When Kickstarter Delivers: Thanks To Simple, Effective Design, Supr’s Slim Wallet Exceeds Expectations DARRELL ETHERINGTON

When Kickstarter Delivers: Thanks To Simple, Effective Design, Supr’s Slim Wallet Exceeds Expectations
DARRELL ETHERINGTON

I’ve backed an embarrassing amount of Kickstarter projects, almost all of them in the hardware/gadget categories, and I’ve been disappointed more than I’ve been delighted. The Slim wallet by Supr however bucks the trend, delivering a front-pocket wallet that finally and truly deserves the honor of actually being carried in that place.

Minneapolis-based Supr Good Co. initially launched the Slim in August, with a funding goal of just $10,000 and an estimated shipping date of September for their minimalist wallet design, which essentially is just an elastic sheath measuring only 3mm thick. The U.S.-made wallet still boasts classic good looks despite its simplicity, however, thanks to a striking contrast-stitched “X” front-and-center where the two ends of the elastic material used in its construction meet.

Because of the wallet’s simplicity, a reviewer like myself doesn’t need to mince words: this is pretty much a perfect slim wallet for those who want just the basics in a lightweight, convenient package. I carry just four cards and some bills, all of which tuck in to the Slim snugly in a way that leaves me confident nothing is going to accidentally fall out or go missing. It manages to be slimmer than the Fossil front pocket wallet it replaces, and a lot lighter, too. I’ve also varied the number of cards I’ve had in there over the past week, and so far, the elastic shows no sign of excess stretch or an inability to return to holding fewer cards securely.

Supr missed their original shipping target by a fair margin, but they were very transparent about their reasons for doing so, and they did also eventually deliver a terrific product. The online shop hasn’t officially opened yet, but you can register your interest for the Slim when it does start to ship to the general public. Kickstarter may not have the security of ordering gadgets from established companies, but when it works, it results in some amazing stuff that you aren’t likely to be able to pick up elsewhere.

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How To Hack Gmail Account Password

How To Hack Gmail Account Password

Learn how to hack Gmail account password using Phishing

Previously i have posted How to Hack Facebook Password. In this article i'm going to show you how to hack a gmail account password using the same method - phishing. Now i'm shure you know what is phishing and why it's used for, but if you don't check Wikipedia to read more about it.


How to hack gmail account password:

1. First of all download Gmail Phisher

2. The downloaded file contains:
gmail.html
log.txt
mail.php
3. Upload all of the files to any free webhost site like:
www.yourfreehosting.net
www.esmartstart.com
www.110mb.com
www.ripway.com
www.t35.com
4. Once you have uploaded the files in the directory, send this phisher link (gmail.html) to your victim and make him login to his Gmail account using your sent Phisher.

5. Once he logs in to his Gmail account using Phisher, all his typed Gmail id and password is stored in "log.txt".


6. Now, open log.txt to get hacked Gmail id and password as shown.


That's it, very simple. Now you have your victim's Gmail id and password hacked.


How it works ?

When a user types a Username Password in the the text box,The info is sent to "login.php" which acts as a password logger and redirects the page to "LoginFrame2.htm" which shows "There has been a temporary error Please Try Again" in it . So when the person clicks on try again it redirects to the actual URL so that the victim does not know that yoursite is a fake site and gets his gmail.com password hacked.

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Burn a CD/DVD on Windows 7 or Vista without using software

Burn a CD/DVD on Windows 7 or Vista without using software

Burn a CD/DVD on Windows 7 or Vista without using software

CD/DVD burning capability has been added to Windows Operating System since the release of Windows XP. However, the steps to burn CD/DVD on Windows Vista and Windows 7 are a bit different (and somewhat simpler) comparing to Windows XP.
For details on how to burn CD/DVD on Windows XP, click here
You can use this built-in feature to create a data CD/DVD or an audio CD. The steps below will guide you through the procedures. Although the steps below are based on Windows 7, they are very much similar to Windows Vista.

