New Products

The Coraid folks have released a free-standing tower version of their EtherDrive Storage Appliance, christened the SR1521T. The SR1521T, with internal RAID, provides true networked storage over standard Ethernet and is based on the open ATA over Ethernet (AoE) protocol. Coraid says that “AoE is a block level storage protocol that is simpler to implement than other SAN technologies and at considerably less cost than iSCSI and Fibre Channel solutions.” Further, because AoE is non-routed, “the need for TCP/IP processing overhead or expensive network adapters” is eliminated. The target customers are those that do not seek a rackmounted solution and “that need powerful and scalable network storage readily available at the departmental level”. The AoE protocol is native in the Linux 2.6 kernel, and software drivers are available for Mac OS X, Windows, Solaris and FreeBSD.

www.coraid.com

Arcosoft joins the growing list of companies that have come to their senses: it just released a Linux version of its VONaLink TeamRecord VoIP-based call-recording application. TeamRecord works with any VoIP phone system based on the SIP standard (think Asterisk), centrally recording all phone calls for a company's workgroup. VONaLink says that TeamRecord, for instance, allows “business transactions over the phone to be verified and disputes resolved” or comply with Sarbanes-Oxley or other disclosure provisions. Furthermore, TeamRecord replaces both expensive analog recording equipment and proprietary products from the dreaded phone company. The recording process involves unobtrusive monitoring of network packets via the port mirroring capability of a network switch and results in an inaudibly watermarked MP3 or WAV file. Users can listen to recordings of their own calls from a Web browser. TeamRecord is available for x86 Linux and Windows platforms.

www.arcosoft.com

ActiveState recently released its new version 4.0 of Komodo Edit, the firm's free, multilanguage editor for dynamic languages. Based on ActiveState's Komodo IDE 4.0, Komodo Edit not only supports Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl, but also client-side languages and Ajax technologies, including JavaScript, CSS, HTML and XML. OS support includes Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Among the product's advantages, says ActiveState, are capability additions via .xpi extensions, storage of configurable elements (such as run commands, macros, code snippets and so on), syntax checking and coloring, an active community site and more. A gratis download of Komodo Edit is available from ActiveState's Web site.

www.activestate.com

When not spending time in Amsterdam's offbeat caf�, the members of Dyne.org are busy developing dyne:bolic, upgraded to version 2.4, a live-or-installed Linux distribution focused on the needs of media-production fanatics. The main advantages of dyne:bolic include recognition of a wide variety of devices and peripherals, numerous tools for recording, editing, encoding and streaming audio and video, and the ability to run on lower-powered hardware. New in version 2.4 are improved user-friendliness via the Xfce-4.4 desktop, encrypted nests for preventing access to personal data stored in home directories, new (QParted) and updated (Cinelerra) software and a modularization of the inclusion of different kernels. You also can run (the previous edition of) dyne:bolic on “modded Xbox game consoles” and even cluster them! Raw ISO CD images can be downloaded for free or purchased for a minimal cost.

www.dynebolic.org