Brocade is helping school districts in California, Missouri and South Carolina upgrade their IT networks to achieve substantial cost-savings by taking advantage of the latest technologies built into the company’s entire range of FCX switches.

The goal of Brocade’s new “effortless network” initiative is to help the IT departments at schools across the nation — which have traditionally focused on supporting data — deal with new challenges, such as streaming video, virtual desktops and unified communications, as well as providing support for personal devices and delivering anytime, anywhere access.

“Our students don’t want access to just the server — they want access to the world,” said Cathi Eredia, interim director of technology at El Monte Union High School District in Southern California.

To make this possible, Brocade’s entire range of stackable FCX switches are now powered by HyperEdge technology that delivers new levels of automation and simplification in campus LANs. According to Brocade, HyperEdge is all about “simplifying network management and paying for only what you need today while enabling you to add seamless capacity and functionality as your needs grow.”

Economy Without Sacrificing Functionality

Among other things, HyperEdge automatically consolidates the management of all campus access devices to a single IP address, which makes it easier for schools to roll out new security access policies.

“Instead of manually reconfiguring each device or configurable stack, HyperEdge technology allows you to update user ports across the campus with just a single command,” Brocade said in a HyperEdge technology video overview.

With most state governments sharply focused on reducing their annual budgets, school districts are also struggling to do more with less money than in the past. At the Fort Mill School District in South Carolina, for example, the student size has doubled to more than 10,500 in the past decade — even as the…

“Android” and “fragmentation” are two terms that go together so often, it’s sometimes hard to remember that Android is supposed to be a single platform. But how fragmented is Android? An app provider is now trying to answer that question with a study and some images.

The company, Open Signal, has been logging over the last six months new Android devices that have downloaded its OpenSignalMaps, which recommends the best network in an area. The data shows the model, brand, API level, and screen sizes for more than 680,000 devices. The result: 3,997 distinct devices and 599 brands.

Samsung Galaxy S II

Open Signal noted that the actual number of different devices is probably somewhat lower, since those devices with custom ROMs report back their identities differently than other devices.

Open Signal created a Device Model Map of its data, and another of Brands. Each contains larger squares representing the most popular devices and tiny ones standing in for the obscure ones. The resulting image looks like a distorted map of Manhattan, dominated by a few larger squares and then breaking into tiny slivers in one corner.

The most popular Android device in their survey is the Samsung Galaxy S II, with more than 61,000 users of Open Signal’s app. The obscure devices represented by tiny slivers include the Concorde Tab from Hungary, the Lemon P1 in India, and the Energy Tablet i724 in Spain.

On the brand front, Samsung won again, representing about 40 percent of the total, or about 270,000 devices. Others include HTC, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Verizon, Sprint, Huawei, KDDI, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Google, Cingular, and more — nearly 600 in all.

There are also a variety of API levels, which are determined by their Android version. Open Signal said that API levels “have become more fragmented over time,” which, they added, “seems natural” since…

Verizon Wireless customers are up in arms about an apparent move to end unlimited data plans. Some are even taking to Twitter to express their disgust over a plan to force users who were grandfathered in to the unlimited package for 3G to subscribe to tiered plans when they upgrade to the faster 4G LTE network.

CFO Fran Shammo, speaking at the J.P. Morgan Technology, Media and Telecom conference Wednesday, said Verizon would offer tiered family plans allowing shared data usage for 4G LTE this summer, and current unlimited package subscribers with 3G would have to change to one of those plans to get LTE service.

Now, in an official statement, Verizon seems to be backpedaling a bit.

“As we have stated publicly, Verizon Wireless has been evaluating its data pricing structure for some time,” Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Brenda Raney said in a published statement. “Customers have told us that they want to share data, similar to how they share minutes today. We are working on plans to provide customers with that option later this year.”

Tweeters Still Angry

Are Verizon Wireless customers satisfied? No, at least not yet. It seems that bad news travels faster than updates, especially ambiguous ones. Customers are still on Twitter talking about the end to unlimited data packages.

“Switch to the network with unlimited data…or not…there’s always that,” tweeted a user named Garrett. Others, like Liza Sabater, are taking to Twitter to call Verizon Wireless “evil.” It seems Verizon will have to work a little harder to undo the ill will its CFO inadvertently created.

