Lauren Ramsey

Micron Technology Inc. announced today a new solid-state drive (SSD) that it described as the industry's fastest for notebook and desktop PCs with about 50% better data transfer speeds compared with today's best consumer-grade flash drives. All current SSD and most hard disk drives use the SATA 2.0, 3Gbit/sec. interface. "This drive is the fastest on 6Gbit/sec. Micron's RealSSD C300 drive is the first to leverage the SATA 3.0 specification, which offers 6Gbit/sec. throughput and the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) 2.1 specification providing sequential read speeds of up to 355MB/sec. and sequential write speeds of up to 215MB/sec., Micron said.

SATA and it's the fastest on 3Gbit/sec. Micron is manufacturing its SSDs using two different NAND flash chip types: a 32Gbit multi-level cell (MLC) NAND chip that offers up to 30,000 write/erase cycles, and a 16Gbit single-level cell (SLC) NAND chip capable of 300,000 write/erase cycles, the company said. SATA," said Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development at Micron. "So even on a system that doesn't have a 6Gbit port, it's an impressive drive." The C300 SSD is Micron's first product using 34 nanometer (nm) lithography technology, which allowed the company to double the NAND flash chip density over its previous 50nm technology. The ReadSSD C300 uses MLC flash chips. Micron RealSSD C300 is based on eight internal parallel channels to its interleaved flash chips.

MLC NAND allows two or more bits to be stored per flash memory cell and SLC allows only one bit per cell. By comparison, OCZ's highest-end consumer SSD, its Agility EX - which uses high-grade SLC-flash memory - has a peak read rate of 255MB/sec. and a top write rate of 195MB/sec. The drive also takes advantage of the faster ONFI 2.1 specification , which was released earlier this year. Also considered an industry leader is Intel's X25-M consumer-grade SSD , which uses a 10-channel architecture and delivers a top sequential read speed of 230MB/sec. and a 100MB/sec.. top write speed. "[Intel's SSD] used to be the industry bar, now ours is," Klein said. The new ONFI specification increases the data transfer speed per channel from 40 megatransfers (MT) per second in the older asynchronous SATA mode to 166MT to 200MT/sec in the new synchronous mode that ONCI 2.1 ushered in. The new C300 drives will be available in 1.8-in. and 2.5-in. models.

A MT is equal to 1 million data transfers per second. "The time it takes to get the data to the NAND and off the channel to do something else is shortened, so even on writes, your performance can go up significantly," Klein said. Both models will come in 128GB and 256GB capacities and will ship in the first quarter of 2010. Micron is targeting its drive at equipment manufacturers and said volume pricing for the C300 SSD in quantities greater than 1,000 units would be $350 for the 128GB model and $715 for the 256GB drive. The combination of these technology advancements has enabled the RealSSD C300 drive to far outshine the competition." Micron posted a video of its RealSSD C300 drive to demonstrate its performance advantages. "Hard drives gain little performance advantage when using SATA 6Gbit/sec. because of mechanical limitations," Klein said. "As a developer of leading-edge NAND technology, along with our sophisticated controller and firmware innovations, Micron is well positioned to tune our drives to take full advantage of the faster speeds achieved using the SATA 6Gbit/sec. interface.

MiFi is going to the enterprise. The actual MiFi device will be free for a two-year service commitment, or $99 for a one-year commitment, on top of a one-time $50 configuration fee per device as well as the iPassConnect service. IPass Inc. said today it will resell in December the Novatel Wireless MiFi 2200 mobile broadband device used by consumers but it will be preconfigured with customer-specific security and connections to iPassConnect mobility manager software for business users.

