Open Source Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Corporate computing on machines that we can recognizably call electronic data processing systems--and what we now call servers--is coming up on its silver anniversary. The world has consumed a truly staggering amount of computing capacity and has devoured countless varieties of chip and server architectures, operating systems, programming languages, and middleware. But consumption is not a goal in and of itself--unless you are an IT vendor selling wares. Rather than consume what vendors feed us, it is time for the companies that buy servers to have more say in how servers get cooked and what server technologies we consume. READ MORE >

Novell Delivers Open Enterprise Server, Preps SUSE Professional 9.3
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Novell said this week that it has begun shipping its Open Enterprise Server, a hybrid of its NetWare and SUSE Linux platforms that it has been talking up for months. Novell announced a preview of its future SUSE Professional 9.3 release at the annual CeBIT IT tradeshow in Hannover, Germany, which is the largest IT event in the world. The company also previewed an update to its ZENworks management tools. READ MORE >

IBM Opens Blue Gene/L Utility Center in Minnesota
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is perhaps fitting that the new supercomputing on demand center that was opened up by IBM last week in Minnesota, home of Control Data Corp, the place where Seymour Cray learned to build supercomputers and the place where he eventually founded another supercomputer company that bore his name. You might think that supercomputer companies pick Minnesota because the HVAC bills are lower, and maybe they do. For whatever reason, Minnesota has always been a hotbed of supercomputing, and Big Blue is continuing in that tradition by opening its first Blue Gene utility computing center in its Rochester, Minnesota, facilities. READ MORE >

Future "Cell" Power Processors to Spotlight Linux
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A few weeks ago, IBM and its partners, electronics makers Sony and Toshiba, announced some of the details of its forthcoming "Cell" processor at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. The Cell chip is generating a lot of excitement for a lot of different reasons, but particularly because its architecture embodies the ideals of cyberpunk novels from two decades ago. IBM is also stressing its support for Linux on Cell. READ MORE >

   But Wait, There's More

Novell Restates Its Financials to Clear Up Errors . . . Scali Moves Its Headquarters to the U.S., Preps for Growth . . . HP Commits to SAS Drives for Servers, Licenses RAID 6 Technology . . . SGI Says Its Servers, Storage, and Viz Technology Are Grid Ready . . . Cray Promotes Ungaro to President . . . Oracle Tops Relational Database Market in 2004, Says IDC . . . Jedox Open Source Multidimensional OLAP Server Coming in May . . . READ MORE >

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