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  • ZTE Announces EV-DO Rev B on CDMA2000 System


    ZTE Corp has achieved what it claims is the world’s first EV-DO Revision B (Rev B) VoIP call on its CDMA2000 system.

    It is the first time in the industry that a CDMA vendor has achieved a 9.3Mbps download rate and 5.4Mbps upload rate.

    EV-DO Rev B allocates flexible bandwidth and offers better Quality of Service (QoS) so improving user experience.

    It is a telecommunications standard for the wireless transmission of data through radio signals, typically for broadband Internet access.

    It was designed as an evolution of the CDMA2000 (IS-2000) standard that would support high data rates and could be deployed alongside a wireless carrier’s voice services.

    ZTE has completed the first stage of achieving EV-DO Rev B and adopted 3-carrier bundling technology, with each carrier having a bandwidth of 1.25MHz.

    Effectively, ZTE’s EV-DO Rev B upgrade’s EV-DO Rev A’s software with no additional hardware equipment required.

    Both ZTE’s EV-DO Rev A and Rev B adopt an identical baseband chipset.

    The company plans to commercialize its EV-DO Rev B system in Q3 2009.

    In future, EV-DO Rev B can bundle up to a maximum of 15 carriers, with a download (forward) rate of 73.5Mbps and an upload (reverse) rate of 27Mbps.

    Li Jian, general manager of CDMA Products for ZTE, said it had launched the world’s first EV-DO Rev.B technology several months ahead of its rivals.

    "We are committed to the industry and continue to invest and speed up large-scale commercial use of EV-DO Rev.B to leverage telecom operators’ investment in EV-DO Rev A networks," he said.

  • Nexsan Launches iSCSI SAN Aimed at Standalone or Virtualised IT Environments


    Nexsan has introduced its first iSCSI SAN, which has been specifically designed and priced to give SMBs and SMEs a new value-alternative in implementing the protocol.

    The Nexsan iSeries is intended as a complete, easy-to-implement, enterprise-class SAN that is ideal for use in standalone or fully virtualised IT environments.

    It is available in two configurations which include additional storage expansion to meet customers growing data storage requirements.

    Bob Woolery, Nexsan’s senior vice president of marketing, said the iSeries gives customers flexibility and value.

    "We’ve designed the iSeries to give customers a solution with all the storage services, data protection and scalability they need at a price they can afford," he said.

    "And, we’re giving our channel partners a new value alternative in this growing market segment. We’ve truly changed the game with value."

    The iSeries offers iSCSI, Fibre Channel and NAS configurations from the same system and provides up to 1PB of storage.

    It also includes a complete suite of easy-to-use enterprise storage services, including virtualisation.

    Woolery said the iSeries was being sold for a single up-front price to affordably accommodate a company’s increasing storage needs.

    "This holistic approach simplifies pricing, removes hidden costs and licensing fees associated with competitive products and smoothly accommodates an organisation’s IT requirements as they change," he said.

    Other benefits offered by the Nexsan iSeries include:

    • Virtualised storage for flexibility and intelligent automation of routine tasks
    • High performance for running multiple demanding applications from a single high-density system
    • Simultaneous use of SAS and/or SATA disk drives in the same storage chassis for application flexibility and low-cost scalability
    • VMware-certified, ensuring high performance in both physical and virtual environments
    • Easy to deploy and manage with wizard-based setup, administration and central management of volumes, snapshots, HA/data replication, mirroring and data migration
    • High-performance with up to four RAID engines per storage system
    • Nexsan’s AutoMAID™ energy-saving technology reduces energy costs by up to 60% without compromising application performance
    • Key application support: storage pooling, virtual servers, archiving
    • High-speed, highly responsive – hyper transport bus, real-time OS, enterprise-class network chip set
    • Fully redundant and designed for 99.999% availability
    • Available immediately through Nexsan’s global network of authorized value-added resellers.

  • Seagate Targeting Datacenter Power Consumption


    Seagate is working on solving the issue of power consumption in the datacenter, according to the company’s CEO Steve Luczo.

    While not going into detail, he told InfoWorld that the disk drive maker has a competitive advantage in that field.

    Steve Luczo, CEO Seagate

    Luczo also said the storage market will bounce back from the global economic downturn sooner than other sectors because of the growing requirement for storage at both the business and consumer levels.

    He said that while IT departments could make storage efficiencies in the short-term they would eventually run out of options and have to look at new solutions.

    This could be within the next two to three quarters.

  • Hyperstone Launches New F4 Flash Memory Controller


    Hyperstone has introduced a new F4 Flash Memory Controller for high performance CompactFlash Cards(CFC) and Solid State Disks(SSD), writes Vanitha Vaidialingam for storage-biz.news.

