Client Server News articles from February 2005

Client Server News archives from February 2005

SCO case might see the inside of a courtroom yet: but Judge 'astonished' at SCO's lack of evidence.
February 14, 2005... Well, it looks like there's chance the $5 billion SCO v IBM case might get heard after all despite IBM's attempts to get it squelched. The federal court judge responsible for the case has thrown out all three of IBM's motions for partial...

Oasis tightens up its indulgent IP Rights policy.(Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards)
February 14, 2005... Oasis, which has kinda recognized both RAND and royalty-free before, has tinkered with its IP Rights (IPR) policy and says that the members of its 60-odd committees can elect to work either on RAND terms or what it calls Royalty-Free (RF) on...

Carly saw the writing on the wall.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... At Christmas, Carly was sidling up to fellow-CEOs like Intel's Paul Otellini and Cisco's John Chambers asking their advice on how to make a graceful, face-saving exit from HP in case the pressure she was under from the HP board boiled over,...

HP's commitment to Opteron deepens, adds blades, workstation, new two-way.
February 14, 2005... HP is about to expand its commitment to the Opteron, adding its very first Opteron workstation--to go up against Sun and IBM--an Opteron version of its two-year-old Xeon-based DL380 two-way--that's gonna irk the dickens out of Intel--and two 2p...

It's official. Swainson named CA CEO.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Chief Executive Officer)(Appointments)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... On Wednesday, an inauspicious day for CEOs everywhere considering that was the day HP CEO Carly Fiorina met the headsman's axe, CA officially made John Swainson its CEO. His two-and-half-month apprenticeship as CEO-elect under interim CEO...

Former Dell vice-chairman joins AMD board.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... AMD has named former Dell vice-chairman Morton Topfer to its board. Topfer, who worked at Motorola before going to Dell in 1994, is now managing director of Castletop Capital, an Austin, Texas investment firm that he started. It's focused on...

Intel tries to redeems itself.
February 14, 2005... Intel evidently benefited from canceling Tejas and the 4GHz Pentium 4 chips last year. On Monday it said it had move up its schedule for dual-core PC chips and that the little dickens would arrive in systems in the second quarter, robbing...

VMware should watch its back.(Virtual Iron Software Inc., Chris Stone)(plans to develop virtual computing platform )
February 14, 2005... Chris Stone, late vice-chairman of Novell responsible for its acquisition of SuSE and Ximian, has surfaced on the shiny new advisory board of Virtual Iron Software Inc, a start-up virtual computing platform outfit in Acton, Massachusetts that...

Voltaire gives iSER to the Linux community.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Voltaire has contributed its iSER protocol sources to the Linux community. iSER is a new IETF standard extension to iSCSI that supports multiple RDMA-based transports like Infiniband and Ethernet RDMA. Besides boosting iSCSI performance,...

OSDL delivers DCL 1.1 and CGL 3.0.(Linux Watch)(Carrier Grade Linux)(Open Source Development Labs )
February 14, 2005... The Open Source Development Labs has delivered its Data Center Capabilities 1.1 (DCL 1.1) specification, an expansion on its initial cut last February, and has also put out its Carrier Grade Linux Requirements Definition 3.0 (CGL 3.0) for...

New MontaVista program to push Linux in mobile phones.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... MontaVista Software has rolled out a program called Mobilinux to boost the adoption of Linux in the mobile phone business. Mobilinux brings together semiconductor vendors, ISVs and integrators to create reference architectures and provide...

Second Avalon preview coming.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Microsoft said its whizzy Avalon presentation subsystem would soon move to a second technology preview that introduces new controls, improves the layout system, heightens performance and enhances XAML support. In Microsoft lingo, a...

The Cell chip shows a bit of eye-catching leg.(microprocessor)
February 14, 2005... IBM, Sony and Toshiba engineers used the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco to hike the skirt on the vaunted and mysterious multicore Power-derived ~4GHz chip code named Cell that they've been...

COAST Consortium disintegrates.(Consortium of Anti-Spyware Technology)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Computer Associates reluctantly pulled out of COAST, the nascent Consortium of Anti-Spyware Technology Vendors, on Monday after two of COAST's four founders abandoned it right before the weekend. Sam Curry, VP of CA's eTrust security...

HP debuts new server management packs.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Hewlett-Packard has put out new management packs for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) to help manage its ProLiant and Integrity Windows servers. The kits integrate policies, groups and rules that extend MOM 2005 and automate...

