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Monday, April 30, 2012

Hitachi-LG Data Storage Inc. Executive Agrees to Plead Guilty to Participating in Bid-Rigging Conspiracies Involving Optical Disk Drives


Hitachi-LG Data Storage Inc. Executive Agrees to Plead Guilty to Participating in Bid-Rigging Conspiracies Involving Optical Disk Drives 
Korean Executive Agrees to Serve Time in U.S. Prison

U.S. Department of JusticeApril 30, 2012
WASHINGTON—An executive of Korean-based Hitachi-LG Data Storage Inc. (HLDS) has agreed to plead guilty and to serve time in a U.S. prison for his participation in a series of conspiracies to rig bids for the sale of optical disk drives, the Department of Justice announced today.
According to the four-count felony charge filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, Senior Sales Manager Woo Jin Yang, also known as Eugene Yang, conspired with others to suppress and eliminate competition by rigging bids for optical disk drives sold to Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP). Yang participated in the conspiracies at various times between approximately August 2006 and June 2009. Under the plea agreement, which is subject to court approval, Yang has agreed to serve six months in prison, to pay a $25,000 criminal fine, and to cooperate with the department’s ongoing investigation. HLDS is a joint venture between Hitachi Ltd., a Japanese corporation, and LG Electronics Inc., a Republic of Korea corporation.
“Today’s charges demonstrate the Antitrust Division’s commitment to prosecute and deter conduct that harms American businesses and consumers,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Joseph Wayland in charge of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. “The division will continue to pursue those who participated in these bid-rigging and price-fixing conspiracies so they are held accountable for their actions.”
Optical disk drives are devices such as CD-ROMs, CD-RWs (ReWritable), DVD-ROMs, and DVD-RWs (ReWritable) that use laser light or electromagnetic waves to read and/or write data and are often incorporated into personal computers and gaming consoles.
According to the charges, from approximately August 2006 until February 2009, HP hosted optical disk drive procurement events in which participants would be awarded varying amounts of optical disk drive supply depending on where their pricing ranked. According to court documents, Yang and co-conspirators participated in a series of conspiracies involving meetings and discussions to predetermine bidding strategies and prices of optical disk drives, resulting in the submission of collusive and noncompetitive bids for HP’s procurement events. Yang and co-conspirators also exchanged information on sales, market share, and the pricing of optical disk drives to monitor and enforce adherence to the agreements.
Including Yang, the department has charged four individuals and one company as a result of its ongoing investigation into the optical disk drive industry. On November 8, 2011, HLDS pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco to 14 counts of violating the federal antitrust laws between approximately June 2004 and September 2009. HLDS also pleaded guilty to one count of participating in a scheme to defraud in connection with an April 2009 procurement event. On the same day, HLDS was sentenced to pay a $21.1 million criminal fine and agreed to assist the department in its ongoing investigation into the optical disk drive industry.
HLDS executives Y.K. Park, S.H. Kim, and Sik Hur pleaded guilty to multiple violations of the Sherman Act on March 27, 2012; April 17, 2012; and April 10, 2012 respectively. Park, Kim, and Hur are currently awaiting sentencing.
Yang is charged with violating the Sherman Act. Each count carries a maximum fine of $1 million and up to 10 years in prison. The maximum fine may be increased to twice the gain derived from the crime or twice the loss suffered by the victims of the crime, if either of those amounts is greater than the statutory maximum fine.
This case is part of an ongoing joint investigation by the Department of Justice Antitrust Division’s San Francisco Office and the FBI in San Francisco and Houston. Anyone with information concerning illegal or anticompetitive conduct in the optical disk drive industry is urged to call the Antitrust Division’s San Francisco Field Office at 415-436-6660 or visit www.justice.gov/atr/contact/newcase.htm.

