Client Server News articles from September 2004

Client Server News archives from September 2004

Start-up Reinvents Technical Workstation as Personal Cluster.
September 6, 2004... Sounds like a good idea. Which immediately makes it suspect. Why hasn't it been done it before? See, two of Transmeta's co-founders have reinvented the technical workstation, which reached its apogee in the 80s and has been in decline ever...

Intel's Business Weakens.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Intel, the high-tech bellwether, cut its revenue estimates for the quarter late yesterday raising fresh fears about the economy and the rebound. In its mid-quarter update, the chip giant said it now expects Q3 revenues to be between $8.3...

IBM Teases Industry with talk of Open Blades.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... IBM server folks and Intel's board people seem to have remembered that they have a two-year-old blade alliance that hasn't been getting much exercise lately so IBM decided it was time to make the design specifications for its BladeCenter...

Google Faces First Unlock Hurdle.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... The first lock-up restriction preventing Google employees from selling their stock expired yesterday and could put another, oh, 4.5 million Google shares on the market, which is why, they say, the stock has been falling all week. It closed...

Microsoft, Whistling Snatches of the Old Netscape Death March, Trains its Guns on Apple.
September 6, 2004... Microsoft Wednesday opened a US-only beta knockoff of Apple's iTunes music store, a thing called MSN Music, forced into being by Apple's success. Microsoft expects it to be a loss leader. Besides selling songs over the web, there is also a...

AMD Tweaks Intel with PR Coup.
September 6, 2004... In a move as predictable as the sun rising in the east, AMD drew a PR bead on Intel this week and managed to get a small bottle of ink spilled over how it had showed off a dual-core x86 90nm Opteron at its facilities in Austin, Texas on...

California Files 'We Was Robbed' Suit against Microsoft.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... In a move that may inspire a whole new round of carping, lawyer- enriching, "we was robbed" lawsuits, six California municipalities, claiming to represent all of the state's government agencies, have sued Microsoft for overcharging them for...

New EC Trustbuster Wears a Skirt.
September 6, 2004... The new head of the European Commission's antitrust unit, Mario Monti's replacement, the guy who's been a thorn in Microsoft's side, is going to be a Dutch woman named Neelie Kroes. The handover will happen on November 1 when Monti's term...

Microsoft Scores Two Out of Two.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Microsoft has persuaded the Sony-led Blu-ray Disc Association, one of the two groups wrestling over what next-generation DVDs are gonna look like, to embrace its video compression technology in its proposed format. That makes two out of...

Consolidation Hits Standards World.(Data Center Markup Language (DCML) Organization)(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... The Data Center Markup Language (DCML) Organization, the defenders of utility computing, is being blended into Oasis where it will become the Oasis DCML Member Section on the theory that it will benefit from the resources, technical process,...

SP1 for SharePoint Products Debuts.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Microsoft has put out Service Pack 1 for its SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and SharePoint Services products. The two SP1 downloads, available separately, are supposed to enhance the SharePoint products, which are designed so teams of...

Sun Tries To Recruit the Microsoft Certified.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Sun is looking for help with its Opteron boxes from Microsoft Certified Professionals and Systems Engineers and has aimed a couple of three-month promotions at them. In one it's offering them a discount of up to 35% off US list on some...

Fujitsu Claims Most Compact Four-Way Blade.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Fujitsu has laid claim to having the world's most compact four-way SCSI server blade, which it's put in a new Primergy BX600 blade server. The company also claims to have the most diverse blade portfolio. It says each blade can accommodate...

Forrester Predicts 7% Growth in IT Spend.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Based on its Q3 CIO Confidence Poll Forrester Research is predicting that IT spending on goods, services and staff will grow 7% a year for the next four year, only slightly faster than the overall economy. It figures the world is half way...

IBM Takes Second Stab at iSCSI.(Internet SCSI)
September 6, 2004... IBM's iSCSI mantra seems to be "If at first you don't succeed, take a break and try again." IBM is back in the market for iSCSI storage devices again, 12 months after pulling the plug on its first such system. Its new TotalStorage...

EMC Beefs Up Celerra.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... EMC has rolled out new models of its Celerra NAS aimed at making inroads into NetApp territory. The new Celerra boxes include a low-end Celerra NS500 and a high-end Celerra NS704G. The NS500, which will also compete against IBM's new...

