- Bluefin storage standard on the horizon
- APAC Telecom services market to reach US$ 137 billion in 2006
- Net4India receives permission to launch ILD services
- Solaris 9 integrates Sun ONE for free
- HP-UX 11I v1.6 to support Itanium
- FireWire may lose its fire with USB 2.0
- Lotus and Windows to step up security features
- Your network's health
- India's server market grows by two percent

Bluefin storage standard on the horizon
The SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) announced that a number of companies including IBM, Dell, Veritas, and Sun have developed and submitted a draft specification that applies open standards in the creation of a complete management solution for interoperable, multi-vendor SANs. The technology is code-named 'Bluefin' and uses the CIM (Common Information Model) and WBEM (Web-based Enterprise Management) technology to discover and manage resources in a multi-vendor SAN through common interfaces. CIM is an object-oriented information model that provides a conceptual view of physical and logical system components. Bluefin is expected to improve storage management applications and provide management interoperability in heterogeneous SANs. The DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) and SNIA have been battling interoperability problems in storage management for years. The DTMF developed WBEM, a standard set of Web-based enterprise management tools that unify management of enterprise computing environments. SNIA says that WBEM includes the CIM, which is an encoding specification based on XML and a transport mechanism based on HTTP.

APAC Telecom services market to reach US$ 137 billion in 2006
According to Gartner Dataquest, the APAC (including Japan) fixed telecom services market after suffering a decline of 4.5 percent in 2001, will increase in revenue to US$ 111.6 billion in 2002, up 1.8 percent from 2001. The industry is expected to continue experiencing single-digit growth rates through 2006, when the market is projected to total US$ 136.8 billion. Telephony contributes about 75 percent of the APAC fixed telecom services revenue. Data services including Internet and public IP services account for 24 percent of the total market, and is expected to increase to 35.6 percent by 2006. New services like IP VPNs and hosting are the fastest growing segments. Gartner Dataquest analyst said that these segments are growing from a low base, and contributions to total revenue will remain small in the forecast period. Broadband access could become a major revenue stream. More developed markets such as Japan, Australia, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore will experience slow growth rates. Japan will have a CAGR of 1.4 percent from 2001 through 2006. China's telecom market will hit US$ 27 billion in 2006 with a CAGR of 7.9 percent from 2001 through 2006. It will account for almost 20 percent of the total APAC market by 2006. India is forecasted to show double-digit growth, with the telecom services market reaching US$ 14 billion in 2006, a CAGR of 14 percent from 2001 through 2006.

Net4India receives permission to launch ILD services
The Government of India has given a Letter of Intent to Net4India Ltd, an ISP, to offer ILD (International Long Distance) services in India. The application for the license had been filed in March this year. By using CAC (Carrier Access Codes) or a prepaid calling card platform, customers will be able to make ISD calls at 40 percent lower costs than the existing rates. With the launch of ILD services, Net4India becomes a complete 'xOIP' (all data, voice, video available on IP network) company. Net4India plans to invest 200 Crore over a period of 2 years in infrastructure. The CEO of Net4India says the total size of the ISD market in India is US$ 1.5 billion and is expected to grow by 25 percent CAGR over the next 5 years.

Solaris 9 integrates Sun ONE for free
Sun plans to integrate the Platform edition of its Sun ONE Application Server, Version 7, with its newly released Solaris 9. By the end of the year the product will also be available for free to customers running Windows NT, Red Hat Linux, AIX, and HP-UX. According to Sun the move will allow customers to extend Web-based applications to parts of their business where costs have been prohibitively high. The Platform and Standard editions of Sun ONE Application Server 7 for Solaris and Windows NT is expected by September, and the editions for Linux, HP-UX, and AIX are expected by this year end. The free Platform edition includes a Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.3 server engine, messaging software, support for Web services standards like SOAP (Simple Object Access protocol), Web Service Description Language, and an HTTP engine for basic Web server functions. While licenses for the Platform edition are available at no cost, support for the software comes at a price.

