Client Server News articles from March 2009

Client Server News archives from March 2009

Misery Index.(Cisco Systems Inc. cuts jobs )(Brief article)
March 2, 2009... Cisco has laid off several hundred people, including 250 at its California headquarters, presumably the beginning of what the CEO John Chambers said early in February would be 1,500-2,000 jobs cut. Cisco, whose earning dropped 27% to $1.5...

Gmail Crash Idles Workers.(Brief article)
March 2, 2009... Gmail, which has something like 31 million users, went down again globally for two-and-half hours by Google's count on Tuesday, starting at around 9:30am GMT. This time it was it was due to routine maintenance in one of its European data...

AMD To Get Istanbul Out on Time.
March 2, 2009... AMD has been publicly demonstrating of its upcoming six-core 45nm Opteron processor, code named Istanbul, to prove that it's gonna get out in the second half. Istanbul is a rival of Intel's six-core 45nm Dunnington chip already in circulation....

Supremes Let Rambus Decision Stand.
March 2, 2009... The US Supreme Court Monday refused to hear the Federal Trade Commission's appeal of its suit accusing Rambus of "deceptive conduct" by hiding its patent rights in technology inserted in a memory standard, thereby gaining a monopoly, a fortune...

Mips Joins Linux Foundation.
March 2, 2009... Mips Technologies, these days an embedded chip house, has joined the Linux Foundation. It says a large majority of Mips developers are using Linux for product development and imagines an evolution in consumer platform support on multi-core...

Novell Cuts Deal with VMware.
March 2, 2009... What with everybody's dancing a few steps with everybody else - virtually speaking - Novell struck a broad collaboration pact with VMware so ISVs can build fully supported SUSE-based virtual appliances on VMware ESX. It's trying to entice...

Employees Steal: Symantec.
March 2, 2009... Symantec had 1,000 Americans who lost or left their jobs last year surveyed and 59% of them admitted to stealing confidential company information like customer contact lists, e-mail lists, employee records and customer information. Front...

Microsoft Sues TomTom's Embedded Linux for Patent Infringement.
March 2, 2009... Well, it's finally happened. Microsoft, which has only sued two other companies for patent infringement in its whole life, is exercising its patent rights over Linux and suing TomTom, the Dutch-based portable GPS device house, for ignoring its...

Intel & Dell Move To Protect the Word 'Netbook'.
March 2, 2009... Intel and Dell have moved to snuff out the trademark claims of Psion Teklogix, the Ontario-based Anglo-Canadian concern that has been sending cease-and-desist letters to PC manufacturers, retailers, the media and bloggers since right before...

The Lights Flicker at Dell.
March 2, 2009... Dell's earnings were down 48% to $351 million, 18 cents a share, on revenues down 16% to $13.4 billion and units down 12% in the January quarter, three of the single worst months since PCs were invented. Dell's gross margin dropped from 18.7%...

Google's App Engine Goes Commercial.
March 2, 2009... Google is ready to start charging for its App Engine cloud platform. For the 10 months it's been in preview it's been free to use but limited to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU, bandwidth and whatnot to support about five...

HP To Resell Solaris on ProLiant.
March 2, 2009... Sun and HP were once great enemies. Sun is now so toothless it needs to sell its software on other people's hardware. And, given the recession, HP is not so foolish as to leave a penny on the table. Besides it owns EDS now, an experience that...

Cloud Start-up Fails, Widgetry Goes to SAP.
March 2, 2009... Coghead, an Amazon EC2-hosted platform-as-a-service start-up that reportedly couldn't repay a million-dollar loan it owed to Western Technology Investment, has sold its IP to SAP, which has no intention of keeping the company going. Terms...

Microsoft Feels the Economic Pain, Shows Wall Street Where It Hurts.
March 2, 2009... Microsoft doesn't expect the global economic contraction to loosen up this year or for a long time after that. It's studied the worst of the US meltdowns - 1820, 1873, 1929 - and recovery always took time. The company says its sales...

Google Wants To Bring the Horse to Microsoft Hanging.
March 2, 2009... Google wants in on the European Commission's latest push to dismember Windows. It's asked to intervene in the EC's Opera-inspired case charging Microsoft with illegally tying its IE browser to its operating system. Google, which now...

European Star Chamber Strikes Again.
March 2, 2009... The European Commission says it won't let Intel defend itself against antitrust charges that it has squeezed AMD out of the market at the oral hearing that Intel has requested and that usually caps such findings. It's being punished for...