Quantum Losing Money, Layoffs Likely.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Quantum says it's going to report a GAAP loss of two -six cents a share in its fiscal second quarter ending September 28 and told the SEC more layoffs were on the way. It's told its staff that it intends to terminate certain people to cut...

Veritas Buys E-Mail Archivist.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Veritas is acquiring e-mail archiving start-up KVault Software in a cash deal valued at $225 million. The acquisition will let Veritas offer software to store, manage, back up and archive corporate e-mail and comply with government...

Copan Snags $25m, Unleashes Revolution.(Copan Systems)(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Storage start-up Copan Systems nailed down a $25 million Series B round a few weeks after it formally rolled out its first product. Pequot Ventures led followed by new investor Pinnacle Ventures and existing investors Austin Ventures and...

EMC Extends Lead.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Sales of external controller-based disk storage in the second quarter rose 5.1% year-over-year to $3.23 billion, according to Gartner's number crunchers. Among the key vendors in this segment, EMC extended its lead position. EMC's...

SCO's Linux Licensing in Shambles; Company Caps Lawyers'.
September 6, 2004... Fees SCO's abject failure to threaten, cajole or persuade practically anybody to buy its so-called Linux licenses without a court-loaded shotgun - coupled with the small fortune it's been spending on lawyers to get that shotgun loaded in...

Novell Moves its Chess Pieces Around.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... To organize things logically Novell says it has moved its SuSE acquisition and its Nterprise NetWare operation in together and will probably call the unit Platform and Application Services. The unit has been given to former Ximian CEO David...

Schools Out To Oust Oracle, PeopleSoft.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... While Oracle is still off trying to buy PeopleSoft - if the courts let it - two universities, saying " a pox on both your houses," are off writing open source software that would deprive both companies of millions of dollars. Indiana...

Red Hat Finds New CFO.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Red Hat has found itself the slick new "big company" CFO that it was looking for. It's gotten Charlie Peters, the former CFO of the textile multinational Burlington Industries, who's had 20 years experience with public companies. Red Hat's...

Red Hat Stock Show No Sign of Comeback.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... "We had expected Red Hat stock to rally as a result of the reduction in uncertainty following the filing of its restated 10K and uneventful resolution of the SEC's questions. In fact, Red Hat's stock has fallen by an additional 20%, reflecting...

Lindows Now Officially Linspire.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Lindows, the Linux upstart that managed to get Microsoft to pay it $20 million to change its name - and thereby save the Windows trademark - is now officially Linspire Inc. It says it has removed all references to Lindows from its marketing...

Irresistible Force Meets Immovable Object.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio better brace herself because she's likely to catch the peculiar disapproval of the outspoken open source community when they find out that she's telling corporate users that throwing out Windows may not be...

Japanese Outfit To Support New Red Hat App Server.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Red Hat says it's expanded its relationship with Japanese open source integrator Ten Art-ni, an outfit funded by Intel, HP, SGI, NEC and Oracle, and that Ten Art-ni will support Red Hat's new Application Server. Ten Art-ni also intends to...

First Boston Sticks with Longhorn in '07.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... First Boston ain't buying Microsoft's new Longhorn timetable. It continues to think that Longhorn won't be released until 2007 even without the problematic WinFS file system. It says Microsoft may have "drawn a line in the sand with its...

Gates Cries into His Longhorn Pillow.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... "The only person who feels crushed by Longhorn's failure to include WinFS is Bill Gates, whose vision it's been for the last 12 to 15 years." - Gartner VP David Smith. BusinessWeek agrees and says Gates spent a third of his time on Longhorn...

Oh God, the CA Miasma Spreads to Oracle.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... A federal appeals court reinstated a billion-dollar securities fraud suit against Oracle brought by irate stockholders. The three-judge panel found strong evidence of accounting irregularities, falsified sales reports, overstated projections...

Acer Founder To Retire.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... Acer founder, chairman and CEO Stan Shih, the guy who helped make Taiwan into a PC powerhouse, has handed in his notice. He wants to retire at the end of the year. He will be succeeded by Acer president JT Wang; Wang is turn will be succeeded...

Burst Hints of Gates Expos.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... The lawyer suing Microsoft on behalf of Burst.com, the failed two- man outfit hoping to collect a king's ransom from the software giant for poaching its streaming technology, is telling the press that he wants the court to unseal his three-hour...

Happy Birthday.(Brief Article)
September 6, 2004... The Internet, a work fated to be perpetually in progress unless it collapses under the weight of spam, or succumbs to a killer virus, turned 35 this past Sunday. It all started at UCLA with two computers joined by a 15-foot cable. A few months...

