Client Server News articles from May 2002

Client Server News archives from May 2002

StarOffice Ships May 15.(Sun Microsystems' StarOffice 6.0)(Product Announcement)
May 6, 2002... Sun is revving up to finally release its forever-in-development rev 6.0 of StarOffice, apparently convinced it will make real inroads against the Redmond money machine, Microsoft Office. Sources report that Sun has picked Wednesday, May 15...

So What Broke Up Scott & Eddie's Marriage?(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Everybody wants to know why Sun CEO Scott Mc-Nealy and COO Ed Zander are getting divorced. The obvious theory suggests that when things went from bad to worse at Sun last year McNealy applied the spurs and started micromanaging, as CEOs...

Wyse & Compaq Swear They're Tight.
May 6, 2002... Both Wyse and Compaq deny there's any truth to the rumor that they're splitting up. Wyse has also been assured that its thin client supplier relationship with Compaq will survive the merger with HP. Apparently word of a special project to...

IBM Lifts eLiza's Skirt; Anticipates Stage Two.
May 6, 2002... IBM is previewing stage-two eLiza technology that's supposed to make systems learn as they work. The widgetry, called Enterprise Workload Manager and due later this year, is meant for both IBM and other people's servers en masse. It claims it...

Servers Flat in Q1.(Gartner report)(Statistical Data Included)
May 6, 2002... Gartner says worldwide server growth was flat in Q1. Shipments total 1.09 million units, up a mere six-tenths of a percent year-over- year, according to preliminary figures. The researcher said, "Businesses are not ready to spend on tech...

Zander Out; Sun Regroups.
May 6, 2002... This is the same story we flashed on Wednesday. Well, now we know why Sun CEO Scott McNealy last week wouldn't speak to the question of whether the company's number two Ed Zander, responsible for much of its success, was sticking around...

Gad, There Goes Another One; DeWitt Leaves Sun.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Stephen DeWitt, VP of Sun's Content Delivery and Edge Computing Division, the guy ostensibly responsible for its coming push into Linux, has left the company. He didn't wait around for the magic end of fiscal year like the flock of other top...

Gates Didn't Give an Inch: Pru.
May 6, 2002... Prudential Securities says the press got it all wrong and that Bill Gates conceded nothing materially important about the possibility of a modular Windows during his court appearance last week. It was generally construed that Gates allowed...

Hmmm, Make That 18-24 Hours.
May 6, 2002... Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Milunovich had hosted Ed Zander at a dinner right before his retirement was announced and had predicted that he was good for another 12-18 months at Sun. Milunovich said abashedly Wednesday that he should have said...

Compaq Box Supports Hot-Plug Memory.(Compaq ProLiant DL580 and DL530)(Product Announcement)
May 6, 2002... Compaq has come out with a next-generation Foster MP-based four-way that's the first industry-standard server to support hot-plug memory, something even mainframes can't do without cordoning the memory off. The IP Compaq's got in the new...

Carly Wins; Walter Throws in the Towel.
May 6, 2002... This story has been updated since the news broke Tuesday. The Delaware Chancery Court where HP namesake Walter Hewlett tried to overturn the narrow HP stockholders vote on the Compaq acquisition after a hard-fought and personally bitter...

HP Dubs More Knights.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... HP has secretly named another thousand middle managers for the combined company. We say secretly because it's not releasing the names although the people were notified last Friday that they're among the elect, but most aren't talking. It...

After DAS, SAN & NAS, EMC Says It's Time for CAS.(content-addressed storage system dubbed Centera)
May 6, 2002... Limping storage biggie EMC introduced a new class of networked storage systems Monday aimed at bringing fixed content such as electronic documents, digital X-rays, MRIs, e-mail, check images and broadcast content as well as information...

MTI in Financial Bind.
May 6, 2002... Storage systems vendor MTI Technology Corporation says it will require additional funding to continue its operations. It is the second venture backed primarily by The Canopy Group, the venture arm of ex-Novell CEO Ray Noorda, known to have...

Storage Tank Postponed to 2003.
May 6, 2002... According to IBM's latest storage software roadmap, its already- delayed Storage Tank technology won't come out until next year. Originally scheduled to debut this past December, the software was subsequently pushed out "several months" to...

Sotera Hires New CEO, Morphs into Vormetric.
May 6, 2002... Storage security concern Sotera Networks has made Bill Schroeder its CEO. Schroeder is an angel investor in Sotera and has been on its board for some time. Prior to joining Sotera, Schroeder, 30 years in the business and a veteran of...

