Posted by Doug Dineley on May 1, 2008 01:00 PM

April 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Test Center Tracker: Packeteer sizzles at CIFS; RIA development heats up

TAGS: Endpoint security, Green IT, Rich Internet applications, Small arrays, Wide Area Networks

WAN speed record: For several years running, our testing of WAN acceleration appliances has served mainly to chronicle the superiority of the Riverbed Steelhead, whose approach to byte- or segment-level caching and CIFS optimization has made it the perennial performance leader and our annual Technology of the Year Award winner. Only Silver Peak Systems, which inched closer year by year, could give Riverbed a run for its money. Last week we discovered that speedy wide area networking, or at least the branch of WAN acceleration concerned with file transfers, is a three horse race. Packeteer's iShaper may not be a better overall solution than Riverbed just yet, but it registered the best CIFS performance in our testing to date. See Keith Schultz's review.

Adobe AIR is the answer? Adobe AIR is not yet widely known or implemented, but it solves all of the major issues keeping the browser from being a common front end for applications, says Tom Yager. Read AIR's praises in Tom's "Ahead of the Curve," then weigh Martin Heller's counterpoint in "Strategic Developer."

RIA for the enterprise: Curl's longtime focus on creating rich, Web-based business applications has paid such dividends as excellent performance, smooth handling of intermittent connections, and support for large data sets. Version 6.0 of the InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award winner advances with skinnable controls, more sophisticated graphics rendering, a Macintosh runtime, and the ability to add a Curl applet to an AJAX page, and vice versa. See Martin Heller's review.

Beat the heat: "In many cases, a datacenter can generate enough heat to heat a building 10 to 30 times its size," says says Steve Sams, vice president of IBM Global Site and Facilities Services. Instead of casting that heat to the winds, some companies are using it to keep other buildings warm, and even to generate electrical power. See Ted Samson's "Sustainable IT."

It's the applications, stupid: Thanks to today's more secure operating systems, remote attacks, where the end-user is not involved at all, are becoming almost a rarity. That means educating end users is the key to client security. See Roger Grimes's "Security Advisor."

Smaller disks, lower power: Mario Apicella tackles a new twist on the old speed versus capacity question: the advantages of arrays built around larger capacity 3.5-inch drives versus those that leverage newfangled, lower-power 2.5-inch disks. See "Storage Advisor."

Posted by Doug Dineley on April 7, 2008 09:14 AM

October 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Test Center Tracker: Slippery malware, storage clouds on the horizon, and a guide to getting green

TAGS: Green IT, Security, Storage, Test Center Tracker

Mutating malware: Roger Grimes gives us a peek inside the network security arms race, where virus and worm authors evade signature-based detection techniques through "server-side polymorphism," and malware fighters seek a better defense. Say what? Server-side polymorphism? See today's Security Advisor.

Hash and stash: In today's Storage Insider, Mario profiles two startups that are rethinking how data is stored: Instead of storing complete data sets in a single bucket, they break the data into fragments and store them in multiple places. Cleversafe uses "dispersed storage" to boost data security, while RevStor applies the technique to disk to disk backup pools.

Green in twelve steps Going green can save you money, spare the air, engender feelings of goodwill in customers, and allow you to shame reprobate competitors. So good, but how do you get started? Forrester Research has a plan, which Ted Samson examines in yesterday's Sustainable IT.

Posted by Doug Dineley on October 26, 2007 10:49 AM

October 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Test Center Tracker: Green tops Gartner's list, security best practices gone wrong

TAGS: Green IT, Security, Test Center Tracker

Green is number one! At least according to Gartner, whose list of ten strategic technologies for 2008 caught the eye of greenalyst Ted Samson. See yesterday's Sustainable IT for Ted's take, and his swift run down the rest of Gartner's list. Hand it to Gartner: It's a fascinating list, a buzz-stirring blend of the real, the improbable, the silly, and the absurd, served with the signature deadpan delivery. Terrific reading. Go Web 2.0!

Guidelines and gridlines: Roger Grimes has spotted a disturbing trend in these times of compliance and governance, wherein best practices guidelines evolve into mandates, and the mandates begin reaching down into systems settings, trapping sensible security managers in a corner. See yesterday's Security Advisor for Roger's tales of good security guidelines gone wrong.

Posted by Doug Dineley on October 12, 2007 10:38 AM

October 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Test Center Tracker: Silverlight Shines

TAGS: Application development, Green IT, Search, Test Center Tracker

It's a great day in the Test Center, with a review on a top web app development system, and looks at sustainable reading and hacker tools.

