Cloud companies such as Amazon have been offering a free trial to customers, in one form or another, for a long time now. It has proven to be a rather effective sales approach for AWS and others, in an industry that lists cost efficiency as one of its core principals.

According to the company, Xeround FREE is easy to manage and is automatically installed and configured, though it only comes with 10MB worth of storage – just enough to run a small app. It’s not sufficient for much else, such as somewhat more persistent use by individual developers.

“Xeround FREE is the direct result of developers asking for a free version of our cloud database service for their MySQL apps,” said Razi Sharir, CEO of Xeround. “Now everyone can enjoy a zero-management, simple, always-on database for their apps at no cost – so developers can experience the least amount of friction while developing in the cloud.”

Xeround is a new but not-so-new player in the cloud industry. The company announced it will be shifting its focus to this market right after it raised $9 million from VCs, and said that plans to adapt its portfolio have been sitting on the drawing board for a couple years.

Recently Amazon Web Services also made a freemium push. It has extended the capabilities offered with two of its free services, enabling developers to run Linux and make use of more memory and I/O, among other things including additional functionality.

Xeround Going Freemium with Complimentary Dev Version is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Xeround Extends Ruby Support with Heroku Add-On
• Xeround Launches MySQL for the Cloud. It’s All About Scale.
• Xeround Changes Agenda after $9M in Funding
• Heroku Launches Standalone PostGres Database-as-a-Service
• Google Announces Database-as-a-Service for App Engine, Hot on Oracle’s Heels
• Third Largest Bitcoin Exchange Bitomat Lost Their Wallet, Over 17,000 Bitcoins Missing

EMC ironically pioneered flash in the data center when it added flash front-ends to its high-end Symetrix fibre channel disk arrays in 2008. The problem that flash is intended to address, as EMC President and COO Pat Gelsinger says in an interview with Wikibon Chief Analyst David Vellante, is the growing gap between the amount of data that the server CPU, which doubles in power every 18 months, can consume and the slow IO speed of spinning disk, which has not changed over two decades.

This put flash below the IO software stack. Since then several startups have moved flash into the server, putting it on the server PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) bus, providing fast, random access read/writes combined with persistent memory to protect the data in case of a server crash or power failure. This left EMC behind as the figures show. While Gelsinger bragged that EMC sold 25 Pbytes of flash in 2011, Fusion-io CEO Dave Flynn responded that his company sold 50 Pbytes. And that was only one of several startups in the market.

VFCache is EMC’s bid to get into this market, and it is in large part a defensive move. Gelsinger inadvertently admitted as much when he said, “Our customers are saying that the combination is really fabulous, so I won’t go with Exadata or someone else.” (emphasis added)

But VFCache differs in important ways from the competition. First, while the startup flash vendors are providing full read/write functionality on the server, VFCache is a read-only cache. New data is written through the cache to the EMC storage array, which slows writes. FVCache is designed to work with the traditional storage stack, while Fusion-io’s vision (and that of the other flash statups) is of single tier storage with all data residing in flash on the server. EMC believes that this will be prohibitively expensive for much of enterprise data, and Gelsinger talks of “hot”, “warm”, and “cold” data and envisions a three-tier system.

“It’s not unusal to see 80% of the IOPS on 20% of the data,” says EMC CTO of Flash Products Dan Cobb. “So what about the other 80% of data.” Putting that on flash will be a cost-prohibitive choice.

Wikibon’s View

Wikibon tends to agree with EMC in this. Vellante in his recorded analysis says, “Flash will become the predominant medium for IO-intensive applications.” The relevant measure for these applications will not be the traditional cost-per-Gbyte but rather cost-per-IO. By this measure, flash is already less expensive for these applications and will “enable a new breed of applications that were once too expensive to justify based on the IO economics of spinning disk.”

But for a variety of reasons including compliance, companies need to maintain very large amounts of data that are not constantly active. Despite the continuing fall of flash prices, it is unlikely to drop below the cost-per-Gbyte price of disk, much less tape, in the foreseeable future.

Dennis Martin, president of Demartek, which conducted an independent evaluation of VFCache, said “The cost-effective approach is to use a small quantity of flash compared to total storage with automated tiering or caching solution….The cache fills up with hot data, making the access times significantly reduced.”

