Client Server News articles from September 2002

Client Server News archives from September 2002

Dell Reorgs.
September 9, 2002... Dell's been moving the furniture around inside its enterprise and client units apparently in search of that Platonic ideal known as the perfect structure that everybody's happy with. Dell's PR people have denied that anything's been...

Madison Sighting.(Intel's forthcoming microprocessor)(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... It looks like Madison, the next rev of the Itanium chip, is going to surface for the first time publicly at the Intel Developers Forum the week of Sept-ember 9. Unisys - not HP, which is looked on as Itanium's biggest booster - says it's going...

MSN Wallet - Old Wine, New Bottle.
September 9, 2002... For some reason or another that probably has to do with heightened Federal Trade Commission sensitives and making Pass-port less of a target, Microsoft has decided to jerk the existing Express Purchase wallet out of Passport and create a "new"...

ServerWorks Goes Ethernet.
September 9, 2002... So, the 21-month-old Broadcom-ServerWorks union has borne fruit in a little less time than it takes a mommy elephant to produce a baby elephant. ServerWorks has branched off into gigabit Ethernet (GbE), a Broadcom interest, and is sampling...

Microsoft Starts Delivering SP1.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 9, 2002... Microsoft has released its promised Windows XP Service Pack 1 to manufacturers and says it will be available to the public on CD and download on Monday September 9. SP1 is supposed to let people substitute third-party middleware for Microsoft's...

IBM To Acquire Identity Management ISV.
September 9, 2002... Announcing its second software acquisition in five days, IBM said it was buying identity management software provider Access360. Financial terms of the deal, expected to close in October, were not disclosed. IBM said the acquisition...

OmniCluster Gets New CEO.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... OmniCluster Technologies has named its COO Sterling Wharton as its new CEO. The Boca Raton, Florida PCI appliance blade concern said Wharton's appointment would "further enhance the company's capabilities." OmniCluster's has bumped its old CEO...

Build or Buy?(Microsoft)(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Insiders say Microsoft is on the lookout for server virtualization and has to decide whether to build or buy the facility. It reportedly dropped by VMware and Connectix a while ago.

Microsoft Cozies Up to Hollywood for Media Player9.
September 9, 2002... Heralding it as the next wave in the digital media revolution, Microsoft launched the public beta of its Windows Media Player 9 Series, aka Corona, and other pieces of the platform at a glitzy event in Los Angeles Wednesday night with Hollywood...

Intel Guides Lower.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Intel guided lower Thursday during its mid-quarter update just as Wall Street expected all week. It said Q3 revenues would come in between $6.3 billion and $6.7 billion rather than $6.3 billion and $6.9 billion like it thought before. It said...

Intel Spins Off LANDesk.
September 9, 2002... Intel is selling off its Software Products & Services Division, which houses its LANDesk desktop management system, to Vector Capital, a San Francisco software spinoff specialist, and vSpring Capital, who will trundle it off to Salt Lake City,...

Fancy That. A 64-bit Wintel System.(Unisys)(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Will wonders never cease? At the .NET Server DevCon in Seattle on Wednesday, Unisys demonstrated what it called the industry's first completely 64-bit Wintel system: a 64-bit Microsoft operating system and a 64-bit database running on a 64-bit...

HP Caught in Numbers Crunch.
September 9, 2002... The combined Hewlett-Packard-Compaq, which came together in May, managed to keep its worldwide lead in Intel servers in Q2 but lost close to five points in market share year-over-year according to the figures IDC's got. Dell, on the other hand,...

More Layoffs Expected at IBM.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... The Wall Street Journal said Tuesday that IBM will lay off another 4,000 support people give or take once its PricewaterhouseCoopers acquisition closes at the end of the month. It's not exactly clear yet where the terminations will come from,...

Toshiba To Field Tablet.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Toshiba, which used to be king of the portables, says it's gotten a copy of the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition from Microsoft and will have a Portege slate out in a couple of months. It's planning on using computer superstores, mail order,...

Street Frets over IBM.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... With HP and Sun complaining about how soft things are. Bear Stearns has started worrying about IBM. Apparently it's not sure which it should worry about more: IBM's hardware exposure, which accounts for 34% of its revenues, or IBM's service...

Microtel, Via, Wal-Mart & Lindows Break the $200 Barrier.
September 9, 2002... Windows wannabe Lindows.com has struck with that $199 Linux box it's been threatening to see get to market in hopes of lighting a tinderbox that burns down the Microsoft concession (CSN No 463). Lindows calls the price point "computer history."...

