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Under the rubric Project Quicksilver, IBM coupled solid-state drives with its storage virtualization technology to achieve a sustained data transfer rate of more than 1 million input/output per second (IOPS), with a response time of less than one millisecond in a 4.1-terabyte rack of SSD storage. SSDs are being supplied by Fusion-io.

IBM said Thursday it is testing a 4-terabyte, high-speed solid-state drive array targeted at the enterprise, as the technology giant gives its imprimatur to flash-memory-based storage.

First it was Intel. Now, Big Blue is keen on solid-state drives.

IOPS is a crucial benchmark for large customers that process credit card information or run reservation systems, for example.

“It’s feasible that we could get it commercialized within 12 months,” said Charlie Andrews, director of product marketing for IBM systems storage. “Right now we have a screaming (fast) system, but there’s more work to be done in terms of long-term reliability and integration with systems applications. We don’t want to get distracted with ‘push the hardware.’ We want to focus on the solution piece first,” he said.

IBM’s said its first implementation of solid-state drives was for select IBM BladeCenter servers in June of last year.

For years, flash memory cards–the first mass-market SSDs–have been limited to digital cameras and music players like the
iPod. But SSDs are now poised to hit technological critical mass in terms of storage capacity, speed, and availability as they find their way into everything ranging from tiny netbooks to massive enterprise storage arrays.

“Performance improvements of this magnitude can have profound implications for business, allowing two to three times the work to complete in a given time frame for classic workloads,” the company said in a statement.

High-performance enterprise storage is where IBM comes in. Engineers and researchers at the IBM Hursley development lab in England and the Almaden Research Center in California have demonstrated performance results that outperform the world’s fastest disk storage solution by more than 250 percent, according to IBM.

By comparison, Intel is commercially shipping SSDs (X25-E Extreme) that individually achieve random data reads of 35,000 IOPS and random writes of 3,300 IOPS. In a 3.8-terabyte storage array using 120 SSDs, Intel claims 4.2 million IOPS.

Compared with the fastest industry benchmarked hard disk drive system, Quicksilver not only improved performance by 250 percent but did this in less than one-twentieth of the response time, one-fifth of the floor space, and with 55 percent of the power and cooling requirements, IBM said.

(Credit:
CBS)

As news organizations reported Michael Jackson’s hospitalization on Thursday afternoon, Wikipedia editors were wrestling with the problem of whether to allow an unverified report of the singer’s death to appear on the online encyclopedia.

The Los Angeles Times initially reported that Jackson was in a coma, and then updated its story at 3:15 p.m. PDT to say: “Pop star Michael Jackson was pronounced dead by doctors this afternoon after arriving at a hospital in a deep coma, city and law enforcement sources told The Times.” (The Times’ Web server was overloaded and could only be reached intermittently.)

Around the same time, the Wikipedia editors had finally intervened in the edit-and-delete-the-edits scrum. One locked two articles about Jackson and his health for about six hours, which prevented them from being modified until the situation became more clear.

Plenty of blogs echoed TMZ’s report, but news organizations tended to be more cautious. Fox News said Jackson’s “condition wasn’t immediately clear,” while Reuters cited TMZ.

Some Wikipedians repeatedly deleted references to Jackson’s alleged demise, saying in separate comments that “This is not yet verified,” “He’s not dead,” “Premature edits,” and “ONCE AGAIN, HE IS NOT DEAD, JUST STOP.”

Michael Jackson, age 13, poses in his home in Encino, Calif., in 1972. He earned his first No. 1 solo record that year with "Ben."

By around 3:15 p.m. PDT, Wikipedia appeared to be temporarily overloaded. The site reported the error: “Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties… Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.24))”

The entertainment site TMZ.com reported at 2:20 p.m. PDT that: “We’re told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back.”

But they were too slow for the legions of Wikipedia users who descended on the site and repeatedly modified the entry about the pop star. The typical edit was to insert Thursday as the date of Jackson’s demise. Others were more subtle; one used the word “was” instead of “is,” while another edit called “Invincible” his “last studio album.”

commentary

Casey Coleman, chief information officer for the U.S. General Services Administration, said in a speech this week that the GSA heavily relies on open source to drive down costs, increase flexibility of IT dollars, and reduce risk.