Microsoft buys anti-virus firm.
February 14, 2005... Moving to strengthen its security position--and bring a tear to the eye of folks like Symantec--Microsoft said Tuesday that it's buying a second anti-virus firm--Sybari Software, the same day that it released another deluge of patches to fix...

IBM to sell Altiris as part of Toolkit.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... IBM is going to sell Altiris' Deployment Solution for Servers as part of its ServerGuide Scripting Toolkit to automate and standardize complex deployments of IBM xSeries and BladeCenter systems running both Linux and Windows. IBM has...

Gateway refreshes its servers.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Gateway has rolled out three new servers designed for a broad spectrum of business, education and government workgroups and departments. The new systems include a 9510 Series tower server, a 9415 1U and a 9515 Series 2U rack-mount. ...

Indigo preview coming in March.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Microsoft said the other day that it plans to put out a pre-beta "community technology preview" of its next-generation web services technology code named Indigo in March. Applications built using Indigo are supposed to be able to interact...

SGI debuts 4Gbps array.(Drive Bay)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... SGI rolled out what it claims is the industry's first 4 Gbps Fibre Channel storage array Tuesday. The new InfiniteStorage TP9700 RAID array is designed to provide faster data transfer throughput for bandwidth intensive environments such as...

InMage scout troops out.(Drive Bay)(InMage Systems)(InMage Systems )
February 14, 2005... Storage start-up InMage Systems has released its disaster recovery software for mid-tier enterprises involving applications such as e-mail and data bases. Dubbed DR-Scout, the appliance-based software is supposed to replicate data in any...

Sony bundles backup exec.(Drive Bay)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Sony is bundling Veritas' Back Exec QuickStart Edition software with its Advanced Intelligence Tape (AIT) drives and DDS-4 tape drives, expecting the bundle to appeal to SMBs looking for a complete and scalable offering. The bundle is...

Oracle as SQL robber.(Structured Query Language)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Oracle is beta testing its Developer Tools for Visual Studio.NET, a plug-in that can harness VS.NET 2003 to develop and deploy Oracle Database 10g applications on Windows. It's got heightened integration that's supposed to translate into...

Sun pushing Solaris-on-Opteron.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Sun has started what it calls the Solar Edge Elite program to drive reseller Solaris-on-Opteron sales to its largest customers. Only a year into selling Opteron boxes and Sun is now reportedly the largest consumer of Opterons even though...

Webroot gets big bucks.(Finance)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Anti-spyware start-up Webroot has raised a whopping $108 million in funding from a syndicate of VC firms including Technolo-gy Crossover Ventures, Accel Partners and the Mayfield Fund. It's reportedly to be the eight-year-old outfit's first...

Dell wants to be an IBM-like $80b-a-year company.
February 14, 2005... Dell earnings dropped 11% to $667 million, or 26 cents a share, in its fiscal fourth quarter ended January 28 because of a $280 million tax charge that worked out to 11 cents a share. Dell is taking the charge in anticipation of...

Enough A1 sauce to smother the worms?(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Microsoft watchers think the company could introduce its anticipated anti-virus suite at the RSA Conference in San Francisco in a few days. Close friends of Microsoft suggest that it'll bundle together some security pieces it's already released...

Credit Suisse plays Yenta to AMD & Transmeta.(Billy Grams)(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Credit Suisse First Boston thinks AMD should buy Transmeta, the entity that forced Intel to create the Centrino. It says it came to this notion "on a dark and rainy San Francisco winter night," but that its own due diligence doesn't suggest...

Now FUDcon.(Billy Grams)(Fedora Project)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... The Fedora Project is going to host its first annual Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDcon) on February 18 at Boston University.

Conspiracy theorists take note.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Novell and IBM are jointly pitching SuSE on IBM's Power platforms to ISV courting them with free software evaluations. SuSE-on-Power is supposedly IBM's instrument for doing Microsoft and Red Hat dirt.

The legacy of Carly Fiorina.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Prudential thinks it could be at least six months before HP finds a replacement for ousted CEO Carly Fiorina and at least nine months before "a new CEO takes the reins and a concrete strategy is articulated." It warns that business could drift...

Itanium watch.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Intel says its anticipated dual-core Montecito Itanium has 1.72 billion transistors but uses 23% less power than its predecessors. It's supposed to clock in at 2GHz, faster than its predecessors, but dissipate no more than 100 watts.

