2008/12/04
Infoworld: Gartner's Top 10 disruptive datacenter technologies
by Jon Brodkin
A new computing fabric to replace today's blade servers and a "pod" approach to building datacenters are two of the most disruptive technologies that will affect the enterprise datacenter in the next few years, Gartner said at its annual datacenter conference on Wednesday.
Datacenters increasingly will be built in separate zones or pods, rather than as one monolithic structure, Gartner analyst Carl Claunch said in a presentation about the Top 10 disruptive technologies affecting the datacenter.
Those zones or pods will be built in a fashion similar to the modular datacenters sold in large shipping containers equipped with their own cooling systems. But datacenter pods don't have to be built within actual containers. The distinguishing features are that zones are built with different densities, reducing initial costs, and each pod or zone is self-contained with its own power feeds and cooling, Claunch says.
Cooling costs are minimized because chillers are closer to heat sources; and there is additional flexibility because a pod can be upgraded or repaired without necessitating downtime in other zones, Claunch said. (Read more about how to reduce cooling costs in the datacenter.)
"Modularization is a good thing. It gives you the ability to refresh continuously and have higher uptime," Claunch said.
TheRegister: Online payment site hijacked by notorious crime gang
by Dan Goodin
Updated Online payment service CheckFree lost control of at least two of its domains on Tuesday in an attack that sent customers to servers run by a notorious crime gang believed to be based in Eastern Europe.Reg reader Richard D. reported receiving a bogus secure sockets layer certificate when attempting to log in to his Mycheckfree.com account early Tuesday morning. On further examination, he discovered the site was mapping to 91.203.92.63. To confirm the redirection was an internet-wide problem, he checked the site using a server in another part of the US and got the same result.
"I managed to get through to a commercial customer support tech, and reported the problem," Richard wrote in an email sent early Tuesday morning. "He was not aware of any problem."
The account is consistent with results of passive DNS search queries such as this one from bfk.de. Spamhaus shows precisely the same thing here.
Security experts say the 91.203.92.63 IP address has long served as a conduit for online crime. Spamhaus offers this laundry list of alleged dirty deeds that includes running botnet command channels and various drive-by download sites. According to security researcher Paul Ferguson of anti-virus software provider Trend Micro, the IP address was recently observed handing off booby-trapped PDF files that infected those unfortunate enough to open them.
Wired: As Facebook Connect Expands, OpenID's Challenges Grow
by Michael Calore
On Monday, Facebook announced it will soon roll out its Facebook Connect login system to several high-profile websites, including Digg, Hulu and Discovery.com. The sites, along with a few others, will begin supporting Facebook Connect within a few weeks. The New York Times has the scoop.
The news is sure to be welcomed by Facebook's 120 million users and its potential partners, but it presents a new challenge to proponents of the so-called "open stack" for ID management — OpenID, OAuth and the related technologies that allow users to share data across multiple websites.
Facebook Connect is the company's technology which lets Facebook users participate on other websites using their Facebook IDs. Along with an easy login, the user gets the option of re-broadcasting whatever they do on the third-party site to all of their friends within Facebook.
For example, users who wants to vote on or leave a comment on a Digg story will be able to log in to Digg.com using their Facebook ID and password. They can participate on Digg just like a registered Digg user, voting, commenting and adding friends. As they click around on Digg, the fact that they dugg such-and-such story, or wrote a comment, will show up in their Facebook news feed in the same way it would if they had written on the Wall of one of their Facebook friends. Of course, the company promises there will be privacy controls, so only information approved by users gets re-broadcasted to their Facebook account.
