A recent end-user survey conducted by Peripheral Concepts, Inc. reveals that 41% of sites with over one terabyte of disk storage have implemented NAS Virtualization. This finding confirms users' last year forecast predicting a two-fold increase in 2006. The percentage of data stored on NAS continues to grow -- sites storing over 30% of their data on NAS have grown to 44% from 29% in 2005 and 25% in 2004. File management and block management are deemed equally important, with NFS access leading, and considered mandatory by half the population. There is more office data stored on NAS than on SAN. Other applications include consumer data and rich media By creating a single logical view across multiple NAS systems, NAS virtualization (or aggregation) addresses the scaling, performance, and management problems that have plagued NAS scalability for years. Transparent scalability is cited as the major product selection criteria, followed by performance, and the ability to merge NAS units from different vendors.

'Solaris 10 runs on over 700 systems, including servers from Dell's PowerEdge, IBM's BladeCenter, Hewlett-Packard's Proliant, and Fujitsu Siemens' PRIMERGY product lines. It is the only operating system proven to scale from widely available x86 servers to massively scalable SPARC-based servers,' said Tom Goguen, vice president of Solaris Marketing for Sun Microsystems. 'Today is the latest in a series of blockbuster new feature announcements that have included virtualization, security, clustering, and performance enhancements -- making the Solaris 10 OS ideal for building secure, scalable and affordable Web-based applications and services.'

DataCore Software today announced that the movement to 'total enterprise virtualization' and iSCSI are driving new users to virtual storage. Hundreds of new, small to mid-size customers have installed DataCore's SANmelody(TM) storage virtualization software in the second half of 2006. New users include Span the Wan, S&S Cycle, Coastal Range Systems, LifeSearch, Hedgemetrix LLC, Fox Williams, Hamilton Beach, Hallmark Financial Services, Inc., ETO, Herakles LLC, Olin Corp., Paragon Engineering, Alchemy Plus, City of Carmel, Wilcox & Savage, First Hawaiian Bank, University of Arkansas, ADMN, John H. Harland Company, Teachers Media Company, Dennis Publishing, VerdictMAX, Adolfson & Peterson Construction, Bridgewater Associates, EngenderHealth, Spectranetics, LTK Engineering Services, All Medical Personnel and many more. Companies worldwide are clearly moving beyond component level virtualization to 'total enterprise virtualization,' which spans servers, desktops and storage. The growing success of VMware and its support for new, low cost iSCSI storage connectivity has also spurred virtualization deployments in smaller to mid- size companies, which want the data protection and greater uptime benefits of a SAN.

Wyse Technology, the global leader in thin computing, today demonstrated a breakthrough software suite for desktop virtualization, delivering a rich PC experience on a simple and cost-effective thin computing device. Based on Wyse Thin OS, the world's fastest operating system for thin computing, Wyse demonstrated unprecedented performance along with access to multimedia rich features in a desktop virtualization environment.

Boomerang CEO Michael Dell's immediate solution to his company's deepening crisis is to scrub all bonuses for 2006, but he promised people above-market raises. For an incentive, he's offering a shortened vesting period of three years for future grants. Michael said in an internal e-mail last Friday that escaped into the wild over the weekend - complements of the Austin American-Statesman - that the company is handicapped by a money-leaching bureaucracy, described as its 'new enemy,' and that he will reduce the 20-odd CEO reports to 12.

Start-up semiconductor house P.A. Semi Inc. has confounded the doubters and naysayers who claimed it could never develop a freaking complicated 2GHz Power chip - with every feature currently known to man - that typically consumes just 5W-13W - or worse case 25W with both of its cores running full tilt at 2GH and all its peripherals active. Well, sounding a little surprised itself, it says it has and will be producing what it calls 'the most power-efficient high-performance processor ever designed' in volume at some secret fab by the fourth quarter. For volume read tens of thousands initially.

Intel has figured out a way to make its 45nm chips more threatening to AMD - at least this year and adding to its current momentum - while at the same time reinforcing Moore's Law, which says transistor counts double every two years. It claims it's made one of the biggest leaps in transistor technology in the last 40 years and has gained what it thinks is a year's lead over everybody else. Intel will be using two 'dramatically' new materials wrapped up in a technology called high-k to build the insulating walls and switching gates of its next-generation Core 2 Duos, Core 2 Quads and Xeons.

