Mobile World Congress is all about mobility-enhancing technologies. But while much of the technology media is focused on the consumer-facing technologies and devices during the event, MWC also celebrates innovations in the underlying tech that supports our devices and networks. As part of MWC 2015, this author was tasked to be among the panel of judges for the Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough category.

Entries in this field mostly consist of vendors and solution providers with devices or embedded technologies that improve performance, connectivity and platform convergence meant for mobile use.

One of the finalists is Airvana OneCell, which is an LTE small cell system meant for both enterprise and consumer-facing applications, which mobile operators can use to augment their capabilities in servicing customers in urban and indoor settings.

Airvana’s technology is borne out of the need to have strong wireless signals even inside buildings. One limitation of LTE — and wireless signals in general — is that signal strength is significantly reduced with obstructions. Building foundations act like a cage, after all, where radio signals are good at bouncing within the structure, but not necessarily across from inside-to-outside and vice-versa.

“Outdoor macro cell towers cannot fully penetrate building walls to deliver quality LTE service indoors, and upgrading legacy distributed antenna systems (DAS) for LTE is prohibitively expensive,” says Airvana. An alternative would be standalone small cells, but this is not effective in large enterprise settings, because these create many “cell borders.” In addition, these are not easy nor cost-efficient to deploy.

“These borders create large areas of interference between cells that result in low throughput, poor VoLTE quality, frequent handovers, complex RF planning, and macro interference challenges. Furthermore, they have static capacity, limited upgradeability, and support only a single operator.”

A cross-carrier solution

Airvana’s OneCell solution addresses the challenge of delivering consistent, high-speed LTE services for multiple operators, but without the cost and complexity of a DAS. Basically considered as a “cloud RAN”, the solution involves a single baseband controller, with radio points distributed throughout a building or establishment. These radio points act as a single cell, which results in zero cell borders, border interference and handovers — which mean better energy-efficiency for the connected mobile devices.

Industry experts consider cloud RAN as a disruptive technology because of two benefits: centralization and virtualization. Centralizing the baseband means significantly cheaper operational expenses — operators in South Korea, China and Japan have demonstrated 30% to 50% OPEX reduction with the use of such technologies. Meanwhile, virtualization of network functions will reduce capital expenditure, particularly the need to build standalone cell towers or micro-cell sites.

An added benefit of OneCell’s solution is that the nodes connect with each other via regular ethernet connection, and each radio point runs on power-over-ethernet, further reducing the complexity of deployment. According to a study by Real Wireless, deployment of OneCell is 69% less expensive than a traditional DAS. Material savings from the passive infrastructure can reach 90%, while simplified cabling means labor savings of 75% to 90%.

And a bigger benefit for enterprises: convergence across carriers. “Large enterprises and public spaces are typically multi-operator environments, and OneCell is designed to cost-effectively support multiple wireless providers with a single infrastructure,” says Airvana. “Architecture is designed to allow operators to take advantage of upcoming LTE capabilities, such as carrier aggregation, Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) and distributed Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) via software upgrades, without replacing any installed equipment.”

Full signal bars

Scalability and cost efficiency are the most relevant benefits for enterprises and other establishments that require indoor wireless broadband connectivity. Meanwhile, for consumers, it means excellent connectivity even within buildings, for a “five signal bar experience.”

“There’s a clear interest among operators in serving indoor enterprise environments with scalable, distributed solutions that are also cost-effective,” says Ed Gubbins, senior analyst at Current Analysis. The potential market for OneCell’s technology is 1 billion users, as the Chelmsford, MA-based firm has dealings with mobile operators from Europe, Asia and North America.

The direction here is clear: the combination of centralized and distributed architectures provided by technologies like the OneCell are a boon to those seeking scalable and cost-efficient means to improve quality of service for mobile broadband users.

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India-based software and services giant Infosys (NYSE:INFY, BOM:500209) has announced the acquisition of enterprise automation startup Panaya, in a deal that values the US-based startup at $200 million. This investment is in line with the strategic thrusts of Infosys’ new CEO, Vishal Sikka, who aims to incorporate better use of automation and artificial intelligence in accomplishing repetitive tasks for client-based projects.

At its core, Panaya is a SaaS platform that enables enterprises to automate the testing process for managing their enterprise resources planning (ERP) software updates — Oracle EBS, SAP and SalesForce — particularly tracking potential pain points and coding issues, then making recommendations for fixes. However, the potential is greater. “The acquisition of Panaya is a key step in renewing and differentiating our service lines,” says Sikka in announcing the acquisition. “This will help amplify the potential of our people, freeing us from the drudgery of many repetitive tasks, so we may focus more on the important, strategic challenges faced by our clients.”