    The memory controllers are intended for embedding into firmware to provide high reliability, endurance and rigorous fail safe features for Single Level Cell(SLC) and Multi Level Cell(MLC) based Flash Memory Solutions.

    The design is based on Hyperstone 32 bit RISC core including instruction set extensions optimized for Flash handling.

    Hyperstone’s core architecture provides both fast RISC processors for data and control functions along with powerful DSP unit for efficient algorithm execution.

    The designs use less silicon and are more power efficient with minimum software complexity.

    The Flash Memory controllers are fully compliant with CompactFlash 3.0 and compatible to 4.1 specifications.

    The controllers also offer Fast ATA supporting PIO mode 6, MDMA mode 4, UDMA mode 4 in True-IDE mode and UDMA 5 possible in fixed board implementations.

    They are designed to sustained read up to 50 MB/s and random read up to 40 MB/s; sustained write exceeding 40 MB/s with interleaving and random write up to 9 MB/s.

    The controllers have two Direct Flash Access(DFA) channels including Sector Buffers and interleaving capabilities. They support connections of up to 16 flash memory chip enables at the rate of eight per channel.

    The Error Correcting code is capable of correcting 4 symbols in a 512 bytes sector with additional CRC.

    The rate of data transfer is up to 80 MB sector.

    Host data transfer rate in UDMA mode 4 is 66 MB sector; in PIO mode 6, it is 512 bytes sector with additional CRC. Data transfer in the MDMA mode 4 is 25 MB sector.

  • How Is The Economy Affecting the US Storage Sector?


    Despite the global economic downturn it appears the US storage sector will continue to remain as busy as ever.

    The need to store increasing volumes of digital files – and to provide continuous access to them – seems to be keeping the industry buzzing with activity, writes Vanitha Vaidialingam for storage-biz.news.

    Most organizations are poor editors of digital information.

    The tendency is to retain everything and add to storage rather than spend the time and effort in weeding out and disposing of digital information that is irrelevant or redundant.

    Moreover, finding time and human resources for such second tier jobs is difficult.

    There is also the latent conviction that the new US federal court rules and other state and national regulations may require a business to produce the data at some future date.

    So, enterprises are more likely to retain the data for legal reasons than they were in the past.

    Benjamin Woo, of IDC Storage, takes an optimistic view of the outlook for the storage industry.

    "Despite the downturn in the macroeconomic conditions, our consensus is that in the short to medium-term, storage is the most resistant to macroeconomic changes," he said.

    "While there is no doubt that there will be some form of pull-back on storage investment, many of the large financial institutions, especially JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America – but also Wells Fargo and Barclays – will need to commit, or in the case of Chase, maintain, substantial IT and storage investment in the next six to 12 months, for integration of their acquired banks."

    Woo said that, while most companies will go into a capital conservation mode in the long term, they too must consider subscription storage models that are offered by online storage providers.

    The indications are that the slowing down of the economy will have its impact on the storage market initially but it will rally over time.

    The optimistic assessment in the industry is that IT organizations will move from building infrastructure to modifying infrastructure and efficiency improvement.

    This, in turn, will revitalize the storage market.

    Moreover, as companies struggle to survive, the cross currents of legal actions will tend to increase, and storage products that cater to legal discovery will drive the growth in the storage market.

    Greg Schulz, founder and Senior analyst of the StorageIO Group, said the focus will be on storage technologies "that can do more in a smaller footprint – that footprint being power, cooling, floor-space, and time in a given density.

    "This means servers [will be needed] that can do more work in a smaller space, storage for active data that can do more IOPS or bandwidth or files or e-mails or videos streamed per watt in a given footprint.

    "Or, for inactive and idle data, more capacity in a given footprint and cost point [will be desirable]."

    What will really happen, will be decided in the womb of time.

    However, there appears to be a general conviction that the storage industry’s optimism is not misplaced.

  • Nanotechnology Will Be An Integral Part of Future Storage Technology


    Michael E.Thomas, president of Colossal Storage Corporation once remarked: "In 1974, I was making 5 Megabyte disk packs – the biggest at that time in the world.

    "At the same time, IBM, Burroughs, Honeywell, and other Computer professionals said no one would ever need that much storage."

    Today organizations are constantly running out of storage space and grappling with ever increasing size requirements in data storage, writes Vanitha Vaidialingam for storage-biz.news.

    It is predicted that magnetic storage technology will soon become obsolete and hard drives will reach their paramagnetic limit in a few years.

    The search for newer and more efficient means of data storage has sparked extensive research into nanotechnology and its potential in the data storage space.