Michael Dell has come back to clean up the mess left by CEO Kevin Rollins, whose immediate resignation was accepted late Wednesday after the market closed. Rollins is gone from the Dell board as well as its executive suite. His departure has been widely expected, despite Michael's insistent public backing of his lieutenant. Dell offered no reason why Rollins is gone now. It may be that he was given a performance deadline and failed because along with the notice of his resignation, Dell said that it expects its fiscal Q4 results to be below First Call estimates of both earnings and revenues.

Federal prosecutors and SEC lawyers interviewed Apple CEO Steve Jobs last week about Apple's backdating practices. Nobody's talking about what transpired but doubtless the ground they covered included how an options award that went to him happened to be explained away by forged board minutes and how he came to sign an SEC disclosure attesting to the phony board meeting and price.

In a move akin to the Peace of Westphalia that brought an end to that nasty little European episode known as the Thirty Years War, Sun and Intel this week formally ceased hostilities. Laying religious differences aside like the Protestants and Catholics in 1648, Sun is going to sell Intel-based Xeon workstations and servers - presumably because it can make a buck selling Intel-based workstations and servers - presumably because Intel is making better server chips right this minute than AMD and customers want them.

On a roll after its détente with Intel, Sun Tuesday came in with respectable numbers for a change and announced that - for some illusive reason - Guernsey-based KKR Private Equity Investors LP had put $700 million in the company in the form of convertible notes. Sun, which has close to $3.5 billion at hand, said it would use the money for growth. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz described the investment as 'an opportunistic transaction.'

Microsoft today announced the official release to Web of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. This tool provides Web developers with the essential tools to simplify building next-generation, AJAX-style Web applications through what it calls 'seamless integration with the .NET Framework and Microsoft platform.'

One of HP's low-level operatives, Bryan Wagner, 'a/k/a mike@yahoo.com,' apparently HP's chief pretexter, has pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy and aggravated identity theft. It could mean seven years in the calaboose and a fine of $500,000. His plea agreement is sealed. Wagner is the guy who said he destroyed his computer so California's attorney general couldn't get his hands on it. He lives in Colorado and Nebraska and worked on HP's so-called Kona investigations trying to track down press leaks from HP's boardroom at the behest of Florida-based subcontractor Action Research Group (ARG). The US Attorney charged him last week with wire fraud, illegal sharing and use of social security numbers, accessing a computer without authorization and siphoning off a Wall Street Journal reporter's phone records through an e-mail account set up for the purpose - to wit, mike@yahoo.com. Within 48 hours he caved and became the first of the HP Five to plead guilty. Wagner, 29, as well as the principals of ARG and Security Outsourcing Solutions (SOS), the Boston outfit that hired ARG, are also up on felony charges made by State of California authorities as is former HP chairman and Kona kingpin Patti Dunn and HP's former ethics officer Kevin Hunsaker. They all pleaded not guilty and are currently supposed to appear in court for a hearing on February 28. Wagner is cooperating with the authorities reportedly providing evidence. The pressure on the others has now obviously increased and there has been talk of the US Attorney charging them too. Bloomberg reported Wednesday that the others have been offered the same deal as Wagner. Then the AP - quoting Wagner's lawyer - reported Thursday that California had offered to drop the four felony charges against Dunn, Hunsaker and the two others in exchange for a guilty plea to one misdemeanor charge. Dunn and Hunsaker didn't seem amenable and it's unclear whether they would still be open to federal charges if they took the California deal. The state charges against Wagner are expected to be dropped because you can't be prosecuted in state court for an offense you admitted in federal court.

With only 12 day left to go before the Great Vista Rollout to consumers on January 30 and missing no trick, Microsoft said late Wednesday that it would break with its tradition of boxed or pre-loaded software and supply the thing online. It's come up with three ways for customers to buy, upgrade or license multiple copies of Vista over the net: Windows Anytime Upgrade, Windows Marketplace and Windows Vista Family Discount.

Cutting AMD off at the knees in Q4 left Intel limping a bit too. Sequentially Intel did great - revenues up 11%, hitting the top of its projections, income up 15%, operating income up 8% - enough for CFO Andy Bryant to characterize Intel's performance as a 'strong ending to a difficult year' - but the year-over-year comparison shows the blood spatter - revenues down 5%, earnings down 39%, and operating income down 55%. Specifically Intel earned $1.5 billion, or 26 cents a share, on revenues of $9.7 billion. After-hours trading sheared upwards of 4% off Intel's stock price, which was up 10% since the first of the year, even if Intel beat the Street coming in with 26 cents, a penny ahead of Wall Street's consensus, which only figured it would do $9.4 billion.

