XtremIO makes storage arrays based on flash memory chips, and is a would-be rival to Violin Memory, the Silicon Valley start-up that’s revving its engine for an IPO later this year, following an $80 million Series D funding round which AllThingsD reported exclusively last month.

Another player in the all-flash storage array business is Pure Storage, which came out of stealth mode last August with a $30 million Series C led by Redpoint Ventures.

News of the deal gave shares of Fusion-IO a jolt. Fusion-IO rose 50 cents, more than 2 percent, to $21.63, just as the markets opened for trading in New York. As of yesterday’s close, Fusion shares have fallen by more than 6 percent since its IPO debut last June.

Fusion is a founding member of the Flash Madness Club. Its flash memory insert cards for servers are widely used in data centers of companies like Apple, Salesforce.com and Facebook, speeding up the ability of servers to process data by eliminating bottlenecks created by conventional hard drives. Its customers also include Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM among other server manufacturers.

Well, today we heard from another bank, and its opinions about Intel’s Romley chip and what it means for data center spending couldn’t be more different. Chris Whitmore, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Market Research, published a note to clients today, arguing that Romley will indeed spur a new round of spending in corporate data centers, and that it will have an equally strong secondary effect on the fortunes of enterprise storage companies, specifically EMC and NetApp.

One of the things that Romley will encourage, Whitmore writes, is a growth in the density of virtual machines running in each server. (Remember that, more often than not, a physical server is virtualized or subdivided into many virtual servers, allowing each machine to act like several machines.) More virtual machines allows you to consolidate your physical machines and add more in the same footprint if you want, which in turn means more computing work getting done overall. Whitmore estimates that, in general, data centers will boost their workloads by 20 to 25 percent by the end of next year.

Roughly 26 percent of Romley chip purchases will be used in these virtualized environments, Whitmore estimates. And that tends to spur demand for storage to support the virtual machines. In fact, the growth of terabytes worth of storage products shipped mirrors closely the unit growth of servers. (See the graphic, below, which I screen-grabbed from the report; click to see it bigger.) In short, it’s good news for NetApp and EMC. Whitmore says both are taking share from other vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, with sales growing at north of 20 percent a year — a growth rate that’s higher than that of the overall market, which grew 14 percent last year. He rates shares of both EMC and NetApp a “buy,” with price targets of $35 and $60, respectively.

Great news for EMC and NetApp, but what does it mean for Intel? Whitmore says to expect a mixed bag. Companies wanting to boost their use of virtual machines will be buyers. Companies that aren’t into virtualization so much, maybe not. “We believe our estimate of x86 servers shipped into virtual environments growing from 21 percent in 2011 to 26 percent in 2013 could prove conservative,” Whitmore writes. “As a result, although we expect Romley to have a relatively muted impact on overall server unit demand, we do expect it to drive another leg of virtual machine growth.”

It went on to explain some of the circumstances of the attack, a little bit about what data was taken, and then later conceded that at least some of that information was used to launch an ultimately unsuccessful attack against the defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

Last year was a tough one for RSA. Its security tokens, which generate six-digit numbers that act as a second constantly-changing password to help keep intruders out of sensitive computer systems, are the backbone of the security systems of many companies and government agencies.

Art Coviello, the onetime CEO of RSA and now executive vice president of its parent EMC, will be giving a keynote address tomorrow at the annual RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. I thought it might be a good chance to talk with him about the legacy of the attack on RSA, see if there was anything new he could share about what was learned about the attack, and how what happened is shaping RSA’s thinking about the computer security landscape.

AllThingsD: Art, You’ll be speaking at RSA about a year after the infamous attack on your company. How are you approaching the speech, and what are you going to say?

Coviello: Part of what I’ll be talking about is the renewed sense of dedication we have to our mission, our responsibility to customers to regaining and maintaining their confidence. And also applying the lessons learned and sharing them vigorously, not only with our attack, but some of the other attacks that we have privileged insight into. And the bottom line is that we do hope, in the final analysis, that people have more of a sense of urgency in protecting themselves, because the truth of the matter is that we weren’t alone. The theme will be how security has to change from the kind of perimeter defenses that seemed to be dissolving even before our attack, to the requirement for more resilient security based on intelligence that you can get on a more real-time basis. So I’ll be outlining RSA’s vision for intelligence-driven security.

It will be a fairly strong call to action for the industry. We’ve had a great run in creating a trusted digital world, for all its weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. But as you see with trends like the consumerization of IT, we’ve never had a generation of employees and consumers that has been as technology-savvy as we have today, and in many instances they’re getting ahead of the enterprise IT organization’s ability to absorb the technologies they use day in and day out. And that puts an even bigger burden, from a security perspective, on IT organizations. And so they need to manage what they can’t directly control, and secure what they can’t directly control, and that means perimeters are nonexistent. So how do you get the intelligent controls you do have deployed more intelligently, so that even if things are out of reach, they’re not out of your ability to secure them? Our attack did not only raise awareness, but also the action level of people.

The attack that RSA suffered last year caught a lot of people by surprise. For those who haven’t kept track, have there been any new disclosures or information disclosed since, or is there anything new that you’ve learned?

No. And the funny part about it, as with all things in the press, if nothing bad happens, nothing gets written about. To date, there has been only one instance where it has been suggested that the information stolen from us has been used in another attack. And that was Lockheed Martin. And that attack was unsuccessful. There have been no other attacks, and believe me, we have stayed close with law enforcement and other sources, and have run down every one of these that has been reported, and there’s no substantiation of even another attempted attack, let alone a successful one. So we stand by the original decision we made in March, which was to announce that information had been stolen, to announce that you couldn’t launch a direct attack with the information stolen, and that if you took the remediation steps that we advised our clients to take, you’d be fine.

I think — and this is my theory — the attacker thought that they would be able to get in, steal the information they got from us without being caught, and then steal information from others, and combine them. And, quite frankly, because of our quick action in detecting that we were breached and some information stolen, we blew their cover. I can’t think of a reason to explain why they would go to all that trouble and you would only see one instance of a follow-up attack, and that one instance was stopped. And that got lost in all the coverage.

The impression I got was that the attacker seemed to get that this was an attack that was only partially successful, and that whoever it was — the speculation was that it was China — they only got a little of what they had hoped to get, and once detected, the jig was up. Is that more or less how you see it?