SAP® Applications Certified for Oracle SPARC SuperCluster

Press release:


SAP® Applications Certified for Oracle SPARC SuperCluster

Pre-Integrated Engineered System Enables SAP Customers to Consolidate on a Single System, Speed Deployments, Improve Efficiency and Performance

Redwood Shores, Calif. – April 30, 2012

News Facts

Oracle today announced SAP® applications are now certified for use with the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, a general-purpose engineered system designed for maximum simplicity, efficiency, reliability and performance.
SAP infrastructure and applications based on the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform 6.4 and above and certified with Oracle Database 11g Release 2, such as the SAP ERP application and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, can now be deployed using the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4.
The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 provides an optimized platform for SAP environments that can reduce configuration times by up to 75 percent (1), reduce operating costs up to 50 percent(2), can improve query performance by up to 10x(3), and can improve daily data loading up to 4x(4).

SPARC SuperCluster Delivers Pre-Integrated Infrastructure for SAP Applications

With the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, customers can:
Consolidate and Simplify – SAP applications, central services and the Oracle Database can be run securely and efficiently on a single engineered system to greatly simplify deployment, management and service of their SAP infrastructure. With its built-in virtualization and high availability capabilities, up to 4TB of memory and up to 10x database storage compression, the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 can scale to support the largest centralized deployments.
Speed Deployments and Reduce Cost – The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 provides hardware and software engineered to work together, which is designed to simplify and accelerate application deployment and systems management. Operating system, virtualization and systems management via Oracle Solaris 11Oracle VM Server for SPARC, and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c are included at no extra cost with Oracle Premier Support services.
Improve Performance and Productivity – Optimized hardware and software - including Oracle Exadata which provides up to 1,000,000 Database Flash IOPS and up to 32 GB/s query throughput – can radically accelerate business queries, reporting, and analysis enabling more informed business decisions. Factory integrated components and comprehensive systems management tools can reduce administrative overhead, helping to free up IT resources.

Supporting Quote

“The Oracle SPARC SuperCluster is an ideal platform for consolidating SAP applications and infrastructure,” said Ganesh Ramamurthy, vice president of engineering, Oracle. “Because the SPARC SuperCluster is a pre-integrated engineered system, it enables data center managers to dramatically reduce their time-to-production for SAP applications to a fraction of what a build-it-yourself approach requires and radically cuts operating and maintenance costs.”

Supporting Resources

Video Podcast: Oracle SPARC SuperCluster
Connect with Oracle Solaris via FacebookTwitter and LinkedIn
Oracle Hardware on FacebookTwitter

About Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4

The Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is the world’s fastest general purpose engineered system, delivering high performance, availability, scalability and security to support and consolidate multi-tier enterprise applications with web, database and application components. The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 combines Oracle’s SPARC T4-4 servers running Oracle Solaris 11 with the database optimization of Oracle Exadata, the accelerated processing of Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud software, and the high throughput and availability of  Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance all on a high speed InfiniBand backplane. Part of Oracle’s engineered systems family, the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 demonstrates Oracle’s unique ability to innovate and optimize at every layer of technology to simplify data center operations, drive down costs, and accelerate business innovation.  

About Oracle

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.

Trademarks

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. SAP, SAP NetWeaver and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and several other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Footnotes

    (1) Comparison based on individual components of SPARC SuperCluster sold separately.
    (2) System comparison based on two Sun Fire E25K servers with 288 cores and EMC VMax SE with 87 TB storage capacity versus one SPARC SuperCluster half rack. The software licensed for these systems is based on number of cores and multipliers including Oracle Database Enterprise Edition.
    (3) System comparison based on Sun Fire E6900 and SPARC T3 servers versus one SPARC SuperCluster half rack.
    (4) System comparison based on one SPARC Enterprise M9000-32 and EMC2 DMX versus one SPARC SuperCluster half rack.

What Oracle Partners are Saying about Oracle’s SPARC T4 Servers and Oracle Solaris

Press release:


What Oracle Partners are Saying about Oracle’s SPARC T4 Servers and Oracle Solaris

April 30, 2012

BGH – Specialized, Platinum level member in OPN and Systems Integrator in Latin America

“The latest innovations in Oracle’s SPARC T4 Servers including Oracle Solaris and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center enable us to give customers better performance and server utilization with less complexity and cost. That is a win for our customer and a win for us.”