MySQL Gets .NET'd.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... MySQL AB, the company behind the MySQL open source database, crows that its database can be accessed from within the Microsoft .NET development environment through multiple interfaces. Its integration with .NET is said to reduce the time...

Linux Becomes Windows-Compatible in Two Years.
September 9, 2002... Outside Jeremy White, the founder and CEO of CodeWeavers, the commercializers of the long-running, never-ending open source Wine Project, which is reverse engineering the Win32 software layer so other people's operating systems can run...

MS Loses 6% of the Web Server Market to Open Source.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Microsoft has lost 6% of its IIS web server market to the open source Apache web server according to the latest numbers from Netcraft, the Internet census taker. Most of the loss resulted from changes at the so-called domain name parks that...

Tower Upgrades Compiler for Linux.(Tower Technology TowerJ 3.9)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 9, 2002... Tower Technology has upgraded its TowerJ compiler for Linux and Solaris platforms. Highlights of release 3.9 include new threading capabilities, improved garbage collection and other unspecified optimizations. Tower claims the new...

Open Source Audio Codec Hardware-Ready.(Ogg Vorbis Tremor)
September 9, 2002... An embedded version of the open source audio compression format with the odd name of Ogg Vorbis has been released. The embedded release, aggressively called Tremor, re-implements the Vorbis format, stripping out Vobis' dependence on floating...

Dell Lands SUNY Buffalo Linux Cluster Deal.
September 9, 2002... Linux continues its march into high-performance compute clustering with a win at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Buffalo's cluster, up and running for six-eight weeks, uses of 2,000 Dell PowerEdge 1650 dual-processor servers...

Turbolinux Warning.(from Gartner)
September 9, 2002... In the face of its retreat back to Japan, Gartner is warning clients off of the Turbolinux distribution, saying that "enterprises should discontinue or avoid deployments based on Turbolinux, except in geographies served by SRA," aka Software...

Linux Numbers Up.
September 9, 2002... Dataquest has fixed 32-bit Linux-on-Intel server sales in Q2 at $220 million, up $50 million year-over-year. Dell led with $59.2 million worth of the booty, HP was next with $58.6 million and IBM after that with $42 million. US shipments were...

Linux-Windows TCO "Roughly Equal" - Microsoft.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Microsoft apparently made a bit of a to-do over its Services for Unix (SFU) 3.0 migration kit at the Server DevCon it had this week and its director of Unix migration strategy Doug Miller was holding forth on how Microsoft figures the cost of...

Linux Turns Tables on Microsoft.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... According to the New York Times and a Microsoft-backed pressure group called the Initiative for Software Choice, Microsoft is currently facing 66 government proposals, statements and studies in 25 countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America...

Yipes, Embedix Lives.(Infomart; Embedix PDA Plus software)(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Ah, so that's why Lineo CEO Matt Harris was in India lately. Out of Bangalore, India's high-tech capital, comes news that a local firm called Infomart is developing a so-called Kaii PDA using an Embedix PDA Plus software stack from the...

Mandrake Linux 9.0 RC1 Out.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... MandrakeSoft has put out the first release candidate of Mandrake Linux 9.0 for testing.

Microsoft Debuts Multipath I/O Support.
September 9, 2002... Microsoft introduced Multipath I/O support for storage devices Thursday and waved around promises of endorsements from a bunch of storage vendors. Multipath I/O technology provides more than one physical path from the OS to a storage...

Storage Consulting Firm Raises $6m.(GlassHouse Technologies)(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... GlassHouse Technologies has raised a $6.4 million Series B round. Existing investor Sigma Partners and new investors GrandBanks Capital and Jafco Ventures participated. The latest round takes the operation's total funding to $8 million. ...

Rumors Say Siebel's Being Shopped; Eyes Turn to Microsoft.
September 9, 2002... Warning: This is still an unconfirmed rumor, but the word on the street on both coasts is that Siebel Systems is being shopped. The notion gets really provocative if one considers who might buy the place. The most natural fit would have to be,...

Figure .NET Server by Valentine's Day - Maybe.
September 9, 2002... .NET Server, that veritable chameleon, has been renamed .NET Server 2003, having previously been called Whistler, Windows 2000 Server and simply Windows .NET Server, a small indication of how long it's taken to get the beast out. According to...

