Client Server News articles from February 2002

Client Server News archives from February 2002

Foo Equals WSI.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Sources say Microsoft and IBM are scheduled to wheel out the so-called Foo initiative on Thursday, February 7. At press time BEA's participation was looking a bit dubious. There were talks with the company, but evidently it didn't make the cut....

Rustling its Skirts, Sun Shows a Hint of Ankle on its Blade Strategy.
February 4, 2002... It forever fascinates us how the whole pack of computer companies always manages to find its way to the same magical spring of bright ideas. Sometimes it must be practically like twilight at a Serengeti watering hole. So it's no surprise...

IBM's "Breakthrough" Storage Software Slips Badly.
February 4, 2002... IBM's Storage Tank software is taking its own sweet time getting out of the door. IBM announced Storage Tank in December 2000 calling it a "technology breakthrough" that creates a universal storage system capable of sharing data across any...

Egenera's Little Coup: Four Fosters on a Blade.
February 4, 2002... Egenera, the Linux blade start-up, is reportedly in manufacturing now with a four-processor blade packaged in a 1U using the Foster MP chips that Intel isn't supposed to launch until CeBit in mid-March. Egenera's got an early parts supply and...

Halcyon Claims To Bridge Java-.NET Divide.(Product Announcement)
February 4, 2002... Halcyon Software Inc, a little-known Java developer, claims it's created a Java implementation of the .NET Framework that will invest .NET apps and web services with Java's vaunted portability, resolving a central crisis in the great...

Europe Okays HP-Compaq Merger; Walter Says it's the Kiss of Death.
February 4, 2002... Many people think Hewlett-Packard took another step toward its ultimate destruction Thursday when the EU, as widely expected, blessed its proposed purchase of Compaq. The deal sailed through review without HP having to sacrifice any assets or...

IBM CEO To Quit at the End of February.
February 4, 2002... The widely watched changing of the guard at IBM is finally in play. The company said Tuesday that heir apparent Sam Palmisano, 50, will take over as CEO on March 1. He's expected to have a good 10-year run. Lou Gerstner, whose contract...

InterTrust Challenges More Microsoft Patents.
February 4, 2002... InterTrust Technologies Corporation is evidently trying to strengthen the digital rights management patent infringement suit it's had pending against Microsoft since last April by contesting Microsoft's ownership of two newly issued patents...

Compaq Skates Off on its New Blades.
February 4, 2002... This is the same story that broke on Monday. Long about now it would be useful to know how those darling people Compaq and Hewlett-Packard segregated off in that clean room to divine their future as a single entity have dealt with blades....

Compaq Aggressively Ups its Guidance.
February 4, 2002... Either the idea of impending marriage really agrees with Compaq or it just took delivery on some really superb Columbian weed. Saying it's on a roll after coming in profitable in Q4, the company brazenly upped its guidance for fiscal 2002...

Intel May Invest in Wasabi.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Sources say Intel may pick up a stake in young New York City-based NetBSD house Wasabi.

Montecito & Chivano.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... ZDNet got it right. Intel has got two revs of Itanium on the drawing board called Montecito and Chivano that incorporate concepts from the DEC Alpha chip whose IP Intel licensed last year along with hiring Alpha engineers. Montecito will come...

Oasis on the WSRP Trail.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Oasis, the XML interoperability consortium, has got itself a Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) Technical Committee to create an XML and web services standard for the plug-n-play of visual, user-facing web services in portals and other...

Settling in a Groove.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Ray Ozzie's start-up Groove Networks, Microsoft's little P2P friend and one of the places it's parked an investment, has imported some new managerial talent. Chuck Teubner is coming in from USinternetworking, where Microsoft lost a packet, as...

Yup.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... After first telling US Today (CSN No 434), HP CEO Carly Fiorina has now confided to the SEC that HP may make more layoffs and it looks like she means whether or not the Compaq deal goes through. In other words, more than the 15,000 they are...

Plus Ca Change.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... AOL Time Warner blocked the Trillian instant messenger developed by Connecticut start-up Cerulean Studios from connecting to the AOL system. Trillian's role in life is to let people access multiple IM programs like Microsoft's MSN Messenger,...

HP's New Little Servers.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 4, 2002... HP is bringing out a small to mid-sized business server that starts at $649 for a configuration with a 950MHz Celeron chip and a 40GB IDE drive. The thing is tagged the tc2100 and can be had with a 1.13GHz Pentium III with 512KB of memory and a...

