Business News Holding

Blog

  • i2Telecom Unveils MyGlobalTalk Smartphone Application

    Digital-Quality Cellular VoIP Application Now Available to Smartphone Users Worldwide for as Little as Two Cents Per Minute

    i2Telecom International, Inc, a developer of VoIP products and services, has announced the launch of MyGlobalTalk for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile users.

    The software allows uses Internet telephony to make international and long distance cellular calls independent of wireless carrier, smartphone handset make, or voice/data plan for as low as two cents per minute anywhere in the world.

    i2Telecom said that non-smartphone users can also access the same benefits by using the MyGlobalTalk “Bridge”.

    Paul Arena, CEO of i2Telecom, said today’s economy required business executives to be smart about how they push business forward domestically and abroad.

    He said MyGlobalTalk provided a high-quality, low-cost option for their communications needs.

    “We are the sensible solution for smartphone users who require an alternative to overpriced international rate plans, hidden fees and poor call quality,” he said.

    MyGlobalTalk enables digital-quality international and long-distance calls to be made at a cost lower than that charged by wireless carriers and, because it does not require local access to the Internet, it is functional virtually anywhere.

    Customers only pay for the calls they make with no contracts, connection fees, monthly or minimum charges.

  • Skype Questions Carriers Commitment to "Open" Networks


    Christopher Libertelli, Skype’s senior director of government and regulatory affairs for North America, has written a strongly-worded letter complaining that the major US wireless carriers are all talk when it comes to "open" networks.

    Writing to the Federal Ccommunications Commission (FCC) chairman, Kevin Martin, he said that if the Commission wanted to live up to its stated goal of making open networks more accessible, it would affirm that this policy covered wireless networks.

    Libertelli said that last week at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment conference in San Francisco, the major US carriers paid lip service to the idea of open networks, but strongly cautioned that too much choice would lead to chaos and damage the viability of their business model.

    "The attitude of the wireless carriers was perhaps best summed up in Sprint Nextel Corp,” he wrote.

    He quoted Sprint CEO Dan Hesse’s recent comment: ‘The big Internet can be daunting… There can be too much choice.’

    Libertelli continued: “This stands in stark contrast to the Commission’s wise policies designed to promote as much consumer choice as possible."

    He said Skype was mindful of the challenges wireless carriers faced in moving to an open network. But he also said it was not enough to simply talk about open networks.

    "Consumer choice, competition and free markets, not carriers acting to block competition, should win the day in wireless–now, not later," he said.

    "If the Commission believed that the transition to more open networks was going to proceed quickly, statements out of CTIA’s convention suggest just the opposite.”

  • iPhone Interface Allows Call Center Mangement


    Smoothstone IP Communications has developed a mobile interface that allows corporate call centers to be controlled from anywhere in the world using the iPod and iPhone.

    The company says Apple’s new support for corporate security standards allows it to provide a secure, enterprise solution for IT professionals to use when they are out the office environment.

    Utilizing the new technology available in Apple’s handset, clients with Smoothstone’s Intelligent Call Control (ICC) suite can now use the mobile version of the revolutionary ICC application to:

    * Manage call queues across multiple locations in real time

    * Reroute any calls to any other agent or call center location on the fly

    * Transfer held calls through a drag-and-drop interface

    * See instant statistics and analytics of call activity and agent performance

    * Listen to live calls via Bluetooth headset or speaker

    * Record and review calls for training and quality assurance

    The announcement comes a year after the initial launch of Smoothstone’s ICC suite, a completely integrated solution.

    ICC requires no customer purchased equipment, is flexibly priced according to client size, and can be tailored to each organization’s individual needs.

    ICC is a part of Smoothstone’s comprehensive managed solution for mid- to large-size enterprises, which delivers next generation applications over Smoothstone’s nationwide, private, MPLS network that utilizes proven Cisco Systems technology.

  • Toshiba Strata CIX System Wins Best VoIP Product Award


    Toshiba’s Strata CIX family of IP business communication systems has been named winner of Network Products Guide’s Best Products and Services Award in the 2008 VoIP category.

