Client Server News articles from November 2004

Client Server News archives from November 2004

Microsoft Lost PC Share: Credit Suisse.
November 1, 2004... After talking to Microsoft about its September numbers, Credit Suisse figures Microsoft has lost 2%-3% of its global PC market share to piracy and Linux in Asia particularly, the first time anything like that has ever been heard. The...

Wyse Reorgs, Brings in New Team.
November 1, 2004... Wyse Technologies has quietly reorganized in search of aggressive growth, new acquisitions and a possible IPO at the direction of its owners, the guys who took it private years ago. The company has replaced its CEO, tossed out its COO and...

QNX Sold.
November 1, 2004... Privately held Canadian RTOS house QNX Software Systems is going to multibillion-dollar-a-year Harman International Industries Inc, the Washington, DC-based outfit best known for its high-end audio and stereo brands, for $138 million. QNX...

AMD Creates New Category Box To Mend Digital Divide.
November 1, 2004... AMD, in a dramatic announcement from India, claimed it was going to leap the great Digital Divide and enable 50% of the world's population to have Internet access and computer capabilities by 2015 under a strategy it's calling 50x15. As...

EC Rolls Over for Oracle.(European Commission)
November 1, 2004... The European Commission on Tuesday rubberstamped Oracle's $7.7 billion proposed acquisition of PeopleSoft, as it has been signaling it would, just days before the term of its feisty antitrust czar Mario Monti expires. In making its...

Scott McGregor To Run Broadcom.(appointments)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Scott McGregor - whom some of us can remember working at Xerox PARC on the first PCs to use a GUI, at Microsoft on the original Windows, at DEC as an architect of X Windows and at the Santa Cruz Operation as operating system czar when it bought...

Live Communications Server 2005 RTMs.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Microsoft has sent its Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005 instant messaging and presence kit to manufacturing in anticipation of a December 1 release. Part of the Office family, LCS 2005 is an upgrade to LCS 2003 and provides presence...

VMware Gets Ready for Dual Cores.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Virtualization specialist VMware Inc is working on adding four-way virtual SMP widgetry to its wares, extending itself beyond its current two-way virtual SMP limitations and preparing for the coming onslaught of multi-core chip platforms. ...

Japan Authorities Want Microsoft To Time Travel.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Japan is trying to turn back the clock on that non-assertion of patents (NAP) provision that Microsoft finally dropped from new Windows OEM contracts after Japanese antitrust officials raided its offices in February. According to the AP,...

Unisys To Get New CEO.(Chief Executive Officer)(appointments)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Unisys CEO Lawrence Weinbach, 64, is going to step aside on January 1 and turn the job over to Unisys president and COO Joseph McGrath, 52, Unisys said. Weinbach is going to become chairman, a role he will have through January 2006. ...

Microsoft Betas Whitehorse Tools.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Microsoft has put out a "Community Technology Preview" of new tools that will let developers build customized visual designers based on the modeling technology in Visual Studio 2005. Microsoft said the new tools would build custom...

Google Snaps Up Keyhole.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Google has acquired privately held digital mapping company Keyhole Corporation on undisclosed terms. Mountain View, California-based Keyhole has 3D images of most places on earth and a database of roads, businesses and other points of...

Sender ID Rises from the Dead Halloween-Like; AOL Ceases To Be Spooked.
November 1, 2004... Barely a month after AOL said it wouldn't support the Microsoft-backed spam-fighting Sender ID program, it reversed course and threw its weight behind the scheme after Microsoft revised the specification. Meanwhile, a chastened Microsoft...

Early JBI in Hand.(Java Business Integration)(www.jcp.org)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Sun and its friends, which now include the Apache Group, Iona and JBoss, have in hand an early draft review of the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification otherwise known as Java Specification Request (JSR) 208. The spec is supposed...

Yahoo Bloomba Yahoo.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Yahoo has brought an e-mail application some people say is easier and better than Microsoft's Outook. Apparently the so-called Bloomba technology, developed by Stata Labs, will be incorporated into new e- mail services expected from Yahoo,...

Tatung Enters UK Server Market.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Tatung is going to try to carve off a piece of the UK server market for the first time. The Taiwan-based company has set up an operation in Swindon called Tatung Server Ltd that will sell a range of PC, storage and blade servers made in...

Liberty 12 Pass ID-WSF 1.0 Interoperability Tests.(Web Services specification)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... The Liberty Alliance, where IBM - contrary to its historic political position - has just signed up as a board member, says 12 companies have earned the Liberty Alliance Interoperable mark in the first tests against Liberty's Identity Web...

