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Silver Peak has launched what it claimed is the biggest WAN accelerator ever — a box able to optimize, de-duplicate, compress, and encrypt 1Gbps of WAN traffic.

Called the NX-9000, it's also the first accelerator with 10Gbps WAN interfaces "to scale for the future," said Silver Peak marketing director Jeff Aaron. It supports up to 4Gbps of bidirectional LAN-side traffic and 1Gbps of bidirectional WAN traffic, he added.

That's several times faster than the published capacity of competitors, such as Riverbed and Juniper. They can handle several hundred Mbps when several devices stacked together, or if some acceleration features are turned off. Cisco's WAE 7371 can handle a 1Gbits/s WAN but has less than half the LAN-side capacity of the NX-9000.

Aaron said that the new boxes are aimed at applications such as datacenter replication, over-the-WAN backup, and the like. That's different from the branch office focus of most other WAN optimizers, he claimed.

"The main differences between datacenter and branch needs are that datacenter devices are more often deployed out of band, not in-line," he explained. "It means they're a little more complicated to deploy, where branch boxes can be plug and play.

"The datacenter means more traffic as well, so there's throughput issues, so it needs more disk capacity. The traffic profile is different too, with fewer user applications and more host-to-host applications."

He said the NX-9000 uses the same optimization technology as Silver Peak's earlier systems, but achieves greater throughput by running on far more powerful hardware. Each appliance has dual Xeon quad-core processors, and like the 500Mbit/s NX-8000, which formerly topped the range, it has 8TB of local RAID storage for data de-duplication.

However, a rival supplier questioned Silver Peak's reliance on Intel silicon, and warned that the device could simply shift the bottleneck to the LAN side.

"I am extremely cynical on their ability to handle that traffic without using network processors," said Simon Jackson, Packeteer's director of systems engineering for Europe, adding that Packeteer (which was recently bought by Blue Coat), uses network processors in its 6Gbps PacketShaper Turbo flow-shaper.

Several others also use these specialist multi-core chips to offload high-throughput tasks, including Cisco.

Jackson continued: "If it's saturating a Gigabit on the WAN, it's significant - but that could need 20 Gbit/s of real feed."

Jeff Aaron countered that although the NX-9000's LAN-side capacity is just 4Gbps, "Scalability is more than just bandwidth — it's also the number of offices and users you can support."

It can optimize up to 256,000 simultaneous flows, meaning it can support many more sessions than its rivals, he said. At perhaps 10 sessions per user, a single NX-9000 in the datacenter connected to a Gig pipe could support thousands of users working in hundreds of remote offices, he suggested.

The new device is not cheap, however — it lists for US$259,995, which is double the price of the NX-8000.

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Read the full article by Max Chafkin online.

Note: Jake and Jeffrey (the cover boys above) will be speaking at the Seed Conference on June 6th here in Chicago. There aren’t many seats left so pick up one up while you can.

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Microsoft made available for download Tuesday the latest beta of its virtualization add-on for Windows Server 2008.

The company said Hyper-V RC1 (Release Candidate 1) is feature complete, but it did add on additional Windows guest operating system support and integration features.

A Release Candidate signifies the software is out for final beta testing before final release. The previous RC, RC0, was released two months ago.

"This is the last planned Hyper-V milestone before RTM," says Jeff Woolsey, senior program manager for Windows Server virtualization. RTM stands for Release to Manufacturing, which signifies the software development process is complete.

Microsoft said in April that it was ahead of schedule on the new timetable for release of Hyper-V and that the technology would likely show up in June or July.

The company has said since the May 2007 decision to cut Hyper-V from Windows Server 2008 that the virtualization technology would ship within 180 days of the release of the server, which was Feb. 28.

"We are feeling pretty good that it won't be up to the full 180 days," said Dai Vu, director of virtualization products and solutions in Microsoft's server and tools division, at Microsoft's Management Summit in April.

