HP has given more details on its Project Moonshot, explaining the platform is not intended to replace existing servers, but instead target the requirements of scale-out datacentre applications such as web hosting and cloud services, where energy costs and space requirements are more important than processing power.

Launched this week, the second generation Moonshot platform comprises a rack-mount enclosure designed to hold 45 individual server modules, each one based on an Intel Atom S1200 system-on-a-chip (SoC) that consumes 6W of energy, but with other options in the pipeline.

This is clearly a market where HP sees an opportunity, as companies operating web hosting and other cloud-based services are now looking at deployments that may run to tens of thousands of server nodes, possibly extending to millions in some cases.

Hence, HP is going out of its way with Moonshot to closely match the requirements of these customers, even down to promises of server modules tailored to running specific workloads as efficiently as possible.

It turns out that many of these service providers are operating on very thin margins, according to HP, and so the cost of the IT infrastructure operating them can be the difference between profit and loss.

Energy costs in particular are a key factor, so power efficiency is considered more important than raw processing power.

“Even back in 2007, the energy consumption of the cloud would have made it count as the fifth largest country in the world, if added together,” claimed Paolo Faraboschi, distinguished technologist at HP Labs, and one of the brains behind Project Moonshot.

When HP first started looking at what would become Moonshot, “we started realising that we were leveraging (processors) in servers that are generalised. If you are only processing web pages, you’re not really doing a lot of work, and so the processor is wasting energy,” Faraboschi said.

Further analysis showed that a lot of energy gets wasted when data is shuffled around the system, from processor to processor, for example.

“Aggressive integration, such as with an SoC, means there is less need to move data around from chip to chip, so we decided that maybe we should start building servers based on SoC,” he explained.

One customer that has been trialling the new Moonshot hardware over the past year is hosting firm Leaseweb, who pronounced it an ideal platform for entry-level services.

“We’re seeing an 80 percent reduction in power consumption, but with 50 percent of the performance level of the existing HP servers we had been using before,” said Marc Burkels, manager of dedicated hosting at Leaseweb.

There are so many great phones hitting the market it can be hard to know where to invest your hard earned cash, especially as once you make a decision you’re tied in for up to two years. As such, getting it right is vital.

This is no doubt why our head-to-head video reviews always prove popular, with the latest, the iPhone 5 v Sony Xperia Z the most read, well watched, story of last week. You’ll have to watch it to see which devices ran out the winner.

Clearly the pressure is building on Apple, though, as analyst reports showed that sales of the iPhone are slowing as demand for Android devices – like the Xperia Z – rise and Windows Phone also grows its market share, albeit slowly.

Another interesting story was that of Rackspace hitting out at Parallel Iron, accusing it of being a patent troll. The story generated some strong responses in the comments sections from readers disagreeing over who’s in the right in the case.

Security warnings saw reports of malware hitting firms every three minutes of interest, and no doubt concern, to readers, while the risk of fraudulent apps on the Google Play store unveiled by Symantec also proved of interest.

The celebration of the mobile phone’s fortieth birthday also generated some interesting coverage and news editor Dan Worth’s claims the device as we know it will be obsolete within the next 40 years was well-read too.

Sony Xperia Z vs Apple iPhone 5 head to head
How do the new innovations in Sony’s latest offering compare with the iPhone’s

Rackspace hits out at patent troll Parallel Iron in Hadoop spat
Cloud services provider says its 500 percent rise in legal bills meant it had to take a more aggressive stance 

Apple iPhone sales stutter as Microsoft Windows Phone market share creeps up
Analyst firm Kantar reveals a 3.5 percent drop in global sales during the first quarter of 2013

Symantec finds plethora of fraud apps on Google Play market
A widespread fraud ring has sold hundreds of dodgy applications on the Google Play Android marketplace

 
Nokia Lumia 920 tips and tricks [Video]
V3 puts Nokia’s latest phone through its paces