3Dlabs & its Mystery Financier.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Accelerator house 3Dlabs, which has racked up a speckled record, has gotten $10 million in convertible subordinated debt financing from an unidentified "strategic investor" that it will use for working capital. In December it got $4 million...

So They Had a Skunkworks All Along.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... We went down this road ourselves a while back and failed to tease the answer out of Intel so our hats are off to the Mercury News, which managed to turn a source and get him to admit that Intel does indeed have an ultra-secret skunkworks off in...

Legal Review.
February 4, 2002... * Wily ProComp, the Sun-AOL-Oracle-backed trade group, recruited Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel Prize-winning Stanford University economist, to its side. Arrow signed an affidavit criticizing the government inflammatory antitrust settlement with...

Fancy That: VA Sold its Hardware Operation on the Sly.
February 4, 2002... Now isn't this odd. VA Linux Systems, a public company and one-time Linux bellwether, dramatically exits the Linux hardware business amid massive write-offs and lay-offs, and doesn't think to mention to anyone that it's "sold" its server...

Red Hat Dumps E-Commerce Suite.
February 4, 2002... Despite denials from senior executives in the last few days, Red Hat has dropped its E-Commerce Suite for mid-sized enterprises barely five months after it was launched. The software has already disappeared from Red Hat's web site and the...

Caldera Slashes OpenLinux Server Prices 70%.
February 4, 2002... Caldera has drastically cut pricing on its OpenLinux Server reportedly out of channel pressures. The latest OpenLinux Server - rev 3.1.1 - is now $249 with 60 days of e-mail support. A few weeks ago, the old rev 3.1 was $799. Some of...

Mono Trades GPL for More Commercial License.
February 4, 2002... The leaders of the Mono Project, the Ximian-led open source effort to produce a Linux version of Microsoft's C# programming language and its little friend, the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), the stuff that ECMA standardized for...

Red Flag To Resell GraphOn.
February 4, 2002... GraphOn, which supposedly cut a tripartite deal with Compaq and Red Flag Software 18 months ago to penetrate China, that mother of all marketplaces (CSN No 355), a deal that apparently went nowhere, now says it's got a reseller agreement with...

HP Debuts New Linux Offerings.(Product Announcement)
February 4, 2002... Hewlett-Packard has expanded its Linux portfolio with new software, servers and services. Targeted at telcos, network equipment providers and other enterprises, the offerings include a pay-per-use utility pricing program for Linux service...

FSMLabs Pinches Turbo Korea COO.
February 4, 2002... Finite State Machine Labs (FSMLabs), creators of RTLinux, has found itself a VP of worldwide sales and business development in Rodney Johnson. Johnson joins the company from Turbolinux Systems Korea, where he was COO. Ironically Turbolinux...

Start-up BladeLogic Does Deal with HP.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Six-month-old start-up BladeLogic Inc has announced what it calls its first major deal. It's integrated its Network Shell server management tools with HP's ServiceControl Manager (SCM). Together the stuff is supposed to let admins manage Linux,...

Covalent Raises $18m.
February 4, 2002... Apache specialist Covalent Technologies has raised a $18 million third round, taking its total financing to $36 million. Menlo Ventures led the financing, which included participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Granite...

Sony Ship Linux Kit for Playstation 2.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 4, 2002... Sony is selling a Linux operating system for its Playstation 2 game console. It's reportedly so Playstation can run Linux apps, so that Linux programmers can use it as a platform to develop games. The kit comes with a 40GB hard drive, a USB...

More Layoffs at LynuxWorks Reported.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Sources say embedded OS vendor LynuxWorks recently laid off about 8% of its employees, its second headcount reduction in six months, leaving it with slightly less than 200 people. Sources also said the San Jose, California concern has...

An Uncharacteristically Radical HP To Push Desktop Linux.(MandrakeSoft Linux marketing deal)(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... HP in a daring move said it's teaming up with MandrakeSoft to peddle the Frenchman's Linux to the US and European desktop market. HP's full line of business PCs, both the Professionals and Essentials, will be certified and HP will sell the...

Glory Be. It's Not. It Is. It's LSB!
February 4, 2002... Well, imagine that, a reinvigorated Free Standards Group (FSG) has actually delivered the long-awaited, long-promised, long-delayed Linux Standard Base specification, which was once feared would never rouse itself long enough from its great...

IBM Loves Linux.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... IBM's commitment to Linux is supposed to be paying off. It says it's working with 2,500 Linux customers worldwide, with products ranging from web serving to large supercomputers doing genomic analysis. Blue is also supposed to be running Linux...

