http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bnsindex.html Description As is traditional with Enterprise Linux releases from Red Hat, the latest RHEL 5.2 update that begins shipping today has a bunch of patches to make it work better on recently announced processors and related I/O peripherals. The update, which went into beta in March, also has the usual refresh of the open source stack for Linux as well as bug fixes and security patches. Significantly, the updated Linux kernel also includes support for more scalable processor clusters, for both physical machines and virtual machines. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns052108-story01.html Hot on the heels of its proposed $13.9 billion acquisition of services pioneer and giant Electronic Data Systems last week, Hewlett-Packard duly reported its financials to Wall Street for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 ended April 30. And as it hinted a week ago, the numbers were a bit better than expected, with overall sales up 9.7 percent to $25.7 billion and net earnings rising by 15.9 percent to $2.06 billion. Thanks to share buybacks, HP was able to boost earnings per share by 23.1 percent to 80 cents a pop. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns052008-story01.html To say that Hewlett-Packard has wanted to be a powerhouse in IT services is a bit of an understatement. Almost straight out of the gate in 2000, then-new chief executive officer Carly Fiorina, the first non-HPer to run the company, tried to do a $17 billion deal with the IT consultancy arm of accountant PriceWaterhouse Coopers and failed, which IBM accomplished two years later with $3.5 billion just as HP had taken a left turn and acquired Compaq for $20 billion in 2001. The Compaq deal gave HP enterprise servers, storage, and some services. But nothing like the $13.9 billion acquisition today of Electronic Data Systems. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns051308-story01.html Hoping to build some confidence in its processor roadmaps, Advanced Micro Devices this week is talking more specifically about its Opteron and Athlon X64 processor plans between now and 2010. With the difficulties of the 'Barcelona' quad-core Rev F Opterons for two-socket and larger machines behind it and the 'Budapest' quad-core variants for single-socket boxes coming this quarter, AMD has taken a hard look at its roadmaps and made some important changes--changes that should improve its chances of keeping pace with a resurgent Intel. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns050708-story01.html It may be anywhere from one to two months late coming to market, depending on how generous you want to be, but Sun Microsystems has delivered a usable distribution of OpenSolaris, the open source and development edition of the Solaris 10 Unix platform. But don't be confused. Sun also thinks that for those bleeding-edge companies who need all the latest-greatest features that have not yet been added to a patch for the commercial-grade Solaris, OpenSolaris is appropriate for production, too. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns050608-story01.html The deck chairs are changing once again at the good ship Big Blue, and this time, not only are the top brass moving into new roles at the company, but some heavy hitters at IBM are trading in their office chairs for Adirondack chairs at their vacation hangouts as they retire from the company. It is hard to get any bluer than Bill Zeitler and Nick Donofrio, but a new team of managers is now being given a chance to try now that these two are retiring from the company in the wake of their impending 60th birthdays. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns050608-story02.html In these times of tight credit, cash is without a doubt king. Or at least a knight, considering how inflation is affecting the cost of the consumables we all buy to live. Nothing demonstrates the power of cash more than the contrast between Rocket Software's failed $69 million attempt to acquire host connectivity and application modernization software maker NetManage, which was launched in December 2007 and withdrawn in March because Rocket Software could not raise the capital it needed, and an a $73.3 million all-cash deal announced today by COBOL and application modernization tool maker Micro Focus International. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns050108-story01.html Late last week, after we had put The Unix Guardian to bed and then moved on to coverage of other platforms, Sun Microsystems announced that it has rolled out an update of its Solaris 10 Unix for Sparc and X64 platforms. The update, which is known as Solaris 10 5/08 even though it is coming out in April, comes out about seven months after the prior 8/07 update, which actually hit in September 2007, not August. (Go figure.) Anyway, the 5/08 update has some important features that Solaris shops have wanted for some time. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns042908-story01.html A little more than a month ago, Sun Microsystems announced that David Yen, who was in charge of its Sparc processor development efforts off and on for many years, was leaving the company to take a job at Juniper Networks. Sun announced this week that it has tapped Mike Splain, a heavy hitter in the chip world who was given the interim job in addition to his duties as chief technology officer for Sun's Systems Group. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns042908-story02.html Competition is a very tough thing, particularly when vendors get pinched by each other and a tightening economy at the same time. But so it is in the market for X64 microprocessors sold by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. While both companies are under pressure, dominant chip maker Intel is still making profits and ramping up acceptable quad-core products, while AMD is just now getting quad-core chips out the door and facing a resurgent Intel as it slashes 10 percent of its workforce to balance its books. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns042208-story01.html