    The annual award by the Silicon Valley publication on technologies and solutions, honors products and services that represent the rapidly changing needs and interests of the end-users of technology worldwide.

    As part of the technology industry’s global awards program, this year’s Best Products and Services were nominated from all over the world.

    Rake Narang, editor-in-chief of Network Products Guide, said: “Toshiba has been awarded Best in VoIP by our readers for its proven ability to deliver solid IP business communication systems that give users flexibility, reliability, durability and migratability across the Strata CIX product family.”

    Toshiba’s Strata CIX VoIP systems range from the newly announced Strata CIX1200, offering up to 1,152 ports, to the small Strata CIX40, which accommodates up to 40 ports.

    All Toshiba Strata CIX VoIP systems can be networked together for up to 128 sites and can be customized using Toshiba’s FeatureFlex adaptability tool.

    The systems work with both digital and IP endpoints, including desk telephones, softphones, third-party SIP phones, attendant consoles, wireless phones, and more.

    Strata CIX systems offer easy migration to larger systems in the Strata CIX family and work with the same applications, including voice mail, unified messaging, IVR, ACD and reporting, video conferencing and collaboration, Web-based personal and system administration and FeatureFlex, all of which reside on Toshiba’s Strata Media Application Server (Strata MAS), a single-server solution.

  • London Council Gives Virtualisation Green Light


    Faced with 100 per cent year-on-year data growth, the London council of Hillingdon’s IT team has decided to virtualise its servers.

    With a population of almost a quarter of a million, Hillingdon is one of London’s largest local authorities.

    It has responsibility for running schools, social services, waste collection and roads within the borough.

    Now the council has created a sustainable IT environment by replacing its disparate array of servers and storage hardware with a greener virtual environment using Compellent and VMware.

    It took the virtualisation decision after being faced with the rapid growth of employees’ e-mail boxes, the need to retain documents such as benefits assessments records, and the increased use of digital images in planning applications and property and highway inspections.

    Roger Bearpark, assistant head of ICT for the Borough of Hillingdon, said they were looking for a new storage solution that could automatically manage data and drive down the cost per TB of stored data over the life of the SAN.

    “It had to provide us with affordable system resilience and also contribute to a greener IT infrastructure,” he said.

    Virtualising the servers with VMware and the storage with Compellent enabled Hillingdon to reduce 94 production servers to just three, and to reduce the number of server rooms it had from three to two.

    The subsequent power reduction from 34kW to 1.1kW led directly to Hillingdon saving GBP £20,000 on its annual energy bill.
    The green IT initiative enabled it to reduce its carbon footprint by 20 per cent over 18 months.

  • SanDisk Launches 32GB Flash


    SanDisk has introduced a 32-GB CompactFlash card aimed at digital photographers and videographers.

    At twice the size of SanDisk’s previous largest product the latest Extreme III CompactFlash is the company’s largest CF storage device.
    It has read and write speeds of 30 MBps.

    The higher-capacity card is intended for photographers using Hi-Def camcorders and will enable users to store as much as 80 minutes of 100 MBps, 10-bit, 4:2:2 HD video.

    This is of sufficient quality for today’s professional video applications, according to SanDisk.

    For photographers, the additional capacity is useful for storing pictures shot in RAW format.

    The format uses 10 times the storage space as regular JPG images, but provides higher-quality images.

    The card can operate under temperatures ranging from minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit to 185 degrees Fahrenheit.
    Pricing (all in USD): 2 GB, $45; 4 GB, $70; 8 GB, $130; and 16 GB, $240; 32 GB, $300.

  • WD Launches Half Terabyte Portable Storage Drives


    WD has launched a 500 GB capacity portable USB drive that is designed to make it easy to store a half a terabyte of music, videos or photos while being small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

    A recent consumer study conducted by WD of 1,559 external hard drive users revealed that 54 per cent of survey respondents wished that there was an automatic way to back up their computer without having to think about it.