 
Malware attacks hitting firms every three minutes
Cyber crooks are targeting businesses with advanced malware capable of avoiding detection from traditional tools

 
The mobile phone will be obsolete in 40 years
As the mobile phone celebrates its 40th birthday, Dan Worth looks at what the next 40 years could have in store

 
Facebook users warned over fake security page phishing scam
Trend Micro warns of a malicious, fake security check page

 
Bitcoin storage firm shuttered following hack
Instawallet victim of a backdoor hack on its systems

 
Zeus retains botnet crown, according to McAfee
Malware continues to be a scourge on users, with researchers reporting it remains the most popular botnet family on the web

OpenStack has posted the seventh update for its cloud computing platform.

Dubbed ‘Grizzly’ the update will contain key updates in storage, computing and management. The company said that the release includes content from some 500 contributors.

“This release, more than any before it, was driven by users who have been running OpenStack in production for the past year (or more) and have asked for broader support for the compute, storage, and networking technologies they trust and even greater scale and ease of operations,” said OpenStack co-founder Mark Collier.

Among the features included in the update will be the addition of a NoDB database management component, which keeps data in a system’s memory and reduces queries to a main database.

The open cloud platform’s dashboard component has also been updated, bringing new interface options for both end users and administrators.

Collier noted that OpenStack Grizzly includes new APIs to allow cloud deployments to offer load balancing as a service for network management. The release will also bring new drivers for a number of networking appliances and protocols.

Storage was also a focus of the update. The Grizzly release brings drivers for HP, IBM, EMC and NetApp clusters as well as components which will allow for quotas to be set on object storage.

Administrators and developers can obtain further information and source code for Grizzly through the OpenStack site.

The release of Grizzly comes as OpenStack continues to gain backing from many of the biggest names in the industry. IBM recently announced that it will use the platform to power new cloud services, while long-time backer RackSpace unveiled new services to be based on the platform.

Cloud services provider Rackspace has hit back at what its describes as one of the US’s “most notorious patent trolls”, a firm called Parallel Iron, saying its 500 percent rise in legal bills meant it had to take a more aggressive stance. 

Rackspace said last week it was named among 12 firms accused of infringing Parallel Iron’s Hadoop Distributed File System patents.

But Parallel Iron is little more than a patent troll that seeks to wrangle settlements out of firms to avoid protracted courtroom battles, said Alan Schoenbaum, general counsel for Rackspace.

“We aren’t going to take it,” he wrote on a company blog.

According to Schoenbaum, Rackspace had been embroiled in a previous patent suit with Parallel Iron in December 2010, which it said was known as IP Navigation Group at the time. At that time, the two firms reached a truce under which they agreed to give the other 30 days’ notice before bringing any subsequent suit.

“We have sued IP Nav and Parallel Iron in federal court in San Antonio, Texas, where our headquarters is located,” said Schoenbaum. 

“We are asking the court to award Rackspace damages for breach of contract, and to enter a declaratory judgement that Rackspace does not infringe Parallel Iron’s patents.”

Schoenbaum said Rackspace had seen its legal bills rise 500 percent since 2010 because of the increasing number of patent claims it’s forced to defend.

Last month, Rackspace won a significant case against Uniloc, over the patenting of mathematical algorithms.

IBM has expanded one of its European datacentres to host SmartCloud services, with the aim of better serving the needs of customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa with its social business technologies.

Based in Germany, the upgraded datacentre will help the firm to expand its IBM SmartCloud for Social Business services, which it claims there is growing demand for among enterprise customers.

“With the new European datacentre, we expand our industry-leading social business footprint, strengthening our ability to meet the needs for businesses seeking security-rich, flexible cloud environments that let them unleash innovation and drive a smarter enterprise,” said Alistair Rennie, general manager for social business at IBM.

The firm said the datacentre addition will enable it to tailor solutions to meet each customer’s needs, using public or private cloud deployment models, or a mixture of the two.

