InfoWorld published an article about Microsoft plan to patch DNS vulnerability in Windows servers operating systems.

Apparently Microsoft is planning to patch the vulnerability on 8th of May. It is pretty long time to wait for critical vulnerability.

Meanwhile, MS suggests a workaround which is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory...4.mspx

Here is an interesting post on Windows Home Server development blog:

http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/archive/2007/0...a.aspx

2385 bugs, almost half is fixed already.

There is still a long way for WHS to go before it is ready for public.

VMware published a report comparing performance of various versions of Xen hypervisor against its ESX server. You can read the report here: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/hypervisor_performance.pdf

Naturally ESX won in the report ( If VMware lost i guess they would not publish it).

In response to this report Simon Crosby, CTO of Xen Source, wrote his opinion defending Xen and questioning some of the benchmark results. It is available on his official blog: http://blogs.xensource.com/simon/?p=12

Xen Source also produced their own report. Unfortunately VMware prohibits publishing results of benchmarks involving VMware products unless they were approved by the company so ESX results were cut out from the paper.

Personally, i like both products. I just hope that both companies will be honest and transparent about the benchmarks so users won’t see another “Get the facts” campaign.

3GSM congress started today. This explains all the mobiles oriented news items.

Here is another one.

Neonode launched N2 mobile. Here is the photo

You can read more about it on the product page:

http://www.neonode.com/en-gb/Products/Neonode-N2/N...facts/

Preston Gralla, the author of Windows Vista in a Nutshell , wrote a short article for PC World recapping hidden costs that you may face when upgrading to Windows Vista :

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128930-page,1/ar...e.html

Steve Jobs published a short essay named ” Thoughts on Music” criticizing concepts of DRM protection for media files. You can access it here: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

It is interesting to see this sudden change because previously Apple always tried to use various types of protection to restrict iPod and Apple users. I think that more people will be interested in purchasing music online if the idea takes off and other manufacturers and media companies drop DRM techniques they use.

Melissa (myria) found an interesting issue with Skype: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=27. She claims that the application reads BIOS on the start up. This certainly looks suspicious and It would be interesting to see whether Skype developers address this claim.

Tom’s Hardware published an interesting report comparing Windows Vista and Windows XP in various areas.

You can find the report here: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/

Personally I am not surprised that Vista performed slower in many applications compared to XP. After all, Vista is quite revolutionary and i guess that it has a lot of extra code to stay compatible with previous applications. I think that Vista performance will improve after software developers start optimizing software for Vista.

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.-January 16, 2007-Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX) today introduced the world’s fastest hard drive - the Savvio 15K drive, the new 15K-rpm addition to the Savvio family of 2.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) enterprise drive solutions. The Savvio 15K drive provides the highest hard drive performance density and reliability while ensuring ultra-low power consumption, reducing thermal loads in data centers. With its combination of benefits that were created for modern storage systems, the Savvio 15K drive is well-suited for a broad range of mainstream enterprise applications in both large enterprise data centers and small, medium businesses, that lowers overall system Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

“Seagate is committed to delivering solutions that will meet the needs of today’s demanding IT environment, and no product demonstrates this better than the Savvio 15K drive,” said Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business. “The development of the 2.5-inch Enterprise form factor represented a new way of thinking. Now, with the added number of performance and capacity choices offered, many of the leading enterprise system makers are transitioning from 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch form factor enterprise solutions.”

The Savvio 15K drive was recently validated as the world’s fastest drive within the latest HP ProLiant family of servers. HP ProLiant servers with 15K Savvio drives are shipping in volume and are leading the transition of small form factor drives in mainstream enterprise environments.

“The Seagate Savvio 15K drives running in HP ProLiant servers and storage devices delivered record-breaking benchmarks at nearly 50 percent lower cost-per-transaction,” said Paul Perez, vice president, Storage, Networks and Infrastructure, HP. “The performance, reliability and power consumption benefits of deploying 2.5-inch Small Form Factor 15K drives are clear, and HP continues to drive the industry transition to them as the principal storage platform inside the HP ProLiant and BladeSystem solutions.”

The Savvio 15K drive’s unique combination of features including its 70 percent smaller size, lower power consumption (30 percent lower than any other 15K drive), industry’s fastest seek time and the industry’s highest reliability, make it the ideal storage solution for all server platforms. Designed from the ground up to meet the demanding requirements of enterprise applications, Savvio achieves the highest reliability rating ever with a 1.6 million hour Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF).

The Industry Shift to the 2.5-inch Enterprise Standard
The move to small form factor enterprise disk drives was driven by data center requirements for greater storage performance density while focusing on lowering power consumption and cooling costs. Seagate pioneered the 2.5-inch platform as the solution to these challenges and formally announced this move in May of 2003 with the support of HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and others. The inclusion of the 15K-rpm model to the Savvio family of drives marks it as a mainstream offering.

“The trend in IT is to scale down the physical size of components while scaling up capacity and performance,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research manager for hard disk drives. “Seagate’s first generation 2.5-inch 15K-rpm HDD is fitting with this trend, delivering fast I/O performance in a small package to meet the needs of demanding server applications.”

Savvio Drive Technical Details
The 15K-rpm Savvio disc drive offers a number of advantages over 15K-rpm 3.5-inch drives including: size (70% smaller), weight (1.12 lbs less), power (30% lower), drive seek time (12% faster than any other drive) and reliability (1.6 million hour MTBF). These advantages translate into system level benefits never before seen in a 15K-rpm drive.

The Savvio 15K drive was built to accommodate a wide range of applications, from grueling, rapid-fire data access brought forth in transactional environments to everyday e-mail/collaboration. The combination of high performance and reliability enables the use of 20% fewer Savvio 15K drives within a system to gain the necessary transaction performance, which ultimately means lower TCO.

Savvio Drive Availability
The Seagate Savvio 10K and 15K families of drives are shipping today. Savvio 10K.2 and 15K drives are currently available through several leading OEM customers. The Savvio 10K.2 drive will launch in the Distribution Channel this quarter as a replacement product for Savvio 10K.1 and as a transition path from Cheetah 10K.7 drives. The Savvio 10K.2 drive provides the highest capacity choices to the family with up to 146GB, while the Savvio 15K.1 drive is ideal for the most transaction-intensive applications.

HP is first to qualify and ship systems with Savvio 15K drives. Savvio 15K drives ship in the SAS interface at 36GB and 73GB capacities, the ideal sizes to meet the IOPS-intensive performance requirements of enterprise server environments. For more information about Savvio drives, in addition to Seagate’s other enterprise storage solutions, visit www.seagate.com.

Seagate Enterprise Trends Podcast
Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business, discusses the changing requirements faced in enterprise disc storage today. To download and listen to this informative Podcast, visit: http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1694/seagat...rprise

Technorati : data, hard disk, hardware, sas, sata, seagate, storage
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Dell released its amazing 2707WFP monitor. It is 27 inch (68.58 cm) LCD monitor with integrated USB hub/Card reader and a variety of inputs including DVI-D with HDCP support (this allows watching full HDTV movies using this LCD). Here is the full list of features:

Monitor Size (Viewable Image Screen): 27 inches (27-inch viewable image size)

Technorati : LCD, dell, monitor, screen
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