- Pablo Gutierrez, Business Development Manager, BGH

Frontline Systems Australia – Gold level OPN partner with 2 Specializations in Oracle Solaris

“Oracle’s SPARC T-Series Server product line and Oracle Solaris combined with our specialized Oracle implementation expertise helps customers achieve the scalability and high performance they require to remain competitive.” 

- Bill Frangeskakis, General Manager, Frontline Systems Australia

InfoVista – Gold level OPN member and ISV based in EMEA

“As a leading provider of service performance assurance and optimization software solutions for IP-based network and application services, Oracle Solaris continues to be critical to the success of our business. With Oracle Solaris 11, we have measured strong memory performance increases for both Java applications and the Oracle Database. We have also successfully tested Oracle Solaris 11 on Oracle’s new SPARC T4-4 Server and our central storage and consolidation layer, based on Oracle Database 11GR2, has shown major performance increases. In addition, we have successfully tested vertical scalability through Oracle Solaris Zones and found deployment and administrations have been tremendously simplified in Oracle Solaris 11. Last but not least, our applications are storage I/O intensive and we have improved our performances thanks to ZFS on hybrid storage pools and mechanisms such as LogBias, ZIL and L2ARC.”
- Michel Schuster, Systems Architect, InfoVista

Keste – Platinum level member in OPN and Systems Integrator in North America with multiple Specializations

“Keste provides implementation services for many Oracle products and we are using the SPARC T4 server line to give our customers excellent performance, stability, and scalability while minimizing costs of licensing. Keste is also looking at SPARC T4 Servers and Oracle Solaris as a scalable consolidation platform to virtualize the large number of applications still running on legacy Sun platforms at our clients.”

- David Cocking, Systems Consultant, Keste

Maplesoft Group – Canadian Systems Integrator and Platinum level member in OPN with multiple Specializations including Oracle Solaris and SPARC

“Running Oracle software on SPARC T4 Servers with Oracle Solaris helps us respond to customer demand for solutions that deliver high reliability, performance and security. Our OPN Specialization in Oracle software and the SPARC T-Series product line helps us differentiate our business and we are pleased to see continued traction for our solutions.”

- Jack Gulas, CTO, Maplesoft Group

MCR - Platinum level member in OPN and a Systems Integrator in Australia with a Specialization in Oracle Solaris

“Oracle’s SPARC T4 Servers provide an architecture that reduces complexities and operating costs. Relying on SPARC T-Series Servers with Oracle Solaris gives our customers impressive performance and reliability they require to remain competitive.”

- Harry Vakili, CEO, MCR

Mobile Tornado - Gold level OPN member and ISV based in EMEA

"By using the virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris 11 in combination with the flexible resource partitioning in Oracle's advanced SPARC T4 CPUs, Mobile Tornado can consolidate its IPRS PTT Server and Oracle Database in a single machine, reducing TCO with higher levels of performance."

- Shlomo Birman, R&D Manager, Mobile Tornado

Mythics, Inc. - North American reseller and Platinum level member with multiple OPN Specializations

“Many of our customers continue to benefit from relying on Oracle’s SPARC T4 Servers. We are finding it is the ideal platform, including Oracle Solaris, for virtualizing and consolidating critical applications from CRM and ERP systems to the database.”

- Nick Psimas, Vice President Systems, Mythics, Inc.

Numerix – A Gold level member in Oracle PartnerNetwork

"A leading provider of cross-asset analytics for derivatives valuations and risk management, Numerix is a long-time partner of Oracle Solaris with many of our products having been imbedded into Oracle Solaris’ top Financial Services ISV applications. Numerix is committed to supporting the SPARC T4 platform and implementing Oracle Solaris 11 realizing the enormous benefit it will bring to both partners and customers. Numerix looks forward to leveraging Oracle Solaris’ proven, innovative technologies, especially the enhanced capabilities for fast, intelligent cloud deployment. Numerix clients are now able seamlessly burst pricing and risk analytics to the cloud, so together with Oracle Solaris 11 accelerating enterprise workloads to a cloud environment will be even easier."