If you're using a Re-Writable CD (CD-RW) or DVD (DVD-RW, DVD+RW), make sure the disc is blank (or "formatted"). You might need to erase (or "format") it before using. For information how to erase a rewritable CD/DVD on Windows Vista or Windows 7 without using a third-party software, see this article.

Insert a blank recordable/rewritable CD (CD-R) or DVD (DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW) disc into the CD burner drive.
With a new blank disc, Windows might pop up a prompt asking you which format you want to use (as shown on the image below).
As explained on the popup, the option "Like a USB Flash Drive" is more convenient if you want to use the disc as an external storage, which you can add or delete (rewritable disc) files on the fly; however, once the disc is formatted with this option, it can only be read on computers with Windows XP or later. On the other hand, the option "With a CD/DVD Player" is the traditional format of CD/DVD disc and is compatible with a wider range of Windows versions as well as other devices, but requires to burn the disc (or erase the entire disc) all at once.



To keep it simple, we will follow the steps to create traditional CD/DVD, so select "With a CD/DVD Player". Don't forget to change the "Disc title" to something descriptive for your disc, then click "Next".

Navigate to the folders or files which you want to burn to the disc, then select (highlight) the folders/files and click "Burn" (located above the file browsing panels)




A new window is now created similar to the following image, showing the selected files and folders added to the queue to burn to disc. Click "Burn to disc".



On the next popup "Burn to Disc", verify the disc title and select the maximum burning speed, then click "Next".



If you have selected audio files (i.e. MP3), you will be asked to burn the disc as data or audio as shown in the following image. For details on the differences between data and audio discs, please prefer to this article.



The burning wizard will start writing data to the disc and will close and eject the CD/DVD when finish.

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Basic PC Shortcut Keys

Basic PC Shortcut Keys

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Basic Shortcut Keys

The followings are some basic PC shortcut keys that are supported in most IBM compatible computers. They are also supported in most application software.

Use at your own risk.

Shortcut Keys Supported Window Versions Description
Alt + e 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Pull down the top Edit menu.
Alt + f 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Pull down the top File menu
Ctrl + a 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Select all text.
Ctrl + c 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Copy selected item(s) (to clipboard).
Ctrl + f 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Find.
Ctrl + v 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Paste copied item(s) from clipboard
Ctrl + x 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Cut.
Ctrl + Ins 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Same as Ctrl + c
Ctrl + (left arrow) 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Move one word to the left at a time.
Ctrl + (right arrow) 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Move one word to the right at a time.
Shift + Ins 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Same as Ctrl + v
Shift + Delelte (or Del) 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Cut. Or permanently delete selected item(s) on Windows Explorer.
F1 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Help.
Home 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Jump to the beginning of the line or page.
Ctrl + Home 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Jump to the beginning of the document or page.
End 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Jump to the end of the line or page.
Ctrl + End 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista ump to the end of the document or page.
Shift + Home 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Set selection (highlight) from current position to beginning of the line or page.
Shift + End 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Set selection (highlight) from current position to end of the line or page.
Shift + (left arrow) 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Set selection (highlight) from current position to the left, one character at a time.
Shift + (right arrow) 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Set selection (highlight) from current position to the right, one character at a time.
Shift + (down arrow) 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Set selection (highlight) from current position to the next line down.
Shift + (up arrow) 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista Set selection (highlight) from current position to the next line up.

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New memory technologies generate attention as successors to NAND flash

New memory technologies generate attention as successors to NAND flash

Although NAND flash might thrive in enterprise solid-state storage through the end of the decade, potential successors are already starting to generate attention. These include phase-change memory (PCM), magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) and resistive RAM (RRAM).

The past couple of years have brought breakthroughs in these new memory technologies that could lead to boosts in performance and endurance far beyond the current state of the art.

IBM Research, for instance, turned heads over the summer with its announcement that thermal-based PCM might one day enable systems to retrieve data 100 times faster than NAND flash and to endure at least 10 million write cycles, an exponential improvement over the 30,000 write cycles of enterprise multi-level cell (eMLC) flash.

