Lauren Ramsey

A company providing online payment-processing services for U.S. Rep. The attack on Piryx began Friday afternoon and lasted into the early hours of Saturday morning and temporarily disrupted a Wilson fundraising effort that was underway at that time. Joe Wilson (R-S.C) is back online after being disrupted by a distributed denial-of service attack over the weekend.

Piryx CEO Tom Serres said. Piryx is a nonpartisan Austin, Texas, based start-up that provides services to help political candidates and nonprofits manage online campaigns and fundraising. It also knocked out services for about 150 other Piryx clients, Serres said. Serres said the company was contacted by Wilson's office last week and asked to manage online donations from supporters rallying behind the congressman after he shouted "You lie!" during President Obama's address to Congress on health care reform Wednesday. Such attacks are designed to render servers and networks inaccessible by flooding them with useless traffic.

Hours after the company began hosting Wilson's homepage on its servers, Piryx found itself the target of a distributed denial of service attack, Serres said. The attacks appear to have been directed at the joewilsonforcongress.com site, Serres said. Initially, the traffic generated by the DDoS attack was manageable but soon Piryx began noticing "massive bandwidth spikes" that knocked its servers offline, Serres said. At the time the attacks started, the site was handling about 100 transactions per minute and had already collected more than $100,000 from people who wanted to contribute to Wilson's campaign, he said. The data center hosting Piryx's servers confirmed that it was the victim of a DDoS attack.

After several failed attempts at mitigating the attacks, filters to block the traffic went into place early Saturday morning. At its peak, the DDoS flood generated about 1 gigabit of traffic per second, which is about 1,000 times the normal traffic on Piryx, Serres said. Service has been normal since then, he said. The incident appears to be one of the rare instances of a politically motivated attack against a Web site in the U.S. said Kirsten Dennesen, an intelligence analyst with Verisign Inc.'s iDefense Labs. It's not known from where the attacks originated, but Serres said it appears to have been initiated by those opposed to Wilson's comments, he said. "It was clearly politically motivated to take down Wilson's ability to raise funds online," Serres said. The attention attracted by Wilson's comments, especially through social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, appears to have contributed to the attack, she said. "One question is whether there are going to be any response attacks," she said.

In a last promotional run-up to the Windows 7 release next month, Microsoft is urging business customers to start their upgrades now with examples of customers already using the software, and another acknowledgement that the company learned lessons from how it handled Vista's release three years ago. Additionally, many customers, as has been typical with a major Windows release, opted to wait for the release of the first service pack for Vista to even consider upgrading, and then many others did not move to the OS at all. Microsoft has devoted an unprecedented level of time and attention to making sure business customers will have a smooth migration and reap financial benefits from the new OS, said Microsoft Senior Director of Product Management Gavriella Schuster, in what is likely to be the last of a series of interviews with reporters as the company prepares to release Windows 7 worldwide on Oct. 23. "The real difference that I think people are seeing with Windows 7 is a different level of quality," Schuster said. "We've never reached this level of quality before in terms of performance, reliability, ease of deployment, the tools around it." As she has in previous interviews, Schuster reiterated Microsoft's mea culpa about how the company handled preparing its business customers, ISVs (independent software vendors) and other partners for the release of Vista, which was made available to them in November 2006. At the time, drivers for key hardware and peripherals were not available, and major applications were not compatible.

Schuster assured customers that moving to Windows 7 will be a far smoother process and will set a precedent for how the company will handle desktop OS releases in the future. We have put a lot of effort in really resolving the customer friction point before we come to them [with the OS]. We are being much more proactive and we're saying to customers, 'You don't have to wait.'" Microsoft introduced case studies Monday showing that some customers have taken this advice - among them, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, the city of Miami and Dutch IT services firm Getronics - and are reporting cost-saving benefits because of this decision, Schuster said. In fact, with a release-to-manufacturing version of Windows 7 already in the hands of many business customers, they can begin to move to the OS now. "In the past customers have had to wait for ISV support, they've needed to wait for a service pack release [to deploy Windows]," she said. "Shame on us, we've learned our lesson. Microsoft has a lot riding on Windows 7 after the overall disappointment of Windows Vista and is hoping the OS will jump-start business spending on desktop software. But analysts have said that many companies still using Windows XP don't really have a choice when it comes to migrating to Windows 7 - the question is more of when they will move than if they will.