That service runs $45 to $60 per month per user in the U.S. and gives 3G WAN wireless broadband access as well as easy Wi-Fi connections globally to 160,000 hot spots, said iPass vice president of product and offer marketing Rick Bilodeau. With iPassConnect, the IT shop of each company also has a single console where it can manage potentially thousands of users. IPass, launched in 1996, is already used by about 400 of the world's largest companies whose workers can find wireless WAN and Wi-Fi access from laptops using broadband cards easily as they travel from country to country, Bilodeau said in an interview. Adding MiFi to its portfolio means iPass customers can connect wirelessly as many as five Wi-Fi-enabled devices to the 2-ounce MiFi device , which then connects to a wireless CDMA 1x EV-DO Rev network. IPass has been device agnostic and already provides access to its software from a variety of laptop broadband cards, but the relationship with Novatel has been longstanding and seemed logical, Bilodeau said.

The MiFi device without a service plan would cost a user about $215, Bilodeau said. "Today, MiFi is just an open hot spot out there, and we see the primary use of MiFi with iPass by folks in consulting and accounting or professional services who visit customer sites and can't use a third-party Wi-Fi service," Bilodeau said. "This approach allows a 3G wireless connection to a corporate VPN, so you still have security." IPass is adding SSID and security keys to MiFi devices specific to each customer, with a configuration to iPassConnect, he said. It is not exclusive to Novatel, however, he said. Paulak said iPass is basically reselling the MiFi service offered by CDMA carriers Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Inc., but iPass will be able to offer a more complete managed mobility service than Verizon or Sprint. With support for MiFi, iPass is able to extend its management service from, for example, a single worker to a workgroup that could need a temporary office solution as the group travels together, said Eric Paulak, a Gartner analyst. In addition to the MiFi service, iPass also announced a new Open Device Framework to allow its customers to quickly integrate new 3G devices into the iPassConnect software.

Paulak said the Open Device Framework sounds like a good idea because it offers a process for helping customers connect to new and different devices, but he had reservations about its impact on newcomers to mobile management. "My concern is that it is going to be lost on most companies that don't see [device management] as a problem today," he said. "This is mainly a promise to existing customers ... but it will be hard to convince non-customers of the value of this type of service." The capability will come to IT managers and others in the form of templates that can be adapted to a growing number of devices that will be wirelessly capable, including machine-to-machine devices that aren't even voice capable, Bilodeau said.

A sweeping new bill that would implement a national standard for data protection and breach notification got a boost of support today from the Senate Judiciary Committee. If it becomes law, the bill, which was introduced by Sen. The committee approved the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act of 2009 (S.1490) by a vote of 15-5. The bill now is headed to the full Senate for consideration.

Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), would require companies and government agencies to follow specific rules for protecting sensitive and personally identifiable data. They also would be required to deploy measures for controlling access to sensitive data, detecting and logging unauthorized accesses to the data and for protecting data while it is in transit and at rest. Under the proposed law, all private and government entities handling sensitive data would be required to implement specific risk assessment and vulnerability testing measures. The bill would introduce a federal breach notification standard under which companies would be required to notify not just affected individuals of a data breach, but also in some cases, credit reporting agencies and the U.S. Secret Service. The law would also provide notification exemptions for companies that have taken adequate measures - such as encryption - to protect sensitive data.

It would establish a new Office of Federal Identity Protection within the Federal Trade Commission and stiffen penalties for identity theft and related fraud. Companies would also not be required to immediately disclose a breach, if it would hinder a criminal investigation. The law provides for penalties against executives of companies that willfully conceal a data breach. But such exemptions would need to be vetted by the Secret Service. If approved, S.1490 would likely pre-empt similar data protection laws that have been passed already in 46 states. Several attempts at passing similar federal legislation over the past three years have failed, howeer, and it remains unclear whether S.1490's fate will be any different.

Many security analysts have been calling for such a federal bill , arguing that it would be easier for companies to comply with one national law rather than a patchwork of 46 different state laws. Growing concerns related to ID theft and the criminalization of cyberspace have added an element of urgency to the bill. But the provisions in S.1490 which would require breached entities to report to the government "will create an entire new set of bureaucracy within the U.S. Secret Service and the FTC," Pescatore said. Even so, the bill includes provisions that are unnecessary and burdensome, said John Pescatore, an analyst with reserach firm Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. "A federal level disclosure law to make sure affected individuals are notified would be a very good thing, mostly to stop the growth of individual state laws with differing requirements," he said. The bill's overly prescriptive language on the security controls that companies need to protect sensitive data is also likely to result in pushback from industry, he said. "I think we have started to already see in the health-care bill a lot of pushback," over similar legislation, and the same thing is likely to happen with this legislation he said.