Intel Ties Up with Craig McCaw.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Intel has pumped an undisclosed amount of money into cellphone pioneer Craig McCaw's WiMax start-up Clearwire to ensure demand for its WiMax chips. The investment is part of the $150 million fund Intel has earmarked for wireless...

Sun Taps Engenio for New Mid-Range System.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Sun has gone to Engenio Information Technologies, the old LSI Logic storage unit, for a new mid-range storage system, the StorEdge 6130 array. Sun is pitching the thing at business-critical applications such as e- mail, ERP and e-commerce...

Hitachi Debuts New Enterprise Drives.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has introduced a new enterprise drive for demanding computing environments. The Ultrastar 15K147 is supposed to provide 33% more I/Os a second than the current-generation 10,000 RPM drives. It...

Veritas Profits Up.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... After a tough Q2, storage software house Veritas reported strong Q3 results earning $96.2 million, or 22 cents a share, on revenues up 11% to $497 million year-over-year. The earnings were a penny ahead of the Street's outlook. In the...

HP Expands SMB Storage Line.(Small and Medium sized Business)
November 1, 2004... Hewlett-Packard has rolled out new SAN and NAS gear targeted at small and medium-sized companies. HP executives described the new StorageWorks Modular Smart Array 1000 Small Business SAN Kit as an entry-level but complete offering for...

Brocade Debuts 4-Gig Switch.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Brocade became the first SAN switch vendor to roll out a 4 Gbps Fibre Channel switch to OEMs with the launch of its new SilkWorm 4100 switch. The SilkWorm 4100 is available in 16-, 24- and 32-port configurations and features redundant...

Dell Gives SuSE a Tad More Respect.
November 1, 2004... Dell plans to offer SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES 9) on some of its PowerEdge servers extending its partnership with Novell and supposedly making SuSE the equal of its relationship with Red Hat although it's transparent that it's not....

Security Hole Found in 2.6 Kernel.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... SuSE is warning of a security hole in the 2.6 Linux kernel that can be exploited to cause a denial of service attack. It says an integer underflow problem in the iptables firewall logging rules can let a remote attacker crash the system via...

Ballmer's Ghostwriter Taunts Linux.
November 1, 2004... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's ghostwriter e-mailed a renewed frontal attack on Linux to customers the other day telling them that Linux is a lot more expensive than Windows, that its TCO sucks, that it's insecure and that it offers no patent...

RLX Goes with Voltaire.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... RLX Technologies, the blade pioneer, has lined up with Voltaire to resell Voltaire's new 10 Gbps Infiniband integrated switch for blade servers to make it easier, they say, for enterprise and HPC customers to deploy small to mid-sized...

Cray Productizes Red Storm.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Cray has productized the giant Opteron-based massively parallel processing (MPP) supercomputer known as Red Storm that it co-designed with the Sandia National Labs, pitting the thing against HPC clusters. It is now shipping the thing,...

US Reclaims Supercomputer Title.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... A Linux-run Itanium-based Altix system built by SGI for NASA and called Columbia is now supposed to be the fastest supercomputer in the world, dethroning Japan's NEC-built Earth Simulator. The 10,240-chip SGI box is supposed to be good for...

SGI Doubles Density.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... SGI has come up with a new version of its Linux-based Altix 3700 called the Bx2 that it says delivers twice the bandwidth and processor density of its high-end predecessor. The new system uses Itanium 2s with 9MB of cache, SGI's first use...

Proginet Debuts Linux Password Tool.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Proginet has introduced a Linux password management tool. Dubbed SecurPass for Linux, it's aimed at companies that have deployed or intend to deploy Linux systems and securely manages passwords for Linux applications. SecurPass for...

Sharp Kills Linux PDA in States.(Personal Digital Assistants)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Sharp is going to stop selling its Zaurus SL6000 Linux PDA in the US, according the AP. It reportedly plans to continue offering the widget in Japan. No reason was given for its decision, but Linux PDAs haven't exactly been a hot item...

Continuous Ports upSuite to Linux.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Continuous Computing has ported its upSuite High Availability middleware for telecom vendors to Linux. The San Diego, California concern said upSuite for Linux had been optimized for modular communications platforms that use Xeon and...

Geez, What Did Intel Do To Tick Off Merrill Lynch?(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Merrill Lynch is advising IBM to devote a substantial part of its manufacturing capacity in East Fishkill to AMD's chips on the theory that it could be a "significant opportunity" if IBM is "willing to take some risks." The broker says...