Longhorn watch.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Microsoft wants to get the first Longhorn beta out by the end of June, according to what John Montgomery, one of its developer division people, told CNET the other day, a target that jibes with what Credit Suisse was hearing before Christmas....

Will they see the forest for the trees?(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Positioning GroupWise, its flagship collaboration production and answer to Microsoft Exchange, as integral to its corporate strategy, Novell says it's planning three releases over the next four years: Sequoia, due this summer, Aspen, due in the...

Sun outsources its IT.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Sun is outsourcing its worldwide IT infrastructure to Computer Sciences Corporation under a five-year $360 million deal they signed that will send two-thirds of Sun's IT people to live at CSC. Sun figures it'll save $100 million over five years...

IBM trapped by SCO discovery order: but resists searching the files of 3,000 developers.
February 21, 2005... So, after a year and a half of evading discovery, IBM's lawyers evidently couldn't figure out how to wriggle out from under the new discovery order the company is under in the $5 billion SCO case--especially since their main escape route was...

Intel says TOEs are toast.(TCP Offload Engines)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Intel has a little surprise up its sleeve for the Intel Developer Forum the first week in March. It's got itself a new "T" to add to its list of other impending technologies like Vanderpool, Silvervale, La Grande, IAMT, FBD, Foxton and...

SCO Flirts with delisting.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Complicating SCO's currently unenviable position, it's gotten a notice from the Nasdaq SmallCap Market telling it that it's in danger of being delisted on February 25 because it hasn't filed its 10-K with the SEC yet for the fiscal year ending...

HP hires headhunter to find miracle worker.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... HP's board has hired Russell Reynolds Associates to search for a new CEO to replace Carly Fiorina. HP said the search would be managed by Andrea Redmond and Charles Tribbett, who co-lead the firm's CEO/Board Services Practice. Needless to...

CA hires biz dev guy, company to focus on eTrust & Unicenter.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Computer Associates has hired retired investment banker Michael Christenson as executive VP, strategy and business development reporting to COO Jeff Clarke. He will be in charge of strategic alliances and M&A. Christenson wound down a...

Microsoft to launch standalone IE 7.
February 21, 2005... In a change of mind, Microsoft says it will release the next version of its browser Internet Explorer 7 ahead of the delayed Longhorn operating system, which is now supposedly due some time next year. Microsoft says IE7 will make the world...

Key Carly aid departs for Apple.(Appointments and Resignations)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... HP senior VP of marketing Allison Johnson is leaving the company to become VP of worldwide marketing communications at Apple reporting to Steve Jobs. Johnson reportedly orchestrated HP's PR during the infamous proxy fight over the Compaq...

Mainsoft to support Solaris 10.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Mainsoft, the .NET-to-Java tools merchant and close friend of Microsoft, is about to announce a deal with Sun Microsystems in support of Solaris 10. It's going to certify its Visual MainWin product suite for x86 Solaris 10 for both 32-bit...

HP's new software throttles viruses.
February 21, 2005... Hewlett-Packard has released proprietary new software, developed by HP Labs, that it swears will control the spread of viruses across corporate networks and limit the damage they do. Dubbed Virus Throttle, it is designed to detect...

Nokia suddenly turns Microsoft-friendly.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Cell phone biggie Nokia, never exactly what you would call friends with Microsoft, is going to use Microsoft's formats to transfer music between PCs and cell phones. In a potentially iPod-trashing move, Nokia is licensing Microsoft's...

AMD's Opterons officially move to 90nm.
February 21, 2005... AMD unwrapped its two latest Opterons this week, as expected, positioning them as a major update. The new 2.6GHz chips, which are supposed to be available in 30 days, are designated the 252 and 852 and claim to be the highest-performing...

AMD demos dual-core Opterons.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... AMD demoed dual-core Opterons at LinuxWorld this week in a Cray XD1 supercomputer, an HP xw9300 workstation, an HP ProLiant DL585 and a Sun Fire V40z. The servers ran four dual-core chips and the supercomputer and workstation two each. ...

Arxceo debuts XP embedded security device.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Security start-up Arxceo has launched what it claims is the first security appliance based on XP Embedded. Dubbed Ally IP1000, the new widget is designed to prevent network reconnaissance, spoofed traffic, session hijacking, DNS cache...