Until an alternative technology meets or beats NAND on cost, it’s unlikely to become a serious contender in enterprise storage, no matter how great its technological advantage.
IBM’s Zurich-based research lab claimed to achieve the reliable storage of multiple bits per cell after monitoring the resistance of the PCM material for six months to confirm the cell’s stability. Haris Pozidis, manager of memory and probe technologies at IBM Research in Zurich, said multi-level cell (MLC) PCM could make its way into enterprise servers and storage by 2016. He said the technology could benefit applications such as “big data” analytics and cloud computing.

That prediction comes with a caveat. Pozidis said the enterprise timeline hinges on mobile phone and memory manufacturers taking up MLC-PCM as a NOR flash replacement in the next couple of years.

Because IBM doesn’t make memory devices or solid-state drives (SSDs), the company relies on external manufacturers to license and produce its MLC-PCM. Pozidis said IBM expects that to happen, but he conceded that it’s no “sure thing.”

PCM and "racetrack memory"

PCM is only one of the memory technologies IBM has been promoting. The company’s Almaden, Calif.-based research center has been touting a magnetic technology called “racetrack memory,” which works by sliding magnetic bits back and forth along nanowire “racetracks.”

In an IBM-authored “Icon of Progress” story on its website, the company claimed that racetrack memory, with a three-dimensional microchip, has “the potential to replace nearly all forms of conventional data storage.” The technology could enable mobile phones, laptop computers and business-class servers to store more information by a factor of 100 times and provide access at far higher speeds, according to IBM.

Stuart Parkin, a fellow and manager of the Magnetoelectronics Group at IBM Research in Almaden, said the technology offers additional advantages over flash, including no wear-out or write limitations, and has the potential to beat NAND on cost. He predicted the nascent technology could emerge in products in the next five to seven years, potentially placing it on a similar timeline with PCM.

IBM's Pozidis, however, said PCM is “the nearer-term memory technology” and “much more advanced” than IBM racetrack memory.

While IBM licenses more than a billion dollars a year of its intellectual property, and the company’s work on new memory technologies shows promise, its PCM and racetrack efforts illustrate the uncertainty over which memory technology ultimately might usurp NAND flash.

“I don’t really take what IBM says too seriously,” said Greg Wong, founder and principal analyst at Forward Insights in North York, Ontario. “If their business was based on making that memory and making it work and commercializing it, that’s a different story. They don’t really have skin in the game.”

PCMS, STT-MRAM and RRAM

Major semiconductor manufacturers that do have "skin in the game" are exploring multiple technologies, including PCM, MRAM and RRAM. But until an alternative technology meets or beats NAND on cost, it’s unlikely to become a serious contender in enterprise storage, no matter how great its technological advantage.

“The next closest thing is probably still five times more expensive,” said Kevin Kilbuck, director of marketing in the NAND solutions group at Micron Technology Inc., commenting on the company’s studies of the alternatives.

In the meantime, Micron works in many areas, including PCM (through its 2010 acquisition of Numonyx B.V.) and Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetoresistive RAM (STT-MRAM). Kilbuck said some technologies may wind up complementary to NAND flash.

“They still might have merit on their own,” Kilbuck said. “It’s too early to say there's a single successor.”

Troy Winslow, the director of product marketing in Intel Corp.’s Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group, said via email that Intel thinks a stacked PCM variant known as phase change memory and switch (PCMS), for its PCM element layered with an Ovonic Threshold Switch, has greater potential than MRAM in enterprise systems.

Intel and Numonyx announced in 2009 that they had demonstrated that a 64 Mb test chip could stack multiple layers of PCM arrays within a single die and pave the way for memory devices of greater capacity, performance and scalability, as well as lower power consumption.

But, Winslow added, “NAND still has a long life in enterprise solutions. Even when a new technology emerges in the next few years, the transition will take place over several years.”

In July 2011, Hynix Semiconductor Inc. and Toshiba Corp. issued a joint press release about their agreement to collaborate on STT-MRAM, a technology they said would be a good fit for smart phones, with its advantages of high speed, high capacity and low power consumption. Toshiba declined further comment, but others claim STT-MRAM eventually might find a home in enterprise systems, too.

