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Alcatel-Lucent recently announced a sweeping set of enhancements across many of its switch and unified communications product lines. ALU, better known in the service provider arena, wants to send the message that it can compete with the likes of Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and 3Com as a total solution provider for voice and data services rather than a point product vendor. Is a single source necessary or the best option?

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According to last Friday's Official Google Blog, the Google Systems Infrastructure Team has sorted a record 1 terabyte of data on 1,000 computers in only 68 seconds, which breaks the previous mark of 209 seconds established in July by Yahoo.

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The energy consumption of data centers is enormous. According to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report to Congress, the peak load on the power grid from data centers and servers is currently estimated to be approximately 7 gigawatts, equivalent to the output of about 15 typical power plants of 1,000 megawatts each.

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While data centers consume massive amounts of energy, most data centers have become massively more efficient over the past several years.

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This morning's Trusted Computing Group summit focused on the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), NAC, and the TNC. The event was well-attended and covered a range of topics from what the TPM is and what it is used for to the TNC's role in NAC and NAC standards. One overwhelming message came out: Users want standards. Vendors are not listening.

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We're in the middle of a project where we'd proposed to measure the difference in perception of virtualization between business decision makers and technology decision makers. At the same time, we're looking at the same perceptions for advanced Web technology -- stuff like Ajax, the trend of adding collaboration and BI capabilities into apps. I've been surprised by the results.

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Green Hills Software Integrity 178B operating system is the first, and only, certified Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 6+ operating system on the market. Green Hills Software uses Integrity as the basis for a secure PC operating system called Integrity PC and includes Padded Cell Virtualization, a secure hypervisor running within Integrity PC. Integrity Global Security LLC has been formed as a subsidiary of Green Hills Software to market Integrity PC. Integrity PC is provably secure.

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There are three legs of a table that, if weakened, put your organization at risk and, if a leg is removed, let the table fall to the ground. IT governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) is fundamentally a return to the basics of information security. Regardless of technology, you need to know what to protect, when it needs protecting, and why it needs protecting. Getting ahead of the game is more effective than catching up later.

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Managed hosting vendor The Planet has announced the availability of an on-demand storage cloud service that merges on-premises storage performance with cloud storage capabilities.

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Brian Snow's keynote at CSI 2008 started with an amusing graphic of a guy pouring gas over his head while lighting a cigar. The message was we always take risks, even when we aren't aware of them. Snow learned a thing or two about risk while working at the NSA for 20 years, ending as technical director for information assurance. Information risks, he points out are, moving targets and information security programs need to be adaptable and well designed.

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This year's CSI 2008 event promises to be every bit as interesting as ever. CSI tracks are broad, the topics deep, and the speakers top-notch. Once again I find myself wanting to see all of it (9 tracks!) but only one of me.

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Few services can be had for free nowadays, but if you're a victim of identify fraud or data theft, add McAfee's new Cybercrime Response Unit to the list of resources you can utilize to aid your investigation.

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Last week, Wolfram Research announced that it was developing a cloud computing service for users of its Mathematica software used to graph and understand complex mathematics, physics, and engineering problems.

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These days, many companies are looking to slash their technology budgets any way they can. A new report from Info-Tech Research shows you how to do it the right way, without adversely affecting morale or operations. And the folks at bMighty.com -- InformationWeek's sister site for small and midsize companies -- have arranged to let you download this $2,000 report, FREE!

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Storage giant EMC today debuted its first cloud-optimized storage offering, called Atmos, that promises to help huge content distribution services, such as video and photo sharing sites, store petabytes of data across cloud storage environments around the world.

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Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt on Friday took himself out of the running for the U.S. CTO post in Barack Obama's administration.

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Early in his presidential campaign, Barack Obama said that the United States isn't doing nearly enough to create jobs through technology and pledged to create the first-ever Cabinet-level post of chief technology officer.

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I've been following with interest a cloud computing debate that's been going on the past week or so between O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly and technology writer Nicholas Carr about the potential for a single company to achieve monopoly control of the world of cloud computing.

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Data centers use staggering amounts of energy, so it's not surprising nonstandard ways of cutting power consumption are quickly gaining the attention of data center managers. One of these is MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) storage technology that employs a large group of disk drives in which only those drives in active use are spinning at any given time.

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As part of its Green Business Technology initiative, Hewlett-Packard on Monday introduced a new technology called Dynamic Power Capping that lets data center managers set a limit on how much power individual servers are allowed to use.

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Gunter Ollmann, director of security strategy with IBM Internet Security Systems, wrote a short paper on designing applications to be resistant to infected hosts. Ollmann offers some solid, high-level design advice that Web developers should read and consider adopting. But the paper also highlights the difficulty and complexity in securing the Web-based ecosystem.

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NIST is wrapping up accepting submissions for a new cryptographic one-way hash algorithm today. NIST's competition follows a tradition of peer review, public discussion, and acceptance of algorithms that brought us DES, SHA, and AES. The selection process won’t be complete until 2012, but final selection should addresses weaknesses in the hash algorithms used today.

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As InformationWeek covers Microsoft's revelations at its Professional Developer Conference this week, it's becoming clear that Microsoft's top brass know they aren't in the same business they were just a few years ago. So is this the transitive stage that spells the end of Microsoft's dominance of the software industry?

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Cisco follows up on its survey on data leakage, which I already wrote about, and an analysis of policy effectiveness. There isn't too much surprising in the findings, but the results continue to highlight the need for sound security policy management processes in organizations and, more important, that the policies need to be communicated to employees.

