Kingston Announces TCG Opal 1.0 Compliant SSDNow KC300

Kingston has announced KC300 SSD which is Opal 1.0 compliant.

Kingston has announced an Opal 1.0 compliant SSD which comes in the form of its KC300 SSD. This new version of the KC300 SSD, built to support the Opal 1.0 specification, is particularly interesting for enterprise applications, as its new features allow it to self-encrypt, as well as perform other built-in security functions.
"As SSDs become more common in businesses and organizations, many of our enterprise customers are now looking into managing these drives in the workforce," said Ariel Perez, SSD business manager, Kingston. "We are proud to offer a version of our top-selling KC300 SSD with the ability to be managed by the most popular endpoint software applications to give companies flexibility and peace of mind to keep work data secure."
It has support for applications such as WinMagic, SecureDoc, McAfee Endpoint Encryption, and Wave Embassy.
The unit will be available through select channels and comes with capacities ranging from 60 GB to 480 GB.

Rumor: Modern UI May be Optional in Future Windows Phone

Users may be able to switch off the tiled interface.

The latest Windows Phone rumor claims that Windows Phone 9 will launch sometime during the second half of 2014. The news arrives by way of Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin who previously made several accurate predictions on the mobile industry. He now claims that the Modern UI seen on current phones and tablets will be optional starting with Windows Phone 9.
"Windows phone 9 (2014 3-4q) have another UI. That's not tales. I repeat - Microsoft change UI from Metro style," he tweets. When asked if the same applies to Windows 8.x, he says that "they aren't decided yet as far as I know. A lot of internal debates."
Other noted tweets rehash what we already know from prior reports: Windows RT and Windows Phone will become one operating system by Spring 2015, and that Microsoft plans to lift the licensing fees for Windows on tablets and smartphones to combat Android. Eventually, Microsoft will have one platform for x86, one for ARM-based chips, and the OS installed on the Xbox One.
After all the fuss about the new Modern UI interface on PC, tablets and smartphones, it seems unlikely that Microsoft will completely ditch the interface with Windows 9. The idea of making the interface optional sounds like a good way to gain new customers who would have otherwise shunned the tile-based interface. But what would the "desktop" interface look like? Something like Android or iPhone?

The time frame provided by Murtazin doesn't click with other reports about Microsoft's road map. Windows Phone 8.1 isn't set to go live until Spring 2014, followed by Windows Phone 8.2 "Threshold" in Spring 2015. Small updates for all form factors will supposedly take place in Fall 2014.
Of course, everything seen here is mere rumor and speculation... for now.

MSI Releases Radeon R9 270X Gaming 4G Graphics Card

MSI has revealed its new Radeon R9-270X Gaming 4G graphics card. This graphics card features a custom design, and being from MSI, this means that it features the TwinFrozr IV cooler. Also, this specific model features 4 GB of GDDR5 memory rather than the standard 2 GB specification.
The card's GPU is clocked at a base frequency of 1030 MHz, while it can boost up to 1120 MHz. The card is also built using MSI's Military Class 4 components which include solid state capacitors to give the card a longer lifetime and better temperature resistance.
Display outputs include dual-DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort, and the card draws its power from a pair of 6-pin PCIe power connectors.
The card should arrive in stores soon.

Dell EqualLogic Refreshes Lineup for First Time in Two Years

Through all the change at Dell, EqualLogic has remained a rock of consistency and retains a loyal installed base.
After Dell bought Compellent and its progressive virtualized storage lineup for $960 million in December 2010, it didn't take long for it to take the smaller company's Fluid Data marketing scheme corporatewide, effectively making Compellent its lead storage brand.

Some folks at Dell's EqualLogic storage division might have taken umbrage at this, but if they did, they were quiet about it. Three years earlier, Dell had acquired the equally ahead-of-the-curve EqualLogic for $1.4 billion, with EqualLogic becoming the favorite child over Dell's previous co-branded storage with EMC.

Therein lies the story of IT: constant evolution.

From all that eWEEK has heard, both of those very different storage providers are thriving under Dell ownership. Both are gaining slowly but surely in market share; both serve different types of customers. EqualLogic is aimed at data centers that use iSCSI storage connectivity, while Compellent supplies storage for a variety of connections and for both hard disk and solid-state drives.

