Three simple rules for buying a new laptop

This is the time of year when friends, family members, casual acquaintances, and people in the street stop me to ask about buying a new PC.

"What should I get?" they ask. "What do I need?" Also heard with increasing frequency: "Should I get a tablet instead of a laptop?"

Loaded questions, to be sure, but not difficult ones. A tablet can take the place of a laptop if all you do is browse the Web and read e-mail. If you need to get any serious work done, whether for school or business or just everyday life, a laptop is still the smarter choice. It gives you a keyboard, a bigger screen, copious amounts of storage, and compatibility with all your favorite software.

So, what kind of laptop should you get, and with what specs and features? I can make this really simple:

1. Get at least 4GB of RAM.

That's "four gigabytes of memory" for those who don't speak PC. Anything less and your system will run like molasses--something to keep in mind as Black Friday deals roll around. Many "doorbuster" laptops will have only 2GB of RAM, and that's just not enough.

2. If you can afford it, get a system with an SSD.

That's short for "solid-state drive," which has no moving parts and therefore runs faster, generates less heat, and consumes less power than a traditional hard drive. You'll pay a premium for an SSD and end up with less storage space, but how much do you really need? Most folks I know rarely fill up more than 100GB.

Indeed, although a 128GB SSD may seem like a downgrade compared with, say, a 500GB hard drive, the speed benefits alone are worth the extra money.

3. Try before you buy.

Although brick-and-mortar tech stores are few and far between these days, there are still places where you can go and browse laptops in person. And that's something you should definitely do.

Sure, you can shop online based on specs and price, but you owe it to yourself to test-drive the keyboard. And the trackpad. Make sure they're comfortable and responsive. Likewise, check the screen: is it glossy and therefore heavy on the glare? Whenever possible, try to lay hands on a laptop before buying it.

One more "rule."

Notice that I didn't mention the procesor. Unless you're doing heavy-duty video editing or playing a lot of graphics-intensive games, the processor just isn't the big factor it used to be. They're all pretty fast nowadays.

As for brands, I have similar feelings: they're all pretty good nowadays. That said, it's always a good idea to do your homework, starting with PC World's Reliability and Satisfaction surveys.

What other advice would you give to someone shopping for a new laptop?

Cloud security vendor Crossbeam bought by private equity firm

Crossbeam has been bought by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, opening up the door for the securitycompany to expand its product line both in-house and via acquisitions.

Known for its high-end X-Series hardware that supports software of major security vendors -- among them Check Point, McAfee, IBM, Imperva, Sophos and Trend Micro -- the company promotes itself as producing products for public and private cloud networks.

CHALLENGED: 11 sorriest tech companies of 2012

The company sells very specialized, high-end hardware to companies with high-performance needs, and the business has grown out of its initial support for Check Point security software, says Joel Snyder, senior partner of Opus 1 and a Network World tester. "They also offer folks like Trend and IBM/ISS on their platform, but fundamentally they sell firewall hardware."

Among its customers are BT, Cell C, Motel 6, NTT Globe Telecom, Telefonica and Volkswagen.

The companies didn't reveal how much Thoma Bravo paid.

They didn't share specifics about their future plans. "So it's a big unknown unless you talk to them, and even then it's a big unknown," says Snyder. "But probably for Crossbeam and its customers and Check Point, it's good."

Crossbeam's senior management team will stay with the company, which has more than 200 employees worldwide. It is headquartered in Boxboro, Mass.

"We look forward to working with Crossbeam's management to build off of that reputation and help them accelerate their growth through the buy and build strategy we have followed successfully many times before," says Seth Boro, a Thoma Bravo partner, in a press release.

"Thoma Bravo's support and expertise in the software and technology industries will allow us to pursue new products and services through strategic initiatives and potential acquisitions to enhance our offerings," says Mike Ruffolo, president and CEO of Crossbeam in the same release.

Thoma Bravo is known for buying up enterprise and infrastructure software and expanding them via strategic acquisitions. The firm bought WAN optimization company Blue Coat earlier this year. Blue Coat later appointed a new president and COO, David Murphy, who says the company will focus on adding security to its products.

Thoma Bravo says that in the realm of software it has bought 54 firms to merge with 25 platform companies and manages a private equity funds worth about $4 billion.

Tim Greene covers Microsoft for Network World and writes the Mostly Microsoft blog. Reach him at tgreene@nww.com and follow him on Twitter @Tim_Greene.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.

Mac 101: Diving into menus, part 2

When last we met, we began exploring Mountain Lions Finder menus. Weve polished off the Apple and Finder menus so lets continue our march to the right in the menu bar.

File menu

The File menu is where we begin to see some consistency among file menus. Regardless of whether youre in the Finder or an application, youre very likely to see some kind of New command in this menu. Likewise youll spy Open and Close commands. In the Finder youll specifically find:

New Finder Window: When you select this command (or press Command-N) a new window appears on your Macs desktop. By default under Mountain Lion, this will be the All My Files window. In this window youll see your files in Icon view and separated by kind.