Wanted: Desktop Linux Beta Testers.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... The quixotic Xandros operation that inherited Corel's Linux interests is shopping for beta testers to shake down its Debian-based Desktop 1.0 code, due to hit market in May. It's looking for 200 people for the first phase of the test that will...

Cobalt's Fortunes Wax and Wane.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... The nose counters at Netcraft have been keeping tabs on Linux-based Cobalt unit - effectively Sun's other x86 OS now that it's killing x86 Solaris - and says that "Although the number of ip addresses on Cobalt machines has increased over the...

CA's Numbers Game.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Computer Associates has added 23 - count 'em 23 - new offerings - 17 of 'em available now - to its Linux portfolio. Twenty are for mainframes. Overall, CA has 54 Linux-based products, 42 shipping, the rest in beta. CA supports Linux across...

PHPed Ported to Linux.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... NuSphere is readying a Linux port of its PHPed integrated development environment. It's in beta and is expected to move into general availability in March.

Compaq, Sendmail Team Up.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Compaq and Sendmail have paired to offer a Linux-version of Sendmail's e-mail software on ProLiant servers. The customizable offering combines Sendmail's Mailstream Manager and Integrated Mail Suite software with the ProLiant DL360, 380, 580...

Sun Loses E*Trade to Linux.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Citing cost savings and performance, online broker E*Trade is migrating from a proprietary platform to Linux. Its new gear will include IBM's Intel servers. E*Trade CTO Josh Levine said the brokerage picked Linux because "open systems and...

OSDL Turns Linux Designer After All.
February 4, 2002... Well, well, isn't Intel on a roll. HP is signed up as one of its telecom server customers and rumor has it IBM and maybe Compaq could be next. The theory is it's getting traction against Sun in the telecom space, where Sun is known to derive...

Sotera To Secure Storage Networks.
February 4, 2002... Stealth start-up Sotera Networks is readying a wire-speed encryption system to secure storage networks. The San Jose, California concern is stingy in describing the technology but claims it will be the first to provide a network-level...

EMC Fashions New Business Continuity Offering.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... EMC has launched new business continuity widgetry that promises to help firms minimize the risk of unplanned outages. Dubbed Rapid Results, the new stuff leverages EMC's professional services organization, hardware, software and business...

SANgate Hires Operations Head.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... SANgate Systems has named Henk Schalke its new VP of operations. Schalke, previously VP of operations at wireless locating systems vendor PinPoint Corporation, will be responsible for all aspects of the product delivery process including...

NuView Optimizes StorageX for NetApp.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... NuView is optimizing its StorageX virtualization and storage management software for Network Appliance filers. Besides its virtualization capabilities, StorageX for NetApp is supposed to let administrators manage multiple NetApp boxes in a...

Motai To Head FalconStor Japan.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Storage networking software provider FalconStor Software has named Akihiko Motai head of its Japanese operations. As country manager of FalconStor Japan, Motai will be responsible for all operations including sales, marketing, professional...

Security Blanket.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Observers say that all those people who doubt the sincerity or rigor of Microsoft's new security jihad should have been on the Redmond campus Monday when everyone who works at Microsoft went back to school. There were reportedly seminars...

Dueling Web Sites.
February 4, 2002... Walter Hewlett, the HP director and guy Carly and her thralls accuse of being a Luddite for opposing their Compaq deal, set up an anti-acquisition web site at www.votenohpcompaq .com/. Not to be outdone, HP responded in kind with an evocative...

Shock Treatment.(Sun Microsystems)(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Merrill Lynch says Sun is trying to re-invent itself with an emphasis on "architecture-led selling" and wants to be "the open IBM." Worst case, it says, "Sun is the next SGI." (Ouch!) It ticks off Sun's problems as Sparc's sustainability, the...

Xeons To Get Hyper-Threaded.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Hyper-Threading, which is what Intel has taken to calling what was originally known as Jackson Technology - sneaky widgetry for fooling server applications into thinking two processors exist when actually only one does - is coming to all Xeons...

IBM Global Services Invests in Aduva.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... A little bird says IBM Global Services is putting money into Israeli-based start-up Aduva Inc, the dedicated Linux patch peddler. The money - and we're not sure how much it is or whether we'll ever know - is reportedly an addendum to the $14...

McKinley Watch.(64-bit microprocessor from Intel)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 4, 2002... Gee, the famous peek-a-boo McKinley chip, Intel's second stab at getting a 64-bit microprocessor off the ground, has been sampling with OEMs for a whole year now. How time flies. Intel of course is expecting to launch McKinley, which requires a...

