ALKHOBAR, 18 February 2003 — Online fraud is something that has been covered in this column before. Internet users lose hundreds of millions of dollars every year in online scamming operations.

In the past, the Nigerians became particularly well known for these schemes. Unfortunately, now, due to the difficult economic conditions affecting so many countries, shysters of a variety of national origins have got into the act.

The e-mails usually begin with a claim that the correspondent is either the daughter, son or wife of a former president of some nation. The letter will go on to ask for help, which always leads to a cash payment.

While most of these felonious e-mails still give various African nations as their origin, there was one fraudulent letter that stood out from the others. It read:

"Dear friend.

"Investment from Mrs. Estrada

"I am Mrs. Louica Ejercitor Estrada, the wife of Mr. Joseph Estrada, the former president of Philippines located in the Southeast Asia. My husband was impeached from office by a backed up rising of the senate.

During my husband’s regime as president of Philippines I realized the sum of us $200 million used from various contract projects I executed successfully. I had planned long ago to invest this money in your company having fully viewed your company’s profile on the Internet. I have decided to invest this fund in your company."

The e-mail goes on to malign the government of the Philippines and to implore the individual receiving the mail to send his name, telephone and fax numbers to the Yahoo account specified, in order to provide Mrs. Estrada with assistance.

If a person takes this step, the harassment begins. Funds, bank account numbers and other personal details are requested. The purpose of this scam is not simply to steal money. Sadly, even if a person doesn’t send any money, he or she will have given up enough personal details to become a victim of identity fraud.

The person supposedly requesting the money in the e-mail above is named Louica Ejercitor Estrada. It is important to note that the wife of Joseph Estrada is Luisa Ejercito Estrada. She is currently a senator in the Philippines and is in no way involved in this fraud.

The government of the Philippines is aware of the problem. The Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission has been investigating a number of pseudo investment scams victimizing thousands of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs).

The commission has created a list of companies allegedly engaged in fraudulent activities and advised Filipinos that all OFWs shun the following groups:

1. Atlantic Invest, 2. Florentino Mateo Lending Services, 3. Golden Firebird Marketing, 4. Vefloni Lending Services, 5. Asian Media Development Group, 6. Asian Islands Management, 7. BXI Properties and Holdings, 8. Citp New Century International, 9. Crisis Solution, Inc.,10. Good Harvest Orchard, 11. Leading Lending Corp., 12. Speed Credit and Collection, 13. Access Credit and Development Group, 14. AVG Group of Companies, 15. MMC Investment and Finance Corp., 16. Multitel Investment Corp., 17. Multitel Investors Corp., 18. Multitel Lending Corp., 19. Phil-Asia Lending Investors, 20. Zurich Investment Group 4, 21. AVG Lending Investors, 22. BGA Lending Investors, 23. Coin’s Account Lending Services, 24. Red Dragon Lending Corp, 25. Five Vision Consultancy, 26. Intercontinental Services, 27. Conrad Group and Associates, 28. Servlink Cargo, 29. Overseas Workers Stock Capital, 30.Mateo Management Group, 31. "T1Bayan Group of Companies."

This list is by no means exhaustive. Unless they are in prison, charlatans usually set up new operations almost as fast as their old ones can be closed down.

The best thing to do if an e-mail asking for cash or personal details is received, is to press the keyboard’s DELETE button.

While it is terrible that technology has helped to facilitate certain types of crime, it is important to note that technology has also been used to stop criminals. Networks and databases have allowed law enforcement organizations to store and exchange incredible amounts of information.

The same trend has dramatically changed the ways other services operate, as well. Take automated teller machines for example. A person on one side of the globe can retrieve cash from his bank account at a financial institution on the other side of the planet. This is in part possible due to enhanced data storage.

Imagine a simple search on the Google Web site. Improved data storage and retrieval enables Google’s search engine to sift through the information contained on billions of Web pages.

Data storage is not a topic that attracts a lot of attention in our every day lives, but honestly we couldn’t do without it. Computers store everything as streams of binary numbers. Binary numbers are just strings of ones and zeros, put together in groups. Each one or zero in a binary number is called a bit and eight bits becomes a byte.

When storing data, the device that is being used for storage will have a capacity measured in bytes. Usually the measurement is given in thousands of bytes or kilobytes (KB), or millions of bytes or megabytes (MB), and above that there are gigabytes (GB), which would be more than a billion bytes and then come terabytes. The aver-age floppy disk holds 1,440,000 bytes or 1.44 MB. A CD holds on average 650 MB. Hard drives are where the gigabytes reside.

