IT

Intel and StorageCraft Collaborate on Backup & Recovery Appliance



Intel may have its Hybrid Cloud platform ready and willing, but it still doesn't possess all the technology needed to deploy an appealing backup and recovery service, so it has partnered with StorageCraft towards that end.

The two have set up the Backup & Recovery Appliance, which operates on the Intel Hybrid Cloud platform but is based on StorageCraft technological expertise.


 It can “clone” an organization's Windows-based computer systems, down to the operating system, applications, settings, and data.

Client companies will enjoy a higher level of productivity and convenience, since they won't have to worry about downtime or bothersome recovery procedures in case of “disasters.”

“Delivering a simple, cost-effective solution that protects customers from any type of disaster is an excellent profit building opportunity for MSPs,” said Curt James, vice president of marketing and business development at StorageCraft.

“The Backup & Recovery appliance, powered by StorageCraft and built on the Intel Hybrid Cloud platform, is a natural extension of the Intel Hybrid Cloud environment and an easy companion sale to go along with an Intel Hybrid Cloud server.”

The ShadowPortect technology makes an “image” of a client system and then, if customers so wish, can keep track of only incremental changes.

This reduces the overhead involved with full backups but still allows for system virtualization, system recovery, and even simple file and folder recovery.

“The value of a reliable backup system, featuring quick recovery options and high-speed full-system restores, is critical to small and medium size businesses,” said Bridget Karlin, general manager, Intel Hybrid Cloud.

“The ability for MSPs to provide their small business customers near enterprise-grade recovery times under a monthly subscription model at an entry-level price point is an important value that customers appreciate. It’s a perfect fit for small business owners who know the value of business continuity. We’re pleased to go to market with StorageCraft and to offer our reseller partners this compelling solution through our AppUp Small Business Service.”

Intel and StorageCraft will be available on a monthly subscription basis, or a 36-month contract for lower cost per user, starting in the second quarter of 2012. Pricing info will be withheld until then.


New Mobile From Samsung Samsung Champ Deluxe DUOS Touch Phone

Samsung announced the launch of its latest dual SIM phone in India. The Samsung Champ Deluxe Duos C3312 - is a feature phone and sports a 7.1-cm (2.8-inch) touchscreen display. It will also have Samsung's TouchWiz user interface running on top along with a 1.3 MP camera, MP3 player and FM radio. Users also get unlimited Free Music and unlimited Free Games, along with a number of apps that are available on the phone.

The feature phone also provides support for native apps for sites like Facebook and Twitter. Users also have the benefit of instant messaging on mobile with the help of Samsung's ChatOn Multi IM feature.

Priced at Rs 4,790 in India and Rs 8,200 in Pakistan, the handset sports a virtual QWERTY keypad, Hindi language input, native Facebook and Twitter apps, all messengers, including Yahoo!, MSN and GTalk, states a Tech2 report. It also offers support for Bluetooth 3.0, USB 2.0, has Push Mail with Activesync and Opera Mini Browser. The Samsung messenger service ChatOn supports multiple platforms, including Android, iPhone OS, Bada OS, BlackBerry OS, etc. It also supports group chats and multimedia transfers. The handset comes with a 2GB free data offer from Airtel.

Embattled Indian IT firms adopt NEW growth strategies

 

Are you willing to provide me with more value-added services so that we can work as partners, rather than deploy five employees who can churn out 10 lines of code at the cheapest rate?

This is the new language that clients of the Indian information technology companies are beginning to speak, leading them to change the way they conduct their businesses.

Indian IT bigwigs are at an interesting intersection. Cost arbitrage, which has been the model on which these behemoths built their businesses, is no longer the only trump card to success.

Granted, as an industry IT has played a key role in putting India on the global economic map; now the question uppermost on the industry leaders' minds is how to move away from linearity -- where growth is inextricably linked to the number of people or man-hours -- to a more non-linear model which thrives on improving productivity and institutionalising their innovation.

What is challenging the status quo? The biggest challenge is that as the wave of globalisation spreads, global consulting companies like IBM, HP and Accenture have been able to replicate the delivery model of their Indian counterparts, leading to the business becoming commoditised.

They have set up 'offshore' centres in India, encroaching into what was once the domain of the Indian IT companies.

 

Samsung Introduces Wave III Bada Phone

The latest sequel in the Wave series, the Wave III comes equipped with superb specs and the best Bada experience for the users on this new device. Reports suggest that Samsung's Bada operating software enjoys a 2.2 per cent market share worldwide, 0.7 per cent more than Microsoft's Windows Phone OS.