I couldn’t put it better than that. And we said that everything we saw pointed to a nation-state, but we never had the smoking gun to point to a particular country as the source of the attack.

So then what happened after the attack was that, since a lot of people and companies and government agencies had put a lot of faith in the RSA dongles and your system to keep people out, there was a bit of a crisis with that faith.

Totally true, let me step in here. That was one of the issues we had to wrestle with when the Lockheed incident happened. Because of the Lockheed thing, people thought we had to issue new tokens to everyone. That was not the case. We continued to stand by the remediation. But we had to recognize the angst and the perception among customers. And that is why we had to offer to replace the tokens. And sure, there were a number of customers who did, but the vast majority did not. No one likes the fact that it happened, but our concern right from day one was for the customers. The proof of the pudding is that our customers are still taking tokens. We’ve lost a negligible number of customers. And, in fact, we’ll be talking this week about some surveys showing that people are still buying tokens.

So you say in your remarks you plan to talk about real-time security intelligence, which is something I’ve talked about with IBM recently. Is real-time intelligence the direction where the entire security industry has to go?

First of all, the NetWitness — and this is another irony in all this — I signed the purchase and sale agreement to purchase NetWitness just a few days before the attack on RSA. And one of the reasons we bought it is that we had it deployed all across EMC. And we viewed it as being very effective in spotting anomalies in network traffic. So the issue today, especially with the porous perimeters that we have, is not whether or not you can or will be breached, because you can be breached. The issue is how fast can you spot it.

The Verizon data-breach report (PDF here) says that more than 90 percent of exfiltrations occur within hours or days of the initial breach. But about 79 percent of breaches aren’t spotted until weeks after they occur. We were able to see the attack in progress, which is why we were able to minimize the information that did get out, and we were within a blink of an eye of stopping the attack altogether. And it was based on this NetWitness technology. But since we acquired it, we have been leveraging it to see not just movements of packets, but to combine with our (Security Event Management) product to not just log information, but ingest all kinds of contextual information. This is unprecedented in security technology and, frankly, IBM doesn’t have it.

And one of the things that I’ll be saying in the keynote is that the age of Big Data has arrived for security, and it has. It is a Big Data problem. If you’re going to be able to spot these attacks in real time and have a resilient security system, as opposed to one that breaks and doesn’t bend, which is what the perimeter defenses do today, then you have to have real-time analytical capability. Only today do we have the storage and analytical capability, and the ability to deploy it at scale. One disadvantage of the attackers is that they are not legitimate. There will always be something in how they get access, or what they do, that will allows us to find them out.

The observation I made in talking with IBM last week is that there are so many new problems and threats emerging that it’s not only difficult to keep track of them, but it’s also hard to filter security vendors who offer conflicting visions and products they all say are a panacea. CIOs are getting confused, and are having a hard time calibrating their priorities. How do they find any clarity these days?

Let me read a line from my keynote: We have to stop being linear thinkers, blindly adding controls on top of failed models. It’s the model itself that is broken. If a vendor is coming to you, saying, “I’ve got this new control, just add it to this uncoordinated silo of controls that already exist,” then they are not doing you much of a service. What we’re advocating is that people double down on some of the qualitative things that have nothing do with technology. So the first element of having what we call an intelligence-driven security system is doing a better job of assessing and managing risk. And I’m going to put a challenge out to the audience, and I’m going to say that no one does this meaningfully, and no one does it well.

So what needs to change?

When I talk about understanding the threats outside-in, as well as inside-out, what I mean is not only understanding what your material assets are, but marrying that knowledge to an understanding of who might attack you, how they might come at you. The next step is getting leverage from the controls that you have. You have to disinvest in some. Let’s face it, 10 or 12 years ago, antivirus signatures numbered in the tens of thousands. Now they number in the tens of millions. How can that make any sense? As soon as you have a signature, someone has a new virus to overcome it. It’s these static models that don’t bend, but break, that have to change. The controls that we have have to be more intelligent.

The e-commerce giant (a term typically reserved for Amazon in these woods) is one of the larger examples companies from the Bay Area that are setting up shop here and looking to soak up some of the Northwest’s rich engineering talent.

Other companies with satellite offices in the Seattle area include Google, Facebook, Zynga and Salesforce.

“I’m surprised I ended up at eBay, but the story is compelling,” said Ken Moss, who was hired in November to be eBay’s VP of managed marketplaces technology; Moss is GM of the Redmond office.

A long-time Microsoft employee whose claim to fame includes inventing the Pivot table in Excel, Moss more recently co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology and later on stock market prediction.

He said eBay’s dedication to the region is one of the biggest selling points for recruitment.

Most of the 75 employees that currently work there were hired over the past few months, and a small team has been here for seven years. Among the newbies I met were a number of Microsoft veterans who had been there for 12 to 15 years.

Moss says he will report directly to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges, which is “a signal to the whole company that diversified development is for real.”

“We are first-class citizens,” Moss said, referring to sometimes strained relationship between remote workers and a company’s headquarters.

Eric Brill, VP of eBay’s research labs, is also based in the Redmond office, and has been working part-time there since joining the company in 2009.

Moss said eBay will be looking to hire a range of technologists, from college graduates to senior leaders, including developers, testers, researchers, data miners and other positions.

While I was at the office on Tuesday, the mountains were peeking out from the clouds and were easy to spot from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fourth floor. It was easy enough for everyone to have a window seat in the open-floor plan.

Although the employees just moved in on Monday, a sign outside the building already announced eBay’s presence. Inside, workers were busy putting the final touches on the space to make it feel like eBay. Primary colors of red, blue, yellow and green highlighted the office walls; with a bit of Seattle flair, conference rooms were named after Northwest tribes such as Puyallup and Quinault (and other names that might be difficult for San Jose-based employees to pronounce).

But missing were some of the perks that some recruits expect these day — no shuttles to and from work or fancy cafeterias, for instance. 

In fact, eBay has a long way to go to compare with what Google has done here. Since entering the market seven years ago, Google has hired more than 900 employees, spread across two locations, a spokesperson confirmed.

One office is in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood; the other is on the Eastside.

The two offices are geographically divided by Lake Washington, which can be crossed by one of two floating bridges — or by boat, if you are crafty enough. The traffic bottlenecks make for a horrendously notorious commute, so having two locations that straddle both sides is a huge perk — like having offices in both San Francisco and San Jose.

