'Critical' Windows Fixes Expected on Patch Tuesday

By Jabulani Leffall09/03/2009

Microsoft is forecasting a rare Patch Tuesday next week, with all of the September security bulletins expected to be deemed "critical."

In its advanced notification, Redmond said that all five fixes to come would address remote code execution (RCE) exploits in its Windows operating systems.

The first critical patch will affect every supported Windows OS. The second patch only touches Vista and Windows Server 2008. Critical item No. 3 would fix every supported Windows OS and the fourth item includes every Windows OS with the exception of XP. Patch No. 5 will be aimed to shore up RCE exploits in Windows 2000, XP and Windows Server 2003.

Microsoft's advanced notifications seldom spell out the exact components to be fixed. Possibly, Redmond intends to patch Windows components such as the recently troublesome Active Template Library or Graphic Device Interface. Clearly, Microsoft will be plugging some holes in Windows, both client and server.

"As we take a look at the summary numbers, all three of Microsoft's server platforms (2000, 2003 and 2008) have critical vulnerabilities," said Don Leatham, senior director of solutions and strategy at Lumension." Therefore, both server and desktop management IT groups will be impacted this month."

All of the fixes on this month's slate may require restarts.

Leatham pointed out that the Vista fixes will lead the pack this month, affected by four of the five patches. It implies that Microsoft's newer OSes will get patched this month too because they utilize the Vista code base.

"This brings up an interesting situation as Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 were released to manufacturing (RTM) early last month," Leatham said. "This means many Microsoft partners and corporate customers will have started using and evaluating these two new platforms. And given the significant amount of code shared between Vista and Windows 7, it is likely that some of these security bulletins could apply to Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2."

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PHP Cache Accelerator for Windows Unveiled

By Kurt Mackie09/03/2009

Microsoft on Tuesday announced a test version of an extension that's designed to help speed up PHP-based Web applications running on Windows platforms.

The new "Windows Cache Extension for PHP" solution, currently in beta release, is an accelerator that works with the PHP engine in Windows and Windows Server. Microsoft released two versions. Users of PHP 5.2 can download the beta here, while PHP 5.3 users can get it here.

To add the accelerator, IT pros need to run the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 RC application. The extension works with Internet Information Services (IIS) versions 7.5, 7.0, 6.0 and 5.1, which are part of Windows Server products.

With the accelerator in place, developers do not need to modify their code to take advantage of any performance improvements, according to a blog by Ruslan Yakushev, a program manager on the Microsoft IIS team.

There are a few caveats to using this extension, the blog noted. It works only with "non-thread-safe builds of PHP." Also, IIS needs to be configured to "run PHP via FastCGI." (Microsoft is currently planning to release FastCGI 1.5 sometime this fall.) For users of PHP 5.3, the extension "can only be used with the x86 VC9 build."

The beta can improve Windows' PHP cache performance in three ways, according to Microsoft. Compiled PHP script bitecode gets stored in shared memory for repeat use. A file cache component reduces the number of file operations handled by the PHP engine. Finally, Microsoft added a caching system for relative file paths that reduces the time spent mapping them to absolute file paths.

Microsoft provides a guide authored by Yakushev on how to use the extension. There's also a forum to report bugs and ask questions or suggest new features.

Microsoft hasn't yet tested the extension with Zend Server, according to a Forum reply on Sept. 2. Zend Server is a Web server product specialized for running enterprise-grade PHP code.

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Court Grants Stay in Microsoft vs. i4i Patent Case

By Kurt Mackie09/05/2009

A U.S. federal appeals court on Thursday stayed an injunction against Microsoft, pending appeal, in a patent dispute involving Microsoft Word.

The stay temporarily suspends a final judgment issued by Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for East Texas until further arguments are heard in the appeal. Oral arguments are scheduled for Sept. 23.

Judge Davis ordered Microsoft to pay more than $240 million in damages and penalties for violating a patent held by Toronto-based i4i LP. The case involves so-called "custom XML" used in Word and Office. In addition, the judge ordered Microsoft to stop selling copies of Word in the U.S. market by Oct. 10 (60 days after the final judgment) if Word uses i4i's patented technology.

Microsoft filed papers appealing the final judgment last week. The company disputes the patent violation and the judge's performance in the case. PC makers Dell and HP filed amicus curiae papers backing Microsoft, suggesting that the restrictions on Word sales would hamper their businesses.

i4i plans to respond to Microsoft's appeals filing on Sept. 8. Loudon Owen, i4i's chairman, said that Microsoft was just using "scare tactics" in the case.

"Defendant-Appellant Microsoft claims it may have to stop distributing Word and Office in the U.S. market until it can redesign both products," Owen said in a released statement. "Microsoft’s scare tactics about the consequences of the injunction cannot shield it from the imminent review of the case by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeal on the September 23 appeal."

