Client Server News articles from May 2003

Client Server News archives from May 2003

Sun & Oracle Show the White Flag; IBM & Microsoft Throw.
May 12, 2003... Down the Gauntlet to W3C By Maureen O'Gara The shiny new BPEL technical committee that Microsoft and IBM arranged to set up over at Oasis - in opposition, of course, to the Sun-led Choreography committee over at W3C - hasn't even had its...

CA To Piggyback on Unbreakable Linux.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Computer Associates, a fervent Linux disciple these days, is planning on hopping on Oracle's Unbreakable Linux initiative and turning it into Secure Unbreakable Linux, a clever idea that, if we're not mistaken, could see Oracle representing...

Hey, You, Wanna Try Our Virtual Server?
May 12, 2003... Microsoft's beaters are out in the bushes trying to flush users who might give the pre-beta preview of its new Virtual Server, the stuff it acquired from Connectix on February 20, a shot. The preview, released Monday, got posted roughly...

Broadcom & ServerWorks Founder Settle.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Broadcom has come to terms with the co-founder and former CEO of its ServerWorks chipset-making subsidiary Raju Vegesna who was fired a few weeks ago along with executive VP of sales and marketing Dave Pulling and VP of business development...

HP Moves the Furniture Around.
May 12, 2003... A few days before laying out its latest strategy to revive its loss- making enterprise business, HP reorganized its Enterprise Systems Group (ESG). Mimicking IBM, HP has created a single hardware business unit called Enterprise Storage and...

HP Spins a New Strategy Tale.
May 12, 2003... Last year's enterprise strategy, Adaptive Infrastructure, never left the nest - lest it be picked off by IBM's upstaging better-thought- out $10 billion On Demand strategy - so the other day HP - to celebrate the first birthday of its merger...

Egenera Claims Virtualization Championship.
May 12, 2003... Egenera is scoffing over Sun, HP and IBM and their "slideware" virtualization promises. The start-up claims it can do what the majors only wish they could. Egenera's BladeFrame system was designed so the blades are stateless and anonymous...

Microsoft Advances its Provisioning Scheme.
May 12, 2003... Microsoft turned up at WinHEC with five new converts to its Automated Deployment Services (ADS) scheme, the server provisioning widgetry that was supposed to be part of Windows Server 2003, but somewhere along the line morphed into a follow-on...

Microsoft Drops CE.NET Pricing.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Microsoft has cut the price of the Windows CE .NET operating system to boost its use in low-cost small-footprint devices. At WinHEC in New Orleans this week, Bill Gates introduced the new license - a Windows CE .NET 4.2 Core for $3 per...

SOAP 1.2 Nears Standardization.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... W3C has released the SOAP 1.2 proposed standard to its membership for final review, which lasts until June 7. The proposed standard, which W3C of course calls a recommendation, consists of the SOAP 1.2 Messaging Framework, which is the rules...

Whither the VB Developer?(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Evans Data Corporation figures 52% of all software developers use Visual Basic, but claims that 43% are going to reduce their dependence on the language over the next year while a third of them push on to VB.NET. It says that over a third of...

Unisys Breaks TPC-C Barrier.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Unisys is all atwitter over the now-official record-breaking TPC-C benchmark it got on its shiny new 16-way ES7000/520, aka Dylan, the shrunken version of its Windows-based mainframe-class technology, the scheme it hopes to use to take out RISC...

Athlon MP Gets More Cache.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... AMD Tuesday released its Athlon MP 2800+ for one- and two-way servers and workstations, a 32-bit chip that will theoretically compete against AMD's new 32/64-bit hybrid Opteron. The 2800 is based on the Barton core borrowed from the mainstream...

First Jini Standard Passed.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... The Jini Community has approved its first standard, a ServiceUI API that standardizes an approach for attaching multiple user interfaces to a single Jini service, allowing it to be accessed by users with varying preferences and accessibility...

Newisys Demos 4p Opteron Box.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Newisys, the company hoping to OEM its AMD Opteron systems to the tier-one vendors, turned up at WinHEC this week with Sobek, its anticipated 4p 3U, as expected (CSN No 497). The box, which is supposed to become available as a beta late...

No Place To Hide.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Sun stock rallied 12% last Friday - relax, that's only 41 cents these days - but it did hit $3.75 setting off vague rumors of a possible takeover fueled apparently by a buy of five million Sun shares, a big transaction even by Wall Street...

