Matthew Dorn

Micello is mapping the great indoors. The only way to chart new territory, they've found, is to start making maps detailing the innards of manmade buildings and complexes. Unlike the mapmakers of yore, who toiled for years perfecting maps of oceans, continents, and mountain ranges, today's mapmakers have found their outdoor frontiers taken away from them by satellite imaging.

Demo's biggest stars of all time13 hot products from DEMOfall '09 And this is where Micello comes in. This way, if you're stranded in an airport and craving a cup of coffee or are at a university looking for a particular lecture hall, you'll be able to look up your location on Micello and find out where you need to walk. The company's goal is to become the Google Maps of indoor spaces as its staff of six people is doggedly mapping large public indoor spaces in the United States such as shopping malls, airports and universities. The maps the company is developing even include a search engine, so you can type "coffee" into a box and have the map point out all the locations in your vicinity that sell coffee. You said today that you're making about 10 maps a day.

In this Q&A with Micello founder and CEO Ankit Agarwal, we discuss his company's passion for mapping, the use of crowdsourcing to make maps and where he plans to take Micello in the future. How many people do you have working on these maps nationwide? In all it takes someone about four hours to get one map done and each person would do around three or four maps a day. Have six people total, three people in design work and three people doing data collection using our tools. We're primarily mapping the [San Francisco-Oakland] Bay Area to start with and our initial focus has been on Bay Area colleges and shopping malls. We get the floor plan of a particular place, whether it's from someone going and taking a picture of it or the building itself gives it to us.

Where do you get your data for building these maps? We then convert the floor plan to a geo-coded, dynamic, personalizable interactive map, so that when you go to a shopping mall, the floor plan on the Micello map will interact with you. That's a somewhat basic version of the interactivity we'll be shooting for in the future. You saw in our demonstration today that we typed 'shoes' into the search engine and it found all the stores in the mall that sold shoes. In the next generation of search we're planning on making it really smart so it can get information on specific brands and models if you type them into the search engine.

For the time being we are designing the indoor maps ourselves. How does crowdsourcing play into your strategy of building these maps? Crowdsourcing comes in for updating information on the maps we've built. People can submit content describing who happens to be coming to give a lecture at a particular hall on campus, for instance, or Macy's can let people know that they're having a two-hour sale some afternoon by flagging it on the map. So people can share stories about what's happening in different locations on the maps. Looking to the future, how do you plan to monetize this application?

In the short term we plan to monetize this application through premium content. We have a short-term and a long-term focus. So to use the Macy's example again, so you want to promote a two-hour sale, you could pay to have information on it pushed out to all Micello users in the area whose profiles show they'd be interested in shopping at Macy's. In the long term we see ourselves as becoming the go-to company for designing interactive indoor maps.

U.S. immigration officials are taking H-1B enforcement from the desk to the field with a plan to conduct 25,000 on-site inspections of companies hiring foreign workers over this fiscal year. The new federal fiscal year began Oct. 1. Tougher enforcement from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services comes in response to a study conducted by the agency last year that found fraud and other violations in one-in-five H-1B applications. The move marks a nearly five-fold increase in inspections over last fiscal year, when the agency conducted 5,191 site visits under a new site inspection program. In a letter to U.S. Sen.

Mayorkas letter was released on Tuesday by Grassley. "[The inspection program determines] whether the location of employment actually exists and if a beneficiary is employed at the location specified, performing the duties as described, and paid the salary as identified in the petition," said Mayorkas in his letter to Grassley. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Alejandro Mayorkas, director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the agency began a site visit and verification program in July to check on the validity of H-1B applications. Mayorkas is a former federal prosecutor who was recently appointed by President Barack Obama. Among the issues that Grassley asked for was specific information about companies that are hiring H-1B workers for jobs that didn't exist, and who, instead, are not paid until contract work is found. He was sworn in August and said since then, "I have worked tirelessly to learn of the condition of our anti-fraud efforts and other critical programs in our agency." In September, Grassley, an ardent critic of the H-1B program, asked Mayorkas to outline the steps his agency was taking in regard to H-1B enforcement.

As part of its enforcement effort, Mayorkas said the Citizenship and Immigration Services has hired Dunn and Bradstreet Inc., which provides credit reports among other services, to act as "an independent information provider" and help verify information submitted by companies hiring H-1B workers. Employers must be held accountable, and should be required to submit contracts and itineraries to prove that a job exists. Grassley, a co-sponsor of legislation that will increase H-1B program enforcement , said in a statement released today, t"If employers are hiring visa holders without actual jobs lined up, American workers are losing out. Simply having them attest that they are complying with the law isn't good enough." Immigration attorneys have seen an increase in demands for documentation from the Citizenship and Immigration Services as part of the approval process.

The storage software market showed signs of rebounding in the second quarter, but is still falling short of the pace set last year. Within the storage software market, revenue for replication products grew 5% compared with the first quarter of this year, and data protection and recovery revenue was 3% higher than in the first quarter. Worldwide, storage software vendors raked in $2.8 billion in revenue in the quarter, down nearly 10% vs. the second quarter of 2008, according to an IDC report issued last week.\ However, some positive signs emerged.