A month later, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. announced its acquisition of Grandis Inc., noted for its work with STT-MRAM. Samsung will merge Grandis into its R&D operations, but STT-MRAM represents only one of many NAND alternatives in which the company is investing.

“Samsung, the world’s largest NAND shipper, is not going to let NAND die without trying everything in the book,” said Ray Lucchesi, president and founder of Silverton Consulting Inc. in Broomfield, Colo. “There’s a lot of money and a lot of companies behind NAND. It’s not going to go away any time soon.”

Forward Insights' Wong doesn’t foresee MRAM or even the stackable variant of PCM as being able to compete with NAND on price in the long run. He said manufacturers are currently looking at PCM and MRAM to supplement or replace parts of DRAM, serving essentially as a type of non-volatile RAM that can retain data even when the power is off, unlike DRAM. He said the technologies could be most useful with random write-intensive workloads that have high I/O requirements, such as databases and financial applications.

But, rather than PCM or MRAM, RRAM might hold the greatest potential to replace NAND, according to Wong. He said that all the big memory companies are working on RRAM, which operates by changing the resistance between two electrical terminals. Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. also has a version that it calls memristor.

“RRAM theoretically is a scalable technology,” Wong said, “but what you need for any technology to replace NAND is it has to be stackable. That’s a fundamental challenge.”

NAND Flash successors affected by tech's extended lifespan

In the meantime, predicting which promising up-and-coming technology will succeed NAND flash has become especially difficult because NAND flash is enjoying a far longer lifespan than anyone expected when the technology first emerged.

“These absolute geniuses in the R&D labs keep coming up with ways to push it just one or two more process steps, and they’ve been doing that for almost 10 years,” said Jim Handy, founder and chief analyst at Object Analysis in Los Gatos, Calif. “Who’s to say they’re not going to do it for another 10 years?”

Handy recalls a 2003 Intel Developer Forum presentation, when an executive asserted that NAND flash wouldn't scale beyond a 60 nanometer (nm) process geometry. Partners Intel and Micron subsequently scaled the technology from 50 nm to 34 nm and 25 nm, and now to 20 nm. Handy expects flash will ultimately shrink to 10 nm and run out of steam at about 8 nm.

With the scaling comes a significant drop in cost. Packing more into the flash cells, with two-bit-per-cell MLC or the emerging consumer-centric triple-level cell (TLC) flash also lowers the price. But the innovation carries the unfortunate consequence of worsening endurance, performance and reliability.

So far, manufacturers have been able to make the two-bit MLC NAND flash usable in enterprise data storage with resourceful fixes such as sophisticated controller technology, error correction code (ECC) and wear leveling. However, they may be running out of tricks with the existing floating-gate technology.

One promising development to extend the life of flash is 3D NAND, which stacks the memory cells in three dimensions. Micron Technology’s Kilbuck likened it to a multistory office building vs. planar NAND flash’s single-story building spread out over a flat, wide campus.

“There’s still a lot of debate in the industry on when the current planar NAND cell is going to reach its scaling limits,” Kilbuck said. “I’ve heard people say it could be the high teens. I’ve heard other people say NAND is going to scale down into the single digits before we have to go to something like 3D NAND.”

Kilbuck said the industry won’t know until it starts manufacturing 3D NAND at high volume what sort of challenges lie ahead and how long the 3D technology might be able to extend NAND’s lifespan.

“The end of flash scaling is what everybody’s worried about and why they’re placing bets on other technologies,” Object Analysis' Handy said. But he thinks it’s too early to tell whether PCM, MRAM, RRAM or some other technology will win. “If it takes another 10 years before NAND flash can’t be shrunk any more, then that’s 10 more years for some dark horse to come out of a corner somewhere and become the leading candidate.”

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World’s oldest digital computer brought back to life

World’s oldest digital computer brought back to life

The Harwell Dekatron, a pioneering computer built from 1949to 1951, has been fired up after 20 years in storage and a three-year restoration project.