Such concerns could once again derail this bil, he said. "Congress should really just focus on a national disclosure law that states cannot preempt - that would bring value to both the people whose identities are being stolen and the businesses which need to be driven harder to protect it," he said.

In many IT organizations, the WAN does not matter. One of the primary roles of the WAN is to enable acceptable application delivery. What you do with the WAN, however, matters greatly.

As will be discussed in this newsletter, we are entering a new ear of application delivery – one that we refer to as Application Delivery 2.0. As will be discussed in the next two newsletters, the challenges of the Application Delivery 2.0 era will be notably more complex and challenging than are those of the current era. That changed a few years ago when IT organizations began to focus on ensuring acceptable application delivery. While ensuring acceptable application delivery has always been important, it historically was not a top of mind issue for most IT organizations. They did this by deploying a first generation of solutions that were intended to mitigate the impact of chatty protocols such as CIFS (Common Internet File System), to offload computationally intensive processing (for example TCP termination and multiplexing) off of servers, and to provide visibility into the performance of applications. Jim and Steve try to avoid cute marketing clichés. Hence, we are hesitant to use the phrase Application Delivery 2.0 as it sounds so much like just one more marketing cliché. However, we see distinct evidence, both from vendors and from IT organizations that we are indeed entering a second generation of application delivery. Unfortunately, the IT organization of a few years ago typically approached application delivery from a tactical, stove-piped approach.

Part of the characterization of Application Delivery 2.0 is that IT organizations are beginning to face a new set of challenges. As is so often the case in our industry, IT organizations have to support traditional or legacy technologies and challenges at the same time that they have to respond to new technologies and challenges. That does not mean that the traditional challenges of supporting chatty protocols or maximizing the performance of servers have gone away. One of the new challenges facing IT organizations stems from the changing role of the mobile worker. That is no longer the case. A few years ago, there were relatively few mobile workers and the communications needs of the mobile workers of that era were satisfied with simple cell phones.

Now it is common to have 25% or more of employees be mobile at any point in time. This introduces all of the performance and security issues associated with wireless networking into the mix of application delivery challenges. These employees have smartphones or other wireless devices that they routinely use to access business-critical applications. In the next WAN newsletter we will continue to discuss the challenges that are driving Application Delivery 2.0. We will also mention some steps that IT organizations are taking to respond to these challenges.

Twitter and LinkedIn users will now be able to post status updates to the two Web sites simultaneously, in a deal aimed at enhancing professional use of Twitter and expanding the audience for the business-focused social network LinkedIn. "The business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says in a video announcing the partnership. "More and more people are finding the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume, in many ways." There are already similar integrations between Twitter and Facebook, allowing users to post simultaneously to the two sites. While on Twitter, users can choose to share all tweets in their LinkedIn status, or only selected ones by typing hash tags #IN or #LI. "The idea is simple: When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing," writes LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue. "And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool." LinkedIn is a more private social network than Twitter, with connection requests requiring confirmation by both parties. LinkedIn users can get started by clicking the Twitter icon on the LinkedIn home page, or go to their profiles and click on an option to add a Twitter account. Integrating the two makes it easier for LinkedIn users to reach a wider audience when they want to, such as when they have an important question or job inquiry. "You want the widest possible distribution … because you want your question answered at all costs," Stone says.

The partnership was announced Monday and the new features will be rolled out gradually this week. Twitter-like status updates can help users find new jobs or kick off new projects, LinkedIn officials say. "It's the integration of the business side of the tweets and Twitter with the business ecosystem of LinkedIn that make the two work together," says LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.