Z-force Names New CEO; Beefs Up Management Team.
May 6, 2002... Storage start-up Z-force Inc has named its chairman and co-founder Gary Johnson CEO. Z-force's former CEO Vladimir Miloushev has been named CTO and chairman. The company also strengthened its management team with the addition of three...

Neartek Gets $27m.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Tape virtualization software vendor Neartek Inc has raised a new $27 million round led by Benchmark Capital with earlier investors Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures and MagnumTelecom kicking in. Neartek has earmarked the money to expand...

SPC Debuts New Test Tools.(Storage Performance Council)(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... The Storage Performance Council has introduced a multi-platform test kit for the SPC-1 benchmark. The widgetry is supposed to let test sponsors quickly produce SPC-1 benchmark results and enhance the compliance and verifiability of the...

Quantum Debuts Backup & Restore Managed Services.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Storage systems vendor Quantum has launched its new StorageCare Managed Services. The managed offering is an automated storage handling service that remotely manages data backup and restoration while the data stays at the customer's site....

Coalsere Reported Close on Series B.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Coalsere Inc, the storage provisioning software start-up promising to scale into the thousands of machines, is supposed to be close to completing a $3 million Series B round to fund its product launch next quarter and its sales and marketing....

OpenOffice.org 1.0 Debuts.(from Sun Microsystems)(Product Announcement)
May 6, 2002... Sun's OpenOffice.org 1.0 open source office productivity suite debuted Wednesday. Described as the culmination of 18 months of collaborative work involving Sun employees, volunteer developers and end users, the suite shares the same code...

Dell & Oracle Pair on Linux.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Dell and Oracle are getting together to push Oracle's database on Linux, with Dell happening to mention that Oracle's next-generation database software for Linux will be developed on Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell's EMC storage. Compaq has...

Caldera Gives Aid & Comfort to Rivals.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Caldera says it's prepared to support its rival distributions, market leader Red Hat, SuSE, Turbolinux, Mandrake Linux and Conectiva, worldwide. All four of its service practices are being opened up including problem resolution, professional...

Microsoft's Loss is Apache's Gain.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Netcraft's web server survey results for April show Microsoft dropping a couple of points, taking its share down to 31.96%. Apparently, Microsoft was hit by Homestead's transition from free ad-supported hosting model to a fee-based business...

Tying Up Loose Ends.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Microsoft quietly wrapped up its Windows security push a few weeks ago and has stopped pawing over existing code looking for problems. That, in turn, means it's getting ready for the .NET Server release candidate one as well as the first XP...

Sun Joins AMD in the Intel Crosshairs.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... At its analyst day last week Intel said it's been targeting 100 key server sites since last year trying to rout out Sun platforms and claimed it was able to replace Sun in 176 designs. Merrill Lynch said that Intel also claimed that by the time...

InterSAN Reported Oversubscribed.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... The smoke signals suggest that InterSAN's C series was oversubscribed and that it took down $17.8 million, an investment led by Worldview Technology Partners. Some months ago, the company talked about a $15 million pre-revenue round (CSN No...

Counting Noses.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Matt Harris, the embattled CEO of Lineo, the struggling embedded Linux house, has been reluctant to discuss who of the executive staff still remains with the company since its last layoffs some weeks ago. Lineo's web site still shows a...

Dell Heffs Hammer.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Remember three weeks ago when we said normally standoffish companies like Dell were being open-minded about AMD's Opteron ne Hammer chip (CSN No 446)? Well, Michael Dell told a Merrill Lynch Hardware Heaven get-together the other day that the...

HP: The Final Count.(Hewlett-Packard acquires Compaq with 2.8% margin)(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Carly got a final certified vote result Wednesday and the numbers work out to the same 45 million share margin as the preliminary count, a margin of roughly 2.8% over poor Walter.

Who Needs UDDI?(Novell proposes LDAP standard)(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... It just came to our attention, but it appears that Novell has had a Request for Comment (RFC) out since February that challenges UDDI, SOAP and XML, all the protocols precious to the web services movement. Novell is not a UDDI groupie and its...

HPQ Realized.(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... HP is going to change its ticker symbol from HWP to HPQ on May 6, the day before the merger becomes official. Not only is Walter Hewlett no longer on the board, but half his name is gone.

Sun's Magic Elixir.(Sun Microsystems' Java Web Services Pack uses Sun ONE network management software)(Product Announcement)
May 6, 2002... Aha, industry guru Amy Wohl says Sun figures to turn its rebranded Sun ONE widgetry into web services through the auspices of its Java Web Services Developers Pack, now in beta and due for GA in June. Elements of the thing are supposed to go...