Microsoft also confirmed that its MSDN and TechNet Web sites have been running in production on Hyper-V for several weeks.

The RC1 code of Hyper-V adds support for Windows 2000 Server SP4 and Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP4. Both of those configurations are one-way and support emulation mode only.

Hyper-V  supports a number of guest operating systems: Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1 (x86), and Windows XP SP3 (x86).

In addition, RC1 simplifies the process for installing integration components for Windows Server 2008 guest systems. Integration components are sets of drivers and services that help ensure virtual machines have a more consistent state and perform better.

Microsoft also said it is releasing mouse integration support for SUSE 10 in conjunction with RC1.

The RC1 upgrade is optional for current testers given that it is not compatible with the current beta of Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008, the Microsoft tools for managing virtual environments. Microsoft says it will release an upgrade of the VMM 2008 beta to support RC1.

In addition, users running earlier betas of Hyper-V on x64 versions of Windows Server 2008 can get RC1 via Windows Update beginning May 27.

The final release of VMM is slated to ship 30 to 60 days after Hyper-V hits its RTM stage.

When Hyper-V ships, Microsoft will be providing users a third hypervisor option to go along with those already available from VMware and Xen-based derivatives marketed by Citrix,Oracle, Red Hat and Novell.

Hypervisor technology is a base technology layer that acts as the virtualization foundation for guest operating systems.

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A group of experts has released an open-source alternative to the BIND DNS server software that boasts higher performance and better security.

The new DNS server — dubbed Unbound 1.0 — is available  here. 

Unbound is a recursive DNS server, which is used by ISPs and enterprises to support DNS look-ups by users. DNS is the feature of the Internet that matches domain names with IP addresses, and it is used for Web browsing, e-mail, and Internet-based telephony.

Unbound was released Tuesday to open-source developers by NLnet Labs, VeriSign, Nominet and Kirei. NLnet Labs, a nonprofit research firm based in The Netherlands, will provide ongoing support for the software.

From its first prototype in 2004, Unbound was designed to be a faster, more secure replacement for BIND. Unbound supports DNS security extensions ( DNSSEC ), which authenticate DNS lookups but are not yet widely deployed because they rely on a public key infrastructure.

"One of the main advantages is that it's high performing. We designed it from the beginning to be fast," says Matt Larson, director of DNS research with VeriSign. "We also designed it from the beginning to support DNSSEC. Other DNS servers had to bolt that on, but we were able to start fresh."

VeriSign has tested Unbound but isn't using it in production mode.

VeriSign runs the authoritative DNS servers for .com and .net, which are the servers that respond to queries from recursive DNS servers like Unbound. VeriSign uses homegrown software it calls ATLAS for its authoritative DNS servers.

VeriSign said that by offering Unbound to the open-source community, it is trying to give back to the Internet community.

"Our goal [with Unbound] is to have an active community. We want to get to the point where the community is looking at it, monitoring it and adding patches," Larson says. "This is just another example of VeriSign's innovation. We're always moving forward."

Developed in the early 1980s, BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) is the most popular DNS server software on the Internet. However, BIND has suffered from serious security flaws, even in its current release, BIND 9.

BIND alternatives already exist, including DNS server software from Microsoft and Cisco and appliances from Infoblox, InfoWeapons and others. Another option is free DNS services from OpenDNS and NeuStar.

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Bangalore, India's outsourcing hub, has been grappling with poor roads, traffic jams, and power cuts. From Friday, the city's outsourcing and other industries in the city have to cope with a new problem — a new, and distant, airport.

Staff working in the city's outsourcing industry, who travel extensively within the country and abroad, will have to travel about 40 kilometers more on average to the city's new airport, called Bengaluru International Airport (BIA).

As a result of the additional distance, air travellers may have to spend two to four hours on the city's congested roads to get to and from the airport, according to various estimates.

The city's older airport is scheduled to stop receiving commercial air traffic on Friday. This move is in line with an agreement between the government and the investors in the new airport, which has been set up in a remote suburb of the city called Devanahalli.