Many companies put a freeze on IT spending in general in the past year during the recession, and while conditions have improved, companies remain cautious about where they put their money. Overall, customers who have moved already are saving on the time of IT labor devoted to PC management in the range of US$89-$160 per year because of new features in Windows 7, according to the findings of case studies Microsoft released Monday. The OS allows administrators to set policies across multiple desktops for updating software and other features through back-end connections to Microsoft server software that manage these processes, Schuster said. In particular, the city of Miami said it would save $54 per PC per year on power management because of new features in Windows 7 for setting group policies. Microsoft also has changed its plans for a software package that helps customers deploy Windows across multiple desktops, she said.

Originally, Microsoft had planned to release a beta of MED-V 2 sometime in the first quarter of 2010, but decided to add Windows 7 support earlier due to customer demand for it, she said. Microsoft plans to release Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2009 R2 in late October 2009, adding Windows 7 support for all components of the suite except for Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V). That support will come in the first quarter of 2010 with MED-V 1.1 Service Pack 1, Schuster said.

Free isn't all it's cracked up to be. The idea that the best price is zero is gaining popularity, thanks to the high-tech tome "Free: The Future of a Radical Price." Author Chris Anderson makes a compelling argument that freebies and giveaways attract customers, especially on the Internet. At least according to free DNS service provider OpenDNS, which is unveiling on Monday a suite of paid services targeted at enterprise customers. But with its announcement Monday, OpenDNS makes clear that its plan is to migrate from free consumer-oriented DNS services toward paid, profit-making products used on enterprise networks. "Our plan is to transition into the enterprise following the Google model," says David Ulevitch, founder and CTO of OpenDNS. "Google did this with Gmail.

Our evolution is similar. First they had Gmail, then they had Gmail for pay, and now they have a complete office suite Google Apps. We have a free consumer service.. Now we're turning that into a paid enterprise service." OpenDNS is a venture-funded start-up with 15 million users of its free recursive DNS service. We invented and pioneered the idea of DNS with integrated security.

These users include consumers, schools and some businesses, which use OpenDNS to allow their employees to browse the Web. One advantage of OpenDNS is that it bundles Web content filtering with its DNS service. OpenDNS says it is handling more than 17 billion DNS queries per day with this service. OpenDNS also operates PhishTank.com, a community site that fights phishing. OpenDNS makes money by selling ads for its re-direction service.

Users of the free OpenDNS service view advertisements when they type in the wrong Web address. Now OpenDNS is selling an ad-free version called OpenDNS Deluxe, which is geared toward small businesses. Ulevitch says OpenDNS Deluxe and OpenDNS Enterprise are more cost-effective for companies than running separate DNS and Web content filtering software from vendors such as Websense. OpenDNS also is announcing OpenDNS Enterprise, which provides more comprehensive Web filtering, auditing and reporting features, 24/7 support and service-level agreements. Another advantage is that these premium services don't require customers to purchase or install appliances, as some rival DNS and Web filtering companies do. "We don't do everything that Websense does," Ulevitch admits. Ulevitch says OpenDNS has 25 businesses using its premium paid services.

