With the IEEE 802.3an 10GBASE-T standards not far away, Carrie Higbie of structured cabling maker The Siemon Company discusses the TCO pros and cons of using Cat6 or better cabling plants now.
Web Development
Desk for a tight space
Are you looking for something different for your home office or is it simply a case of not having enough space. Now there is hope with the launch at the second largest PC show in the world, Computex of a desk that has the lot. It’s an aluminium desk with a built in case, or at least parts of one.
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The L shaped desk has a computer slot in the right hand side, and it snugly fits a standard looking computer case. Above your right knee when you are sitting at the desk is a multi-card reader, and above your left knee is a hidden power strip.
This whole concept of computing spaces, with integrated bits has a lot of promise. Rather than a PC that fits your work space, you have a PC that IS your workspace. Problems with proprietary parts are a potential hazard, but it is nothing that can not be worked around. For corporate settings, it holds even more promise than home use. Hopefully this will become widespread soon.
LAN Systems Powering UPS Sales
Emerson Network Power has appointed LAN Systems as a national distribution partner with a view to more SMB sales.
Emerson, a leading uninterruptible power supply and environmental control and monitoring vendors, is the name behind the Liebert brand, the company says it chose LAN Systems as its national distributor because of the synergies in focus and market segments.
A key factor in the decision would have been LAN Systems’ relationship with Cisco with all three having an eye on the emerging VoIP and convergence markets.
Peter Spiteri, marketing manager of Emerson, said, “We’ve reached the stage in our channel business where we’re ready to push on to the next level of market penetration with Liebert, and LAN Systems gives us the ideal platform to do so.
“LAN Systems represents a number of industry leaders, like Cisco, with which we have strong technology relationships, especially in the provision of power protection for growth markets like IP telephony and Power Over Ethernet. This was a major factor for us in choosing them as our national distributor.”
Wendy O’Keeffe, general manager of LAN Systems, said, “This partnership reinforces LAN Systems’ commitment to bringing resellers best-of-breed technologies and further strengthens our vendor portfolio as Emerson’s offering strengthens our focus on providing complementary convergence, security, networking and storage technologies to the channel.
O’Keeffe also said something about “attractive reseller margins” and the SMB UPS market.
O2 Combines Business and Pleasure
O2 delivered a new white knight in shining armour today to Australians looking for a mobile device to save them from the boredom and demands of everyday life.
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“Australians are looking to do more with their mobiles and we are offering the O2 Xphone IIm as a solution,” said Oceanic VP of O2 John Featherstone. “The O2 Xphone IIm is a knight in shining armour to people who want to be rescued from the boredom of commuting or who are trapped in the demands of work. The O2 Xphone IIm lets you chill with its mini entertainment centre while you commute during peak hours or work away from the office with its smart productivity features.”
O2 runs Windows Mobile 2003 as an operating system and the Xphone IIm offers wireless modem, GPRS and Bluetooth connectivity. Armed with Microsoft Pocket Outlook and MSN Messenger to keep users in touch the phone’s entertainment and Internet features have been beefed up too.
Windows Media Player 10 gets a dedicated softkey for easy access. But the neat thing about this phone is that you can set the device to download music, video or games from websites onto the on-board memory or to a miniSD card.
The O2 Xphone IIm supports a wide range of music file formats, including WAV, WMA, MP3, AMR and AAC. In addition, the microphone and loudspeaker offer crystal clear sound to support vivid MPEG-4 video playback, and 32-chord polyphonic, MP3, WAV and WMA ring tones.
The O2 Xphone IIm offers greater convenience with its dual-function keys which allow you to access a wide variety of the device’s functions in fewer clicks. For example, a quick press of the “Home” button brings you back to your designated home page. A longer press of the same button turns off Bluetooth or GPRS. Its streamlined architecture is further improved by O2 Menu, a simple and intuitive icon panel which makes most phone functions accessible within two clicks.
Priced at $649 (RRP), the phone is distributed by Ingram Micro and Brightpoint Australia.
Industry Picks Bluetooth To Link Home Devices
The world’s largest electronics firms have settled on Ultra Wideband Bluetooth technology to send high quality video between devices in the home.
iPod Accesories Take Off
Sales of accessories for portable digital players are soaring as the gadgets become the latest craze in take-along technology. The problem for many retailers in Australia is getting hold of iPod stock to drive the accessory sale.