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Both companies exceeded the Street's expectations last quarter. Now... how to close '08 with a bang?

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Data centers consume massive amounts of energy. In a Forbes commentary in August, Kenneth Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute (which monitors data center uptime), said the number of servers in data centers in the United States has grown from 5 million in 2000, to 10 million in 2005, to a projected 15 million in 2010.

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ICANN, the organization that manages the technical aspect of the DNS, among other things, has opened up a 45-day public comment period on the process for requesting a new generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) such as .com, .net, and .gov. The comment period is the next step along the path of adding more gTLD's to DNS. If you are involved with DNS, or work for a global or national brand, you want to pay attention to these developments.

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At IBM's Market Street offices in San Francisco this week, I saw a first-hand demo of OpusUna, a unique Web-conferencing platform that incorporates widgets, audio, and video cameras so that multiple users can collaborate and communicate from within the same browser.

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Both Google and Microsoft in the past month have disclosed details of their data center energy usage, confirming that the two software giants operate some of the most efficient facilities in the world.

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The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) really is a good model for standardization bodies. The MEF brings service providers and equipment makers together to create standards for all facets of Carrier Ethernet as well as providing conformance testing and certification. Kevin Vachon, COO of the MEF, provided some interesting insights into the direction of the MEF and, therefore, the direction of Carrier Ethernet.

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Ethernet Expo is the place to be to get current on the technology and service offerings. While the main show is aimed more toward service providers, enterprise attendees to the show can gain some valuable insights on upcoming standards work, deployments, and last mile connectivity.

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Based on a survey of IT executives, CIOs, and other business leaders, IDC said this week it expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold in the next five years, reaching $42 billion by 2012.

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Amid the economic turmoil that's gripped Wall Street the past few months, Adam Honoré, a senior analyst at Aite Group who specializes in brokerage and financial services technology, declares that "human factors such as poor risk management, not computerized trading," are primarily responsible for the market's current volatility.

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My first impression is that it's an odd place to try to unlock the mystery of the Big Bang theory: 300 feet below a bucolic French village in an unpresupposing conference room, next to a 10-foot-high tunnel stuffed with catwalks, cables, and a thousand cylindrical, supercooled magnets, linked like sausages in an underground ring 17 miles in circumference.

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Google is the latest company in the data center industry experimenting with raising the thermostats in its data centers as a way of saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in energy costs, according to a report this week by Data Center Knowledge.

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LightReading and InformationWeek are putting on Enterprise Day at the end of Ethernet Expo on Oct. 22 at the Hilton in New York. Registration for the event is open. Spending the day will get you up to speed on the happenings in Carrier Ethernet from both a standards and business perspective.

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Find out how you can rein in the sprawl of proliferating virtual machines in the latest InformationWeek Analytics Audio: Managing Virtual Servers.

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Last month I suggested future computing models would let employees pick their own machine with company funds, fetching a corporate desktop via some mix of VM tech. At Citrix, the future is now.

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John Timmons at Ars Techinca wrote about the interorganizational wrangling beginning as .gov studies DNS fix. At issue: Who should implement and manage the root signing process rasises the question about who should hold the root keys to such a critical service. But my question is, why does the root zone need to be signed at all?

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Is your kid's school using technology in innovative, exceptional, or surprising ways? I'm not talking only about in-the-classroom use of computers; I'm also referring to technology that's being deployed behind the scenes.

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Lawsuits driven by the financial crisis may be good news for companies that sell electronic discovery software and services.

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The pendulum swing between responsibly disclosing a vulnerability privately to affected vendors so they can create a fix versus telling the world so IT can be aware of potential problems is swinging back into the vendors' favor. The result is that without public awareness, vendors aren't motivated to institute fixes on a timely basis.

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Get an overview of the state of the changing service-oriented architecture landscape in the latest InformationWeek Analytics Audiobook: SOA: Convergence And Consolidation. Learn about the major SOA technologies and the strengths and weaknesses of the major vendors.

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Cisco commissioned a global survey of IT administrators and computer users about their perceptions on data leakage. Not surprisingly, the study found employees use their work computers for personal use and IT knows it.

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LiveOffice launches a free e-mail continuity offering as a loss-leader for its archiving service.

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Ben Tomhave posted a lengthy set of observations from the IEEE Key Management Summit 2008. He did walk away confident that key management standards will be forthcoming. That's too bad. One of the best ways to protect data at rest is to encrypt it. However, enterprise encryption requires enterprise key management, not a bunch of proprietary systems in use today.

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My last blog entry on our NAC experience at Purchase College resulted in the expected emails and phone calls from NAC vendors convinced that we would be ready to junk StillSecure’s SafeAccess and adopt their products just because I used the line “while it's not going as well as we hoped, it is going better than we feared.” Well folks while we do have a few bones to pick with StillSecure, which I’m not getting into today, most of our headaches are more about how NAC is harder in the EDU space than the real, read corporate, world.

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A day after Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced Oracle's first-ever hardware product, the HP Oracle Database Machine, which he touted as the world's fastest database machine, I sat through an OpenWorld session that promised to revolutionize query processing.

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While technological challenges abound in e-discovery, IT's biggest hurdle may be getting in-house attorneys to meet them halfway.

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Find out what it takes to survive and thrive as a CIO in the latest InformationWeek Analytics Audiobook: Tomorrow's CIO. We look at responses from more than 700 readers who weighed in on how to keep the CIO role strong well into the future. Author John Soat looks at the qualities that the CIO will need, including technology savvy, business leadership, and more.

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