Citrix Makes Bomb Run on VMware.
March 2, 2009... Citrix made an all-out strategic strike on VMware. It's going to stop selling XenServer 5 - the open source virtual infrastructure that it's added a bunch of proprietary features to since it acquired XenSource last year - and offer it to...

While Bullets Fly Around It, VMware Issues a Progress Report.
March 2, 2009... VMware has been peddling this vision of companies setting up internal clouds that bridge to external clouds using its promised Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS), VDC-OS extensions and a management layer that lets service providers...

Red Hat Sketches Out Its KVM Virtualization Plans.
March 2, 2009... Red Hat, which is coming from behind and has to mange a change in strategic direction, moving its followers from Xen to KVM virtualization, is putting together a new portfolio of virtualization products that's supposed to break down the...

VMware Licenses Neverfail Technology.
March 2, 2009... VMware has licensed Neverfail's high availability/disaster recovery software to serve as its new vCenter Server Heartbeat solution - a shiny new VMware product that monitors and manages the automatic failover of its vCenter Server. A year...

Bull Launches myVMBox.(Brief article)
March 2, 2009... Bull has come up with what it calls myVMBox, a built-to-order combination of VMware Infrastructure on Bull NovaScale servers and StoreWay storage plus a systems administration platform supporting VMware's vCenter and Bull's System Manager. ...

VMware Adds vShield Security Appliance.
March 2, 2009... Among the flourishes it promised at VMworld Europe this week, VMware added vShield Zones, a new security virtual appliance for its upcoming Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS) both due later this year. The appliance is supposed to...

New CEO Remaking Yahoo in Her Image.
March 2, 2009... Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo for all of six weeks, is reorganizing the place and getting some of the yahoos out of Yahoo. Where Microsoft winds up is unclear. She appears to be centralizing more of the management in her own hands and trying...

Canonical Aims Koala at Amazon's Cloud.
March 2, 2009... Last Friday Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth dubbed the next turn of Ubuntu "Karmic Koala," the future Ubuntu 9.10 due in October, and immediately pointed its server side to the cloud. "Ubuntu," he said on a blog, "aims to keep free...

Novell's Net Income Off 36%.
March 2, 2009... Novell's net income skidded 36% to $11 million, or three cents a share, in the January quarter, its first fiscal quarter, on revenues down $16 million, or 6.9%, to $215 million. On a non-GAAP basis the company beat the Street by a penny at...

SCO Files Its Appeal.
March 9, 2009... SCO Wednesday filed its appeal brief asking the 10th Circuit in Denver to overturn the Utah district court's summary judgment finding that Novell owns the Unix copyrights and that Novell had the right to tell SCO to call off the dogs and waive...

Gartner Projects Nastiest PC Decline in History.
March 9, 2009... Gartner is currently figuring PC shipments will drop 11.9% this year to 257 million units worldwide, the steepest plunge ever. PCs' worst showing before was in 2001 when the market declined a mere 3.2%. Gartner says sales in emerging...

Bartz Lays Down Terms.
March 9, 2009... In her first public appearance Tuesday since her apotheosis Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz laid down terms. If there are going to be talks with Microsoft, they're going to be private, not in the press, a perimeter she's apparently already...

Microsoft Testing Kumo.
March 9, 2009... Failing Yahoo, Microsoft went into the Live Search reconstruction business last year and is now starting to test the rebranded Kumo.com redesign internally. Kumo is a codename that surfaced months ago. It's unclear whether it will stick....

TSMC To Produce 'Strategic' SoC Atoms for Intel.
March 9, 2009... Intel has signed a strategic memorandum of understanding to ship its low-cost little Atom chip over to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's largest build-to-order foundry, for System-on-Chip (SoC) treatment in order to...

EveryZing Creates First Cloud-Based Online Video Solution.
March 9, 2009... EveryZing, a spin-off of BBN Technologies, the outfit that dreamt up ARPANET and the e-mail @ sign, has launched MediaCloud, the first-ever cloud-based solution for online video and media companies. The widgetry automatically generates and...

DOJ Suspects EMC of Hanky-Panky.
March 9, 2009... The Justice Department is investigating storage biggie EMC, the parent company of virtualization leader VMware, for kickbacks and overcharging on government contracts. According to the Wall Street Journal, NetApp, an EMC rival, is expected...

Windows Widgetry Added to EC2 Europe.(Amazon.com Inc's Elastic Compute Cloud )(Brief article)
March 9, 2009... In December Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud set up shop in Europe - Ireland actually - catering to folks using Unix/Linux environments and promising to add support for Windows Server and SQL Server down the road. Well, the company got to...