The world's oldest original working digital computer will now go on display at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.


The Harwell Dekatron was first used at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Oxfordshire and later in computer lessons at Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College.

It was built to help scientists by performing calculations previously done using adding machines.

The official unveiling on 20 November is to be attended by some of its creators as well as staff that used it and students who learned computer programming on it, according to the BBC.

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Although reliable, the machine took up to 10 seconds to multiply two numbers. It was superseded by smaller computers in 1957.

The Harwell Dekatron then went to the Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College. In 1973 it was donated to Birmingham's Museum of Science and Industry.

After being on show for 24 years, the machine was dismantled and put into storage when the museum closed in 1997.

There it remained until spotted by chance by Kevin Murrell, a trustee of The National Museum of Computing, in a photograph taken by a computer conservationist.

He located the Harwell Dekatron and collect its component parts which were taken to the museum at Bletchley where the restoration took place.

The restoration team was led by conservationist Delwyn Holroyd, who said they had replaced as little as possible so most of the parts on the machine are original.

“The restoration was quite a challenge, requiring work with components like valves, relays and paper tape readers that are rarely seen these days,” he said.

Murrell said: "It's important for us to have a machine like this back in working order as it gives us an understanding of the state of technology in the late 1940s in Britain."

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CIO interview: Tom Baker, head of ICT, Sunderland City Council

CIO interview: Tom Baker, head of ICT, Sunderland City Council

Tom Baker, head of ICT at Sunderland City Council, has an office in the council’s datacentre.

It is not a bad place to have an office because the datacentre has been somewhat rejuvenated, thanks in part to modern IT that takes up far less space than the old mainframes that used to be housed there.


The modernisation has made Sunderland City Council's datacentre something of a profit centre, and strategic to the council's goals of digital equality and community ICT.

With a background in commercial IT, having previously worked at infrastructure and business services group Mouchel, Baker now runs a city council datacentre that provides hosting for third parties, virtual desktops for the council, and a suite of cloud services for community ICT.

The council has spent the past two years building its cloud computing infrastructure with IBM. “It is very rare to find a local authority building its own cloud computing platform, but the council is very mindful of some of the challenges it faces given the financial backdrop,” he says.

The city has a long heritage of creating and fostering social and cooperative enterprise, and Baker says Sunderland City Council is looking to take this forward, not only by continuing to support these initiatives, but also by enabling organisations to get more ingrained in public service delivery.

SUNDERLAND SOFTWARE CENTRE
The £10m Sunderland Software Centre is the city’s fourth technology incubator – a partnership between the council, Sunderland University and Sunderland Business Innovation Centre. It has 62 business units, and has the potential to employ 600 people.

Tom Baker, head of ICT at Sunderland City Council, is one of two people who represent the council in the partnership. He says the city has housed a number of innovative IT start-ups, including a tools testing tools firm, The Leighton Group, a company that has won a £8m software deal with Trinity Mirror, defence contractors, as well as a company that makes software for designing car gearboxes.

“There’s a whole raft of [technology] companies that can sell into other markets we have in the city. It’s about creating an environment where people can sell to each other,” says Baker.

“We will use the cloud computing platform to provide low-cost, scalable, pay-per-use computing facilities to organisations we might be doing business with,” he says.

The tools IT has provided can give the council the confidence that the organisations using the Sunderland City Cloud are operating in a safe and secure manner when dealing with public data, he adds.

IT modernisation that pays for itself
The datacentre used to house the council’s mainframes, but IT modernisation has seen the space required by the council’s IT shrink, allowing Sunderland City Council to run its own cloud infrastructure, as well as act as a hosting provider.

“It has become very much like a business," says Baker. "We are making a decent return on this building. We can effectively sell the space. It becomes an asset of the city.”

In a tour of the datacentre, he points to a server and says: “We are getting rid of that AS/400, replacing it with some modern servers, and that will create some more space.” The AS/400 is running legacy council applications, which are being migrated onto a Microsoft Dynamics platform.