For customers, one advantage of the upgrade is that their data is physically held in a European location, rather than one of IBM’s US datacentres.

Its social tools enable employees to build collaborative networks in real time, both internally and externally, which can improve the speed of marketing and sales processes, according to IBM.

These include IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition 9, introduced last month, and SmartCloud Docs, a cloud-based office productivity suite, unveiled at the end of last year.

Microsoft has posted an update for its SkyDrive cloud storage service on iOS.

The company said that the update would add support for Apple’s latest hardware releases as well as interface and performance enhancements.

With the 3.0 release of SkyDrive for iOS, users will now be able to install the application on their iPhone 5 handsets and iPad Mini tablets.

Microsoft said that while it has seen strong uptake for SkyDrive on Windows, it is looking to increase the service’s reach with other platforms as well.

“With the release of Windows 8 and Windows RT back in October, more and more people every day are using SkyDrive for their most important files through the SkyDrive app, as well as through SkyDrive integration in File Explorer,” Microsoft SkyDrive Apps group program manager Mike Torres wrote in a blog post.

“Of course, there are great SkyDrive experiences for Windows devices, but being the place for all your files means we invest a significant amount of effort ensuring you have a great experience across all the devices you want to use.”

In addition to the expanded iPhone and iPad support, Microsoft is adding a number of performance and interface enhancements. IOS users will now be able to download either full resolution photos or smaller-sized images to either iPhones or iPads. Additionally, the service will add support for image metadata on uploaded images and will improve support for third-party applications.

Microsoft said that the latest version of SkyDrive for iOS can be downloaded through the iTunes App Store.

Google Apps for Business users have been given the opportunity to get QuickOffice for Android and the iPhone.

Quickoffice allows users to edit Excel, Powerpoint, and Word documents and save them to their Google Drive clouds. Companies that use Google Apps for Business are allowed to use the program for free. Until recently, the software suite was only available for the iPad.

“Google Apps for Business can already edit Microsoft Office files using Quickoffice on an iPad, and starting today they can do the same on iPhone and Android devices,” wrote Quickoffice Product Manager Mark Beaton in a blog post.

“From Word to Excel to Powerpoint, you can make quick edits at the airport or from the back of a taxi and save and share everything in Google Drive.”

Quickoffice is a mobile productivity suite that Google bought the rights to last year. The suite is offered as a part of the Google Apps for Business program. Google’s enterprise offering is a monthly charged productivity offering that gives user’s access to Google Apps and storage.

The Quickoffice news comes as Google continues to attempt to entice businesses over to its selection of Google Apps. Over the past few years the search giant has been attempting to find converts for its cloud-based productivity software.

Google has started pushing its Chromebook devices as a high-end offering. The Chromebook Pixel is a pricey touchscreen laptop that runs the Chrome OS. Google’s released the device with Quickoffice pre-installed.

Recently Microsoft also joined the push towards cloud apps with the launch of Office 365. Redmond’s software saw an update last February that brought it expanded integration with enterprise social networking tool Yammer.

Google Apps for Business users can currently grab a copy of Quickoffice for Android in the Google Play Store starting now. iPhone users can also pick up the app in Apple’s App Store.

Backup specialist PHD Virtual is building on its enterprise backup operation with the acquisition of VirtualSharp.

The company said that the acquisition would bolster its disaster recovery options by offering users better choice in scheduling and managing backups.

Founded in 2005, PHD Virtual specialises in backup services for virtualisation and cloud computing services. The company has expanded its services in recent months to cover VMware, Citrix and OpenStack cloud deployments.

Joe Noonan, senior product manager for PHD Virtual, told V3 that the acquisition of VirtualSharp would bolster the company’s own disaster recovery holdings.

“Those were some areas where our products and other products fall short,” Noonan explained.

“What VirtualSharp is offering is disaster recovery assurance.”

The company said that it will integrate VirtualSharp’s products and staff into its own operations, but the brand and services will continue to be offered.