Datamark’s evaluation of VFCache running against a typical Oracle application found that populating the cache fully from the storage array took about an hour but resulted in a 2.6X to 3.3X increase in transactions-per-minute and also increased write speed to the underlying disk array, which was relieved of much of the read load by the VFCache. Martin suggests that this architecture is most valuable when used with read-intensive workloads with small IO block sizes of up to 64K, random IO workloads, and/or multiple IO streams. It would be less effective with write-intensive applications such as those capturing large amounts of transaction data for near-real-time analysis.

This, however, presumes an effective intelligent data management layer to move the most active data to the VFCache and then replace it as that data cools and newer data becomes more active. EMC does have that technology in the form of FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) and Flash Cache, which, says EMC SVP of Flash Products Mark Sorenson, (http://siliconangle.tv/video/emc-launches-vfcache-pcie-flash-solution) it plans to extend to VFCache this year. EMC also promises high-performance deduplication for its flash product. Once this is available, EMC will offer unified multitier data storage from the server to the archiving layer with automated tiering. At present, however, FVCache is an immature product.

What is EMC’s VFCache Good For? is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Gamesmanship: Fusion-io Sold Twice as Much Flash Last Year as EMC – An Interview with CEO Dave Flynn
• EMC Lands UK Government Contract
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• Top 10 Executives from VMworld
• Astute Networks Boosts I/O for VMware Environments
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The company is introducing the concept of the cloud to the networking layer. It offers an alternative to buying costly IT gear in order to handle demand overflows, and instead enables clients to offload traffic during peak-times to its own data centers. Cloud host Rackspace is one of the biggest names on Nicira’s user list today, along with carrier AT&T, eBay and others.

Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman believes that in the long run, this new tech will appeal more to cloud companies rather than enterprises, and that – while Nicira has the potential of turning out as a disrupting force in the networking world – it’s not ready to take on Cisco just yet.

“Network virtualization is the biggest change to networking in 25 years,” said Stephen Mullaney, chief executive of Nicira. “NVP provides the final pivotal piece to cloud computing, the most transformational change to IT in a generation. And the largest most forward-thinking cloud providers are laser-focused on operations and economics, the two benefits Nicira delivers.”

This pitch seems to have done its magic on some of the higher-profile VCs in the tech industry. In the same announcement, Nicira revealed its product the startup announced that it has raised $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA and a couple of independent investors – which is none too shabby for a seed funding round.

Nicira is not the only one that has been disrupting the traditional network recently. IBM unveiled an OpenFlow-based product in collaboration with NEC a couple weeks ago.

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According to the company’s new tariffs, data stored up to 50 TB will see a 12 percent reduction in cost, and storage more than 500 TB will see a cost reduction of 13.5 percent. Amazon has cut the price from $0.14 per gigabyte per month to $0.125 for the first terabyte of data, and $0.110 per gigabyte per month for the next 49 TB, instead of the earlier $0.125.

The new price plan will be applicable only for US consumers. For other regions, Amazon has published a separate data storage outline.

On the company’s official blog, Jeff Barr, vice president of Amazon Web Services, said “there’s been a lot written lately about storage availability and prices. We’ve often talked about the benefits that AWS’s scale and focus creates for our customers. Our ability to lower prices again now is an example of this principle at work.”

Amazon explains that the decline in costs is due to the exponential growth of the Cloud. Last week, AWS made the astounding announcement that it had stored 762 billion objects in 2011.  That year the number of stored items increased by 192 percent, making it the largest annual increase since the creation of Amazon Web Services.

Last month, AWS launched AWS Cloud Gateway today, which connects on-premise software appliances with cloud-based storage.

Red Hat Storage Appliance for the Amazon Cloud

Not surprisingly, the Amazon Web Services ecosystem continues to grow.  Market leader in enterprise Linux, Red Hat, announced their Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services this week as well.  According to Red Hat, the new appliance will offer excellent performance by taking advantage of Amazon’s cloud services.

The Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS is a software implementation on EC2 and EBS (Elastic Block Storage). Thus, a NAS file server can be run directly into the cloud. According to Red Hat, this also means that all applications can be lifted with support of NAS storage without any adjustments to the cloud.