New Folder: If youd prefer to create a new folder instead of a new Finder window (because you need a place to file some related documents), choose New Folder or press Shift-Command-N. The folder will appear on your desktop, named Untitled Folder. You can immediately change this name simply by typing in a new one and pressing the Return key.

New Folder With Selection: This is a recent addition but a cool one. Suppose you have a few documents related to a particular project. You could create a new folder and then fling those documents into that folder, or you could save a step by selecting the documents and then choosing this command. Do so and a New Folder With Items folder appears on the desktop, which contains those selected documents. Again, while the name is highlighted just type a new name and press Return.

New Smart Folder: Mountain Lion and the past several versions of the Mac OS support something called Smart Folders. These are folders that contain items that match certain conditions. For example, a smart folder might hold all movie files over a certain size or any files youve created in the last week. Well discuss smart folders and other smart items in a future column.

New Burn Folder: Those Macs that have built-in SuperDrives (media drives for playing DVDs and CDs) or have such drives attached to them externally can not only play those discs and read data from them, but can also record media and information to writeable CDs and DVDs. This process is called burning. This command creates a special kind of folder. Into this folder place any items that you eventually want to record to a writeable CD or DVD. When the time comes to do the actual recording insert a blank disc and select the Burn command (which well visit shortly) to start the process.

Open: The Open command, along with the next few commands, appears in gray until you select something. It largely serves the same purpose as selecting an item and double-clicking. If you highlight a folder or volume (your hard drive or a disk image, for example) and choose Open, the folder will open into a window and reveal the folders contents. Select a file and choose Open and the application related to that file will open and display the files contents.

Open With: I just told you that when selecting a file and choosing Open, that file will open in the application the Mac believes is best suited to open it. However, some documents can be opened in a wide variety of applications. For example, you can open a text file in Apples TextEdit, Microsoft Word, or in any of dozens of text editing applications.

When you choose Open With a list of compatible applications will appear in the submenu to the right. If the document you have cant be opened by any application on your Mac, try selecting App Store. The Mac App Store application will launch and, with luck, youll be presented with an application that can open your document. Purchase and download that application and you can then open your document.

Print: Although most people print documents from within the applications theyre working in, you can also print documents from the Finder. To do that select the documents you want to print and choose this command. Provided that youve set up a printer for your Mac (something well go over in a future column) a printed copy of the selected documents will soon emerge from the printer.

Close Window: If you find clicking a windows red Close button too much work, you can close it with this command or the Command-W keyboard shortcut.

Get Info: Select an item in the Finder and choose Get Info and youll learn many details about that itemits name, when it was last modified, the kind of file it is, its size, where its located on your computer, when it was created, and much, much more. The Get Info window can be a powerful tool and its one Ill discuss at another time.

Compress: There will be times when you want to gather together multiple items and send them as a single item. Or youd like to let some of the air out of a particularly bloated file so that it can be emailed. Thats the point of the Compress command.

If you select multiple files and choose this command, those files will become a single archive file and .zip (these three letter things following a period are called extensions) will be appended to the end of its name. .zip files can be opened by any computerMac or Windows PCbut cant be opened by iOS devices such as iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads. So, if you intend to send someone a zipped file, be sure that theyll receive it on their computer rather than their mobile device.

As the name implies, compressing files can also reduce their size. For example, if you have a large image file that uses the TIFF format, compressing it can reduce its size significantly. (And do so without losing any of the original images quality.) However, if the original file was in a compressed format to begin withsay an MP3 or AAC audio filecompressing wont help as its already pretty well smushed.

Duplicate: Want a second copy of a selected document or folder? Select it and employ this command.

Make Alias: With the Mac OS you can create files that act as pointers to other files. These pointer files are called aliases (and serve the same function as shortcut files on Windows PCs). Open the alias, and the original item opens.

So, how would you use this? Lets say you have a folder inside your Documents folder that you access all the time. Instead of having to dig down to find that folder, you could simply use this command to create an alias of that folder and place the alias on the desktop. When you want to copy something to the folder, just drag the item to the alias folderthe item you dragged to the alias will be placed in the real folder that you created the alias from.

A quick way to create an alias is to hold down the Command and Option keys and drag on an item. Doing so creates the alias.

Quick Look: This is a feature you will use all the time. Lets say you have an image file youd like to look at. You could open it in Preview by double-clicking on it or you could do the simpler thing and select it and then invoke this command (or, simpler still, press Command-Spacebar). A window will appear that shows you that image.

You can use Quick Look with a variety of filestext files, movies, audio files, presentations& oodles of stuff. Its one of the handiest things your Mac can do.

Show Original: You now know that you can create an alias of an item. What if you want to see the original item the alias points to? Just select the alias and choose this command. The original item will appear within the folder that holds it.