Compellent, thanks to its intelligent tiering and versatility in both hard-disk drive and solid-state media, is now the rising star in the midrange storage sector, challenging everybody—NetApp, HP 3PAR, EMC—in the market and coming away with wins.

Evidence of this came out Oct. 8 in a market survey issued by Deni Connor and James Bagley for Storage Strategies NOW, which indicates that Dell is now the No. 1 vendor of choice among enterprise storage buyers for deploying flash/SSDs. In the survey of 550 global companies, the results show that 32 percent of respondents currently use or have definitive plans to deploy flash/SSD technologies, and that Dell is first on their list to check out. This is 6 percentage points or more higher than storage market leaders EMC, NetApp, HP and IBM.

Through all this change, however, EqualLogic has remained a rock of consistency. There are a lot of older data centers in midrange-size companies that use iSCSI and don't need to change anything. EqualLogic fills that need, and thus has built a loyal installed base.

With this as background, the news here is that Dell has refreshed its EqualLogic lineup for the first time in two years; part of that news is NAND flash options are available for the first time. EqualLogic also will be able to run Compellent's Fluid File System for the first time, so mixing Dell storage products in a data center won't pose any problems.

The company also has updated its network switches and refreshed its data center management system. All of this was announced Dec. 10 at Dell World in Austin, Texas.

Here is a list of new features in EqualLogic's lineup:

--EqualLogic PS6210 Series arrays: With six models, including all-flash, hybrid and all-HDD options, the new arrays offer increased throughput, up to three times higher performance and four times the memory of prior generations with a faster, more powerful storage controller, Dell marketing executive Bob Fine told eWEEK. The scale-out architecture enables organizations to minimize I/O bottlenecks and address growing workloads with flash-enabled SANs that can achieve more than 1.2 million IOPS with less than 2-millisecond latency, Fine said.

--EqualLogic Array Software 7.0: This has new policy-based access controls and an improved user interface, available, like all EqualLogic software, at no additional charge for customers with active support contracts. There is a new 64-bit software version for new arrays that works seamlessly with a 32-bit version for older arrays.

--Dell EqualLogic SAN Headquarters 3.0: Dell's SAN monitoring software provides in-depth reporting and analysis and robust performance and event monitoring across multiple EqualLogic groups. The new release includes Array Software 7.0 features support and Dell SupportAssist enhancements.

--Dell Fluid File System (FluidFS) v3 on EqualLogic FS7610/7600: Dell's latest file system software decreases the capacity needed to store common enterprise file data by up to 48 percent by deduplicating and compressing redundant data when no longer needed. FluidFS v3 offers expanded protocol support and more third-party certifications, growing the ecosystem of industry-specific supported solutions, including leading health care picture archiving and communications system (PACS) vendors.

All the new Dell storage arrays and software are available this month, Fine said.

Building Secure Cloud Apps: CSA, SAFECode Provide Guidance

New guidance aims to enable developers and cloud implementaters to build secure deployments, but don't expect any secret tips on how to avoid government snooping.
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is partnering with the Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code (SAFECode) in an effort to improve the security of cloud applications. The two groups have published a 27-page document on Practices for Secure Development of Cloud Applications, which outlines the approach for what needs to be done.

As more organizations move to the cloud, there is a need to provide guidance for software development in the cloud, John Howie, chief operating officer of the CSA, told eWEEK.

Said Tabet, senior technologist at EMC and one of the paper's co-authors, told eWEEK that a key goal of the guidance is to address threat and design issues in software development that are a risk to the cloud. The joint report identifies four key threats to cloud computing: data breaches, data leakage, insecure interfaces/APIs and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

From a design perspective, which is where the document provides a lot of guidance, topics include multitenancy, trusted compute pools, the tokenization of sensitive data, data encryption, and authentication and identity management.

A goal of the guidance, according to Tabet, is to provide content for how security controls should be designed and implemented in the cloud. Among the key challenges is the simple fact that threats keep changing.

"You're seeing software deployed today that in a very short time is becoming vulnerable to attack, not because the software was written poorly but because the operations and threat landscape has evolved," the CSA's Howie said. "We expect to continue to invest in this effort with iterations of the document and supplemental guidance."