“Essentially what we are providing is network-attached storage in the cloud,” said Tom Trainer, storage product marketing manager at Red Hat. “Availability is a very important aspect of any storage system, irrespective of if it’s based in an enterprise’s own data center or in the cloud. Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services can do synchronous replication in one AWS region and multiple availability zones.”

The appliance is based on virtual storage appliance from Gluster, a company and product that Red Hat acquired in October last year. Red Hat plans to introduce the appliance in clouds from other providers in near future.

Red Hat Launches New AWS Tool is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• The Storage Wars: Gluster Becomes a Core Pillar for Red Hat Storage With New Integrations for AWS and OpenShift
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• Third Largest Bitcoin Exchange Bitomat Lost Their Wallet, Over 17,000 Bitcoins Missing
• Red Hat Proves Why Amazon Web Services Is A Must Consideration
• Black Clouds Over The Cloud? EMC’s RSA Unit Addresses The Issues

• Basho hired former Accenture CTO Don Rippert in In June of last year.
• Opscode hired Mitch Hill, formerly of Accenture, and most recently served as  CEO of Avanade, a technology services joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft.
• Zenoss Founder and CEO Bill Karpovitch is a pioneer in the realm of cloud computing. Earlier in his career, he spent five years as an Accenture executive where he led architecture and development of large-scale OSS/BSS applications for global telecommunications providers.

Dave Rich said in his time at Accenture he often encountered CEOs of startups who were either technically brilliant or super enthusiastic sales people. The technically brilliant people can demonstrate how their technology is superior but that is just an aspect of what is required to sell into the enterprise. The CEO with a sales pedigree may be overly optimistic, which leads to its own set of issues.

In his role, Rich said he acts as foil. There has to be the right balance between entrepreneurialism and managing the business.  Venture capitalists really need that expertise as it’s all about managing the burn. He said that’s something  you learn at Accenture.

Accenture executives play the role of advocate for both innovation and what’s right for the customer. They know that balance and can  bring that understanding into the startup.

“In many ways we have been running startups inside businesses,” Rich said.

Don Rippert retired as Accenture’s CTO on June 3o after 30 years working at the company. On July 1, he started work as CEO at Basho.

“I was working with a lot of small, innovative companies that wanted to be incdued in Accenture solutions that Accenture would sell,” Rippert said in an interview this week. “I would identify them. I got to know quite a few. I got to know the startups and the people. I  learned one of the biggest hurdles for startups is thinking through how to sell to large enterprises.”

It’s the message that matters, Rippert said. Accenture executives are trained to help customers think through solutions.

“You are accustomed to saying ‘this will save you this much – this will generate this additonal revenue,’ ” Rippert said.

It is an adjustment for the startup when an Acccenture executive joins its ranks. Basho employees expressed some reservations about hiring an Accenture executive. But they accepted him. They essentially wanted to see if he had the chops to be their CEO. He said he was able to do that by proving to them he understood the technology.

It also helps that Rippert is steadfast about keeping the company’s hacker culture intact.

“There was a bit of a concern that there would be people with suits and ties coming in, that’s the last thing i need,” he said.

Basho has a particular focus on the DevOps culture and how it is emerging. DevOps looks at the ways developers and operations people work together to deploy and manage apps. It’s a cultural mix in some ways similar to the new services focus that Accenture executives bring to technology companies.

Opscode Founder Jesse Robbins and CEO Mitch Hill

Opscode’s story is in many ways what Rich and Rippert describe. The companies needed a CEO who could take the company to the next level. And the founder, in this case, Jesse Robbins, now acts as the chief community manager for the company, overseeing Opscode and Chef, the open-source community driven recipes that provide IT with ways to automate and provide integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud.  Robbins now gets to do what he does best with a Mitch Hill, a CEO who has a proven track record.

And Zenoss? CEO Bill Karpovich received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2011 Maryland Award in the Emerging company category. He has been featured on the cover of InformationWeek and has led the companty from startup to category leader in the IT management software market.

Not bad, huh?