Add to Sidebar: You dont have to be satisfied with what Apple puts in Finder windows sidebars. Youre welcome to put items of your own in the sidebar. To do that, select an item and choose this command. (Or simply hold down the Command key and drag the item into the sidebar.) To remove an item from the sidebar, hold down Command and drag it out. It will disappear in a puff of virtual smoke.

Now that youre familiar with the term alias I can tell you that when you add something to the sidebar youre not placing the original file there. Instead, youve added a kind of alias. Delete the item from the sidebar and only the alias disappears. The original file remains in its original location.

Move to Trash: While you can certainly drag files to the Trash to get rid of them you can also use this command on selected items. Easier still is to select the items and press Command-Delete.

Eject: If youve selected some kind of removable mediaa CD or DVD in the Macs SuperDrive, an external hard drive, or a mounted disk imageyou can eject it using this command. Optionally, just drag that item to the Trash.

Burn Item to Disc: Weve talked a bit about burning (or recording) items to writeable CDs and DVDs. This is the command you invoke to make this actually happen. The items youve selected will be recorded to the disc and then the disc will be verified to ensure that the data you recorded made the journey safe and sound.

Find: Under its shiny hood, Mac OS X has Spotlight, a powerful feature for keeping track of and finding the items on your Mac. There are a couple of ways to find thingswhich well deal with in another columnand this Find command is one of them. Invoke it and a Searching This Mac window appears. Enter what youre looking for in the Search field and a list of results will appear below. Again, well deal with the ins and outs of searching in the future.

Label: If youve ever used a yellow highlighter on a book or article youll understand the idea behindlabels. You can apply colors to the name of Finder itemsdocuments as well as folders. This helps these items stand out in a folder or on cluttered desktop. If you have a particularly hot project youre working on and all its associated files are in a folder, its not a bad idea to assign a red label to that folder so you can pick it out of a crowd.

Edit menu

I know that was a lot to swallow. Fortunately the Edit menu is short, sweet, and very helpful. Even more than the File menu youll find those commands included in the Finders Edit menu routinely appear in the menus of other applications you use.

Undo: Undo does what it says. If youve just committed some action that you now regret, choose Undo to reverse that action. For instance, if youve moved a file to the trash and would like to pluck it out, choose Undo Move of nameoffile. The file will hop out of the trash and back into the Finder. This is another handy keyboard shortcut to memorizeCommand-Z invokes Undo in nearly all cases.

Note too that the Undo command remembers more than just the last action. You can invoke Undo multiple times to reverse several of your past actions. In some applications you have unlimited levels of undo.

Redo: Okay, so you just undid something that you thought better of, but youve now changed your mind yet again and want to do the thing you did originally. Thats the reason for Redo.

About the clipboard

The next few commands involve something called the clipboard, so it's best to explain what that is before we tread farther down the Edit menu. The clipboard is a holding area where you can store a single item (usually). That item can be an image, chunk of media, bit of selected text& just about anything you can select. I weasel with the usually because it's possible to select multiple files in the Finder and add them to the clipboard. You put things in the clipboard so that you can later place them somewhere else. For example, you might grab a portion of an email message youve received, open a new text file in TextEdit, and then put that text in your text document for safe keeping.

Clear? Great. Now to the commands.

Cut: The Cut command (Command-X) removes the selected item from its present location and places it in the clipboard. So, if in the sentence, The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog I select quick brown and choose Cut, the resulting sentence would read The fox jumped over the lazy dog. The words quick brown would be in the clipboard. Shortly youll learn what you can do with that clipboard text.

Copy: Similar to the Cut command, the Copy command (Command-C) places a copy of the selection in the clipboard. Using our previous example of selecting quick brown, the original sentence would remain exactly as it was but quick brown would still wind up in the clipboard.

Paste: And heres how our little drama resolves. To move the contents of the clipboard to another place, you choose the Paste command (Command-V). Again, once youve copied quick brown you can open a text file, place your cursor anywhere you like, press Command-V, and the words quick brown appear at that location.

The cool thing about these three commands is that theyre going to appear in just about every application you use. Plus, you can cut, copy, and paste items between applications (and within applications as well).

Select All: There are a variety of ways to select items. You can click and drag on them. You can Command-click on the items you want to select (a discontiguous selection, meaning that you can click on anything you like in a list and youll select only the clicked items). You click on the first item in a list that you wish to select and then hold down the Shift key and click on the last item in that list (acontiguous selection where the clicked items plus everything in between are selected). Or, if you simply want to select everything, use Select All (Command-A). You can use this not only for items in the Finder, but also all the words in a text document, images in a photo album, songs in a playlist& you get the idea. Anything thats selectable.

Show Clipboard: Theres no expiration date on the contents of the clipboard provided that you havent restarted your Mac. If you cant recall the last thing you placed in it, use this command to learn what it holds.

Start Dictation: Dictationthe ability for your Mac to transcribe the words you speak into its microphoneis a subject well tackle at another time. For now, understand that this command (which appears in most applications) can be found near the bottom of the Edit menu.