IBM Keeps Liberty in Suspense.(liberty alliance)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... The Liberty Alliance is dying to see who IBM puts on the Liberty board now that it's a member. It may know by the time of the next board meeting December 7-8. See, whoever it is will give the consortium a handle on whether IBM's participation...

PeopleSoft's Big Kicker ID'd.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... In the September quarter that PeopleSoft is so proud of it signed a record 31 deals worth over $1 million and one worth over $10 million. We suspect, based on a memo put out by California State University's Office of the Chancellor, that we've...

Red Hat Red China Bound.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Red Hat is going to open its first office in China in the next two week, according to what CEO Matthew Szulik and the company's new CFO Charlie Peters said at the Prudential Technology Conference. Red Hat is seeing increased competition from...

HT Hits Big Five-O.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Intel says that in the last two years it has shipped 50 million desktop, server and mobile microprocessors that have its Hyper- Threading Technology (HT) in them. The performance-boosting widgetry, a prelude to multi-cores, fools newer...

World Braces for SCO-Groklaw Shootout.(www.prosco.com)(Santa Cruz Operations Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... SCO is supposed to launch its counter-Groklaw site on Monday so people can have access to all the court filings in the great SCO v IBM suit et al absent Groklaw's usual anti-SCO vitriol. Originally SCO said it was going to call the site...

Intel Backs Friend of Microsoft.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Intel, JMI Equity Funds and Israeli-based Platinum Neurone Ventures have stashed an undisclosed amount of "strategic" money in Toronto- based Panorama Software, the source of Microsoft's OLAP technology. Panorama currently does business...

HP Scientist Named to ISOC Board.(appointment)(Internet Society)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Dr Stephen Squires, HP's chief scientist, has been appointed to the board of trustees of the Internet Society (ISOC), whose mission is to ensure that the open development, evolution and use of the Internet benefits people everywhere. It is also...

Stone Out at Novell.(resignations)(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Novell vice-chairman Chris Stone, the guy credited with orchestrating Novell's death-defying move into Linux and its acquisition of SuSE and Ximian, is out. Supposedly he's leaving to pursue "other professional opportunities." ...

Cluster Start-up - with a Little Help from the HyperTransport.
November 8, 2004... Consortium - Challenges SMP Systems By Maureen O'Gara PathScale Inc, the Linux cluster start-up, whose contribution so far has been a compiler suite, claims its brand new interconnect, its first foray into hardware, is an SMP killer....

Dell Sued for Non-Payment of eCommerce 'Tax'.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... DE Technologies Inc, a little-known Virginia company that apparently holds the patent on international e-commerce, has sued Dell in federal court for patent infringement. The Dell suit is the first DE has brought in the ultimate...

New 7000s Expected from Unisys.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Unisys is about to release three new ES7000 servers implementing Intel's new Itanium 2 chip, the Madison with 9MB of cache that Intel is supposed to launch on Monday. The systems double the number of processors and quadrupled the memory...

HP To Integrate Brocade Switch in BladeSystems.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... HP is going to build Brocade's new 4 gigabit-per-second storage networking switches into its P class BladeSystems under a new arrangement between the two companies. It will be the blades' first optimized, embedded Fibre Channel fabric...

RLX Puts Yamhill in a Blade.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... RLX Technologies, the company that invented the blade server, is now up to its sixth generation machine, the new SB6400. The thing uses dual Xeons, the Nocona chip with the AMD-like 64-bit extension, aka the Intel EM64T, or more familiarly...

Intel & Microsoft in Their Very First Ad Campaign Together.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Imagine, in the whole long, sometimes prickly, sometimes sordid, history of the Wintel alliance Microsoft and Intel have never done co- op advertising together, but the penetration of the parlor is so danged important to both of them that...

Bear Stearns Lowers Q4 PC Projection.(Industry Overview)
November 8, 2004... Bear Stearns has lowered its Q4 PC unit growth projection from 14% to 13% year-over-year to reflect weaker consumer demand (think HP and Gateway) offset by the continued recovery of corporate demand. It still thinks the year will be up 14% on...

WRMS Upgrade Beta Coming.(Windows Rights Management Services)(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Microsoft is putting out a beta of its Windows Rights Management Services Service Pack 1 program, which lets customers protect their sensitive digital information such as web content, documents and e- mail from unauthorized use. SP1 is...

