Client Server News articles from June 2009

Client Server News archives from June 2009

Cloud by Mail.(Amazon.com Inc.)
June 1, 2009... Amazon has started telling people to send in their cloud data by mail. No, really. Swear to God. It's not just us enamored of how much better people look by candlelight. Because of dead-slow bandwidth on burgeoning datasets at the...

Desktone Trademarks DaaS.
June 1, 2009... Desktone has gotten trademarks on the expressions "desktops as a service" and "DaaS" from the US Patent and Trademark Office. Senior director of strategic development Jeff Fisher says the company will enforce the trademarks if it can -...

Google's Out To Catch a Wave.(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... Google has a new open communications and collaboration platform up its sleeve that the public won't see for a few months called Google Wave. It combines features of e-mail, instant messaging and document sharing. Conversations, so to...

Dell's Not Ready To Call a Bottom.
June 1, 2009... Dell, the industry's bellwether of pain, saw earnings plunge 63% to $290 million or 15cents a share on revenues down 23% to $12.3 billion in its first fiscal quarter ended May 1. Its operating income was off 54% at $414 million....

IBM Sues its Ex-M&A Chief for Taking a Job at Dell.
June 1, 2009... IBM is suing another one of its former executives to stop him from going to a competitor. This time it's former M&A chief David Johnson who's bound for Dell. Last time it was chip guru Mark Papermaster after he was hired by Apple to be...

Adobe Treads on PowerPoint's Toes.
June 1, 2009... Adobe is gonna try nibbling on the great PowerPoint franchise. It's publicly beta testing a collaborative web-based presentation application built on Flash called Acrobat.com Presentations. The widgetry is another arrow in a quill of...

Microsoft Abandons its Search Engine for a 'Decision' Engine.
June 1, 2009... Microsoft did as expected and unwrapped its remade, rebranded search engine when CEO Steve Ballmer turned up for a chat with PC maven Wall Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference in California Thursday. Live...

HP Only Gets a Piece of Donatelli.
June 1, 2009... A Massachusetts court has decided that the former president of EMC's storage business, David Donatelli, until a few weeks ago the company's number two guy in charge of the bulk of its ~$15 billion in revenues, can go to work for HP after all....

VMware Buys 5% of Terremark.
June 1, 2009... VMware is buying a 5% piece of its top infrastructure service provider Terremark Worldwide Inc for $20 million, paying $5 apiece for four million newly minted shares. Terremark is pushing VMware's vCloud widgetry into the enterprise and...

Intel Indulges in RISCy Saber Rattling.
June 1, 2009... On the eve of AMD delivering Istanbul, its first six-core chip, months ahead of schedule, Intel did a bit of thunder-stealing and started talking up its coming eight-core MP chip, the Nehalem-EX, which won't be available in systems until early...

It Can't Get Much Worst for Servers than Q1: IDC.
June 1, 2009... As Lot's wife found out, looking back can be nasty and Q1 was very nasty for servers according to IDC. Server revenue worldwide dropped 24.5% year-over-year to $9.9 billion in the first quarter, it says, the worst showing in the 12 years...

'The Bad News is We're Gaining Share': HP CEO Mark Hurd.
June 1, 2009... HP CEO Mark Hurd told a Sanford Bernstein conference in New York Thursday that he's not ready to call a bottom or even speculate on the timing of a breakout, when the bubble of pent-up demand created by four-year-old desktops, notebooks and...

HP Using Cast Iron To Push Clouds through the Channel.
June 1, 2009... HP and Cast Iron Systems, the Saas/cloud integrator, have partnered up to offer integration services to SMBs looking to reduce costs by leveraging SaaS applications in their existing infrastructures and applications. Cast Iron calls the...

AOL To Spin Out of Time Warner.
June 1, 2009... Time Warner confirmed Thursday that it's finally going to lance its carbuncle, AOL. The unit will be spin out around the end of the year as a separate publicly traded company run by ex-Google ad honcho Tim Armstrong hired for the job in...

EMC Buys Configuresoft.
June 1, 2009... EMC Wednesday said it's buying Configuresoft, the makers of server configuration, change and compliance management software, on undisclosed terms. The transaction is expected to close next month and have little impact on EMC's results this...

Russians Value Facebook at $10b, Chuck in $200m.
June 1, 2009... Facebook said Tuesday that it had taken $200 million from Russian Internet investor Digital Sky Technologies (DST). In return DST gets 1.96% of Facebook's equity in preferred stock, no board seat and no vote, not even observer status. ...