Because of Google’s size here, many of its perks are similar to its Mountain View headquarters, including free meals prepared by chefs, frozen-yogurt bars and other, mostly food-based, luxuries.

In eBay’s case, the new digs are located deep on the Eastside, a couple of miles past Microsoft in Redmond, and roughly 15 miles from Jeff Bezos’s empire in downtown Seattle. Recently, Amazon relocated its headquarters to a brand-new campus in South Lake Union, a neighborhood being revitalized by former Microsoft executive Paul Allen.

Other outside companies that have also established sizable tech centers here include Facebook and Zynga. A couple others have gained offices through acquisitions. Electronic Arts, for instance, now has a large office here, after acquiring PopCap; EMC now has big expansion plans here, after purchasing Isilon.

And Geekwire, a Seattle-based technology blog, is good at keeping an ongoing tally, including recent moves into the area by Jawbone and SweetLabs, a San Diego-based start-up, based by Intel Capital and Google Ventures.

Two years ago, Facebook opened an office in the heart of downtown Seattle. It plans to move soon to a 27,000-square-foot space that will have room for about 135 employees. The 70 or so engineers in the office today have worked on projects such as video calling, the Facebook iPad app and other big issues, such as security.

Last April, social game maker Zynga opened an office in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, hoping to absorb some of the game talent here, spawned from Xbox and Nintendo, and cloud-computing knowledge from Amazon. It has 50 employees today, but declined to say how many it planned to hire in the near future.

As with most of these companies, eBay believes it can find a diversity of talent here that can’t always be easy to hire in the Bay Area.

As a Seattle native, and having covered tech here for the past 12 years, including an eight-year stint at the Seattle Times, I might not be the most unbiased on the subject. But I’ve seen first-hand the breadth of talent here, from Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile and many others, including a strong start-up pool.

Despite that, the local tech community often suffers from an inferiority complex when it compares itself with the Bay Area, which is much larger. Still, it seems that Silicon Valley companies are finding a number of excuses to travel north to drink from the area’s plentiful tech waters.

The Hopkinton, Mass., company, which sells data-center products, has posted strong results of late as customers seek efficient ways to store and access mounting troves of documents and media. But worries have emerged that macroeconomic conditions are causing softness in tech spending.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Fast forward to October, and Slootman is not only CEO of a new company, ServiceNow, but is getting his old band from Data Domain — which he sold to EMC in 2009 after a takeover battle with NetApp — back together.

So what is ServiceNow? It was started in 2003 by Fred Luddy, the former CTO of help-desk management outfits Peregrine Systems and Remedy, one of which is now part of Hewlett-Packard, the other part of BMC. The ServiceNow idea is basically to compete with HP and BMC by replacing those old on-premise help desk management applications with a cloud-based software-as-a-service offering.

ServiceNow has grown like crazy, doubling its sales every year for eight years in a row — it now has 500 employees and boasts $130 million in recurring revenue. Slootman joined as CEO in April. And now he’s hired a bunch of his old buddies from Data Domain to join him.

Having earlier in the week tapped Arne Josefsberg — a 25-year Microsoft veteran who was most recently general manager of the Windows Azure service — as its chief technology officer, ServiceNow has just hired a batch of Data Domain guys away from EMC:

• Michael Scarpelli, the former CFO of Data Domain will now be ServiceNow’s CFO.
• Dan McGee, the onetime senior vice president of engineering, will be — you guessed it — senior vice president of engineering.
• David Schneider will be senior vice president of worldwide sales and service, taking the same title he held at Data Domain.

Though people know Slootman primarily for his work in the storage business at Data Domain — which he ultimately sold to EMC for $2.1 billion — he calls his journey into that line of business a “diversion.” Before Data Domain, he was a senior executive at Borland Software. “Before I was a storage guy, I was an applications guy. I worked in the software layer, so this is right in my wheelhouse,” he told me. “People say the cloud is hot, but what’s even hotter is cloud management, because people need software to manage it, and we’re right smack in the middle of that set of issues.”

So what’s the plan for ServiceNow? To kick things up a notch, naturally. “We’re getting the company IPO-ready,” Slootman says. And while it hasn’t hired any bankers yet, it’s not for nothing that Slootman just brought in a team of trusted execs who were along for the ride with Data Domain’s 2007 IPO and subsequent acquisition.

If and when it happens, a ServiceNow IPO will be rather different from so many others in recent history. ServiceNow is already cash-flow positive: It has $70 million in cash on the balance sheet, Slootman says, and started with practically no venture capital. It took a small $2.5 million round from JMI Equity in 2005; in 2009, Sequoia Capital invested by buying out some employees’ shares, and Sequoia’s Doug Leone joined the board of directors.

So what happened at Greylock? “I found out that I don’t have the temperament or disposition or DNA set to be a venture capitalist,” Slootman told me. “A lot of people told me I wouldn’t last, and they knew me better than I knew myself. If you’re going to fail at something, it’s best to fail fast and move on to the next thing.”

The end of the search comes just as suddenly as it began, with Dirk Meyer’s surprise resignation in January. The search was a tough one, in no small part because AMD — whose business is already complicated by the fact that it has to compete with Intel — is widely seen as missing the boat on key new markets like mobile computing and tablets.

It’s equally surprising that there were no leaks about this hiring, though word had circulated that several A-list executives had been approached and turned the job down. Among them: Pat Gelsinger, COO of EMC and a former CTO of Intel, said no twice; both Michael Capellas, the former CEO of WorldCom and Compaq, and William Nuti, CEO of NCR, turned down AMD’s inquiries.

So, who is Rory Read? His bio at Lenovo says he led that company’s American unit to a $140 million surge in profitability in 2007, and revenue grew 14 percent on his watch. Before that, he spent 23 years at IBM — remember that Lenovo bought out IBM’s PC division for $1.75 billion in 2005.

AMD shares rose 10 cents, or more than 1.5 percent, as of 10:40 AM Eastern time.

Next we saw Violin Memory — which makes flash-based storage arrays that are intended to make enterprise applications run faster — land $40 million in venture capital funding.

Now we see a third player entering the “flash madness” narrative. Pure Storage is coming out of stealth today, announcing its plans to sell flash-based storage arrays. It is also announcing that it has landed a $30 million C-round led by Redpoint Ventures, with Samsung Venture Investment joining. (Yes, that would be the venture capital arm of the South Korean electronics giant that happens to be the world’s biggest manufacturer of flash memory.) Greylock Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures also participated. The latest round brings Pure’s total funding raised to date to $55 million.