Microsoft Smiles on Transmeta.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Microsoft has tapped Transmeta to be a reference design partner for the next generation of CE.NET-based Smart Displays, wireless touch screens that access XP PCs remotely. Evidently several OEMs "expressed interest in developing for the...

3Com Heads East.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... 3Com, which lost its networking star to Cisco, has joined the exodus out of Silicon Valley and is moving its headquarters East to Marlboro, Massachusetts where two-thirds of its activities are already centered. 3Com CEO Bruce Claflin is an...

Microsoft Puts Small Fortune into DRM.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Microsoft has invested over $250 million in digital rights management technologies since 1999. According to an e-mail CEO Steve Ballmer sent to customers and partners lately, Microsoft is making substantial investments in digital rights...

Failing All Else, Microsoft Tries To Innovate.
May 12, 2003... Gee, it looks like Bill Gates has finally stumbled over the idea that PCs have gotten frozen in time like the pre-historic Iceman found at the top of the Alps and that without innovations to entice people to buy there's no reason for them to...

Last Two Die-Hards File Quixotic Appeal.
May 12, 2003... Massachusetts and West Virginia, the two remaining states whose knickers are still in a twist over the weak Microsoft antitrust settlement, filed their 76-page appeal the other day claiming that the "decree fails to meet even the most basic...

Veritas Joins Utility Computing Push.
May 12, 2003... Veritas, the storage software vendor, is hopping on the utility computing bandwagon. Utility computing, the new mantra of a beleaguered IT industry reeling under the impact of the worst spending slowdown in living memory, means delivering...

Sandial Switch Launch Imminent.
May 12, 2003... Peek-a-boo storage start-up Sandial Systems dropped its veil the other day to talk up its storage backbone switch and imminent launch. Targeted at the Global 2000, Sandial's director-class multi-protocol SAN switches, currently in limited...

McData Sees Higher Revenues, Profits.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... McData reported preliminary results for its fiscal first quarter ended April 30 that were higher than its forecast. The storage switch vendor says that it expects revenues to range from $102 million-$103 million compared to its previous...

StorageTek Debuts New Data Protection Device.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... StorageTek has launched a new disk-based data protection iSCSI appliance. Dubbed EchoView, the widgetry is supposed to continuously capture data as it is written thereby eliminating the need for a backup window. A thin client on every...

Trebia Names New CEO; Raises More Funds.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Storage start-up Trebia Networks has found itself a new CEO in Ruediger Stroh. Stroh was previously CEO of Systemonic, a developer of silicon system solutions for multi-protocol, multi-band wireless LANs. Philips Electronics recently...

Dot Hill Raises Revenue, Profit Forecast.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Dot Hill Systems has increased its revenue and profit forecast for this year following encouraging revenue figures in Q1. The Carlsbad, California-based storage networking products vendor says it's now targeting annual revenues of $171.5...

FIA Debuts New NAS Appliances.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... First Intelligent Array Inc has launched a new NAS appliance aimed at mid-sized businesses. Dubbed Popnetserver 8000, the rack-optimized 2U family of devices features eight front-load hot-swappable drives and can store up to 2TB of data....

Red Hat Cuts Key Deal with Fujitsu.
May 12, 2003... Fujitsu, which practically has co-developer status on the Sparc chip and has been one of Sun's most loyal resellers, is cuddling deeper under the covers with Red Hat in the name of its new Intel initiative - the one that will see it create...

SCO Hit with DoS Attack; Penguinistas Thought Responsible.
May 12, 2003... The SCO Group, an industry pariah since it sued IBM alleging that it misappropriated SCO's Unix trade secrets and put them in Linux, says it experienced a massive denial of service (DoS) attack last Friday that consumed 90% of its ISP's...

SCO Leaves the Door Open To Suing Linux Distros.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... SCOsource general manager Chris Sontag, the guy in charge of monetizing the SCO Group's IP, says that the company has IP issues with the major Linux distributions and with the Linux kernel itself, but that "what we chose to do about it has not...

PeopleSoft Portfolio Falls to Linux.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... PeopleSoft is going to port its whole software portfolio to Linux under a joint development deal with IBM to optimize the stuff for IBM's hardware and software. IBM's xSeries machines, DB2 database and WebSphere application server and Red Hat...

Red Hat Previews Opteron Code.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Red Hat has released a technology preview of its 64-bit Opteron code for the Linux community to play with. The real product, due later this year hopefully, will be a version of what used to be called Advanced Server 3. The preview, called...