A $42.5 billion company, Infosys has been facing challenges in growing its business in the wake of Sikka’s ascent as CEO and managing director, after stepping down from his post as head of technology at German enterprise software giant SAP. The firm faces management churn and high attrition rates among its 160,000 staff globally, even as it is the second-largest IT outsourcer in India. The Panaya acquisition is thus more of an intellectual property acquisition than one of customer or data. By incorporating enterprise automation, Infosys can potentially improve the efficiency of its business services that range from banking, finance, manufacturing and other industries.

Prior to acquisition, Panaya has raised $59 million in at least six funding rounds, so far, with a $20 million Series E round announced in January 2015. For its part, Infosys has expressed interest in acquiring Europe-based technology firms to bolster its presence in the region, which is considered to be a difficult market for the Bangalore-based company, with high language and cultural barriers.

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Social media has transcended social networking, and is now an important part of business. Going beyond reaching out to consumers in a B2B communications model, however, companies are finding the need to reach out to other enterprises as well, especially those whose business models involve dealing with vendors, suppliers and fellow businesses or entrepreneurs.

B2B social media has also gone beyond the purview of the traditional PR company. Cloud- and desktop-based tools are already available, and any CMO or marketing manager would have such tools at their disposal, or perhaps even access to boutique PR firms that focus on running effective social media campaigns meant for the enterprise. Still, it’s not that easy to find the optimal means of reaching out to fellow businesses and entrepreneurs. In some cases, “likes” or connections don’t necessarily convert to actual business.

According to a study by Business2Community, this particular genre is dominated by LinkedIn, given the professional focus of the social network. About 91% of marketing professionals dealing in B2B are active on LinkedIn, compared with about 85% on Twitter and 81% on Facebook. However, the same study says only 36% of the same professionals consider themselves well-versed in doing B2B social media. Here is where enterprises will need help, says Daniel Kushner, co-founder and CEO at Oktopost, a startup that provides B2B social media consulting and services. An alumnus of companies like Zend Technologies, application service automation startup Nolio, and medical technology firm Syneron Medical (NASDAQ:ELOS), Kushner now focuses on enabling effective B2B social media management for enterprises through his Tel Aviv-based startup.

In an interview with Bright Side of News*, Kushner says his motto is “Screw likes, get leads,” which means generating business is inevitably more important than simple connections. While a basic “like”, retweet, +1 or share might be a plus in terms of relevance and authority in social media, what really matters is the bottomline, and how to properly attribute or account for such success.

Here is an excerpt of our Q&A:

Bright Side of News*: Can you shed some light on your decision to focus on B2B social media management?

Daniel Kushner: Social media has evolved from a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to a place where businesses both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) users can reach their customers, prospects, and fans. There has been a huge rise in social media management tools that all revolve around the B2C way of marketing. B2B is different, however, and we learnt this from first-hand experience when running global marketing teams for hi-tech companies. Being frustrated that there’s no social media management platform that is in line with the objectives of B2B marketers, we decided to create one.

There are a few big differences between marketing with consumers and businesses in mind. B2B marketers need to manage huge social editorial calendars due to the amount of content they are producing. They also need to measure and understand their RoI on social media. These two factors are the core of Oktopost, making it the only platform that is truly B2B focused.

BSN*: Is there any particular advantage with targeting social media campaigns this way? If I’m running a business, can’t I just hire someone to manage my Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn pages?

DK: Social media, like most marketing activities, can be managed either in house or with external vendors. In fact, I strongly believe that if you don’t know “how” to do social media marketing then it is in fact better to hire an external agency. Social media management platforms help you manage the social media marketing — they don’t do it for you. So if you don’t know what you’re doing, a platform won’t really help. Just like using a CRM won’t make you into a better sales person, but will help you manage your sales, taking into consideration that you have your sales methodologies, and the like. Even when using an agency, they will most probably be using a platform like Oktopost to manage their clients’ social media.

BSN*: Can you share some trends with regard to business’ uptake of social media? What do businesses want to accomplish with their social media campaigns?

DK: Social media is a new bi-directional channel for businesses that is at most controlled by the customer (consumer in B2C case), so there are a few angles that social media play within the business. There’s a “marketing maturity level” that business go through not only in regards to social media, but also in overall marketing management as a whole. There are those at the very beginning of the scale and are more activity-driven that business-driven. This is old-school marketing where a marketer will be measure by how many trade shows they did and press releases that were put on the wire. Then there is a trend to measure how marketing is helping the business and becoming a profit center instead of a cost center. This is normally done by measure how many leads are generated by the marketing team, quality of leads, sale ready leads, etc.

On the higher end of the maturity level, I see marketing scientifically measuring and A/B testing everything from lead source to touch points to opportunity contributions. Measuring becomes a centric part of the marketing DNA, and social should also be measured. Not only how many likes, followers, retweets, but how many leads, and what social content is driving those leads.

BSN*: What are the common misconceptions do businesses have with working with social media? Any common gaps that businesses need to address?