Carly & Co Embarrass Themselves.
September 6, 2004... Somebody tell HP it's not "cool." Somebody tell them they're high school geeks grown old and that their pocket protectors are indelibly embossed on their souls. Carly in gold lam pajamas first thing in the morning was bad enough, the dancing...

Oracle Wins.
September 13, 2004... Oracle has won the suit brought by the Justice Department to stop it from acquiring PeopleSoft just as the armchair speculators who kept tads on the four-week trial said it would. The judge said the government failed to prove its case but...

Horus, the Falcon-Headed God, Morphs into ExtendiScale.
September 13, 2004... Newisys, the Opteron developer now owned by Sanmina-SCI, has formally christened the so-called Horus widgetry that's supposed to leapfrog Opteron's native eight-processor limitation and build 32- way or better Opteron boxes (CSN No 561). ...

CA's Get-Out-of-Jail Card Could Cost It Half-a-Billion Dollars.(Computer Associates)
September 13, 2004... Supposedly Computer Associates is going to announce a deal with the SEC and federal prosecutors in the next few days and ring down the curtain on the two-year investigation of CA's books that found the company "corrupt." Supposedly it's a...

Shock!! Horror!!! Intel Admits Itanium Ain't Cutting It.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Abhi Talwalkar, the general manager of Intel's Enterprise Platform Group, was seen alive and well at the Intel Developer Forum Wednesday, the day after he publicly admitted during a Q&A that the company's precious multibillion-dollar Itanium...

NEC To Bundle Microsoft's New Virtual Server with FT Rig.
September 13, 2004... NEC US has decided that it wants to be known as the high- availability company. That's why, it says, it's picking up the four-way Xeon MP-based fault-tolerant server that its partner Stratus has been selling over here for the last year....

Intel Shows Mystery Dual-Core Desktop Chip.
September 13, 2004... Well, Intel did say - dismissively of course - that wasn't going to try to match AMD's little dual-core Opteron demo coup of last week and show off a dual-core Xeon at the Intel Developer Forum this week and - as good as its word - it didn't....

IDF Scorecard: The Intel Roadmap.(Intel Developers Forum)
September 13, 2004... Itanium: Fanwood - a previously disclosed low-voltage dual-processor single- core Madison, the current Itanium generation, due early next year. Montecito - a previously disclosed dual-core Itanium due at the end of 2005 and demoed for...

IBM To Support AMD Dual Cores.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... While Intel was in the midst of its Developer Forum and promising to go dual-core from top to bottom next year, IBM threw its weight behind AMD's rival dual-core x86 chips. It said it has this box called the eServer 326 that is already...

AMD Makes Dual-Core Pricing Noises.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... AMD, which is doing its best to challenge a supposedly bemused Intel to some kind of dual-core shootout although Intel allows that IBM and Sun already won it, is recommending that ISVs license their applications by the socket when AMD's...

Intel Raids Samsung for Marketing Chief.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Intel has hired Eric Kim, a guy out of Samsung Electronics to run corporate marketing, an odd place to go for a skill historically associated with American companies, but as Intel has explained before the emerging Asian markets represent a lot...

360 Developer Dead at 77.(Brief Article)(Obituary)
September 13, 2004... Bob Evans, the computer architect who led the team that developed IBM's revolutionary 360 mainframe in the early 1960s, the machine that made IBM a force to be reckoned with after nearly wrecking the company, died of heart failure in California...

Quattrone Gets 18 Months in the Slammer.
September 13, 2004... Toppled IPO kingpin Frank Quattrone, the discredited Credit Suisse investment banker and symbol of late 1990s high-tech excess who swapped carloads of bubble IPO shares and shamelessly favorable stock coverage for the banking patronage of his...

Dell Opens Hand-Holding Center in China.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Dell has put what it calls an Enterprise Command Center (ECC) in China that is meant to anticipate and plan around any contingencies like a monsoon, say, that might disrupt server and storage deliveries or customer service. Dell opened the...

Rave Creates Multi-OS Fire Blade.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Rave Computer Association has launched an integrated Sun Fire Blade 1600+ system that can run Windows XP or 2003, Solaris 9, Solaris x86 and Red Hat Linux simultaneously. The Sterling Heights, Michigan integrator says the server offers...