Andrew Updegrove, cofounder of Boston-based technology law firm Gesmer Updegrove LLC, doesn't think that sales of Microsoft Office and Word will be slowed down by this court case.

"I'll wager you that no one will have any more trouble buying Office the day after the 60 day pendancy period runs out than they did before," Updegrove wrote in his blog. "That's because the key to the solution is also all about money, calculated under three alternate paths."

Those three paths for Microsoft include reaching a settlement with i4i, continuing to sell Office and Word in defiance of the court, and coming up with a technology workaround. Whichever path Microsoft chooses, it will emerge as a winner, Updegrove argued. Even if a settlement is reached, it may be for less than what the judge awarded, he added.

The technology considerations in the case are moot, according to Updegrove.

"In short, this isn't about XML, or the Commons, anything else high minded -- it's a game of high-stakes, commercial chess, being played out by two obviously skillful opponents."

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Red Hat Launches Linux Release with KVM Hypervisor

By John K. Waters09/02/2009

Red Hat today released the fourth update of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform, which the company is calling the foundation of its virtualization portfolio.

The company announced the release at its annual Red Hat World and JBoss Summit in Chicago, which was linked via narrowcast at a press conference held at San Francisco’s W Hotel near where VMware's annual VMworld 2009 conference is also taking place this week.

REHL 5.4 comes with several new features but the biggest change in this release is the integration of the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor technology Red Hat acquired last year with its purchase of Qumranet. The company had been, and still is, closely aligned with the Xen hypervisor, which was first integrated into RHEL 5.0 in March 2007. The KVM hypervisor will "sit right beside the Xen hypervisor," said Navin Thadani, senior director for Red Hat's virtualization business. He was quick to add that RHEL customers who have deployed the Xen hypervisor will continue to be supported throughout "the full lifecycle" of RHEL 5.

Red Hat announced its virtualization product strategy, which is centered on a product portfolio called Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), in February. The RHEV portfolio consists of a server virtualization management system, a VDI management stack, a stand-alone hypervisor based on the KVM, and RHEL itself with the integrated KVM.

"RHEL is the foundation of the RHEV," Thadani said. "And our customers are beginning to see [RHEV] as the foundation for their cloud-based computing future." The RHEV portfolio relies on a built-in open management infrastructure enabled by the libvirt open-source virtualization API. The libvirt API allows developers to use the same GUI with any virtualization technology that utilizes libvirt. For the enterprise, RHEV essentially becomes a substrate for private or internal clouds that can tie into other cloud providers who are basing their infrastructures on open source, he said.

RHEL 5.4 also comes with features targeted to application developers, including an enhanced Systemtap performance monitoring toolset with support for profiling and monitoring C++ applications. This release includes a large number of static kernel trace points "to simplify performance observation for the highest profile kernel subsystems," the company said. Down the road, Red Hat plans to include an implementation of the malloc memory allocation library tuned for the latest generation of multicore processors.

"We recognize the importance of the application developers and the ISVs in our ecosystem," Nadani said. "All the ISVs that are certified for RHEL are also certified to deploy their application on RHEV. It’s a new deployment paradigm, and Red Hat stands behind it. Red Hat virtualization is supported by a number of leading server vendors, Nadani added, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Dell, and Intel.

RHEL 5.4 is the first release to production of several products for the RHEV portfolio, Thadani said. The company will be filling out that portfolio throughout the rest of the year.

Red Hat VP of corporate development Michael Evans, who manages Red Hat’s cloud strategy, was on hand in San Francisco during the press conference. He said that this is the first time the KVM hypervisor technology has been included in a production, commercial-grade, enterprise-ready RHEL.

"We could see three years ago when we started with Xen that there would probably be a better solution coming along underneath," he said. "That was when KVM was in its early days. We just assumed that there would be something better. And there may be something better than KVM in two years. It’s the nature of the Linux community that the next innovation can come anytime, from anywhere."

Virtualization complicates life for developers, Evans said. "It’s thrown them for a loop, efficiency-wise," he said. "It complicates their test matrix dramatically. Now you throw in this cloud stuff, and they have a whole new challenge in front of them. We believe that, by having our ISV partners having built their software on RHEL and JBoss, and us making RHEL and JBoss run on the Amazon cloud, simplifies things quite a bit."

Red Hat was the first vendor to offer a commercially available Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) app server on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web service. Red Hat’s existing 3,000-plus ISV partners already using RHEL don’t have to do anything to get their apps to run on RHEV, Evans said, and they can run them in the Amazon cloud without much modification.