    One such invention is the ferroelectric molecular optical storage nanotechnology by Thomas. Another is the recent breakthrough in self-assembling nanotech devices that provide user with amazing storage options.

    Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley and University of Massachusetts Amherst have achieved a breakthrough in the creation of self-assembling nanotech blocks with immense potential to scale up indefinitely.

    These blocks consist of tightly packed polymer chains that were previously considered impossibile.

    Significantly, the polymer chains are different from each other and when bunched together, these molecules arrange themselves into a grid to form a block of co-polymer.

    The team used sapphire crystal to create the vast fields of blocks.

    The crystal does not break down when scaled up to form a large number of blocks.

    The facets of the sapphire are cut and heat treated to facilitate the formation of nano-scale sawtooth ridges, which resolve the problem of scale as the copolymer is formed on these ridges.

    The resultant arrangement of molecules can store electronic data as bits at the rate of 10 terabits per square inch or 1,250 gigabytes of data in an area that is only the size of a large postage stamp.

    This represents a storage density that is more than 15 times the capacity that is available in the market today.

    This technology is at a nascent stage but holds out promise. It is the first step in the direction of proving the hypothesis that it is possible to store large volumes of data in nano spaces.

    This breakthrough is exciting and interesting as it will address many of the issues relating to the increasing storage requirements of the modern world where electronics is being inducted into different aspects of our life.

    Conventional storage devices are proving inadequate and cumbersome.

    Moreover, this breakthrough also has several other implications.

    • It will revolutionize the semiconductor chip processes.
    • It will bypass the minimum size limits for photolithography and enable the production of transistors and chip interconnectors that will reduce the demand for power hungry processor chips.
    • It may also enable the creation of energy efficient photovoltaic cells.

    In other words nanotechnology will be an integral part of all future technology and gadgets and will be the power that operates them.

  • OnRelay's Ivar Plahte Wins Smartphone-biz.news' Person of the Year Award


    A true visionary, a trend spotter, truly innovative and the driving force behind OnRelay.

    Just some of the plaudits from those that voted OnRelay’s CEO and co-founder Ivar Plahte as smartphone-biz.news’ Person of the Year 2008.

    In second place was Ofer Tziperman, president and co-founder of LocatioNet, the mapping and location applications company.

    As CEO of OnRelay for the past seven years, Plahte has established himself as a key thought leader in the Fixed Mobile Convergence space.

    Prior to OnRelay, Plahte was director of IP telephony at Telenor, where he created and was the general manager of the Telecom over IP business unit.

    Ivar Plahte, CEO OnRelay

    His team produced several world-first launches and was among the first public operators worldwide to establish a voice over IP based revenue stream.

    Before Telenor, Plahte was Ericsson’s global product manager for IP Services.

    He has a BSc in Electrical Engineering and an MSc in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

    Voters who recommended Plahte spoke of his vision and drive.

    "Ivar has been at the forefront of Mobile telephony for his entire career," said one reader.

    "He founded OnRelay to develop cellular FMC and only recently has the market managed to get over the WiFi hype and start to take the cellular option seriously.

    "Ivar has been there all along, and now has his company well positioned to capture the market as it looks for the right solution."

    Others described him as a "telecoms pioneer" whose vision predicted FMC shift back in 2000 and did something about it – "picking the right tech and staying at it".

    The last word must go to one supporter, who simply said "he rocks". Praise indeed.

    The runner-up, Ofer Tziperman, has over a decade of extensive experience in international business and in the marketing of high-tech products.

    LocatioNet provides mapping and location enabled applications to tier one telecom and defense customers around the world.

    Under Tziperman’s guidance the company has become one of the leading technology providers in the LBS and C4I markets, with an international presence in Europe, USA, Latin America and Asia.

    Prior to establishing LocatioNet, he served as VP Marketing for OTI, a public high-tech company listed in the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and NASDAQ that specializes in contactless smart card technology.

    Tziperman played a major role in turning OTI from a young start-up company to an international organization with subsidiaries and front offices around the world.

    An attorney who practiced commercial and business law, he holds an LLB degree from the Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University and is a graduate of the Israeli Naval Officers Academy.

  • AmAze Clear Winner of Smartphone-biz.news' Product of the Year Award


    AmAze’s free navigation and local search service is the winner of smartphone-biz.news’ Product of the Year 2008 award.

    With 41 per cent of the nominations, the turn-by-turn GPS program was the clear winner in a field that included Fring, mobile messaging service Nimbuzz and cellular fixed mobile convergence solution OnRelay MBX.

    AmAze has carved out a strong position for itself with its wide coverage of maps, including aerial photo in Europe, North America, Australia and parts of Asia and Africa.

    In collecting the most votes amAze also got some strong endorsements from readers who universally praised the service for its features and usability.

