Articles by Maureen O'Gara

Fujitsu To Field Virtualization Manager

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Fujitsu is coming into North America with the widgetry it’s been selling in Japan that gives users control of both physical and virtualized blade servers through a single management interface. The stuff is called RCVE, Resource Coordinator Virtual Edition, and is supposed to cut the time and resources needed to install, configure and roll over workloads on blades, regardless of whether they’re physical or virtual. Currently it can manage VMware. By the middle of next year it should be able to handle Hyper-V and Xen as well.

Fujitsu To Field Virtualization Manager

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 20:00:00 EDT

3Tera Beats Amazon in Windows Cloud Computing Support

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:00:00 EDT

3Tera has put out its AppLogic 2.4 beta, the grid operating system that supports virtual appliances running Windows Server in all the infrastructure components necessary to run Web applications including storage, networking and load balancing. It gleefully sniffs that Amazon only plans to offer Windows support.

Red Hat Tickles Open Source SOA

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:00:00 EDT

By the end of the month Red Hat will release JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 and JBoss Operations Network 2.1, which are supposed give it more skin in the enterprise SOA game. The company said the new revs feature cooperative support and allow for remote monitoring and management of open source SOA deployments. Red Hat’s SOA strategy is centered on driving down cost and complexity.

H-1B Visas Rife with Fraud, Government Finds

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:15:00 EDT

Thirteen percent of the H-1B visas granted are based on fraud and another 8% contain so-called technical violations, according to a study just done by the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, and forwarded to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The USCIS processes visa petitions and, given the findings, says it's making procedural changes that haven't been disclosed yet.

Alleged Palin Hacker Indicted

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:15:00 EDT

David Kernell, the kid who allegedly hacked Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Plain’s Yahoo e-mail, distributed screenshots to the Internet and gave others access to the account, has been indicted and arraigned in federal court in Tennessee where his daddy is a Democratic state legislator.

Quest To Stage Auction Buyback and Wants to be a Virtualization Company

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:00:00 EDT

Quest Software was one of the only tech companies whose stock price was up after Thursday’s holocaust and that was because it said Wednesday that it would buy back $135 million-$400 million worth of stock through a modified Dutch auction tender offer with an expected price of $13.25-$15.50 a share, a 25%-47% premium. That represents 9%-26% of its outstanding shares.

Entellium Duo Charged with Cooking Books, Ripping Off VCs

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:00:00 EDT

The FBI arrested former Entellium CEO Paul Johnston and CFO Parrish Jones Tuesday night and on Wednesday the pair was hauled into district court in Seattle to face criminal charges of wire fraud. Seems they kept two sets of books: one that they allegedly used to con about $50 million from investors like Ignition Partners and Sigma Partners and the real ones that weren't anywhere near as bonnie.

Symantec Makes Aggressive $695m Bet on Cloud Computing

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:00:00 EDT

Symantec is buying MessageLabs, the privately held online messaging and messaging security house, for about $695 million in cash, a mix of pounds and dollars, to advance its position in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Symantec intends to pair MessageLabs with its own fledgling SaaS platform, the Symantec Protection Network, with its Online Backup, Online Storage for Backup Exec and Online Remote Access, to create a new SaaS product group that accelerates Symantec’s development of SaaS solutions and hybrid offerings.

Amazon Cuts S3 Prices

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Amazon will be cutting the price of its S3 hosted storage service come November 1. Pricing will be tiered from now on and favor heavier users. The company’s entry-level price of 15 cents a gigabyte a month in the US will remain in place but only for the first 50TB, the next 50TB will cost 14 cents a GB with the next 400TB after that costing 13 cents a GB. Users of more than 500TB will get a bill for 12 cents a GB.

Mono 2.0 Released

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:00:00 EDT

The open source Mono project that makes Microsoft's .NET development framework cross-platform – and is meant to entice Windows developers to Linux by making things seem warmly familiar – is now loosely compatible with .NET Framework 3.5. It lacks Windows Presentation Foundation, Workflow Foundation and Communication Foundation.