Storage Blow For Sony
Sony have been dealt a major blow following a decision by Microsoft and Intel to support Toshiba’s HD-DVD format over Blu-Ray.
It is exepected that Intel & Microsoft will announce that they are backing the HD-DVD format developed by Toshiba over the Blu-ray standard championed by Sony, Matsushita Electric, Samsung and others. Microsoft announced in June that it would work with Toshiba to develop high-definition DVD players. Now, Microsoft and Intel say they will develop software and chips that will allow personal computers to play the next-generation DVD’s from Toshiba.
According to the New York Times the two companies said they had not ruled out incorporating Blu-ray technology in their operating systems and on their chips in the future. But they are convinced that as of now, the HD-DVD format discs can be produced more cheaply and more quickly than the Blu-ray discs, and are therefore likely to become the dominant technology. For the last two years, Microsoft and Intel have been careful not to alienate either camp in the format battle because they sell software and components to companies on each side. They also hoped that the electronics makers and Hollywood studios developing the formats would reach a compromise.
But the major Hollywood studios are now split between the formats, and electronics companies on both sides plan to start selling next-generation DVD players as early as December 2005. Sony also plans to include Blu-ray technology in its new PlayStation 3 game console to be released next year.
As the format standoff has deepened, demand for the current generation of DVD’s and DVD players has slowed, alarming Hollywood studios, which have come to depend heavily on disc sales. The studios, as well as electronics makers and computer manufacturers, expect high-definition discs to restart sales growth. But the lack of a resolution over the future format has slowed the changeover. “We were neutral for a long time,” Jordi Ribas, the director of technical strategy for Windows at Microsoft, said. “But we’re approaching the time when this has to come to market and from our standpoint, the earlier the better.”
As early as last year, however, some industry executives said that Microsoft was likely to side with the Toshiba camp.
Though Microsoft and Intel do not make DVD machines, they benefit from the sale of next-generation discs because consumers will also want to play the new discs on their PC’s. That means that the computer operating system will have to be designed to read those discs.
Microsoft and Intel say that Toshiba has proven that its discs can be copied onto hard drives and home servers and sent over home networks. The companies also favor the “hybrid” disc developed by Toshiba that includes a standard definition version of a movie on one side and a high-definition version on the other side.
Their decision to support Toshiba’s HD-DVD format also creates another fissure in the tug of war between the companies backing the two formats.
For instance, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, two of the world’s largest PC makers, are part of the Blu-ray group. Their computers, assuming they include Microsoft and Intel products, will be capable of playing HD-DVD discs. But if they want their machines to play Blu-ray discs, they may have to find a third-party to design software for them.
In addition to developing software to play HD-DVD discs on PC’s, Microsoft may also create software so its new Xbox game console, which will be released later this year, will be able to play HD-DVD discs.
In an exclusive interview with Tom’s Hardware Guide, one of Microsoft’s lead representatives on the DVD Forum Steering Committee said that decisions regarding whether his company and Intel would back and promote HD DVD as a high-definition video disc standard, were determined only within the last few days. Prior to some critical recent developments and announcements, both companies – which had proclaimed neutrality – may have been ready to back Blu-ray.
“Until now, we viewed ourselves more as a technology provider for both groups,” said Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s director of technology strategy for Windows Digital Media, and a key developer of the VC-1 codec currently in use by both HD DVD and Blu-ray. He revealed that Microsoft and Intel had produced a list of what he called “key requirements for the success of next-generation DVD.” For several months, while those requirements were being circulated, both companies worked on developing key standards to be implemented by both formats. Ribas said he was directly involved with implementing the VC-1 codec, and also worked jointly with Disney to produce the iHD interactive layer considered by both camps, but eventually adopted only by HD DVD (Disney is a member of the Blu-ray Disc Association.) During that time, Intel and Microsoft both maintained their public neutrality. But very recently, from the two companies’ perspective, things started unraveling unexpectedly for Blu-ray. 
“Our decision is based mainly on where the formats are today,” Ribas said, referring to Microsoft. “A year and a half ago, both format organizations had very similar goals, and to some extent, the story of Blu-ray was actually very powerful. It had higher capacity, it had what we would consider benefits at the time. But then as time went on, and we’d seen what’s the reality of both formats today, and what were promises versus what’s proven and what’s real, that’s when we decided to make the decision.”
