Intel to roll out new low-cost and high-end SSDs

Intel Corp. will release a $120 solid-state disk (SSD) drive positioned as a server "boot drive" with only 40GB of capacity, but the drive could also be used in low-end laptops PCs and netbooks. Intel's current line of enterprise-class drives, the X25-E series , have capacities of 32GB and 64GB. The 120GB X25-V SSD, known internally as the Glen Brook drive, uses lower-cost multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash chips. Intel is also planning a new line of enterprise-class SSDs with 50GB, 100GB and 200GB capacities, which would more closely mimic the capacities of high-end hard disk drives used in servers today, an Intel representative said.

The drive is currently being shipped in sample volumes among computer equipment makers and is expected to be generally available in January, said Jon Peracchi, a marketing manager at Intel. For example, the new 50GB drive is expected to have an MSRP of $350. The new enterprise-class drives are expected to ship as samples to equipment manufacturers in April and are expected to be generally available in July, 2010. In other SSD news, STEC Corp. plans to begin shipping next week a new enterprise-class ZeusIOPS SSD with serial-attached SCSI interface. Peracchi, who was speaking at a SSD Seminar sponsored by Bell Microproducts Inc. in Westford, Mass. said the new enterprise-class SSDs, which are based on single-level cell NAND, would represent a 40% price cut or about $6.50 per gigabyte over its current X25-E SSD prices. The new drive would have a 6Gbit/sec SAS interface compared with the current 3Gbit/sec SAS SSD, according to an STEC representative. The company is also planning a new follow-on to its Mach8 SATA SSD, which will double the interface throughput to 3Gbit/sec and include support for native encryption.

The new ZeusIOPS SAS SSD will support sequential read rates of up to 350MB/sec and write rates of 300MB/sec. The Mach16 SSD drives are expected out in the second quarter of 2010, and will support read rates of 250MB/sec and write rates of 225MB/sec.

Wall Street Beat: Big tech deals stir market

As industry insiders attempt to gauge the impact of economic recovery on IT, acquisitions and legal deals among vendors including Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Hewlett-Packard, 3Com and Logitech are sparking investor interest by altering the shape of the tech market. The company and its archrival, Intel, announced on Thursday that they have settled all antitrust litigation and patent cross-license disputes between the companies. At first blush, AMD is one of the big winners.

Intel will pay AMD US$1.25 billion. But ultimately the real winner may be Intel, even though it will take a big earnings hit for the quarter. AMD's share price jumped 22 percent to close the day at $6.48, up by $1.16. The deal gives AMD a much-needed cash infusion. As a result of the legal settlement, Intel said it expects its spending in the fourth quarter to be approximately $4.2 billion, up from $2.9 billion. The deal also allows Intel "to focus on its real long-term threat," according to industry analyst Jack Gold. "No, it's not AMD – its ARM Holdings and all of the licensees of the ARM chip designs (e.g., Qualcomm, TI, Freescale, Nvidia, Samsung, Marvel). While PC and server chips are its breadwinner today, Intel rightly understands that the sheer number of personal and consumer intelligent computing devices that will be built over the next several years will far outnumber the traditional PC marketplace," Gold said in e-mail. However, the chip giant needs the competition from AMD to stay fresh and focused, and to allay antitrust concerns.

Intel shares dropped $0.16 to close at $19.68. That doesn't mean that IT investors thought the AMD deal was bad for Intel; most tech bellwether shares dropped Thursday on macroeconomic concerns. The federal deficit for the budget year, ended Sept. 30, set an all-time record in dollar terms of $1.42 trillion. The Treasury Department reported that the federal deficit for October totaled $176.4 billion, higher than economists expected. High deficits may push up interest rates, which could in turn hurt what looks to be a slow, fragile recovery. The purchase is a challenge to networking giant Cisco Systems and a major step toward HP's ability to provide a one-stop shop for computing, storage, services and networking.

The signature M&A deal of the week was HP's $2.7 billion acquisition of network switch maker 3Com. Cisco earlier this year started selling servers, which made it more of a direct competitor to HP. However, the deal may have its biggest impact not on Cisco, but on smaller networking players like Brocade Communications. Cisco shares declined by only 2.17 percent, dropping $0.52 to close at $23.40. The HP acquisition takes Brocade out of play as a possible acquisition target by HP while increasing competitive pressure. Brocade shares Thursday slumped to close at $8.08, down by $1.17 or 12.7 percent. In what would have been the major M&A deal in most other weeks, tString := StoryDateLine + " (" + @Text(StoryFiledDate) + ") - "; @If(datelineinbody = "No"; tString; "")Logitech said Tuesday it will acquire HD video communications equipment maker LifeSize Communications for $405 million in cash. Logitech shares slumped in the wake of the news, however.

