March 2009

Intel did more than just introduce a faster server processor today with the introduction of the Xeon 5500; it enabled a greater level of differentiation to its server and storage vendor partners that ultimately will result in a broader set of choices and better ones for enterprise infrastructure & operations professionals. While the performance improvements of the 5500 in themselves are impressive, there is just as much to like in the new memory and I/O architectures and power efficiency. The new memory architecture triples bandwidth over the 5400 and brings back DDR3 allowing up to 18 DIMMs per CPU. This lets customers reach much higher memory configurations at a lower cost. While you have to add memory three DIMMs at a time, 36 GBs per socket is now achievable with low cost 2GB DIMMs. This is a significant boon to server virtualization where memory is typically the first resource to be fully utilized. Cisco is taking this capacity even higher in its UCS blade servers.

[Posted by Christine Overby]

Last week, Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst on the Interactive Marketing team that I manage, caught flak for comments that he made on his personal blog about the community vendor Mzinga. As you might expect, we both have been communicating with Mzinga's Chairman Barry Libert and other members of his team. At the same time, Jeremiah has been reflecting on the conversation begun by the post. So have I.

On Monday, March 23, 2009, HP’s Application Security Center announced the release of a free tool, SWFScan, designed to analyze security vulnerabilities in applications using Adobe Flash.

A few months earlier, IBM Rational announced the availability of their scanning/testing capability against Adobe Flash objects, which is a new addition to their AppScan 7.8 release on January 13, 2009.

For those who are not familiar with Adobe Flash, Flash is a multimedia platform that allows better processing of graphics, animation, special efforts, and bi-directional video streaming. Many websites that have rich interactive content or multimedia content use Flash as an underlying technology.

[Posted by Gene Leganza]

I have to report for jury duty on April 1. I have several reminders set so I don’t mistakenly think I played an April fool’s joke on myself. This upcoming instance of civic duty reminds me of the incredible trial I was on a few years ago where I wound up being elected jury foreman. Subsequent EA workshops I have conducted exhibited a remarkably similar phenomenon to my contentious jury experience from that trial. Let me explain…

It was an amazing trial – not one of those incredibly tedious cases where some jerk is suing another jerk and you couldn’t possibly care who’s right. In this case, a drug dealer had shot a cop in the face. They caught the defendant hiding nearby, wearing the same glaringly obtrusive camo outfit that witnesses to the shooting claimed the shooter wore. Some of these local residents had seen him up close and talked to him just before the incident trying to get him to move off.