IBM announced it is helping the Finnish Defence Forces create a networked coalition that will bring together diverse military and civilian organizations to better respond to crises as part of the FDF’s Network-Centric Operations strategy. The FDF’s Major General Markku Koli will be presenting the details of the project to global business and IT leaders during this week’s "Leadership for a Networked World" conference being held at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

The FDF is using a combination of IBM middleware software to integrate and manage its information technology infrastructure. In addition to its homegrown and legacy applications, the SOA that supports the FDF is based on IBM WebSphere integration middleware, a DB2 information management database, WebSphere Portal and Lotus Notes for a standards-based interface, and Tivoli infrastructure management software.

In a case of justice gone horribly wrong, WebGuy.net’s Mark W. Mumma, ISP, spam victim and anti-spam activist, has been dealt the ultimate"low blow" by a Federal Court. The small, Oklahoma City based ISP has been ordered by a U.S. Federal Jury to pay $2.5 Million in damages to the very company that admitted sending him unsolicited email in the first place.

In a mind numbing decision, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema ruled that Mark W. Mumma’s statement that Plaintiffs, Cruise.com, Omega World Travel and Gloria Bohan "are spammers" is "untrue" in spite of the fact that Cruise.com witnesses confirmed, under oath, that they never ask a recipient’s permission prior to sending them email offers. The reason given by Cruise.com CEO Anthony Hamawy regarding why they don’t verify an email recipient’s desire to receive their offers was, "No, we have not, primarily because our competitors don’t."

IBM has announced IBM Metadata Workbench, new data visualization and management software within IBM Information Server designed to deliver important insight about data and speed deployment of SOA, SOA, compliance, business intelligence and master data integration projects.

Metadata is information embedded within data that describes its important attributes such as where it originated, what it means, where it has been, and how it can be used. It is becoming an increasingly important element of compliance initiatives, information integration efforts and electronic discovery for the Web.

To help IT and business users better manage their growing reliance on metadata, IBM developed the IBM Metadata Workbench, a metadata management tool that visually depicts the relationships among data sources and data users, and provides proof of data lineage required by many compliance regulations. The IBM Metadata Workbench makes it easier to manage and visualize metadata for reporting and development projects that rely on this critical information embedded in data, since it is typically stored and managed in a variety of tools and technologies.

The new IBM software can also be used to pinpoint the exact impact of any data change and show the relationships among business and technical information assets. For SOA business intelligence projects, the Metadata Workbench provides key insight into the origins of information, linking fields in leading business intelligence reporting tools linking SOA service data elements all the way back to the sources from which they came, showing exactly how the data was derived. This capability is also critical for business intelligence projects that need to identify where business intelligence report elements originated.

Mobilizing your corporate email does not have to dig holes in your budget nor demand lots of work. Mobile email can now be offered to the whole workforce without costly implementations or compromising security.

With PrimoMail 5.0 On-Demand corporate users are able to just pay just for what they actually use. No limitations to the number of users and as it is installed in-house PrimoMail On-Demand is as secure as ever. PrimoMail 5.0 for IBM Lotus Domino is now available for download and purchase.

Learn about the benefits and options of the more flexible and adaptable reporting tool introduced in IBM Rational Portfolio Manager Version 7.1. You can now use external relational databases to store and manipulate your data, and you can choose the reporting tools that you prefer, including the Common Reporting tool that is now included with this Rational software.

IBM and Sun Microsystems are looking to brings supercomputing into the "petaflop" era.

The two IT giants will detail the specifics behind their new supercomputer systems to the audience attending the 2007 International Supercomputer Conference in Dresden, Germany, which kicks off June 26–two systems that promise to break the petaflop barrier in terms of performance. A petaflop equals 1 quadrillion calculations per second.

By contrast, IBM’s Blue Gene/L system, which is installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., offers 280.6 teraflops, or 280.6 trillion calculations per second, and sits on top of the current Top 500 supercomputer list. Members of the ISC are expected to announce the updated Top 500 supercomputer list later this week, and Big Blue is expected to retain the top spot.

Seagate Technology is serving up its first 1-terabyte hard drive. The company is expected to announce Monday that it will offer a retail hard drive for $399 beginning in the third quarter of this year. The Barracuda 7200.11 will have up to 32 megabytes of cache and a five-year warranty.

The amount of information that can be stored in a 1-terabyte drive is equal to turning 50,000 trees into paper, according to researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. Hitachi shipped its first terabyte drive two months ago, for the same price of $399.

Synaptris, the software product company which offers flexible reporting solutions has announced its expansion into the Australian market as part of its APAC channel expansion plans. As the first step in its foray into Australia, the company has established a partnership with New South Wales-based Cri-Tech Consulting.

The partnership will initially focus on Synaptris’ IntelliPRINT range of products which are designed specifically for the IBM Lotus Notes & Domino platform. Australia is one of the largest markets in Asia Pacific for Notes & Domino applications and this makes it a very attractive market in this region for Synaptris.

With over 8 years of experience in delivering solutions on Lotus Notes & Domino technologies to customers in Australia, Cri-Tech is ideally positioned to partner with Synaptris in addressing this market.

Sometimes in IT, the best defense is a good defense moved further up the network stack. At least that is what some vendors and analysts are predicting about the next generation of network firewalls.

Vendors are increasingly looking to integrate IPS (intrusion prevention systems) with firewalls, but truly integrated, full-featured products are in short supply, said Gartner analyst Greg Young. He cited research by his firm stating that threats have become more complex and moved higher in the network stack, forcing firewalls to move beyond just providing stateful protocol analysis to having increasingly rich management and configuration tools.

Quantum, specialist in backup, recovery and archive, announced the DXi7500 enterprise disk backup and replication system, designed to anchor a comprehensive strategy for linking backup, restore and disaster recovery protection across the distributed enterprise. With the addition of the DXi7500, Quantum’s DXi-Series becomes the first disk-based backup family to extend the benefits of data de-duplication, remote replication and disk-to-tape creation across a product line that covers distributed sites, midrange environments, and primary data centers.

With a scalable capacity of up to 240 TB, performance of up to 8 TB/hour, a high-availability architecture, and a unique policy-based data de-duplication approach, the DXi7500 provides disk backup capabilities to match the needs of the most demanding enterprise data centers. And because it leverages the same integrated software layer foundation first introduced in Quantum’s DXi3500 and DXi5500 disk backup appliances, the DXi7500 can also serve as a secure core repository for centralizing backup and disaster recovery from multiple distributed sites.