Video communications systems, a major thrust for Cisco as well, has become a hot product category as businesses cut travel to pare costs. Often, acquisition announcements have a negative impact on the acquiring company's stock. However, Standard & Poor's Equity Research reiterated its "hold" recommendation on Logitech, stating that the deal will help the vendor in a fast-paced market. A big purchase can dilute earnings for the acquiring company. Tech market reports this week, meanwhile, were generally positive.

In the mobile-phone arena, smartphone sales increased 13 percent in the third quarter over the year-earlier period, Gartner said Monday. IDC Monday said that microprocessor unit shipments in the third quarter rose 23 percent from the second quarter, and by 0.3 percent from the same period in 2008, though the overall value of shipments declined. Overall mobile-phone market growth was much lower, increasing by 0.1 percent, Gartner said. With that all industries will suffer; certainly consumer electronics will have its ups and downs." The big hope for tech is that, just as it has been less affected by the recession than other sectors, it will fare better in the recovery as well. "The good news is certainly consumers continue to gravitate toward technology," DuBravac said. "They continue to spend on technology while trying to cut back on other categories to make room for their tech spend." While economic recovery appears to be underway, economists urge caution. "We believe that the recession is ended, that it ended in July ... but that certainly doesn't mean that we're out of the woods," said Shawn DuBravac, an economist at the Consumer Electronics Association. "We believe that while we're in an expansionary period now that it will be a mediocre, slow recovery where jobs continue to be hard to come by.

Google Alters News Indexing to Accommodate Pay Walls

In a bid to appease publishers, Google has updated its search programs, allowing publishers who charge for their content to limit users to only five free page views per day. If you browse the WSJ site directly, for example, you could browse a certain number of articles for free, but once you reach the set limit, you would be prompted to register or subscribe to the site. Many publishers impose this type of limits on free page views for Web surfers who visit their sites directly. But, in the past, Google refused to implement these limits on its search results and articles in its Google News service.

Because of this stance, Google has drawn the ire of some news publishers. If you only clicked through WSJ articles using Google News, for example, your entries weren't counted toward the site's limit. Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has called Google many names and has threatened to remove its news assets (like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal) from Google search. Google has stood firm and refused to pay news publishers for indexing their content. There were even discussions of Murdoch partnering with Microsoft, which would pay to exclusively index the content.

But the search giant now seems to have acknowledged the turmoil the newspaper industry is going through and is now making changes to accommodate the much disputed pay walls on certain Web sites. So if one user clicks on more than five articles in a day, he/she will be automatically routed to subscription purchase pages. The changes to Google's First Click Free program let publishers prevent unrestricted access to subscription Web sites. Google's John Mueller explains in a blog post that the company hopes "this encourages even more publishers to open up more content to users around the world!" On Tuesday, the same day that Google announced the changes, Rupert Murdoch spoke at a Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism in the Internet age. He did not mention name of sites, but this has been seen as a direct attack at Google and its News service. Murdoch explained that good journalism is an expensive commodity and criticised sites that profit from reusing news articles by others without paying.

Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post also spoke at the workshop on Tuesday, and accused Murdoch of confusing aggregation of news with misappropriation. Rupert Murdoch is expected to erect more pay walls for it news properties in the coming months. Huffington said she strongly believes in aggregation next to original content, noting that some of Murdoch's own sites aggregate eternal content as well.

Study: MySQL use to drop under Oracle ownership

Usage of the open-source MySQL database is set to decline if Oracle succeeds in buying the software's owner, Sun Microsystems, according to new data released by analyst firm The 451 Group on Friday. While 82.1 percent of respondents use MySQL today, that figure will drop to 72.3 percent by 2014, the study found. The firm polled 347 open-source software users.

Fifteen percent said that if Oracle buys Sun, they would be less inclined to use MySQL. Only 6.3 percent indicated they would be more likely to use the database under Oracle's stewardship. Officials there have expressed particular concern over the fate of MySQL under Oracle's ownership. Oracle announced plans to buy Sun in April, but the deal has been held up while European authorities conduct an antitrust review. But some observers have argued that MySQL and Oracle's own database aren't direct competitors, meaning Oracle would have little reason to stifle it. PostgreSQL usage will get a bump as well, growing from 27.1 percent of all users to 30.5 percent by 2014. As for MySQL, some respondents want it to be maintained outside of Oracle. 32.6 percent called for it to be given to an independent organization that would further its development.

In addition, MySQL's code base would live on through offshoot projects like MariaDB. According to the 451 Group study, MariaDB usage is expected to rise from zero today to 3.7 percent of all users by 2014, according to the study. Still, only 4.3 percent said Oracle should be made to sell the database off to another software company. "We do not believe that Oracle would see any of the alternatives to divesting MySQL as any less of a last resort and we do not expect Oracle to offer any concessions," 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett said in a statement. "However, we believe that Oracle might be more inclined to open up the development of the MySQL database under its own terms in order to encourage more widespread adoption." Meanwhile, Oracle's bid to buy Sun recently received a potential boost from prominent open-source legal expert Eben Moglen, founder and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center. Moglen issued the opinion after a request from Oracle's legal team, according to a statement. Moglen sent a letter to the European Union on Nov. 19, telling regulators the open-source license used by MySQL, General Public License Version 2, provides adequate protection for parties outside Oracle to develop and redistribute MySQL. "Without expressing any opinion on any other aspect of the Commission's ongoing merger investigation, I believe that the issues raised concerning the GPLv2 status of the MySQL codebase do not warrant a conclusion that this transaction threatens significant anti-competitive consequences," he wrote in part.