By integrating the VirtualSharp disaster recovery brand into its backup line, PHD believes that it can offer its large enterprise and service provider partners with disaster recovery services which can be tested multiple times to provide customers with more assurance that their backup instances will be available and compatible in the event of a disaster.

“A product like this allows you to test much more frequently,” Noonan explained.

“They can prove to you that not only is your disaster recovery plan working, but the objectives you set with them can be met.”

Yahoo has announced that its email client now offers integration with Dropbox’s cloud.

The partnership will allow users to send, share, and manage email attachments using Dropbox. Yahoo’s latest integration comes as the firm continues to revamp its product offerings.

“Email attachments can be tricky: they’ve got file size limits, you can’t keep them updated, and when you add people to a thread, attachments are the first to get left behind,” wrote Dropbox product designer Joshua Jenkins in a blog post.

“The Yahoo Mail team decided to fix this – by integrating with Dropbox.”

Starting immediately Yahoo Mail will support integration with Dropbox. The rollout will start with integration for Yahoo Mail versions in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish languages.

The integration allows users to send and receive files larger than 25MB. Integration supports the ability to save doc, picture, and video files.

For Yahoo the integration catches the company’s email client up to competitors such as Gmail and Outlook. Both Google and Microsoft web-based email clients offers support for cloud storage.

The Dropbox integration is unique for Yahoo as Dropbox does not own the cloud storage provider. Google and Microsoft created both Google Drive and SkyDrive for use with their email platforms.

Yahoo has been working to update their product portfolio over recent months. The team at Yahoo recently updated its Homepage. Yahoo also recently bought mobile app Summly for $30m.

Dropbox has been making waves over the past few months as well. Late last year the firm brought two-step authentication to its cloud offering. The security update came following a massive data breach suffered by the company last August.

Peer 1 Hosting has taken the wraps off mission critical cloud computing services for enterprise customers, offering availability up to 99.999 percent (five nines) plus built-in disaster recovery from its global network of datacentres.

Announced at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara, Mission Critical Cloud is based on Tier 3’s cloud computing platform, which itself uses VMware technology but with its own orchestration and management layers.

The result is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering capable of meeting reliability requirements for hosting enterprise applications in the public cloud, Peer 1 claims.

“We wanted to provide our customers with choice in respect to cloud. If I’m an enterprise user, I want an environment that mitigates risk, and has more robust service level agreements of four or five nines,” Peer 1’s worldwide GPU cloud specialist Richard Rivera told V3.

The firm said that Mission Critical Cloud offers high availability by building in local mirroring of virtual infrastructure, plus replication to a second Peer 1 datacentre for redundancy.

“In the event of a failed node or failed hypervisor, that stack would quickly be up and running again in another location,” Rivera said.

However, this capability is only offered in the Enterprise version of the service, not the Standard version. The Enterprise version also offers an SLA of five nines, while the Standard is set at four nines.

Customers can also choose a specific datacentre location from Canada, the UK or Germany for hosting their applications.

Mission Critical Cloud offers customers a self-service portal, with the ability to provision infrastructure using Blueprints. These templates contain everything required to stand up an enterprise application, including specifications for a virtual server or group of servers and the supporting infrastructure, according to Rivera.

However, with recent high-profile outages experienced by the likes of Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), enterprises are likely to be wary of putting any more vital infrastructure into the public cloud.

But Peer 1 said it is in a different position to those cloud providers, as it owns the end-to-end infrastructure.

“We own and operate our own FastFiber 10Gbit/s wide-area network and the datacentres we reside in, so we are able to manage the upstream and downstream of that entire network, which is how we can offer those very strong SLAs,” Rivera said.

Peer 1 is also looking at offering hybrid environments, combining the public cloud with dedicated physical infrastructure for hosting the most critical elements of a customer’s infrastructure, such as clusters of SQL servers, he added.

The Peer 1 Mission Critical Cloud is available under pay-as-you-go pricing, but exact tariffs have yet to be released by the firm.