DK: Social media for marketing is multifaceted — there’s no one method, tactic, or way of doing things. There’s also not a single objective, KPI or outcome. Social media can be used for content distribution, brand awareness, content curation, customer support, and much more. Each discipline needs to be understood and management separately. You can’t just simply send 10 tweets a day and call that social media marketing. What are those tweets for? Promoting a webinar, a whitepaper, or talking about an event? Driving traffic to you blog? The major gap is having the business understand what is important for them and what they want to measure. From there a social media plan can be created.

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Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is about to challenge technology incumbents in a whole new game, and these may include the likes of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). With an upcoming feature called Facebook at Work, the social network wants to make itself more relevant to the workplace, offering collaboration, professional networking and other enterprise- and business-oriented functionalities.

Facebook is today’s biggest social network, with more than 860 million daily active users on both mobile and desktop platforms. There is one catch, however. While popular as a means to connect with friends, relatives and family, Facebook is widely shunned in the workplace, what with the abundance of time-wasting memes, videos and viral hits.

There’s no questioning the potential of social networking platforms for collaboration, however. This is where Yammer hit gold last year. Prior to being acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion, Yammer had raised $142 million in venture capital and had 8 million enterprise users. Staying agile after acquisition, the team still focuses on being a fast and simple platform for enterprise collaboration.

LinkedIn, meanwhile, has about 330 million registered users, although the stark difference is that these users connect with each other on a professional level, which means more sober discussions and tame status updates. LinkedIn can be a rich source of network leads for headhunters and job seekers. Users also connect to widen their professional contacts.

With Facebook already running its own private networks and chat platform (Groups and Messenger), it can easily overrun Yammer as the platform of choice for colleagues for conferencing, chatting and sharing documents. Likewise, Facebook’s social graph might lead to a richer professional networking experience. Facebook employees are already using the network to collaborate with co-workers, so why shouldn’t everyone else be able to do the same?

Facebook for Work, which is being beta-tested by several companies, will provide collaborative tools for the workplace, according to sources cited by the Financial Times (paywall). The advantage that Facebook at Work provides is that it lets users easily switch across personal and professional profiles, to safely separate work and personal lives. This is likely to reduce incidences of getting into trouble with the bosses after unwittingly posting drunken weekend photos. And with Facebook already putting a big premium on its mobile efforts, a collaborative tool for the workplace will also play well with those who work while on the go.

With Facebook being considered a time-wasting productivity killer at the workplace, will Facebook at Work finally change HR departments’ perception of the social network and eventually unblock it from their office firewalls?

Featured image credit: Twin Design / Shutterstock.com

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Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has published its financial report for the first quarter of fiscal year 2015 (July to September 2014), with $23.2 billion in revenue, up 25.2% year-on-year. Operating income from this quarter was at $5.84 billion, down by 7.9%. The company’s diluted EPS was at $0.54, down 12.7% Y/Y.

According to the report, Microsoft’s profit decline during this period is largely due to $1.14 billion integration and restructuring expense related to the acquisition of Nokia’s (HEL:NOK1V) mobile phone and services division.

This quarter showcases strong performance by several divisions, however. First is Surface, which is Microsoft’s Windows-powered tablet aimed at both enterprise and consumer markets. Surface revenue was at $908 million this quarter, up 127% from the same period in FY 2014. According to the the report, margins from the sale of surface tablets are positive this quarter, meaning the company is starting to earn profits from its tablets, a contrast to previous periods in which it focused on growing sales figures first.

“The product line up is the right one and customers are responding favorably,” said CEO Satya Nadella in an earnings conference call. “We’re seeing strong interest from students, professionals and increasingly enterprises who are replacing their laptops and tablets with Surface Pro 3 for their productivity needs,” said CFO Amy Hood during the same discussion.

Microsoft’s big cloud push continues to pay off, with commercial cloud revenue growing 128% during this period. Commercial revenue grew 10% to $12.28 billion, including Office 365, Server products, Productivity solutions and Windows volume licensing. In terms of Microsoft’s own use of its cloud platform, Nadella says it drives economies of scale for the company. “[T]hink of Azure as the common fabric of all our applications,” said Nadella in the conference call. He further cites that 80% of Fortune 500 companies now use Microsoft’s cloud platform.

Gaming is also seen as a strong performer. Microsoft says 2.4 million Xbox consoles were sold during the quarter — an increase of 118% over the previous quarter. This can be attributed to cheaper devices sales due to the unbundling of the Kinect accessory, as well as the lower price of the Xbox One. The Xbox’s entry into China — a market that previously banned gaming consoles — also helped in this regard.

“[G]aming is an important category that will drive additive business value for Microsoft,” said Nadella. “It is the single biggest digital live category measured in both time and money spent across devices of all type.” He said the company expects the acquisition of Mojang and its popular Minecraft title to extend Microsoft’s community and ecosystem across multiple platforms. In addition, Microsoft derives development value from games, which extends to its enterprise and productivity offerings. “The reason we’re why we’re so competitive now in Cortana and speech recognition, which I think is core to productivity, first started with Kinect and Xbox,” added Nadella.