STA To Define Serial Attached SCSI Spec.(SCSI Trade Association)(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Picking up for the like-named working group, the SCSI Trade Association (STA) is now supposed to define the marketing requirements for the Serial Attached SCSI spec to give mid-range and low-end servers access to a higher order of storage. A...

Macromedia Rumors.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Consider the source but F&%4edcompany.com claims Microsoft and Macromedia are talking because Macromedia's in trouble and layoffs are imminent. One wonders of course how Macromedia might fit into the unannounced Microsoft-IBM Web Services...

WS-I: Out of the Closet.(Web Services Interoperability Organization spearheaded by Microsoft and IBM)
February 11, 2002... Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya they were putting this thing together. To head off a modern Tower of Babel, IBM and Microsoft are spearheading a Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) that they say will work out a common...

Sun Blinks.
February 11, 2002... Well, something sure spooked Sun to make it act like a horse taking off at a gallop when it saw a rattler. Sun missed a golden opportunity to make a splash at the LinuxWorld show in New York last week - where the guys manning its booth were...

M'soft Supplies its Missing Java Migration Piece.
February 11, 2002... In a move that's likely to irritate the bejesus out of Sun Microsystems, Microsoft Tuesday wheeled out a beta of the missing piece in its year-old overarching Java-to-.NET migration strategy known provocatively as JUMP. The new stuff is...

Sun To Sue Microsoft FT Says.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... The Financial Times has a story out saying that Sun Microsystems is about to sue Microsoft for its anticompetitive behavior in playing fast and loose with Sun's precious Java. The paper seems to be under the impression it could happen any...

Rational Commits to .NET & Java.(Rational XDE Professional 2000)(Product Announcement)
February 11, 2002... On the theory that .NET and Java are going to be the only two dogs pulling the sled from here on out, Rational Software has buckled its design and modeling tools to the two premier development environments, Microsoft's new Visual Studio.NET and...

Borland Targets C++ Web Services Opportunity.(Borland C++ Builder 6.0 released in Enterprise, Professional and Personal Editions)(Product Announcement)
February 11, 2002... In the run-up to the great Microsoft tools party in a few days, Borland says it's got its Borland C++ Builder 6 ready, saying it can do rapid development of e-business apps with web services support in a "true" C++ visual development...

Iona Adds to its Larder.(Iona Technologies' Orbix E2A Collaborate and Partner editions)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 11, 2002... Ah, yes, Iona. Now, let's see. In this mad, touchy-feely dash to web services, Iona's the one that claims its stuff doesn't treat web services like a feature, heck, no, they're central to the company's Orbix E2A widgetry. Ah, yes, well, that...

HP Sets Date; Eyes Turn to ISS.(Institutional Shareholder Service)
February 11, 2002... HP will seek shareholder approval for its contested acquisition of Compaq at 8 o'clock Tuesday morning, March 19; Compaq shareholders, provided the deal hasn't been savaged, will get to express their opinion the next day. Having a date...

Funny, but Carly & Walter's Stories Don't Jibe.
February 11, 2002... So how is it really that Compaq and Hewlett-Packard came to be caught up in their elephantine mating ritual aiming at the biggest, potentially most destructive merger ever seen? Walter Hewlett, HP's dissident board member, tells quite a...

Walter to Carly: "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire".
February 11, 2002... Episode 13: HP CEO Carly Fiorina publicly claims on Monday that she's got enough votes to put the Compaq merger over. Her b?te noir Walter Hewlett immediately calls her a liar claiming her "statement appears to be a clear violation of the...

Poof, There Goes That Dell Itanium Box Again.(Dell Computer Dell Precision Workstation 730)(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... eWeek swears it's got the story nailed this time. It's saying again for the second time that Dell has canned its Itanium Precision Workstation 730 for lack of interest. The first time through a few weeks ago Dell denied it although not...

Whoops.(Correction Notice)
February 11, 2002... Hmmm. Seems we got the story a bit twisted. Tim Witham, the director of the Open Source Development Lab didn't say he couldn't get the vendors to back a hardened data center Linux, he said he was about to start rallying them to the cause when...

. Compiler Framework for Itanium Ready.(from Intel and Chinese Academy of Sciences)(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Intel and its buddy of the last year the Chinese Academy of Sciences have delivered themselves of an advanced compiler framework for the Itanium line. They're on a two-year quest to develop the next generation of compilers. The framework is...