    One user described it as an "amazing free GPS tool – kicks dust into the expensive and cumbersome to update Garmin and other GPS services".

    Another said it was "just as good, if not better, than pricey GPS programs", while someone else said the GPS navigation "looks really great…and is FREE. It doesn’t get any better".

    Runner-up Nimbuzz took 20 per cent of the votes and also earned some enthusiastic admiration from readers who praised its services in the crowded mobile IM client space – "Nimbuzz stands out for it’s stability, well thought out interface and impressive network support," said one voter.

    "Smart connection options certainly don’t hurt the product either".

    Nimbuzz is targeting mobile users and online communities with free calls, chat and more.

    The "more" includes free mobile VoIP calling (excluding data charges), conference calling, instant messaging, chat and group chat, and photo and file sending across multiple IM communities, including Skype, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo, AIM, Jabber and ICQ, plus 23 social networks, including Facebook and Myspace.

    Nimbuzz’s ability to "go beyond Skype" is a major appeal. One reader said: "I have tried many mobile instant messaging solutions, and Nimbuzz does everything I expect it to, does it well, keeps improving, and is free."

    Coming in third in the competition with 12 per cent of the vote was Fring, the mobile internet community and communication service.

    As well as its social appeal, Fring also lets users make affordable local and international calls to landline and regular cellular numbers using a SkypeOut/SkypeIn account or almost any internet voice service (SIP) such as SIPNET, EuteliaVoIP, VoIPVoIP and VoIPTalk, including from non-SIP enabled handsets.

    Among the voters’ praise for Fring was the fact the "wonderful application…keeps me available to my boss, colleagues and friends always".

    Others congratulated Fring for "supporting different VoiP providers in a single tool which can be installed in several mobile platforms", and described it as "the best software enabling you to keep in touch with all IM buddies as well as enabling you to make Voip/Sip calls".

    "It’s simple and easy to use and works well," explained a user. "Unlike similar applications it truly offers choice and freedom and is totally free. There is also free web support, free and interesting add-ons and a thriving online community."

    The fourth placed product with 9 per cent of the vote was OnRelay with its pioneering mobile PBX – the first global private mobile branch exchange, OnRelay MBX.

    It offers enterprises and operators a seamless Cellular Fixed Mobile Convergence solution and has commercial deployments in Tier 1 operators and Fortune 500 companies.

    The groundbreaking architecture has enabled OnRelay to claim to be the only cellular based FMC solution on the market able to completely replace desk phones, creating a "mobile only PBX" to disrupt the hardware intensive VoIP and WiFi markets.

    Readers described it as "the coolest thing ever – one phone does all", "the most innovative and exciting product on the market" and said "the addition of MBX to your professional life is transformative".

    One voter said: "The beauty of the smartphone is that they can save companies money because they can be used for several things.

    "In OnRelay’s case – customers can also replace deskphones with smartphones – a huge opportunity in this bear market.

    "Also a big opportunity for smartphone vendors to sell more smartphones."

    The top four entries saw off competition from a wide-ranging field of companies, including JaJah, Octrotalk, Orblive, Handyshell, Beejive IM, DinnerSpinner, MobiExplore and the N-Gage platform.

    Smartphone-biz.news would like to thank everyone who took the effort to nominate a product and to cast a vote.

  • Mirial's Softphone Video Conferencing Software Upgraded to Full-HD


    Mirial has released version 6.2 of its video conferencing software that steps the Softphone up from 720p to 1080p.

    Cristoforo Mione, business development director at Mirial, said that with Full-HD resolution up to 1080p for both decoding and encoding, the upgraded version set the pace of the evolution in video and VoIP technology, according to voip-biz.news.

    He said that whatever the PC settings and available bandwidth, the Softphone automatically optimizes configurations to provide the best user experience and video quality, even in case of floating call conditions such as bandwidth drops/peaks.

    Mione said the Softphone was "nearly like having a top-class HD camera, an enterprise-fit MCU and a shared meeting room, all in one single piece of software to be launched everyday, anytime, from any desktop".

  • OWC Doubles Speed of Mercury Pro Blu-Ray Drives to 8X


    Other World Computing (OWC) has upgraded the speed of its Mercury Pro Blu-ray/SuperDrive just four months after launching it as the world’s first external Blu-ray drive with a quad interface.

    Now twice as fast, the Mac and PC technology company device boasts 8X Blu-ray write speeds of up to 2GB per minute, blank DVDs at 16x and writable CDs at up to 32x.

    It offers FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0 and eSATA interfaces for Plug & Play compatibility with both Windows and Macintosh systems.

    The Mercury Pro Blu-ray External Drive is available immediately priced starting at USD $399.99.