America: Western Digital adds 40GB, 80GB pocket-sized drives
By Brad Cook, MacCentral.com
Western Digital Corp. has introduced two new portable sto-rage devices: 40GB and 80GB Passport hard drives that feature USB 2.0 connectivity and bus-powered operation, eliminating the need for a separate power supply. Their interiors contain 5400RPM 2.5-inch Scorpio EIDE drives and Data Lifeguard protection against data loss, while their exteriors offer shock- absorbing cases. Western Digital expects to ship them next month for US$199 (40GB) and $249 (80GB). Mac OS X v10.1.5 is required.
America: Seagate ships 400GB PC hard disk drive
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service (Tokyo Bureau)
Hard-disk drive maker Seagate Technology LLC has started shipping a drive targeted at personal computers that offers 400G bytes of storage space, it said.
Increasing popularity of PC-based multimedia applications, particularly home video editing and downloading of movies and TV shows from peer-to-peer networks, is driving demand for larger capacity hard-disk drives in the PC space. In addition to high-storage capacities, such drives need to be able to read and write data to the drive fast enough to keep up with real-time video.
The drive is the fourth member of Seagate's Barracuda 7200.8 series of drives and is available in two versions, one with an Ultra ATA/100 interface and one with a Serial ATA interface. The rotational speed of the disc is 7200 rpm (revolutions per minute), with an average seek time of 8 milliseconds.
The latter version supports a Serial ATA technology called Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which allows the drive to manage mul- tiple commands from the PC in whatever order it deems most efficient. Until now, drives have handled read and write requests in the order they have been received. The NCQ technology means users of the Serial ATA version of the Barracuda drive with systems that support NCQ will see performance closer to that of a 10,000 rpm drive than that of a 7,200 rpm, according to Seagate.
The disc includes three media platters, each capable of storing 133G bytes of data, which is a record for a PC-targeted drive, according to the company. Pricing was not announced.
Plans for the drive were first announced by Seagate in June this year when it presented its upcoming product plans at a news conference in Tokyo.
Europe: European businesses prefer consumer IM
By Bryan Betts, Techworld.com
Businesses are increasingly making use of instant messaging, but enterprise IM tools such as Microsoft's Live Communications Server (LCS) and IBM SameTime are losing out to programs origi-nally designed for home users.
That's the conclusion of a survey of 340 European IT managers carried out by Sybari Software Inc. Nearly 90 percent of the IT managers agreed that instant messaging needs management, but 56 percent said they had no plans to do this by installing enterprise IM software. More than half of the businesses surveyed are already using consumer IM tools such as AOL, MSN or Yahoo Messenger instead. Tom Bueonillo, Sybari's VP of product management, says it's because they've found security tools to let them do that safely.
"You are seeing IM become recognized as a business tool - in some industries it's a requirement for people to do their jobs," he says. "What I'm hearing people say is that they have to get IM in and get a handle on it." he says.
The primary concerns vary by sector - Sybari's survey shows viruses, Trojans and worms are the top worries overall, while in regulated industries such as finance and healthcare, Bueonillo says it is compliance and message logging. "People are saying yes to public IM for business because they know they can cover those concerns - companies like IMlogic (Inc.), FaceTime (Communications Inc.) and Aconix (Ltd.) can manage all that," he adds.
Those companies provide secure proxies or gateway devices to identify and manage IM traffic, while Sybari's role is to add tools such as content filtering and anti-virus. Bueonillo says it works with Microsoft to help secure LCS, and with IMlogic to perform the same role for consumer IM. So does enterprise IM have a future? "It's a valid ques-tion," says Kailash Ambwani, president and CEO of FaceTime. He adds that while LCS and the like might integrate better with other applications in the future.
Europe: IT FORUM: Microsoft talks security, seriously
By Scarlet Pruitt, IDG News Service (London Bureau)
Products announced this week to streamline software-patch delivery are just part of Microsoft Corp.'s overall efforts to tighten system security, Scott Charney told attendees of the IT Forum in Copenhagen on Tuesday. As Microsoft's Chief Trustworthy Computing Strategist, Charney laid out the company's security efforts with all the seriousness one would expect from a former public prosecutor and U.S. Department of Justice cybercrime chief.
Though many of the company's current security initiatives are well-worn subjects to those familiar with the company's accelerated efforts in the area, Charney's straight talk and big-picture approach underscored the need for the software maker to clearly outline its plans and get partners and customers onboard for its security efforts to work.
"As a leading player in the IT ecosystem, we're required to go out and talk about what were doing," Charney said.
In addition to working on building more secure products by design, promoting security training and development and easing patch management, the company is partnering with hardware makers and security companies, Charney said. The company's announcement Monday that it is teaming with Dell Inc. to provide a single tool for updating hardware and software and the release Tuesday of a public beta of Windows Update Services to help administrators automate and control software updates are recent examples of these efforts, he added.
Charney's message seemed to resonate with at least some of the 3,000 forum attendees, who had been looking for evidence that a change in the industry's security approach was afoot.
"It was really refreshing to hear a Microsoft executive speak with no marketing slides. It gave me the impression that security is actually a top concern," said Copenhagen-based IT consultant Erik Trudso Jespersen. Indeed, Charney portrayed security as his mandate, saying that when government initially ceded the Internet and computers to the public domain, it also gave away its role as protector.
Given Microsoft's prevalence in the market, and Charney's top role at the software maker, that makes him a cop with a very large beat.
"When you see the reliance we have on this system we built, you see the possible damages," Charney said. "It's been said that every company is a software company whether they know it or not. That may be true ... every bank is a software company nowadays."