As reported by Computerworld, MySpace announced this week that it has switched from using traditional hard disk drives in its servers to using Solid-State-Disk (flash drives) as primary storage instead.  The new SSD drives are actually PCIe cards, from Fusion-io, containing the solid state chips.

“MySpace said the solid state storage uses less than 1% of the power and cooling costs that their previous hard drive-based server infrastructure had and that they were able to remove all of their server racks because the ioDrives are embedded directly into even its smallest servers.”

The cards currently come in 160GB, 320GB and 640GB capacities and a 1.28TB card is expected later this year.

In recent years the trend for email servers has been to consolidate and centralize. A massive n-way server or cluster is often hosting tens-of-thousands of user mailboxes using massive and expensive NAS storage arrays. Some of our customers are already rethinking this approach by taking lessons from the cloud.

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Just as certain as the change of seasons is the recurring prediction of the end of email.  The Wallstreet Journal published an article yesterday, titled:  “Why Email No Longer Rules… …And what that means for the way we communicate”.

It seems that email is pronounced dead every time a new communication technology gets user traction. The last time around, IM and SMS were replacing email. Now Twitter and Facebook are taking over. Perhaps this is simply driven by our love-hate relationship with email and the fact that our inboxes have gotten so cluttered with useless and sometimes even harmful junk that we are all wishing for alternatives.

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The Wired blog ‘Epicenter’ reports on a study commissioned by the IT staffing company Robert Half, which found that 54% of US companies have banned the use of social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn sites at work. Apparently, the primary concern is loss of worker productivity, but fears over unknown legal and brand exposure may also play a role in this.

“Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access,” said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, in a statement.

Another study conducted by Nucleus Research also indicated that employees who use social networking sites at work do so up to 2 hours a day. 87% of employees admitted they weren’t using the sites for business, but for personal purposes instead.

Does your company have a social networking use policy in place? Perhaps a good time to check before HR comes knocking.

Update: I just found this short presentation on slideshare…

Neowin reports that passwords of 20,000 hotmail, live and msn accounts have been compromised. It is unclear whether the passwords were obtained through a hack or phishing scheme. A list containing the account credentials was posted by an anonymous user on a public forum at pastebin.com.

It appears that currently only accounts starting with the letters A-B are affected, but other lists could exist.

I suggest that you change your password on your msn, hotmail or live account just to be safe.

Even if you have not fallen victim to a phishing scam yourself, it is good to know that the FBI is taken the threat seriously. Last Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation pulled in the net on the largest cyber fraud phishing case to date, aptly named “Operation Phish Phry“.  The FBI case started back in 2007 and resulted in a multinational sting with almost 100 people being charged.

“The FBI said it uncovered a sophisticated phishing operation that was designed to swipe personal information and then use the data to defraud banks. On Wednesday, authorities arrested 33 of the 53 defendants named in an indictment. Egyptian authorities charged another 47 alleged cybercrooks.”

Each of the defendants indicted in the US, is charged with conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, with a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison. Hopefully this case will result in convictions with stiff sentences, sending a strong signal to other aspiring cyber crooks.

Ken Gartner, reporting from the monthly NE Lotus User Group meeting. (Caution technical lingo ahead.)

Last night was the September meeting of the NE Lotus User Group in Waltham, MA.  A good turnout overall with a nice mixture of Domino customers, partners and IBM’ers.  The technical presentation was about DAOS as it appears in Domino 8.5 and the big improvements now in Domino 8.5.1.   Not only was the subject matter well-received by the audience generally — who doesn’t like to save more than 40% on their storage and backup costs? — but being able to discuss technical aspects was especially nice for us.  We had a lot to contribute, based on our own experience with large enterprise customers.

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