The GSA, by the way, is no small fry. It manages more than one-fourth of the federal government’s total procurement dollars and influences the management of $500 billion in federal assets.

The agency uses a laundry list of great open-source software–initially for its information systems but also increasingly for transactional mission-critical systems–such as JBoss, Linux (Red Hat), Bugzilla (bug tracking), JUnit (testing), JMeter (Apache performance monitoring tool), Eclipse, KnowledgeTree (content management), and others.

Coleman cited some excellent reasons for deploying open-source software:

By using open source, the agency won’t be locked in to using a proprietary software program, at least for the duration of the contract.

Not having sunk costs in a commercial software program also means the agency can move to a new program more quickly should its needs change. The general openness also means the agency could become a collaborator in the further development of the software itself.

“You get much more transparency and interoperability, and that reduces your risk,” she said.

When the GSA, the organization that influences the purchasing for the rest of the U.S. federal government, buys heavily into open source, you know it’s time for the rest of the government to do so, as well. In fact, it already is–at least, 55 percent of it.

Ms. Coleman, I want my tax dollars to stretch a bit further, though. Please instruct the rest of the government to buy into open source much more actively. Thanks!

Nokia and the University of Cambridge are showing off a new stretchable and flexible mobile device of the future called Morph.

(Credit:
Nokia)

The new concept phone is part of an online display presented in conjunction with the “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition underway through May 12 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The device, which is made using nanotechnology, is intended to demonstrate how cell phones in the future could be stretched and bent into different shapes, allowing users to “morph” their devices into whatever shape they want. Think Stretch Armstrong for cell phones. Want to wear your cell phone as a bracelet? No problem, just bend it around your wrist.

Nokia says the concept device demonstrates handset features that nanotechnology might be capable of delivering, including flexible materials, transparent electronics, and self-cleaning surfaces.

(Credit:
Nokia)

“Nokia Research Center is looking at ways to reinvent the form and function of mobile devices,” Bob Iannucci, chief technology officer for Nokia, said in a statement. “The Morph concept shows what might be possible.”

Even though Morph is still in early development, Nokia believes that certain elements of the device could be used in high-end Nokia devices within the next seven years. And as the technology matures, nanotechnology could eventually be incorporated into Nokia’s entire line of products to help lower manufacturing costs.

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)

Audiophiles never gave up on vinyl, but now kids are driving a current LP boom.

Kristina Dell’s feature article in Time magazine looks at the trend of people, including teens, turning to vinyl to escape the awful digital grime of downloads and MP3s.

“Bad sound on an
iPod has had an impact on a lot of people going back to vinyl,” one teen says. Another teenage vinyl devotee tells Time, “Most things sound better on vinyl, even with the crackles and pops and hisses.”

And when you figure that LPs usually cost a little more than CDs and iTunes, you can conclude that some kids are willing to pay more for what they truly value! Wow, the kids really are all right!

Sure, the retro appeal of vinyl, the large format, cover art, and the tactile feel of the vinyl experience are responsible for the resurgence. The Warner Music Group posted a 30 percent increase in vinyl sales last year, and indie labels are cranking out new vinyl titles all the time. Used LPs, selling for a buck or less are easy to find at yard sales, used bookstores, and I’ve personally found dozens of perfectly good records on the street. The future of CDs may be in doubt, but vinyl will be around for the long haul.

Here at Adobe’s Engage event in South San Francisco, one of the services getting some buzz is The New York Times’ social-bookmarking tool Shifd. It’s a neat idea–give users a place to write and share little notes between their PCs and mobile phones, while providing a way to publish those notes to social services people are already using.

This morning the company has released the Adobe Air version of the app, allowing anyone to create and manage notes they’ve made while offline, and without having to fire up a browser.

The notes you can make are fairly simple in nature. Each note is color-coded and a lot like a Post-It, along with locations and Web links. What makes the app useful is that each link has links to various popular sharing and reference tools. For example, if you save a URL from your clipboard, you can then go back later and access it on your phone or home machine, then push it out to del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, et al.