Sunderland City Council’s datacentre hosts school systems for Sunderland and the North East, racks for other councils, a node for the NHS Local Involvement Networks (LINks), a rack for a Primary Healthcare Trust, as well as servers for Fire and Rescue.

“All of the gas infrastructure for the North East is run out of this datacentre, as well as a Vodafone point of presence, and we host racks for Virgin Media,” says Baker.

The council is providing tools that enable organisations within the community to get involved in public services. These organisations may not have access to the systems and budgets needed to provide such services. The Sunderland City Council cloud is critical to support this without them having to understand how to work with the Information Commissioner or protect personal data, he says.

“The council has found itself delivering a cloud-based service to provide something which is open, flexible and scalable, that other people can tap into through our identity management solution, so they can deliver public services in the same way as the council and are able to access our data securely.”

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Datacentre infrastructure
The private cloud in Sunderland City Council’s datacentre uses a 10Gbps network backbone, IBM XIV storage and IBM x3850 quad-processor servers, which are fully virtualised using VMware to run the council’s applications. The servers also run Citrix XenDesktop Platinum, NetScaler MPX and XenServer, to provide virtual desktops within the council. The cloud platform uses a Cisco network.

“The beauty of the configuration is that it is high performance. Things are much quicker. Users access file stores two racks down,” he says.

Data is replicated to another IBM XIV storage box 10 miles away.

The servers are monitored and managed using Tivoli. The council uses Tivoli Service Automation Manager to control cloud provisioning. "We have a portal where I can provision a server within three minutes from my desk,” says Baker.

Working with Citrix partner Cetus, Sunderland’s virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been configured to provide third-party Active Directory support, which Baker says will enable the council to provide virtual desktops to third parties.

“Citrix has been very good in terms of licensing models, so we can essentially leverage our spending power for the benefit of the city,” he says.

In his office, Baker uses a Wyse terminal to connect to the datacentre and access his Windows desktop.

Commenting on the virtues of desktop virtualisation, he says: “I can migrate the workload from my desktop terminal to my Blackberry and vice-versa. It provides a huge amount of flexibility and the terminal uses far less power on the desktop. If it fails, I can use another device to access my corporate applications.”

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Whiptail promises four million IOPS all-flash array performance

Whiptail promises four million IOPS all-flash array performance

All-flash array maker Whiptail has announced an upgrade to its Racerunner operating system that will allow its Invicta NAND flash arrays to scale to 30 nodes and up to 360TB of storage.

The all-flash array company claims that scaling to such capacities could bring up to four million IOPS (input/output operations per second) and throughput of around 40GB per second.


Currently such levels of performance represent an extreme that is only required by a handful of organisations worldwide. But Whiptail is aiming its new capabilities at organisations that want to move all their high-performance storage requirements onto a single array.

Max Riggsbee, head of products and marketing at Whiptail, said the platform is designed for multi-tenant storage requirements.

“Where you might see organisations buy a different array for different needs – say Oracle on one, VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] on another, batch processing on another, none of which needs one million IOPS – we suggest they could consolidate onto one array with a smaller footprint and not worry about performance.”

The Invicta Silicon Storage Array is a NAND MLC flash-based all-flash unified storage (file access plus Fibre Channel and iSCSI) array product.

It comprises Whiptail Silicon Storage Routers that provide some processing power, connections to networks and other storage nodes, and some features such as RAID management, replication and snapshots. Meanwhile, Silicon Storage Nodes comprise capacity and storage controller with functions such as RAID and snapshotting on board.

Previously, Invicta scaled to six nodes. The announcement marks an upgrade to Racerunner version 4.2 that will see it scale to 30 nodes. Routers and nodes can be mixed and matched to scale capacity or performance.

All-flash arrays have risen in prominence over the past year or two to meet a need for very fast processing, in use cases such as financial transactions and for virtual desktop environments.

Initially, start-ups such as Whiptail and Violin Memory blazed the trail, but more recently the big storage suppliers have taken notice and made acquisitions, such as EMC’s purchase of XtremIO, IBM’s buy-out of Texas Memory Systems and Hitachi Data Systems’ addition of an all-flash module to its VSP enterprise arrays.