Special Characters: Your Mac is capable of producing more characters than you see printed on your computers keyboard. If you seek an arrow character, foreign currency symbols, math symbols, pictographs or Emoji characters, heres where you look. To insert a special character in a line of text, just double-click on it.

And that wraps up the two menus that are commonly found in most applications.

Next week: Diving into menus, the conclusion

Lenovo sees profit growth sag in fiscal Q2

Lenovo said Thursday its net profit for the fiscal second quarter increased by only 13 percent year-over-year, marking a shift from the high profit growth the company has previously seen.

For the fiscal second quarter ending on Sept. 30, Lenovo's net profit reached US$162 million. Revenue for the quarter was a record US$8.7 billion, a year-over-year increase of 11 percent.

In its fiscal first quarter, Lenovo reported 30 percent year-on-year growth in net profit. Last year, the company saw profit growth almost doubling year-over-year in some quarters.

Lenovo has consistently reported solid growth in its product shipments despite slowing growth in the PC industry, and competition from Apple's iPad which has cut into sales of laptops.

The Chinese company increased PC shipments in the fiscal second quarter, and was named theworld's largest PC vendor by research firm Gartner. Research firm IDC, however, still ranks rival HP as the top PC vendor with a slight lead ahead of Lenovo.

During the quarter, Lenovo reported that its PC shipments grew year-over year by 10.3 percent. Lenovo has credited the growth to its "protect and attack" strategy, with the company maintaining its dominant position in China's PC market, while expanding into new emerging markets. In China alone, the company's revenue reached $3.9 billion, accounting for 44 percent of Lenovo's global sales.

The company also saw growth in its Mobile Internet Digital Home group, which sells smartphones. The business group saw revenue reach $718 million in the quarter, up 155 percent from the same quarter last year. In China, Lenovo's smartphone shipments reached second place, behind Samsung, according to research firm Canalys.

Lenovo announced during the quarter it would begin selling smartphones in Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam and India. Microsoft's Windows 8, which was formally launched only two weeks ago, could also help grow PC sales.

Hitachi releases new 1.6TB flash modules

Making good on the flash strategy it announced in August, Hitachi Data Systems has unveiled its first flash module, a 1.6TB SAS-interface flash card.

Three months ago, HDS lifted the covers on its flash strategy saying that like EMC, it will put NAND flash products in servers, storage and appliances in order to enable compute acceleration, caching and high-performance storage.

Hitachi's Accelerated Flash Module

The new modules and accompanying flash chassis is being marketed for use in enterprise-class mission critical applications such as online transaction processing (OLTP) and financial data and metadata indexing.

The company is calling its solid-state platform Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage.

At the heart of the Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage is a proprietary flash controller, a CPU with firmware that manages its multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash-based storage modules.

"We will not be dependent on any vendor per se for the SSDs [solid state drives]. We can use any. If tomorrow Samsung comes up with a drive that has four times the capacity of today's NAND or Toshiba comes up with 8X NAND, we can use that," said Roberto Basilio, vice president of Infrastructure Platforms Product Management at HDS.

HDS's controller is a multi-core, high bandwidth architecture with up to 128 flash DIMMs (dual in-line memory module).

HDS is currently offering a 1.6TB flash module. Next quarter it will add a 3.2TB module. Following that it plans to offer a 6.4TB flash module.

By comparison, flash storage maker Virident offers a flash module called a FlashMAX that is available in both single-level cell (SLC) and MLC NAND flash and range in capacities from 550GB to 2.2TB. The MLC-module can generate 325,000 random read IOPS (using 4K blocks) and one million IOPS using 512 byte blocks). The SLC card is able to generate up to 340,000 IOPS using 4K blocks and 1.4 million IOPS using 512 byte blocks.

Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage also uses a new 8U-high (a U or unit equals 1.75-in) flash chassis that holds up to 48 drives, a rack-optimized flash module drive (FMD) and associated interconnect cables. The new flash chassis is a set of four drives per 2U-high tray.

Each enclosure can scale from 6.4TB up to 76.8TB of flash storage, giving it 2 times greater density than the largest MLC SSD available today, Hitachi said. Up to four flash enclosures can be housed in Hitachi's high-end Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) array, enabling more than 300TB of flash per system.

The flash storage can be configured for RAID 1, RAID 5 or RAID 6.

The single 1.6TB module, which uses a 6Gbps SAS 2.0 interface, can perform just over one million random read I/Os per second (IOPS) using 8K block sizes and 270,000 random write IOPS, HDS said.

HDS said it would not provide pricing for its drives or storage platforms, "but based on our calculations, Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage is up to 46% lower in cost when compared to an MLC SSD of similar capacity," a spokesman wrote in an email reply to Computerworld.

Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage introduces several new capabilities including inline write compression that speeds writes on flash and improves MLC flash memory endurance. When compared to standard 400GB MLC SSDs, Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage has four times better performance, improved environmental characteristics (power and space), the company said.

Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage is fully compatible with all Hitachi VSP features, including Hitachi Dynamic Tiering (HDT), which allows data to be moved to different tiers of storage based on use patterns.

"Today's announcement is a milestone achievement in how flash technology will be used in the enterprise data center moving forward," Basilio said in a statement. "Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage is the first flash device that is optimized for the performance and reliability required for mission-critical applications."

How HDS's flash modules broken down by drive, enclosure and chassis and how they would fit into an HDS VSP array.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

See more by Lucas Mearian on Computerworld.com.

Read more about storage hardware in Computerworld's Storage Hardware Topic Center.

Verizon expands Lync service to hosted operations, management of UC

Verizon announced today it is extending its managed services offering for Microsoft Lync Server to its business customers by adding the ability to operate, monitor and manage unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) servers and functions.

Since 2010, Verizon has been assisting businesses with UC&C planning, design and implementation with Lync but decided to expand its service with operations and management of Lync from its own network operations centers, said Bob Riley, senior consultant for UC&C at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, in an interview.

The hosted service, called Managed UC&C for Microsoft Lync Server 2010, is available now in the U.S. and 19 European countries. Verizon will serve even the largest multinational businesses whose mobile workers use such services as instant messaging, collaboration over the Web and voice and videoconferencing.

Riley said the price of the service will vary by the number of Lync servers under management and the number of users. He said Microsoft estimated the cost at $7 per worker per month.

By operating and managing the Microsoft System Center Operations Manager gateway servers on a business location, Verizon hopes to distinguish itself from other Lync services providers, Riley said. SCOM is a hub and a collection point for data from various UC&C Lync servers that range from SharePoint to Exchange to a SQL Server as well as a Verizon voice gateway.

Demand from enterprises for a range of UC&C capabilities is high, especially to improve worker productivity and lower costs, Riley said. With the new capability, a large company can use instant messaging, audio, video and Web conferencing and even desktop videoconferencing through Lync, along with voice services over Verizon's global IP network. That IP network offers Voice over IP and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which are both integrated into the public switched telephone network.

In addition, the new management service can be combined with Verizon SIP Trunking connections (offered since 2007) with managed session border controllers for better network security and reliability. Verizon uses a variety of third-party vendors that have partnered with Microsoft to round out its UC&C services capability, including Acme Packet, a provider of session border controllers and Polycom, a videoconferencing provider.

Verizon also offers hosted services using the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Services capability and others, but Lync is desired by many companies that already incorporate Microsoft applications and software throughout their IT operations, Riley said.

Read more about unified communications in Computerworld's Unified Communications Topic Center.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google targeted by cloud provider Joyent

Joyent may be the biggest cloud provider you haven't heard of.

According to the pure-play infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider -- which was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in San Francisco -- it is a top 5 vendor of cloud-based virtual machines in the world, a stat that's backed up by Gartner. That means it's rubbing elbows with the big names of cloud computing -- Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google.

"They're the most interesting cloud company that few people talk about," says George Reese, CTO of enStratus, a company that consults with enterprises on cloud strategies and helps business deployapplications to the cloud. "When we talk to people we get questions about AWS, Rackspace, HP, and when we mention Joyent, they're like, 'Who?'"

Perhaps users should start paying attention, though. The company this week released Joyent7, the latest version of its cloud management platform named SmartOS, which it says enhances capabilities for hybrid cloud deployments between a customer data center and Joyent's cloud.

Company founder and CTO Jason Hoffman is aiming for the fences with his company, openly stating that he's looking to take on the Amazons, Googles and Microsofts of the world.

Does he have a shot?

MORE CLOUD: Gartner's IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who's who of cloud market

VMWARE'S MOVES: CTO: Adapt, enable choice, or die

Joyent's differentiator, Hoffman says, is its integrated stack. SmartOS is not just an operating system, but also a networking fabric and hypervisor -- it uses KVM. He describes it as analogous to a large-scale storage area network (SAN), with an integrated network between compute and data layers that run virtual machines directly on it. "We completely collapse the model into a single hardware design," he says. By doing this, new customers are easily onboarded to the cloud, with each new customer site added to Joyent's network being like the equivalent of adding another availability zone in AWS's system.

Hoffman says Joyent is cheaper and offers more compute for the buck compared to AWS. A pricing comparison chart on the company's website shows that Joyent prices are between 6% and 29% less compared to prices of similarly sized VM instance types in AWS's cloud.

Reese, the cloud consultant, says Joyent seems to have a dedicated user base, but it is still a niche play in the market. "They don't have a ton of features, but the features they do have perform really well," Reese says. VMs come up fast and are predictable and reliable, he says, based on testing he's done within enStratus for customers using Joyent's cloud.