BT Standardizes on Novell Directory.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Novell says it's gotten a big deal from BT to provide directory and consulting services to BT Exact, the UK firm's technology and IT operations division. BT Exact is supposed to use Novell's eDirectory as the basis of BT's identity...

AOL Gives Time Warner Other Financial Headaches.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Time Warner is going to restate 2000, 2001 and possibly 2002 because it didn't consolidate its earnings with AOL Europe's after it agreed to acquire the 80% of the operation it didn't already own from Bertelsmann. It's also going to set...

Two Former CA VPs Settle Up with the SEC.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Vice Presidents)(Securities and Exchange Commission)(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Former Computer Associates senior VP of finance David Kaplan and former finance VP David Rivard, both of whom have already pleaded guilty to criminal charges of securities fraud and obstruction of justice, have settled up with the SEC, agreeing...

Overseer Picked for CA Restitution Fund.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Kenneth Feinberg, the lawyer who administered the multibillion-dollar 9-11 Victim Compensation Fund, is going to oversee Computer Associates' $225 million Restitution Fund, according to the US Attorney's office that investigated CA's cooked...

Hollywood To Sue Online Thieves.
November 8, 2004... Borrowing a leaf from its mates at the Recording Industry of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), its members and other film studios say they are going to launch hundreds of lawsuits against people who illegally...

Linux Networx Launches Storage Appliance; Gets $40m.
November 8, 2004... Linux Networx, which sells Linux clusters to commercial and government accounts, rolled out a new storage system called Xilo on Thursday. Designed specifically for the company's cluster systems, Xilo is supposed to combine storage devices,...

Acopia Snags $25m.(Acopia Networks )(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Acopia Networks has raised $25 million in a new round taking the total capital raised to $65 million. Goldman Sachs led the third round in the Lowell, Massachusetts start- up as a new investor with participation from existing backers...

BakBone Gets New CEO.(Chief Executive Officer)(appointments)
November 8, 2004... BakBone, the storage software house, has named James Johnson as its new CEO. Johnson was most recently CTO of SoftBrands' Hospitality Group, a privately held enterprise application software firm specializing in hospitality and...

Wind River Opens the Kimono on its First Linux.
November 8, 2004... Wind River Systems, which hopped on the Linux bandwagon last October, launched its first Linux operating system the other day, calling it the Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition (or Platform NE) and aiming it at the telecommunications...

Groklaw To Expand.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... The Groklaw blog that's been following the SCO court cases against IBM, Novell and others says it's going to start carrying "daily links" to other "legal and related IT news stories," evidently stuff provided by Groklaw readers. It says...

Scali Bears Down on US Market.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Scali, the Norwegian high-performance clustering house, has set up a new US headquarters in Westborough, Massachusetts where it is consolidating its operations and personnel under newly installed executive VP and general manager James Biggs....

OSDL Backs OpenAIS.(Application Interface Specification)(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... The Open Source Development Labs has joined hands with the Service Availability Forum in support of OpenAIS, the open source Linux project kicked off by Montavista Software that aims to implement the Forum's Application Interface Specification...

SCO Muffs Groklaw Rejoiner.(Santa Cruz Operations Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... SCO shot itself in the foot the other day - as it is often wont to do - and failed to materialize the Groklaw-fighting prosco.com web site as promised on Monday. It seems it and its lawyers got cold feet at the last minute and want to give the...

Open Source Ingres Moves into GA.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Computer Associates made its open source Ingres r3 database generally available the other day. The widgetry is for both Linux and Windows and is out under a CA Trusted Open Source License. CA started giving open source developers a shot at...

SGI Lands Linux Supercomputer Deal.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... The Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) plans to roll out a SGI Altix Linux supercomputer as its core computational system for developing energy systems. The value of the deal was not disclosed. SGI and Fujitsu, its systems...

SuSE 9.2 Eval Ready.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Novell has an evaluation LiveDVD of SuSE Linux 9.2 available for download. It will let users test drive the open source desktop, server and applications functionality in SuSE's consumer distribution. It includes both the Gnome 2.6 and...

Microsoft May Halt Free Security Updates: Ballmer.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... On a flying visit to Europe, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the German publication WirtschaftsWoche that he's reconsidering Microsoft's policy of providing free Windows security updates because of piracy in countries like China and Malaysia...

CA Drops Out of OMG.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Object Management Group)(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... After being part of the Object Management Group for a dozen years, Computer Associates, which says it supports open standards, has dropped out and given up its board seat, basically conceding its position in the Corba-UML modeler space to...