Red Hat Sues Swiss Government Agency over Microsoft Deal.
June 1, 2009... Red Hat and 17 other companies last week sued the Swiss Federal Bureau for Building and Logistics (BBL), a government agency, in the Swiss Federal Administration Court seeking to overturn the award of a $36 million three-year contract to...

Novell Profits Up & It's Got a New Friend.(Financial report)
June 1, 2009... Revenue from its Linux Platform Products, however, increased 25% year-over-year to $37 million. The results seem counter-intuitive. IDC reported Thursday that Linux server revenue - and it's talking hardware - was only $1.4 billion in...

Nvidia's Ion Gets its First Customer.
June 1, 2009... This summer Lenovo will start selling the world's first Atom-based netbook sporting Nvidia's Ion graphics platform. Nvidia of course has claimed Intel priced Atom with its own graphics and chipset for less than Atom alone. The IdeaPad S12 has a...

Netbooks Cannibalize 20% of Laptops.
June 1, 2009... Intel's European sales chief Christian Morales told Reuters that netbooks have cannibalized about 20% of full laptop sales. The wire service also quotes Morales as saying that netbooks currently represent ~16% of all notebooks sales globally...

Ex-MySQL Chief Joins RightScale Board.
June 1, 2009... Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has joined the RightScale board. It's the cloud management start-up. Mickos of course is treasured for his experience in high-growth start-ups.

Zune To Surf.
June 1, 2009... Microsoft says the next generation of Zune, its iPod-challenging music player, will have a web-surfing web browser, a battery-saving organic light-emitting diode touch screen, and a digital radio receiver. It's due out in the US this fall as...

Cisco Pushes into Volume Server Market.
June 8, 2009... Cisco Wednesday came up with entry-level rack-mounted versions of its high-end Unified Computing System (UCS) that it means to push into the channel where it will piggyback on resellers that already sell other people's machines. That mean...

Cassatt Collapses into CA.
June 8, 2009... After weeks of slow-moving negotiations and due diligence, CA has bought what it describes as "certain data center automation and policy-based optimization expertise and assets from Cassatt," the failed Bill Coleman start-up that sucked up $100...

EMC & NetApp in Tug-of-War over Data Domain.
June 8, 2009... Wednesday morning NetApp raised its offer for Data Domain to $30 a share to match EMC's hostile bid. However, it can't match EMC's deeper pockets. It's still offering a mix of cash and stock but claims its new bid is really worth $1.9 billion...

Windows 7 Due October 22.
June 8, 2009... Microsoft says Windows 7, its new Vista-replacing operating system, will be generally available on Thursday October 22, a month ahead of Black Friday, the traditional holiday shopping kickoff in the states and three months ahead of its supposed...

Now Imagine a Sun Netbook, Larry Does.
June 8, 2009... Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who is soon to own Sun Microsystems, made a cameo appearance at JavaOne Tuesday to reassure the faithful of his continued investment in their pet language. And to those naysayers who figure Oracle's going to dump...

Tibco Silver - Amazon for Dummies.(Brief article)
June 8, 2009... Tibco is going down the cloud path like everybody else and like everybody else claiming that what it's got is "unique." Its mission is to make it easier for the cloud-curious but diffident Global 2000 to use Amazon and put to rest their...

Russian Regulators Investigating Microsoft: Reuters.
June 8, 2009... Russia must need pin money. According to Reuters, its anti-monopoly police are investigating Microsoft because supplies of XP have dried up and it thinks Microsoft violated its laws by cutting deliveries of the operating system to the...

Verizon Takes to the Cloud.
June 8, 2009... Verizon has been talking about launching an on-demand Computing-as-a-Service (CaaS) utility for two years now. It didn't know then that it was talking about a cloud but it did Wednesday when it finally launched the thing, a few months after its...

Intel Enables Anorexic-But-Not-Pricey Laptops.
June 8, 2009... Really thin laptops are pricey and little netbooks are dumb. That leaves a space in the middle that Intel - in a money-generating segmentation exercise - means to fill with low-cost, skinny, full-featured hybrids" that are a cross between the...

Supremes To Hear Bilski Appeal.
June 8, 2009... The US Supreme Court is going to hear the Bilski business methods patent appeal in December. A district court and then the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit en banc threw out the so-called State Street test for patentability when...

AMD Pushes Out Six-Core Chip.
June 8, 2009... AMD has a 45nm six-core chip now just like Intel that will appear in HP, Cray, Dell, SGI, IBM and Sun systems this month. How the Istanbul chip and its adopters fare in a lousy make-do market remains to be seen. AMD pushed the doohickey out...