Dell Turns Orange.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Dell wants everybody to know that it knocked out a proprietary dual- processor RISC system at Orange, the UK telecoms house, and is replacing it with a cluster of four Xeon-based Dell servers running Oracle9i RAC and Red Hat Linux Advanced...

HP To Challenge Microsoft.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Reports out of HP Labs say it's well advanced in using Linux as the operating system for a variety of handheld products under development as opposed to any version of Windows. The story is that HP plans to challenge Microsoft's software...

My, How Times Change; Lindows To Drop Netscape.
May 12, 2003... In late September, after selecting Netscape 7.0 to be the default Internet suite in LindowsOS 2.0, Lindows.com CEO Michael Robertson couldn't stop raving about it and its parent AOL. "To millions of people," he said, "AOL IS the Internet." ...

Ah, the Old Numbers Game.
May 12, 2003... There seems to be some debate among the punter class about how many Opteron chips AMD can get off. Merrill Lynch's chip watcher Joe Osha has said 170,000 this year, maybe 1.5 million next year (CSN No 498). Nathan Brookwood, Insight 64's...

Standards Body For Hire.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Given that the name Oasis stands for the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards and according to its own home page is supposed to be dedicated to the adoption of e- business standards, one can only wonder what the...

Microsoft, DOJ Hit Speed Bump.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Apparently Microsoft and the Justice Department are dickering over how much Microsoft can charge for those communications protocol licenses it's supposed to make available under its antitrust settlement so third parties can interoperate....

No Deal for Corel.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Vector CC Holding LLC, the outfit that picked up Microsoft's shares in Corel, doesn't have dibs on buying Corel anymore. The standstill agreement signed in March so Vector could do due diligence expired the other day without Vector making a...

Oh God.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... "I think we have two or three years before we actually hit bottom and start to recover." - Jim Breyer of Accel Partners at the annual meeting of the National Venture Capital Association in New York.

Just Call Me Dell.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Dell Computer Corporation wants to be known simply as Dell Inc from now on. It doesn't want to dilute the fact that it sells servers, storage, printers and other gear as well as PCs.

Naughty, Naughty.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... Seems the infamous Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) caught Sun Microsystems red-handed with its fingers in the cookie jar. It's sent Sun a cease and desist letter after finding Sun employees downloading and sharing copyrighted...

And It's IBM by a Head.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... It seems that IBM pulled ahead of BEA last year on the J2EE application server front. Dataquest is giving IBM 37% of the market to BEA's 29% where in 2001 BEA had 34% and IBM 31%. Evidently other analysts are skeptical of the numbers saying the...

Longhorn To Be Bonded & Bottled in '05, Promise.(Brief Article)
May 12, 2003... It seems that Will Poole, executive VP of Microsoft's Windows Client unit, publicly confirmed at WinHEC this week that Longhorn, the successor to Windows XP, will be released in 2005. It's supposed to beta in October and there's a second beta...

Sun To Come Out Swinging at Linux.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Sun CEO Scott McNealy on Monday is going to try to ease on out from between the rock and a hard place that he finds himself caught in by positioning Solaris x86 as the answer to the market's low-cost computing desires instead of Linux, his...

Report Says Sun Plans To Go with Opteron Blade.
May 19, 2003... Next month Sun Microsystems plans to introduce a new family of x86- only blade servers code named Grizzly, according to a source familiar with the project. Grizzly was initially supposed to be a two-way Xeon white box blade server but is now...

Sell You a Web Services Mainframe?
May 19, 2003... Unisys is about to come out with its promised line of Dorado ClearPath Plus mainframes, the sister to its Libra family, and it's supposed to position the little beast as the mainframe for web services, Unisys' bow to modernizing the things. ...

Intel Finds Erratum in McKinley Chip.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Intel said Monday that extreme stress testing had uncovered an erratum in some of the McKinley Itanium 2 chips that can cause a system to act unpredictably or even shut down. Intel will offer OEMs a workaround that will cut the McKinley's...

RLX Gets Another $23 million.
May 19, 2003... RLX Technologies, the Texas blades inventor, claims it was only looking for $15 million in additional capital and landed $23 million instead. That'll mean that nearly $100 million has flowed through its bank account. It won't discuss...

IBM Buys Think Dynamics.
May 19, 2003... IBM has acquired a three-year-old Canadian start-up called Think Dynamics to bolster its on-demand computing capabilities. Think Dynamics provides a suite of applications peddled under the brand ThinkControl that automates the management of...