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• 5 Open Source Startups to Watch in 2012 # 4: Opscode
• Dell Open-Sources Code for Hadoop Deployment Tool
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Today’s news is that Massive Media managed to leverage Clustrix’s database to accommodate the four million users its social network, Twoo, gained in about six month. It didn’t have to shard the DB nor has it seen any downtime caused by usage spikes, according to a statement.

“Pre-Clustrix, we spent a lot of time on optimizing for performance and scale. Now we can spend those resources better,” said Lorenz Bogaert, co-founder and CEO of Massive Media. “It does not make sense to build a new site using the old system of sharding MySQL.”

Alongside Massive Media’s achievement, the company also revealed  the Clustrix Development Kit. The free download is a software-based sandbox environment that lets users toy around with the capabilities of Clustrix database appliance without actually having to buy the hardware.

Oracle’s MySQL is losing ground and buzz to NoSQL and other alternatives, often with equally catchy name. In an interview with SiliconANGLE last year MIT Professor Michael Stonebreak pointed to NewSQL as the biggest trending topic in 2012, and he’s not the only one who’s been making bets against MySQL.

Oracle itself has begun expanding on what was at first – and still is – regarded as a marketing ploy rather than a serious move. The DB giant is actually investing in unstructured data analytics and Hadoop, most recently via a team-up with Cloudera, one of the biggest players in this industry.

Clustrix Gains Traction in NewSQL, Offers New Product is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• NewSQL Will Prevail in 2012 says MIT’s Michael Stonebraker
• Clustrix CTO: In-Memory is a Hack to Throw Hardware at the Database Problem

It is so easy to start a fight. Ask your friends whose legacy is more timeless: the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. If you’re watching a soccer game, declare that Cristiano Ronaldo is highly overrated. Or, if you’re at a database conference, tell those relational database types that Web apps don’t all need to conform to ACID principles (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability).

Yes, the fur will fly. But you’ll have broached a topic that urgently needs more attention. The fact is, the evolution of application design has not kept pace with the explosion of data. In today’s “connected era,” in which billions of devices are now generating, collecting, analyzing, and sharing massive volumes of data with each other, a company’s ability to innovate is largely dependent on its ability to process all this data in a timely fashion. And one frequent obstacle to innovation is the long-standing notion that only ACID-compliant databases will satisfy the stringent requirements of data-driven Web apps. The time has come to investigate other options.

The Limitations of ACID

ACID means that database changes are “all or none” (atomic), that any change or read doesn’t interfere with others (isolated), that the result of any change is a new database state that remains fixed (durable), and that any transaction performed will take the database from one consistent state to another. These guarantees come with certain performance costs, and applications that don’t require all properties of ACID can afford to trade off some of them for higher throughput. Such applications often include those that index large numbers of documents, serve pages on high-traffic websites, or deliver streaming media. In these cases, maintaining the integrity of a transaction is secondary to completing a request as quickly as possible.

Strict adherence to ACID also leads to an increased amount of development work as the database load grows larger and the volume of data increases. Techniques such as sharding (horizontally partitioning your data using a hashing algorithm) have emerged over time to address the complications of manipulating large amounts of data, but these solutions unnecessarily influence application architecture and don’t solve the underlying problem. For example, if you’re “lucky” enough to have “big data,” and you need to change the schema,  a migration could still take months to run!

Nathan Hurst’s guide to NoSQL Systems

Beyond ACID

The ACID vs. non-ACID debate is not going to be settled here and now, nor does it need to be. The purpose of this article is simply to point out that there are alternatives to ACID, and that the time has come to explore them. Why now? Several methodologies, practices and technologies have gained enough traction to encourage us to look beyond ACID-only data stores. Here are a few of them:

●      Widespread adoption and validation of agile development methodologies, fostering rapid innovation and an iterative approach to feature development.

●      Mature development frameworks that enable developers to connect alternative data stores more easily. This also means that projects are more likely to use different types of data stores depending on technical requirements.

●      Service-oriented application design – data stores and application logic are increasingly decoupled in modern architectures, with applications developed as a collection of functional modules connected via APIs.

●      The vast amounts of data gathered by social platforms – and most applications today have a social component – can often be represented more efficiently using a non-relational schema.