Samsung Bada OS is already available on Wave series devices, which include Samsung Wave and Wave II. The latest entrant to join the Bada bandwagon is Samsung's upcoming Wave III, but it is the first device to run the latest Bada 2.0 OS, reports TOI . The company is touting this device as their best Bada phone to date.
The Wave III sports an aluminium back cover with brushed metal and a unique uni-body design. The device comes equipped with 10.2 cm Super AMOLED display, a 5 megapixels camera, 1.4GHz processor to enjoy multiple applications.

The other key features of Samsung Wave III include new Bada 2.0 OS, TouchWiz UX, Wi-Fi direct, multitasking, Samsung app, Social hub and Music hub. The Wave III comes preloaded with Ch@ton app that opens a new era of communication for everyone, right from group chat to sharing content, pictures and music. The device packs 512 RAM, 4GB internal storage and a micro SD card slot for up to 32GB additional storage.

The Samsung Wave III is priced at Rs 19,600 in India.



HP, Dell, Acer to expand R&D investments
Seeing that the PC industry is going through a slowdown, PC players Hewlett-Packard (HP), Dell and Acer have all expanded their investments in R&D and as the PC industry will enter an atmosphere that is filled with multiple platforms in 2012, each vendor's R&D, branding and marketing abilities will become important drivers to increase their competitiveness in the future, according to sources from PC players.

HP is set to increase its investment in R&D and to strengthen the related resources. The company also changed its policy to have senior vice president of research, and director of HP Labs Prith Banerjee directly report to company CEO Meg Whitman.

Meanwhile, Dell is set to expand its R&D funding to US$1 billion each year, up 51.28% from US$661 million, that was reported a year ago. Dell also noted that the company will continue to acquire companies in the future and will need more funding to integrate the acquired firms.

Furthermore, Acer's first R&D center is also expected to increase its total engineers from 600 in the middle of the year to 1,000 by year-end with executives of brand vendors and ODMs all major targets for headhunting.

An Acer executive also pointed out that the PC industry is experiencing a significant change, transitioning from Wintel system dominated to competition between several different platforms. Therefore, to the ability to develop devices based on Google's Android system or ARM will become important.




HTC considering Chrome OS for Internet-access devices

Although Chromebooks offered by Acer and Samsung Electronics may see low cumulative sales of 25,000-30,000 units at the end of 2011, HTC is evaluating the feasibility of combining the advantages of Chrome OS and Android for use in Internet-access devices, products between tablet PCs and netbooks, according to component makers. However, Acer and HTC did not respond when asked for comment.

Although Google's Chrome OS has advantages over its ability to operate under both x86 and ARM and fast boot up times, since Windows-based netbooks and entry-level notebooks currently still outmatch Chrome OS-based devices in terms of price and specifications, notebook players are mostly taking a conservative attitude about the potential of Chrome OS.

Currently, Acer's 11.6-inch AC700 Chromebook, made by Quanta Computer, is priced at US$349 in the US with Samsung also having several models with prices starting US$429.

The sources pointed out that the price of Chromebooks will need to drop to around US$199 to be able to attract consumers, but such a strategy will strongly impact the devices' overall gross margins.

Top 10 Key Information Technology Trends For 2012

At the Gartner Symposium IT/Expo, David Cappuccio, managing vice president and chief of research for the Infrastructure teams with Gartner, said the Top 10 Trends show how IT is changing in that many of them in the past been outside the traditional purview of IT, but they will all affect how IT does its job in the future.

The Top 10 Trends and their impact, briefly include:

1 The evolution of virtualization: Cappuccio says virtualization will ultimately drive more companies to treat IT like a business. The danger during the next few years will be in following a specific vendor’s vision, though it is unlikely that any one vendor’s vision will prevail. Users should have their own visions of architecture control, and build toward it with a constantly updated strategic plan.

2 Big data, patterns and analytics: Unstructured data will grow some 80% over the course of the next five years, creating a huge IT challenge. Technologies such as in-line deduplication, automated tiering of data to get the most efficient usage patterns per kilowatt, and flash or solid-state drives for higher-end performance optimization, will increase in importance over the next few years, Cappuccio said. Analytics and other systems to monitor for recurring data patterns that could develop  into money making applications will also be important.