Back on track with PCs?

Device and Consumer Licensing was down 8.7%, however, reflecting a continuing industry-wide decline in PC sales, relative to mobile devices. OEM revenues have declined only by 2%, however, signifying that the decline in sales of desktop PCs and laptops may finally be slowing down. Also, Microsoft says the number of licenses actually grew, although this is driven by cheaper price-point licenses, such as the zero-cost Windows 8 with Bing. It is the same case with Windows Phone revenue, with a 46% decline. Microsoft cites the decline in IP licensing from lower-royalty devices.

Microsoft is optimistic that with enterprise PC refresh cycles, and the discontinuation of Windows XP, that businesses will start upgrading within the fiscal year. “We expect the ongoing business PC refresh cycle to continue, said Hood. “We expect that the consumer PC market will remain stable with many of the same dynamics we saw on Q1.”

Revenue for the succeeding quarter of the fiscal year is expected to be at $25.1 billion to $26.2 billion, which will be largely driven by sales increases in devices and games during the holiday season.

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As per BlackBerry’s (NASDAQ:BBRY) latest quarterly earnings call, the company exceeded expectations by posting a narrower loss than analysts have forecast. For the second fiscal quarter ended August 30, 2014, the company’s net loss has narrowed to 2 cents per share (after one-off items), which is better than the 16 cents loss per share forecast by Thomson Reuters.

BlackBerry has posted a loss of $207 million or 39 cents per share, compared with a loss of $965 million or $1.84 per share in the same period last year. Non-GAAP loss is reported at $11 million. This comes amid lower quarterly revenue figures for second quarter of FY 2015: $916 million, compared with $1.57 billion the same period the previous year.

“We delivered a solid quarter against our key operational metrics, and we are confident that we will achieve breakeven cash flow by the end of FY15,” says Chen in a statement. “Our workforce restructuring is now complete, and we are focusing on revenue growth with judicious investments to further our leadership position in enterprise mobility and security, driving us towards non-GAAP profitability during FY16.”

According to Chen, BlackBerry expects its handset unit to return to profitability with as few as 10 million devices per year. Meanwhile, Chen also expects revenue from software to double from $250 million to $500 million by FY 2015. Software and other revenue account for 8% of BlackBerry’s revenues, while hardware and services account for 46% each.

BlackBerry has just launched its latest Passport smartphone, squarely aimed at the enterprise market with the hopes of revitalizing its weakened smartphone business. The device has a decidedly different form factor compared with popular smartphones today (a square screen and a wide form factor reminiscent of an actual passport). Executive Chairman and CEO John Chen says the Waterloo, ON-based company has sold 200,000 units so far since its launch on Wednesday.

Along with Passport, BlackBerry also launched its Blend feature, which enables sync and bridging of messages and content across different devices based on different operating systems. The company has also made a string of acquisitions in the past few weeks: UK-based Movirtu, which makes virtual SIM solutions for mobile operators, as well as voice and data encryption firm Secusmart.

BlackBerry stock rose 4.6% as of closing Friday, and the stock has risen about 22% over the past 12 months.

The post BlackBerry Narrows Quarterly Loss, Expects to Double Software Sales by FY2015 appeared first on VR World.

There’s a very good chance that today’s Wired piece about Kevin Mitnick’s newest venture has a lot to do with the discovery of the Bash Bug within various Linux and Unix operating systems. This is a bug that could be considered a Zero Day exploit because of the fact that it is a security vulnerability within an application that is possible to exploit due to the fact that the software vendor has no knowledge of it yet or it has not been patched yet.

Either way, it is a vulnerability that someone can take advantage of. Now, Wired ran a piece about Kevin Mitnick and his security company which does security consulting which includes a whole host of internet and non-net consulting all pertaining to security. The Wired piece in question talks about one of Mitnick’s latest ventures which claims that his company is finding security researchers’ and hackers’ zero day exploits and selling them to the highest bidder.

“With his latest business venture, Mitnick has switched hats again: This time to an ambiguous shade of gray,” Wired wrote.

Late last week, Mitnick revealed a new branch of his security consultancy business he calls Mitnick’s Absolute Zero Day Exploit Exchange. Since its quiet inception six months ago, he says the service has offered to sell corporate and government clients high-end “zero-day” exploits, hacking tools that take advantage of secret bugs in software for which no patch yet exists. Mitnick says he’s offering exploits developed both by his own in-house researchers and by outside hackers, guaranteed to be exclusive and priced at no less than $100,000 each, including his own fee.

And what will his clients do with those exploits? “When we have a client that wants a zero-day vulnerability for whatever reason, we don’t ask, and in fact they wouldn’t tell us,” Mitnick tells Wired in an interview. “Researchers find them, they sell them to us for X, we sell them to clients for Y and make the margin in between.”