So what is Pure Storage all about? I met up with CEO Scott Dietzen last week and got the download.

The fundamental problem with enterprise storage is that hard drives just can’t keep up with everything else that’s gotten faster in the data center. Flash memory is fundamentally faster, it uses less energy and it takes up less space. We all know this.

The problem with flash is that it has always tended to be more expensive than hard drives. Today, you can buy a one terabyte hard drive for $100 or less. But just try getting that same amount in flash memory and see if the price isn’t, well, a lot higher.

The same principles apply in the data center. CIOs would love to convert to flash-based systems, as long as they’re reliable and affordable and work with the applications and other hardware they already have.

Pure Storage is essentially promising to deliver just that, Dietzen says. The company’s first product is an all-flash storage array that is 10 times faster and 10 times smaller than hard-disk-based systems. It’s called the Pure Storage FlashArray, and it is being aimed at mainstream enterprises in a manner that’s easy to deploy.

Pure’s founders are John Colgrove — one of the founding engineers at Veritas, now part of Symantec — and John Hayes, a founding engineer at Bix, which was ultimately swallowed up by Yahoo. Dietzen hails from Yahoo as well, by way of its acquisition of Zimbra, where he was CTO.

An early key hire was Michael Cornwell, who was lead technologist for flash at Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle). Cornwell also worked at Apple, where he was Manager of Storage Engineering for the iPod division, and oversaw that product’s transition to — you guessed it — flash memory. Remember the first iPod nano? That was his baby.

Another key name: Greylock venture partner Frank Slootman, the former CEO of Data Domain, is on Pure’s board.

So what’s so special about a storage array built on flash memory? “Disks get slower every year,” Dietzen says. “Intel says processors have gotten 175 times faster over the last 15 years.” Disks just keep getting more data packed onto them, which doesn’t really make them any faster. The mechanical arm inside the disk that grabs data from the platter really can’t go much faster. “Disks today are comparably slower than tape was 15 years ago,” he says.

This creates a problem. Storage needs are going up, but hard drives are slowing data centers down, preventing them from reaching their full potential. It’s only because of cost — about $5 per gigabyte — that hard drives are still appealing. Enterprise-grade flash, on the other hand, tends to cost $40 to $100 per gigabyte, and because flash is historically less reliable, you have to buy double what you really need.

Pure’s play is to get over the cost hurdle. Dietzen says the company can get the cost down to $5 per gigabyte and less.

How does it do that? By reducing the amount of data you actually store. What happens in enterprise environments is that various bits of data get copied and recopied, over and over. Imagine a big filing cabinet with 50 copies of each document scattered around in different folders, when you really only need one. Suddenly the size of that file cabinet need not be so big. The same applies in data storage: Why bother having 10 copies of the same block of data, when one or two will do?

Using a technique known as deduplication, a system can eliminate all those unneeded copies and thus streamline the whole operation. Deduplication, combined with compression, was the primary principle behind Slootman’s Data Domain, which is now part of EMC.

But deduplication is expensive on hard drives, and really doesn’t make sense. Because the mechanical arm in a hard drive is always searching around for where its next needed block of data is to be found, if you employ deduplication, you end up with a bunch of reference signs telling the arm where to go, Dietzen says. The end result is that the disk has to spin more, not less. Flash memory chips don’t have that problem. “We make that process fast, because there’s no performance hit to the deduping process,” he says.

On top of that, Pure has created some algorithms that make the process a lot more granular than on hard-disk-based systems, by working with smaller disk-sector sizes. How small? He wouldn’t say exactly.

Unlike other storage companies — like, say, EMC — Pure’s array, Dietzen says, is built from the ground up for running flash. “The disk-centric companies are slotting flash into places where disks used to be, but they’re not changing the software to take advantage of the flash, to protect the flash from uneven wear and other things.”

A few early companies have tried the hardware, among them the law firm of Fenwick & West, whose CIO Matt Kesner is quoted in Pure’s press release as saying that the data used for various workloads was reduced from 50 to 90 percent.

One key thing that’s going on in the data center these days is virtualization — running several virtual computers within one single physical computer. When you run a lot of virtual machines, you have a lot of data that, like the paper in that big file cabinet, is essentially the same. Dietzen says that Pure’s flash array is able to eliminate a lot of that data. “Even if those virtual machines are a mix of Windows and Linux, there are a lot of commonalities between them,” he says. It’s not uncommon to see the data footprint for virtual machines reduced by a factor of 15 or 20 to one.

And that has caused some interesting reactions among early customers trying out the array. “Some people try it and are shocked when they put 15 terabytes on it and see there’s only one terabyte and think we’ve lost a lot of their data,” Dietzen says. “It’s a little scary at first, but then they run all their workloads and see all the data is there.”

The bigger news is that Dave DeWalt, the McAfee president who saw the company through its $7.7 billion acquisition by Intel last year, is departing, though he will remain on McAfee’s board.

It’s not the first time that DeWalt has taken a company into a large acquisition. In 2003, he was the CEO of Documentum, which was acquired by storage giant EMC. He’s also chairman of the board at Polycom and recently joined the board of Jive Software, the pre-IPO social enterprise concern where former McAfee director Tony Zingale is CEO.

Last month VentureBeat reported he was going to Palo Alto Networks, a security start-up backed by Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners and JAFCO Ventures.

DeCesare joined McAfee in 2007 and had run its global operations, including manufacturing, facilities, and worldwide sales. Gebhart joined McAfee in 1999. His most recent role was running the retail and direct web sales strategies for the consumer, mobile and small business units.

“Following a very robust auction, we are pleased at the outcome of the auction of this extensive patent portfolio,” Nortel Chief Strategy Officer George Riedel said in a statement. “The size and dollar value for this transaction is unprecedented, as was the significant interest in the portfolio among major companies around the world.”

The winning bid requires approval of both U.S. and Canadian courts, which the company will seek at a joint hearing expected to take place on July 11. Nortel said it will work with the winning bidders in an effort to close the sale in the third quarter.

The consortium won the bidding, but a number of other players had publicly expressed interest or were believed to be interested in the patents, including one of the eventual winners — Ericsson — and Google, which had placed the initial $900 million bid to begin the auction process. Google had justified its initial bid by saying that patents are necessary given the increasingly litigious environment these days.