IT Doesn't Matter, the Harvard Business Review Says.
May 19, 2003... Seems the Harvard Business Review thinks IT has run its course and can join the telegraph and the railroad on the ash heap of history. Its strategic value, the journal says, has been devalued by commoditization. What makes a resource strategic...

Uh-Oh.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... A vulnerability found in all 200 million copies of Passport by a Pakistani computer researcher could put Microsoft in hock to the US regulators for an unfathomable $2.2 trillion thanks to that agreement that the company signed with the Federal...

Choreography-BPEL Player Gets Funding.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Intalio Inc, one of the companies that originally co-authored the Sun-SAP-BEA WSCI choreography specification submitted to W3C but has now gone over to the enemy camp and will co-submit the BPEL 1.1 specification to Oasis along with IBM,...

New Moon: The 'Intelligent' Alternative to Citrix.(Canaveral iQ 2.0 )
May 19, 2003... Citrix wannabe New Moon Systems Inc is about to ship its Canaveral server-based application scheme all decked out for the new Windows Server 2003 and cast as the "intelligent alternative" to Citrix because it's a lot cheaper and easier to...

SAS Brands Unisys ES7000 Config.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Unisys has struck up a three-way alliance with SAS and Sigma Marketing to create a thing called Z3 Customer Analytics, a pre- integrated CRM solution based on a dedicated, specially tuned eight- to 32-way Unisys ES7000 Windows mainframe that...

T-Mobile Hangs Up on Microsoft.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Deutsche Telecom's T-Mobile, Europe's second largest cell phone service provider, has canceled its ballyhooed plans to introduce a phone based on Microsoft's Smartphone software. Sendo canceled last fall. When T-Mobile announced in...

SCO CEO Says He Will Donate His IP to Open Source if.
May 19, 2003... Infringement Claims Prove Untrue By Maureen O'Gara It's Red Hat's worst nightmare. The SCO Group, which owns Unix and is suing IBM for a billion dollars for IP infringement, has sent a letter to the CEO and to the chairman of the audit...

Linus Reacts.
May 19, 2003... This is supposed to be Linux Torvalds, the father of Linux' reaction to SCO's letter-writing escapade. We poached it off of LinuxWorld. "I'd personally just like to know what they claim infringes, since they themselves seem to be quite...

Gartner Tells Users To Do Due Diligence on Linux & Open.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Source A month ago, foreseeing that SCO's infringement claims would impact users, Gartner told customers that if their IT departments were using Linux or other open source code they should get themselves an internal vetting process to do...

SuSE Gets Crumbs from Fujitsu's Table.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Well, it's not the global deal Red Hat cut with Fujitsu last week - the one that promises to give Red Hat the engineering muscle to ultimately run on a 128-processor mainframe-style system Fujitsu Japan is building out of Intel parts - but SuSE...

Astaro Picks Up Series A Round.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Astaro Corporation, the three-year-old German-based firewall appliance vendor, has abandoned bootstrapping and taken in a $6.2 million first round from Insight Venture Partners in New York and Wellington Partners Venture Capital in Munich. ...

Opteron Plays Games.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Super Computer Inc (SCI), the games hoster, figures it's the first to put an Opteron-based cluster to work, using one of those RackSaver BladeRack XTs, a 44 dual-node system fitted with 88 of AMD's 1.6GHz Opteron chip. Anyway, it demo'd it at...

Ximian Upgrades Red Carpet.(Red Carpet 2.0)(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Ximian has released an upgrade to its Red Carpet desktop client software, which lets users download and update Linux software from Ximian and other vendors. Highlights of Red Carpet 2.0 include a streamlined user interface, new...

Microsoft For Free.
May 19, 2003... The International Herald Tribune, that divine ex-pat paper that treats both fashion and the Vatican like they were, well, real, hit pay dirt the other day when it came upon a treasure trove of old Microsoft e-mail, plus a confidential Microsoft...

EMC Debuts New Subscription-Based Apps.(AutoAdvice and SAN Architect software)
May 19, 2003... EMC has expanded the capabilities of its ControlCenter storage management software with two new subscription-based applications. Aimed at addressing the growing complexity of IT infrastructures, the new programs work by leveraging the...

Netscout Adds SAN Reporting Features.(free enhancement to nGenius Performance Manager)(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Netscout has introduced additional performance monitoring and reporting tools for SANs. Delivered as an enhancement to its nGenius Performance Manager at no additional cost, the new capabilities provide expanded real-time and historical...