    My Passport Elite portable drives are equipped with software to automatically back up consumers’ ever-growing collection of personal media and digital files.

    Weighing in at less than 7 ounces and designed to withstand the rigors of everyday use, the new 500 GB My Passport portable drives are small enough to fit in a pocket or backpack for easy portability.

    Jim Welsh, vice president and general manager of WD’s branded products and consumer electronics groups, said: "In our mobile society, there is an increasing desire to have data collection at your finger tips at all times.

    "The new My Passport 500 GB portable drives provide the convenience of a compact USB-powered drive with the high capacity previously only available in larger desktop drives."

    MSRP for the My Passport Essential family of portable drives is GBP £109.99 for the 400 GB and GBP £129.99 for the 500 GB capacities.

    MSRP for the My Passport Elite family of portable drives is GBP £133.99 for the 400 GB and GBP £153.99 for the 500 GB capacities.

    Features of the My Passport Elite and My Passport Essential portable drives include:

    – USB-bus powered, which eliminates the need for an external power adapter

    – Synchronisation software that lets users sync their changes and protect their information with 128-bit encryption

    – plug-and-play capability with gaming consoles to make it easy to play music and view photos and video files on a TV.

  • Broadcom Achieves Industry-first HBA Functionality


    Broadcom Corporation, a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, has announced that it is the first to demonstrate 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) iSCSI host bus adapter (HBA) functionality, along with converged networking and storage functionality, within VMware virtualized server environments.

    These capabilities will be demonstrated at this week’s VMworld 2008 exhibition on Broadcom NetXtreme II converged network interface controllers (C-NICs) that address the challenging and dynamic input/output (I/O) requirements of a virtualized server by offering networking and storage convergence, as well as real-time flexibility in I/O processing, in a low power, low cost solution.

    Besides the newly added iSCSI HBA functionality to its C-NICs, Broadcom is working with VMware to provide support for VMware virtualization including advanced networking features such as NetQueue and VMDirectPath.

    Networked storage is crucial in virtual server environments as it provides for a smooth migration and failover of a guest operating system (GOS) from one physical server to another.

    iSCSI has emerged as a high-performance, easy-to-manage networked storage technology that is popular in many virtualization deployments.

    As server and enterprise application customers strive to achieve density and compute-resource utilization objectives for their servers and enterprise applications, Broadcom’s NetXtreme II iSCSI HBA functionality, with support for Vmware virtualization, provides the converged functionality needed in a virtualized server environment by offering complete on-chip processing solutions that free up CPU resources, and increase bandwidth and performance.

    "Broadcom is working with VMware to provide support for VMware virtualization such as iSCSI HBA functionality, as well as VMDirectPath and NetQueue for networking, on our NetXtreme II C-NIC products," said Vinod Lakhani, Senior Director & General Manager of Broadcom’s High-Speed Controller line of business.

    "Today’s demonstration of iSCSI HBA functionality and convergence on a VMware ESX hypervisor marks a significant performance milestone for I/O processing on virtualized
    servers."

    "Advancements in VMware virtualization technology coupled with the increasing processing capability of hardware platforms are driving higher server consolidation ratios in data centers.

    To complement this trend, Broadcom’s innovation in high bandwidth I/O subsytems and network fabric convergence can add value for our customers by pushing the current boundaries of performance and functionality," said Brian Byun, Vice President of Global Partners and Solutions at VMware.

    "VMware is pleased to work with Broadcom in the areas of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, network convergence, and hardware offloads, and the VMDirectPath iSCSI performance shows the exciting results of one of our joint efforts that leverages VMware NetQueue and VMDirectPath I/O technologies.

  • Orange Chooses ExaStore Storage Back-end For key French Football Matches

    Orange leverages ExaStore to support VOD and live streaming of French League 1 football

    Orange, a subsidiary of France Telecom, has deployed the ExaStore Clustered NAS System to serve as the storage back-end for its production and distribution of French football’s key Championship matches via its mobile network.