Google, as well as its hardware partners, face a number of lawsuits related to Android. Apple, for example, has sued HTC, while Oracle has sued Google directly and Microsoft also has claimed Android hardware infringes on its patents, suing both Motorola and Barnes and Noble.

The patents covered a broad range of areas, Nortel said, including all manner of telecommunications and networking technologies — wireless and 4G wireless, among others — as well as additional areas such as Internet search and social networking.

Even with the cash haul, Nortel said it still doesn’t expect to have any remaining value for common shareholders once it completes its bankruptcy protection hearings.

It is in stealth mode no more. The company today took the wraps off at least some of its plans and revealed the closing of a $9.2 million Series A funding round that also includes investments from Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Levine is joining Bromium’s board.

Its founders are Gaurav Banga, the former CTO of Phoenix Technologies; Simon Crosby, the former CTO of the Data Center and Cloud Division of Citrix; and Ian Pratt, the current chairman of Xen.org and another Citrix veteran. Both Pratt and Crosby joined Citrix after it acquired the open source virtualization company Xensource in 2007.

Bromium is turning out to be a bit of a reunion of former Xensource execs: Frank Artale, a managing director at Ignition who was also a Xensource exec, is joining Bromium’s board as well.

So what does Bromium plan to do? It won’t say, but I got a few hints from Simon Crosby, Bromium’s CTO. “The timing of this is perfect to what is going on right now with all the attacks that have been going on recently,” he said.

The attacks against EMC’s RSA security products, and also on Google’s Gmail, he says, were carried out via the client — that is, end user devices like a PC, a smartphone or a tablet. “Bromium believes that getting to a secure era in cloud computing requires securing both the client and the cloud.”

And how to get there? Again, he wouldn’t say exactly, but he did point the way: Virtualization. The technique of creating numerous “virtual” computers that run concurrently on a single physical host computer has been a fundamental development in the evolution of cloud computing. “Everyone I think knows that virtualization can help with security, but no one has really delivered an elegant solution that enhances security through the use of virtualization,” Crosby told me. “This is where I think we can strike a blow for the good guys.”

For another hint, look at Intel’s recently closed acquisition of security software concern McAfee. “Intel gets that security needs to move closer to the hardware, and we would agree with that,” Crosby said. McAfee’s CTO, George Kurtz, is on Bromium’s board.

Bromium marks the second security start-up that Andreesen Horowitz has invested in recently. The other was Silver Tail Systems. And it probably won’t be the last. As AH founder Marc Andreesen said in his appearance with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D9, he loves security. Why? “The threats keep morphing.” Indeed they do.

This is exactly the sort of problem I predicted in January. That Hurd, who is also a former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and of NCR before that, and Gelsinger, a former CTO of Intel once considered a possible successor to Paul Otellini, have been approached is not surprising, given their tech and managerial bona fides. Nor is the fact that they turned the job down.

The third name jumps out at me simply because I’m not familiar with Greg Summe. His bio on the Carlyle Group site says he spent 20 years as chairman and CEO of PerkinElmer, the $2 billion health sciences company, and before that, he ran the Avionics business at AlliedSignal, now part of Honeywell.

The search is being run by Heidrick and Struggles, Bloomberg says, and the fact that Summe was approached indicates how widely the company is casting its net. The clock, however, is ticking. When I last spoke to someone at the company, not directly involved with the search, I was told that the plan was to have a new CEO named before its next earnings report, scheduled for July 21. That’s 36 days away.

Historically, this is unlike AMD, which has always taken care to have a managerial bench, and like most big companies, has typically had a CEO successor waiting in the wings. Former CEO Dirk Meyer (pictured) was named COO in 2006, tapped by then CEO Hector Ruiz, who had himself been recruited from Motorola’s Semiconductor unit (now Freescale) to succeed AMD’s founding CEO, the colorful Jerry Sanders. Ruiz, however, had been recruited in 2000 because of the surprise resignation in 1999 of AMD’s heir apparent, Atiq Raza, who’s now a tech investor, backing, among others, Violin Memory.

That’s not to say there aren’t internal candidates who could step up. Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s products group, has been mentioned as on the list for consideration, though the board has favored an external candidate from the start. But the company has been bleeding talent. Two other internal contenders bolted in February — Bob Rivet, AMD’s onetime COO under Meyer, and Marty Seyer, the well-regarded senior vice president for corporate strategy, who in 2006 personally landed the deal to sell the first AMD server chips to Dell (until then an Intel-only shop) and had been known to occasionally jam with Ruiz on the electric guitar. Other senior managers are bailing out as well. Just last week Jeff VerHuel, corporate vice president of platform strategies, left AMD to join SMSC as its head of engineering.

Meyer’s sudden departure is said to have come after a row with the board of directors, impatient that AMD is not showing up in any meaningful way in the market for chips for mobile devices. The days when it was dealing perennial market leader Intel bruising punches in the punishing business of selling server chips are over. And its overall share of the market for PC and server chips has slipped to 13.2 percent versus Intel’s 86.5 percent as of March, according to Mercury Research. It still makes a compelling case as an alternative supplier for chips in notebooks and desktop PCs, as The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, but Intel’s lead, given its powerful manufacturing infrastructure — AMD no longer owns its own factories, opting instead to farm those duties out to GlobalFoundries, its onetime manufacturing arm — will as the years progress prove ever more difficult to erode even incrementally.

And even trying will increase the operational costs of an already profit-challenged company. AMD delivered profits in 2009 and 2010, but only after undergoing a massive restructuring to rid itself of its manufacturing operations. Still, the profits are thin: In 2010, AMD reported income of $471 million on sales of $6.5 billion. Compare that to Intel’s $11.5 billion profit on nearly $44 billion in sales, and you see how hard a time even the new, leaner, fabless AMD has competing with Intel.

Competing with Intel for share of its traditional markets is hard enough. If AMD’s board is determined to push the company into the business of selling chips for mobile devices, the path to success looks nearly impossible. Just look at the troubles Intel is having in that space competing with ARM Holdings and its numerous licensees, which include Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Texas Instruments to name but a few. When it comes to mobile devices — tablets and smart phones — ARM-based chips are as ubiquitous as x86 chips are in PCs and servers: They are the standard. Intel’s low-power Atom-based chip has so far been largely unsuccessful in penetrating that business. And if Intel is not scoring any significant wins there, why would anyone want to take on the job of leading AMD into a likely failure? No wonder potential candidates are finding it easy to say no. Bloomberg quotes Gelsinger: “I said no, and I said no again.”