Unisys Hires New China Chief.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Unisys has hired David Fu, the former VP of sales and marketing for Equant Network Services in Hong Kong, the communications infrastructure house, to run its business in Greater China, replacing John Wen, who's retiring. Asia-Pacific...

Hitachi Aims for the High Ground with TagmaStore.
September 13, 2004... Hitachi Data Systems, which has been losing ground lately to EMC and IBM, is back trying to reshuffle the deck with a new high-end enterprise storage system that it touts as the most advanced on the planet. Launched Monday at the...

EMC Gets New CTO.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... EMC has tapped IBM veteran Jeffrey Nick to be its CTO. Nick, an IBM Fellow when he left IBM in June after 24 years, will obviously play a key role in EMC's technical strategy and help evolve its information lifecycle management. Nick's...

Adaptec Updates.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Blaming softness in its US channel, Adaptec said results for its fiscal second quarter ending September 30 would hit the bottom end of its guidance. It previously said it expects revenues of $124 million-$127 million and a pro forma net...

Networked Storage Grew Briskly in Q2.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Networked disk storage revenues grew three times as fast as total disk storage revenues in Q2, according to IDC. Revenues from networked disk storage, which includes NAS and Open SAN, are estimated to have grown 17.9% year-over-year and to...

XOsoft Debuts Enterprise Rewinder.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Business continuity ISV XOsoft has released a data center version of its Data Rewinder suite of continuous data protection software. Dubbed appropriately Enterprise Rewinder, the product is designed so administrators can rewind affected...

Java Desktop Claims To Take its First Steps to World.
September 13, 2004... Domination Chinese rivals, who ought to know what's going on in their own country since everybody's tied into the government one way or another and the government sets the pace, claim that Sun has yet to move a single Java Desktop System...

Sybase Launches Freebie.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Sybase has put out a free but limited version of its Adaptive Server Enterprise database for Linux. Dubbed, logically enough, Adaptive Server Enterprise Express Edition for Linux, the thing is targeted at developers and small businesses....

Novell Joins China Linux Standards Group.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Novell has become the second Western company, and the first Western commercial Linux outfit, to join the four-month-old China Linux Standards Group set up by the Chinese government. SAP's China Research Center is the other formal Western...

OSDL To Host Summit.
September 13, 2004... The Open Source Development Lab is putting together a three-day Enterprise Linux Summit scheduled for January 31-February 2 in Burlingame, California on the issues surrounding successful Linux deployment. The summit is directed towards...

Red Hat Shores Up its Defenses.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Red Hat has moved up several security enhancements that weren't supposed to appear until early next year ostensibly to tout the value of having a Red Hat subscription. The widgetry, packaged as the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 3 and...

Infiniband Spec Revised.(Infiniband Trade Association (IBTA))(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... The Infiniband Trade Association (IBTA) says it's completed the 1.2 rev of the Infiniband spec, which extends the bandwidth to 120 Gbps in each direction by introducing double and quad signaling rates. There are also revisions covering...

KDE To Enhance Search.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... The KDE folks plan to provide an enhanced desktop search feature in the next version of the KDE desktop. Look for it to debut in the next 18 months. KDE developers say the Google-style search feature will be included in the control...

Open-Xchange GPL'd.(ISV Netline)(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... German ISV Netline Internet Services has released a free GPL version of its Linux-based Open-Xchange collaboration server. Open-Xchange, the engine behind SuSE's Openexchange server, is a modular tool that provides e-mail, calendar,...

Wall Street Show Set.
September 13, 2004... The one-day 2004 High Performance Technology on Wall Street show is set for Monday, September 20 at the Roosevelt Hotel in mid-town Manhattan. It focuses on HPC, blades, clusters and Linux systems. Admission is free and the doors open at 8am....

Scratch Bayshore.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Intel was supposed to come up with a third-generation chipset for the Montecito and Montvale Itaniums that supported a few more flourishes than the current 8870. It was called Bayshore. Well, it appears Bayshore won't happen. Intel said it...

Piper Jaffray Edgy about Oracle.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... With Oracle about to report its quarter, Piper Jaffray got nervous and cut its estimates citing the "uncertainty around the [PeopleSoft] acquisition and [Oracle's] corporate strategy combined with the lower growth expectations and uncertainty...

SCO & IBM To Square Off in Court.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... On Tuesday SCO and IBM are supposed to turn up at an all-important discovery hearing related to SCO's $5 billion suit against IBM. SCO claims IBM hasn't turned over everything it was ordered to cough up. Imagine, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano never...

