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Cloud

Submission + - Is Amazon Glacier So Much Marketing Hype? (enterprisestorageforum.com)

Submitted by
storagedude
storagedude writes: "With vague claims of data 'durability' of 11 nines and costs of a penny a gigabyte, Amazon is making assertions about its Glacier cloud storage system that, at a minimum, need to be explained or clarified, writes Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum. 'Is durability the data integrity of the file, or does durability mean the availability?' asks Newman. 'Does the claim mean that you get 11 nines if the file does not disappear because the storage fails? Is this a guarantee? What does average durability mean?'"

Submission + - Boy Developers: Is "Brogrammer" Culture Really So Bad? (datamation.com)

Submitted by
jammag
jammag writes: "In the testosterone-laden world of software development, "brogrammer" culture – boys being boys in the workplace — is a well known phenomenon. A veteran coder (who's more the thoughtful type) talks about his experience with brogrammers, and the resulting conflict when a female developer came on board. To be sure, things got weird: "Tacked to the wall was a poster of a girl in a red bikini laying on a red Ferrari with the caption 'Red and Juicy.'" Doesn't it seem that brogrammers are more prevalent than they used to be?"
Google

Submission + - Is Siri Smarter than Google? (cioupdate.com)

Submitted by
storagedude
storagedude writes: "Google could go the way of the dodo if ultra intelligent electronic agents (UIEA) make their way into the mainstream, according to technology prognosticator Daniel Burrus. Siri is just the first example of how a UIEA could end search as we know it. By leveraging the cloud and supercomputing capabilities, Siri uses natural language search to circumvent the entire Google process. If Burrus is right, we'll no longer have to wade through "30,000,000 returns in .0013 milliseconds" of irrelevant search results."
Data Storage

Submission + - SSD Performance Potential Can Be Tough to Achieve (enterprisestorageforum.com)

Submitted by
storagedude
storagedude writes: "Vendor SSD performance claims may not matter much beyond a certain point, as other limitations like the file system and kernel may limit performance long before theoretical drive limits are reached, according to this analysis from HPC storage specialist Henry Newman. 'If you are doing single threaded operations, the limiting factor is going to be the time it takes to do the I/O switching between the user and the kernel. For file system operations like find and fsck, I think the difference between having a 100,000 IOP SSD and a 1 million IOP SSD likely does not matter. ... SSDs are a great thing, and I suspect that in the near future we will see changes to operating systems to allow them to work more efficiently.'"
Data Storage

Submission + - Hadoop, Big Data and Small Businesses (enterpriseappstoday.com)

Submitted by
storagedude
storagedude writes: "Hadoop and Big Data are all the rage these days in enterprises, but what's a small business to do if it wants to get in on growing trends like distributed data mining, search and indexing? The options for small businesses are limited: they can either move their data to the cloud for such services or build their own infrastructure, which few SMBs have the expertise or infrastructure to support. HPC veteran Henry Newman says what's needed is a search and indexing appliance with multi-level security (MLS) that can be installed and run with little IT expertise. Some appliances are on the way, says Newman, but they'll lack MLS and other critical features that could make Big Data work for SMBs."

Submission + - Coming Soon: Google+ Data Mining (enterpriseappstoday.com)

Submitted by
storagedude
storagedude writes: "In the wake of the meteoric rise of Google+, it should come as no surprise that social CRM and social media monitoring firms are already considering monitoring the service in addition to the usual suspects Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But until Google releases an API or lets it be known how much data it plans to release, those firms will be limited to screen scraping and other such methods. But whether their methods are crude or sophisticated, it's just a matter of time until companies start listening in on your Google+ conversations."
Privacy

Submission + - Salesforce Profiles Customers via Social Media (enterpriseappstoday.com)

Submitted by
storagedude
storagedude writes: "Salesforce.com today revealed where all its acquisitions and product launches are headed: toward creating customer databases that contain individual profiles that include Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, age, gender, location, purchasing and customer service history, and all that information can be called up with just a phone call to a service center. Other uses include determining sentiment toward a brand and finding out who the most influential customers are and tracking marketing campaigns to see if they resonate by age or gender, for example. It's all part of an ongoing effort by companies to get on top of what Salesforce official Marcel LeBrun says is the biggest change in corporate messaging and customer perception in more than a century. 'Now our customers have a much bigger voice than we do, and our customers trust each other more than they trust companies,' LeBrun said."

Submission + - Salesforce Buys Radian6 for Social Data Mining (ecrmguide.com)

Submitted by
storagedude
storagedude writes: "Corporate mining of social media data has been one of the hottest trends in enterprise software in recent years, and why not? Every public post about a product, company or competitor is a potential goldmine for sales, marketing and R&D folks. Salesforce.com is making a big play in this space today with the $326 million acquisition of Radian6, a company that 'captures hundreds of millions of conversations every day across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and online communities.' Combine that with a Salesforce CRM system and a little online behavior tracking and you'd have one heck of a user profile."