Mitnick declined to name any of his customers, and wouldn’t say how many, if any, exploits his exchange has brokered so far. But the website he launched to reveal the project last week offers to use his company’s “unique positioning among security researchers and the hacker community” to connect exploit developers with “discerning government and corporate buyers.”

In fact, they interviewed Mitnick appearing to take many of his quotes out of context in order to sell their own agenda that he is selling these Zero Day exploits to whomever will pay him. In fact, it seems odd that they would include commentary from people on Twitter as part of their article when its merely an opinion and doesn’t actually add anything to the piece, other than mentioning that Mitnick responded to his tweet.

The reality of the situation is that for people that discover vulnerabilities in government and corporate infrastructure, there is a very difficult balance to strike. Many ethical hackers looking to notify companies of their security holes eventually become the targets of investigations and attacked for what they do. Sure, there are plenty of unethical hackers out there that might try to hold a company ransom for a fee to give them the Zero Day that they’ve found, but that has nothing to do with what Mitnick is doing. They are offering researchers and security minded people an intermediary to help those companies find and close Zero Day exploits and to reward the researchers for their work and at the same time protect them from frivolous lawsuits if they try to approach the company directly.

Mitnick’s company vigorously vets all of their potential clients and makes sure that no bad actors are being involved in the process. They are not selling Zero Day exploits to competitors of the companies that have the security holes and they aren’t selling Zero Day exploits to the government that might make a company vulnerable. The goal is to help companies see their problems and give them the opportunity to fix them before they become public.

The post No, Kevin Mitnick is not Selling Zero Day Exploits to Hackers appeared first on VR World.

A day before Intel’s Developer Forum kicked off in San Francisco, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) officially unveiled the Xeon E5-2600 v3 known previously by its code name of Grantley.

On stage, Intel’s Diane Bryant, the company’s general manager of its Data Center Group, said that the “big data” economy was driving demand for a new series of Xeon Chips.

“The digital services economy imposes new requirements on the data center, requirements for automated, dynamic and scalable service delivery,” Bryant said on stage. “Our new Intel processors deliver unmatched performance, energy efficiency and security, as well as provide visibility into the hardware resources required to enable software defined infrastructure.

“We are continuing to be the most energy efficient processor on the planet,” she continued,” promising 27 world records in performance across the product line.”

“[Intel is] excited about the role this platform is going to play as we all collectively re-architect the datacentre from static to dynamic and from proprietary to open standards,” she later said on stage.

While the previous generation of Intel Xeon chips had a core count that went as high as 12, the third generation of Xeons offers up to 18 cores with clock speeds of up to 3.7 GHz . The Xeon E5-2600 v3 will also be the first in the series to support DDR4 RAM, which offers substantial clock speeds above DDR3’s JEDEC speeds as well as power savings due to lower operating voltages.

Another new feature of the Xeon E5-2600 v3 is the update of Intel’s Quickpath Interconnect (QPI) that’s capable of transferring data at 9.6 GTps, much faster than existing front side bus (FSB) technology.

To aid in the inquiry of fault detection, Intel is including a new range of telemetry sensors to give administrators more information and metrics on CPU usage, memory and I/O.

The new Xeon is available in 22 different versions that vary wildly depending on required clock speed and cores. Pricing begins at $213 and tops out at $2,072. For the workstation, the chip is available as the Xeon E5-1600 with pricing ranging from $295 to $1,723.

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Today I’m taking another look at Western Digital’s WD RE 4 TB WD4000FYYZ enterprise drives. I reviewed a single WD4000FYYZ in our Western Digital 4 TB roundup, and Western Digital was kind enough to provide us with some more drives to put through their paces.

The WD RE 4 TB FYYZ was the highest performing drive in our earlier roundup, and as an enterprise drive, it’s rated for double the load/unload cycles of the consumer drives. As such, these drives are optimized for RAID arrays.

The specifications of the drive are below:

• Interface – SATA 6.0Gb/s
• Capacity – 4TB
• RPM – 7200 RPM
• Cache – 64MB
• Load/Unload Cycles – 600,000

I’ll start off with the basic configuration, a single FYYZ drive.

In AIDA64, the single drive has a top linear read of 171.0 MB/s, a random read of 148.8 MB/s, and a buffered read of 345.2 MB/s. It has an average read access of 12.19 ms.

In CrystalDiskMark, the single drive provided a sequential read of 176.6 MB/s and a sequential write of 171.8 MB/s.

We had an issue with AIDA64 and the average read access times. For some reason they were coming out as 0.00 ms for the RAID 0 and 1 arrays, which is incorrect. The AIDA64 screenshots below still include the average read access, but any 0.00 ms times should be ignored

Moving on to two of the 4 TB FYYZ drives in RAID 1, a mirrored array, however, an NTFS RAID 1 array won’t provide any speed benefits.