.Carly Blows Off Advice from Jack Welch.(former GE chairman against Compaq acquisition)(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Retired GE chairman Jack Welch, regarded by many as the greatest CEO of all time, told Carly Fiorina, a neophyte at the job, that her plan to acquire Compaq will create the kind of "chaos" that competitors will exploit. Neutron Jack, now a...

.HP To Trump Old Guidance.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... HP said Monday that its Q1 results are going to shoot through the guidance it gave back in mid-November when it forecast that its revenues would be down sequentially because of seasonality. It said an obviously surprising uptick in consumer...

.Judge Asked To Halt M'soft Settlement.(Colleen Kollar-Kotelly)(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... The American Antitrust Institute wants Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to stop the antitrust settlement process until she decides whether Microsoft disclosed all the relevant contacts its lobbyist had with the government. Following AT&T's old...

.Wounded InterTrust Retrenches, Seeks "Alternatives".
February 11, 2002... InterTrust Technologies Corporation, the shrinking digital rights management (DRM) house that's suing Microsoft for patent infringement, has laid off 45% of its staff. It's also retained financial advisors Allen & Company to find strategic...

.InterTrust Files Second Suit against Microsoft.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... InterTrust filed a second patent infringement suit against Microsoft Wednesday, alleging that Microsoft's Plug and Play Driver Certification Program infringes one of its patents, No 6,157,721. Issued in December 2000, the InterTrust patent...

.Microsoft's Enemies Got Pushy with the Feds.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... US deputy assistant attorney general Deborah Majoras said at a conference the other day that a lobbyist representing Microsoft's foes tried to intimidate the Justice Department last fall when the agency was moving toward settling the antitrust...

.Moody's Casts Evil Eye on CA.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Dear. Dear. Computer Associates was forced to pull the sale of $1 billion in bonds the other day that would have let it refinance its debt because Moody's Investor Service was threatening to downgrade its credit rating, a situation that helped...

.Microsoft Should Take Lessons.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Intel has managed to dodge the bullet. The European regulators have dropped a year-long investigation into complaints brought by AMD and Via Technologies that Intel was being a bully, abusing its dominant position and not giving its rival a...

.XML: An RDBMS Issue.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Merrill Lynch says IBM is trying to figure out whether it's going to need a new database architecture to handle unstructured data, increasingly written in XML. The broker figures Oracle's wrestling with the same question. If they don't move,...

.HP Writes Blade Spec.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Hewlett-Packard, the first of the major vendors to move into blades a couple of months ago, has come up with a blade specification it calls OpenBlade meant to rally followers to its CompactPCI-based architecture. HP wants its approach,...

.Intel Seeks Hyper-Threaded Apps.
February 11, 2002... In an effort to drum up as much ISV support for its high-end, margin-enhancing Xeons as it can, Intel has devised an Early Access Program so folks whose server software is - tsk - still unoptimized can truly partake of the glories of...

.Novell Joins Liberty Alliance.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Novell, whose eDirectory includes identity management, has joined the Liberty Alliance as a sponsor. As one of Microsoft's longest serving opponents, where else would it go? It said it expects to participate in the policy, marketing and...

.PCI-X 2.0 Inches Forward.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... The draft PCI-X 2.0 specification has hit final review by the PCI- SIG's PCI-X Technical Work Group on its way to review by the full SIG later this quarter and general release in Q2. The new standard will facilitate connections to adapter cards...

.BizTalk Upgraded.(Microsoft BizTalk Server 2002)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 11, 2002... Microsoft has upgraded its 14-month-old BizTalk Server integration software. New features in BizTalk Server 2002 include a technology called SEED to enable rapid connectivity to business partners, improved XML web services support,...

.IBM Workstations Put Under One Umbrella.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 11, 2002... IBM has folded its Sun-baiting RISC-based Unix workstations into its Intel-based IntelliStation line, bragging that it's the only outfit to be going after the $7.5 billion workstation market with a three- pronged strategy of Windows, Linux and...

.PlateSpin Gets Follow-on Backing.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... PlateSpin Inc, the two-and-a-half-year-old Toronto-based server infrastructure management start-up, has gotten $1.9 million from the Canadian VentureLink Fund and San Jose, California's Raza Foundries. The follow-on funding is supposed to...

.Hammer Hits First Silicon.(AMD's Hammer chip)
February 11, 2002... AMD got first silicon on its Hammer chip in January, according to AMD Fellow Wayne Meretsky. Now whether that means AMD so-called Clawhammer or its Sledgehammer or both of them because they're basically two sides of the same coin is completely...