Moody's Ponders HPQ.(Hewlett-Packard)(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Moody's said Thursday - the day after any doubts of the coming merger were erased - that it may cut HP's A2 senior unsecured credit rating and its Prime-1 short-term debt rating and raise Compaq's comparable Baa2 and Prime-2 ratings. Some $6.4...

Microsoft-Navision Combo?(Brief Article)
May 6, 2002... Microsoft is supposed to be buying Danish ISV Navision A/S for $1.2 billion. Its software, written to run the operations and finances of mid-sized firms, would apparently be paired with the Microsoft Great Plains unit, turning Microsoft into...

Okay, Who's Got the Web Services Back Button?
May 13, 2002... The world has been waiting for web services to arrive, and after all the publicity and hype, it's still waiting. Maybe, part of what it's waiting for is a web services "back button." The World Wide Web became an international success...

Caldera Retracts After Revenue Failure.
May 13, 2002... Caldera International Inc had another layoff the other day. It's come up short on its Q2 sales projections and will only be able to manage somewhere between $15.1 million and $15.5 million, not the $16 million-$18 million it thought it could...

Ahh, the Finagling at WS-I.(IBM public relations)
May 13, 2002... So it seems that IBM, which has been carrying the water and looking like the heavy on this Sun-WS-I business, got startled when some of the water in the bucket slopped over and wet its shoes - PR speaking. So it apparently figured the role...

HP & Compaq: Together at Last.
May 13, 2002... Well, it's all over but the execution. HP and Compaq are finally married and most sensible people are beset with doubts over whether it will work. Such unions never have before and theirs is afflicted by a particularly bad morale problem. ...

Microsoft To Buy Navision for $1.3b.
May 13, 2002... Confirming recent rumors, Microsoft said Tuesday that it's acquiring Danish business software vendor Navision A/S. Microsoft is paying $1.3 billion in stock and cash for the 18-year- old company, which sells a range of software including...

Crusoe Hits the Desktop.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Transmeta, in a move away from both the ultra-light notebooks that it's identified with and the blade server, where it's a spoiled pioneer, has turned up in its very first desktop, an NEC Solutions box. The NEC machine, one of its Mate series,...

For Unisys It's Do or Die as a Box Peddler.(Illuminata analysis)(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Illuminata sat down and had a think about this on-going ES7000-Win2K Datacenter promotion that Unisys and Microsoft are doing and realized that the $25 million in reportedly matching funds that Unisys is kicking in represents 10% of the total...

Volera Chases Web Services.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Volera, the spun-out Novell caching subsidiary, is planning to deliver corporate networking software that accelerates, manages and secures web services starting in phases this fall. It says the stuff will help scale the network, save bandwidth...

Evans Counts C# Noses.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Evans Data Corporation says that by its count 12% of developers are currently using Microsoft's newfangled Windows-optimized C# programming language compared to 7% six months ago. The researcher found that 24% expect to use the language in the...

P4 Hits 2.53GHz.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Intel is now up to 2.53GHz on the Pentium 4, saying at that clock speed it can convert songs into MP3 format almost six times quicker than the fastest PCs three years ago, pointing out the time savings to consumers. It's also supposed be good...

Apache 2.0 Upgraded Already.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Apache 2.0, the stuff that's supposed to be as good on Windows as on Unix, finally arrived a month ago and they've upgraded it again. The Apache HTTP Server Project is now saying that reaction to the production release led to improvements and...

Iona Pursues Government Sales.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Iona Technologies has created Iona Government Technologies Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary to go after the government market with its Orbix E2A Web Services Integration Platform.

IBM Plucks Database Crown from Off Oracle's Head.
May 13, 2002... Oracle is contesting Gartner's handing the database leadership to IBM, a bitter blow. It claims the data is wrong and says IBM and Microsoft should produce audited numbers. Gartner says that thanks to the Informix acquisition and growth in...

Microsoft Out Soon with New Unix Widgetry.(Microsoft's Services for Unix 3.0 )(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
May 13, 2002... Microsoft's Services for Unix 3.0 kit was released to manufacturing the other day. This time through the migratory nudge integrates a reportedly full Unix environment that runs on the Windows kernel so both Windows and Unix apps will run...

DOJ Wants Settlement Approved.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... The Justice Department Thursday asked the antitrust court to enter its settlement with Microsoft "as soon as possible," making no reference to the states-pressed remedies hearing that's still going on. The agency formally certified that it had...