●      Non-relational databases have matured with the guidance of early adopters and companies whose businesses would not be possible without them. Companies have also emerged to provide commercial support and development for these technologies.

The New Breed of Databases

Thanks to the open source movement and the accelerating pace of commercial development, there is no shortage of non-relational, distributed databases. Of course, each database has advantages and disadvantages, as well as specific use cases.

Before we delve into specific examples, let’s be clear about one key point: it’s a mistake to assume that non-ACID datastores make absolutely no guarantees. They simply provide a different set of them. These guarantees are governed by the “CAP Theorem,” which essentially states that you may choose any two of the following three:

●      Consistency: all nodes have the same view of the data.

●      Availability: every request to a non-failing node returns a response.

●      Partition tolerance: system properties (consistency or availability) hold true even when the system is partitioned.

For example, you can choose to have consistency and availability, while sacrificing partition tolerance. Or choose availability and partition tolerance, so processing can continue even in the case of network failure, but decide to forgo a consistent view of your data.

An excellent summary of this concept, along with this very intuitive and useful visual guide to Non-ACID systems, has been developed by Nathan Hurst and others.

An Overview of the Current Players:

The list below summarizes key characteristics and use cases of some of the most popular non-ACID datastores.

●      Riak is a Dynamo-based NoSQL database designed specifically for extreme distribution, fault tolerance and scalability. It shines in applications where even seconds of downtime are unacceptable. It has no single point of failure, scales simply and intelligently, and makes data highly available for use in read and write-intensive Web applications. Commercial support is available from Basho.

●      Redis, sponsored by VMware, is an open source, disk-backed, in-memory data store written in C. It is a datatype server, so it provides highly optimized operations on sets, lists, arrays, etc. Redis is extremely fast and easy to set up; it may not be best for large databases, but it’s a great choice for rapidly changing data with a DB size that fits in RAM.

●      MongoDB is a document-oriented database written in C++. It provides schema-free databases that store JSON documents in binary format. It is extremely popular and remarkably easy to get running. MongoDB offers automatic failover when replicated in a set, and its single-master, low-concurrency read performance benchmarks are impressive. MongoDB is a good choice for read-heavy applications where all data fits in RAM. Commercial support is available from 10gen.

●      CouchDB: Another open source, document-oriented store, CouchDB is written mostly in Erlang and is designed for local replication and horizontal scaling across a wide range of devices. Like MongoDB, CouchDB is easy to use, but it has a more robust replication model and greater data consistency guarantees than MongoDB.

●      Membase/CouchBase: CouchBase Server is the result of a Memcache company and a CouchDB company joining forces. In its Membase mode, it is optimized for storing data for highly interactive Web applications. It provides a high-speed distributed key/value store that is extremely performant and very easy to set up. In its Couchbase mode, it offers the same data persistence, clustering, and flexible replication modes of CouchDB. Commercial support is available from Couchbase.

●      Neo4j is a popular open source database that is optimized to represent graph relationships. Implemented in Java, it is an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than tables—meaning that operations that traverse a network are fast. Neo4j is developed by Neo Technology, a startup based in Malmo, Sweden and Menlo Park, CA.

●      Cassandra is a column-based DB designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many servers with no single point of failure. Cassandra is a NoSQL solution initially developed by Facebook to power its Inbox Search feature.[1] An industrial-strength DB, it is best for write-heavy applications. Cassandra can be a bit cumbersome to set up and manage, but commercial versions make this task easier. Commercial support is available from DataStax and Acunu.

●      Hadoop is an open source software framework with an entire ecosystem of tools, languages and knowledge. Inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers, Hadoop is best for heavy analytics and processing of vast amounts of data. It is extremely mature and battle-tested. Commercial support is available from Cloudera, HortonWorks and MapR, among others.

Simplifying Exploration of New Database Options

Without question, ACID is an essential requirement for certain types of applications and will continue to find usage. But there is an increased understanding of the potential of non-ACID databases and the opportunities they provide in improving performance in Web applications that don’t require transactional guarantees.