So where does that leave AMD now? There are two paths. First, consider an internal candidate to lead the company. As more external candidates spurn AMD’s approaches, the list of objections AMD’s board may have to hiring internally could shorten. Bergman may get a second more serious look.

The other is to sell the company to someone bigger. That’s another complicated question, mainly because with the terms of its settlement with Intel (or what I like to call the Treaty of Maui) and the terms of its complicated patent-cross licensing agreements that date back the the 1980s, any buyer would have to first pass muster with Intel or find themselves in a very expensive lawsuit. Then there’s the fact that AMD is 20 percent owned by Mubadala Development Company, the investment arm of the Arab Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Buying AMD — at current valuations it would take about $7 billion — would be, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, a “big bag of hurt.”

Even private equity players who specialize in buying troubled companies, fixing them up and spinning them off at a profit, are wary of AMD, having learned well the lessons of the disastrous 2006 buyout of Freescale by the Blackstone Group, Carlyle, TPG Capital and Permira Advisers.

Ultimately there will be no easy options at AMD. No surprise, its shares are trading down by 11 cents or more than 1 percent as of 9:45 am New York Time this morning.

Later, after RSA described how it was attacked, the defense contractor Lockheed-Martin found its systems under attack. EMC admitted that its technology was breached in the Lockheed incident, and has since offered to replace the tokens of affected customers. Long a lynchpin of computer security at many companies and agencies doing sensitive work, there’s no question that the reputation of the SecurID system has been hurt.

Since the first attacks against RSA were disclosed, many of those organizations that have relied on the tokens have been trying to figure out what to do, and whether or not they can still trust them. One of those organizations was the National Security Agency, the super-secret spy agency who sets IT security policies throughout the U.S. government’s intelligence and defense establishments.

The unclassified document below is an internal advisory from the NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate concerning its recommendations. If your company is among those coping with the headaches that are arising as a result of all this, I thought at the very least it would make for interesting and hopefully useful reading. Granted, this document was issued in March, which was before RSA came clean on the details of the attack, but it may prove useful nevertheless.

NSA RSA Advisory

In a letter to customers Monday, the EMC Corp. unit openly acknowledged for the first time that intruders had breached its security systems at defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The company says that because its information security team detected the attack right away and took aggressive action to ward it off, its systems remain secure.

Reuters is reporting that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department have offered to help Lockheed determine the extent of the attack. It’s not known as yet if any data was taken or who the attackers are. Reuters is also citing a “person with direct knowledge” saying the attackers had broken into sensitive Lockheed Martin networks, and similar networks run by other U.S. defense contractors.

While there’s no official word as yet regarding what kind of attack it was, Reuters is citing that same person as saying the attackers created duplicate SecureID devices. These are the electronic key fobs that generate a new numeric sequence every 60 seconds which are used in combination with a personal identification number to create a two-factor authentication system that is intended to keep intruders out of sensitive networks.

The tokens come from RSA, a unit of EMC, whose systems were attacked in March. In April it disclosed that it fell victim to a phishing attack.

EMC isn’t saying anything concerning the Lockheed incident, but Bloomberg News is reporting that the company is speedily replacing existing key fobs with new ones as a way of remediating the damage.

All of this is yet another example of how the Internet has gotten scary in recent years. The knowledge and capabilities to launch attacks on the systems and networks used both in sensitive military work and in the industrial systems that control the machinery required for modern life have made those networks increasingly tempting targets for people who want to have an impact.

There’s no indication as yet that the parties who carried out the attack against EMC are the same who have attacked Lockheed, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suspect they’re related. That would make it a fairly sophisticated, multi-phase attack. What the target may ultimately be is anyone’s guess.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a U.S. defense contractor had been attacked. In 2008, a BusinessWeek cover story profiled an attack against Booz Allen Hamilton, also carried out via phishing.

Going after the systems used by defense contractors to steal jet designs is one thing. Attacking systems like the power grid–deemed by the government to be “critical infrastructure”–is quite another. It’s the fear that these systems could come under attack just as readily as any other that keeps the government funding numerous “Cybersecurity” efforts.

You can see a little of one such facility–one that’s probably seeing action as events unfold–in the CNBC documentary “Code Wars,” which airs tonight on that network. While TV documentaries are generally not known for their ability to accurately convey the complex story that computer security often is, security professionals I know who’ve watched it have described it as “surprisingly good.” Below that is Lockheed’s full statement disclosing the attack.

BETHESDA, Md., May 28, 2011 — On Saturday, May 21, Lockheed Martin detected a significant and tenacious attack on its information systems network. The company’s information security team detected the attack almost immediately, and took aggressive actions to protect all systems and data. As a result of the swift and deliberate actions taken to protect the network and increase IT security, our systems remain secure; no customer, program or employee personal data has been compromised.

Throughout the ongoing investigation, Lockheed Martin has continued to keep the appropriate U.S. government agencies informed of our actions. The team continues to work around the clock to restore employee access to the network, while maintaining the highest level of security.

To counter the constant threats we face from adversaries around the world, we regularly take actions to increase the security of our systems and to protect our employee, customer and program data. Our policies, procedures and vigilance mitigate the cyber threats to our business, and we remain confident in the integrity of our robust, multi-layered information systems security.

Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., Lockheed Martin is a global security company that employs about 126,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. The Corporation’s 2010 sales from continuing operations were $45.8 billion.

Remember, if you will, that RSA disclosed it was under what it described as an “extremely sophisticated attack” in March. Later in April, the EMC-owned security outfit disclosed some of the anatomy of the attack, though it didn’t say much about what information was taken.

A few days ago, Robert Cringely reported that a major U.S. defense contractor had a very bad weekend, as a network issue took down remote access, meaning that anyone who routinely worked remotely had to go instead into the nearest office. The way he tells it, the incident was followed by word that all employees using the tokens would be issued new ones and would be required to change their passwords. The tokens are used to provide two-factor authentication to the corporate network from outside the firewall that’s meant to keep outsiders out.

Obviously, word of a network disruption like this is disturbing on many levels, not the least of which is the fact that Lockheed Martin works on some of the country’s most important and most sensitive defense projects, like the F-22 and F-35 jet fighters.