HP numbers show earnings strain.
February 21, 2005... Showing you how anxious Hewlett-Packard's board was to get rid of Carly, its first-quarter numbers, posted after the market closed on Wednesday, were better than people expected. Earnings were flat, but revenues were up 10%. In case you're...

Novell finds backdoor into Red Hat's mansion.(Linux Watch)
February 21, 2005... Novell may have figured out a way to elbow into some prestige Red Hat accounts simply by giving them what they want. It has tied up with Aurema Inc, which does mainframe-style cross-platform workload management, to create ARMTech for SuSE...

OSI in life-threatening squeeze.(software licensing by Open Source Initiative)
February 21, 2005... The days of the seminal Open Source Initiative (OSI) may be numbered unless it can think of something else to do with itself besides recognizing open source licenses. OSI has officially sanctioned close to 60 open source licenses--some...

OSDL warms up for the desktop push.(Linux Watch)(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) released the first cut of a Desktop Linux (DTL) Capabilities paper this week, roughly a year after it set up a DTL working group to wrestle with how it should go about trying to pry Microsoft's fingers loose....

FSF moves the furniture around.(Linux Watch)(Free Software Foundation)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has replaced its executive director. The incumbent, Bradley Kuhn, has shifted over to the newly created $4 million Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) set up by FSF general counsel Eben Moglen and some OSDL...

New study finds Windows more secure than Linux.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Ah, the religious issue of which is more secure Windows or Linux has reared its divisive head again. Seems two researchers, one of them a professor from the Florida Institute of Technology and a Linux convert, the other the director of...

Novell open sources NetMail code.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Novell has set up an Exchange- and Domino-competitive open source project called Hula meant to create a collaboration server based on code from Novell's NetMail collaboration server, which claims four million users. It says Hula will provide...

AMD to port Xen to AMD64.(Linux Watch)(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... AMD says it's going to port Xen, the open source virtualization pack, to AMD64 in collaboration with XenSource Inc, the start-up founded to support the technology. The port of Xen, which lets a single machine run multiple operating...

Red Hat 4 is here, well almost.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Red Hat has finally trotted out the long-awaited Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4), its commercial version of the Linux 2.6 kernel, calling it "a defining milestone in the evolution of Linux as the backbone of the enterprise." It's supposed...

Unisys gets RHEL 4-certified.(Linux Watch)(Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Unisys' ES7000 system has become one of the rare boxes to be Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4-certified for both 32- and 64-bit servers with up to 32 processors. RHEL 4 is the first commercial Red Hat distribution to be based on the 2.6 Linux kernel....

StarOffice 8 betas.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Sun has been showing off a StarOffice 8 beta, claiming greater interoperability with Office and a better look-and-feel. Sun said it added productivity by increasing wizards and tools and supporting some Lotus and WordPerfect versions....

MySQL jumps on subscription train.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... MySQL AB has rolled out a new subscription-based pricing model for its open source database that combines software, support and alerts. It is called MySQL Network and was announced at LinuxWorld this week. The company said the subscription...

Wind River betas platform NE for Linux.(Linux Watch)(Network Equipment)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Embedded software house Wind River Systems put out a reference design release of its Platform for Network Equipment Linux Edition the other day. It is said to be the first Wind River platform to include a complete Linux reference file...

Sybase ports ASE for Linux to OpenPower.(Linux Watch)(Adaptive Server Enterprise )(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Sybase has launched its Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database for Linux on IBM's OpenPower-based servers. Sybase executives are pitching ASE for Linux on OpenPower as suited for transaction-heavy environments such as financial services.

IBM to pour $100m into managed Linux clients.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... IBM says it's going to invest $100 million over three year to up the Linux support and technology in its Workplace software portfolio. It says it was inspired by the high double-digit growth last year in the number of people deploying IBM...

Palamida offers Advil for software IP headache.(Linux Watch)(Palamida Inc)
February 21, 2005... The latest start-up, Palamida Inc, has managed to combine the commercial launch of its software IP asset manager for large corporations with a $5 million round of funding from marquee investors. It will compete against Black Duck, Serena...

Dead man walking update.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... After that speech in which he reportedly offered the sexist premise that the reason there aren't more women in math and science is because of some innate female limitation, Harvard president Lawrence Summers can safely be called embattled. ...

W3C makes the world a little smaller.( Universal Character Set )(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... The World Wide Web Consortium has standardized the "Character Model of the Word Web: Fundamentals," saying it provides a well-defined, well understood way for web applications to transmit and process the characters of the world's languages. ...