For the second time in a row HP beat out Dell in moving PCs worldwide, this time increasing its lead, according to both Gartner and IDC. Gartner reckons HP shipments in Q4 grew 24% in Q4, giving it 17.4% of the world market, and it figures Dell's sales dropped 8.7%, reducing its share to 13.9% from 16.4% year-over-year. IDC gives HP 18.1% to Dell's 14.7%. In Q3 HP had 16.3% and Dell 16.1%, according to Gartner.

Joe Marengi, the 51-year-old general manager of Dell's commercial business group, which includes servers, storage and PC and accounts for 85% of the company's revenues, will be leaving at the end of March, retiring they say, and then Dell is going split the unit into two separate units. One, called the commercial business unit, will focus on large corporations, Dell's main stock-in-trade, and will be run by Bill Rodrigues. The other, called the public business unit, will concentrate on government, education and healthcare and will be run by David Marmonti. Dell, a company in search of solutions, has lost its edge; HP is now the hot PC company.

Intel has decided not to contest the special master's decision handing AMD certain discovery rights in its US antitrust suit against Intel. The discovery relates to Intel's business dealings and sales transactions with customers in foreign countries. AMD is fishing for evidence that Intel forbid OEMs to buy from AMD and threatened retaliation if they did. The US court decided months ago that it doesn't have jurisdiction over strictly foreign business dealings and that AMD can't claim damages if it was stopped from selling German-made processors to overseas accounts, but the special master sided with AMD on discovery and said it should have the scope to prove its claim that Intel is a monopoly and foreclosed AMD's chances of selling American-made products at home and abroad and foreign-made products to domestic accounts.

Intel came out at the Consumer Electronics Show with its first mainstream quad chip, a part branded a Core 2 Quad for the occasion and made immediately available. There are also two other new quads, giving Intel a total of nine versions of the widget for the desktop and enterprise markets. AMD has none yet but is expected to have a superior design when its Budapest chip arrives in a few months with the four cores integrated on a single sliver of silicon rather than two dual-cores soldered together and so have lower latency and require less power.

Comverse Technology's former general counsel William Sorin is going to pay $3 million to settle a criminal SEC backdating-cum-stock manipulation suit. He will also be barred from ever again serving as a lawyer, officer or director of a public company and faces a possible five years in jail when he's sentenced in a few weeks. He is the first of the backdating lawyers - and there are a flock of them - to catch hell. The US government is still trying to extradite runaway ex-Comverse CEO Kobi Alexander from Namibia. Meanwhile, both BEA and Wind River are still trading on the Nasdaq on sufferance because they haven't filed their financial results because of backdating investigations. BEA has been told it has to file its missing 10-Qs for its July and October quarters by the end of February and Wind River either had to come up with a copy of its final report regarding its ongoing stock option investigation on January 8 or submit a written response to questions posed by Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Panel. Wind answered the questions. It also has to file its 2Q07 10-Q by February 7 and its 3Q07 10-Q by February 21. Otherwise, its shares could be delisted.

Federal authorities have moved against one of HP's operatives, charging Bryan Wagner, 'a/k/a mike@yahoo.com,' apparently HP's chief pretexter, with conspiracy and aggravated identity theft. It could mean seven years in the calaboose and a fine of $500,000. US Attorney Kevin Ryan filed suit in district court in California on Wednesday.

Late Thursday, very late in fact, AMD put out a statement saying that its Q4 revenues - excluding anything it might see out of its ATI acquisition - would only be up 3% from the $1.33 billion it reported in calendar Q3, a number, roughly $1.37 billion, that is lower than expected. Wall Street was figuring on about $1.44 billion in sales, up over 8%. AMD also said that its Q4 operating income, which again it limited to chips, is 'expected to be positive but substantially lower than in the third quarter.'

NCR said Monday that it's going to spin its Teradata data warehousing business off into a publicly traded company. When exactly depends on board authorization, an IRS ruling, SEC filings and the usual IPO preparations, but it won't be for another six-nine months. During a short conference call, NCR, which came close to ruination when it was acquired by AT&T 15 years ago, said it has been teasing with the idea for 'many, many, many quarters' but was hamstrung by the fact that the unit wasn't making any money. That situation apparently brightened a year ago. NCR said Teradata earned $309 million on $1.5 billion in revenues, up 9%, in 2005.