EMC isn’t commenting on the incident. But Reuters is quoting Steve Winterfeld of TASC, a company spun off from Northrop Grumman, as saying RSA hasn’t provided enough details on how its network was breached, and that this has led him to consider the RSA devices as no longer secure. People are, he says, “freaked out.”

He’s likely not alone. As of 2009, there were more than 40 million people either using RSA tokens or RSA number-generating software on their smart phones.

The order is said to coincide with the forthcoming release of a new product that Isilon is expected to announce next week.

So huge an order for data storage would coincide with the construction of Apple’s huge data center in Maiden, N.C., and that’s expected to be the hub for a new version of iTunes that relies more on storing media in the cloud and less on using its customers local hard drives.

If you have trouble getting your head around the petabyte, the fine folks at another EMC unit, the backup service Mozy (soon to be a unit of VMWare) produced this fascinating graphic. As they tell it, one petabyte is enough to store more than 13.3 years worth of HD video, meaning 12 petabytes would be enough to store nearly 160 years worth.

The scale of the storage infrastructure, if true, would amount to another potentially intriguing clue to the environment Apple is using inside its data center. Previously it had disclosed in job ads on its Web site that its hardware there will include a mix of systems running Mac OS X, IBM’s AIX, Oracle’s Sun/Solaris, and some Red Hat Linux-based machines.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple’s Area 51: The Truth Is Out There
• Apple’s N.C. Data Center Intended for iTunes, MobileMe
• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center
• That’s Apple’s New Data Center? Where’s the Giant Glass Cube?

Conceding that Cisco has been “slow to make decisions” and “been surprised where it should not,” he promised to take “bold steps and make tough decisions.” The consensus appears to be that divestitures are coming.

Cisco has been an acquisition machine during the last decade, but has little to show for it. Obvious candidates for divestiture are its consumer products business, which includes the Linksys brand of home networking gear, and Pure Digital, the makers of the Flip Digital video cameras. Consumer products carry lower margins than other products, and Cisco’s already got enough problems with its gross margins, which have stood at 64 percent since 2008 and gone nowhere.

One problem, the analyst Brian Marshall of Gleacher and Co. wrote in a note to clients issued yesterday, is that Cisco has so thoroughly dominated its core networking markets that it has effectively saturated its market. In looking for new areas to grow into, Cisco has been forced to look for what Marshall calls “adjacent markets,” like consumer networking gear, TV set top boxes, among others, both of which sap the potential for margin growth.

And while it’s hard to argue that Cisco’s low valuation doesn’t create a buying opportunity, there’s a lot more to consider, Marshall says. While Cisco grew its total revenue base by 7 percent from 2008 to 2010, a group of smaller independent competitors–Marshall calls them the “chimps” compared to the Cisco “gorilla”–like Juniper, Checkpoint, F5 Networks, Aruba Networks and a few others–collectively added roughly the same amount of incremental revenue that Cisco did during the same period, and nibbled away at Cisco’s dominance in the process. “Innovative companies can still have an impact in the technology industry even when competing against an 800-pound gorilla,” Marshall wrote.

One ace in Cisco’s deck, Marshall says, is VBlock, a data-center-in-a-box made by VCE, a company Cisco jointly owns with EMC and VMWare, and run by former Compaq CEO Michael Capellas: Cisco adds the networking component, servers and management software, EMC brings the storage and VMWare brings the virtualization. The product is just getting off the ground, but VCE recently said it has a pipeline of orders worth $1 billion and 120 interested customers. It is at least something for Cisco bulls to hang their hats on for now.

Initially, it released no details about how the attack was carried out. Now, RSA–which is a unit of storage giant EMC–has gone into some detail concerning how its systems were breached, in a blog post by Uri Rivner, whose title is Head of New Technologies, Identity Protection and Verification. It all started with phishing emails. Over the course of two days, two groups of emails were sent to a small group of employees, none of them high profile, nor apparently especially senior. Though RSA doesn’t spell out who received them, the emails may well have gone to the human resources department or some other quiet corner of the company. The emails contained an Excel spreadsheet attachment entitled “2011 Recruitment Plans.” Naturally it was created to look just believable enough that one of the employees who received it fished it out of the spam folder to which it was initially directed and opened it. You can probably fill in most of the blanks from here.

The spreadsheet contained a Zero-day exploit that took advantage of a weakness in Adobe Flash, which has since been patched. Through that hole, attackers were able to install anything they wanted on the target machine. They chose a version of a program called Poison Ivy RAT, and in this case RAT stands for “remote administration tool,” a program that is used to control one computer from another in a different location.

Armed with remote access to the target machine, the attackers then set about gaining deeper access to RSA’s corporate network. Like a person masquerading as a real employee searching a company’s building for a set of master keys, these attackers carried out a series of attacks designed to escalate the level of access they had to the system. They gathered login credentials from the relatively low-level accounts they compromised at first, including usernames, passwords, and domain information, then went after higher-value accounts with more access.

Once that was done, they started working on the real job: Finding the data they wanted to steal, and then extracting it from RSA’s systems. They gathered what they wanted, collected it in a “staging area,” compressed it, and then downloaded via FTP.

Still unexplained at this point: What information was taken, and does it in any way affect the integrity of its own security products? When the attack was first disclosed, the company said that some information about its SecureID products was taken by the attackers. This has led to a lot of questions and speculation by security pros who naturally have to think about the worst-case scenario, and frankly, there are many for which the adjective “worst” would apply.

The big looming question is whether or not the attacker gained access to the seeds–the random keys embedded in each token–that are used to generate the constantly changing numeric codes that appear on the device’s display. For instance, in one scenario described by David Scheutz of the Intrepidus Group, the attackers might have found a list of seeds and token serial numbers. Once you have the serial number of an individual token, you can then create your own token that would allow you to impersonate that user on whatever systems they use.

That scenario, which is only one of four on Scheutz’s list, is potentially pretty scary. As of 2009, some 40 million RSA tokens were in use securing networks at companies large and small and at numerous government agencies. And aside from the hardware tokens, software that mimics them runs on some 250 million smart phones.

When it first revealed the attack, RSA said it was “confident that the information extracted does not enable a successful direct attack on any of our RSA SecurID customers,” though it did say it thought the information taken would make attack easier. Hopefully RSA has more to say about all this in the coming days.

Separately, EMC said today it has acquired privately held NetWitness, which specializes in network security analysis. NetWitness provides “precise and pervasive network visibility” which gives companies the ability to detect and cope with “advanced threats” while automating the investigation process. NetWitness will operate within RSA. Financial terms have not been disclosed, but judging by the description of this attack, it seems like a timely acquisition.