Blu-ray failed the Intel/Microsoft test in six critical areas, Ribas told us, referring to a document listing those areas that a Microsoft spokesperson provided to Tom’s Hardware Guide:
First, and perhaps foremost, is the ability for a consumer to make authorized copies of a legally obtained disc, in order to store the content on a hard drive and stream it to devices around the house. Intel particularly wants this capability for its Viiv home entertainment platform, announced last month. “We think it’s a great consumer win, and it’s a great industry win, to be able to ensure that with good copy protection, you can have so much functionality for the user,” Rivas told us. But when recently questioned about its support for these features, Ribas said, although Blu-ray had appeared supportive at one time, its current stance is now uncommitted.
Support for hybrid discs that can be read in both current DVDs and future players, was the second critical element. This would “future-proof” new releases, enabling consumers to buy DVDs that can play in today’s players, while also providing high-def content for tomorrow’s. “That’s something that both promised,” said Ribas, “but HD DVD delivered, and Blu-ray has not – and it seems it’s nowhere in sight. [Blu-ray has] claimed they have it in the lab, but to go from the lab to mass production is like night and day. There’s a lot of effort that needs to happen. So as of now, there’s nothing that leads us to believe that that’s going to be possible [from Blu-ray] at this point.”
Maintaining low production costs is a critical factor, which has been a key HD DVD talking point in light of current revelations about factory upgrade costs for Blu-ray. “For a long time, we actually thought that the Blu-ray Group had the upper hand in costs,” Ribas said, mainly because of the involvement in Blu-ray of most of the major Japanese CE manufacturers – Sony, Matsushita (Panasonic), Pioneer, and Sharp – as well as Philips. Here is where recent events played a critical role: In a development that was brought to light only this morning, two of the world’s leading China-based DVD player production facilities announced their support for HD DVD over Blu-ray. In press statements, these companies cited the relative openness of the DVD Forum compared to the Blu-ray Disc Association. “Now that we see China embracing HD DVD,” said Ribas, “we actually see that on the cost side, HD DVD will have an advantage, because the Chinese have been the ones who have lowered the prices, via the competition, for HD DVD players.” As much as 75 percent of DVD players sold in America today come from China, he added.
Maintaining low disc replication costs affects the consumer price for media, said Ribas, which would play into any price/performance evaluation. A disc production factory can make minor upgrades to its equipment, he stated, with the result being equipment that can produce both conventional DVD as well as HD DVD. Citing figures circulating this week throughout the industry, Ribas said it would cost as much as $1.7 million per production line to install Blu-ray disc production equipment, and as much as $2.0 million for each new mastering system installed. That’s a significant expense, he explained, for a business which only turns over a 10 percent margin.
The surprise entry in Microsoft’s and Intel’s list of failures is disc storage capacity. On paper, Blu-ray appears to have the advantage. But the two companies looked beneath the paper: Capacity, said Ribas, “used to be the biggest advantage of Blu-ray, and we believed it. We thought, they’ll get 50 GByte BD-ROM discs working, but it’s not happening, and it’s nowhere in sight. There are not even pilots. It’s only in the lab that they are building these discs.” With regard to demonstrated capacity, he told us, HD DVD-ROM actually leads BD-ROM by a score of 30 GByte to 25 GByte.
The final entry is interactivity standards. Although Microsoft and Disney jointly developed the iHD interactivity layer, based on XML – which is the glue that holds together the “Vista vision” of Microsoft’s future Windows platform – and even though Disney is a Blu-ray proponent, the Association chose instead to endorse BDJ, an implementation of Sun-s Java Mobile Edition. Ribas told us that the major studios – either publicly or quietly – are opposed to BDJ, citing its relative complexity and its lack of compelling new features compared to iHD. An optional commentary track for videos, for example, that superimposes the speaker’s image on-screen as well as providing audio, is one key iHD feature that BDJ will support only as an option, maybe. “Which means nobody will use it,” said Ribas.
“Intel was looking at similar issues,” said Ribas, “and [we] realized, ‘We are getting very close to getting these things into the market, we have to stop hoping or expecting or believing promises. We have to look at what’s real and what’s not.’ That’s where our decision came from.”
Ribas told us more about his and his company’s expectations for the future of video disc technologies and interactive media in general.