Coding by Silverlight: The race is on for web-application development framework, with Ajax, Flash, Curl, Ruby, and others all muscling and edging one another for attention. Microsoft has thrown Silverlight into the mix, and Martin Heller finds a lot to like in the upstart development language. Between a well thought-out development environment and a clear division between tasks for designers and programmers, Martin thinks that Silverlight can offer a lot to new web app developers, especially if they've already committed to Microsoft Visual Studio.

Sustainable Reading: Some folks cast a skeptical glance at any capitalist involvement with "Green" issues, but Ted Samson looks at a business publication and finds encouragement in corporations that take a serious look at sustainable operations. When top management sees sustainability in terms of dollars and cents, that's when change can truly start in the enterprise.

Learning the Hacker Way: There's no reason that hackers should have all the cool tools, and Roger Grimes points out two of the best in his latest column. The Security Adviser thinks you should know how hackers think and how they work -- and these tools will give you a leg up on each of those goals.

Posted by Curt Franklin on October 2, 2007 10:30 AM

August 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Test Center Tracker: App limits

TAGS: Applications, Green IT, Security

By now, pretty much everyone is aware that Skype suffered a massive meltdown last week, with bazillions of users unable to log into their P2P VoIP accounts. Skype says the problem was caused by Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, but not everyone is buying that explanation. Here at the Test Center, we're accustomed to the routine of testing products and watching them break, so Skype's explanation is plausible--though that doesn't mean it's correct. That's the real value of the kind of testing we do here, and it's why we're going to keep doing it. Sure, we're probably not going to be able to simulate every single combination of conditions, and modeling millions of clients rebooting at once is dicey, but we'll test as many products as possible, under conditions that give readers as much information as possible. We'll also be grateful that we're not responsible for keeping the Skype network up and running, but that's probably another blog entry.

Speaking of keeping things running, Ted Samson reports on Fujitsu's installation of a hydrogen fuel-cell generator for back-up power. I've seen very small hydrogen fuel cells for emergency back-up power, but Fujitsu has gone out on the leading edge for a facility of its size. Since most building-sized back-up generators are diesel units, switching to hydrogen could have a significant impact on both particulate and green-house gas emissions.

Finally, it's been amazing (and frustrating) to watch the evolution of the Storm Worm. Zero Day Security is tracking the twists and turns of this dangerous malware--if you're responsible for the security of even one system, you should follow along and stay on top of this truly vicious worm.

Posted by Curt Franklin on August 21, 2007 09:11 AM

August 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Test Center Tracker: BRMS wars, mainframe futures, and encryption caveats

TAGS: Application development, Business Rule Management Systems, Data Protection, Full disk encryption, Green IT, Mainframes, Test Center Tracker

BRMS Pushmi-Pullyu: Doctor Doolittle's two-headed llama has nothing on ILOG's JRules, a product that is moving forward and backward at the same time. JRules 5.0, which James Owen reviewed in June 2005, was a silky combination of strong performance and rich rule tools, nabbing the highest score we've given to a rule management system. But by the time of Owen's evaluation of JRules 6.0 and top rival Blaze Advisor 6.1 in July 2006, JRules had not only lost ground in performance to the Fair Isaac engine, it stumbled on documentation at the same time it introduced more complexity in its tools and repository. With Version 6.5, reviewed last week by Stephen Nunez, JRules continues the flow of important new functionality -- now exposing decision logic as Web services -- but hasn't reversed the ebb in performance, documentation, or general ease of use.

Project Big Green: We already knew that the mainframe is harder to kill than Stephen Seagal. The mainframe's resource management and high availability features are unparalleled, and it has virtualization capabilities that the x86 can only dream about. Although "mainframe migration" stories sprout like weeds from enterprise IT publications, if you ask deep-pocketed IT shops (think IRS) that can actually afford what they really want, they'll tell you they're running their most important apps on Big Iron. Turns out there may be another reason to invest in the monoliths: IBM claims they are more energy efficient than little iron. See Ted Samson's report in Sustainable IT.

Encryption dos and dont's: Embarrassing data breaches are all the rage these days, and encryption seems like a sensible, no-brainer solution. But as Roger Grimes points out in Friday's column, file encryption is not as simple as lock and key. Encryptors can require a surprising amount of free disk overhead. Some files will refuse to be encrypted. Some encryption processes leave readable traces of file text behind. Before you take the plunge, check these considerations and caveats from the Security Advisor.

Posted by Doug Dineley on August 6, 2007 10:52 AM