Another benefit of using the AIR app is that it functions similar to a widget engine of its own, meaning you can manipulate and keep notes on your desktop as you would with sticky notes.

There are several other companies showing off updated and new AIR apps throughout the day here at Engage, including some we’ve already written about. To keep track of them, bookmark this link and check back throughout the day.

Leave small Post-It notes and access them on your phone too.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Some Yahoo Mail users were unable to log in to their e-mail accounts on at least two separate occasions this week due to planned maintenance work, Yahoo says.

On Monday, Yahoo Mail was inaccessible to an unknown number of users as a result of an “unexpected issue” that arose during routine scheduled maintenance, the company says. The issue was resolved and by 9 a.m. Tuesday morning the outage was over.

Then, on Tuesday evening the mail service was unavailable for one hour and 40 minutes during a scheduled maintenance release coordinated with AT&T, according to Yahoo.

I’m kind of surprised that scheduled maintenance work would disrupt any user’s access to Yahoo Mail and would think that a backup system would be employed. But, what do I know?

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Many Windows users are annoyed by the Autoplay feature. But Leo Notenboom recently explained why it is dangerous, rather than annoying.

Many of us, when we run across an unknown USB flash drive (a.k.a. thumb drive, pen drive, memory stick, etc.) will stick it in a computer to see what’s on the thing. It’s at this point that Autoplay can screw you big time.

Unlike with CDs, Autoplay on a USB flash drive will run a program immediately, no questions asked. Quoting Leo “USB Thumbdrives or flash drives are a non-obvious but easy way to spread malware.” The only thing most malicious software needs is for you to run the program. The Windows Autoplay feature, for flash drives, hands this service to the bad guys on a silver platter.

The question posed to Leo was “I found a USB thumb drive, plugged it in and now my system won’t work. What happened?”
His answer: the computer was probably infected with some type of malicious software.

Windows XP

To disable Autoplay totally, Leo suggests a free program from Microsoft for Windows XP called TweakUI. TweakUI is needed for Windows XP Home Edition users, but XP Professional can do this without the extra software (TweakUI will work on XP Professional).

The downloaded program, TweakUiPowertoySetup.exe, is only 146K. When you run the program it installs immediately, no questions asked, no decisions to be made. It does not create a desktop icon for itself, so you find it with Start -> All Programs -> Powertoys for Windows XP. To turn off AutoPlay system-wide, run TweakUI, start at My Computer -> Autoplay -> Types -> turn off the checkboxes.

Disabling Autoplay in Windows XP Professional with Group Policy

Windows XP Professional can disable Autoplay using the built-in Group Policy feature (see above). To invoke the Group Policy Editor, click the Start button, then Run and enter “gpedit.msc” without the quotes. Go to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System. Scroll down to “Turn off Autoplay” and double click on it. It starts out in a “Not Configured” state. Click on the “Enabled” radio button, then for  ”Turn off Autoplay on”   select “All drives”.

Windows 2000

Windows 2000 does not, by default, Autoplay on USB flash drives. Nonetheless, it supports Group Policies that can be used to disable Autoplay system-wide. Quoting the operating system itself:

“By default, Autoplay is disabled on removable drives, such as the floppy disk drive (but not the CD-ROM drive), and on network drives. If you enable this policy, you can also disable Autoplay on CD-ROM drives, or disable Autoplay on all drives.”

Disabling Autoplay in Windows 2000 with Group Policy

The procedure to disable Autoplay system-wide is very much like that in XP Professional. Click the Start button, then Run, and enter “gpedit.msc” without the quotes. Go to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System. Scroll down to “Disable Autoplay” and double-click on it.

At this point, the terminology couldn’t be any worse. What does it mean to disable the policy that disables Autoplay? Do two wrongs make a right? As shown above, enable the policy and then “Disable Autoplay on All drives.”

Windows Vista

As with Windows XP, the expensive versions of Vista (Business and Ultimate) include a Group Policy editor. To run it, click the Start button and in the search box type “gpedit.msc” without the quotes. Browse to Windows Components, then to AutoPlay Policies. Change the value of “Turn off Autoplay” to enabled.