The city's business leaders and some other citizens are demanding that both airports be allowed to operate, with the older airport on the outskirts of the city at least handling short-distance traffic to and from Bangalore. The Bangalore City Connect Foundation (BCCF), an organization set up by Bangalore's citizens, is demanding that government renegotiate its contract with BIA to allow for the continued operation of the old airport for some traffic.

Industry representatives, including some from outsourcer Infosys Technologies, took to the streets on Saturday to protest the closure of the older airport. Its closure will affect the growth of the city's business as the new airport is not designed to meet new projections of passenger growth, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairman and managing director of biotechnology company Biocon, told reporters.

Almost 30 per cent of IT industry workers in Bangalore travel outside India at least once a quarter, said T.V. Mohandas Pai, director of human resources and a member of the board at Infosys.

But some analysts say the new airport, though inconveniently located, is not likely to affect Bangalore's outsourcing business.

"The old airport could not handle the growing traffic, and it will be a temporary blip as people adjust to the new reality," said Siddharth Pai, a partner at outsourcing consultancy firm Technology Partners International (TPI).

Customers who travel all the way from the U.S. or Europe to visit outsourcing companies in Bangalore are not going to change their minds because of an extra two or three hour drive, Pai said. Likewise, software engineers travelling abroad will, after some grumbling, leave early to catch their flights, he added.

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An online retailer in the U.K. is taking preorders for a motherboard equipped with the upcoming Diamondville version of Intel's Atom processor for £53, or $104.

Tranquil PC's D9454GCLF Mini-ITX motherboard measures 17 centimeters by 17 centimeters and has a 1.6GHz Atom 230 processor and an Intel 954GC chipset, which includes integrated graphics. The motherboard is not a complete system, and still requires users to add memory and a hard disk, among other parts.

Diamondville is a variant of the Atom processor used in the Centrino Atom package for handheld computers. The Diamondville chips are intended to be used in low-cost laptops and desktops.

Tranquil is pitching the Atom-based motherboards as a powerful upgrade to Mini-ITX boards based on Via Technologies' rival C7 processor. The company says users can expect to see benchmark scores that are three to four times higher with the Atom system compared to the C7.

While users can order Atom motherboards from Tranquil now, they won't ship until the first week of June, when Intel plans to formally launch Diamondville at the Computex exhibition in Taipei. The Tranquil motherboard isn't the first product based on Intel's upcoming Atom chips to hit the market. Online retailer Expansys is taking preorders for Micro-Star International's Wind laptop, which also uses Diamondville.

REFERENCES:
MSI's upcoming Wind laptop priced from $560, May 12, 2008

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The unlikely story of advanced 3G cellular service in the world's most tightly controlled and secretive country has turned another chapter with the start of network trials.

Cellular carrier Orascom said on Monday that it has completed the first 3G call on a WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) trial network in North Korea, and is working towards a commercial launch there later this year.

Orascom, based in Egypt, said in January that a 25-year exclusive license to offer 3G cellular service in the country had been awarded to CHEO Technology, a joint venture in which Orascom holds a 75 percent stake and Korea Post and Telecommunications holds the remaining 25 percent.

A full commercial service is scheduled to begin in the second half of the year, Orascom said.

In January, Orascom said it intended to provide voice, data and value-added services across the network, which represents a $400 million investment.

North Korea, the world's only Communist dynasty, keeps tight control of its people. Almost all citizens are forbidden from leaving the country and there are controls on internal movement of people into the capital city of Pyongyang. Poor conditions in the country have prompted hundreds of thousands over the last decade to risk their lives and flee to neighboring China.

Almost total government control of the population means phone calls are restricted and subject to routine monitoring, according to humanitarian aid groups that monitor North Korea.

A GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) cell phone network was previously launched in the country but access was restricted in 2004 and it's now thought to be used by a handful of elite in the country.

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