IBM's Out Gunning for Intel Volume.(working onI BM BladeCenter)(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... According to IBM, who's on the threshold of announcing BladeCenter, its first dense server, blades are the Next Big Thing. This is where it's going to settle old scores. The way it reads market shares figures, it's been getting more than its...

Four-way Fault Tolerance.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Stratus is supposed to wheel out its first four-way fault-tolerant system in a few days. It's using Xeons and Windows 2000.

Intel Pops its Six-Pack.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Intel wanted what it calls the "Big Six" as early adopters for the Itanium 2. SAP, now on board, gives it a complete set, sorta like having matching footmen. The others are SAS, Oracle, BEA, SQL and DB2. Now all it needs is Microsoft to come...

Sun-AOL Alliance Apparently Suspect.
September 9, 2002... Hmmm. The New York Times thinks the regulators investigating AOL's affairs may be poking around that 1998 deal between AOL and Sun that resulted in the Sun-Netscape Alliance. Under the terms of the deal they cut, Sun paid AOL $310 million a...

Newsforge Retracts.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Before it failed to morph into the Compaq of Linux, or even a hardware shop that could support itself, VA Software also had overweening media ambitions as well and under its former VA Linux Systems avatar bought And-over.net for an ungodly...

RackSaver Pledges Itanium 2 Blade Server.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... RackSaver Inc, a low-profile San Diego, California HPC systems builder, says it expects to productize an Itanium 2-based blade server by the first quarter of next year. It says its homegrown design, the first hint of an Itanium dense server to...

Paula Hunter Tipped To Head United Linux.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... According to sources in the United Linux consortium, a relative unknown by the name of Paula Hunter will be made head of the three- month-old organization this Wednesday, September 18. The job was supposed to go to ex-Caldera CEO Ransom...

Stratus Finally Announces Long-Awaited Four-Way Fault- Tolerant Box.(Stratus Technologies ftServer 6500)
September 16, 2002... Stratus Technologies has gone GA with the first Windows-based four- way fault-tolerant SMP system, the ftServer 6500, a widget code named Liberty that's been expected since last year but initially got derailed when Intel's server Fosters, shy a...

Stratus Pairs with VMware.
September 16, 2002... Stratus Technologies is due to say Monday that it's going to offer VMware's virtual computing GSX Server on its Win2K Server-based fault-tolerant boxes, including its new four-way. GSX Server is used to consolidate and partition servers, manage...

Microsoft Acquires XDegrees.
September 16, 2002... Microsoft has acquired two-year-old secure information access ISV XDegrees Inc on undisclosed terms reportedly for its storage thrust. Microsoft signed the acquisition agreement in June. The price was not material. Xdegrees, which never...

Sun Starts Eating its Own Linux Box.
September 16, 2002... Sun denies it, but it sure as heck looks like it's pitting its own Solaris/Sparc-based low-end Sun Fire V100 server against its new low- end Linux server. Sun is upping the clock on the V100's UltraSparc IIi chips to 550MHz or 650MHz and...

Intel Boosts Xeon Clock in Anti-Sun Move.(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... Intel boosted its Xeon MP chips for two-way servers and workstations from the 2.4GHz widgets it brought out in May to clocks of 2.8GHZ and 2.6GHz this week, attempting to create a huge gulf between itself and the best its RISC rivals,...

Liberty Chief Resigns.(Liberty Alliance, Eric Dean)
September 16, 2002... The Liberty Alliance has lost the president of its management board. Eric Dean, in real life the CIO of United Airlines, has stepped down and been replaced for the interim by the VP of Internet strategy at American Express, Michael Barrett, who...

Neoware Releases New Widgets.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... Neoware has released two thin clients, its Eon Preferred 6000 and Eon Professional 6300, running XP Embedded. The first starts at $650, the second at $770. It's also got two new NT Embedded products, the Eon Proven 5100 and Capio 710, which...

Oasis After New Standard.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Oasis has formed a new technical committee to concoct an interoperable web services management protocol that covers desktops, services and networks across an enterprise or the Internet. Novell's Winston Bumpus is chairing the Management...

Intel To Put Hyper-Threading in Desktop Chips.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Intel says it's going to extend its Hyper-Threading technique, reserved so far for its server chips, to the desktop when it wheels out its 3GHz Pentium 4 widget later this year. The technology lets multithreaded software run as though it had...