As the evidence continues to accumulate regarding the benefits of non-ACID databases, it’s important to ask yourself, as part of your requirements analysis, whether one of these databases might be a better tool for the job at hand. You should also consider whether a combination of tools is the best solution, mixing ACID and non-ACID data stores as appropriate.

Learn More: Suggested Reading and Upcoming Events

For additional discussion of the topics covered in this article, please read the following publications and blogs.

●      Alex Popescu’s myNoSQL: http://nosql.mypopescu.com/

●      NoSQL Tapes: http://nosqltapes.com/

●      Basho’s video resources ( http://basho.com/resources/videos/ ) The basho speakers are fantastic. You’ll always learn something new from them.

●      InfoQ NoSQL presentations. Great collection at /a>

●      10gen’s videos and presentations: http://www.10gen.com/presentations

●      Kristóf Kovács NoSQL comparison http://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis

In addition, the following events and meetups are highly recommended:

●      Boundary tech talks (great place to learn about distributed systems): http://www.meetup.com/Boundary-Tech-Talks/

●      Riak Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Riak-Meetup/

●      MongoDB Meetups: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-MongoDB-User-Group

●      Cassandra Meetups: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Cassandra-User-Group/

●      HBase: http://www.meetup.com/hbaseusergroup/

●      SF Graph DBs: http://www.meetup.com/graphdb/

●      Couchbase: http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-Couchbase-Meetup-Group/

Guest Post: Unshackling Your Data-driven Web Apps is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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The Good

Dr. Jules Pokens of Hasselt University led a team of surgeons for an operation involving the use of an artificial jaw made from titanium powder, heated and built-up in layers in a 3D printer to create a working lower jaw, which was then finished with a bioceramic coating.

“The new treatment method is a world premiere because it concerns the first patient-specific implant in replacement of the entire lower jaw,” Dr. Pokens stated.

Dr. Pokens also stated that the patient was able to recover faster, speaking a few words just hours after the surgery and was able to speak and swallow normally a day after the procedure.

Even Bioengineers at the Seatle Children’s hospital make use of 3D printers to create accurate 3D models of an infant nasal and oral passage.

“Accurately modeling the premature infant nasal pharynx has been a difficult task,” said Jay Zignego, Bioengineer at the Center for Developmental Therapeutics.  “Yet, having these models readily available is essential to our ability to test respiratory device interfaces.”

They use the V-Flash Desktop 3D Printer from 3D Systems.

“With V-Flash we have been able to create solid models  which accurately represent the morphology of the nasal pharynx from CT scans.  In fact, we are the first to create accurate 3D models of an infant nasal and oral passage. These models allow us to test the efficacy of various respiratory device interfaces, such as nasal prongs,” Zignego added.

And with 3D printers now becoming more affordable, commercial and home use of this technology is now possible.  The V-Flash Personal 3D Printer is priced under $10k, so anyone with that money can purchase it and use it for whatever.

And that’s the problem.

The Bad

3D printers can make use of different kinds of materials, from metal to plastic and even ceramic.  If industrial printers were used to create prototypes or even mass produce jewelries, gadget casings and other stuff that can be found in the market, personal 3D printers can be used to produce pirated products.

Just look at the German 3D printer manufacturer EOS; they can now create metal objects as robust as cast parts, and often as strong as forged parts.  They even created a fully-functional replica of a Stradivarius violin!  See what I’m getting at?  A 3D printer is a piracy tool.

And now, there’s an app made for 3D printing.  The 3D Printing Sculpteo Design Maker app by Sculpteo can be downloaded for iPhones and iPads for free.  It allows you to design anything you want, from iPhone casings, coffee mugs, bowls, vases etc. and order the 3D print at Sculpteo, which they will ship to you.  This is actually pretty cool, especially if you’re very creative or like giving personalized gifts.  But if you own a 3D printer and a 3D printing app, what’s stopping you from copying stuff found on the web and selling them at a cheaper price than the original?

Will 3D Printers Prompt Next-Gen Piracy? is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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The interview started with the discussion on the company’s history. Oxygen Cloud was started last year, and introduced their first client faced product last June. They provide companies an option upgrade any storage to secure storage clouds, with cross-device access to all corporate files.