Even though I write for SYS-CON, I've never publicly complimented them. But this time they really deserve a credit. SYS-CON will present the AJAXWorld 2007 Conference & Expo 2007 East in March. Usually, attendees have very limited access to speakers during conferences, and SYS-CON Events came out with a simple but smart idea - yesterday they have created an Ask The Faculty Forum, where anyone can post questions to the conference speakers and faculty. And you do not even have to attend the conference to participate in this forum. It's a very nice idea, or rather 'Idea 2.0' Speakers should visit the forum and answer the questions to promote their sessions, and software developers will have a chance to correspond with well known people in the industry. Yours truly will run Adobe Flex Hands-on Workshop during this event, so feel free to post relevant questions - it does not matter if you are planning to be there or not. I'm sure, other event organizers will start copycatting SYS-CON, which is a win-win situation for everyone.

A significant vulnerability in the security logic of a well known open source AJAX library called DWR has been identified by the Imperva Application Defense Center.

Does JavaScript, which was never intended to do anything resembling what it does within the approach now called AJAX, have a fundamental design flaw? That's the question being asked by Stefano Di Paola and Giorgio Fedon.

At the end of each year, when SYS-CON informally polls its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors, our question is always the same: where's the industry going next year?

db4objects Releases Rev 6.0 db4object has got a production-ready release of db4o 6.0 that it says is 10 times faster and 90% leaner on memory consumption than version 5. The new open source object database rev also supports a new server-side cursor technology for deterministic response times when querying multi-user client/server environments.

Microsoft Tuesday gave security vendors like Symantec and McAfee, who two months ago very publicly complained of being locked out of Vista because of Microsoft's new 'you-can't get-to-the-64-bit kernel' PatchGuard widgetry, draft APIs that are supposed to let them access the operating system enough to create products.

Matsushita Electric, also known as Panasonic, claims to have come up with a better rechargeable lithium-ion battery that unlike Sony's infamous lithium-ion batteries, which sparked the largest recall in computer history, won't start fires.

Opteron and the Athlon64 are 'aging' architectures according to Nollenberger Capital analyst Hans Mosesmann and Intel's Core 2 Duo eats its lunch in 95% of all PC applications. AMD is also, as everyone knows, late in moving to 65nm.

AMD has only started making 65nm chips and Intel has already started making 45nm ones so AMD said that it and its buddy IBM would have 45nm parts in mid-'08 using newfangled ultra-low-K interconnect technology and immersion lithography, which should give AMD a performance-per-watt edge.

Somebody's gonna have a very merry Christmas - once they sober up. Clustered storage start-up Isilon Systems Inc went public last Friday nominally pricing its shares at $13 although the broad market never saw that price - it opened $25 ending up 78%. It has yet to give back any ground. It was the third biggest opening day gain of the year - the biggest if you just count technology.

Intel, in its newfound mission to bring low-cost computing to the third world - and compete with One Laptop Per Child - is going to develop an electronic version of the Quran in partnership with two Saudi Arabian ISVs and a training computer for teachers outfitted with the Saudi government-approved K-12 curriculum.

Remember back in, oh, 2001, when a couple of engineers were nabbed at San Francisco Airport just before boarding a plane to China and had their grips searched and out poured all these confidential trade secrets from Sun Microsystems, Transmeta, NEC and Trident Microsystems?

Apple is going to be late handing in its an annual report to the SEC because of its backdating investigation, which has so far resulted in its ex-CFO Fred Anderson leaving the board and casting its ex-general counsel in a bad light. Apple's year ended September 30.

Dell is doing one of those two-in-a-box management things and putting server chief Brad Anderson and desktop chief Jeff Clarke over the new Business Products Group. Notebook boss Alex Gruzen will run the Consumer Products Group on his own. Both Anderson and Gruzen are HP graduates.

Lehman Brothers, which thinks that AMD is capacity-constrained, also thinks that Intel may be aggressively pricing products and quotes China-based Commercial Times, which cites PC OEMs as its sources, as saying that Intel may again cut prices on its P4s by better than 60% on January 21. Lehman, acknowledging that Intel has not confirmed the story, believes the 'pricing environment for MPUs is one of the most crucial variables impacting AMD' and attributes Intel's aggressiveness to 'AMD's margin shortfall in 3Q06 - and remains a risk that we acknowledge the company has limited control over.'

A letter written to Hurd by a couple of Michigan Democrats says the transaction didn't appear to be pre-scheduled. They want to know whether he made the sale while 'in possession of potentially damaging material facts that shareholders' lacked.

HP has apparently dropped an expected shoe. In a widely picked-up story the New York Times said Thursday that HP has sent the highest of high-powered Silicon Valley lawyers, Larry Sonsini, packing, severing his long-standing advisory ties with its board. He was the board's outside counsel and the guy who, after the fact, mind you, sanctioned the company's pretexting caper as 'within legal limits' without cracking a law book.