Workstations Down.(DataQuest Survey)(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Dataquest figures the worldwide workstation market shrunk 5.4% in Q1 year-over-year, with shipments totaling 358,829. Dataquest doesn't see a light at the end of the tunnel yet. It says the market is bedeviled by the weakness of the US economy,...

Hitachi Debuts TrueNorth.
May 13, 2002... Hitachi Data Systems introduced its seminal new TrueNorth initiative at N+I Tuesday positioning it as an open information strategy that will let enterprise customers integrate their preferred storage products and manage them centrally through a...

Crossroads CEO Bounced; Founder Back in the Saddle.
May 13, 2002... Storage house Crossroads Systems' founder and chairman Brian Smith has returned to the company as CEO and president effective immediately as part of a restructuring. Smith replaces Larry Sanders. Sanders' tenure as CEO was brief. He...

IBM Debuts New Backup Service.
May 13, 2002... IBM has introduced a new disaster recovery service aimed at providing customers with faster, more secure backup. The service, which is being delivered through IBM Global Services, is supposed to copy both data and applications remotely. ...

Sun Exec Lands at BlueArc.(Jeff Allen)(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... NAS start-up BlueArc Corporation has named Jeff Allen senior VP of strategy and business development. A storage vet, Allen has done stints at Sun and EMC. Before joining BlueArc, he was VP of global network storage sales at Sun. His mandate...

SGI Want In on Storage.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... SGI wants a piece of the storage action, or what's left of its anyway. It's going to be launching what it calls an "extensive, complex data management strategy and initiative" over the next few months that it thinks will help solve a lot...

Stockholders Demand EMC Board Be More Independent.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... EMC lost a shareholders' fight over the independence of its board. A small group of 20 stockholders, representing about a tenth of one percent of the company, sponsored a non-binding resolution that the company make its board, a notorious...

Tricord Learns the Hand that Feeds Can Also Slap.(RGC International Investors sues)
May 13, 2002... It's not everyday that an investor files suit seeking to close down the company it's put money in. But that's exactly what RGC Inter-national Investors did a month ago when it sued Tricord Systems in a Delaware court alleging the company...

IBM Tinkles Blue Ice To Woo SMBs.(Product Announcement)
May 13, 2002... IBM has introduced a new infrastructure bundle aimed at enabling small and mid-sized businesses to deploy e-business apps on Linux quickly. Dubbed Blue Ice, the new integrated platform includes xSeries rack- optimized servers, the DB2...

Red Hat Linux 7.3 Out.(Product Announcement)
May 13, 2002... Linux major Red Hat launched the latest version of its Linux operating system, Red Hat Linux 7.3, Monday. Targeted at small businesses and individuals, the upgrade comes with new productivity tools, a firewall configuration at install and...

IBM Bolsters Linux Volume Management.(IBM Enterprise Volume Management System)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
May 13, 2002... IBM has beefed up the volume management on Linux through a new open source product called Enterprise Volume Management System 1.0 logically enough. IBM expects EVMS, a collaboration between its Linux Technology Center and the open source...

BSD Version of RTCore Debuts.(Finite State Machine Labs' RTCore/BSD operating system)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
May 13, 2002... Finite State Machine Labs has released a BSD version of its RTCore operating system, the kernel for RTLinux/Pro, its commercially licensed version of the RTLinux hard real-time OS. Applications are split between the real-time components...

McNealy To Keynote LinuxWorld.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Scott McNealy, who is now all things to all people at Sun, is going to keynote Linux-World in San Francisco come mid-August. Sun should be on the threshold of unveiling its Linux boxes about then. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is also going to...

Red Hat Spurns StarOffice 6.0.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Red Hat has made it clear it doesn't plan to ship Sun's upcoming StarOffice 6.0 office suite. Red Hat said it made a business decision not to ship the stuff because of Sun's decision to charge for the previously free Microsoft-competitive...

Red Hat Establishes Engineering Center.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Red Hat has set up an engineering and R&D center in Massachusetts, just now memorializing something that's really existed for a while. The facility, located in Westford, is supposed to house 50 jobs, mostly engineering, among them, ex-DEC...

Thresher Will Hit IBM & Reportedly Oracle Too.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... The inimitable F@#$%^Company.com claims IBM is gonna lay off 10% of its US workforce and that "D-Day" is Thursday May 23. It says IBM Global Services, which IBM has already been snipping away at, is gonna be hit the hardest. It also says the...

