HDTVs, Blu-Ray Players Push Web Connections

Connected TVs, set-top boxes, and Blu-ray Disc players aren't new, but they continue to make new connections with Web sites and services, from YouTube and Netflix to Amazon and Internet radio sites. Some offer a lot more than others, but all are building up their portfolios of Web video and interactive services. The definition of "connected" varies widely between consumer electronics vendors.

Some of the newest entries were on display last week at the CEDIA (Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association) event in Atlanta. Available on networkable Bravia sets, the video service will also appear on a new networkable Sony Blu-ray Disc player, the BDP-N460, which will ship later this fall priced under $250. (Sony Bravia TVs also offer Web content such as stocks, weather, and Twitter, via their Bravia Widgets.) LG Electronics, meanwhile, announced the addition (via a firmware upgrade later this month) of the Vudu on-demand service to the Netcast Entertainment Access service on its $399 BD390 Blu-ray Disc player. Sony, which already offers movies, TV shows, and music from some two dozen partners, including Amazon movies on demand, Slacker radio, and YouTube, announced that it will add Netflix to its Bravia Internet Video lineup later this fall. The service already offers access to CinemaNow, Netflix, and YouTube content. And Samsung's networkable Blu-ray Disc players, including the BD-P1600, BD-P3600, and BD-P4600, will add YouTube access to the existing Pandora and NetFlix services.

Samsung's Internet@TV service, which already had a dozen Yahoo widgets, now offers on-screen access to Rallycast fantasy sports applications, including Facebook messaging and access to team stats. Pioneer, meanwhile, demo'd a new platform for connected electronics. The prototypes at CEDIA featured everything from video-on-demand services to backup. Code-named Project ET, it is designed to allow device designers and/or consumers to choose the content and services they want by clicking on menu buttons in the service's Web portal. Pioneer officials said the platform could exist on a set-top box of its own or on a Blu-ray Disc player or other networkable device (one demo setup featured a Blu-ray player with 1 terabyte of built-in storage. The company hopes to show a product based on the platform within the next few months.

Start-up releases uber-fast, efficient enterprise-class SSDs

Pliant Technology Inc. today released its first series of enterprise-class solid state disk (SSD) drives based on a proprietary ASIC design that the company claims can handle - without using any cache - more than twice the input/output operations per second (IOPS) as the top competitive drives. The 3.5-in. drive can produce up to to 500MB/sec sustained read or 320MB/sec write rates and the 2.5-in. up to 420MB/sec read and 220MB/sec write rates, Pliant said. "Put it on a log application and write to it as hard as you want for five years - it will run 24/7 for at least that long," said Greg Goelz, vice president of marketing at the three-year-old startup. The first two two enterprise flash drive (EFDs), the EFD LS and EFD LB models, are 3.5-in. and 2.5-in. drives that can produce up to 180,000 IOPS and 140,000 IOPS respectively. Pliant also claims there is no limit to the number of writes that can be performed to the drive and that it will work without slowdown for at least five years.

In an enterprise environment, that's one of the major concerns: The wear out of the SSD." Most enterprise-class SSD companies today use Fibre Channel connectivity. The drives are aimed at equipment manufacturers such as EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Hitachi Data Systems and Sun Microsystems Inc., the company said. "They're able to claim some pretty solid performance numbers on read and writes and they're also able to claim unlimited program and erase [write/erase] cycles," said Joseph Unsworth, research director for NAND flash semi-conductors at Gartner Inc. "That's big. Pliant's first products use serial-attached SCSI (SAS), which most industry observers believe is the interconnect of the future for servers and storage arrays. "You don't want to saturate your [server] CPU cores and then find out we have this great SSD but the bottleneck is now the interface," Unsworth said. "It's all about speed." SAS currently supports 6Gbit/sec data transfer speeds and its roadmap indicates 12Gbit/sec rate by by 2012. Fibre Channel drives are currently capable of 4Gbit/sec data transfer speeds, and while Fibre Channel switches and interface cards are now emerging with 8Gbit/sec speeds. STEC Inc., the top provider today of enterprise-class SSDs, recently announced its own SAS model. SAS is eclipsing those speeds at the device level. "Six gigabit SAS in terms of data throughput is going to be the performance leader," said Jeff Janukowicz, a flash memory analyst with IDC in Framingham, Mass.

But even that next-generation product produces a maximum of 80,000 IOPS compared with Pliant's 180,000 IOPS. Pliant's SSD controller architecture is not vastly different from those of other high-end SSD manufacturers. The drives are configured as RAID 0 for increased performance and the controller. It has twelve independent I/O channels to interleaved single level cell (SLC) NAND flash chips from Samsung Corp. Most enterprise-class SSDs today also use a general purpose field programmable gate array (FPGA) controllers as opposed to Pliant's custom controller, which is programmed specifically to address SSD issues, such as wear leveling (spreading writes more evenly throughout the memory) and write amplification (reducing the number of operations required for a write), according to analysts. Also, the lack of any DRAM cache, which can store data writes more quickly, laying them down on the NAND flash chips during non-peak performance periods, is also unique to Pliant's enterprise-class product.

Also unique to Pliant's controller is the use of a triple redundancy error correction code algorithm to ensure that meta data - which is used to locate data on the drive - is saved even if two copies of it become corrupted. Some of today's more popular server-class SSDs, like those from Intel, use serial ATA interfaces, which has a half-duplex interface as opposed to SAS, which like Fibre Channel, is full duplex. Single-port half-duplex allows for one or the other. The difference between the two is that full duplex is dual ported, allowing for reads and writes at the same time. Pliant, based in Milpitas, Calif., released its new SSDs for beta testing last year and plans to make them generally available later this month. And, based on Pliant's claims, they see to have addressed many of those important issues." The company refused to release a suggested retail price for the drives.