The executive–Todd Bradley, who heads HP’s personal-computer business–decided earlier this month to remain with the company, the people said.

But the negotiations underscore Intel’s willingness to consider unusual measures to strengthen its management ranks as the company faces the difficult task of identifying an eventual successor to Chief Executive Paul Otellini. An executive vice president regarded as the most likely candidate among Intel’s top managers, Sean Maloney, is recovering from a stroke he suffered a year ago. Another potential candidate, Patrick Gelsinger, left Intel in 2009 to join EMC Corp.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Coviello didn’t disclose many details about the attack, but said the attackers were able to extract some information about the company’s SecurID products. The backbone of the SecurID system is the keychain-sized tokens like the one pictured that generate a new number every 30 seconds or so, and used to log in to computer networks and other systems. The tokens and software that generates numbers in the same way on smart phones are widely used by corporations and governments to keep attackers out. As of 2009, RSA estimated that 40 million people used the tokens and another 250 million used RSA software on their smart phones.

Coviello said that so far it doesn’t look like the SecurID system has been compromised. But the information taken by the attackers could make an attack that would compromise it somewhat easier. “While at this time we are confident that the information extracted does not enable a successful direct attack on any of our RSA SecurID customers, this information could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack,” he wrote. “We are very actively communicating this situation to RSA customers and providing immediate steps for them to take to strengthen their SecurID implementations.”

RSA has classified the attack as an “Advanced Persistent Threat” which in security industry parlance means it’s sophisticated enough that it may require the resources of a nation state to carry out, though the phrase is often met with mild derision by security professionals. As one put it, APT is another way of saying “not attacked by a script kiddie.”

It remains to be seen exactly how significant this incident will prove to be over the long term. As one security expert put it to me, if algorithm used to generate the numbers displayed by the token is compromised in any way, confidence in the SecurID system will plummet, and the cost to RSA and EMC could be serious. Not only will there be the cost to replace all those tokens, but work will have to be done to change the software algorithm used to generate the numbers. Neither will be inconsequential. EMC shares finished the day up 25 cents or nearly 1 percent, but are falling slightly in after-hours trading as the news about this attack has come to light.

Richard Gardner of Citigroup is in the bullish camp. In a note to clients today, he said that HP shares “remain significantly undervalued” and reiterated a $65 price target. HP, he wrote, has an “under-appreciated set of assets” that should help deliver strong earnings growth over the next five years, observing that it trades at a 35 percent price-to-earnings discount versus IBM, and a 30 percent P/E discount when compared to Cisco Systems.

Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank was much more muted. In a research note to clients issued today, he said that HP is fairly valued based on the risks associated with execution on the strategy combined with an anticipated increase in spending, while revenue from such businesses as PCs and printers is growing more slowly. Nor was he impressed by CFO Cathie Lesjack’s announcement that HP will boost its quarterly dividend, and that it expects to increase its per-share earnings by $7 between now and 2014. “In aggregate, we believe the long term EPS target and the dividend increase suggests no large transformative acquisitions in the near-term.” Finally, he doesn’t seem to expect much from HP’s plans for webOS, the mobile operating system it acquired with Palm last year. “While we believe the webOS offering has potential, it is late to market (Android and iOS have 12-18 month lead) and HP risks alienating Microsoft which is a key partner. Finally, HP has yet to ship a Touchpad into a market that is showing enormous demand for the recently refreshed iPad 2.” Apple has, he said, “an insurmountable lead” in the market for tablets and smartphones. He rates HP stock a “hold” with a price target of $42.

Robert Cihra of Caris and Company said he found Apotheker’s comments to be “relatively familiar.” Talking about leveraging scale to approach the cloud computing business, as Apotheker did yesterday, is “similar to those same strategic opportunities being targeted by virtually every HPQ competitor.” He conceded that, while consumer technology is leaving an indelible mark on corporate IT–that trend often described as “the consumerization of IT”–HP is in a unique position, given its reach in both areas. He’s just not convinced that HP knows what to do to take advantage of that position.

“HP stock certainly looks cheap if it can achieve targeted numbers, but we see it getting tougher for the company to navigate its massive IT superstore (after all this is HP + Compaq + EDS) while also keeping pace with competitors we consider more innovative and defensible, including Apple, EMC and IBM.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apotheker Sets Hewlett-Packard on a Cloud-Centric Path
• Léo Apotheker: Hewlett-Packard Will Build a Cloud
• HP’s New CEO Has a Big Day Planned, and a Bigger Job Ahead
• Another Advisory Firm Singles Out HP Director Babbio
• Shareholder Group Contends HP’s New Board Is Too Chummy
• “Peripatetic Polyglot” Léo Apotheker Wants to Save HP’s Soul by Buying Software Companies
• HP Earnings Today: Will Léo Apotheker Speak?
• Michael Dell Thinks HP Paid “Way Too Much” for 3Par
• Judge: HP Can Re-Investigate Hurd Departure
• Is This the HP Board That Will Allow Us to Stop Thinking About HP’s Board?
• Meg Whitman, Patricia Russo Among Five Joining HP Board
• HP Plans Another Probe Into Hurd Departure
• Léo Makes It Official: SAP’s Bill Wohl Joins Hewlett-Packard
• Want Enterprise Growth, HP? Think Services
• Mark Hurd Really Wants to Keep the Jodie Fisher Letter Private
• Mark Hurd Doesn’t Want You to Read the Letter That Cost Him His Job
• HP Networking Head: “People Are Tired of Paying for Cisco”
• HP Names Ex-SAP Chief Apotheker as CEO

The software sold by Nexenta Systems of Mountain View, Calif., builds on a trend the industry calls “virtualization,” a broad term for pooling computing resources across physical hardware to make the gear more efficient. Virtualization is a key technology for companies that sell computing services over the Internet to business customers, a growing market known as “cloud computing.”

Nexenta’s software virtualizes data-storage systems but with a twist: the software can run on basic server systems from any hardware vendor. That makes the start-up a competitor to both storage behemoths such as EMC, which sells hardware-software systems, and providers of on-demand computing resources such as Amazon, Nexenta executives said. Amazon, the 800-pound gorilla in cloud computing, uses storage software it built in house to maximize the capacity of its gear, they said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site