Splunk says that version 4 of its IT search application has hit the streets, offering improvements in usability, scalability and performance. Splunk 4 enables users to search, analyze, monitor and report on data from any application, server or network device in real time to troubleshoot outages, investigate security incidents, meet compliance requirements and more—“in minutes instead of hours or days”, says the company. Some of the 1,800 enhancements and 50+ new features include 10x faster search and 2x faster indexing, custom dashboards for users of any skill level, more sophisticated enterprise-level management and the Splunk 4 App Framework for creating or leveraging existing apps running on the IT search engine.
The “ounce of prevention” guys at H.D.S. Hungary have released version 2.9 of Hard Disk Sentinel, a data protection solution that monitors the status of solid-state and hard disks. Hard Disk Sentinel provides detailed disk information, statistics, alerts and backup functions, alerting to present or future disk problems, such as excessive temperature or degradation of disk health, which are signs of imminent hardware failure. The company touts the solution's unique support for a wide range of both internal IDE/SATA/SCSI/SAS and external USB/FireWire/e-Sata hard disks and hard disk enclosures. The new version 2.9 offers deep disk tests to verify hard disk noise, performance and temperature changes. In addition, disk information in RAID arrays connected to 3ware/AMCC and ARECA RAID controllers and solid-state disk features also can be detected. The Enterprise server solution allows monitoring and managing of disk information of remote hosts from a centralized administration console.
Making the space for on-line video more interesting is Kaltura Community Edition (KCE), which Kaltura dubs “the world's first and only open-source, self-hosted on-line video platform”. The freely downloadable KCE allows any site owner or Web developer to integrate customizable video and interactive rich-media functionalities, including video management, publishing, uploading, importing, syndicating, editing, annotating, remixing, sharing and advertising. Kaltura also claims that KCE breaks the “build vs. buy” conundrum and vendor lock-in by allowing publishers and enterprises to build upon and extend an existing robust platform to customize fully their own self-hosted solution on their own servers, behind their own firewalls and at no cost. The company further offers paid support services. KCE runs on Linux, Mac and Windows and is slated to be available on several cloud computing platforms.
If you are an administrator who has worked with *nix but is new to virtualization, the authorial team of Luke S. Crawford and Chris Takemura has a book for you: The Book of Xen from No Starch Press. Xen is a tool that lets administrators run many virtual operating systems on one physical server, including Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris and Microsoft Windows. In the process, users save money on hardware, maintenance and electricity. The book explains everything needed to run Xen, covering installation, networking, virtualized storage, and managing guest and host operating systems. Beyond the basics, it covers profiling and benchmarks, migration, XenSource administration and hardware-assisted virtualization.
Although the engineering discipline has done many wonderful things for civilization, it has at times been blind to important social and environmental considerations. In order to foster more humane disciplines of engineering, the team of David Douglas and Greg Papadopoulos penned the new book Citizen Engineer: A Handbook for Socially Responsible Engineering (Prentice-Hall). Citizen Engineer helps engineers of all types to see the full impact of their work beyond design to include ecological, intellectual property, business and sociological perspectives.
Led by the kick-butt motto “Excel without the hell”, the company Jedox has announced “the industry's first free ODBO [OLE DB for OLAP] driver” as a part of its open-source OLAP product, Palo. Jedox states that the new ODBO connectivity allows users to carry out advanced OLAP-based Pivot table queries in Excel without the need for expensive licenses for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. Although Pivot tables in Excel are read-only, Palo users have the option to write back values from Excel directly to Palo's OLAP cubes. The company calls “Excel plus Palo” a solution with all the advantages of a centralized BI solution without the cost and time.
In the pursuit of bringing us closer together comes the new Zero9 Chat Engine, a product that enables mobile VAS and telco providers to run image- and video-rich chat/dating services via the Web, WAP and SMS. Users can stay in touch with friends via their Web browsers, browsing a WAP site or texting with their cell phones. The engine's core is Zero9's Matching Algorithm, which proposes the ideal and best-matched friends. A back-office suite controls elements, such as CRM, a matching tuner and advanced reporting. The engine is based on the LAMP platform and the Zend framework.
The latest offering from Corsair is its Extreme Series X32, X64 and X128 high-performance solid-state drives in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB densities, respectively. The firm says that the drives offer the highest performance currently available on the market, with read speeds of up to 240MB/s and write speeds of up to 170MB/s. Each drive in the Extreme Series utilizes the Indilinx Barefoot controller, Samsung MLC NAND Flash memory and 64MB of onboard cache. Intended uses are as primary drives in desktop and notebooks systems, as well as RAID 0 configurations in high-performance desktops for enthusiasts who want extreme performance.