One thing the CSA/SAFECode guidance is not designed to do is help cloud providers and developers circumvent potential snooping from a government agency. Throughout 2013, there has been a lot of talk about snooping from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as a result of leaks made public by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

"We believe the focus should be on illegal access to content by cyber-criminals, terrorists and nation-states engaged in cyber-espionage," Howie said. "On the face of it, regardless of your political affiliation or personal beliefs, the activities conducted not just in the U.S., but by governments worldwide, are legal, until the courts or legislatures change the laws."

This week, a group of tech vendors in the United States, including AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo, published an open letter in an attempt to start a national conversation on the topic of U.S.-government surveillance reform. The tech vendors are looking for more oversight and transparency.

"Our focus has always been on illegal and illicit access, and the best practices in this report reflect that," Howie said.

iPad grabs top spot in tablet purchase poll

Apple's iPad was the preferred pick of prospective tablet buyers this holiday season by a huge margin, according to a market research firm's survey of 25,000 Americans.

ChangeWave Research, an arm of 451 Research, said last week that 13% of those polled planned on buying a tablet in the next 90 days, more than twice the number of its previous survey in August, and in the ballpark of the polls before the last two year-end holiday stretches.

"Apple continues to hold a tight grip on next 90-day tablet demand," said ChangeWave in a short description of some of the survey's results.

Seventy-two percent of the people who said they would buy a tablet in the next three months claimed that they would choose an Apple device, representing about 9% of the 25,000 who responded to the survey.

ChangeWave attributed the dramatic increase in iPad planned purchases to the late-October introduction of the iPad Air and Retina-equipped iPad Mini. The unveilings, along with the $30 price reduction of the first-generation iPad Mini, dampened consumer enthusiasm for other tablets, including those from Amazon, Google and Samsung.

The Samsung Galaxy line, for example, dropped from 13% in August to 9% in the November-conducted poll, while Google's Nexus fell from 12% to 9%.

Only Microsoft's Surface brand gained planned-purchase share, climbing from 7% to 8%. "[That's] a hopeful sign for [Microsoft's] October Surface 2 tablet launch," said ChangeWave.

Microsoft introduced its second-generation Surface tablets in late September and started selling them Oct. 22. The company also kept the first-generation Surface RT, renamed as simply "Surface," at the marked-down $349 price it had used since July, when it began to unload excess inventory.

ChangeWave's survey also showed that of Apple's tablets, the iPad Air was the one most likely to be bought, with 55% of those selecting an Apple tablet saying that they would purchase the new Air. That matches other metrics that have called out the Air as Apple's top seller since early November.

Dell joins forces with Dropbox to boost hosted storage for enterprises

Dropbox is getting help from Dell to persuade enterprises to pick its hosted storage and file-sharing platform, and also to make it more secure.
Take advantage of enterprises' growing interest in and acceptance for personal cloud-based storage services, vendors like Dropbox have been partnering with large telecom operators and software vendors.
On Thursday, Dell announced that its global sales team will from now on sell the business edition of Dropbox. The news follows an announcement from Box, which focuses on SMBs and large enterprises, that it partnered with Australian operator Telstra and British mobile operator EE last week. Dropbox and Box are still new names for CIOs and working with larger partners gives them both a stamp of approval as well as a larger sales force.
Dell is combining Dropbox for Business with the Cloud Edition of its Data Protection suite to let employees use hosted storage at work while at the same time providing IT departments with more control.
The Cloud Edition was announced in March, and offers features such as encryption, usage monitoring and the ability to create white lists of email addresses that users are allowed to use for file sharing. In addition to Dropbox, it is also compatible with Box and Microsoft's Skydrive.
This year, Dropbox has worked to improve its enterprise product. The company announced last month a new version that comes with the ability to better separate work-related and personal files and also allows administrators to remotely delete folders.