The cheap versions of Vista, such as Home Premium, can do this in the Control Panel. Under Hardware and Sound, click on “Play CDs or other media automatically.” Then uncheck the checkbox for “Use AutoPlay for all media and devices.”

Is This Enough?

I have seen reports online that the above measures are not sufficient to fully protect you from autorun/autoplay in all instances. I can’t evaluate these claims for myself, but even if they are true, there is no doubt that you are safer disabling autorun as described above than you are not disabling it.

Update: March 16, 2008: Just for good luck, make a Restore Point before changing the Autoplay default. See Four tips to using System Restore on Windows XP.

Update: March 17, 2008: Added section on Windows 2000.

Update: August 27, 2008: Added section on
Windows Vista.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

The more files you store on your PC, the harder they are to find and manage. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Copernic Desktop Search, my favorite local-search freebie, and compared it to Google Desktop Search and Windows Desktop Search. All three retrieve the files you’re looking for much faster and more simply than Windows’ built-in search tool, but I prefer Copernic for its customizability and clean interface.

Still, most people spend the majority of their file-management time in Windows Explorer, which by default isn’t particularly informative about the files and folders it displays. You can spend time tweaking Details view so that it shows more information about files and folders, or choose Thumbnails view to convert image-file icons to mini versions and to get a glimpse of up to four of the image files stored in a folder, but this still leaves the searching to you.

A faster way to find a particular file among the gigabytes of data on your PC’s various storage media is to create virtual folders that store all the files matching specific search criteria. Vista even updates these folders for you automatically, though in XP you have to perform a new search to add recent files when you return to these folders.

You already use virtual folders all the time. Desktop, My Documents (or Documents in Vista), the Recycle Bin, and many other standard file “locations” in Windows are virtual. The contents of these folders don’t depend on the actual physical location of the files. In fact, the WinFS (Windows Future Storage) technology originally intended for use in Vista relies completely on virtual folders.

To create a virtual folder in Vista, click Start > Search, enter your search term (click the down arrow to the right of Advanced Search to see more options), and once the search is completed, click Save Search. By default, the new virtual folder is placed in the Searches folder under your user ID, along with Vista’s pre-built virtual folders: Recent Documents, Recent E-mail, Recent Music, Recent Images and Video, Recently Changed, and Shared by Me. You can save the new folder anywhere, but I find it simplest to keep all my virtual folders in one place.

By default, Vista places your new virtual folder in the same folder as its pre-built virtual folders.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Now whenever you’re looking for a file matching the criteria you specified, simply navigate to and select that virtual folder in the Searches folder under your user name to see an updated list of the files returned by the search.

You can approximate Vista’s virtual folders in XP by clicking Start > Search, entering your search term in either or both of the two text boxes, choosing the drive or location to search, or using any of the other search options available, and clicking Search. When the search finishes, click File > Save Search, specify a location for your saved search file (the default is My Documents), give the file a name (or accepting Windows’ default name), and click Save. When you open that .fnd file subsequently, a search window opens with the specified criteria entered automatically, but with no files in the results window. Click Search to repeat the search.

Repeat a search without re-entering the search criteria by using Windows XP's Save Search feature.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Tomorrow: Do desktop-search tools slow down your PC?

Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-Hee was indicted on charges of evading taxes on billions of dollars he hid in stock accounts under the names of his aides, The New York Times is reporting.

Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-Hee

(Credit: Samsung)

He also faces criminal charges of breach of trust, stemming from his involvement in arranging for company subsidiaries “to sell stock to his son” at “unfairly low prices” to help his son “take over management control,” The Times says.
Lee was cleared, however, of more serious allegations he starting a slush fund worth $215 million used to bribe prosecutors, judges, and other public officials.

Nine other Samsung executives were indicted on charges similar to Lee’s, but none were arrested. Lee wasn’t arrested either.

Still, the charges aren’t good for the image of South Korea’s largest company. Samsung operates in many industries, but is primarily known for its electronics. The company is one of the largest television manufacturers in the world, and is also a leading handset maker.

Lee thus far has maintained his title, however Samsung is planning a related restructuring, the details of which will be disclosed next week, according to The Wall Street Journal.