Submission + - What data mining firms know about you (time.com) 1

Submitted by
storagedude
storagedude writes: "Time writer Joel Stein spent three months learning what data mining companies know about him. After learning everything the companies had profiled about him (some of it inaccurate) — social security number, age, marital status, religion, income, debt, interests, browsing and spending habits — he had a surprising reaction: complacency.

"... oddly, the more I learned about data mining, the less concerned I was. Sure, I was surprised that all these companies are actually keeping permanent files on me. But I don't think they will do anything with them that does me any harm. There should be protections for vulnerable groups, and a government-enforced opt-out mechanism would be great for accountability. But I'm pretty sure that, like me, most people won't use that option. Of the people who actually find the Ads Preferences page — and these must be people pretty into privacy — only 1 in 8 asks to opt out of being tracked. The rest, apparently, just like to read privacy rules."

Submission + - Iron Speed Designer: Who needs web developers? (databasejournal.com)

Submitted by
storagedude
storagedude writes: "Database Journal columnist Danny Lesandrini tested Iron Speed's automated web development app and found it could create a simple web-facing database app in about five minutes. While you could take issue with the software's claim that that five minutes represented the equivalent of 459 hours of code time, Lesandrini nonetheless calls the software "without a doubt, the most ingenious product I've ever reviewed."

"This development tool will build your websites for you. Just point it at a database, check off a few options and let it run. The final product requires tweaking, but yes, it really is that simple."

Submission + - Big Brother Friends Facebook (ecrmguide.com)

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: Clara Shih, who created the first business app on Facebook in 2007, is back with a new venture: Hearsay Social, which makes Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn more palatable to corporations by adding features like SEC and FINRA monitoring and compliance and analytics. Conversations are monitored around the clock, regardless of where employees access pages from — work, home or mobile — and workflow tools let companies approve or suggest content before it appears. Those features appear to be making financial companies a little more comfortable Facebooking, as State Farm and Farmers Insurance are two early customers. Shih is backed in the new venture by veterans of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Software

Submission + - MicroHP: The New IT Giant? (ecrmguide.com)

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: Although it may have gone unnoticed by most IT industry watchers, this week's announcement from Microsoft and HP that the two have combined on integrated appliances for corporate business intelligence and email could be the start of a closer relationship between the two IT giants as they seek to counteract the growing hardware and software dominance of IBM and Oracle. From the article: "Combine Microsoft and HP — call it MicroHP — and what do you have? A full Windows-plus-Linux scale-out hardware and software lineup, with an exceptionally strong position both in SaaS/public cloud and data centers, and a huge presence on the business desktop. This would allow such a combined entity to produce well-tuned appliances for such hot areas as BI/analytics — as Microsoft and HP have just done.
Software

Submission + - IBM's New Way of Selling IT (ecrmguide.com)

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: Instead of TCO and speeds and feeds, IBM has found a new way of selling to corporate IT departments: by promising specific outcomes, like percentage improvements in operating margins or sales, as the result of whatever hardware, software and services the customer buys. While agreeing on measurements and results could prove difficult — such as what is due to the economy and other factors and what is a direct benefit of the technology — it's nonetheless an interesting move by IBM that could change the way that companies buy technology. According to the article, "IBM says that it perceives the outcome-driven sell as eventually their main engagement strategy with customers and prospects — whatever the final sale, IBM leads with promising an outcome.
Data Storage

Submission + - In-Memory Analytics Threatens Storage, Databases (ecrmguide.com)

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: Traditional databases and storage networks, even those sporting high-speed solid state drives, don't offer enough performance for the real-time analytics craze sweeping corporations, giving rise to in-memory analytics, or data mining performed in memory without the limitations of the traditional data path. The end result could be that storage and databases get pushed to the periphery of data centers and in-memory analytics becomes the new critical IT infrastructure.

From the article:

"With big vendors like Microsoft and SAP buying into in-memory analytics to solve Big Data challenges, the big question for IT is what this trend will mean for the traditional data center infrastructure. Will storage, even flash drives, be needed in the future, given the requirement for real-time data analysis and current trends in design for real-time data analytics? Or will storage move from the heart of data centers and become merely a means of backup and recovery for critical real-time apps?
Privacy

Sheriff's Online Database Leaks Info On Informants 185

Posted by Soulskill from the second-verse-same-as-the-first dept.
Tootech writes with this snippet from NPR: "A Colorado sheriff's online database mistakenly revealed the identities of confidential drug informants and listed phone numbers, addresses and Social Security numbers of suspects, victims and others interviewed during criminal investigations, authorities said. The breach potentially affects some 200,000 people, and Mesa County sheriff's deputies have been sifting through the database to determine who, if anyone, is in jeopardy. ... The FBI and Google Inc. are trying to determine who accessed the database, the sheriff said. Their concern: That someone may have copied it and could post it, WikiLeaks-style, on the Internet. 'The truth is, once it's been out there and on the Internet and copied, you're never going to regain total control,' Hilkey said. Thousands of pages of confidential information were vulnerable from April until Nov. 24, when someone notified authorities after finding their name on the Internet. Officials said the database was accessed from within the United States, as well as outside the country, before it was removed from the server."

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