Virtualization Expo - IBM Moves To Calm Earnings Fears

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 09:15:00 EDT

IBM got a jump on what people fear may be a nasty earnings season and pre-announced its Q3 results Wednesday night after the market closed. It said its income would be up 20% to $2.8 billion on revenues up 5% to $25.3 billion. It also reaffirmed its full-year earnings projection of at least $8.75 a share. The earnings look better than expected though revenues were light about a billion dollars.

Bull Moves to Advance Its HPC Ambitions

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 08:15:00 EDT

Bull wants to be king of the HPC hill in Europe and so it's buying science + computing AG (s+c), an HPC solutions and services house in Germany, which happens to be the largest HPC market in Europe. What it's paying is a secret but the acquisition is supposed to turn Bull into a HPC powerhouse.

SOA World Expo - Unisys Rolls Out New Mainframe-y Big Iron

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:56:00 EDT

On tap are the high-end Dorado 700 and mid-range Dorado 4000 and Libra 4000, all terribly real-time and transaction-oriented, as well as a new release of the company’s SOA-style Visual Studio-based Agile Business Suite and Business Information Server development environment software.

eBay Layoff Rumors True

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:00:00 EDT

Those rumors about eBay making layoffs proved true. It's kissing 1,600 people good-bye, 10% of its workforce. The move, which will save $150 million a year, isn't supposed to stem from the punk economy, which is admittedly hurting business, CEO John Donahoe said. It’s more institutional and competitive. Traffic on the site is down 11% over the last two years, though revenues this year are expected to be up 17% to $9 billion.

AMD Spins Off Manufacturing into a Joint Venture with Abu Dhabi

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:15:00 EDT

Hector Ruiz, the ex-AMD CEO who sheparded the so-called "asset lite" strategy into being, will be chairman and give up the chair at AMD. ATIC and AMD will split the board at the joint venture. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. It covers AMD's two fabs in Germany, plus related assets and IP, and 3,000 people. There is a separate 12-month deal between ATIC and Mubadala that will have Mubadala project-managing ATIC's interests in the Foundry.

Is the AMD Deal Legal?

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:00:00 EDT

See, AMD is only in the x86 business by virtue of a licensing agreement with Intel going back in one version or another to 1976 and the juiciest parts of that agreement are under strict non-disclosure – and since the details of AMD’s brand new arrangement with the government of Abu Dhabi haven’t been disclosed – no one outside of a chosen few can tell whether AMD has the right to construct the deal the way it did – and even that may be open to interpretation.

If VMware Is "Virtualization 1.0" Is Microsoft the Avatar Of "Virtualization 2.0"?

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Well, Egenera - which has no market cap at all because it hasn't gone public yet - claims it is. IDC, which coined the term, defines 'Virtualization 2.0' as the next step beyond server virtualization replete with faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery, resource balancing and ultimately policy-based automation. Egenera says IDC is speaking its name.

Amazon EC2 To Add Windows

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:30:00 EDT

Amazon said Wednesday that its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), currently limited to various Unix and Linux operating systems, will start supporting Windows Server and SQL Server sometime this fall, describing it as "one of our most requested features." It's currently running a private beta of the widgetry.

SAP Takes Sales Hit, Blames Credit Crisis

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:45:00 EDT

Mid-morning Monday SAP confessed that the bottom suddenly fell out of its sales in the last two weeks of September as the economy tanked and the company found it increasingly hard to sign contracts. CEO Henning Kagermann blamed liquidity and financing issues especially at mid-sized companies – but did not identify problem geographies – and said that SAP’s Q3 numbers will be below expectations.

Silverlight 2 Reportedly on the Horizon

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:00:00 EDT

Silverlight 2 advanced to Release Candidate 0 over the weekend. Microsoft underscores that it is only for testing and “should not be used for launching Silverlight 2 applications for the general public.” But final release, covering Windows and Mac, is thought to be imminent.

AMD's Virtualization Play Shanghai Due After Istanbul

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:00:00 EDT

AMD’s first 45nm chip, the Shanghai version of its quad-core Barcelona server processor, is reportedly in full production. The company has reportedly pulled in delivery of two-way and eight-way models from Q1 to any minute now. Shanghai evidently means a 20% improvement over Barcelona at the same frequencies and a performance-enhancing increase in cache size to 6MB. It only supports HyperTransport 1.0 however.