In AIDA64, the two drive RAID 1 array has a top linear read of 173.6 MB/s, a random read of 130.7 MB/s, and a buffered read of 7278.0 MB/s.

In CrystalDiskMark, the two drive WD RE 4 TB RAID 1 array provided a sequential read of 176.5 MB/s and a sequential write of 166.8 MB/s.

Next up are the two WD RE 4 TB drives in RAID 0, a striped array, meaning performance should almost double.

In AIDA64, the two drive RAID 0 array has a top linear read of 339.3 MB/s, a random read of 289.1 MB/s, and a buffered read of 7359.2 MB/s.

In CrystalDiskMark, the two drive RAID 0 array provided a sequential read of 338.3 MB/s and a sequential write of 334.1 MB/s.

Now we get to the behemoth four 4 TB FYYZ drives in RAID 0, for an array 16 TB in size. The performance should be impressive.

In AIDA64, the four drive RAID 0 array has a top linear read of 713.5 MB/s, a random read of 559.7 MB/s, and a buffered read of 7440.5 MB/s.

In CrystalDiskMark, the four drive RAID 0 array provided a sequential read of 657.1 MB/s and a sequential write of 642.6 MB/s.

These figures are better than any consumer-grade SSD currently on the market, and certainly this array provides a much larger capacity.

We also tested four WD RE 4 TB drives in RAID 10. RAID 10 is the same as RAID 1 + 0, meaning that two pairs of drives are striped, and those pairs are mirrored. This array should yield similar performance to the two drive RAID 0 array, however, note the disclaimer below.

Disclaimer: It should be noted that the RAID 10 benchmarks were done via SATA 2.0 (3 Gbps) on an Intel X79 chipset, whereas the rest of the benchmarks in this review were done via SATA 3.0 (6 Gbps) on an AMD 990FX chipset. This will likely have some effect on the performance of the drives.

In AIDA64, the four drive RAID 10 array has a top linear read of 327.9 MB/s, a random read of 265.4 MB/s, and a buffered read of 6902.5 MB/s. It has an average read access of 11.92 ms.

In CrystalDiskMark, the four drive RAID 10 array provided a sequential read of 336.0 MB/s and a sequential write of 322.5 MB/s.

The drives themselves are very impressive, and scale well in RAID configurations. The WD RE 4 TB WD4000FYYZ currently retails for $300. While this might be a bit too pricey for the average consumer, prosumers and businesses interested in drive performance and guaranteed durability should definitely consider the WD RE 4 TB WD4000FYYZ.

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Yesterday, Apple and IBM announced that they would be entering into a partnership where IBM would help Apple develop enterprise software for iOS devices and Apple would supply OS and hardware to enable those enterprise applications. This announcement marked the first partnership or relationship between the two companies since Apple stopped using IBM’s Power PC CPUs in their systems in 2006 with the last product announced in 2005. It’s been a long time since the two companies have worked together on anything and now that IBM is mostly a software company (They still have the Power Architecture and Power Chips for HPC) it makes sense that the two companies would work together again.

IBM’s enterprise software and cloud offerings are some of the most developed on the market and squarely focused on the needs of large enterprises, which already have millions of iOS devices in deployment. Apple will be supplying the devices for IBM’s planned iOS-based enterprise software platforms which will boost Apple’s enterprise sales even better than they already have them. It will also give Apple a very strong foothold inside the enterprise that none of their competitors are anywhere near having. It should also provide Apple enough enterprise sales to become even more of a fixture in enterprise applications than they already are. Apple is not struggling in enterprise, they don’t NEED IBM, however IBM does need some sort of a hardware partner. And if you’re going to look for a hardware partner, you might as well go for the biggest one and the one with the most enterprise deployments already.

As a result, IBM gets some sort of hardware platform to build their enterprise applications platform and Apple gets to sell more iPhones and increase iOS’ penetration in the overall market. This marks Apple’s first serious movement into enterprise, even though they already have a pretty strong presence in most enterprises because of their consumer product success. While I don’t suspect that Apple will do anything different to iPhones deployed with IBM software, there is a good chance that we could see ‘pro’ or ‘enterprise’ hardware in the future that might command an even greater price premium than Apple’s current line of consumer products. Enterprise customers want to feel special and feel like they’re getting what they pay for, which is why IBM has committed upwards of 100,000 employees to be available to the Apple project.

Overall, this is a very good move for both companies and I would suspect that this is only the beginning of such relationships between software and hardware companies. After all, Apple has seriously been struggling recently to deploy software that is popular with consumers and enterprise outside of their operating systems on their own hardware. With IBM’s enterprise software, Apple partially solves part of that equation and IBM is able to provide quality and reliable hardware to their enterprise customers that they’re already familiar with.