Revenue for device management and archiving software has also grown slightly since the beginning of 2009. "The storage software market is slowly starting to recover with positive growth over the first quarter of 2009," IDC analyst Michael Margossian said in a press release. Globally, revenue for external disk storage systems was $4.1 billion in the second quarter, an 18% decline year-over-year. However, IDC cautioned that growth between the first and second quarters is typical, so the year-over-year comparisons are more significant. 9 data storage companies to watch   While last week's report covers storage software, IDC this month also reported that storage hardware sales continue to struggle. The network disk storage market declined 15% year-over-year. EMC led the storage software market with 22.4% of revenue in the second quarter, ahead of Symantec (18.5%), IBM (11.5%) and NetApp (8.5%). EMC also leads the external disk storage systems market with 21.5% of worldwide revenue.

This was the third straight year enterprise storage systems revenue declined in the second quarter.

Data Robotics today released its first iSCSI SAN storage array that, like its other low-end arrays, manages itself and allows any capacity or brand of disk drive to be mixed, matched and exchanged without any downtime. The new system extends the number of Smart Volumes - Data Robotics' thin provisioning that pools capacity from all eight drives - so users can now create as many as 255 virtual storage volumes, up from 16 volumes in the current Drobo model. Data Robotics' DroboElite offers automated capacity expansion and one-click single- or dual-drive (RAID 5 or 6) redundancy for Windows, Mac and Linux machines.

The latest addition to the Drobo family of arrays is aimed at the small to mid-size business market and resellers selling into the virtual server space, according to Jim Sherhart, senior director of marketing for Data Robotics. "Virtual servers tend to use a lot of small LUNs (logical unit numbers)," said Jim Sherhart, senior director of marketing for Data Robotics. For example, if a user were to initially set up DroboElite for dual drive failure, he could switch to single-drive failure with one mouse click. The DroboElite is also able to drop from higher to lower levels of RAID with no manual intervention. Users can also change out drives, adding higher-capacity models, in 10 seconds - with no formatting required, according to Sherhart. Tarun Chachra, chief technology officer at marketing company KSL Media , has owned two Drobo USB arrays for about a year and a half. DroboElite can support VMware environments and advanced functionality including VMotion, Storage VMotion, snapshots, and high availability.

He purchased four DroboPro arrays in June for use in two offices for Microsoft Exchange replication and backups for about 16 servers. Chachra said he was impressed that he could simply go out and buy a 1TB, 7,200 RPM SATA drive for $69 and stick it in the DroboElite, saving him money on total cost of ownership on pricier SAS drives. He's also beta testing the DroboElite, which he plans to purchase for backing up his VMware servers because of its higher throughput with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and greater number of creatable volumes. Chachra has been comparing his existing DroboPros, which can be configured with up to eight 2TB drives, to what he'd previously been using for backups: a Hewlett-Packard AiO400R array with four 500GB drives. The HP array runs the same iSCSI stack as the DroboPro, but it uses Windows 2003 Storage Server as a backup and replication application. Chachra said the DroboPro cost about $3,500 compared with the AiO400, which cost $5,219. The HP array was set up for RAID 5 right out of the box and couldn't be changed; the DroboPro offers both RAID 5 and 6 interchangeably.

The HP has forced Chachra to reboot his backup server every three days or so because it would hang up and couldn't handle bandwidth, he said. "We don't have huge IT teams looking at servers, so it's better for us to have something that can tolerate a higher driver failure rates," he said. "We also don't stock a lot of hard drives. The DroboElite also offers a non-automated thin provisioning feature called Smart Volumes that allows users to create new volumes in seconds and manage them over time by pulling storage from a common pool rather than a specific physical drive allocation. The main thing, though, is redundancy and having Exchange available all the time." "I don't know that an enterprise is going to run out and deploy this for 2,000 or 3,000 [users], but for small or mid-size shops, this is cost effective and it works as well as it should," Chachra added. Smart Volumes are also file system aware, which allows deleted data blocks to be immediately returned to the pool for future use. Geoff Barrall, CEO and founder of Data Robotics, said the DroboElite can deliver cost savings of up to 90% compared to other iSCSI SANs "by combining cost-effective hardware with robust iSCSI features." The DroboElite is currently available starting at a price of $3,499, with multiple configurations selling for up to $5,899 for a 16TB configuration (using eight 2TB drives).

Extreme Networks this week unveiled a blueprint for migrating data centers from the physical world to virtualization, and then ultimately to cloud computing. Extreme's approach seeks to eliminate virtual switching at the server level while Cisco proposes adding that element to data center servers, specifically the blade servers within its new Unified Computing System platform. At the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, Extreme disclosed its data center evolution strategy, which is in sharp contrast to that endorsed by Cisco.