“We will share specific details of the plans and any related policy changes well in advance of their introduction, so customers will have time to evaluate their choices and make the best decisions for their wireless service,” Raney said. “It is our goal and…

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With more than 50 percent of U.S. mobile phone users now equipped with smartphones, demand for mobile apps continues to soar. The average number of mobile apps per smartphone jumped from 32 apps to 41 apps during 2011 – a 28 percent rise in comparison with 2010, according to a new report from Nielsen.

However, U.S. smartphone owners spent about the same amount of time using mobile apps each day in 2011 as they had during the previous year — 39 minutes per day versus 37 minutes per day, Nielsen said.

Nielsen researchers said 70 percent of the survey’s respondents expressed “concern over personal data collection” and 55 percent were “wary of sharing information about their location via smartphone apps.” So we asked Al Hilwa, director of applications software development at IDC, what developers need to do to address privacy concerns as well as prod U.S. smartphone users to spend more time using their apps.

Hilwa said he expected to see the development of new app types as well as the further expansion of apps into other areas of life.

“And developers will continue to chase ever narrower opportunities” while hoping to “hit areas that have not transitioned fully from Web to mobile, or aspects of life not digitized fully yet,” Hilwa said Wednesday. “But at some point this pace of growth will slow down.”

Claiming More Minutes

Privacy and security considerations definitely stop some people from using apps.

“And that may be another area where the industry can move to claim more minutes of app usage by increasing the confidence in apps,” Hilwa said.

Clearly, users ramp up the most toward app usage in their first few months of smartphone usage.

“After that, a steady state ensues, and it is a challenge for the app ecosystem to keep existing users engaged,” Hilwa said….

Samsung is king of mobile phones, while Apple owns a not-too shabby 7.9 percent of the global phone market. And Android remains the top operating system, with more than half the market.

Those are some of the findings of a report on the global mobile market in the first quarter of the year by Gartner.

Nokia Is Slipping

South Korea-based Samsung’s sales to end users amounted to 20.7 percent of the worldwide total in the quarter, up from 16.1 percent in the same quarter last year, Gartner said. That growth comes at the expense of Nokia, the Finnish company that saw its share shrink from 25.1 percent to 19.8 percent.

California-based Apple received its accustomed dose of good news with a share that doubled from 3.9 percent to 7.8 quarter over quarter. Considering that Apple makes only a single smartphone (in varying generations and storage capacity), the news is impressive.

Research In Motion dropped from 3.0 percent to 2.4 percent. The Canadian BlackBerry maker lags behind China’s ZTE, South Korea’s LG and China’s Huawei to take up seventh place.

Gartner’s report follows one by Strategy Analytics based on vendor surveys that put Samsung at the top of the market with a 31 percent share, toppling Nokia’s 14-year reign at the top spot.

Google’s Android OS saw substantial growth year over year, from 36.4 percent to 56.1 percent, while Apple’s iOS also grew from 16.9 percent to 22.9 percent, according to Gartner. Nokia’s fading Symbian platform dropped significantly as the company switches to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, dropping from 27.7 percent to just 8.6 percent. Research In Motion’s platforms fell from 13.0 percent to 6.9 percent.

Windows Phone also dropped, from 2.6 percent to 1.9 percent.

Overall, mobile phone sales reached 419.1 million units in the quarter, a decline of 2 percent, Gartner said, marking the first decline in sales…

On the heels of major revisions to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Google is revamping its own. On Wednesday, the tech giant announced the launch of its Knowledge Graph, which is intended to help users quickly and easily discover new information.

In a posting on the Google Official Blog, Senior Vice President of Engineering Amit Singhal wrote that, instead of primarily focusing on matching keywords to queries, the enhancement enables the search engine to use an intelligent model that “understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.”

‘Critical First Step’

Singhal said the Knowledge Graph “knows about” a variety of things, people, and places, such as landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art, and other subjects. The Graph’s current inventory of knowledge, he said, is only the “critical first step” toward creating the next generation of search, which understands the world in ways closer to how people do.

The Graph is more than just calling up data in Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook, and other supplies of knowledge. It’s been populated with more than 500 million knowledge objects, with more than 3.5 billion facts about the relationships between those objects.

The first step in this new kind of search, Google said, is understanding the differences in meaning for a given query. For instance, is the search for “Taj Mahal” about the monument or the musician? The Graph will give choices.

Next, the Graph provides summaries containing key facts that a user might want about a particular subject. The example given by Singhal is Marie Curie. The Graph will deliver birth and death dates, as well as information on her education and scientific discoveries. There’s also knowledge about her relationship with other entities, such as her Nobel-prize-winning relatives.