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to Ship with Open Source jQuery

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 03:00:00 EDT

Microsoft said, “Going forward we’ll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new AJAX server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well.”

Google-Yahoo Deal Put on Hold

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 07:15:00 EDT

Yahoo’s life-saving revenue-enhancing alliance with Google, supposedly set to kick off in a week and substitute for a Microsoft buy-out, has been put on hold while antitrust regulators at the Department of Justice continue their investigation. The companies issued separate statements late Friday saying they had agreed to a "brief delay in implementing the agreement."

"OK, Boys, Cloud Computing Is the Plan" - Steve Ballmer

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:00:00 EDT

With Microsoft mandarin Kevin Johnson bolting to Jupiter, leaving Microsoft to lick its wounds over Yahoo and reorganize, CEO Steve Ballmer sent out an all-hands e-mail to Microsoft folk encapsulating the message he delivered to financial analysts gathering in Redmond Thursday. Ballmer highlighted software-plus-service, associating it with a 'platform in the cloud and delivering applications across PCs, phones, TVs, and other devices, at work and in the home' (Microsoft's Mesh widgetry) and promised 'more about our cloud platform initiatives and the next versions of our Live and Online technologies' at the company?s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) at the end of October.

Microsoft to Enable Cloud Computing Through Rosario

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:30:00 EDT

Presumably still months before rollout – there’s no date yet – Microsoft started talking up the next version of its developer tools and platform, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, Monday describing them as enabling cloud computing and democratizing application lifecycle management (ALM). The “democratizing” Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010, code-named Rosario, is supposed to bring all the members of a development organization – from the core developers and testers to the wider team of project managers, designers and business analysts – into the application development lifecycle and remove many of the existing barriers to integration.

Microsoft's Hyper-V Released

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:45:00 EDT

Let the games begin. First thing this morning Microsoft said that its standalone Hyper-V Server 2008, the bare metal hypervisor meant to help it wrest leadership of the virtualization market from VMware, would be available today. Anticipating Microsoft’s coming, VMware declared its standalone hypervisor a commodity a couple of months ago and – in a market broadening play – cut the $495-$1,090 price to free. Microsoft, which was only supposed to charge a nominal 28 bucks a head for its like-minded widgetry, followed suit a few weeks later.

Microsoft’s in the Market for European Search Engineers

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:00:00 EDT

As should come as no surprise, Microsoft is going to build an enterprise search R&D center in Norway around its Fast Search & Transfer acquisition. It says it will add 50 R&D workers to Fast’s 300 employees. It will be Microsoft’s third R&D center in Europe and part of Microsoft’s post-Yahoo strategy. It’s also planning to open a new European Search Technology Center (STC) with arms in Paris, London and Munich under Jordi Ribas, who until a minute ago was general manager of its Conncted TV business group.

Red Hat Delivers Integrated Linux-based HPC Platform

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:00:00 EDT

Red Hat Thursday delivered what it called the industry’s first integrated Linux-based High Performance Computing (HPC) platform, otherwise known as the Red Hat HPC Solution, an all-in-one HPC cluster stack that Red Hat and Platform Computing put together over the last year. The delivery is timely since Microsoft is just pushing out the final code of its Windows HPC Server 2008. Both Microsoft and Red Hat have in mind to broaden HPC’s commercial appeal and get SMBs as well as large accounts to sign on.

Cloud Computing Journal - Top 20 Open Source Packages

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The Open Source Census, the catch-as-catch-can opt-in attempt to discern trends in open source adoption that OpenLogic started, has collected six months worth of data on some 300,000 installations on about 2,000 machines and from this very narrow and probably unrepresentative slice of life has deduced that government and the financial sector are the biggest users of open source “per machine scanned,” Europe is ahead of the United States, OpenOffice is 3:1 more common on personal PCs than on company machines and that there’s a reasonable amount of open source software being used on Windows.

SOA World Expo - Watch Out For WSO2!

