Investors Back New Open-Source Server Virtualization Company
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

VMware, the workstation and server virtualization software vendor that pretty much had the market to itself until Microsoft got into the act by buying Connectix last year and launching Virtual Server 2005, just got some new competition. The leaders of the Xen open-source virtualization hypervisor project formed a corporation to sell and support Xen in December and have just secured $6 million from venture capitalists. READ MORE >

HP Boosts Integrities with Madison 9Ms, Other Stuff
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As we reported previously, Hewlett-Packard will this week upgrade its Itanium-based Integrity server line with the latest chips from Intel. Specifically, HP is rolling out the new 1.6 GHz/9 MB cache "Madison" processors into its entry and midrange rx series of Integrity machines as well as its top-end Superdome servers. HP has developed its own chipsets for the Integrity machines, and this round of server announcements does not include changes to those chipsets. READ MORE >

Why Do Rack Servers Persist When Blade Servers Are Better?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in December, I attended the UBS Server Forum, a gathering of Wall Street players, IT executives, and IT vendor luminaries. It was a day full of presentations, but about half of the presentations were in one way or another concerned with blade servers or blade PCs. Blade servers are one of those "eureka!" ideas that make intuitive sense, and everyone at the forum was generally optimistic about the prospects for blades in the IT market. But as I listened to representatives from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, RLX Technologies, and ClearCube Technology talk about the blade market, I kept wondering why rack-mounted servers persist when blade servers, in concept, are clearly better for whole classes of applications. READ MORE >

Will IT Vendors Set Up a Patent Trust?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In a move that was both generous and surprising, IBM has announced that it will bequeath 500 of its own software patents to the open source software development community, free of charge. With Europe in the midst of a controversial plan to enact laws that mimic software patent practices in the United States, people on both sides of the Atlantic are used to thinking of patents as a black or white issue. Either software patents are good, because they protect the innovations of IT vendors, or they are bad, because software is not patentable and to pretend otherwise is to stifle innovation. Now IBM has created a gray area. READ MORE >

  But Wait, There's More

Pervasive Commercializes PostgreSQL Database for Linux, Windows . . . Red Hat Hires New Head of North American Sales . . . GUPTA Launches Team Developer RAD for Linux . . . Consumer Electronics Linux Forum Becomes Nonprofit Corporation . . . OSDL to Host Linux Summit, Names Samba Creator a Fellow . . . IBM Wins Patent Contest for 12th Year in a Row . . . IBM Rolls Out Low-Rate Financing to Boost Sales, Again . . . READ MORE >

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