EU wants safe volume settings on portable music players

The European Commission has ordered all makers of portable music players to add a default volume setting of around 80 decibels (dB) and a health warning to all new devices within the next two years. The current maximum volume level permitted for portable devices of 100 dB in the European Union remains unchanged, the Commission said in a statement. It is also calling on standards bodies to change industrywide technical safety standards for mobile devices to include the 80 dB default setting. An estimated 10 percent of music player owners in Europe (up to 25 million people) risk going deaf by listening to music at volumes of up to 120 dB - - roughly the volume of a jet airliner taking off - for an hour or more each day on a regular basis, consumer rights commissioner Meglana Kuneva said in a press conference Monday.

Eighty dB is roughly the volume of road traffic."It's easy to push up the volume on your MP3 player to damagingly loud levels, especially on busy streets or public transport," Kuneva said, adding that young people especially "have no idea they can be putting their hearing at risk."The new standard default setting on devices won't prevent users from overriding the default settings and pumping up the volume, but there will be clear warnings so they know the risks they are taking, Kuneva said. You can safely listen to music at 80 dB for up to 40 hours a week without harming your ears, a study conducted for the Commission concluded. The industry said it supported the move but it warned the Commission not to try to prescribe universal volume levels for all users. Bridget Cosgrave, director general of the trade group Digital Europe, added that music players are only one part of the problem of hearing loss, but the industry would cooperate in the European initiative, "to best serve consumer interests" she said. It urged the Commission and standardization bodies to match the wishes of users with safety considerations when they set the default level. Digital Europe called for global harmonization of the standards to be applied in Europe. "Unharmonised requirements would undermine credibility and confuse users, potentially exposing themselves to inappropriate volume of noise," the trade group said in a statement.

Kuneva warned firms that she won't tolerate their failure to observe the new standards. "Regardless how big the company, no matter how reputable, I will take action," the commissioner said. And it warned the Commission against setting "overly stringent regulations", pointing out that this would drive sales of products to countries with more relaxed regulation.

Lawsuits over Heartland data breach folded into one

A lawsuit consolidating 16 separate class-action complaints brought by financial institutions against Heartland Payment Systems Inc. has been filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. The complaints allege that the payment processor was negligent in its duty to protect card holder data. The claims stem from the massive data breach disclosed by Princeton, N.J.-based Heartland in January.

The amended complaint includes for the first time several statements that Heartland is alleged to have made regarding the controls it had in place to protect credit and debit card data just prior to the breach. The lawsuit seeks compensation from Heartland for the costs that the financial institutions say they've had to bear in notifying customers about the breach and in reissuing new payment cards. The fact that the company suffered the breach despite its claimed security measures shows that Heartland either negligently or deliberately misrepresented the facts, the lawsuit alleged. Among the financial institutions listed are the Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union, Lone Star Bank of North America and Amalgamated Bank of New York. "There were multiple lawsuits filed all over the country on behalf of financial institutions, and all of those cases were sent to federal court in Houston" for consolidation, said Joseph Sauder, an attorney with Chimicles & Tikellis LLP. The Haverford, Penn.-based law firm is representing some of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. "This complaint incorporates the strongest claims from all of the financial institution class-action lawsuits," Sauder said. "The next step is for Heartland to file a response to this complaint," he said. The breach, which is considered the biggest involving payment card data, compromised more than 100 million credit and debit cards.

Heartland on Jan. 20 disclosed that unknown intruders had broken into its network sometime last year and accessed payment card data belonging to an undisclosed number of customers. So far, Heartland has publicly admitted to spending nearly $13 million on breach-related costs, and analysts expect it will cost the company millions more in the coming years. The cases were consolidated in federal court in Texas because Heartland's data centers are located in that state, Sauder said. Heartland, one of the biggest payment processors in the U.S., manages about 100 million credit and debit-card transactions per month. A "separate track" of cases involving consumer lawsuits against Heartland is also being heard in the same court, Sauder said. BJ's Wholesale Club, Hannaford Bros. and Dave & Buster's restaurant chain.

In September, Albert Gonzalez, 28, of Miami pleaded guilty to the data heist at Heartland and several other retailers, including TJX Companies Inc. Gonzalez is scheduled to be sentenced in December and faces 15 to 20 years in prison under the terms of his plea agreement. Heartland did not immediately respond to a request for comment.