    Orange’s 5.9 million subscribers will be receiving the French League 1 football on their mobile phones via VOD and general broadcast.

    Speaking at the IBC in Amsterdam, Jeronimo Munoz, Exanet’s Regional Vice President, Southern Europe, said ExaStore would ensure that Orange could always match the demand required by the ever-increasing size and quality requirements of video broadcasting.

    “Most notably, ExaStore was deployed and integrated into Orange’s broadcast environment by system integrator Cognacq Jay within two weeks,” he said.

    Cognacq-Jay Image (CJI), Exanet’s media partner in France, said it chose ExaStore for Orange because it provided the highest performance within the most economical system by independently scaling online, in real time, ensuring customers get their football when they want it.

  • New IBM System First to Process 1 Million Transactions per Minute

    IBM Unveils New x86 Servers With Latest Six-Core Intel Xeon Processors

    IBM has announced two IBM System x servers – the System x 3950 M2 and x3850 M2 – both of which feature new six-core processor technology from Intel.

    Among their benchmark achievements is becoming the first single x86 server to burst through the 1 million transactions per minute barrier on a TPC-C benchmark.

    This was achieved with an 8-socket System x server running 64-bit IBM DB2 9.5 on Red Hat Linux 5.2.

    Both the System x 3950 M2 and x3850 M2 seamlessly support IBM’s portfolio of virtualization technologies including WebSphere Virtual Enterprise.

    As part of a SmartSOA approach, WebSphere Virtual Enterprise provides application infrastructure virtualization capabilities designed to deliver greater flexibility, agility and efficiencies to clients.

    It virtualizes application servers through policy-based workload, application health and application edition management.

    James Northington, vice president of IBM System x, said that as the market leader in high-end x86 servers and the only vendor to design its own chip set for Intel-based servers, IBM was addressing the performance needs of our clients and the growing demand for scale up x86 servers.

    He said the IBM System x servers, together with VMware technology and WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, provide a powerful combination that can enable clients to reap the full benefits of virtualizing their data center.

    "The new System x servers provide the innovation our x86 clients have come to expect, with better performance and power usage than our competitors’ offerings," he said.

    Northington said the new servers would be an important element in helping clients develop a new enterprise data center, which offers dramatic improvements in IT efficiency and provides for rapid deployment of new IT services to support future business growth.

    IBM is helping clients move to new enterprise data centers by focusing on best practices around virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.

    Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Server Platforms Group, said the world-record database and enterprise resource planning benchmark results posted by IBM were testaments to the performance of the Intel Xeon Processor 7400 series with IBM’s eX4 chipset.

    "These represent more compelling examples of how Intel technology paired with the innovative fourth generation of IBM’s X-Architecture is providing IT managers’ greater performance, scalability and investment protection for their enterprises," he said.

    Other benchmarks the new servers recently topped include:

    * The highest 4-socket x86 server TPC-C benchmark, delivering more transactions per minute than any other 4-processor server.

    * Highest 4-processor performance and overall best price/performance on the TPC-E benchmark, outpacing the Dell 4-way server in both performance and price/performance.

    * The world record for 8-processor results on two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark.

    Based on eX4, the fourth generation of IBM’s chipset for Intel processor-based servers, X-Architecture, the new systems include the following advantages:

    * System x3950 M2: IBM has tuned the memory of the x3950 so clients can take full advantage of virtualization on the system with mainframe-like reliability and high efficiency power supplies and memory technology capable of up to 37 percent lower overall power consumption.

    * System x3850 M2: With special features for fast performance and efficiency, clients can support a large number of demanding business applications like those for ERP and database on a single server. The system offers flexible scalability that allows clients to easily expand their system from 4 sockets to 16, so clients can pay for more capacity only when they need it — not up front as with other vendors.

    The IBM System x3850 M2 and x3950 will be available with Intel Xeon 7400 processors in September, starting at USD $10,389 and $13,389 respectively.