Adobe Previews Cloud-based BrowserLab.(Adobe Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
June 8, 2009... Adobe has broken out a free preview of BrowserLab, a hosted cloud service that will let web designers compare their sites on various browsers and operation systems to pinpoint anything squirlly. The widgetry, code named Meer Meer, includes...

Sun's Java Store in Private Beta.
June 8, 2009... Sun talked up its promised new Apple-beholden Java Store at JavaOne. It said a private beta was underway and would open to all US-based Java users later this year. It also said that developers can begin submitting Java SE- and...

Intel Buys Wind River $884m.(Company overview)
June 8, 2009... Intel is buying Wind River for roughly $884 million in cash, $11.50 a share, a 44% premium. The move into software will give Intel VxWorks, Wind River's proprietary and multi-core-ready RTOS, and its commercial-grade Linux operating system...

Acer To Sell Android Netbook.
June 8, 2009... Acer could be the first of the big PC vendors to peddle an Android netbook. It means to start selling such a device in Q3. It has not said what the widget will cost or what portion of its output will be dedicated to the Google OS. The...

Hadoop Start-up Raises $6m.
June 8, 2009... Cloudera, the eight-month-old commercial Hadoop start-up that raised a $5 million first round last year, has gotten a $6 million B round it says it doesn't need, led by Greylock with Accel Partners, an existing backer, kicking in. Greylock gets...

Penguin Builds Scyld Management Framework.(Penguin Computing )(Brief article)
June 8, 2009... Penguin Computing has built a Scyld Integrated Management Framework (IMF) that's supposed to make it easier to monitor and manage what are usually quite elaborate HPC Beowolf clusters. It aggregates functionality in a single web interface...

Google Takes Another Crack at Enterprise Search.(Brief article)
June 8, 2009... Google has hauled out a next-generation yellow enterprise Search Appliance based as usual on a customized firewall-protected Dell PowerEdge rack server. The Linux-based widget is supposed to have a new architecture and new software as well...

So the Dog Ate Your Presentation Huh.
June 8, 2009... PBworks, which used to be PBwiki until a month ago when it realized the name didn't fit anymore, is targeting professional services and agencies with a newfangled PBworks Project Edition that combines hosted collaboration with project...

Oracle Reportedly Hiring.(Brief article)
June 8, 2009... Oracle is reportedly recruiting executives to replace the ones it expects to leave or get fired when it takes over Sun, which will be integrated into Oracle, not run as a free standing subsidiary. Sun chairman Scott McNealy is expected to be...

Google, Yahoo, Apple, Others Probed for Big Hiring No-No: Report.
June 8, 2009... Google, Yahoo, Apple and other big high-tech firms are under investigation by the Justice Department for "negotiating the recruiting and hiring of one another's employees," according to the Washington Post. That's collusion and a nasty...

California Upholds Non-Compete.(Brief article)
June 8, 2009... Well, fancy that. A California court has agreed with a Massachusetts court about enforcing a non-compete. California doesn't recognize non-competes. That's why when David Donatelli skipped out on EMC, where he was president of its storage...

Cisco Replaces GM on Dow.
June 8, 2009... Cisco will replace General Motors on the Dow Jones Industrial Average on June 8 because of GM's bankruptcy filing. Travelers will replace Citigroup, its former parent. Dow Jones said it was adding Cisco because "its communications and...

HP a GM Creditor.
June 8, 2009... HP is on the list of GM's 20 largest unsecured creditors. It's in for $17 million.

Google, Mozilla, Opera Pressing EC on Microsoft.
June 8, 2009... The Wall Street Journal says Google, Mozilla and Opera are agitating to get the European Commission to order Microsoft to offer their browsers to all existing Windows user via automatic download as well as pre-load their widgetry on Windows and...

Ex-Massachusetts Speaker Indicted in Cognos Scam.
June 8, 2009... A federal grand jury Tuesday indicted the powerful former Speaker of the House in Massachusetts Salvatore DiMasi, who resigned in late January under a cloud, on eight charges of corruption. DiMasi along with three associates are accused of...

Another Ex-Googler Goes to Washington.(Andrew McLaughlin )(Brief article)
June 8, 2009... Google's public policy and government affairs boss Andrew McLaughlin is reportedly leaving the company to join the Obama administration as deputy CTO, reporting to CTO Aneesh Chopra, the guy who used to be secretary of technology for Virginia....

Microsoft Buys Merck Assets.
June 8, 2009... Microsoft is going to buy certain assets of Rosetta Biosoftware off of Merck so it can incorporate genetic, genomic and proteomics data management in its new Amalga Life Sciences platform for what it calls "enhanced translational research...