Liberty pushes ahead.(Liberty Alliance)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Liberty Alliance, which has pretty much canceled Microsoft's Passport, has published a draft release of ID-WSF 2.0, its second-generation framework for identity-based web services. It now supports SAML 2.0, specifically defining how SAML...

EMC gives Clariion iSCSI support.(Drive Bay)(Internet Small Computer Systems Interface)
February 21, 2005... EMC has launched new models of its Clariion storage systems with native iSCSI support; SMEs can now deploy low-cost SANs using their existing IP network infrastructure. The new systems include the Clariion AX100i, CX300i and CX500i. ...

3Par to debut new copy utility.(Drive Bay)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... 3Par is planning to release a new copy utility called mySnapshot on Tuesday so non-storage folks such as software developers, test engineers and database administrators can make copies of test data on their own without bothering storage...

Xerox debuts new archiving drives.(Drive Bay)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Xerox has rolled out new storage gear designed to let companies store and retain important corporate information for several years and meet regulatory compliance requirements. Xerox executives say the new Ultra Density Optical drive,...

Brocade comes in strong.(Drive Bay)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Brocade earned $27.9 million, or 10 cents a share, on revenues of $161.6 million in the fiscal first quarter ended January 29 thanks to growth in the midrange, enterprise and blade segments. The storage switch house lost $68.8 million, or...

NetApp profits up 50%.(Drive Bay)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Network Appliance came in with earnings of $60.1 million, or 16 cents a share, up 50%, on revenues of $412.7 million, up 39%, for its fiscal third quarter ended January 28. Wall Street was expecting 16 cents on revenues of $407 million. ...

Evidently HP got a woman to clean house.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... HP's board was reportedly able to squeeze its list of complaints with Carly's administration on four pieces of paper that were assembled and read to her in early January by Patricia Dunn, now her replacement as chairman of the board. From all...

Carly reportedly fired the wrong people.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... The rumor mill says one of the problems the HP board had with Carly was the preemptory way she fired three key executives for lack of something better to do when HP's fiscal Q3 numbers came a cropper last year. Supposedly they were the wrong...

HP has considered buying Xerox, Kodak.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... HP has thought a lot about acquiring either Eastman Kodak or Xerox to flesh out its printer operation, according to what somebody close to HP told the New York Times. Xerox has a market cap a tad under $13 billion and Kodak close to $10...

Sun to its critics: go suck an egg.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Sun president Jonathan Schwartz apparently feels vindicated. According to his blog posting last Friday, 420,895 Solaris 10 licenses were downloaded in the first 10 days or so since the operating system started to ship commercially on January...

Expect immersion.(Billy Grams)
February 21, 2005... Intel intends to make its platformization the centerpiece of the Intel Developer Forum March 1-3.

Microsoft speaks in tongues.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Microsoft's got an experimental research language it calls C Omega that it claims won't turn into a supported commercial language or be integrated into any product. It's a data-oriented programming language, an extension of C# 1.0, that's...

Lab building on upswing.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... HP has set up a $3 million open source utility performance center (HPC1) in France for prototyping and deploying complex IT solutions involving its products and services. HP apparently got the University of Oslo to can its Sun-based e-mail...

The legal mind at work.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... In a footnote in its motion for reconsideration of the latest discovery order that the court imposed on IBM in the SCO case, IBM says that in the last year and a half it has produced documents from the files of 174 people and SCO has produced...

Novell hires chief marketer.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Novell has hired William Hewitt, the group VP who used to be responsible for PeopleSoft's demand generation and field marketing, as its chief marketing officer. He gets to wear senior VP chevrons.

$2b & all we get are these stinking worms.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Bill Gates told the RSA Conference crowd the other day that Microsoft spends over $2 billion a year on security-focused R&D, a third of the company's total R&D budget. Some ROI.

OES exceeds historical interest.(Billy Grams)(Open Enterprise Server)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Novell says the NetWare+SuSE Open Enterprise Server it sent to open beta in December has been downloaded 7,000 times, the largest number in Novell's history. It's supposed to be available in early March and will be priced the same as NetWare...

Gartner expects PC sales to slow.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Gartner looked into its crystal ball and decided that worldwide PC shipments would total 199 million units this year, up 9% over 2004, which in turn was up 11.6% over 2003. It expects mobile PCs, which won the popularity contest long ago, to...