Intel Set To Launch New Chip Architecture
Intel is set to launch several new initatives at this weeks Intel Developers Forum being held in the USA.
Intel is set to unveil the next generation architecture at Intel Developers’ Forum set to kick off in the USA today. Newly annointed CEO Paul Otellini, is also set to reveal several other Intel initatives including an outline of the company’s SmartHouse offerings.
But the story of the week may very well become the triumph of Intel’s Israel Design Center (IDC), whose more moderate approach to processor architecture has won that team several architectural victories of late–not only over arch-rival AMD, but also over Intel’s own NetBurst architecture, which may very well follow the path Itanium has carved toward Intel’s back burner.
“The rule of thumb in ‘NetBurst land,'” Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with the Insight64 consultancy, told Tom’s Hardware Guide this afternoon, “was just throw clock frequency at the problem, and you’ll get more performance almost without thinking. And it turns out we’ve run into the end of that era. The Israelis saw that coming.”
With all the recent innovations in multicore CPU packaging, microarchitecture–the design of processor engine components–has recently assumed a secondary role in public conversation. Lately, the talk has been about what Brookwood characterizes as, “How many cores can you fit on the head of a pin?” As a result, what’s happening inside each individual core hasn’t been a front-burner topic. So if you were to judge tomorrow’s likely IDF news from a multicore vantage point alone, you might overlook an upheaval going on beneath the core-level: The so-called NetBurst architecture which was the key feature of Pentium 4 when it was introduced in 2000, is being phased out.
NetBurst had originally introduced Intel’s first 20-stage execution pipeline, and proceeded to grow the pipeline from there, having shipped a P4 with a 31-stage pipeline, according to Brookwood, and having cancelled a product that would have included a 40-stage pipeline. Longer pipelines were originally introduced, according to Intel, to enable greater pre-assessment andoptimisation of machine code prior to execution.
“A very long pipeline turns out to be extremely inefficient,” said Brookwood. “Therefore, although you felt good because you had a 3 GHz processor, in reality, it wasn’t delivering any more performance than a 2 GHz processor with shorter
pipelines. But it used a lot more power and generated a lot more heat.”
The Israeli team’s alternative was Pentium M, introduced in March 2003. As Brookwood confirmed, Intel conducted some convincing tests indicating Pentium M performance on a par with Pentium 4 in everyday, general-purpose applications– even though the P4 was expected to yield as much as four times the performance, and even though Pentium M units feature as small as 10-stage pipelines.
“So from moving from the NetBurst core to a new core based on the Israeli techniques,” added Brookwood, “I think Intel will end up with a core that scales better with frequency.” With lower power consumption, you can put two or four of
the new cores on a single chip, and still preserve what he called “reasonable thermal characteristics.” The new architecture will also mark the first time that desktop and server CPU architectures were derived from a mobile platform. As Brookwood reminded us, the Pentium III architecture was modified once to create the “Mobile” edition, and
then modified a second time to create the first Xeon processors. But the Israeli design team was first commissioned five years ago to develop a mobile processor architecture that could meet what were then considered the extreme thermal conditions of notebook and laptop systems. The solution to the mobile thermal problem became the solution to the desktop and server thermal problem a few years later. “This represents the triumph of the power-efficient design methodologies that came out of Israel,” said Brookwood, “moving into Intel’s mainstream desktop, and server lines, as well as next-generation mobile processors.”
Tomorrow’s announcements are expected to indicate that the so-called Merom processor architecture–first code-named in 2004–will serve as the basis for the Conroe desktop CPU architecture and the Woodcrest server CPU architecture.
Oftentimes, smart companies publish bad news on the heels of an otherwise good-news day. So if rumors put forth in the Inquirer this afternoon are correct that HP plans to cancel its planned orders for Itanium-based systems–in the wake of HP’s already having cancelled its collaboration with Intel on Itanium’s design–then this news could conceivably come during IDF.
While unable to confirm such rumors himself, Insight 64’s Nathan Brookwood speculated, “If HP were to turn down Montecito…that would, I think, cause a great deal of reassessment in almost all parts of the industry that touch
Itanium.”
Other announcements expected no later than Wednesday include whether Intel has stepped up its plans to proceed toward 45 nm lithography–thus bending the curve of Moore’s Law up just slightly–as well as a new, lower-wattage dual-core Xeon
processor.