New $440m Investment Fund Raised.
March 9, 2009... Snapping its fingers under the nose of the "Great Recession," Index Ventures has closed a 350 million euro investment fund, a little pile worth upwards of $440 million, that it means to trickle into high-tech start-ups that need seed money and...

Microsoft To Expand its SaaS Base.
March 9, 2009... Microsoft is pushing its SaaS Business Productivity Online Suite, part of Microsoft Online Services, out for trial to 19 countries. That will make Exchange Online and SharePoint Online available for trial in Austria, Belgium, Canada,...

Spun-Out AMD Factories Dubbed GlobalFounderies.
March 9, 2009... AMD closed its long-sought manufacturing spin-out on Monday, and by Wednesday those assets, transitionally known as the Foundry Company, were rechristened GlobalFounderies, the new repository of AMD's plant operations in Germany and the $4.2...

He replaces Hector Ruiz, who retired to chair GlobalFounderies.
March 9, 2009... Claflin's been a member of AMD's board since August, 2003, a veteran of 3Com, where he was CEO, DEC, where he ran sales and marketing, and IBM, where he was president of the old IBM PC Company Americas. AMD also put Waleed al Mokarrab, the...

IBM & SAP Demo Load Balancing in the Cloud.
March 9, 2009... SAP and IBM have been showing off the live migration of SAP applications across remote IBM Power6 systems via the cloud, a bit of widgetry developed at IBM'S Research Lab in Haifa as part of the European Union-funded RESERVOIR cloud computing...

RightScale Offers Schools Free Cloud Code.(Brief article)
March 9, 2009... RightScale is offering educational institutions its Cloud Management Platform for free "to foster research and innovation." It says Harvard Medical School's Center for Biomedical Informatics is among the first to participate in the new...

Google Opens Half-Way House for Code.
March 9, 2009... Google has opened up a site called Google Code Labs, not to be mistaken for Google Code or Google Labs, where developers can now go to get involved with potential products in their early days, familiarize themselves with APIs still being...

HP Exits Consumer Cloud Storage.
March 9, 2009... HP is closing down its 11-month-old Upline consumer online storage/backup service. It's given customers until March 31 to remove their files and says it will return any paid subscriptions in full by refunding the user's credit card or...

EC Eases Up on Microsoft Surveillance.
March 9, 2009... The European Commission said Wednesday that it no longer needs a full-time monitoring trustee to ensure Microsoft's compliance with its 2004 antitrust decree. Instead it intends to rely on the ad hoc assistance of technical consultants. ...

Adobe Pre-Announces.(Adobe Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
March 9, 2009... Adobe, the subject of a lot of Wall Street downgrades lately, pre-announced Wednesday and said it will fall short of its revenue target of $800 million-$850 million for the February quarter. Instead it should clear 30 cents a share (GAAP)...

IBM & Oracle Reported Interested in Satyam.
March 9, 2009... According to the Wall Street blog, The Motley Fool, both IBM and Oracle have been among the flock of 50-odd companies that have responded to the possible sale of Indian consulting/outsourcing biggie Satyam Computer Services, whose founder and...

If Wishes were Chips, Nvidia Would Have an x86.
March 9, 2009... In answer to a question at a Morgan Stanley tech conference the other day, Nvidia's senior VP of investor relation Mike Hara suggested that the graphics maven will try to get into the x86 SoC market for netbooks and mobile Internet devices...

Kiss the IPU Good-Bye.
March 9, 2009... Jon Peddie, the graphics guru, says the popular integrated graphics processor chipset known as the IGP and used in PCs for the last 11 years is only going to be around for a few more years. By 2012 it will have ceased to exist, replaced by...

Linux Foundation To Take Over Linux.com Site.
March 9, 2009... The Linux Foundation is going to take over SourceForge's Linux.com site and its flagging editorial, intending to change the focus from news to collaboration with the community creating the content. Terms were not disclosed but SourceForge,...

Concurrent Chases Embedded Market.(Brief article)
March 9, 2009... Concurrent, the folks with the real-time Linux technologies, is targeting its new RedHawk Embedded Linux, a complete software development environment, at embedded applications in a wide-range of industries, including aerospace and defense,...

Heidrick & Struggles Creates the 'Rentable CEO'.(chief executive officer)(Brief article)
March 9, 2009... Heidrick & Struggles, the big headhunter, says it's seeing "clients in need of immediate access to top talent who can step into short-term situations and solve problems quickly, or provide operating insights and advise" so it's setting up what...