HP-UX 11I v1.6 to support Itanium
It's one of the latest initiatives of HP to migrate its users from proprietary RISC systems to standard Intel servers. The release of its latest version of HP-UX called HP-UX 11i Version 1.6 is the first high-end Unix OS that has been designed from the ground up for Intel's 64-bit Itanium architecture. According to HP, the OS offers exactly the same functions and features as HP's Unix version for PA-RISC boxes. This means that users may be able to take applications running on HP's current PA-RISC servers and run them unchanged on Itanium boxes. But users will have to wait until a new generation of Itanium servers begins to ship later this year to see what price/performance gains they can derive by moving applications from PA-RISC servers. Though PA-RISC-based Unix applications will run unchanged on Intel servers, users will need to recompile many of them if they want optimal performance on Itanium technology.

FireWire may lose its fire with USB 2.0
The high-speed USB 2.0 (Universal Serial Bus) has been installed by most PC makers in their product lines over the last few months. USB 2.0 can move data up to 480 Mbps and provides competition to FireWire, a technology invented by Apple Computer that transports data at 400 Mbps. FireWire had gained popularity at the expense of USB 2.0, which was delayed. But with USB 2.0 in the market, FireWire may lose its fire. At the same time a new version of FireWire is on the anvil which will transmit data at 800 Mbps. USB enables plugging in of several devices into the same port. Dell intends to make USB 2.0 its standard method for connecting devices to its desktop PCs. It plans to eliminate a number of specialized ports those specifically used to connect PC's keyboard, mouse and printer replacing them with USB 2.0 ports. Also 80 to 90 percent of Intel desktop platforms will have integrated USB 2.0 by the end of the year.

Lotus and Windows to step up security features
The Lotus Software Group will include new server-side tools to reject spam before it hits an end user's mailbox in its upcoming Notes R6 software, the next version of the IBM subsidiary's e-mail and collaboration software. According to IBM, R6 will offer the ability to automatically block e-mail from IP addresses like those listed on the MAPS (Mail Abuse Prevention System) RBL (Realtime Blackhole List). MAPS, a nonprofit operation run mostly by volunteers in California handles complaints from individuals and companies about bulk, unsolicited commercial e-mail, colloquially known as spam. If MAPS finds an individual or company responsible for sending spam, the organization places the associated IP address on the RBL. Service providers and companies can then subscribe to the list and set blocks so their servers won't accept e-mail coming from those IP addresses. In Notes R6, the server software will automatically block the sites on the RBL and filter the header and body of an e-mail for key words and phrases an administrator considers a likely indicator of spam. In the current version of the software R5, Notes administrators can set up these rules. But in R6, the scripts come ready to be run out of the box, requiring only the addition of words and phrases. On the other front, Microsoft wants to add security hardware prior to a future release of its Windows OS. The company wants future PCs to contain a security technology called Palladium, and is in discussions with Intel and AMD to develop the chips. The new architecture would entail a security chip used for encryption which when added to PCs along with new APIs (Application-Program Interfaces) take advantage of Palladium. Palladium may also cover chipsets, graphics processors and USB I/O systems. The timeframe for Palladium's inclusion into Windows is uncertain for now, as the initiative is only in its early stage.

Your network's health
If you face scalability and ease of use issues in your network, your network's health and availability needs to be looked into. Network management tools that perform these functions may soon become a vital administrator's preference. An example of such a tool is Concord Communications' eHealth Suite, which is an integrated performance and availability management solution. Concord claims that a fault management tool by itself cannot identify the problem thus an integrated fault management and performance tool is needed. This tool works by polling all the network devices and applications on the network. The tools capture the critical matrix, be it availability, bandwidth or packets in/out, from all devices. The data is collected in the database and a trend or behavioral history of each device is generated. The advantage of this solution is that any new device added is included in the polling and reports are generated inclusive of the new device. By doing this the entire network topology can be viewed and the exact link with the fault can be pointed out. - Minu Sirsalewala

India's server market grows by two percent
The APAC server market (excluding Japan) saw a growth of nearly one-percent for Q1-2002 compared to Q1-2001. These are figures released in Gartner Dataquest's final Asia-Pacific server market statistics report for the first quarter of 2002. From a yearly perspective, Singapore and India were the only two countries to record a positive increase in over all server revenue. They recorded 25.9 percent and two percent growth respectively. The APAC server market witnessed a decline in shipments both quarterly and annually at around twelve percent and three percent respectively. Low shipments from China, and a decline in the unit shipments from Korea, Taiwan and India resulted in the three percent unit decrease across the region. Overall the 2002 server market figures for India were not disappointing considering the current economic scenario.