Sun Microsystems hopes to take on the likes of Microsoft and Amazon in offering businesses cloud-based infrastructures from which to deploy web services.
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Details on its new Sun Cloud initiative are hazy but Sun sees it as a more open alternative to rival offerings and plans to release the application programming interfaces – the specifications for connecting to the cloud – as open source documents. Sun is rumoured to be possible target for IBM which has partnered with rival Amazon’s EC2 cloud initiative.
IE8 – coming soon to a screen near you
Brace your firewalls as Microsoft has finally released Internet Explorer 8, which will be automatically deployed to PCs via Windows Update in coming weeks. Speed is the big selling point of IE8 and Microsoft claims it cuts page loading times by up to 50 per cent over rivals. Other features include right-click access to services such as Live Search and web slices, which keeps track of updates made to frequently visited pages.
EMC’s bigger solid-state drives
Storage Giant EMC has brought out two larger-capacity versions of its new line of Enterprise Flash solid-state drives. Aimed at high-performance enterprise applications, the 200GB and 400GB drives are still more expensive than traditional magnetic drives so EMC is stressing the better performance and, above all, big energy savings made possible by using solid-state disks.
HP’s entry level NonStop computer
Hewlett-Packard has added an entry-level model, the Integrity NS2000, to its NonStop line of fault-tolerant computers. With the NS2000, HP wants to broaden the market for the NonStop beyond stock exchanges and big banks to small and mid-sized organisations that need highly reliable hardware but previously balked at the price. The NS2000 costs from $100,000, which is cheap compared to traditional NonStop systems.
Defence against Flash attacks
HP has released a free tool to help prevent viruses and attacks being mounted via the Flash multimedia browser plug-in. The growing popularity of Flash on corporate and consumer websites makes it a favourite target for malicious code writers. The HP SWFScan tool allows website developers to write more secure code without becoming security experts.
Oracles updates Mantas platform
Oracle Financial Services Software has unveiled a new release of its Oracle Mantas software to tackle financial fraud. Dubbed a ”behaviour detection platform”, Mantas is designed to help financial institutions spot cross-channel fraud by monitoring suspicious activities across different channels and lines of business. Before being acquired by the US software giant, Oracle Financial Services Software was known as Indian software company I-flex Solutions.
Windows takes the apps’ revenue sharing route
If you cannot beat them, join them. Microsoft has followed Apple’s revenue-sharing business model in a bid to boost the popularity of Windows with mobile software companies. Apple’s online App Store offers more than 10,000 third-party applications for the iPhone and Microsoft hopes its Windows Marketplace for Mobile will achieve similar popularity with developers, who get to keep 70 per cent of the revenues that their Windows applications generate.
Citrix makes virtualisation easier
Citrix has enhanced its XenApp virtualisation product to make it easier to manage large virtualised environments. With the latest improvements to XenApp5, IT departments manage a single standardised XenApp server ”image” which can then be rapidly deployed to hundreds of virtualised servers across a big data centre. User profiles are also easier to manage, which is particularly important when users access the system from different devices.
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BY Geoff Nairn
Source：The Financial Times
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2009. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of The Financial Times Ltd.
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