is worse than you think" for several years. Every once in awhile, I meet with a security vendor who backs up my words with scary metrics. Last week in New York, Trend Micro filled this role.

According to Trend Micro's Chief Technology Officer Raimund Genes, the volume and potency of Web-based threats is now exceeding the industry's capacity to fight back. For example, Trend Micro says that it added approximately 50 new anti-malware patterns to its database each day in 2005. In 2008, the volume has grown 100 times, Trend Micro adds about 5,000 new patterns a day. As Phil Rizzuto used to say, "holy cow."

With traditional security software, vendors like Trend Micro develop new patterns or signatures and then upload them to customers running their software. The more patterns the vendors write, the more network bandwidth, storage, memory, and processor resources they use. Pretty soon your PC is using an inordinate amount of its horsepower for security.

Trend Micro believes this model is not sustainable and proposes an alternative. Its new service (aka Trend Micro Smart Protection Network) uses a lightweight client to communicate with Trend reputation services in the cloud. Reputation services proactively scan Web, e-mail, and file content, identify attack patterns, and then block this content in the network. The goal here is to use network connectivity and real-time communication to block bad stuff from happening in the cloud rather than relying on local pattern-matching databases and manual scans. The company says it believes it can provide better security with its new cloud-based model while freeing up resources on endpoints. A true win-win.

So will it work? Yup. Whether it's Trend Micro or its competitors, many security vendors are creating new hybrid models that enhance native endpoint security safeguards with additional network intelligence. The company may be the first vendor to walk down this road but it certainly won't be the last. All in all, this is a beneficial trend. Everyone wants strong security but when it takes 10 minutes to boot your PC each day, something is wrong with the current model.

Cloud computing is growing in popularity, thanks in large part to the availability of Web-based services that take some of the pain out of IT.

But when things break, it isn't always easy to know why: Is the problem in the application or in the cloud?

CloudStatus works with Amazon Web Services now. Hyperic plans to support additional cloud service providers later this year.

Hyperic, a San Francisco-based company specializing in Web management tools, has one answer. It's launching a new service, called CloudStatus, that reports on the health and performance of Amazon Web Services.

The free service, in beta testing now, works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service, and Flexible Payment Service.

The company says that CloudStatus will report on service availability, latency, and data throughput.

Hyperic says it plans to add the capability to monitor other cloud computing services later this summer.

Click here to see more stories on cloud computing.

It comes as no surprise that a healthy percentage of Apple consumers buy the products for the way they look. But for those of you less interested in the sleek white boxes and black rectangles, and more interested in the software, then perhaps the Psystar Open Computer is the way to go.

The Psystar computer (which looks like a pretty generic tower) comes installed with Apple's Mac OS X Leopard and functions exactly how you'd expect an Apple to function, but for hundreds of dollars less. In Monday's Daily Debrief, my first question for CNET News.com reporter Tom Krazit was how has Apple not caught on to the small, Florida-based company that's finding ways to get around the licensing agreements. And that's exactly why. They're small and they haven't sold enough machines to waken the sleeping giant. Not yet, at least!