The Raleigh, NC-based company is currently ahead of its chief competitors—Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft—in the cloud, said Gartner distinguished analyst Yefim Natis. "Red Hat goes a step further and provides a more advanced and elaborate architecture so that you can create a more dependable environment. You have to give them credit for providing that architecture."

"Cloud right now is in what I call the goat-rodeo stage," Evans added. "The hype around cloud is making virtualization look old and boring, even though only 10 percent of the stuff has been virtualized. I guess we’ve been here before with other trends. But cloud is unique in my experience in at least one way: This is the first major market way in which open source is just assumed to be part of it from the beginning. Every cloud provider except Microsoft uses open source at least heavily, and often, massively."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is globally available today and is automatically delivered to customers with an active subscription.

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Windows 7 Enterprise Trial Edition Announced

By Kurt Mackie09/03/2009

Microsoft rolled out yet another free test version of Windows 7 on Tuesday -- this time targeting IT pros who haven't previously had access to the new operating system.

This release is called the "Windows 7 Enterprise 90-Day trial edition." It's available for those who aren't subscribers to Microsoft's TechNet or MSDN professional services or who haven't signed up for the Software Assurance option as part of Microsoft's volume licensing agreement.

The trial edition is strictly for testing. It will expire in 90 days, shutting down every hour. Those who downloaded Windows 7 through Microsoft's subscriber services or volume licensing with Software Assurance don't face such time limitations on their copies of Windows 7.

Microsoft doesn't intend the trial edition for consumers, and you have to qualify to use the software by first completing a survey.

The offer is limited to an undisclosed number of downloads, or until March 31, 2010, whichever comes first. The trial edition comes with its own activation key but testers need to activate the software within 10 days of use or it will start shutting down.

The Windows 7 Enterprise 90-Day trial edition (32-bit or 64-bit) is available only in English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. It can be downloaded at Microsoft's Springboard page here.

A big caveat to using the trial edition is that there's no upgrade path to the commercial Windows 7 Enterprise edition if you decide you like it and want to buy it on Oct. 22, which is when Microsoft will publicly release the OS. Instead, you'll have to do a clean install of Windows 7 all over again, as well as your all of your drivers and applications.

Those who downloaded the release candidate (RC) test version of Windows 7 can continue to use it until it expires on June 1, 2010. The RC will warn of its impending expiration by rebooting every hour, and that process will start happening on March 1, 2010. Microsoft no longer offers the RC version for download.

Users who have a 30-day trial version of Windows 7 sitting around that they never activated can use a trick (described by the Windows Secrets Web site) to extend the trial to as long as 120 days, even without an activation key.

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Oracle 11gR2 Database Released

By Jeffrey Schwartz09/02/2009

Oracle released the first major update of its flagship database in two years with an upgrade focused on server consolidation, improved storage and extended data warehouse performance. But it remains to be seen what percentage of Oracle's installed base or whether other enterprises will move to the latest version.

The release of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 version is consistent with the company's longstanding process of upgrade cycles. Oracle typically launches a new version and follows up a year or so later with a refined update. The company is confident that this release will appeal to many organizations that have been on the sidelines.

"It's really the release that the masses of our installed base will be moving to as they go to the 11g family of databases," said Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle's senior vice president of database server technologies during a conference call Tuesday announcing the release.

Only 18 percent of Oracle shops have upgraded to 11gR1 from earlier versions according to estimates from Forrester Research. "So far 11g adoption has been slow," Forrester analyst Noel Yuhanna said. "Many organizations feel that they can’t keep up with new features, and would rather stay with an older release."

Yuhanna said there are still compelling reasons for Oracle customers to upgrade. "We find that with every new release Oracle is improving the manageability, performance and security of databases, which not only lowers administration efforts, defers hardware upgrades resulting in cost savings, but also improves security to defend against growing data theft and attacks," he said.  For example, Oracle 11gR2 makes database consolidation simpler and more manageable, improves unplanned downtime of applications and data warehouse queries, he noted.

A major feature that beta customers of Oracle 11gR2 found appealing, he added, was the new cluster file system that extends beyond Oracle databases to offer a general-purpose file system, designed to reduce storage costs. "With this file system you can store files, database files and the database all in one," Yuhanna said. "It makes use of storage more efficiently."

Another key feature touted by Oracle is its support for Real Application Clusters (RAC), its higher end clustering solution designed to let organizations consolidate their database pools." We added a lot of automation to that in the release, and we've measured huge improvements in our ability to install and configure and grow and shrink these clusters," Oracle's Mendelsohn said.

Oracle has also added a lower cost alternative, RAC One Node, which provides a new database option that lets organizations consolidate less mission-critical databases, while offering RAC-based redundancy and availability, Oracle said. "It lets you get most of the availability benefits of RAC and lets you use RAC for deploying these smaller applications that run on single servers, and do it at a lower cost," Oracle's Mendelsohn said.

