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BBC reporting today: "Google has issued an apology after a 'miscalculation' caused a blackout of its Gmail service, affecting the 'majority' of its 150 million users. The firm described Tuesday's two-hour outage as a "big deal" and said it was investigating ways to ensure it did not happen again." more»
IBM, Syracuse University and New York State have entered into a multiyear agreement to build and operate a new computer data center on the University's campus that will incorporate advanced infrastructure and smarter computing technologies to make it one of the most energy-efficient data centers in the world. The data center is expected to use 50 percent less energy than a typical data center today, making it one of the "greenest" computer centers in operation. more»
During a presentation at the Interop Conference currently ongoing in Los Vegas, Mike Repass, Product Manager at Google, informed the audience that a new cloud storage service will be rolled out by Google within weeks. The role out is part of Google's expansion of its AppEngine platform which is said to offer similar security infrastructure as Gmail and Google Apps. "[T]he app partitioning and isolation are the same best of breed technology approaches that Google is developing for the rest of its customer base," Repass said. more»
A recent paper released by by Urs Hölzle and Luiz André Barroso of Google's infrastructure design and operations team provides an introduction into today's high scale computing along with factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure. From the abstract: "As computation continues to move into the cloud, the computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator, but a warehouse full of computers. These new large datacenters are quite different from traditional hosting facilities of earlier times and cannot be viewed simply as a collection of co-located servers..." more»
Companies in the technology, media and telecommunications industries (TMT) significantly reduced investment in security spending in 2008, according to a new survey from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. The third edition of the Deloitte TMT Global Security Survey reveals that 32% of respondents reduced their information security budgets, while 60% of respondents believe they are "falling behind" or still "catching up" to their security threats -- a significant increase from 49% over the previous year. more»
Google on Thursday was granted a patent for its floating data center design, an idea that the company filed to protect on Feb. 26, 2007. The patent describes techniques for designing a data center located on a ship, platform, or on shore that use the tidal motion of the sea to generate electricity and seawater for equipment cooling... more»
If anyone has the right to be excited about cloud computing, it's John Chambers. But on Wednesday Cisco Systems' Chairman and CEO conceded that the computing industry's move to sell pay-as-you-go computing cycles available as a service on the Internet was also "a security nightmare." Speaking during a keynote address at the annual security confab, Chambers said that cloud computing was inevitable, but that it would shake up the way that networks are secured... more»
IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems, marking the beginning of what is likely to be a new wave of acquisitions in the tech industry over the next 18 months. It's the logical consequence of the all-out war for the data center -- the large computer rooms that keep businesses and the Internet running -- that the industry is suddenly in the midst of. Businesses will spend about $100 billion on equipment and software for data centers in 2009, according to research company IDC. more»
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the vast majority of business and IT executives report that cloud computing is a viable technology option that can improve a company's bottom-line results according to a new global survey conducted by an independent market research firm. However, despite growing evidence that cloud-based systems have the potential to lower costs, the majority of companies report no plans to integrate cloud computing in the next 12 months... more»
According to a new study by PGP Corporation and Ponemon Institute, data breach incidents cost U.S. companies $202 per compromised customer record in 2008, compared to $197 in 2007. The study is based on 43 organizations across 17 different industry sectors with a range of 4,200 to 113,000 records that were affected. It is also noted that since 2005, the cost component has grown by more than $64 on a per victim basis since -- nearly a 40% increase. more»
With the alarming increase in cyberattacks, criminals are literally turning businesses against their own customers in order to steal consumer's personal data, warns the latest annual X-Force Trend and Risk report from IBM. "The security industry puts a lot of effort into the technical evaluation of security threats, examining, sometimes at great length, the potential threat that each issue might present to corporations and consumers. Criminal attackers out for profit, however, have considerations that the security industry does not always take into account, such as monetization cost and overall profitability." more»
Over the past few weeks, numerous reports have surfaced suggesting that the mythical Google GDrive, an online storage service developed by the online giant, might be a reality even though the company has kept its alleged existence under wraps. Blogger Brian Ussery has uncovered an interesting hint that the GDrive might actually exist. The Google Pack software bundle, which is for Windows users who want to use software from Google and its partners, includes a small piece of code apparently containing the GDrive's product category and description. more»
Responding to market demand for more energy-efficient datacenters, Sun Microsystems, Inc. has announced the completion of its new Broomfield, Colo. datacenter. The largest datacenter consolidation project undertaken in the company's history is expected to save more than $1 million in electricity costs and 11,000 metric tons of CO2 per year in Broomfield. The new Broomfield datacenter follows similar Sun projects completed in Blackwater, UK, Santa Clara, Calif. and Bangalore, India in August 2007. more»
Network Solutions is having problems with "all" its name servers, according to their tech support and a recent post on North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) mailing list indicates that it has been under very large-scale UDP/53 DDoS attack for the last 48 hour period. As a result, domain names hosted with Network Solutions' Worldnic have been affected. Network Solutions is one of the leading domain registrars and DNS hosting providers in the world, managing more than 7.6 million domain names. more»
Amidst all the recent reports of data breaches, Gunter Ollmann of IBM Internet Security Systems, has reported today about one particular case which may be the largest data breach to date. Ollmann wirtes: "The media has been full of analysis concerning data breaches over the last couple of weeks, mostly related to the uptick in 2008 reports. While much of this increase can be accounted for by the wider adoption of state legislation that mandates companies to publicly disclose their data breaches, I think it is worth pointing out today's latest disclosure -- which is quite probably the largest breach ever." more»