How much data is out there and how much is going to need to be stored globally? In her keynote at Hewlett-Packard’s ENSA@Work 2003 Conference

held in Amsterdam last month, HP’s CEO Carly Fiorina stated that "there will be more data created in the next three years — data that has to be stored, managed, used and mined for insight — than has been created in the history of mankind up to this point. Scary thought."

ENSA@Work is HP’s annual storage conference and exhibition. This year the conference focussed on the idea that while data storage will continue to be a major growth area, it is an area that is changing dramatically.

Fiorina said that HP has "heard from many of our customers that they are really focused on things like storage-utilization improvement projects. What a lot of our customers tell us is that they are trying to take the aggregate utilization of all of their storage assets from 20 percent today to up to 80 percent. But on the other hand they tell us that once they get their utilization rates up to 80 percent, they believe their storage requirements will grow at 20 to 30 percent going forward."

HP has found that customers want the best return on information technology (RoIT), which means lowest total cost of ownership, improved productivity, better manageability, better interop-erability, reduced complexity, and improved reliability and security. Companies want to do more with less. No one is willing to throw old hardware away. Companies are demanding that legacy sys-tems be combined with new developments in hardware and software to meet and exceed needs.

When HP merged with Compaq a new business unit was formed to handle customers’ storage requirements. Olaf Swantee, vice president, Network Storage Solutions, Global Business Unit (GBU), HP Europe, Middle East and Africa is focused on solutions that deliver storage as a utility service to companies.

Delivering storage as a utility is the ability to provide a constant data supply using pools of networked storage that can be managed centrally and agnostically. Providing storage in this way helps companies overcome problems associated with data storage such as scaling and cost, and simplifies storage management.

During ENSA@Work, Swantee spoke about HP and how its storage solutions are being received both regionally and globally. In the Middle East there has been some confusion about who is number one in storage, with several companies claiming the honor. Swantee explained that IDC, a world-wide market research company, measures the global storage market in 11 different ways.

"If you take all the segments, those are like external storage, direct attached storage, storage area networks (SANs), storage software, for example, if you take those 11 segments HP today in the Middle East and in Europe is leading in 10 out of 11 segments," said Swantee. "The segments where we are number one and we are particularly proud to be number one are the segments focused on where the storage market is going. These are SANs where we have 34% market share in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. External Storage is also important where we have 26% market share. The area where we are not number one is mainframe-based storage. This is storage directly attached to a mainframe product. One has to say that the market for mainframe-based storage is shrinking because customers are moving more toward open modular storage solutions."

Why does being number one matter?

"It really is not something to brag about or to constantly talk about. What is important in the storage market, which is technically still quite a challenging environment, is that at least market share says something about experience," explained Swantee. "If you take our SANs in number of units, which is the number of times we install them – the number I gave you before (concerning market share) is the value – if you take the number of installations, every second SAN comes from HP. This basically means that compared to the company in the number two position, which is IBM with UNIX, what we install in a year, IBM does in two and one-half. This shows our greater experience."

Without a doubt SANs are the driver in the storage market. More data, fewer staff and a need for scalability, efficiency and manageability, means that SAN installation is the choice being made, especially by medium and large enterprises. During ENSA@Work 2003, HP achieved an industry-first by establishing a massive heterogeneous SAN with more than 1000 ports, including a network with more than 30 switches, more than 20 different storage arrays and more than 50 servers comprising 10 different operating systems running on 15 server platforms. The SAN was designed to rival the data center environment of even the most progressive and demanding enterprises in the world and enable advanced management and functionality beyond what any company actually has to deal with today

The enormous SAN also showed HP’s commitment to modularity and standards-based products, which enable flexibility and choice. Fiorina asserted that HP will continue to stick to an engineering paradigm that bets on heterogeneity and a diverse technology environment.

"This bet on heterogeneity is a long-standing commitment of HP, it isn’t something that we’ve just come up with recently to try and get you to buy proprietary technology," she said. "And this bet on heterogeneity (diversity) is why you are going to see us continue to invest in being the leading platform provider for NT, UNIX and Linux platforms. Because we think all three are critical in building out an IT infrastructure."

Fiorina continued, "It’s also why you’re going to see us continue to invest very heavily in virtualization — virtualization in storage; virtualization in servers; and virtualization across the entire data center. Because virtualization is what ensures that you get maximum utility as well as flexibility and adaptability out of the resources, investments and the systems that you have made, and will make."

So what does all this mean? What is heterogeneity and virtualization?

Well, since understanding these concepts is essential to understanding data storage in the future, it seems only reasonable to invest some time explaining them. So that’s what we’ll be doing right here next week.

Drop by with your thinking cap on!

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