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:00:00 EDT

WSO2 is the ambitious two-year-old Sri Lanka start-up that's writing a complete open source middleware platform for Web Services on Intel Capital's nickel expecting it to become the standard. It says it's the same as a comprehensive SOA platform. It is looking ahead to a Mashup Server written in JavaScript this fall. It expects to have an external Web Services Registry this year and it's working on Web Service management. Then come business rules, governance and policy, security and a portal, all based on its Web Services Framework.

Google Wants $4.4 Trillion To Cut US Energy Dependence

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:00:00 EDT

In a week of ludicrously large numbers beyond a normal human being's comprehension of what it will cost to barely survive the current economic catastrophe Google announced that - by its calculations - it will take $4.4 trillion to reduce America's dependence on fossil fuel by 88% by 2030 (and that's only 38% in cars). While the world waited for the US Senate to vote on a patchwork rescue measure to save the global economy, Google Wednesday unveiled its "Clean Energy 2030" plan, which would substitute wind (heaven help the birds), nuclear and geothermic (a particular pet of Google's) for coal and oil to save an estimated $1 trillion between now and 2030.

xkoto Virtualizes SQL Server

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 09:45:00 EDT

Xkoto, the database virtualizer, fielded a Gridscale for Microsoft SQL Server virtualization product today that it says improves application performance, scalability and reliability in SQL Server environments. The active-active widgetry virtualizes the database infrastructure and distributes application loads horizontally across multiple instances of SQL Server. Xkoto says that means better reliability and performance than more costly and complex legacy clustering solutions with their shared storage, partitioning and mirroring.

HP Buys LeftHand to Extend its Virtualization Portfolio

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:00:00 EDT

Dell got its name in the papers late last year when it bought EqualLogic. HP followed suit Wednesday when it said that it was buying EqualLogic’s iSCSI rival LeftHand Networks, the nine-year-old storage virtualization and iSCSI/SAN ISV, for around $360 million cash. Dell paid $1.4 billion cash for its acquisition, a record for Dell.

White House Asked To Create an IP Czar

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:00:00 EDT

The US Congress had trouble passing the “save the world” legislation the White House asked for this week, but it didn’t seem to have any trouble sending the White House a bill the White House didn’t want – and may veto – that would establish a so-called Senate-confirmed IP czar or Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator with cabinet-level chevrons, who’s supposed to chair an inter-agency committee and fight a tougher fight against counterfeiting and piracy worldwide.

Microsoft in the Line of Fire: Ballmer

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:00:00 EDT

As the financial crisis deepened, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who last week said hardware and software sales would be hurt without following that statement to its logical conclusion, raised the decibel level and told Reuters that Microsoft would get hurt – some parts more than others.

Yahoo's Zimbra Reaches Out to Microsoft

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:00:00 EDT

Zimbra, Yahoo's open source messaging and collaboration software company whose fate was unclear if Microsoft had bought Yahoo, says it's got a new open extension framework for its Collaboration Suite (ZCS) that will enable two-way interoperability with Microsoft Exchange. It expects the move to encourage large enterprises and academic institutions to explore Zimbra more.

Cloud Computing: Infrastructure and the ‘Hybrid’ Cloud

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:00:00 EDT

Two-year-old venture-backed Skytap Inc, a University of Washington cloud infrastructure spin-out, says it’s got an API to enable “hybrid” clouds. Rather than use cloud computing in a silo, Skytap’s Web Services API and one-click VPN functionality create a situation where cloud resources are used as an extension of existing infrastructure.

Bluenog Has Rolled Out ICE 4.0

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Bluenog – a nog being a peg that holds a structure together – has rolled out ICE 4.0, or Integrated Collaborative Environment, calling it the industry’s first pre-integrated suite of enterprise content management, RIA portal development environment and business intelligence reportedly suited to non-technical users.

Does Yahoo Foresee a Bad End to its Google Adventure?

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:00:00 EDT

Canadian antitrust regulators have now gone the same path as the US Justice Department and reached out and hired an outside litigator, David Kent, a Toronto antitrust expert, to look into the Google-Yahoo deal. The news comes from the Wall Street Journal, which got it from “lawyers close to the matter.” The paper couldn’t get Canadian officials to comment.