NEC & Intel Claim Hot Benchmark.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... NEC and Intel are claiming the world's best TPC-C benchmark on a non- clustered Windows platform, 308,620 transactions a minute on a 32- processor Itanium 2-based NEC TX7 using the 64-bit beta of SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition on...

BEA Increases Intel Support.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... BEA Systems, which is trying to lessen its dependence on Unix systems like Sun's, has put out JRocket 7.0, a version of its Java virtual machine, optimized to run its J2EE-based WebLogic widgetry on Intel machines. It's on 32-bit Xeon systems...

Intel To Make the World a Safer Place.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Intel is supposed to make the world a safer place by sticking some sketchy anti-hacker, anti-virus, supposedly opt-in security mojo it's cooked up called LaGrande Technology (LT) in its chips starting next year with Prescott. LT is the...

IBM Picks Up Holosofx.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... IBM has continued its recent string of software acquisitions by buying business integration software provider Holosofx Inc. Financial details of the deal, which closed on Wednesday, were not disclosed. IBM said it acquired Holosofx to...

Hitachi Backs Voltaire.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Hitachi is putting money into Infiniband router start-up Voltaire Inc, throwing its sizeable weight behind Infiniband's fading fortunes. How much money they didn't say. The two, although very vague about it, are supposed to co-operate on...

Legend To Sell Tablet.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... So the Legend Group, China's dominant PC maker, is going to going to make and sell Microsoft's newfangled Tablet PC come November 7 when the thing starts moving. Legend is the only native company to be bless with a deal. Acer in Taiwan is...

Now a Pornographer Wants Napster.
September 16, 2002... A self-described "premium-quality adult" entertainment company in Barcelona by the name of the Private Media Group (PMG) said Thursday that it had made a bid for Napster's trademarks and the napster.com domain name. It bid a million shares of...

Windows Servers Down 5% in Q2.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... After counting up all the numbers, IDC figures the Windows server market was worth $2.8 billion in the second quarter, off 5% bother year-over-year and sequentially. It gave a slipping HP 34%, Dell 23%, an all-time high, and IBM 16.6%. The...

Has Dell Found a Use for McKinley After All?(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Dell's supposed to have a teleconference on Tuesday to talk about high-performance computing clusters and Dell president and COO Kevin Rollins has been talking about the fact that maybe Dell might ship Intel's Itanium 2, which Dell has so far...

XML Market Looking Good: IDC.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... IDC figures the XML server market, which grew 163.8% between 2000 and 200 despite budget constraints, will be worth $3.5 billion in 2006 and attributes it to the steady demand for integration technologies. It reckons the growth can be...

ClawHammer Delayed.(AMD microprocessor)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... We were chasing this report all week but couldn't nail it and the Wall Street Journal irritatingly did and got somebody at AMD it could quote to say so too. The company is delaying the introduction of the desktop version of its novel 64-bit...

When Is a Linux Super-Cluster Not a Cluster At All?
September 16, 2002... SGI, the graphics pioneer fallen on Dickens-like hard times and trying hard to reinvent itself out of the poorhouse, has turned up with a 64-processor Linux-on-McKinley benchmark that blows rivals like IBM's AIX-based p690s and Sun's...

NEC Makes Linux Fault-Tolerant, a First.
September 16, 2002... NEC has quietly gone into production in Europe and Japan with a fault-tolerant Linux, a wholly unheard of creature. The company is being a tad more conservative in the states and is currently in beta with the thing expecting to release it in...

A Clear Case of the Cart Before the Horse.
September 16, 2002... Lindows.com claimed last Tuesday that LindowsOS was finally able to support HP printers, only the most widely deployed printers in the world, and that folks who might have bought one of those Lindows machines that Walmart.com's has been selling...

PCs To Go the Way of Cell Phones, Lindows Speculates.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Playing off the fact that HP, Dell and Sony have gone with Corel's WordPerfect rather than the pricier Microsoft Works in their low-end consumer boxes, Michael Robertson, head of the wannabe Windows Lindows .com, figures that with Wal-Mart...

IBackup for Linux Debuts.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... IBackup has launched a new application for backing up Linux server data offsite that expands its suite of applications for web-based online storage and retrieval. Dubbed IBackup for Linux, the kit is a suite of backup/restore apps native...

HP Expands its Platform Deal.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... The reseller deal between distributed and grid computing specialist Platform Comp-uting and Hewlett-Packard has been expanded into a new global multi-year systems integration and reseller pact to provide Linux, Windows and Unix cluster and grid...