Topspin Cozier with Both IBM & Sun.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Topspin's relationship with both IBM and Sun has reportedly taken a new turn. Topspin's Infiniband switches are going to be offered on IBM's BladeCenter server while the Topspin-Sun alliance, which started modestly enough, has reportedly been...

Sun's Old Attack Dog Finds a New Master.(appointments)(Azul Systems Inc)(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Shahin Khan, once Sun's gadfly chief competitive officer and then the head of a company-wide HPTC business unit Sun set up, has turned up at Azul Systems Inc, the start-up founded by fellow Sun veteran Stephen DeWitt, who back in the glory days...

IBM Recruits Cognos for Linux-on-Power Play.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Cognos is getting behind IBM's precious Linux-on-Power push and is going to offer its ReportNet kit on the Linux-on-pSeries platform. The arrangement is reportedly part of a global multi-year agreement to drive business intelligence adoption on...

Microsoft Canada Chief Steps Down.(resignations and appointments)(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Frank Clegg, the head of Microsoft Canada, is stepping down and will be replaced by David Hemler, an American. Clegg is reportedly taking a six-month sabbatical and is supposed to return to Microsoft in another role. During Clegg's...

AMD Adds Radio Shack Exec to Board.(appointments )(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... AMD has named Radio Shack president and COO David Edmondson to its board. Evidently it's interested in picking the consumer/"digital lifestyle" side of Edmondson's brain.

Wyse Reorg Claims More Victims.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... It looks like the bloodletting continues at Wyse Technologies. After quietly dismissing its CEO, COO, marketing chief and head of EMEA sales, it appears to have dumped its VP of sales, Americas Jim Crocco and its CFO Lumin Chang too - and...

Steve Chen's Working for the Chinese.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... The New York Times has tracked down Seymour Cray's illusive Taiwan- born protg-cum-rival Steve Chen to Mainland China where he has been building a next-generation supercomputer for a local company after failing to find sponsors in post-bubble...

Streamline Spins Out Allinea.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... UK VAR Streamline Computing Ltd, a purveyor of cluster supercomputer systems and apparently a close friend of Sun's, has spun out Allinea Software Ltd to exploit and evolve the technologies it's been developing the last few years. Allinea is...

Intel Writes Second Check to z/OS-on-Itanium Start-up.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Intel has tucked a few more bucks - amount undisclosed - in Platform Solutions Inc (PSI), the start-up that wants to challenge IBM's mainframe monopoly by making Itanium 2-based systems that run MVS, z/OS and S/390 as well as Unix, Windows and...

Novell Reportedly Replaces Stone with ex-PeopleSoft Exec.(appointments )(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... Novell is reportedly going to replace newly departed vice-chairman Chris Stone, who ran engineering, product management and alliances, with former PeopleSoft executive VP, products and technology Ram Gupta. The appointment will reportedly...

Microsoft's Search Jihad Starts in Earnest; Google Responds by Doubling its Index.
November 15, 2004... Forget Iraq and the Middle East. An explosive new holy war has broken out in the states between two of the biggest IT brands over huge pots of money and the right to be gatekeeper of the world's information. On Thursday, Microsoft...

EC Objects To Microsoft-Time Warner ContentGuard Deal.( European Commission)(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... The European Commission, which couldn't find anything wrong with the proposed Oracle-PeopleSoft acquisition, has reportedly sent Microsoft and Time Warner a so-called statement of objections, the EC's way of saying it's having trouble...

The Browser War is Back.
November 15, 2004... The fox is in the henhouse. On Tuesday, Mozilla released the Firefox 1.0 web browser after a successful preview that supposedly saw the beta downloaded eight million times. In a dig at Microsoft's notoriously buggy Internet Explorer...

Otellini Gets the Job.(appointments)(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... Intel's board elected heir apparent Paul Otellini CEO effective next May, succeeding Craig Barrett, who will replace demigod Andy Grove as chairman. Grove will be off the board, but serve as a senior advisor to both the board and senior...

Microsoft Forces VMware To Cut the Price of GSX.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... VMware, the virtualization maven, has pared the price of its three- year-old GSX Server for both Windows and Linux to $1,400 for a two-CPU license and $2,800 for an unlimited license that supports systems with up to 32 CPUs to stand off...

Comcast To Start Deploying Microsoft TV Software.
November 15, 2004... Comcast, the cable giant, is about to start deploying Microsoft's TV Foundation software for cable operators on the set-tops of a million subscribers in Redmond's home state of Washington. The move marks the first commercial use of the TV...