Client Server News articles from September 2003

Client Server News archives from September 2003

Microsoft Kicked Out of Shanghai Schools.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The Shanghai public schools are replacing Microsoft Office with Kingsoft Corporation's Chinese-made WPSOffice 2003 starting September 1 when the new semester begins. The shift comes after Microsoft discovered that a lot of the copies of...

The Resurrection of Mary McDowell.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Mary McDowell, who ran Compaq's - later HP's - Industry Standard Server Group, which was stripped of HP's Itanium machines - a move that reportedly left McDowell "thermonuclearly" ticked - has returned from what HP called a short sabbatical to...

Sun Uses SCO Brouhaha To Leverage Solaris x86.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Sun Microsystems, which threw its Solaris x86 baby out with the bathwater and then had to go and resuscitate the thing, is uncharacteristically trying to push the operating system on to other people's x86 hardware. It says it has a...

CA Reaches into its Pocket To Resolve Lingering Lawsuits.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Computer Associates is prepared to divvy up 5.7 million shares of its stock among shareholders and take a charge of 17 cents a share this quarter to settle the three class actions and related litigation that have been pending against it for...

PeopleSoft Claims Oracle Bid Has Sputtered Out.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... "I truly believe that the Oracle saga is over." - PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway who figures PeopleSoft's hurried combination with JD Edwards killed the Oracle bid for all intents and purposes. On the other hand, an evidently still worried...

Rackable Fends Off Marauder.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Rackable Systems, which a month ago sued white box maker King Star Computer Inc for treading on the patent to its architecture - the widgetry that lets its dense servers be set up back-to-back in a rack to save space, increase density and cool...

Trade Secrets Win Out over the First Amendment.
September 1, 2003... The California Supreme Court unanimously decided the other day that trade secrets can trump First Amendment rights and reversed a decision by a California appeals court holding that one Andrew Bunner had a right under the Bill of Rights to post...

Microsoft Lowballs Small Business Server.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... That Small Business Server that Microsoft made part of the Windows Server 2003 family will go for $599, according to what Microsoft said at the Xchange Conference in Florida on Monday. The entry-level server, which includes Windows Server 2003...

Fujitsu Siemens Launches New Servers.(Primergy RX800 and 1U RX200 )(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Fujitsu Siemens has rolled out two new rack servers, a high-end four- or eight-way Primergy RX800 aimed at enterprise data centers and applications such as database servers or server consolidation and a two-way 1U RX200 positioned as a front...

Intel Buoyant.
September 1, 2003... Intel cheered everybody up last Friday by announcing that it expects third-quarter revenues will be higher than thought. It said revenues should be between $7.3 billion and $7.8 billion, not $6.9 billion and $7.5 billion. Intel also said...

Hitachi Wants Piece of Outsourcing Action.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Hitachi wants a piece of the North American outsourcing action so Dallas-based Hitachi Consulting Corporation has launched a new business unit under executive VP Larry DeBoever as part of its parent company's medium-term business plan. It says...

McData To Buy Nishan, Sanera; Invests in Aarohi.
September 1, 2003... McData is spending about $200 million to acquire two storage start- ups Nishan Systems and Sanera Systems to bolster its storage networking portfolio. Separately, McData has entered into an agreement with Aarohi Communications to acquire...

Sun, Hitachi Renew Vows.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Close on the heels of HP renewing its reseller agreement with Hitachi, Sun said Monday that it had extended its two-year-old global agreement to resell Hitachi storage arrays through 2006. The original Sun-Hitachi deal, which was set to...

IBM Turbo-Charges Mid-Range Storage System.(FAStT600)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... IBM has enhanced its mid-range FAStT600 storage system with a new turbo option designed to boost capacity, speed and performance. With the turbo option, FAStT600 is supposed to scale up to 16.4TB of capacity with 112 drives and offer up to...

SGI Debuts New Mid-Range Storage Array.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Troubled SGI has launched a new mid-range storage array for NAS and direct attached storage. Dubbed the TP9300, the new Fibre Channel array is targeted at workgroups and small business. The new array features two redundant 2 Gbps Fibre...

Storage Funding Drops.(according to the Byte and Switch web site)(Brief Article)(Industry Overview)
September 1, 2003... VC funding for storage networking start-ups dropped by at least 50% to $1.1 billion in the 12-month period from July 2002 to June 2003, according to the Byte and Switch web site. Most of the funding (61%) is estimated to have gone to hardware...