Joyent seems optimized for customers that run large, complex, cloud-native apps in Joyent's cloud, apps from which developers want high visibility and highly reliable performance, Reese says. The focus on its core features leaves some wanting, though. Joyent doesn't have a database as a service feature, for example, nor does it have nearly the breadth of services offered by AWS or Rackspace. Ultimately, that could provide a challenge for Joyent significantly biting into Amazon or Rackspace's dominating market share.

Joyent is continuing to develop its products and company, though. The release of Joyent7 is about enabling "seamless hybrid cloud," Hoffman says. The new OS furthers LDAP integration and adds a catalog of APIs, specifically around workflow management, image management and security groups.

In addition to announcing Joyent7, the company also appointed a new CEO, Henry Wasik, formerly president and CEO of Force10 Networks, to lead the company.

Hoffman likes his chances of going up against the gorillas of the industry. "If someone really wants to take on AWS," which Hoffman clearly states he wants to do, "you have be multi-region, multi-AZ from the get-go." If a provider takes a pure-hardware approach, it says it would cost a half billion dollars to set it up. "We're in a space where, as a private company, we're partnering with a top-three chip maker [Intel], we have our own technology stack end-to-end and we've raised hundreds of millions of dollars." The company announced its latest $85 million funding round in January.

Gartner says it will be an uphill climb for Joyent, though, especially when it's competing with companies that have much greater resources they can devote to R&D. "Joyent is focused on developing its own technology, which creates long-term challenges in competing against providers with greater development resources," Gartner says. If Joyent remains a niche provider, Reese believes it has a chance to carve out a chunk of the market and serve it well. It's an open question if a company like Joyent can scale up to the size of some of the major cloud providers in the market, though.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

Citrix and NetApp simplify on-premises data sharing

Citrix Systems and NetApp have jointly developed a software and hardware package optimized for Citrix's ShareFile with StorageZones.

ShareFile with StorageZones is Citrix's enterprise-friendly answer to cloud-based file storage and sharing services like DropBox, Apple's iCloud and Google's Drive, and allows CIOs to place data in the organization's own data center as opposed to in the cloud.

Enterprises can now meet compliance and data sovereignty requirements, while users can still access their documents and images from anywhere at any time. Storing data close to users also helps improve performance, the two companies said on Wednesday.

By joining forces, Citrix and NetApp hopes to help enterprises simplify and accelerate on-premise, large-scale data sharing and storage deployments, they said. The two have seen to it that StorageZones works with NetApp's FAS and V-Series storage systems running its clustered Data ONTAP software.

The integration lets enterprise take advantage of features such as de-duplication and compression to decrease the amount of storage needed to host employee content.

De-duplication does that by eliminating duplicated content, so if two users are storing the same image there only needs to be one copy.

NetApp's Snapshot technology can be used to backup and recover the data.

This is the second time in less than a month Citrix and NetApp have joined forces to make life a little easier for IT staff.

Last month the two companies announced they are working on integrating NetApp's storage software with Citrix's CloudPlatform and the Apache CloudStack project, offering features such as storage automation and virtual machine backup and recovery.

On Wednesday, Citrix also announced two new NetScaler MPX hardware appliances aimed at smaller enterprises, it said.

The MPX 5550 and MPX 5650 cost from US$14,000 and are now shipping. They can be used for load balancing, SSL processing and traffic inspection to protects against threats such as cross-site scripting and SQL injections.

Send news tips and comments to mikael_ricknas@idg.com

Oracle buys Instantis for project portfolio management software

Oracle on Thursday said it has agreed to acquire PPM (project portfolio management) software vendor Instantis, in a move that will build upon its past acquisition of Primavera. Terms of the deal, which is expected to be completed this year, were not disclosed.

Instantis has both on-premises and cloud-based software, which will be combined with Primavera as well as Oracle's next-generation Fusion Applications, according to a statement. All told, the software "will provide the ability to manage, track and report on enterprise strategies - from capital construction and maintenance, to manufacturing, IT, new product development, Lean Six Sigma, and other corporate initiatives," Oracle said.

Instantis' main product is called EnterpriseTrack, which incorporates dashboards and reports that can be shared "at any phase of the project life cycle from ideas to proposals to project execution to metrics and results," according to its website. The company's software also has a native social networking platform called EnterpriseStream, as well as an integration framework for tying EnterpriseTrack to other systems.

Oracle "plans to continue to invest in Instantis' technology, evolving the solutions organically and deepening the integration capabilities with Oracle technology," according to a FAQ document released Thursday.

As with all of its acquisitions, Oracle will also gain further footholds in enterprise accounts, giving its sales representatives opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell other products to Instantis users, which include Ingram Micro, DuPont, Credit Suisse and Xerox.

Oracle's competitors in the PPM market include CA Technologies, IBM and a number of smaller vendors.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

The cloud as data-center extension

A year after Oregon's Multnomah County deployed an on-premises portfolio management application, the two IT staffers dedicated to it resigned. Other staff struggled to maintain the specialized server environment. Left with no other option to guarantee support of the mission-critical tool, the county leapt into the cloud.