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Intel’s first quarter earnings for 2014 were for the most part fairly tepid. Sure, they were able to post an earnings of $0.38 per share on $12.8 billion in revenue, however this only beat analyst’s fairly conservative expectations of $0.37 per share by $0.01. On $12.8 billion in revenue, Intel showed operating income of $2.5 billion and net income of $1.9 billion. Intel’s net income for Q1 2014 was down 5% over the same period a year ago, nothing to cheer about but still much better than previous declines. They also saw an increase in revenue of about $200 million, even though there was a slight decrease in profitability of about the same amount.

The truth is that Intel’s performance this past quarter was not anything especially exciting write about. The most exciting thing for most, however, was the fact that Intel was essentially flat. To many, that came as an indication of their stemming the tide of PC declines and growth in enterprise and server. Also, remember, that before this earnings report, Intel changed how they report their revenue for certain divisions based on new product groups. So now things are categorized under the following 5 categories:

• PC Client Group revenue of $7.9 billion, down 8 percent sequentially and down 1 percent year-over-year.
• Data Center Group revenue of $3.1 billion, down 5 percent sequentially and up 11 percent year-over-year.
• Internet of Things Group revenue of $482 million, down 10 percent sequentially and up 32 percent year-over-year.
• Mobile and Communications Group revenue of $156 million, down 52 percent sequentially and down 61 percent year-over-year.
• Software and services operating segments revenue of $553 million, down 6 percent sequentially and up 6 percent year-over-year.

If you look at their new break down of revenue (and profitability) per division, you can see that their PC Client Group is still the bulk of the company’s revenue followed closely by the Data Center Group. All of the others are still relatively at around $500 million or less in terms of revenue, and even less in terms of profitability towards Intel’s bottom line.

But if Intel wants to become a truly competitive company in the mobile space their Mobile and Communications Group is going to need to grow much faster rather than shrinking 52% sequentially and 61% year over year. Not just that, but at $156 million this is actually their smallest business segment which is a bit concerning when you think about how important Mobile and Communications are to Intel’s future.

Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich said about their earnings, “In the first quarter we saw solid growth in the data center, signs of improvement in the PC business, and we shipped 5 million tablet processors, making strong progress on our goal of 40 million tablets for 2014. Additionally, we demonstrated our further commitment to grow in the enterprise with a strategic technology and business collaboration with Cloudera, we introduced our second-generation LTE platform with CAT6 and other advanced features, and we shipped our first Quark products for the Internet of Things.”

The truth is that Intel is buying their tablet share and it remains to be seen if that 40 million tablets for 2014 goal is really going to be worth it for Intel to effectively eat the profitability for the sake of penetration. Their lack of communications penetration is their biggest weakness and I’m not entirely sure it was a good idea for Intel to commit an entire division to IoT solutions without a solid definition for IoT even existing yet. There is no doubt that Intel is gungho on growth and expanding their product lines, but the real question is whether or not they can help reinvent the PC in ways that make it relevant while also making sure they are a serious player in the mobile computing AND communications front. Sure, they’ve landed themselves inside some of the Samsung Galaxy S5 phones, but their lack of consistent design wins is concerning to say the least. Qualcomm needs a serious and stable competitor and I’m not entirely convinced that Intel is there yet.

Since their earnings announcement, Intel is basically flat (was up 0.60% yesterday and gave up 0.40% over night).

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Seagate is finally catching up to their competition with the announcement of their 6TB drive that finally brings the company into the realm of drives over 5TB. Their competition, WDC launched the HGST 6TB enterprise drive with Helium all the way back in November. While I’m not sure what took Seagate so long, it may not bode well for the company that they’re so far behind in terms of capacity. There are a lot of reasons that we could suspect why it took Seagate so long, but nevertheless they are here.

Yes, this drive is a 3.5″ drive, which comes as no surprise to anyone that knows about drive capacities. All of the leading capacity drives start out as 3.5″ drives and eventually their technology enables higher 2.5″ drive capacities. This drive will come in SATA 6G and SAS 12G, each with four different flavors and four different capacities. There will be two standard models one with 4KN (advanced 4K formatting) and one with 512E and an SED model as well as an SED-FIPS model. There will also be 5TB, 4TB and 2TB capacities of this same updated enterprise model and all version of this drive will be shipping with 128 MB of cache.

All of these drives will be 7200 RPM and are rated at a 1.4M MTBF, which makes these drive relatively reliable even though Seagate’s reliability has been put into question as of late by multiple publications and even by some of our own experiences with their 2.5″ enterprise drives.

In terms of performance, the SATA6G (SATA 3.0) drives are expected to deliver a sustained sequential read speed of up to 216 MB/s while the SAS12G (SAS 12 Gbps) interface drives are expected to deliver an extra 10 MB/s at 226 MB/s of sustained sequential read speeds. Seagate claims that this is the fastest 6TB drive in the world and as a result that would explain why they didn’t necessarily launch as early as WDC did with their HGST drive. The drives latencies remain the same across the board with an average latency of 4.16 ms. Their power consumption is also expected to hover around 8w (SAS) and 7w (SATA) under average idle power and almost 12w (SAS) and 11w (SATA) under typical operating conditions with random reads.