‘People Also Search for’

The Graph’s ability to determine what is…

Intel just rolled out three new Xeon processor families with a range of target uses: the E5-4600 for boosted performance and flexibility, the E5-2400 for small- to mid-sized businesses, and the E3-1200 v2 with improved performance per watt, data security and graphics capabilities for entry workstation customers. Altogether, Intel introduced 28 processors.

As part of the announcement, Boyd Davis, vice president and general manager of the Datacenter Infrastructure Group at Intel, said companies are increasingly dependent on IT to deliver innovative products and services to customers. Intel hopes to be the one to make IT look good.

But will Intel’s move to drive Xeon innovations for small business and emerging scale workloads be met with enthusiasm among server makers? If OEM adoption is any signal, Intel could see new profits as both IBM and Dell deliver Xeon-based systems to market targeting these niche audiences.

The Ivy Bridge Disruption

We caught up with Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, to get his take on the latest news in the x86 data center revolution. He told us the overarching story has been a tale of industry standard upward mobility, pressing and pressuring traditional systems from below.

At the same time, he continued, displacement has been a constant theme in that narrative. Enter Intel’s latest fab technology, widely known as Ivy Bridge. King said Ivy Bridge may look to some like just another chapter in an ongoing story but it could actually signal an entirely new era of industry-standard computing.

That, King said, is because not only did Intel’s revolutionary new 3D Tri-Gate fabrication technology allow the company to become the first CPU vendor to deliver commercial 22-nanometer based products, the company also executed the process in good time, speeding its traditional “tick-tock” upgrade schedule and establishing a viable, believable roadmap for future tinier transistors.

Intel’s…

Cisco on Wednesday offered up findings from its “bring your own device” study and used the results as a jumping off point to announce new mobility solutions. But can Cisco carve out a niche in the nascent BYOD services space?

The Cisco IBSG Horizons Study surveyed 600 U.S. IT and business leaders to discover the benefits and complexities of allowing workers to use their own mobile devices on corporate networks. A whopping 95 percent of respondents say their organization allows employee-owned devices on the network.

The study also revealed that the average number of connected devices per knowledge worker is expected to reach 3.3 by 2014, up from an average of 2.8 in 2012. All in all, managers are balancing security and support concerns with the very real potential to reap significant cost and productivity benefits from the BYOD trend.

BYOD Meets Virtual Desktops

As Cisco sees it, BYOD is here to stay and managers are seeing the need for a more holistic approach — an approach that is scalable and addresses mobility, security, virtualization and network policy management — in order to keep management costs in line and realize savings.

According to Cisco IBSG, Cisco employees pay an average of $600 out-of-pocket for devices that will give them more control over their work experience. The benefits of BYOD vary based on an employee’s role and work requirements. Cisco IBSG estimates that the annual benefits from BYOD range from $300 to $1,300 per employee.

While the BYOD trend gains momentum, desktop virtualization is on the rise. Sixty-eight percent of respondents agreed that a majority of knowledge worker roles are suitable for desktop virtualization and 50 percent noted that their organization is in the process of implementing a desktop virtualization strategy.

Cisco’s ‘Smart Solutions’

Cisco’s answer to the opportunity and challenge is the Cisco Unified Workspace, which allows everything…

Google is revising the way it rolls out new Android versions and devices, according to a new report. The move is intended to give the tech giant greater control over features and apps, and to reduce the influence of wireless carriers.

According to a story in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, Google will now give new versions of Android to as many as five manufacturers at a time, and devices using the new version will be sold directly to consumers. Previously, Google’s practice was to produce “lead devices” for a new version with a single manufacturer and then roll out to other makers, with devices being sold through carriers or retail stores.

Nexus-Branded Products

Under the new scheme — which has not yet been confirmed by Google — Google would sell the Nexus-brand products from the manufacturers through its Web site and possibly through some retailers. Google has tried direct sales to consumers on a limited basis previously, with limited success.

The amount of involvement that wireless carriers would have in marketing and selling this wave of products is not yet clear. One might assume that phones or tablets sold directly to consumers by Google would not be subsidized by carriers, so, unless Google is ready to pick up that slack, the prices are expected to be considerably higher than what buyers have come to expect.

It would be expected the phones would be sold unlocked, so that they would work on a variety of networks. Unless a contract is packaged with the sale — something that would seem to counter Google’s strategy — the buyer then would have to find a carrier. But, potentially, a device buyer could purchase a prepaid wireless plan, making the total ownership cost less than currently and not obligating the buyer to a contract.

The new Google strategy, according to the…