Chang then discussed the importance of the iPad in driving enterprise cloud adoption, and the current gaps in the market. He notes that more and more people are using their iPad and other mobile devices in the workplace. This brings more challenges to a firm, as they might lose control over company’s sensitive data when a user leaves the firm or loses their device.

That’s why Oxygen Cloud has created a secured virtual file system that accepts file and transfers them to one of the several cloud storage sites. The file system also interacts with iPad and other mobile devices, allowing BYOD users to access the files securely and remotely.

Chang talked about some similarities of Oxygen Cloud services to that of DropBox, SugarSync, and Syncplicity. But Oxygen Cloud adds one more layer to its services that other don’t provide. The company interposes IT management through its virtual file system, and allows authorized users to choose from a number of possible IT-approved destinations for a given file. At the same time, it also uses either an internal or external cloud system powered by EMC’s Atmos.

Chang goes on to discuss how Oxygen Cloud’s unique security model protects corporate content with minimal disruption. He also highlighted the company’s adoption of a new model of content access in the enterprise that will further enhance capacity management.


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• Todd Papaioannu of Battery Ventures Discusses Node.js Trends, Stealth Startup
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• VMware Revises Mobile Apps Amidst Virtualization Shift
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• HP Data Thrust is Delivering Performance in the Cloud, says HP Exec

Negotiations ended recently with the 1.27 gigabytes of source code released Monday night, claimed to be source from Symantec’s PCAnywhere. The company also makes Norton Antivirus, they warned users to disable PCAnywhere until they patched it (which happened earlier this month.) Thus, this leak may have little to do effect on the market altogether.

What really looks interesting about this is the saga of the sting and the involvement of law enforcement.

It all starts with a persona generated by law enforcement under the pretense of being a Symantec staffer offering $50,000 to not release the code. This started a month-long drama with the hacker Yama Tough, part of the Anonymous hactivist collective and also a member of the now notorious Lords of Dharamaja.

“You won’t believe it but Symantec offered us money to keep quiet,” YamaTough wrote on Twitter. “And quess what they couldn’t make it over 50k for the whole range of their src shit, therefore the show starts as of tuday.”

Of course we know now that the supposed Symantec staffer, “Sam Thomas,” is really a false identity used to attempt to lure the Lords of Dharamaja out and get them to reveal the code and perhaps set themselves up for arrest. The entire conversation that Yama Tough had with who they believed to be Symantec had been with law enforcement.

Over the weeks, a protracted negotiation for the $50k amount began to draw out. While the amount had been agreed upon YamaTough and cohorts would not accept it in small increments over time, they wanted it all at once in a lump sum or not at all. The hacker offered a Liberty Reserve account for the extorted money, refusing to accept PayPal transfers (possibly because of how easily it could be traced or stopped.) During the negotiations YamaTough revealed suspicions by accounting a belief that Symantec was working with the FBI.

We know now all of this had been for naught: the code is now leaked onto the Internet via BitTorrent.

Symantec is still poring over the leaked code. They still maintain that the code is way out of date, and a spokesperson for the company has stated that they believe that the recent patches will protect customers.

“We’re able to say with high confidence,” said Cris Paden of Symantec to Forbes, “any type of cyber attacks generated by this attack would have old characteristics and look like an attack from 2006 that can easily be stopped using current versions of our solutions. Our customers are protected.”

The saga may be over with the leak of the code, but the next step will be the cat-and-mouse game between law enforcement and the Lords of Dharamaja. Symantec has told the media that the cannot comment on what they know about any evidence revealed or the strategy of law enforcement.

“As to what happens next,” Paden says. “We’re not really sure.”

For those curious, the entire e-mail chain between YamaTough and the false Symantec employee persona is available on Pastebin.com.

Symantec Code Leak Happens Where Sidewalk Ends in Law Enforcement Sting Attempt is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• FBI Arrests of Suspected LulzSec, Anonymous Hackers Sweep the U.S.
• Anonymous Strikes Back: The Texan Sheriff HD Edition
• UK Police Continue Pursuit of Anonymous with Another Arrest in Hartlepool
• Thousands of Identities Compromised by AntiSec Law Enforcement Hack
• Anonymous Deletes CBS.com and Downs Universal in #OpMegaupload
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