Economy 'Pretty Dire': Google CEO.
March 9, 2009... Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a Morgan Stanley Technology Conference Tuesday that the economy really stinks and that it's going to catch up with Google eventually. "We may be better positioned from an advertiser perspective, but ultimately the...

Whatever He's Smokin' I Want Some.(Jonathan Schwartz)(Brief article)
March 9, 2009... "I'm neither worried about the role information technology will play in the economy, nor am I worried about the relevance of Sun's offerings. I'm not worried about the future, I'm focused on its arrival date." - Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who...

World's Most Admired.
March 9, 2009... The top 10 on Fortune's latest list of most admired companies are: Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Toyota, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, FedEx, Southwest Airlines, GE and Microsoft. Southwest and Microsoft replace Starbucks and...

Carly Has Cancer.
March 9, 2009... Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, 54, was operated on for breast cancer last week, three days after she reportedly got the diagnosis. She is expected to make a full recovery and challenge US Senator Barbara Boxer for her Senate seat.

dezineforce Gets More Money.
March 9, 2009... dezineforce, which claims to have the first web-based, on-demand engineering design optimization service, has gotten the second tranche of a u1.8 million ($2.5 million) Series A round from IQ Capital Partners LLP, DN Capital Ltd and several of...

NComputing Rolls Out to 5k Indian Schools.
March 9, 2009... NComputing says it rolled out its low-cost Wintel-based desktop virtualization solution to 5,000 schools across the state of Andhra Pradesh in India getting 1.8 million students computer access in just four months, quicker than expected The...

Servers Hurting: IDC.
March 9, 2009... IDC says server unit sales dropped 12% globally in Q4 taking revenues down 14% to $13.5 billion. All vendors, geographies and technology segments were impacted. IBM revenues were down 15%, HP's 10.1%, Dell 9.9%. Volume boxes performed the worst...

Google To Spend $200m on Data Center.
March 9, 2009... Google is going build a $200 million data center in that derelict paper mill in Finland that it's buying, according to what Google Finland chief told Reuters. The place should reach the testing phase by the first half of next year.

Nvidia Hires New CFO.
March 9, 2009... Nvidiaa has named Sanmina-SCI CFO David White its own CFO replacing Marvin Burkett who said he would retire a year ago.

Spansion Files for Bankruptcy.
March 9, 2009... Spansion - the tenuous situation it was because of too much product on the market and falling prices now aggravated by the slack demand for gismos - filed for bankruptcy protection Sunday meaning to restructure its $2.4 billion debt. It...

Next Vista RC.
March 9, 2009... Release candidates of Vista SP2 (32- and 64-bit) and Windows Server 2008 are downloadable.

VMware as Lifesaver.(NetKeepers' revenues)(Brief article)
March 9, 2009... NetKeepers is targeting cloud services at SMBs on VMware's Infrastructure 3 to differentiate itself and increase margins. Although its revenues are flat the Canadian hoster claims it's increased its profitability by 30% due to virtualization's...

SAP Troop Movements.
March 9, 2009... SAP has made Rob Enslin president of SAP North America, up from COO of SAP's fast growth markets, global field operations. He's previously been CEO of SAP Japan and COO of SAP America.

Amazon Fiddles with Utility Pricing.
March 16, 2009... Amazon Web Services (AWS), the subsidiary that runs the company's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), has tinkered with the cloud's established pay-as-you-go pricing structure and come up with what it calls reserved instances. Customers will be able...

On-Demand Instances.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... United States Europe Standard On-Demand Instances Linux/UNIX Usage Windows Usage Small (Default) $0.10 per hour $0.125 per hour Large $0.40 per hour $0.50 per hour Extra Large $0.80 per hour $1.00 per hour High CPU On-Demand Instances...

Google's Americas Sales Chief To Run AOL.
March 16, 2009... Time Warner dumped the misbegotten team of AOL CEO and chairman Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant late Thursday and wheeled in Tim Armstrong, until that minute Google's Americas sales chief, as CEO and chairman. Google, remember, owns 5% of...

Oracle Reported Interested in Buying Virtual Iron.
March 16, 2009... Last week's Wall Street scuttlebutt that Oracle might make a so-called "strategic" move and acquire Virtual Iron has now blossomed into a couple of unconfirmed press reports that the pair has progressed to a signed letter of intent. ...

Google's Cloud Springs a Scary Leak.
March 16, 2009... Some users of Google's vaunted Google Docs service discovered this weekend that behind their backs the widgetry has been sharing some of their documents with folks who were never authorized to see them. There are at least three things that...