"A lot of customers are talking about this feature, since it brings improved availability to even those smaller or less critical apps," Forrester's Yuhanna said.

Besides support for files, Oracle has also focused on improving the use of storage in the new release. The company said it has improved its partitioning capability as well as the ability to compress data by two to four times, a feature that will appeal to organizations using tiered storage, Mendelsohn said.

On the data warehouse front, Oracle said the new release, when used with the company's Oracle Database Machine, offers faster query performance, up to 10x. The Oracle Database Machine, launched last year, is an appliance-based package offered in partnership with Hewlett Packard based on HP's  Xadata server and storage components.

Mendolsohn said a user can query information that will cache the data across all the servers and run the in-memory parallel query. "If you have a 10-node cluster, you can have a terabyte or two of memory in those clusters," he said. "If you have data in your database that can be cached in a terabyte or so of memory, this in-memory parallel query technology will engage and it can be used."

While these features should all be welcome to large enterprises who can afford it, Oracle is known for steep licensing fees and charges for numerous extras. One of the key concerns customers have is that Oracle is now offering more add-on options which are not free, Yuhanna noted, where customers have to buy separate licenses. Such is the case for Oracle RAC, Partitioning, Audit Vault, Database Vault, encryption, data masking, Real Application Testing and advanced compression.

"Most customers love Oracle technology, but it’s the cost that really makes them move to another DBMS," he said. Also Microsoft's SQL Server and IBM's DB2 have been catching up with more advanced features, he added. "It's definitely putting a lot of pressure on Oracle," he said. "But for now, they continue to enjoy their dominance."

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IBM Launches Cloud-Based Desktop

By Jeffrey Schwartz09/02/2009

IBM has begun taking desktop computing directly to the cloud. The company this week released a virtualized client computing offering it touts as a cloud-based desktop.

The new service will let business users login to their desktops from either a thin-client terminal or low-end PC. But rather than using the thin client to connect to data in an enterprise data center via IBM's Smart Business private cloud and CloudBurst offerings, both of which were launched in June, users will be accessing those same resources in the cloud hosted by IBM. The latter was also disclosed at the time.

Big Blue's new Smart Business Desktop on the Cloud is subscription-based and is intended for those that don't want to invest in the server, software and networking infrastructure, according to IBM.

"Our Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud is the industry's first public desktop cloud offering," said Arthur Chiang, VP of end user services portfolio management for IBM Global Technology Services in an interview. "There's no upfront capital or one time expense, they can purchase it as a service." Customers still must acquire desktop clients, whether they are PCs configured as thin clients with software from Citrix or VMware or thin-client terminals from Desktone or Wyse. All four have partnered with IBM for the offering.

By virtualizing desktop computing resources, IBM said it is proving logical rather than physical access to data, compute resources and storage. "If Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing strategy can be thought of as software plus services, offerings such as IBM’s new desktop cloud can be seen as more like services minus software," said Michael Dortch, acting director of research at IT researcher Focus in an email.

The benefit of such a virtual desktop is ease of management, improved security and reliability, IBM said. Big Blue made a similar case for its initial foray into the virtual desktop in June, while the benefit of its newest iteration eliminates the need for server, storage, and network infrastructure, IBM said.

The service initially will be available with support for Microsoft Windows XP and Vista desktops running in the cloud. Chiang said Windows 7 support will be added shortly after launch, though he did not specify when. Customers will have to pay for the OS license and any software they would have to run on Windows. While Chiang wouldn't disclose pricing, he indicated there are no startup fees and users can sign up for a minimum of three months and 50 users. Another option will allow 36 month contracts with at least 200 users. "We will have different pricing for different models," Chiang said.

But price notwithstanding, thin client computing has always served niche customer bases. It remains to be seen whether enterprises will want to move their traditional PCs to the cloud. "The real challenge to widespread adoption is for vendors to prove that such solutions are seamlessly interoperable with the dominant incumbent desktop tools, notably Microsoft Office, and that they impose no additional complexity onto current environments," Dortch noted. "To the extent that IBM and its partners can offer credible reassurances in these key areas, they should do well with their desktop cloud, which is basically the 'old-school' concepts of 'thin-client computing' and 'network computing' in more contemporary packaging."

But others say old habits die hard. "Companies are attracted to the efficiencies and low costs of running anything in the cloud," said RedMonk analyst Michael Cote in an email. "But there's still work to calm down their freak-out at losing control and physical possession of their hardware, not to mention easily to pray-upon worries about security, regulations, and other fine-print driven FUD."

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