Iomega Rolls Out NAS Backup Bundles for SMBs.(320m, 640m and 1280m)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Iomega has introduced three NAS backup bundles for small and mid- sized businesses that leverage disks for routine backups and tape for archival and off-site storage. The bundles include a Windows-powered Iomega NAS server with up to...

LinKPro Launches IPReplicator Upgrade.(Release 2 )(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... LinkPro Technologies has upgraded its Windows-based IPReplicator replication and backup software, which is designed to provide file replication and backup over TCP/IP based LANs, WANs and the Internet. Release 2 of IPReplicator includes new...

Ta-ta, Trebia.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Storage network processor start-up Trebia's new CEO Ruediger Stroh says the company is being acquired and denied reports that Trebia had shut down its operations. "We are in the process of completing an acquisition process," he said. Stroh...

Applied Micro To Buy JNI.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Applied Micro Circuits Corporation is acquiring host bus adapter vendor JNI Corporation for $190 million in a bid to expand beyond its networking silicon domain and into the SAN market. Applied Micro said it would pay $7 in cash for each...

SuSE Teams with SGI.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... SGI, which has been using a Red Hat-based distro of its own on its monster Linux machines, has gotten SuSE to agree to support the beasts. SGI says it'll start bundling SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 on its 64-processor Itanium 2-based...

SGI Retracts Again.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The continuing sad state of the once-great SGI given the tight economy and its own peculiar failures has forced the company to cut another 600 jobs to bring costs in line with revenue targets for fiscal 2004. It said the cuts "concentrate...

Turbolinux Rejoins OSDL.(Open Source Development Lab )(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Turbolinux, which was one of the nominal founders of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) back before its fortunes turned completely sour and it was sold off to a Japanese integrator, re-upped and rejoined OSDL this week. Turbolinux is...

FreeBSD Gets JDK 1.3.1 Support.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The FreeBSD Foundation has got a binary distribution of the Java JDK 1.3.1 for FreeBSD. It can be downloaded at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml. The foundation is also providing OEM licenses so FreeBSD developers can ship...

Open Source Zealot Vandalizes SCO Web Site.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The SCO Group was hit with a distributed denial-of-service attack last weekend that took its web site out from Friday night through Monday morning. The guy responsible contacted Eric Raymond, the president of the Open Source Initiative,...

MontaVista Opines on SCO.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... "SCO has yet to prove any of its claims that Linux contains either SCO trade secrets or material covered by SCO-held copyrights. Even in the unlikely event that SCO eventually shows that either trade secrets or copyrighted material reside in...

$169 Webstation Morphs into BusinessStation.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The irrepressible Lindows.com has evidently taken the new $169 LindowsCD-based Webstation and, poof, turned it into a $169 BusinessStation through what it describes as a network-based "My Profile" management tool that can customize one to 5,000...

HP Strings 2,000 Madisons Together.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... HP has supposedly built the fastest open system supercomputer in the US out of Itanium 2 processors and Linux. Well, the fastest unclassified one at any rate. The thing now lives at the Energy Department's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory...

IBM Kicks HP When It's Down; Aces Out HP & Dell in.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Servers IBM has just been canonized as "the number one overall server vendor worldwide" for Q2 by IDC, trouncing a flagging HP. IBM, which now controls 30.4% of the market, couldn't help but rub it in how HP missed its third-quarter...

SGI Lies Low.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... On the theory, it said, that anything that it says will be taken out of context, SGI has refused to discuss the fact that its name is being bandied about as one of companies other than IBM that allegedly put Unix code into Linux and changed the...

OK, So It'll Take a While.(HP's Adaptive Enterprise computing environment)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... HP doesn't expect its Adaptive Enterprise schema, precipitated by virtualization, utility pricing, internal grids and an increase in offshore operations, to mature into a legitimate mainstream computing environment for another three to five...

Define Epiphany.
September 1, 2003... "I think there is a reason [Dell] took the word 'computer' out of their name. [Dell] is not a technology company. I think they're a distribution company." - HP CEO Carly Fiorina

Athlon64 Proliferation.(2.2GHz Athlon 3200, 2.2 GHz FX51 and the 1.67GHz Mobile 2800)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... When AMD launches the Athlon64 on September 23, it's expected to push three models into the water: the 2.2GHz Athlon 3200 and the 2.2 GHz FX51, both of which are for desktops, and the 1.67GHz Mobile 2800, which is for notebooks. Prices are...

