Archive for March, 2010

Microsoft to extend Silverlight for Mac?

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

HTML 5 in Internet Explorer may mean Microsoft is rejoined the league of civilized nations on browsers, but another Microsoft technology remains under lock and key more firmly than ever.

Microsoft’s Silverlight media player has, with version 4 due next month, gone from being closed source but able to work on other platforms – the Mac – to being increasingly tied to Windows.

An up-coming feature called COM Automation has been introduced that potential lets content in Silverlight and Silverlight applications work with documents in Microsoft’s Office stored on a PC. Also, COM Automation could access other system capabilities like a USB security card reader.

COM is a Microsoft architecture, not found on the Mac, so this means Silverlight is beginning to be built by Microsoft to give Windows a leg up over the competition. (more…)

Dell OEMs Data Domain and Celerra

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Dell is broadening its storage product range by OEMing EMC’s Celerra and Data Domain products, and developing its own object storage product.

The background to this is the continuing and dramatic rise in the amount of semi- and unstructured information. This leads to a sheer storage capacity problem and to infrastructure problems, particularly when organisations need to respond to sudden and unpredictable changes in IT demand.

Dell is responding to that by increasing the ability for its customers to virtualise their IT environments, manage them more efficiently with infrastructure products, and equip their data centres with both servers and storage better suited to what it calls the virtual era.

The Reg covers the server, cloud and infrastructure parts of today’s Dell announcement set elsewhere; here we concentrate on the storage which focuses on the efficient storage of billions of files and objects.

Dell is introducing three new storage product sets: the DX object store; DD deduplication systems; and the NS unified file and block storage systems Both the DX and NS products are OEM’d from EMC whereas the DX is not. It appears that Dell decided not to take EMC’s Centera object storage product set. (more…)