- Steve O’Hanlon, President and Chief Operating Officer, Numerix


Q Associates – EMEA Platinum level reseller with multiple OPN Specializations including Oracle Solaris and Oracle’s SPARC T4

“The Oracle Solaris and SPARC T-Series Server Specializations combined with our architecture and industry expertise allow us to design and implement powerful and optimized platforms for mission-critical applications.”

- Andrew Griffiths, Business Development Director, Q Associates

About Oracle

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center.  For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.

Oracle Unveils Sun ZFS Backup Appliance for Oracle Engineered Systems

Press release:


Oracle Unveils Sun ZFS Backup Appliance for Oracle Engineered Systems

New Backup Solution Can Deliver up to 4x Faster Restore Performance than NetApp and EMC; Enables Efficient Test and Development on Oracle Database with Hybrid Columnar Compression

Redwood Shores, Calif. – April 30, 2012

News Facts

Oracle today announced the Sun ZFS Backup Appliance, an integrated, high performance backup solution for Oracle engineered systems, including Oracle Exadata Database MachineOracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4.
Oracle’s Sun ZFS Backup Appliance delivers up to 20 terabytes per hour full backup and up to 9.4 terabytes per hour full restore throughputs, the fastest published recovery rates among general purpose storage systems for Oracle engineered systems data protection.
The Sun ZFS Backup Appliance’s extremely fast backup throughput is based on backups of unique data, and does not require additional host-side software or CPU resources.
Tested, validated and supported with Oracle engineered systems, Oracle’s Sun ZFS Backup Appliance provides superior speed, simplicity and savings.
The Sun ZFS Backup Appliance can decrease recovery time by up to 4x, compared to published Oracle Database backup performance rates from NetApp and EMC(1).
The Sun ZFS Backup Appliance also offers up to 3.9x lower total cost of ownership (TCO) over a three year period, versus comparable NetApp and EMC Data Domain solutions(2).

Oracle Hardware and Software Engineered Together Provides Superior Data Protection and Return On Investment

The Sun ZFS Backup Appliance helps reduce the risk of failed restores by optimizing availability with predictive self-healing features and a fault management architecture that automatically detects and diagnoses underlying problems. End-to-end data check-summing also automatically checks and repairs corrupted data down to the bit level.
Using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) direct connection via TCP/IP over InfiniBand, the Sun ZFS Backup Appliance is more efficient and cost effective than competitive solutions and can eliminate the need for additional servers and expensive third-party backup software.
The Sun ZFS Backup Appliance also helps eliminate complex and costly changes to data protection procedures by delivering full performance and optimal space savings while implementing Oracle recommended RMAN full and incremental backup procedures.
Oracle Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) on the Sun ZFS Backup Appliance allows better return on investment through efficient data and system usage. Oracle storage, including the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, is uniquely able to clone and enable full system operation on HCC-compressed database copies. Snapshots of HCC-compressed tables can be cloned without decompression overhead, and used for test and development, quality assurance, reporting, or additional data protection.
Quick and easy to configure, deploy and manage, Oracle’s Sun ZFS Backup Appliance is available in two configurations, High Performance and High Capacity, and comes pre-racked and cabled, helping to eliminate hardware tuning.
Oracle’s Sun ZFS Backup Appliance is engineered with Oracle’s complete software stack, from Oracle Applications to Oracle Database and Oracle VM, as well as the Oracle Exadata Database MachineOracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4.

Supporting Quote

“Business operations are highly dependent on database availability, making fast backup and recovery an enterprise imperative,” said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president, Storage, Oracle. “Oracle's Sun ZFS Backup Appliance is purpose-built to work with Oracle engineered systems, taking advantage of hardware and software engineered together to deliver the speed, simplicity and savings customers need to protect their data and meet stringent recovery time objectives.”

Supporting Resources

Oracle Hardware on FacebookTwitter

About Oracle

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.

