Guild Companies

Windows & Linux Edition
Volume 2, Number 8 -- February 26, 2003

But Wait, There's More. . .

Three new additions to the Express family of infrastructure products were formally announced last week at IBM's PartnerWorld event. The new offerings apply to DB2, Lotus, and Tivoli. IBM says they will be generally available in the second quarter. IBM expects the Express products to be instrumental in its bid to fight Microsoft in the small and midsized business market, where smaller IT staffs struggle to develop complex Web applications and price, ease of use, and manageability are a key considerations. Pricing for DB2 Express is yet to be determined, although at least one industry source reports that it will be less than $500 per CPU. IBM clearly intends DB2 Express to be price-competitive with both Oracle and Microsoft. Ease of installation and use, and manageability, are issues with which IBM intends to make points in the marketplace. Despite being a scaled-down database, DB2 Express boasts high-end features, like self-healing and self-tuning capabilities, which should gain the support of system administrators in the SMB market. The initial offering will run on Windows and Linux. Later this year, probably in the fourth quarter, an OS/400 version will become available. Lotus Domino Collaboration Express will combine the Domino Server collaboration and mail software, with the option of either the Notes or the iNotes client, and access to collaborative applications via a Web browser or a separate Notes client. Enterprise-quality messaging, group calendaring, and off-the-shelf or custom application support is also part of the Express deal. Tivoli Storage Resource Manager Express Edition is designed to help SMBs to better manage their storage through increased capacity utilization and simplified administration. It is designed to deploy on single-processor desktops. WebSphere Application Server Express, which became available in December 2002, was the first of the Express family of open infrastructure software. It will be joined by WebSphere Portal Express for Linux and Windows in the second quarter. IBM, just days ago, added support for WAS Express on iSeries, and it promises support for AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX in the second half or 2003. WebSphere Portal Express for iSeries is forecasted for general availability near the end of 2003.

Trying to get as many feet in the door at small and midsized businesses as possible, IBM has announced new enterprise-class storage products, branded under the TotalStorage name, including a new version of its midrange disk and midrange tape storage, aimed at these key customers. Now entered into the storage lineup is FAStT 900, a midrange disk storage option offering high-end capabilities with up to 120 percent improvements in disk read/write performance over previous models. According to performance figures released by IBM, it handles 2 Gigabit Fibre Channel technology and the capability to scale from 36 GB to more than 32 TB. It also includes a built-in, automatic alert, so that if a problem occurs IBM knows about it and can react before downtime becomes a major issue, and disaster recovery features such as IBM FlashCopy and Remote Mirror technology, which allows data retrieval after an interruption in service. When it becomes generally available March 14, there will also be platform support for Unix platforms (IBM's AIX, Sun Microsystems' Solaris, and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX). Also announced is the TotalStorage Linear Tape-Open Ultrium 2 drive, an LTO tape system that IBM claims is the fastest LTO tape drive performance available, with more than double the capacity and speed of the previous models for archiving and disaster recovery. It is currently available in UltraScalable Tape Library 3584 and the Ultrium External Tape Drive 3580. The new tape drives double the capacity (up to nearly a petabyte of compressed data in the 3584) and more than double the performance over the first generation of IBM Ultrium offerings. Other notable points of comparison include 200 GB Ultrium 2 cartridge capacity (400 GB at 2:1 compression); 35 MB/sec data rate (70 MB/sec at 2:1 compression); switched fabric Ultrium 2 Fibre Channel drives; and control Path Failover for the UltraScalable Tape Library. IBM is also adding new autonomic computing enhancements to the UltraScalable Tape Library 3584 to include control path failover, where one communication path is substituted for another in the event of a disruption. The new drives can read and write to first-generation Ultrium cartridges, which protects customers' investments in LTO technology. In addition, the Ultrium 2 tape drives can process first-generation Ultrium tape cartridges at improved performance rates, up to 20 MB/s. That's a 33 percent performance improvement, according to IBM computations. IBM also announced that Tivoli Storage Manager now supports FAStT 900 and Ultrium 2 tape drives as well as all IBM tape libraries that currently support IBM Ultrium 2 tape drives. Also available from IBM and its U.S.-based business partners is the Cisco MDS 9216 and 9509 for enterprise-class storage networks.
JDA Software Group will donate $3.5 million worth of software and services to the Toronto, Ontario, based Ryerson School of Retail Management, the Scottsdale, Arizona, software company announced last week. Ryerson's students will study the use of several JDA offerings to learn visual merchandising, product and demand planning, customer data analysis, and assortment optimization. "As the industry continues to face dramatic changes such as international competition, shifting consumer behavior, and technological advances, it's clear that new strategies for our curriculum are essential," said Donna Smith, director of the school. The Ryerson School of Retail Management offers the only university-level degree in retail management in Canada, and students can take courses over the Internet. Jim Armstrong, JDA's chief executive, studied at Ryerson.
If you were running IBM Lotus Domino-based mail networks, the recent SQL Slammer worm didn't affect you. But that doesn't mean that the Net's nasty critters, which seem to have a special affinity for Microsoft products, won't ever be targeted at Domino. To that end, Symantec released a new line of antivirus software for Domino at the Lotusphere show last week. The new product, called Symantec AntiVirus/Filtering for Domino, protects Domino databases running on Solaris, AIX, iSeries, Linux, and Windows NT/2000 servers. This update brings support for the latest version of Lotus Notes/Domino, version 6.0, in addition to a new rules-based content filtering feature. The new version of AntiVirus/Filtering for Domino also brings support for more e-mail attachment types.
Security is the number-one concern of the IT organizations of American manufacturers, Gartner Dataquest reported last week. Dataquest recently conducted a survey of decision makers at 35 manufacturers in the United States, asking them to rank the importance of a list of IT projects. Security came out on top, followed by ERP upgrades and extensions, and Web services, which was number three. Dataquest says the results show that a number of respondents are anticipating that the government may implement new laws requiring tougher security at their organizations. Similarly, a new war could lead the government to require its contractors to tighten their IT infrastructure, Dataquest says. To effectively sell security solutions, Dataquest recommends that vendors adapt an approach that focuses more on the potential return on investment that implementing security may bring.