"All of our IT projects are tracked through Planview," says Staci Cenis, IT project manager for Multnomah County, which includes Portland. "We use it for time accountability and planning. Monitoring scheduled and unscheduled maintenance shows us when staff will be free to take on another project."

Initially the county had two dedicated Planview administrators, Cenis explains. But over a period of around three months in 2009, both left their jobs at the county, "leaving us with no coverage, " Cenis says. "We didn't have anyone on staff that had been trained on the configuration of our Planview instance or understood the technical pieces of the jobs that run within the tool to update the tables," among other things.

Cenis hadn't considered the cloud before that issue, but agreed to abandon the in-house software in favor of Planview's software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering after assessing the costs. Training other IT staffers on server, storage, backup administration, recovery and upgrades alone would have compounded the on-premises software expenses, Cenis says.

Nowadays, with the infrastructure and application administration offloaded to the cloud, IT can handle most configuration, testing and disaster recovery concerns during a regularly scheduled monthly call. "I wish we had gone with the cloud from the start because it has alleviated a significant burden," Cenis says, especially in the area of software upgrades.

Each upgrade handled by the application provider instead of her team, she estimates, adds numerous hours back into her resource pool. "What would have taken us days if not weeks to troubleshoot is generally answered and fixed within a day or two," she adds. At the same time, users can access the latest software version within a month or two of its release.

Multnomah County's embrace of the cloud is one of five models becoming more common today, according to Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

Gartner categorizes them as follows:

Replace, as Multnomah County did by ripping out infrastructure and going with SaaS;

Re-host, where IT still manages the software, but it is hosted on external infrastructure such as Amazon, HP or Rackspace public or private cloud servers;

Refactor, where some simple changes are made to the application to take advantage of platform-as-a-service;

Revise, where code or data frameworks have to be adapted for PaaS;

Rebuild, where developers and IT scrap application code and start over using PaaS.

"Not a lot of companies rebuild or do a lot of major modifications to migrate an application to the cloud. Instead, they either replace, re-host or refactor," Manes says.

Primarily, enterprises view the cloud as an escape hatch for an overworked, out-of-space data center. "If you're faced with the prospect of building a new data center, which costs billions of dollars, it certainly saves money to take a bunch of less critical applications and toss them into the cloud," Manes says.

Problems in paradise?

However, since first observing the cloud frenzy years ago, Manes recognizes companies have taken their lumps. "Many business leaders were so eager to get to the cloud that they didn't get IT involved to institute proper redundancy or legal to execute proper agreements," she says. Such oversights have left them vulnerable technologically and monetarily to outages and other issues.

Companies that moved applications and data to the public cloud early on also didn't always plan for outages with traditional measures such as load balancing. "Even if an outage is centralized in one part of the country, it can have a cascading effect, and if it lasts more than a day can cause a real problem for businesses," she says.

Tips for getting to the cloud

Know what should go where: If you require a more controlled environment for your data, consider building a hybrid cloud using internal servers and shared dedicated cloud infrastructure. Doing so enables you to track where data lives without having to manage a sprawling data center.

Understand your licensing: Some companies are unwittingly getting double-charged by software companies and service providers for application, operating system and other licensing. Double-check your contracts and if yours doesn't include cloud architecture, then renegotiate with your vendors. Consult with your cloud provider because it might have an in-place deal with software makers. Also, as NASA's JPL advises, make sure to involve your legal team in all service agreements.

Stay involved: Sending your applications to the cloud might free up infrastructure and administrators, but IT still has to keep a close eye on critical elements such as security, integration, configurations, updates and disaster recovery. Multinomah County regularly meets with its SaaS provider to ensure proper communication and support levels.

Missing something? Don't be afraid to ask: Cloud providers are eager to please and want your business. Inform your cloud providers when a feature or functionality is absent from your service or platform. If you need load balancing, a provider probably will support that for you without much additional cost.

Seek support: You can offload cloud management to a third party if it is too onerous for your in-house team. For instance, some cloud providers will handle round-the-clock technical support of environments hosted in the Amazon cloud.

-- Sandra Gittlen

But Dave Woods, senior process manager at business intelligence service SNL Financial, disagrees. SNL Financial aggregates and analyzes publicly available data from around the world for its clients. Despite having a sizeable internal data center, the company's homegrown legacy workflow management application was testing its limits.

"Our data center was full" with both internal and customer-facing applications and databases, Woods says. The company didn't do a full-on analysis to find out whether it was server space or cooling or other limitations -- or all of the above -- but at some point it became clear that they were running out of capacity, and cloud software became attractive.

Though he briefly considered rebuilding the application and building out the data center, the costs, timeframe and instability of the code dissuaded him. "The legacy application lacked the design and flexibility we needed to improve our processes," Woods says. The goal, in other words, was not just to rehost the application but to do some serious workflow process improvement as well.