The company raised $15 million in Series C funding in March, which was used to ramp up production of the SSDs, the company said. "I think with Pliant's announcement we're starting to see some of the true promises of SSD coming to market," Janukowicz said. "A lot of these applications are demanding, mission critical, 24/7 applications and they require high reliability, efficiency and predictable performance. However, it did note that the drives will be more expensive than Intel's X25-E SSD , which sells for $780 for a 64GB SATA model, and less expensive than STECs Zeus SSD , which sells for about $6,000 for a 73GB Fibre Channel model.

Microsoft offers tools for secure app development

Microsoft is introducing on Wednesday two testing tools to help Windows programmers build better security into their C and C++ applications, but an industry analyst was dismissive of how useful the tools would be for enterprise developers. It also verifies use of strong-named assemblies and up-to-date build tools. "Essentially, what it does is it checks for a variety of SDL requirements like GS flag, which is used to prevent buffer overflows," said David Ladd, principal security program manager for the security development lifecycle team at Microsoft. Offered at no cost, the tools enable implementation of Microsoft's SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) process, for injecting security and privacy provisions into the development lifecycle as opposed to testing during pre- and post-deployment of an application. [ Last week, Microsoft revealed some features planned for its upcoming Silverlight 4 application technology. ] One of the tools, BinScope Binary Analyzer, analyzes binary code to validate adherence to SDL requirements for compilers and linkers. Buffer overflows enable hackers to take control of an application, Ladd said. "To the extent that you can prevent those at compile time, that's a good thing from a security standpoint," he said.

The second tool, Microsoft MiniFuzz File Fuzzer implements the fuzz testing technique. The tool requires symbol files, providing security against hackers potentially using the tool to analyze software on the Web for weaknesses. Testers check application behavior by parsing files that have been deliberately corrupted. An analyst, however, doubted that enterprise developers would have much use for the tools. Security tests are applied to take code through different flow patterns and identify whether resulting crashes should be investigated as potential application security risks. "If you find a file failure and it has security ramifications, you want to go out and fix that problem," Ladd said.

These developers are more likely to be using Java and .Net managed code technologies with Visual Basic. Corporate developers also do not generally develop applications for open files, which is what the fuzz-testing tool is used for, he said. "There isn't much of a story for enterprises for these tools themselves," Gualtieri said. "These tools are more helpful for systems and software vendors than they are for most enterprise IT shops," he said. Net and C# rather than C or C++, said Michael Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research. By releasing the tools, though, Microsoft continues to demonstrate its commitment to making the SDL process real for developers, said Gualtieri. Microsoft previously has released a threat management tool and process management template based on SDL. Microsoft on Wednesday also is releasing a paper entitled "Manual Integration of the SDL Process Template," to guide Microsoft Visual Studio Team System users through a manual process to incorporate elements of the SDL process template into Team System projects. A Microsoft representative said many of the checks featured in BinScope Binary Analyzer are inherently built into .NET coding.

The tools and paper can be accessed through this Web page.

Intel announces storage- and communications-specific processor

Intel Corp. today announced it will be shipping an enhanced version of its dual-processing Nehalem Xeon chip that is aimed specifically at the data storage and communications market with the ability to natively create RAID and is integrated with PCI Express (PCIe). The processors, due out in December, are aimed at applications such as ultra-dense blades, IPTV, VoIP, network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN). debuted its new Nehalem-based Xeon microprocessor code-named Jasper Forest in April. Intel said the enhanced processor lowers system power consumption by 27 watts when compared to the Intel Xeon 5500 series and it integrates two Jasper Forest processors with 16 PCIe Generation 2.0 lanes each and is paired with the Intel 3420 chipset platform controller hub. The new Jasper Forest processors are capable of configuring storage as a RAID 5 or 6, protecting against single or dual disk failure, respectively. "Nehalem cores are quite powerful, but customers still want to be able to offload storage functions to a core, especially when you get down into two-core and single core versions of processors, really simplifies the architecture," said Seth Bobroff, general manager of Intel s Server Platforms Group. This integration of the I/O hub via PCIe enables significant power and space savings, resulting in one of the highest performance-per-watt Intel Xeon chips ever.

Jasper Forest provides a scalable option to system designers with a single-core, 23-watt processor to a quad-core, 85-watt processor using the same socket. The processors, which come in single or quad-core models, will offer a bridging functionality that allows multiple systems to connect over a PCIe link, removing the need for an external PCIe switch. The chips will also protect against data in case of a power failure with a function called Integrated Asynchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory Self-Refresh memory. Bobroff said that in terms of work load consolidation, the new Jasper Forest chip can natively handle storage management processing functions such as data deduplication, data snap shots, storage virtualization and any basic storage management requirements. "All the control and management aspects of storage management systems and with RAID being integrated into a CPU can simplify hardware and software design," he said. "There s no hardware acceleration for algorithms like we have here." The processor is also suited to support the Storage Bridge Bay specification , which is currently being developed as a way to plug control boards directly into storage arrays, allowing for a denser architecture. The feature automatically detects a power failure as it s happening and enables allows memory controller sequences to finish and forces the system memory to a self refresh before shutting down. Today, storage controllers require a separate blade slot.

The processors will be offered with 7-year lifecycle support.