3. Energy efficiency and monitoring: The power issue has moved up the food corporate food chain, Cappuccio said.  Nascent tools are beginning to roll out that can use analytic tools to watch power usage on a variety of levels.  With the increased attention given to power consumption, it has become apparent that many systems are highly underutilized. At low utilization levels, they use a high percentage of their total energy draw. An average x86 server that is turned on, but idle, will draw upward of 65% of its nameplate wattage, for example.  IT organizations need a clear inventory of what compute resources are doing and what workloads there is the potential for significant waste of energy.

4. Context aware apps: The big question here how to do something smart to take advantage of smartphones.  Gartner has in the past said context-based computing will go beyond the business intelligence applications and truly make a unified communications environment possible by  bringing together data culled from social networks and mobile-devices.

5. Staff retention and retraining: Here the idea is developing a plan to get people excited about their jobs enough to stay.  And we’ll need is as starting in 2011 an average of 10,000 baby boomers will be eligible to retire every day for the next 19 years, Cappuccio said. Loyalty to one company is not a quality found in new workers.

6. Social networks:  Affordable and accessible technology has let individuals and  communities come together in a new way – with a collective voice – to make statements about our organizations, the products/services we deliver and how we deliver them, Cappuccio said. The collective is made up of individuals, groups, communities, mobs, markets and firms that shape the direction of society and business. The collective is not new, but technology has made it more powerful -and enabled change to happen more rapidly Cappuccio said. The collective is just beginning to have an impact on business operations and strategies but most organizations do not have a plan for enabling or embracing it.  Ignoring social networking is not an option, Cappuccio said.

7. Consumerization: The key trend here is the fact that new application types will be developed to address mobile users but they won’t be desktop replacement applications.  Still,  a secure, well-defined strategy needs to be put into place to take advantage of this development, Cappuccio said.

8. Compute per square foot:  Virtualization is one of the most critical components being used to increase densities and vertically scale data centers. If used wisely, average server performance can move from today’s paltry 7% to 12% average to 40% to 50%, yielding huge benefits in floor space and energy savings.  Two issues that need to be considered going forward are the number of cores per server — four- and eight-core systems are becoming common, and 16 cores will be common within two years –  and overall data center energy trends. IT will also have to address things like performance/licensing, Cappuccio said

 9. Cloud computing: While cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits of cloud computing are built-in elasticity and scalability. As certain IT functions industrialize and become less customized, such as email, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing, according to Cappuccio.

 10. Fabrics: Gartner defines this infrastructure convergence as: The vertical integration of server, storage, and network systems and components with element-level management software that lays the foundation to optimize shared data center resources efficiently and dynamically. Systems put forth so far by Cisco and HP will unify network control but are not there yet.


Another Feature From Google: Search Within Search
The most popular search engine Google added one more feature to its search, where you can search within a search. If you type in popular company/website key words, like ‘amazon’, ‘wikipedia’, ‘intel’, ‘microsoft’ on Google, it brings up the relevant result at the top and immediately underneath is a second search box. If you type a keyword in that secondary search box it will return results from within that site.


Facebook Adds Skype Video Chat Feature
Facebook has announced a partnership with Skype to add video chat to the social networking site.

The move is likely to be seen as a shot across the bow of Google, which recently launched a Facebook rival, Google+, also featuring video calling.

This is not the first time Facebook and Skype have teamed up – they already share some instant messaging tools.
 Skype is in the process of being bought by Microsoft, which is a major shareholder in Facebook.

The new video-call service was launched by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who also revealed that the site now had more than 750 million users.
 However, he said that the total number of active users was no longer a useful measure of the site’s success.

Instead, the amount of sharing – of photographs, videos and web links – was a better indication of how people engaged with the site, explained Mr Zuckerberg.

At launch, Facebook’s video chat service will only be able to connect two users face-to-face, whereas Google’s system allows group video calls, known as Hangouts.


Android Will Power Everything In Future!

Android is getting bigger and better. It is becoming increasingly powerful in all parts of the world, including India. Diogo Ferreira, a young hacker who turned up at Droidcon India, the first-ever international Android conference in the country believes that Android will power everything.

According to a report from The Hindu, Ferreira said that this open source mobile operating system will be ubiquitous, powering digital devices across the board. He said, “We'll see it power everything ... even cars, maybe.”

He cited an example of the CISCO gadget presentation at the event where he saw a smartphone with a tablet built into it (that's made on Android). This enables you to pick up the tablet from the phone and proceed for a meeting.

The sheer fact that Android is open source makes him believe that the platform has the potential to go places. He said, being open source, it can be adopted by anyone. "They just have to take the code and modify it in the direction of their choice.”