So Screw PeopleSoft.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Prudential thinks Oracle " has turned the corner and is headed back into positive growth territory in FY04 after two years of negative year-over-year growth." The broker also doesn't think Oracle needs PeopleSoft to achieve organic growth in...

Corel Goes to Vector.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Despite a shareholder attempt to derail Corel's takeover by San Francisco VC Vector Capital Corporation because the price was too low, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, the last hurdle the deal faced, waved it through. Vector took Corel...

Post Superdome.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Evidently HP is developing a 256-CPU post-Superdome system.

Good Grief, Stratus Delivers its Next Generation on.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Schedule Stratus Technologies has supposedly re-engineered a couple of its fault-tolerant boxes, making them smaller and faster and reportedly maybe as much as 50% cheaper than they have been, which should help it in its effort to push...

Longhorn Watch.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Microsoft is now supposed to release a "developers preview" and hand out SDKs of the perspective (and far off) Longhorn operating system at its developers conference on the Left Coast in October. The news is rather timely considering the thing,...

What Becomes a Legend Most.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Legend, the Chinese box maker, has cut a deal with Intel to form a jointly run R&D center. What they'll do there hadn't been made clear.

Virus Cost $2b.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Computer Economics, a research company in Carlsbad, California said dealing with computer viruses cost $2 billion in August and the month wasn't even over yet. If we track down the vandal, we can hand them a bill before we hang them.

Ah, the Old Chinese Wall Problem.
September 1, 2003... One wonders who is uncontaminated enough to rewrite Linux is SCO gave them the chance.

And Now for its Next Trick, The Poor Man's Itaniums.(Intel Deerfield)(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Deerfield, the low-cost/low-power version of the Madison Itanium shrink, is due to appear on Monday, September 8, debuting as the LV Itanium 2. As Intel has already said, the gismo is supposed to come in at 1GHz with 1.5MB of Level 3 cache...

Microsoft To Change its Browser Because of Eolas Decision.
September 8, 2003... Because of the court decision ordering Microsoft to pay little-known Eolas Technologies Inc and the University of California $521 million for treading on their browser patent (CSN No 511), Microsoft, which has said it means to appeal the...

Intel's Outlook Gets Better and Better.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... It was only the other day that Intel poked its head up to say that things were looking brighter than it figured and now for its mid- quarter update Thursday things got brighter still. Intel said it now expects revenues to be between $7.6...

Stratus Re-engineers its Exotic Five9s Windows Servers.(the 5600 and the 6600 )
September 8, 2003... Stratus Technologies is expanding on the dense second-generation modular packaging it kicked off when it introduced its low-end 3300 Five9s fault-tolerant system in March. Now besides the 3300 it's got itself a new spiffier mid-range...

NEC Packages Up Exchange Servers.
September 8, 2003... After some soul searching, NEC Solutions, the unit that sells the company's Intel-based fault tolerant servers, has decided that it is in fact a North American sales and marketing arm of a very big parent and that it ought to be doing marketing...

PeopleSoft To Offer Up 750-1,000 Living Sacrifices.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... During a two-hour presentation to analysts that was webcast after the market closed Thursday, PeopleSoft said it will cut 750 to 1,000 jobs, 7%-8% of its workforce, to contain costs now that it's trying to swallow its $1.8 billion JD Edwards...

Oracle Extends PeopleSoft Tender.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... At press time, a few hours after PeopleSoft met with Wall Street, Oracle - claiming that "PeopleSoft's plans means confusion and execution risk for customers and shareholders" - extended its hostile bid for the company for the fourth time. The...

Microsoft Soldiers On with DRM.(Windows Rights Management Software )(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Microsoft continues pushing ahead with implementing what used to be called Palladium, the digital rights management software (RMS) that scared the bejesus out of lots of people. It's made several announcements relating to protecting...

HP To Buy Talking Blocks.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Hewlett-Packard is acquiring web services management start-up Talking Blocks to further its utility-style Adaptive Enterprise strategy. Terms of the cash deal weren't disclosed. San Francisco-based Talking Blocks provides software for web...

Server Sales Stop Declining.(Industry Overview)
September 8, 2003... Servers worldwide have been declining for the last nine quarters, but IDC says the drop stopped in Q2 when server factory revenues were up 0.2% year-over-year to $10.6 billion. The growth is too miniscule to count as evidence of a rebound, the...