The final retail price still hasn’t been released yet, but I would expect it to sell in excess of $400 per drive, probably closer to $500.

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Microsoft’s CEO search has finally ended with the appointment of Satya Nadella to CEO by Microsoft’s Board of Directors. They have finally selected someone to replace Steve Ballmer after the sudden and unexpected announcement of his departure. Microsoft’s CEO search started with people like Ford’s current CEO Allan Mulally and Qualcomm’s soon-to-be CEO Steve Mollenkopf, who actually got the position earlier than anyone had expected because of Microsoft’s offer to make him CEO. Qualcomm obviously couldn’t let that happen so instead they promoted Mollenkopf from COO to CEO earlier than anyone would have expected. There are some very interesting parallels between the two companies but we’ll go over those later.

Satya Nadella, ultimately became their choice for CEO because they couldn’t bring anyone in from the outside and he was their best choice for promoting from within. A lot of people talked about the fact that Microsoft wanted to bring in someone else from the outside to bring in a set of ‘fresh eyes’ but the truth is that there are plenty of very capable and skilled people within the company that don’t necessarily have Microsoft blinders. And by the looks of it, Satya Nadella appears to be one of those people even though he has been with the company for 22 years.

Satya’s life began back in his home city and country of Hyderabad, India. He got his undergrad from Mangalore University and his Masters in Computer Science from none other than UWM-Milwaukee and his MBA from Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He has slowly worked his way up through the company over the decades and served as the VP of Microsoft’s Business Division, Corporate VP of Microsoft’s Business Solutions and Search and Advertising Platform Group as well as EVP of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group.

His continued success within the company has been one of the reasons that he was promoted to the position of CEO and his belief in life-long learning that he talked about in his interview (pictured above). Microsoft actually had a pretty good video, even if it was a bit creepy seeing him walk through the empty halls of one of Microsoft’s busiest buildings.

Satya still has a lot of work cut out for him, as he needs to find a way to improve Microsoft’s business offerings beyond what he’s already been able to do and even more importantly make Microsoft’s mobile push a significant one. Right now, Microsoft’s weakest point is the fact that the PC market is slowing and the fact that the server market is growing ever more Linux-based. It also doesn’t help that Microsoft’s Windows 8 OS is taking a beating on the desktop and on laptops because of the growth of Android and OS, which are mutually exclusive when Windows is considered. Sure, there are some dual-OS devices, but the generally accepted principal is that devices ship with one OS.

For Satya, I believe the biggest challenge will be trying to figure out how they can make the Nokia acquisition work for Microsoft and their OS, as well as how he will integrate Stephen Elop into his management team. Because, after all, Stephen Elop was CEO of Nokia and there were lots of rumors that he was being considered for CEO. Thankfully, Microsoft’s Board of Directors is not crazy and they didn’t end up picking him, considering what he did to Nokia. Anyways, Satya appears to have a good head on his shoulders and is probably one of the most qualified people to run Microsoft today.

This brings us back to the Qualcomm parallel, in the fact that both Microsoft and Qualcomm have both only had two CEOs since their founding and this will make only the third CEO in the company’s history. In the case of Qualcomm, it would be the first person that isn’t a member of the Jacobs family, however, in Microsoft’s terms that isn’t really the case since Ballmer and Gates aren’t related even though they’ve been through a lot together. The other parallel is the fact that Bill Gates is stepping down as Chairman of the board and Jacobs is stepping down as CEO, however, both men are going to actually focus on new and exciting technologies and helping the company on the bleeding edge of tech. The truth is that both Gates and Jacobs are visionary CEOs and they both know what to look for in the next great product, and because of this both of them may not have positions of power within the company, but their influence is only increasing.

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Afore mentioned three models are almost identical to already existing Core i7 920, 940 and 965, but for the QPI inteface, which is allegidly set at 5.4 GT/s on all parts. G Also, very interesting part is the similarity in names between Core and Xeon series, something we haven’t seen recently. 2.66GHz Nehalem corresponds to the name Core i7 920 and Xeon 3520, i7 940 is Xeon 3540, while the 3.2 GHz part is known as Core i7 965 and Xeon 3570. We estimate this small change in number is due to QPI link.

We all saw the execellent scores that appeared in legally leaked benchmark results on several sites on the ‘Net. Thus, AMD’s Shanghai should better brace for impact, because Nehalem is coming from high altitude.

This also practically confirms the rumors of faster Core i7 Extreme processor, since Intel had the tradition of launching higher-clocked desktop part as soon as server parts reach the clocks of desktop versions (at least, up to Core 2 Quad era).

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