Failures Darken Google Cloud.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... No sooner was Google over a reportedly limited Google Docs security breach this weekend when Gmail started acting up, giving the Google cloud, in particular, and all clouds, in general, another black eye. Some Gmail users were without...

Satyam Goes to the Auction Block.
March 16, 2009... A majority 51% of the big survival-threatened Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services Ltd, whose disgraced founder and former CEO confessed in January to loading its books with a billion dollars in "fictitious" assets and "non-existent"...

Atlassian Launches Elastic Bamboo.
March 16, 2009... Atlassian, the Australian ISV that makes the JIRA issue tracker and the Confluence enterprise wiki, has pushed out the 2.2 release of Bamboo, its continuous integration server. The widgetry's dubbed Elastic Bamboo because of a sexy new feature...

FBI Raids the Old Offices of Obama's CIO Appointee.
March 16, 2009... A week after resigning as CTO of the District of Columbia to become the first chief information officer of the United States of America under the Obama administration, the FBI raided the old D.C. offices of Delhi-born Vivek Kundra and arrested...

Microsoft Tries to Antitrust-Proof Windows 7.
March 16, 2009... It's official. Microsoft is going to let PC users turn its browser off in Windows 7 to keep the European Commission at bay. The EC's latest indictment of Microsoft accuses it of the antitrust sin of tying Internet Explorer to the Windows...

EC Extends Microsoft Deadline.
March 16, 2009... Microsoft was supposed to submit its rebuttal to the European Commission's January antitrust finding that bundling the Internet Explorer browser with the Windows operating system is anti-competitive the other day. Instead it asked for and...

Apple Netbook Rumors Back.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... Rumors that Apple is working on a netbook are back. It all started Monday when DigiTimes read in the Chinese language Commercial Times that Quanta, which knocks off Apple's MacBooks and iMacs, will make the thing and that Wintek will supply...

HP Claims 'Industry Changing' Data Center Design.
March 16, 2009... HP has come up with a timely new device that promises to cut the capital cost of data centers by 15%-25%. And increase their efficiency while it's at it. It claims it's "industry changing." It's called multi-tiered hybrid design and HP...

Stratus Gives Away VMware Software.
March 16, 2009... Stratus Technologies is giving away VMware's Infrastructure Foundation software for free with its Intel-based ftServer fault-tolerant systems. It calls it its "We Feel Your Pain" campaign. According to SVP, product & solutions development...

SAP Standardizes on Citrix XenServer & XenApp.
March 16, 2009... Citrix has picked up a little showcase account. It says SAP will virtualize about 500 servers with XenServer by mid-year to reap the rewards of server consolidation. Of course Citrix and SAP have been tight for a long time and of...

ScaleMP Boosts the Software in its Virtual SMP Box.
March 16, 2009... ScaleMP, the folks whose Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture aggregates multiple x86 systems into a single virtual x86 HPC system, has enhanced the performance of its flagship vSMP Foundation software with a 2.0 rev that supports the Intel...

Nvidia Trolls for Investments.
March 16, 2009... Nvidia, whose revenues ducked into the crapper last quarter and who's got myriad other problems too, has effectively put an ad in the paper looking for a handful of promising early-stage start-ups that will grow the GPS platform that it sees as...

Penguin Out with Linux-Based GPU Clusters.(graphics processing unit)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... Penguin Computing has started peddling a couple of fully integrated Nvidia GPU-based clusters targeted at technical workgroup computing. Their CPUs are AMD Shanghais. The Linux-based Altus 1702 cluster has four twin 1U compute nodes, four...

Microsoft Piggybacks on Eclipse.
March 16, 2009... A release candidate of Eclipse4SL has arrived. That's the open source plug-in commissioned by Microsoft from Eclipse Foundation member Soyatec, a French-based "open solutions" company, so cross-platform Silverlight-based rich Internet...

Compiere Leverages EC2.
March 16, 2009... Compiere, the open source ERP house that sounds like it should be in Rome but is actually in Redwood Shores, California, has released its ERP solution on Amazon's EC2 cloud. It calls the stuff its Cloud Edition and says it's based on its...

RightScale Supports Ubuntu in the Clouds.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... RightScale, the cloud manager, says it can now fully support Ubuntu Server with its Cloud Management Platform on cloud infrastructures such as Amazon EC2. Since Ubuntu is such a fast-growing Linux distribution, RightScale anticipates that...

Microsoft Rubs Shoulders with Open Source.
March 16, 2009... Microsoft and the Creative Commons turned up at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and released an Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 so authors can add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies,...