Ex-USL Chief Stabbed.(Unix System Labs)(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... SCO CEO Darl McBride and SCOsource chief Chris Sontag have had enough threats come their way since the Unix-LinuxIP flap began to have given a passing thought or two to getting a bodyguard so it's highly ironic that the guy who used to run Unix...

What Microsoft Needs Is a Burst.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Microsoft is still at least a year away from tangling with tiny little Burst.com in court. Burst, like Sun and Be, is suing Microsoft for antitrust as well as patent infringement and currently they're in discovery with Burst complaining that...

Romanian Arrested for Creating MSBlaster.F.(Dan Dumitru Ciobanu )(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Softwin, the PC anti-virus house in Bucharest that seems to have been seminal in identifying the rascal, says that the Romanian authorities have arrest a hacker believed to be the author of the MSBlaster.F version of the blasted worm. If...

Infonetics Slashes Fibre Channel Forecast.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Infonetics has slashed its forecast for the Fibre Channel SAN switch market. The San Jose, California market researcher has cut its forecast for 2005 from $3.3 billion to $1.6 billion, a drastic change. Infonetics also figures revenues...

E-Mail Archive Start-up Gets More Funding.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Content archiving and e-mail management software start-up KVS Inc has secured $17 million in a Series B round taking its total financing to $37 million. Index Ventures and FT Ventures led the round, which also included participation from...

Certance Debuts Backup Unit.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Certance has introduced an entry-level data protection product to address the backup, restore and archiving requirements of small and mid-sized companies. Priced at $1,500, the 1U rack-mount unit comes with up to two Certance DAT 72 tape...

Overland To Launch New Tape Libraries.(NEO 8000 Series)(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Overland plans to introduce a new family of tape libraries designed for SAN operations with a capacity of up to 500 cartridges. Dubbed the NEO 8000 Series, the new products are due to ship by the end of the year. The new family...

Network Engines, Bocada To Debut BackupReport Appliance.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Network Engines and Bocada have teamed up to provide a backup reporting appliance based on Bocada's BackupReport application. The BackupReport Appliance is supposed to provide a centralized view of all critical backup activity across...

SCO Plans To Bill 'Thousands' of Companies.
September 8, 2003... The SCO Group is supposed to start sending out "thousands" of bills this month demanding payment of what is effectively a Linux tax, according to SCO spokesman Blake Stowell. At least that's the plan, he said. It may not come together at...

PC Club Sells Lindows.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... PC Club, the retail chain with 50 stores spread around Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Utah and Washington State, is moving Lindows on its low-end Intel-based Sparx desktops. Lindows.com says it's the "first major US chain"...

Opteron's Off to School.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... In October the Center for High Performance Computing at the University of Utah is supposed to accept delivery of a 500-node supercomputer cluster, code named Arches, designed to hold 1,000 Opteron chips put together by Angstrom Microsystems out...

WANsync Betas on Linux.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Business continuity software provider XOsoft has released a beta of its WANsync application on Linux. Previously available only on Windows and Solaris, WANsync is a WAN-based application integrity and availability program. It is designed to...

Desktop Linux Do Scheduled.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... The breakaway Desktop Linux Consortium, unhappy with the Lindows- serving Desktop Linux Summit in February, is going to have its own conference dedicated to Linux on the desktop at Boston University's Corporate Education Center in Tyngsboro,...

Another IBM Layoff Rumored.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Word from inside has it that IBM is telling its managers to brace for another round of layoffs which may take until the end of the year to make. It's speculated that the reduction in force, aka RIF, may be a thinning of the weaker sisters who...

There's That Light in the Tunnel Again.(Brief Article)(Industry Overview)
September 8, 2003... SG Cowen says its latest user survey indicates there a modest recovery taking place, but - there's always a but - but it's not as strong as it looked like it was going to be in March. It says key leading indicators like capacity demand,...

BEA Co-Founder To Try Again.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... BEA co-founder and ex-CEO Bill Coleman, lately its chief customer advocate, is going to see if lightening strikes twice and start another software company. What exactly is still a big secret, but it's supposed to be compatible with BEA. Coleman...