Extreme's blueprint is expected to collide with Cisco's Data Center 3.0 strategy, Force10 Networks' Virtualization Framework, elements of Juniper's Stratus project and architectures pitched by Brocade, HP and other data center switching competitors. Extreme's plan is built on four "pillars" of data center infrastructure and operations: physical, efficiency, scalability and automation/customization. It's intended to assist in evolving data centers to wide-scale virtualization and cloud computing "without forcing certain technologies or operating methodologies" on users, says Gordon Stitt, Extreme chairman and co-founder. Physical deals with network topology, switching tiers, bandwidth and performance; efficiency involves integration, support, and management of virtual machines and hypervisors; scalability revolves around switching capacity to support thousands of VMs and applications; and automation/customization supports configuration and extensibility through XML and APIs. Extreme is addressing the first pillar through its existing stackable and modular switching lines - the Summit x450 and x650 switches for top-of-rack server access applications and the modular BlackDiamond 8800 series for the core. Extreme switches are also 40/100G Ethernet "ready" through the inclusion of an expansion slot for uplinks, Stitt says. Stacking allows switch capacity and density to increase while also enabling the stacked configuration to be managed as a single switch, with aggregated links providing increased bandwidth and redundancy.

He expects Extreme to have 40/100G modules for the switches around mid-2010. For efficiency, Extreme proposes that switches become "VM aware." Extreme currently supports VMware's hypervisors with plans to add others to the mix. The differentiator, though, comes in the scalability pillar. This will allow the company's switches to dynamically track and manage VMs and apply policies as VMs move across the network. Today, vendors such as Cisco and even the leading blade server companies - IBM, HP and Dell - propose adding a software-based virtual switch to the server itself to handle the growing number of VMs. Cisco's instantiation of this is VN-Link and the Nexus 1000V software-based switch. Meanwhile, moving - or keeping - switching in the network reduces management complexity while increasing switching performance, the company says. But virtual soft switches on servers add another element and layer of management complexity to the virtual data center, Extreme asserts.

So Extreme proposes keeping switching in the switch and not moving it to the server. VEPA does this by allowing a physical end station to collaborate with an external switch to provide bridging support between multiple virtual end stations and external networks, according to a presentation on the IEEE Web site. "A hardware switching is very predictable" in performance and behavior, Stitt says. "Software or server-based switches can be unpredictable." Work on standardizing VEPA began last month, Stitt says, adding that Extreme plans to be one of the first vendors to adopt it once it is ratified. The company is a proponent of an emerging IEEE specification called Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregation (VEPA), which, among other attributes, is designed to eliminate the large number of network and virtual switching elements that need to be managed in a data center. Extreme still needs to flesh out its data center strategy with a plan around network and storage convergence, however. Regarding the latter, Stitt believes it to be an interim, perhaps short-term remedy."If FibreChannel is already installed, I wonder if FCoE would be a good choice," Stitt posits. "Ethernet will ultimately carry storage traffic.

Stitt says that will be forthcoming and will include Extreme's views and plans around technologies and standards like Converged Enhanced Ethernet and FibreChannel-over-Ethernet. Ethernet ultimately wins."

Under a legal threat from another software firm with a similar name, Acresso Software Inc. is changing its name to Flexera Software after just 19 months. Acresso sells software such as software its installation utility, InstallShield, and software license manager, FLEXnet, to software vendors and enterprises. The company will officially announce the change next Tuesday, but had already notified partners and customers on Thursday.

It was spun out of Macrovision Corp. after the unit was acquired by venture capital firm Thoma Brava Cressley in April 2008. Macrovision retained the digital rights management (DRM) apps for which it is best-known. Acresso, which the company said was derived from the Latin word "Cresco" for "to grow, increase" faced a "challenge" on its name from ERP software maker Agresso Software , said Randy Littleson, senior vice-president of marketing for Acresso. "Our executive team decided that there were better ways to invest our time and money, and that we didn't need this distraction," Littleson said. "The action we're taking will let us avoid a potential lawsuit." Acresso did not immediately return an e-mailed request for comment. It changed its company name in July to Rovi Corporation. Acresso was founded in 1980 and has annual revenue of about $475 million. That dwarfs Acresso, which has 375 employees and annual revenues of $115 million.

It also has 3,500 employees at 16 offices globally. Flexera will be the fourth name in five years facing long-time users of InstallShield, which was bought by Macrovision in 2004. Perhaps predictably, early public reaction to the new name tended towards the sarcastic. "As if the makers of InstallShield hadn't already done enough damage to their brand, let's just go change names yet again!" wrote Christopher Painter, an InstallShield consultant, on his blog yesterday. "Acresso Software is becoming Flexera Software for no apparent reason. Littleson said the company considered changing its name to Installshield, being that it is its best-known product, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it didn't represent the breadth of its application stable. Go ahead. #ScrambleMyBrands," another tweet said. He dismissed the notion, brought up by some bloggers , that the new name will cause legal trouble or just confusion with a solar and wind power company Flexera. "We're quite aware of it. We think this is very different, compared to when it was two software companies."

That's one of the reasons why it's Flexera Software," he said. "How similar are we to an energy company?