But he says that OpenDNS offers the most popular features of a product like Websense, including the ability to block adult content and 50 other categories of Web sites. "We do 70% of the things that Websense does that people care about," he adds. These paying customers include The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, a retail chain that offers in-store Wi-Fi and uses OpenDNS to support Web browsing and to block adult content. "These retail chains want to monitor sites, but it's not reasonable for them to put a security device in every store," Ulevitch says. "They are growing fast, and they want to have one Web-based dashboard so they can block certain sites to all their stores. They don't want to show ads, and they are willing to pay for professional support." OpenDNS says the new premium paid services for enterprise customers are available under an early access program, with general availability expected in the fourth quarter of 2009. Free recursive DNS services such as OpenDNS and DNS Advantage Service from rival Neustar UltraDNS are gaining in popularity among corporate customers. Now they have granular control, and they don't have appliances which is a huge savings. Neustar UltraDNS says it is handling between 3 billion and 5 billion DNS queries a day through its free DNS Advantage service. DNS Advantage "does obviously generate additional business for our managed DNS service," says Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at Neustar. "But companies are looking for a DNS solution that deals with phishing and pharming and malware…Some of our customers want DNS Advantage, and some of our customers already have DNS appliances in their network." Joffe says DNS is so critical to corporate networks these days that customers care more about performance than about price, be it free or paid. "The kinds of customers we have had for 10 years don't come to us because they are trying to save a buck.

However, Neustar UltraDNS derives most of its revenue from selling managed external DNS services to enterprises and e-commerce sites such as J.Jill and Diamond.com. They may in the beginning, but they are staying with us because we run an enterprise-level service infrastructure," Joffe adds. "These tend to be customers for whom DNS is critical." DNS Advantage doesn't include Web filtering like OpenDNS Enterprise, but Joffe says this feature will be available in the first half of next year. Joffe says having companies like OpenDNS enter the enterprise space with outsourced DNS services helps validate the niche. "We've been the major provider for quite awhile," Joffe says. "There's definitely a market."

Juniper Networks has invested in Blade Network Technologies, maker and supplier of switches for data center blade servers.

The amount Juniper invested in Blade's $10 million B round of funding was not disclosed. Privately held Blade has  accumulated $230 million in funding since being spun off from Nortel in 2006.  

Juniper is a new investor in Blade, as is NEC and a third "technology powerhouse" as a silent investor, said Blade CEO Vikram Mehta. Garnett & Helfrich Capital, Blade's founding investor, completed the round with its reinvestment.

Hajime Fukuzawa, chief manager of NEC's client and server division, will join Blade's board.

Blade is an OEM supplier to both NEC and Juniper; Juniper's EX2500 top-of-rack 10G Ethernet data center switch is supplied by Blade. 

"Blade is well aligned with Juniper Networks in our commitment to reduce the total cost of network ownership while providing the high performance, scalability and virtualization required by today's dynamic data center environments," said David Yen, executive vice president and general manager of Juniper's fabric and switching technologies business group, in a prepared statement. "We are delighted to invest in Blade Network Technologies to address some of the most challenging connectivity needs for next-generation networks."

Juniper is working with IBM - also a BLADE customer - and other companies on its Project Stratus cloud computing architecture. 

Blade will use the investment to ramp up R&D and sales and marketing. The company plans to develop a 64-port 10G top-of-rack switch and management products for virtualized data centers, and it plans to be the first vendor in the industry to unveil 10G switches at less than $100 per port, Mehta says.

Blade just wrapped a second quarter, which grew 30% from last year and saw the firm ship its 6 millionth Ethernet switch port. That port was shipped to Baidu, the largest search engine in China.

Citing data from Dell'Oro Group, Blade said it ended 2008 as the third-leading vendor of fixed, managed 10G Ethernet switch ports and fifth in fixed, managed 1G Ethernet port shipments.

Separately, Juniper unveiled enhancements to its E Series Broadband Service Router. New features include a line module and multiple IPv6 extensions for scaling subscribers, supporting in-service software upgrades, and dynamically assigning addresses over Ethernet.

The new module, called the Advanced LM10A, doubles the per-slot subscriber density of the E320 while reducing the number of line modules required in the network, Juniper says. The new IPv6 features support dynamic subscriber interfaces and DHCPv6 local pools for dynamic address assignment over Ethernet.

The Advanced LM10A line module and the IPv6 enhancements are available now. Pricing was not disclosed.