Greater choice essential

At the Enterprise Architect Summit 2007 last week, John deVadoss, director of architecture strategy at Microsoft, discussed Software Plus Services, reports Application Development Trends.

"We see the Software Plus Services model as a platform of 'and'," deVadoss said, meaning that enterprises will have a choice of including on-premises solutions 'and' hosted solutions. deVadoss added that the notion of Software Plus Services is a convergence of software as a service, service-oriented architecture and Web 2.0 technologies.

We aren't living in a "one size fits all approach" type of world, he emphasised. Instead, we are shifting to a "differentiated approach. Coming up in the next three to five years is a world with a lot more choice and control to create value."

Cisco routers were the source of a major outage early this month in an NTT network in Japan, according to an investment firm bulletin, reports Network World.

Between 2 000 and 4 000 Cisco routers went down for about seven hours in the NTT East network, after a switchover to backup routes triggered the routers to rewrite routing tables, according to a bulletin from CIBC World Markets. The outage disconnected millions of broadband Internet users across most of eastern Japan.

Cisco says it could not say which specific router models were involved. "Cisco is working closely with NTT East to identify the specific cause of the outage and help prevent future occurrences," a Cisco spokesman said in an e-mailed reply. "At this time, Cisco and NTT have not determined the specific cause of the problem."

Sun Microsystems announced the expansion of its storage virtualisation portfolio, with the introduction of the Sun StorageTek 9990V Enterprise Storage System, reports Computer Technology Review.

The latest announcement further drives the development of the OpenSolaris storage community, and the partnership between Sun and Hitachi Data Systems, which has helped to yield some of the industry's most important storage technology breakthroughs to help enterprises solve complex data management challenges, Sun of Santa Clara, California, said.

The new Sun StorageTek 9990V storage system delivers performance and scalability, along with new thin provisioning capabilities with Dynamic Provisioning software, which helps to improve storage utilisation, save money and provide customers with an easy, transparent way of adding additional storage as needed over time, Sun said.