SnapGear & Red Hat in Turnkey Embedded Deal.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Internet security appliances vendor Snap-Gear Inc and Red Hat have teamed up to provide turnkey embedded hardware and software products based on Linux. The partnership brings Red Hat's professional services capabilities together with...

Infloblox Debuts LDAP Server Appliance.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... Infoblox has introduced a Linux-based LDAP server appliance. Infoblox executives claim the LDAP One appliance is the first to focus on network services delivery and makes LDAP implementations easier. The widget, based on a 733MHz...

Panasas Lands $32m, Product Launch Delayed.
September 16, 2002... Storage start-up Panasas Inc will say Monday how thrilled it is that six VC and high-tech firms are putting another $32 million in it. What it probably won't be thrilled to talk about, and may sidestep or downplay, is the fact that its...

JNI Gets New CEO.(Russell Stern)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Storage products vendor JNI Corporation has found itself a new CEO in former Quantum exec Russell Stern. Stern succeeds interim CEO and JNI board member John Stiska, who was brought in when the company fired its old CEO Neal Waddington in...

Investment Tally.(Venture Reporter)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Venture Reporter wets its pencil and figured out that $617.7 million has been invested in 39 storage deals over the past 16 months.

HP, Hitachi Ink Storage API Deal.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... HP signed its third storage API swapping agreement, this time inking a deal with Hitachi so they can manage each other's storage arrays. HP will be able to manage Hitachi's Lightning 9900 and 9900 V Series (which HP re-brands) and Thunder...

Intel Beefs Up Storage Portfolio.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... At IDF, Intel introduced a host of storage products including a new 1.6GHz low-voltage Xeon aimed storage apps like NAS and SAN host processing. The $350 chip, now shipping, also supports Intel's vaunted Hyper-Threading technology that makes...

Sweet Sixteen.(IBM's Itanium 2 server)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... SGI is sniggering - and has it's fingers crossed at the time - because rumor has it IBM's unannounced Itanium 2 server won't get past 16p.

Sun Desktop Mystery To End Soon.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Sun in few days is supposed explain what it means by a Linux desktop - a market it's threatening to go into - and we'll all find out whether it's a classic x86 box or, as we've theorized, some sort of reheated NC, aka a Sun-Ray, backed by bank...

Unisys Claims Interest on the Rise.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Unisys claims it's getting a lot more interest than it reckoned on for the Itanium 2-based version of its ES7000 Windows mainframe that it announced in July and won't deliver in volume until Q4. It also says all of the interest is in 16p...

Office by subscription flops.(Microsoft Office)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Well, it looks like Microsoft may be dumping the idea of selling Office by subscription. It's been piloting the notion in Australia, Brazil and New Zealand since May using Office XP in its Professional and Small Business flavors and from what...

$15m Bum's Rush.
September 16, 2002... What price failure? Well, at Microsoft it seems to be $15 million plus interest, because that's what the company basically gave its short-lived, do-nothing president Rick Belluzzo when it ousted him, giving rise to criticism of corporate waste...

Now He Tells Us.(Microsoft's Brian Valentine)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... "I'm not proud. We really haven't done everything we could to protect our customers. Our products just aren't engineered for security." - Brian Valentine, senior vice-president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development

Hurd Named COO.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... NCR has named Mark Hurd, its president and the head of Teradata unit, COO as well. He keeps his Teradata responsibilities, but gets to worry about all of the company's other lines.

No More for You.(Cisco cutting Dell off as a reseller)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Cisco is taking a leaf from the HP printer folks' book and is cutting Dell off as a reseller effective the end of October because it's turning competitor on networking products like the switches it's selling.

The Many Faces of Red Hat.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... Red Hat apparently has in mind to morph its new Advanced Server code into a list of various personalities like Red Hat Carrier Grade or Red Hat Embedded or whatever comes up.

US Exports Drop 20%.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
September 16, 2002... US high-tech exports fell 20%, roughly $20 billion, in the first half compared to the first half of 2001. According to the American Electronics Association, US companies shipped $82.4 billion versus $102.5 billion. The biggest drop was to the...

Situation May Be Worse Yet.(Intel's 3rd qtr 2002 performance)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
September 16, 2002... Hmmm. Fred Hickey's "High-Tech Strategist" newsletter thinks Intel's current quarter is dicier - and the industry picture a bit bleaker - than Intel president Paul Otellini let on during the company's mid- quarter update last week. Hickey says...