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A week after a core switch failure caused worldwide outages for Research in Motion's BlackBerry servers, the company is attempting to make amends: RIM announced today that it would be offering a dozen apps (worth roughly 0) to its customers free of charge, as well as a month of free technical support to its enterprise customers.

The outages, which affected RIM's browsing and messaging services among others, impacted customers worldwide, with most outages lasting between one and three days – the first service outage hit Europe, the Middle East, and Africa on October 10th, and services were restored on the 12th and the 13th. You can read RIM's account of the outage on their press page.

The apps in question are mostly games with a smattering of productivity apps, and will be available until the end of December – you can see the full list in RIM's press release, linked below for your convenience. Current enterprise customers can request their month of technical support using this link, and the free technical support is also being made available to prospective customers in the form of a free trial.

Source: Research in Motion

MULTI-LEVEL CELL (MLC) flash-based solid state disk drives were, until recently, considered more of a consumer device choice, since their read and write performance, as well as expected lifetime in terms of number of writes before the cell is gone, were quite a bit behind the standard SLC (Single Level Cell) devices seen in entereprise class SSD units.

However this year saw a massive change, as MLC gained both in performance and reliability, while keeping the capacity and price advantage it offers over SLC. The final blow was Intel’s own Series 710 enterprise SSDs shown at the IDF event in September. The new SSD drives, with up to 300GB capacity in a standard 2.5in form factor, completely replaced the previous SLC-based range.

What changes enabled this move? Improvements in the controllers and write leveling algorithms drastically reduced the write penalty while keeping good bandwidth and latency, and the silicon design of the cells themselves was sufficiently improved to further come closer to SLC performance and reliability.

With up to 38,500 IOPS in reading and 2,700 IOPS when writing (4K blocks), they stack up well to their SLC-based brethren, and you still get a 300GB enterprise drive for less than ,000 apiece. For that, you also get decent latency at 75µsec for reads and 85µsec for writes, but unfortunately the bandwidth is still limited by the old 3Gbits/s SATA-II Interface here, reaching 270MB/s for reads and 210MB/s for writes. Power consumption, at 2.7 watts in active mode, is very decent though.

It seems a bit odd that Intel didn’t go with the brand new 6Gbits/s SATA3 interface, which its competitors in the SSD market have already actively embraced. On the other hand, Intel might be after something even more attractive in its next line of high-end SSD drives.

Last year we ran a little series called Ask the Experts where you all wrote in your virtualization related questions and we got them answered by experts at Intel, VMWare as well as our own expert on all things Enterprise & Cloud Computing – Johan de Gelas.

Read on for the first installment of Johan's answers to your questions!

Last year we ran a little series called Ask the Experts where you all wrote in your virtualization related questions and we got them answered by experts at Intel, VMWare as well as our own expert on all things Enterprise & Cloud Computing – Johan de Gelas.

Given the growing importance of Enterprise & Cloud Computing technology we wanted to run another round, this time handled exclusively by Johan. The categories are broad, but if you've got any questions related to Enterprise, Datacenter and/or Cloud Computing respond in the comments. Johan will be picking a couple of questions to answer in his usual in-depth style next week!

Buying an SSD for your notebook or desktop is nice. You get more consistent performance. Applications launch extremely fast. And if you choose the right SSD, you really curb the painful slowdown of your PC over time. I’ve argued that an SSD is the single best upgrade you can do for your computer, and I still believe that to be the case. However, at the end of the day, it’s a luxury item. It’s like saying that buying a Ferrari will help you accelerate quicker. That may be true, but it’s not necessary.

In the enterprise world however, SSDs are even more important. As we've shown in the past, a single enterprise SSD can replace several 15,000 RPM mechanical drives. You get better performance, much lower power consumption, and if you choose your drive well, more predictable reliability. From the manufacturer's perspective, the enterprise SSD market is more lucrative as cost is less of an issue.

Earlier this year Micron released its RealSSD C300, a consumer MLC drive. Today Micron is announcing the enterprise version of the drive: the RealSSD P300. We dive into the announcement to see what Micron has changed to address this market. Read on.