Satyam's New Owner Calls for Mass Layoffs.
June 8, 2009... Vineet Nayyar, the CEO of Tech Mahindra, the company that bought the controlling interest in Satyam, the Indian outsourcer plundered by its founder, thinks the 40,000-man company has 10,000 too many people on its payroll, especially since...

Google Docs Adds Formats.
June 8, 2009... Google Docs now supports Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) formats .docx and .xlsx. It already supports .doc, .odt, .xls, .ods, .ppt, .csv, .html, .txt and .rtf. IDG reports Google's enterprise unit president Dave Girouard chatting up...

HP Designs New Cloud-Size Server Family. Blades are passe; Trays are in.
June 15, 2009... HP Wednesday took the wraps off the first new server family it's created since the BladeSystem C-class was invented and ran away with the market. The line is call ExSO, short for Extreme Scale-Out, and it's purpose-built for global...

Google Launches Guerilla Attack on Exchange.
June 15, 2009... If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, then, by George, Mohammed's gonna go to the mountain, which is exactly what Google's doing. Rather than try to get the throngs of immovable Outlook and Office users to switch to Gmail and Google...

Voltaire Aims its First Ethernet Switch at Cisco's Nexus.
June 15, 2009... A month ago Voltaire joined the anti-Cisco front and sketched out its vision of a Scale-Out Ethernet architecture supporting what it likes to think of as "virtual mainframes" built out of industry-standard gear and making extensive use of...

Cisco Pays for its Server Impertinence.
June 15, 2009... Despite steep price cuts, Cisco lost 14.4 points of market share in high-end SAN switches and 9.8% overall to Brocade in Q1, according to the Dell'Oro Group because OEMs switched their allegiance when it became clear Cisco was going to enter...

Thinking Global, Big Chinese PC Maker Allies with NComputing.
June 15, 2009... Lenovo's not the only Chinese PC maker with global ambitions. So has Haier Computer Group, reportedly the country's second-largest PC maker and part of the $16 billion Haier Group, already the world's fourth-largest white goods manufacturer....

Cloudera One Ups Amazon.
June 15, 2009... Cloudera, the Hadoop start-up with the glitterati backers that's going mano a mano with Amazon over who's gonna have the dominant commercial Hadoop implementation is now going Amazon one better and supporting Amazon's Elastic Block Store (EBS)...

Aster Opens MapReduce to .NET Developers.
June 15, 2009... Aster Data Systems, the coming data warehouse company, has leveled the playing field and made it possible for .NET developers - what it calls the "other half" - to leverage the vaunted MapReduce programming model popularized by Google to write...

Microsoft Unloads IP Service on Start-Up.
June 15, 2009... Microsoft's Software Licensing and Protection (SLP) Services operation, which hasn't sought any new customers since late last year, has been spun off into a Dublin start-up called InishTech. The new company is an idea cooked up between...

Developer Dead after Hack Deletes 100,000 Hosted Sites.
June 15, 2009... A 32-year-old software developer, who started a company called Lxlabs at home in Bangalore, is dead of an apparent suicide after hackers exploited a critical vulnerability in the VPS management software he wrote and wiped out the data on a...

Tripwire Untangles the Rat's Nest of VI Data.(Brief article)
June 15, 2009... Tripwire's got what it thinks is the first "complete" virtualization infrastructure management tool for VMware. It's called vWire and it will continuously monitor the state of virtual systems and correlate data with critical events to...

Hosted Solutions Promises Trustworthy Cloud.
June 15, 2009... Hosted Solutions, the eight-year-old infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company acquired last year by ABRY Partners, the private equity house, for $144 million, is branching into the cloud business with an "over-architected" platform called the...

NextIO Gets Another $15m.(Brief article)
June 15, 2009... NextIO has picked up a $15 million D round. NextIO's the six-year-old Texas outfit with the rack-optimized I/O virtualization solutions based on high-performance PCI Express (PCIe) switching technology and the money is supposed to...

Russian, Korean & Malaysian Cloud Researchers Join Open Cirrus.
June 15, 2009... The Russian Academy of Sciences, South Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute and MIMOS, a strategic R&D organization under Malaysia's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation are joining the HP-Intel-Yahoo open...

China Requires a Censorship Wall on All PCs.
June 15, 2009... An ostensibly priggish Chinese government has mandated that all PCs sold in the country ship with a special piece of anti-pornography censorship software starting July1. Well, at least that's the way it's being positioned anyway. It's...

Second Bidder Upsets Micro Focus-Borland Deal.
June 15, 2009... Although a vigilant press never sleeps, we confess we nodded off there for a moment and this almost got by us. Last week while EMC was distracting everybody by one-upping NetApp in a hostile play for Data Domain, Micro Focus was saying...