SCO Wants XFS Out of Linux.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... SGI has been reluctant to answer any questions about its alleged participation in the Great SCO Ripoff (CSN No 513) so we asked SCO what it wanted out of SGI. SCO spokesman Blake Stowell indicated that SCO is demanding that XFS be removed from...

Siebel Rumored Going OnDemand.(Siebel OnDemand)(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... According to the Wall Street grapevine, Siebel may return to offering a hosted version of its CRM app. Supposedly the thing's supposed to be called Siebel OnDemand and be launched to fight off competition from such as Salesforce.com and maybe...

Microsoft's Prospects Look Good.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... According to a Merrill Lynch survey of 50 big-time IT execs, "the upgrade opportunity from Windows NT to 2003 is encouraging, and Office 2003 is generating a good buzz prior to the October launch." Merrill said 22% of its respondents are going...

IBM & Borland Team on C#.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... This fall IBM is going to ship trial versions of Borland's C#Builder, the first independent enterprise development environment for .NET Framework-based development, with DB2 and Borland is already returning the favor and shipping DB2...

IBM Continues To Swear Off Apps.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... IBM Software czar Steve Mills turned up at the Credit Suisse Global Software Conference this week and reiterated IBM's determination to steer clear of applications - despite the temptations of the expected consolidation of application and...

Gateway Turns Integrator.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Gateway is going to outsource PC production and service so it can fire at least 450 of its own people, roughly 5.3% of its headcount. The company, by now famous for its continuing losses, expects to save $115 million to $130 million a year on...

Washington To Get New E-Government Chief.(Office of Electronic Government )(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... President Bush said Wednesday that he intends to tap Karen Evans, the CIO of the Department of Energy, to fill the slot vacated by Mark Forman, administrator of the Office of Electronic Government in the Office of Management and the Budget....

Red Hat Plays Numbers Game.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Word on the street claims Red Hat is trying to trim the price of the next version of its enterprise operating system - which is said to be unstable - down to $1,500 by turning Cluster Manager and the Piranha load balancer into add-on packages...

Blade Pioneer Figures To Find Exit Strategy in Storage.
September 15, 2003... RLX Technologies, the first of the blade houses - storm-tossed but a survivor and certain it will eventually be a great monolith although it had only sold 3,700 blades last time it counted - has gotten another $10 million in backing. It is, it...

Start-up Writes Rare C# Program.(Anystream Agility Presenter 1.1 PowerPoint plug-ins )(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... We've heard of another one of those terribly rare birds - a software program written in Microsoft's C# programming language. There's only one other that we know of - the last rev of Crystal Decisions. The one we just uncovered comes from a...

Dell: A Standard Unto Itself.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... IBM and Intel may be under the impression that they've been spinning out a blades standard, but Michael Dell - and remember Dell has been kinda diffident on the subject of blades - suggested the other day at OracleWorld that Dell - in the name...

IBM Tarts Up BladeCenter.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... IBM has gussied up its BladeCenter with enhancements that could turn into performance and functionality increases of as much as 33%, it said. First, it's gone to the latest Intel Xeons, 3.06GHz ones. Second, it's integrated a Nortel...

Oracle Grid Lock.(10g Database, the 10g Application Server and the 10g Enterprise Manager)
September 15, 2003... Oracle is being mysterious about the price and availability of the next-generation 10g database that it unveiled this week. The stuff of course is still in beta and isn't supposed to ship into production environments until late this year. ...

Sun & RealNetworks Square Off Against Microsoft.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Two of Microsoft's biggest opponents, Sun and RealNetworks, congratulating each other on their use of open standards, teamed up this week in hopes of landing a punch in Microsoft's soft underbelly. Sun is going to be bundling RealPlayer with...

Sun Races to Ws-I Finish Line.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Sun has put out a qualification release of J2EE 1.4 source code for J2EE licensees that it says supports the final WS-I Basic Profile and includes the J2EE programming model for portable web services applications. Preening, it points out...

AMD May Have Solved Its SOI Problems with Hammer.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... AMD has added two more hybrid 2GHz Opteron chips to its lists in a move that suggests it may have resolved most of its SOI issues with the Hammer architecture, according chip guru Nathan Brookwood. The mid-range 246 Opteron that AMD brought out...

Grids are Hype: Carly.(OracleWorld)(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Not to rain on Larry's parade or anything, but HP CEP Carly Fiorina turned up at OracleWorld Thursday saying grids were more hype than reality and that - given the absence of standards - it will take another three to five years for companies to...