Ferreira, who is currently pursuing his Ph.D., is a known name in the Android world. He has developed apps and contributed significant code. He is a part of CyanogenMod, which maintains a community version of Android.

 It is a distribution of Android that you can install in the device after you buy it. It offers features like private browsing, or something as simple as FM Radio that a manufacturer may choose not to enable. He says that the beauty of CyanogenMod is its property of being customised. It allows the developers to build what they want and use it on their device. \

Commenting on the issue of Android dealing with 'hardware interface' and the perception that it is only for geeks, Ferreira said, it is unfair to make a comparison of low-end, slower-processing Android device with iPhone. If an iPhone is positioned against a high-end Android device, the latter one is the clear winner. The chinks with the user interface, he adds, are currently undergoing huge improvement by Google.

Having said that, the young hacker believes that Android is one platform that can bridge the gap between the high end and low end devices. He said, “Even if we consider the notion that performance is not to the optimum level, people who can't afford an iPhone should be able to be part of the ecosystem.”


IBM To Open Offices In 40 Cities By 2013
IBM announced yesterday that it is planning to set up offices in 40 cities across the country by 2013. The company also announced the opening of three regional offices in Dehradun, Guwahati and Raipur, which has taken up the total number of branch offices to 18 across India. The firm has a lot of clients in these three cities from banking, education, government, energy, manufacturing, industry and IT sectors.

A few clients of IBM in these cities are - Uttarakhand Power Corporation and Kurmanchal Bank in Dehradun, and Vandana Global and Jindal Steel in Raipur.

According to the company, it is presently focusing on increasing its presence in rapidly growing smaller cities, as part of its plan of setting up 40 offices by 2013. The company is also looking at strengthening its ability to deliver more advanced technologies and services to its clients by increasing its network of regional branches.

The company has not disclosed the number of employees that would work in these centres. In the past one year, the firm has started its offices in Ahmedabad, Indore and Coimbatore.

The company is also looking at partnerships with the educational institutes in order to support the growth of Open Source technologies. For this, the company has even partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Guwahati to foster innovation and promote local technology talent.


Nanotechnology Training Programs From NSTC 
Nano Science and Technology Consortium (NSTC), India has announced the Nanotechnology Training (Certification) Programs for different fields of Science & Technology. With the help of such training programs, NSTC is looking forward to sensitise students, professionals and industries with requisite knowledge of Nanotechnology. NSTC is offering several domain specific programs like:- Nanotechnology Sensitisation Program which is of 6 month duration and is the first of its kind in India. The program's focus is on providing entry level information for all those who are interested in the field of Nanoscience & Nanotechnology.

Another program offered by NSTC is Introductory Program in Nanotechnology of a 3 month duration. This program explains the basic perception and exploration of nanotechnology. The institute also adds applications of technology in various sectors to aware the implementations of Nanotechnology at various levels. This program is meant for those who want to explore science and are curious about the demand of Nanotechnology in daily life.

Another course for the duration of 9 months is Integrated Program in Nanotechnology which explains the integration of physics, biology and chemistry at the nanometer scale along with applications of technology and engineering to ensure know-how of practical implementations of Nanotechnology at various levels.

Industry Program in Nanotechnology is a 6 month program which is meant to enhance the knowledge base of participants who have a very basic knowledge of Nanotechnology. It equips the participant to be able to understand the practical and business aspects of various Nanotechnology techniques and materials from the point of view of the industry.

A 6 month program about Nanoelectronics & Its Industrial Applications is meant for the budding engineers and professionals.

Bionanotechnology & Its medical Applications, which is again a 6 month program, aims to give a participant a thorough grasp of new application of Nanotechnology. The participant becomes equipped to explore further and discover the power of the nano-level in offering relief to humankind from so-called incurable maladies. A lot of focus is also on the practical applications of the study material in the domain of Nano-scale Biotechnology.

Nanopharmaceuticals & Its Industrial Applications 6 month program offers the ability to detect diseases at much earlier stages and the diagnostic applications could build upon conventional procedures using nanoparticles. It also represents an emerging field where the sizes of the drug particle or a therapeutic delivery system work at the nanoscale.

The Nanotechnology Teachers' Training Program is held for 3 months as well as 6 months and explains the integration of physics; biology and chemistry at the nanometer scale, and tops this with applications of Nanotechnology and engineering to ensure know-how of practical implementations of Nanotechnology at various levels.