Ballmer Pushes Back Against Obama.
June 15, 2009... At a Bloomberg Round Table Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer threatened to move "lots" of jobs offshore if Congress goes along with the president's plan to hike taxes on US companies' foreign profits. What the White House is planning would make...

Yahoo Sends its Version of Hadoop Out into the Wild.(Brief article)
June 15, 2009... At the Hadoop Summit in California Wednesday Yahoo released the source code to its version of Hadoop, its Google-inspired distributed file system and parallel execution environment for sifting through Brobdingnagian-size data sets, for anyone...

Petabyte-Scale Data Analytics Moving to the Cloud.
June 15, 2009... Forrester analyst Jim Kobielus has predicted that data warehousing will evolve into a "virtualized, cloud-based, supremely scalable distributed platform." Greenplum, the Postgres-based massively parallel open source data warehouse company,...

ECIS Accuses Microsoft of Fudging Numbers.
June 15, 2009... The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), which wants to nail Microsoft's hide to the barn door, told the European Commission that Redmond "substantially understated" its share of the European browser market in an effort to blunt...

Did Microsoft Just Give the EC the Finger?
June 15, 2009... Maybe it's just wishful thinking on our part, but it sounds like Microsoft - in the very nicest way, of course, to avoid any further fines - just told the European Commission to go fuck itself. See, at press time, CNet was saying that it...

Novell Reportedly Planning Free Apps Store.
June 15, 2009... Novell means to create an open source apps store chockablock with free software that can be uploaded in a click, according to PC Pro. The British publication talked to Novell's VP of business development Holger Dryoff. Apparently it's aimed...

Dell To Bundle Boxes with Open Source Apps: Report.
June 15, 2009... Dell is reportedly going to chase SMBs with offers of boxes preconfigured with open source software, according to what Amit Midha, the president of its SMB business in Asia-Pacific and Japan and the president of its Greater China operations,...

Why Novell Kisses Microsoft's Ring Every So Often.
June 15, 2009... Microsoft and Novell decided to revisit their eyebrow-raising pact the other day, the one that was signed in November of 2006 to the outrage of the FOSS mob, and let it be known - na-na-na-na-na - that it produced upwards of 100 new customers...

Fedora 11 Out.(Brief article)
June 15, 2009... The latest version of Red Hat's free open source operating system, Fedora 11 is out. It's supposed to include substantial improvements in virtualization, such as an upgraded interactive console, a redesigned virtual machine guest creation...

Oracle's Secret Plan for Sun.
June 15, 2009... If Oracle hasn't been exactly forthcoming with its reportedly three-year plan for Sun, it's because it's still trying to figure out exactly what it is. Like what it's really going to do about the Sparc chip, for instance. Oracle CEO Larry...

Dell Believed on Acquisition Trail.
June 15, 2009... Dell now has ~$10 billion in its jean to spend on an acquisition or two. It raised another billion this week selling bonds. That's the second time in two months it's sold debt, not something it's done much of in years past. It also has IBM's...

SAP Apes Oracle, Thinks Acquisitions.
June 15, 2009... Sounding a bit like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, his bete noir, SAP CEO Leo Apotheker told the French daily Le Figaro that the company could throw $7 million (5 billion euros) at large acquisitions to get a bigger market share. It spent $6.7...

Ozzie on Cloud Margins.
June 15, 2009... Microsoft's chief architect Ray Ozzie has figured out that cloud margins aren't gonna be the same as the margins derived from on-premises software. "The margins on services are not like the margins on software so [cloud computing] will increase...

EMC-NetApp-Data Domain Halo Effect.
June 15, 2009... The stock market has been under the impression that somebody will come in and challenge Intel for Wind River. Intel said last week that it was buying the embedded OS house for $11.50 a share. The stock has been up over that price ever since....

Bing Creates Mini-Surge.
June 15, 2009... The initial response to Bing, Microsoft's new 10-day-old search engine, is favorable. According to comScore, Microsoft's share of US searches was up two points from 9.1% to 11.1% after a week and Microsoft's penetration of daily searchers went...

Microsoft Kills Money.
June 15, 2009... Because of the competition, Microsoft says it will stop selling Microsoft Money, its personal finance program, at the end of the month. It stopped updating the software last year. Ah, remember when it tried to buy Intuit? The Justice Department...

Storage Market Bleeding.
June 15, 2009... Sales of disk storage fell 18.2% to $5.6 billion in the first quarter, with HP down 25.8%, IBM 21.7%, Dell 17.2% and EMC 16%, according to IDC. HP also lost some market share but is still number one. Capacity shipped was up 14.8% to 2.15PB. The...