Veritas Supposedly in Turmoil.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Steve Duplessie, head research guru at the Enterprise Storage Group, told Merrill Lynch that "Veritas is in turmoil" and that a half- dozen VPs are looking to leave.

Brazen.(Stratus Technologies' ftServer 3200, ftServer 5200 test results online)(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Stratus is confident enough that its 5200 and 3200 fault tolerant servers are the most reliable around that it's put an ftServer Uptime Meter on its web site to illustrate its 5Nines availability based on the service incidents reported by...

That Makes a Even Half-Dozen.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... When it came to do its story on Sun's massive executive defections, if that's the right word, BusinessWeek remembered that still another senior Sun executive is out of day-to-day operations. Chief counsel Mike Morris gave up that title to focus...

It's Catching.(Open GIS Consortium )(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Word has it that the board of the Open GIS Consortium Thursday morning skipped down the same IPR path as the World Wide Web Consortium and put its thumbprint on an even tighter royalty-free policy than W3C. Open GIS members include IBM, Oracle,...

DeWitt's Replacement.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... The chap replacing recently departed Sun VP Stephen DeWitt, head of its Content Delivery and Edge Computing Division, in other words its Cobalt appliances and soon-to-be general-purpose Linux servers, is another Cobalt Networks co-founder, Sun...

Another County Heard From.(Brief Article)
May 13, 2002... Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission is now investigating Microsoft for possible abuse of its dominant position, according to the China Post. Corporate users reportedly complained that Microsoft threatened to withdraw technical support if they didn't...

One in 20 Jobs Gone.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
May 13, 2002... The high-tech work force shrunk 5% in the US last year to 9.9 million people, according to the Information Technology Association of America. Overall sales grew less than 1% compared to an average 8% from 1998-2000. Meanwhile, since 20000, the...

Lineo Assembles New Crew.
May 13, 2002... A bunch of new faces has popped up in Lineo's executive suite. Tim Riker, who used to be his predecessor's Tim Bird right-hand man, is now CTO. Ishrat Hakim, who was in sales under Rich Larsen, replaces him as senior VP of sales and...

Compatibility Issues Dog StarOffice 6.
May 20, 2002... If you thought the absence of 100% two-way compatibility with Microsoft Office was the only issue with Sun's newly introduced StarOffice 6.0, think again. Sun executives acknowledged Wednesday that StarOffice 5.2's supposedly eight...

Jareva Fields Blade Software.(Product Announcement)
May 20, 2002... In its first foray into blade software, two-year-old provisioning house Jareva Technologies Inc should have its shiny new Blade-Force Blade Management Suite out next month. It says the thing was designed to do bare metal discovery,...

Apple as Server.(Apple Xserve)
May 20, 2002... So Apple's got itself a 1U rack-mount server. How utterly derivative! Apple has tried servers before and couldn't cut it. It's also not, as they say, considered an enterprise player. Steve Jobs used an unaccustomed word to describe the new...

RealNames Fails & It's All Microsoft's Fault.
May 20, 2002... RealNames has hit the wall and is blaming Microsoft for making it crash and burn. See, Microsoft, which owns 20% of the company, won't be extending its two-year-old distribution contract to use the browser-dependent RealNames keyword...

HP Org Chart.
May 20, 2002... http://www.g2news.com//HP%20Org%20Chart%205-02_files/slide0001.htm

Sun Begets New RaQ.(Sun Microsystems Cobalt RaQ 1U)(Product Announcement)
May 20, 2002... Sun's got a new Linux 2.4-based Cobalt RaQ 1U built on a 1.26GHz Intel Pentium III - yup, Intel like most of its other RaQs - that it's positioning as a replacement for the traditional enterprise NT server, among other things. By Sun's...

Please, God, Let It Work.(Brief Article)
May 20, 2002... Carnegie Mellon, a bunch of corporates and a federal agency or two have formed the Sustainable Computing Consortium (SCC) to grapple with issues relating to software dependability, quality and security. Software defects are estimated to...

Configuresoft Upgrades Key Software.
May 20, 2002... Consider for a moment that misconfigurations are as responsible as anything for Microsoft's security woes and that corporate resources are constantly changing. Enter Configuresoft, the three-year-old Windows NT/2000 configuration...

Yahoo Piggybacks on Sun To Monetize Content.
May 20, 2002... Sun and Yahoo have teamed up. Yahoo is kicking in content for Sun's Portal Server in hopes the two will thrive together. No money is changing hands between them, however, even if it is a needed attempt to monetize Yahoo's content in the face of...