Riggsbee gave examples of organisations Whiptail is aiming the product at. They include financial services for batch processing, transaction processing, market data and analytics; customers that want to boost website response times; file conversion in the media industry; and CAD drawing processing in construction.

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Charityshare gets Violin flash array for 2,000 seat VDI rollout

Charityshare gets Violin flash array for 2,000 seat VDI rollout

IT consortium Charityshare has deployed a Violin Memory 3000 Series all-flash array to support the roll-out of up to 2,000 virtual desktops for its Age UK operations.

Violin was chosen on grounds of cost and the company’s backing from HP over Whiptail and Texas Memory Systems (TMS). An all-flash array approach was chosen over mixed flash and spinning disk because of concerns that automated storage tiering features in the IBM V7000 array would not provide the availability required for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) operations.


Charityshare provides enterprise level IT to three charities, Age UK, The Alzheimer’s Society, and The Children’s Society from two datacentres, in west London and the Docklands.

Its existing storage infrastructure comprised HP EVA and Hitachi Data Systems AMS 2300 SANs but this was deemed unsuitable for use with the Age UK virtual desktop roll-out due to issues of contention for I/O suffered by the other charities on the HP SAN.

Greg Cooke, engineering manager with Charityshare said, “We had been running VDI – Windows XP on XenDesktop on VMware – for two or three years for The Alzheimer’s Society, and The Children’s Society from the EVA SAN. But, we had Exchange and SQL on the same SAN, and there would be issues with, for example, SQL taking all the I/O, so we decided we needed dedicated storage for VDI.”

Cooke’s team calculated it needed between 10 and 80 IOPS (Input/output operations per second) per user and averaged that to 35 IOPS per user, with a 5GB Microsoft Windows 7 virtual desktop. Initial deployment was to 800 users with capacity to expand to 2,000 when the other charities move to the same VDI infrastructure, which would require 70,000 IOPS.

After evaluating options including mixing flash and hard drives in a SAN and other all-flash array products, Charityshare went for a Violin Memory 3000 Series array with 12TB of MLC flash Violin Intelligent Memory Modules (VIMMs).

VIMMs are Violin’s proprietary storage media, sourced via agreement with Toshiba and built onto cards with Violin software on board to provide data protection and other functions. They are hot swappable, with data failing over to spares on VIMM failure.

The 3000 Series is sold as direct-attached storage that connect to a physical server via PCIe in contrast to Violin’s 6000 Series which are marketed as SAN arrays that provide shared storage via a fabric.

Other flash suppliers evaluated following recommendations from Gartner were Texas Memory Systems (now owned by IBM) and Whiptail. TMS was ruled out as too costly. Violin was chosen over Whiptail because of its backing from HP. This was seen as important by the Charityshare IT team because all-flash arrays are a new technology and the organisation wanted guarantees from a big storage supplier.

Other options examined included IBM’s V7000 enterprise SAN with a flash tier.

Cooke said this was ruled out after the organisation heard of the "Monday morning problem", where the automated tiering algorithm moves data off flash to lower tier disk over the weekend because it isn’t being used very much.

“Sure, it would reconfigure it to move that data back to flash but VDI needs its data from fast storage straight away,” he said.

All-flash arrays have risen to prominence in the last year or two, initially from startups such as Violin, Whiptail, Pure Storage and Kaminario, and have more recently gained big supplier backing with EMC’s acquisition of XtremIO and IBM’s purchase of Texas Memory Systems.

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Nutanix supports Red Hat KVM in upgraded storage stack hardware and OS

Nutanix supports Red Hat KVM in upgraded storage stack hardware and OS

Converged storage and server maker Nutanix has announced upgraded hardware and a new operating system (OS) version with support for Red Hat's KVM hypervisor in addition to existing VMware support.

