International voice traffic is on the rise, according to market research companies such as TeleGeography. Cross-border voice traffic increased 14% in 2007 and 12% more in 2008. That amounts to an amazing 384 billion minutes of talk.

But despite all this traffic, voip in general and Skype more specifically have forced prices and margins down and so “old-school” telcos are registering more traffic, but cashing almost the same as they did the year before or maybe even a little less.

On the other hang Skype, only five years since launch is now the largest provider of international voice communications on the planet, controlling the 8% of all traffic of this kind. Free is always nice but even Skype’s paid-for ‘Skype Out’ service – which lets users make calls to standard telephones – is on the rise , generating 8.4 billion minutes of calls in 2008.

So since the competition in the telco market is becoming more intense on all fronts, old-school providers will have to learn new tricks to stay in the game.

The Internet Archive Organization is getting a new data centre which can house two petabytes of data for its ‘Wayback Machine’ and the announcement will come next week.

The digital library of Internet memories stores 85 billion archived versions of Web pages dating back to 1996 that amount to more than three petabytes of data. It is expected to continue to grow by 100TB of data per month now that it’s live.

According to a Sun event the Internet Archive has moved from a traditional Linux Server based datacenter to Solaris 10 with ZNF in a Sun modular datacenter design.

Wayback Machine

Sun Event

The UCS, according to Cisco, is a next-generation data center platform that unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization into a cohesive system designed to reduce TCO and increase business agility. The system integrates a low-latency, lossless 10GE unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers. The system is an integrated, scalable, multichassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified management domain.

It seems like the blade part of the offering is based on Intel motherboards and Xeon CPUs while virtualization is implemented either using VMware infrastructure or Microsoft Hyper-V technology. Microsoft is also a preferred management partner and SQL Server seems to have a role in the offering as well. All the new stuff is bundled with established Cisco switching and Fiber technology so that LAN and SAN traffic use a common 10GE Ethernet infrastructure.

UCS aims at decreasing data center costs by lowering energy consumption by through consolidation into fewer boxes that at the same time reduce cabling and cooling requirements. Unified management of the platform is bound to also bring IT Management costs down.

Cisco’s former partners and now soon to be rivals shouldn’t be too happy for the new contender in a market they consider their own and they watched their stock fall in the hours after the announcement.

Sounds like exiting times ahead since Cisco has some cash to spare and is in this game for the long run.

Microsoft’s Windows Azure “cloud” platform, still in pre-beta, had its first crash this past weekend. Azure stayed offline for almost 22 hours leaving a large number of deployments offline, and applications unreachable in “stopped” or “initializing” states.

It is not yet clear what caused the outage but in his post in the MSDN forums, Azure team member Steve Marx said he expected a root cause analysis would be conducted to “understand exactly what went wrong and what we need to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Once we have that sorted out, I’ll put together a summary.”

Amazon Web Services had a similar insident earlier this year.

Steve Marx post

Since the global chip sales pie decreased by 5.2% last year, somebody had to lose as well as was the case with AMD which fell to the 11th place of the chart with a revenue decrease of 7.8% .

With the global chip market shrinking by 5.2 per cent last year, there were always going to be some losers, most notably AMD which slipped out of the top ten (albeit into 11th place) with revenue dropping 7.8 per cent.

http://www.theinquirer.net/