Trademarks

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Footnotes

(1) NetApp FAS3170C aggregate throughput for a single clustered system. Read only: 1.5GB/sec (1500MBPS) and Write Only:.75GB/sec (750MBPS). From performance data for four clustered systems in “Extreme Throughput with Oracle RAC, 10GbE and NetApp Storage” presentation by NetApp at Oracle OpenWorld, September 2010: http://openworld.vportal.net/?auid=12838
Data Domain 880 performance rates:http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/technical-documentation/h6835-backup-recovery-oracle-clariion-data-domain-ra.pdf, pp 18-19, February 2010.
(2) Comparison based on current U.S. list price for initial investment and cost over three year period for the NetApp FAS3270C, EMC Data Domain 890 and Oracle’s Sun ZFS Backup Appliance.

Barnes & Noble, Microsoft Form Strategic Partnership to Advance World-Class Digital Reading Experiences for Consumers

Press release:


Barnes & Noble, Microsoft Form Strategic Partnership to Advance World-Class Digital Reading Experiences for Consumers
April 30, 2012
Newly Formed Subsidiary to Include NOOK® Digital and College Businesses.
Send EMail
NEW YORK and REDMOND, Wash. — April 30, 2012 — Barnes & Noble Inc. (NYSE: BKS) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced the formation of a strategic partnership in a new Barnes & Noble subsidiary, which will build upon the history of strong innovation in digital reading technologies from both companies. The partnership will accelerate the transition to e-reading, which is revolutionizing the way people consume, create, share and enjoy digital content.
The new subsidiary, referred to in this release as Newco, will bring together the digital and College businesses of Barnes & Noble. Microsoft will make a $300 million investment in Newco at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion in exchange for an approximately 17.6% equity stake. Barnes & Noble will own approximately 82.4% of the new subsidiary, which will have an ongoing relationship with the company’s retail stores. Barnes & Noble has not yet decided on the name of Newco.
One of the first benefits for customers will be a NOOK application for Windows 8, which will extend the reach of Barnes & Noble’s digital bookstore by providing one of the world’s largest digital catalogues of e-Books, magazines and newspapers to hundreds of millions of Windows customers in the U.S. and internationally.
The inclusion of Barnes & Noble’s College business is an important component of Newco’s strategic vision. Through the newly formed Newco, Barnes & Noble’s industry leading NOOK Study software will provide students and educators the preeminent technology platform for the distribution and management of digital education materials in the market.
“The formation of Newco and our relationship with Microsoft are important parts of our strategy to capitalize on the rapid growth of the NOOK business, and to solidify our position as a leader in the exploding market for digital content in the consumer and education segments,” said William Lynch, CEO of Barnes & Noble. “Microsoft’s investment in Newco, and our exciting collaboration to bring world-class digital reading technologies and content to the Windows platform and its hundreds of millions of users, will allow us to significantly expand the business.” 
“The shift to digital is putting the world’s libraries and newsstands in the palm of every person’s hand, and is the beginning of a journey that will impact how people read, interact with, and enjoy new forms of content,” said Andy Lees, President at Microsoft. “Our complementary assets will accelerate e-reading innovation across a broad range of Windows devices, enabling people to not just read stories, but to be part of them. We’re at the cusp of a revolution in reading.”
Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have settled their patent litigation, and moving forward, Barnes & Noble and Newco will have a royalty-bearing license under Microsoft’s patents for its NOOK eReader and Tablet products. This paves the way for both companies to collaborate and reach a broader set of customers.
Newco
On January 5, Barnes & Noble announced that it was exploring the strategic separation of its digital business in order to maximize shareholder value. Barnes & Noble is actively engaged in the formation of Newco, which will include Barnes & Noble’s digital and College businesses. The company intends to explore all alternatives for how a strategic separation of Newco may occur. There can be no assurance that the review will result in a strategic separation or the creation of a stand-alone public company, and there is no set timetable for this review. Barnes & Noble does not intend to comment further regarding the review unless and until a decision is made. 
Additional information will be contained in a Current Report on Form 8-K to be filed by Barnes & Noble.
Barnes & Noble and Microsoft will host an investor call and webcast beginning at 8:30 A.M. ET on Monday, April 30, 2012. To join the webcast, please visit: www.barnesandnobleinc.com/webcasts.