Nutanix debuted in 2011 with its NX-2000 Complete Cluster storage stack aimed at server and desktop virtualisation use cases. This comprised 2U blocks with Intel Westmere processors, plus PCIe and SATA flash drives and hard disk drives (HDD) with the VMware hypervisor built in. Marketed as a "datacentre in a box", the product could be scaled by adding compute and storage capacity.


Nutanix has now added the NX-3000 hardware format, which sees processing power boosted with an upgrade to 8-core Intel Sandy Bridge chips, increased memory and two instead of one 10 Gbps Ethernet ports per node.

The OS upgrade to version 3.0 includes replication to other Nutanix instances and disaster recovery policy configuration that includes the ability to specify data protection domains with combinations of primary and secondary sites.

There is also high-availability failover and failback functionality, support for another hypervisor – Red Hat’s KVM – and compression of blocks of data according to usage patterns.

Red Hat KVM is a hosted hypervisor, which means it is more efficient than the likes of VMware and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. KVM has a tiny share of the virtualisation market at present, but is reportedly used by some big cloud users, including Google, IBM and Rackspace. Nutanix cites Hadoop as a use case for its KVM variant arrays.

The latest Nutanix OS also has auto-detection of new Nutanix nodes, which means they can be added without downtime and the OS will auto-balance data across the newly expanded pool.

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Top 10 server virtualisation stories of 2012

Top 10 server virtualisation stories of 2012

The benefits of server virtualisation are indeed quite impressive for today's server and datacentre administrators, but what about you – the storage manager? While everyone else is reaping the rewards of their newly virtualised servers, you are realising that your job just became a lot more complex and time-consuming.

We feel your pain. For that reason, Computer Weekly has compiled a top 10 list of tips and guides to server virtualisation to help you address the variety of storage-related challenges you may face in your virtual server environment.


Best practices for using server virtualisation in your storage environment
Server virtualisation can lower costs and increase capacity, but there are a number of best practices to consider when using or thinking about server virtualisation. Check out this tip to learn four key things to keep in mind when using server virtualisation in your storage environment.

Virtual server and virtual machine backup: Hot data backup storage technologies

Virtual machine (VM) backup is still in its adolescence, but maturing fast, with significant developments that should offer some relief to beleaguered backup administrators. Explore this report to learn more about the basics of VM backup.

iSCSI versus Fibre Channel in virtual server environments
Deciding which SAN technology to use for your virtual server environment requires careful consideration. Find out for yourself by learning the pros and cons of iSCSI versus Fibre Channel in virtual server environments.

Everything you need to know about vSphere and data storage
System administrators are still gushing over the benefits of VMware's virtualised servers, but for storage professionals, the shift in server architecture has caused new headaches. Find out how VMware vSphere aims to address many of these storage-related shortcomings.

Storage virtualisation benefits: Increasing flexibility and utilisation with virtualisation
Our e-guide will help storage professionals understand storage virtualisation benefits and get started with their own storage virtualisation project by providing purchasing tips, file virtualisation best practices and more.

I/O virtualisation: Approaches and implementations
Learn which companies have offerings in the I/O virtualisation space, how they approach the network infrastructure bottleneck problem, what the pros and cons of each product are, and the differences between I/O virtualisation and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

Including server virtualisation in your disaster recovery plan
This tip discusses best practices for including server virtualisation in your disaster recovery (DR) plan based on the hypervisor in use, the IT infrastructure in place, and the required recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).

How to buy a blade server
Blade servers can make your datacentre more efficient, but a blade project can be costly. In this expert tip, we tell you what questions you should ask before committing to a blade server supplier.

Storage virtualisation essentials: Cut costs and increase storage efficiency
Storage virtualisation can cut equipment costs and increase storage efficiency. Explore this guide to discover the pros and cons of storage virtualisation architectures and learn about storage virtualisation products and how storage virtualisation fits into disaster recovery plans.

Guidelines for implementing virtualisation in your storage infrastructure
Virtualisation has shown up in all layers of the storage infrastructure and storage managers need to balance the benefits of virtualisation against the complexity it brings. Here are some guidelines for implementing virtualisation in your storage infrastructure.

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