Google buys into undersea cable

Having outgrown the capacity of telecommunications companies to provide bandwidth for its online applications and services, Google is buying part of an undersea cable to carry data to and from Asia, says Information Week.

Google said it would join with five other telecoms companies, Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet and SingTel, to invest $300 million in the construction of a 10 000km submarine cable.

The high-speed fibre optic trans-Pacific cable, called Unity, will have a capacity of up to 7.68Tbps and will run between the US and Japan. It is planned to accommodate demand for trans-Pacific bandwidth, which has grown at a rate of 63.7% annually between 2002 and 2007, and is expected to double biannually from 2008 through 2013, according to TeleGeography, a telecoms consultancy.

Through deals with HP, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens and IBM, VMware has arranged to ship its ESX 3i hypervisor virtualisation software preinstalled in servers, reports Tech News World.

The products will also come with a trial version of VMware's Infrastructure 3. While VMware works to capitalise on its position as the leader in the virtualisation market, Microsoft is readying its own offering.

VMware has announced the upcoming availability of servers from a variety of manufacturers that will include a fully integrated preinstalled version of VMware's virtualisation software.

On Monday, Adobe Systems rolled out its new Web 2.0 development tool, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). There were some concerns from the security community after its release, says News.com.

AIR, formerly Adobe Apollo, is a runtime environment that allows developers to use HTML, Flash, Ajax, Flex and other Web 2.0 tools to create desktop applications. One such application built using Adobe AIR comes from Nickelodeon Online.

Some security experts are concerned about local file access by AIR applications. Recently, Firefox experienced a vulnerability that could have allowed remote attackers to access a targeted file system. To mitigate this, Adobe says it implemented a sandboxing environment; however, Adobe's documentation suggests that the sandboxes are less secure than a Web browser's sandbox.