To accomplish this, SNL Financial adopted Appian's cloud-based business process management system. Although the annual licensing cost was similar to the on-premises software the firm had been using, the clincher was avoiding the $70,000 in hardware costs that would have been needed to update the application at the time. (SNL has since built a "spectacular new onsite data center," Woods says, so it's no longer an issue.)

SNL Financial is expanding its workflow processes to more than 500 banks in Asia, with Woods crediting the cloud for allowing this type of scalability and geographic reach. "We wouldn't have been able to improve our legacy workflow in this way. There was a much longer IT development life cycle to contend with. Also, the application wouldn't have had as much capability," he says.

"These platforms are mission-critical to us, not a side project," Woods explains. "They affect our business engine at our core and they have to enable us to fulfill our timeline guarantees to our customers," he says.

The processes Woods refers to are those involving collecting, auditing and reviewing data and news for specific industries -- the information that SNL sells to clients, in other words.

That's not to say there haven't been some bumps on the road to the cloud. Woods says that while IT was brought in at the start of the decision-making, his process-improvement team missed the mark on making sure IT was fully informed. "We found that no matter how much we thought we were doing a good job communicating with IT and networking, over-communication is the order of the day," he says.

Building up trust in the cloud

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has a similar stick-to-it attitude with the cloud. With more than 100 terabytes spread across 10 different services, JPL's trust in the cloud built up over time.

Its first foray was in 2009, when reality sunk in that the 30-day Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission would last far longer than originally thought, and demand far more resources than the internal data center could handle. (MER is still sending data back to Earth.)

"All of our IT systems had filled up. We either needed to build new IT systems internally or move to the cloud," says Tom Soderstrom, CTO.

Soderstrom and his team of technicians and developers used Microsoft's then-nascent Azure platform to host its "Be a Martian" outreach program. Immediately, JPL saw the benefits of the elasticity of the cloud, which can spin up resources in line with user demand.

In fact, outreach has proven a fertile playground for JPL's cloud efforts, such as using Google Apps as the foundation for its "Postcard from Mars" program for schoolchildren. Soderstrom calls the platform ideal because it enables an outside-the-firewall partnership with developers at the University of California, San Diego.

External developers are simply authorized in Google -- by JPL's IT group -- to work on the project. "If we used the internal data center, we would have had to issue them accounts and machines, get them badged by JPL, and have them go into schools to install and manage the application code," Soderstrom says. "The cloud approach is less expensive and more effective."

JPL also taps Amazon Web Services for various projects, including its contest for EclipseCon, the annual meeting of the Eclipse open-source community. "All testing, coding and scoring is done in Amazon's cloud so our internal data centers don't have to take the hit," he says.

The cloud benefits internal projects, too, including processing data from the Mars missions. To tile 180,000 images sent from Mars, the data center would have to spin servers around the clock for 15 days or more. JPL would have to foot the cost of that infrastructure and spend time on provisioning specifications down to the type of power plug required.

In contrast, the same process took less than five hours using the Amazon cloud and cost about $200, according to Soderstrom.

As cloud use grows in popularity and criticality, JPL continues to beef up its cloud-based disaster recovery/business continuity, using multiple geographic zones from a single service provider as well as multiple vendors. "We always have failover for everything and consider it as insurance," he says. For the summer Mars landing, JPL instituted a double-failover system. "All cloud vendors are going to have outages; you just have to determine how much failover is required to endure it," he says.

For its data on Amazon, JPL switched on load balancers to move data between zones as necessary. "Previously, network engineers would have been needed to do that kind of planning; now app developers can put in these measures themselves via point and click," Soderstrom says.

Self-service provisioning

There have been hiccups along the way, such as trying to match the application to the cloud service. "Cloud services used to be a relationship between a provider and a business leader with a credit card," Soderstrom says. Now, "we make sure IT is involved at every level," he explains.

To accomplish this, JPL has standardized its cloud provisioning overall, creating an online form that business leaders and developers fill out about their project. Based on pre-set templates created by IT, their plain-English answers to questions such as "are you going to need scalability?" and "where is your customer and where is your data?" guide which cloud service and the level of resources they will need.

The move to self-service provisioning has meant retraining system administrators to be knowledgeable about cloud-use cases. Also, IT security staffers serve as consultants for the cloud environment, vetting and hardening operating system and application builds.

Though this sounds like a complicated evolution, Soderstrom says the technical challenges presented by the cloud have been easy compared with the legal ones. Legal is front and center in all negotiations to ensure appropriate licensing, procurement and compliance deals are struck and adhered to.

In all its cloud contracts, JPL includes language about owning the data. In case of service shutdown, a dispute or other agreement termination, the provider must ship all data back on disks, with NASA picking up the labor tab.

Overall, though, Soderstrom says he is glad he made the leap. "Cloud is changing the entire computing landscape and I'm very comfortable with it. Nothing has been this revolutionary since the PC or the Internet."