Sun Exec Goes to MontaVista.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... MontaVista has plucked Peder Ulander out of Sun where he was senior director of marketing for its Desktop Products Group, and made him VP of marketing.

Sasser/Netsky Author Indicted.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Sven Jaschan, the German brat who released the hyper-destructive Sasser and Netsky worms, has been charged with computer sabotage, data manipulation and disruption of public systems. Jaschen was arrested in May after confederates of his turned...

AMD Reportedly Masters the Digital Divide.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... BusinessWeek says AMD has teamed up with contract manufacturers to create a cheap, networked PC for India and China. It may announce the deal next month.

Rogue CEO Makes Most Wanted List.(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Next time you go to the post office look at the wall where they used to hang wanted posters for Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly. The post office wants to get its hands on ex-Symbol Technologies CEO Tomo Razmilovic and is offering a rare...

Ex-Microsoft COO Writes Book.(The Fiefdom Syndrome)(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Ex-Microsoft COO Bob Herbold, who retired from the company in 2001, has written a book called "The Fiefdom Syndrome" decrying the ubiquitous individuals and groups who control the flow of information out of their offices as a way of gaining...

Carly Sprays Grid Perfume on Her Storage Pig.
September 20, 2004... The nicest thing one can say about HP's storage business these days is that it sucks. And HP knows it. Heck, storage came in significantly below plan last quarter and helped make a mess of the company's results. Things are at a pretty...

Infineon To Plead Guilty to Price Fixing.(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... Infineon Technologies AG, the German DRAM maker, has copped a plea, agreeing to plead guilty to charges of price-fixing and pay a huge $160 million fine for taking part in what the US Department of Justice called an "international conspiracy"...

Sender ID Runs Aground.(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has refused to standardize Microsoft's spam-fighting Sender ID proposal because Microsoft has applied for patents on the technology. In an e-mail to the group's discussion forum, the co-chairs of...

Airbus Makes Bomb Run over EC in Microsoft's Name.(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... Airbus, at Microsoft's instigation, has asked to intervene on Microsoft's behalf in Microsoft's antitrust mess in Europe. Airbus would complain to the European Court of First Instance, which is hearing Microsoft's appeal, that the penalties...

JP Morgan Ditches Giant Outsourcing Deal with IBM.(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... IBM's great outsourcing scheme, the centerpiece of IBM CEO Sam Palmisano's growth strategy, fell down the stairs the other day and threw its back out when JP Morgan Chase canceled its huge $5 billion-over-seven-years outsourcing deal with IBM....

Microsoft Settles Sendo Suit.
September 20, 2004... Darn if Microsoft didn't go and settle one of those lawsuits that promised to be so mud-slingingly diverting. This time it's the one Sendo, the ticked-off cell phone start-up, brought against its ex-partner right before Christmas in 2002....

PeopleSoft Hangs Tough.(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... In the face of the devastating upset handed the Justice Department last week, PeopleSoft continues to refuse to meet with its unwanted suitor Oracle. In an immediate public statement it only said that its board would review the...

VC Knocks Verari Down & Stuffs Money in its Pockets.(Venture Capital)(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... There'll be no living with Verari now. It took in $13.275 million that it wasn't even looking for from the Carlyle Venture Partners, a fund managed by the chi-chi Carlyle Group, which is chaired by former CEO of IBM Lou Gerstner and claims...

Judge Slashes Microsoft's Legal Bill.(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... The judge superintending the California class action that claimed Microsoft overcharged for Windows has let some of the air out of the ridiculously inflated $270 million bill presented by the lawyers who won the supposedly $1.1 billion...

Symantec To Buy @stake.(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... Symantec is acquiring @stake, the start-up providing digital security consulting, and security auditing and analysis products to business. Financial terms of the transaction, which is expected to close this month, were not disclosed. ...

Celestica, Shutters, Cuts Q3 Forecast.(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... Celestica, the rocky Canadian contract manufacturer that makes Opteron boxes for AMD as well as widgetry for IBM, Lucent, Sun, Cisco and HP, cut its Q3 revenue projections on Tuesday from $2.25 billion-$2.4 billion to $2.05 billion-$2.15...

Microsoft Defends Smart Tags.(Arendi Holdings)(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... Microsoft was in court in Rhode Island this week fighting a suit brought by Arendi Holdings claiming that the Smart Tags linking technology Microsoft used in Office XP infringes its patent number 6,323,853. Arendi's mojo appears in a product...