Wireless carriers agree to offer phone unlocking

The top five U.S. mobile operators have agreed to let their customers unlock their devices and move to another provider under pressure from  Congress and the Federal Communications Commission.
AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular  signed on to an agreement that allows customers to unlock their mobile phones and other devices once they have fulfilled their contracts with their original carrier, the mobile trade group CTIA announced Thursday.
The agreement is a voluntary commitment by carriers to respond to unlocking requests promptly, unlock their phones when eligible and notify subscribers about eligibility. It also includes a commitment to unlocking devices belonging to military personnel when they are deployed for service.
Most mobile devices sold in the U.S. are locked to a particular carrier's network and can't be used on other networks unless they are unlocked, a software change that may be carried out either in person or remotely. Unlocking gives device owners more freedom to choose among mobile operators for the best prices on service. Critics have accused carriers of making it difficult for their subscribers to unlock their phones even when eligible.
Activists, lawmakers and the FCC have leaned on carriers to allow unlocking and inform consumers about it. Last month, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler threatened to legally regulate unlocking if the mobile industry didn't agree to a set of principles for making it easier. In a letter to CTIA President and CEO Steve Largent, Wheeler said the FCC and CTIA had been in talks about unlocking for eight months. Wheeler sought action before the December holiday season.
For regular monthly subscribers, carriers agreed to unlock devices upon request after the customer has fulfilled their contract or financing plan or paid an early termination fee. For prepaid customers, they will unlock devices no later than one year after the first activation. The carriers also agreed to clearly disclose their unlocking policies and give timely notice when subscribers are eligible for unlocking. They also committed to responding to unlocking requests within two business days.
The carriers agreed to implement three of the standards within three months and implement the whole commitment within a year. The CTIA didn't specify which three should be implemented first.
The five operators that agreed to the principles include the four major national carriers and the next largest provider that isn't being absorbed by a major carrier. Leap Wireless, which has been an independent prepaid carrier, is in the process of being acquired by AT&T. The CTIA recommended that the standards be incorporated into the CTIA Consumer Code for Wireless Service, under which the organization annually certifies mobile operators.
Consumer rights group Public Knowledge applauded the agreement but said it shouldn't take a year to carry out.
"This agreement provides customers of the largest carriers the definite ability to unlock their phones and move them to competing carriers. Crucially, it also has strong requirements that carriers give clear and useful notice to consumers of their rights when they can unlock," Vice President of Legal Affairs Sherwin Siy wrote in a statement. "However, it shouldn't take nearly a year, or the intervention of the FCC, to achieve a partial solution to this problem. With more sensible laws in place, the Commission wouldn't have to take steps like these to cajole the carriers into a common-sense solution."

Microsoft times BUILD dev conference to fall outside Apple's shadow

Microsoft will return to San Francisco in April to reprise its BUILD developers conference, the company announced today.
BUILD 2014 will run April 2-4, and again take place in the Moscone Center, the facility Microsoft used last June and the same one Apple has planted its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) for 11 years running.
Registration for BUILD 2014 will begin on Tuesday, Jan. 14, at 9 a.m. PT on the conference's website.
Microsoft has not posted an agenda, but in a blog post Friday, Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft's chief evangelist in the company's developer and platform group, said: "We'll talk about what's next for Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Azure, Windows Server, Visual Studio and much more."
Speculation has swirled that Microsoft will launch an update for Windows Phone 8 and push out tweaks to Windows 8.1 around the timetable for BUILD. Microsoft is also expected to introduce a smaller-screen Surface tablet in 2014, perhaps at the conference.
Assuming analysts have scoped out the company's CEO selection timing correctly, BUILD could also be the first forum for a new chief executive to step on stage, address developers and provide his or her take on the company's strategies.
The scheduling move from June, when Microsoft held BUILD this year, gets the conference out of the shadow of WWDC, the annual Apple event that garners massive attention from bloggers and grabs mainstream media headlines because the Cupertino, Calif. company usually introduces new operating systems and some hardware on WWDC's first day.
In 2013, WWDC took place at the Moscone Center two weeks before BUILD.
Prices for BUILD remained flat at $2,095, the same as for 2013's conference. Microsoft did not say, however, whether it would offer a $500 discount for the first 500 who register, as it has done in the past.
Developers should expect that BUILD will sell out -- this year's version did in about 24 hours -- and plan to register when Microsoft opens its virtual ticket office early on Jan. 14.