Tom’s Hardware Guide from whom SOR takes content has a team in San Francisco to cover the events of the Intel Developers’ Forum as they happen. Stay in touch with us for breaking news all this week, including your first look at the new Pentiums.
EMC Steals Microsofts Thunder
In what looks like an attempt to spike Microsoft’s publicity guns, EMC has unveiled a CDP-like product that is an update to its existing RepliStor software.
The SMB mid-range Windows server-hosted software is not a true continuous data protection product. EMC said it still plans to launch true high-end CDP software soon.
By introducing the ability to trigger snapshots of file systems in RepliStor version 6.1, EMC has created a product that is comparable to Microsoft’s first ever standalone backup product, its Data Protection Manager software. Usually EMC does not announce products until they are shipping or are very close to shipping.
But there is no date set for the RepliStor update, and EMC said only that it will ship before the year end. Microsoft is expected to make the official launch of DPM soon, and that may have inspired EMC’s decision to unveil and detail a product unusually far ahead of its GA date.
Exactly as DPM, RepliStor 6.1 does not qualify as a true continuous data protection product because the Windows server-based software does not capture every change made to data. Instead it simply stores a series of snapshots of file systems, as does DPM.
On a technical basis, that separates RepliStor and DPM from true CDP products that are also aimed at backing up file level data but capture every change made to data. These products include IBM Corp’s recently launched Tivoli CDP for Files and Symantec Corp’s imminent Panther product. But RepliStor is also different from those products and from DPM in its support for Exchange email databases, and its lack of a self-service file recovery facility.
While DPM and the Tivoli products cannot yet backup Exchange databases, RepliStor 6.1 can. Score one for RepliStor’s ability to protect data for Exchange 2003, a key and almost ubiquitous application.
On the other hand, RepliStor does not provide the major advantage of a self-service web portal that allows end-users to recover lost files, speeding file recovery and eliminating what can be a major workload for IT administrators. The IBM and Symantec products both offer this service.
“We don’t have that at the moment. But at least the IT people themselves have access to the [RepliStor generated] backup data,” said EMC’s director of product marketing Rob Emsley.
RepliStor was first launched by Legato around four years ago, as Windows server-based asynchronous replication software, which mirrors file data from remote offices or departments to central locations in many-to-one configurations. Evaluator Group analyst Dennis Martin said that RepliStor began life in the mid-nineties as a product called Octopus. It was later acquired by Legato, which was itself bought by EMC in 2003.
“This is a market that’s really heating up, at least on the vendor side. There are so many suppliers trying to crack the nut. Backup has always been a problem in IT,” Mr Martin said.
RepliStor 6.1 will be able to store up to 64 file system snapshots. It will list from around $2,000 per server. The software will trigger snapshots via the Windows VSS interface, using either the Windows snapshot engine, or disk array-based snapshot tools. Using the latter will improve performance, EMC said.
Storage Wars As Western Digital Battle Seagate
As several vendors spruik cloud deals a backup storage war has broken out in Australia with two of the biggest players Seagate and Western Digital going head to head with smart new storage products.
The battle intensified yesterday as major rivals Seagate and Western Digital both announced new consumer products that offer easy backups linked to online services.
Seagate introduced its new BackUp Plus line of consumer portable drives at a media function staged – for reasons not immediately apparent – in a Sydney tenpin bowling and Laser Skirmish shoot-em-up alley.
In what B. S. Teh, MD for Asia-Pac and Japan, claimed is an industry first, the drives back up from personal computers with consummate ease – and also save, share and back-up photos and other content on social networking sites like Facebook and Flickr. They can be switched between Macs and Windows PCs without reformatting, Seagate stresses.
The company’s Dashboard software is said to enable one-click local backups as well as a simple way to save and share photos and videos on the social media sites.
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The portable 2.5 inch drives come in red, blue, silver and black, with prices starting at A$139 for a 500GB unit. There’s also a super-svelte unit called Slim, just 9.5mm thick, for $159; and a 3.5-inch desk-based drive (in basic black) starting at $179 for one terabyte – and with additional modes offering up to 4TB.
– Meanwhile, rival Western Digital announced its new “Personal Cloud” line of “MyBook” drives, said to offer integration with cloud storage service Dropbox, using the company’s WD 2go software “The new version of WD 2go lets customers move, copy and share content between their mobile device, their Dropbox and their WD personal cloud,” according to an e-mailed press release.
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