Fibre Channel SAN Market up 3%.(according to gartner)(Brief Article)(Industry Overview)
May 19, 2003... The worldwide Fibre Channel SAN components hardware market grew 3% to $1.47 billion in 2002, according to Gartner. Fibre Channel switching products accounted for $847 million while host bus adapters totaled $570 million. Brocade...

Vicom Files for Chapter 11.
May 19, 2003... Storage virtualization house Vicom Systems has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Fremont, California outfit filed in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California on May 1. Vicom has gone through some...

IBM Upgrades Shark.(aka TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server 800)(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... IBM has enhanced the Shark, otherwise known as TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server 800 by improving its capacity on demand and enhancing its copy services and disaster recovery. With the upgrade, customers get a standby capacity on...

Dell OutDoes Itself.
May 19, 2003... The smart money on Wall Street didn't much care what Dell had to say about Q1. They figured it was in the bag because of Dell's April guidance - then got disappointed because Dell didn't exceed expectations - still what they really wanted to...

CA Losses Narrow.(q4 2003)(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Computer Associates lost $106 million, or 18 cents a share, on revenues of $801 million in its fourth quarter ended March 31. For the comparable period last year, the company lost $238 million, or 41 cents a share, on revenues of $772...

Brocade Posts Whopping Loss.(q2 2003)
May 19, 2003... Brocade reported a hefty loss of $146 million on revenues of $130.9 million in its fiscal second quarter ended April 26. The losses includes restructuring costs of $10.9 million, a charge of $135 million related to the acquisition of...

NetApp Profits Triple; To Launch New Appliance.(Q4 2003 launching FAS250)
May 19, 2003... Network Appliance's profits more than tripled in its fiscal fourth quarter ended April 30. The NAS vendor earned $24.8 million, or seven cents a share, in line with the Street's forecast. A year ago, NetApp earned $7.8 million, or two...

User Backlash.
May 19, 2003... Microsoft reportedly hosted one of those cute little CIO tete-a- tetes last week and a session on the wonders of Windows Server 2003 led by CEO Steve Ballmer scheduled to run an hour apparently turned into four-and-a-half hours of user backlash...

Smart Remarks Department.
May 19, 2003... "Hmmm. So HP has adopted a technical strategy based (we can presume) on random mutation and natural selection (Darwinism). In other words, the forces of nature acting without any plan, purpose, or goal - Richard Dawkin's 'blind watchmaker' -...

Fujitsu Fancies SuSE.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Fujitsu, it is rumored, has notions of maybe buying SuSE.

IBM Suspected of Warming Up for a Big Acquisition.(according to Bear Stearns)(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Bear Stearns walked out of the IBM analysts meeting the other day with the impression that "IBM may plan an acquisition in the $2 billion-$7 billion range by early 2004 to validate growth in 2005." IBM offered no new guidance but, just like...

Ah, an Old-Fashioned Living Sacrifice.
May 19, 2003... SuSE, we hear, has offered up a living sacrifice because of the SCO mess. Gregory Blepp, who was managing the United Linux relationships for SuSE, is reportedly no longer VP, international sales and channels. SuSE, by the way, would like to...

Naughty, Naughty.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... A vendor claims Sun's accounts payable people are deducting 1% from the invoice without consultation presumably in hopes most people won't want to rock the boat.

IM Scores.(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Microsoft claims that 100 million active users a month worldwide are using the MSN Messenger Service, the instant messenger. It also claims the thing, which competes against AOL and Yahoo, was number one in 11 countries among free services in...

Board Seats.(at Red Hat and Computer Associates)(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Red Hat has made a second board appointment in as many weeks. This time it's W Steve Albrecht, associate dean of the Marriott School of Management and Arthur Anderson Professor at Brigham Young University. He's an accountant and fraud examiner...

Zander Turns VC.(joining Silver Lake Partners)(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... Former Sun number-two Ed Zander, who indicated when he resigned last spring that he was looking for a CEO job, is joining Silver Lake Partners and becoming a VC instead. Silver Lake was set up in 1999 as a high-tech buyout group by a bunch of...

SQL Architect To Advise White House.(Pedro Celis to serve on President's Information and Technology Advisory Committee)(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... SQL Server architect Pedro Celis has been named to serve a two-year term on the President's Information and Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). The 25-member committee is supposed to provide the White House with expert independent advise on...