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News Briefs and Product Shorts
What do Super Mario, AIT3 tape technology, grid computing, pornography, Bill Zeitler, Linux,
Motorola, PalmPilots, JPEGS, mainframes, industrial espionage, and the PowerPC architecture have in
common? That's right; they're all included in this week's rendition of News Briefs and Product Shorts,
where no stone goes unturned and you can witness the jarring collision of the ridiculous and the sublime.
Several weeks ago, BCC Technologies introduced its first tape drives and libraries based on the Linear
Tape-Open, or LTO, standard. Since then, the Irvine, California, provider of storage solutions for the
OS/400 marketplace has announced a new line of high-performance tape drives based on the third
generation of Sony's Advance Intelligent Tape technology. AIT3 tape drives are twice as fast as AIT2 tape
drives but can still read AIT2 and AIT1 cartridges. BCC's Maxback 9192 Tape Subsystems with AIT3
technology come in one- and two-drive versions; they hold from 2 to 8 cartridges that can contain 100 GB
each, or 300 GB using compression, and cost from $13,500 to $25,600. BCC's AIT3-based Maxback 4575
Tape Libraries feature up to 12 drives; they manage up to 360 cartridges, for up to 108 TB of compressed
storage, and range in price from $14,500 to $215,000. For more information on BCC's products, visit www.bcctech.com. For more information on AIT3
technology, visit www.aittape.com.
IBM's processor buddy, Motorola, has pushed the PowerPC architecture to 1 GHz for the
first time. The company announced last week that its new processor, the MPC7455, will be the first
processor using the PowerPC instruction to ship with a clock speed in excess of 1 GHz. The PowerPC
architecture is used in many processor applications, including IBM iSeries and pSeries 64-bit servers, Apple Macintosh PCs, and Nintendo video game systems. Motorola recently landed an OEM deal for
the MPC 7455 with Ericsson, which plans to use it in
its GPRS backbone.
Move over Super Mario. Look out, Donkey Kong. Nintendo has a new name in town. Nintendo of Europe, the German
arm of the Japanese gaming software giant, has chosen Magic Software Magic Software's eDeveloper suite of fourth-generation
language tools to extend and modernize its OS/400-based ERP package. The contract, which Magic says
will initially be worth $250,000, includes the development of an online information- and order-processing
system for the Italian market, as well as the development of a new licensing system. The solution will run on
Linux and iSeries servers in an integrated environment, using DB2/400 as the back-end and including
failover and backup systems.
Wireless computing in the enterprise may have not lived up to the hype of the last few years, but Palm, which leads the handheld computer market with its
PalmPilot, has unveiled new offerings, hoping to land wireless technology squarely in the enterprise realm.
Last week Palm announced its Enterprise Messaging Solution, a suite of products that includes the Palm
i705 handheld, the Palm Wireless Messaging Server, the Enterprise Software Suite, and the Palm.Net
messaging service, as well as technical support. The Wireless Messaging Server integrates with IBM Lotus Notes- and Microsoft Outlook-based e-mail systems, includes a license for 25
users, and starts at $2,499.
At Lotusphere last week, GROUP
Software announced the latest release of its suite of Domino-based security software, which prevents
inappropriate content from being transferred using e-mail. The Version 5.2 release of the securiQ Suite
filters images included in incoming and outgoing e-mail and e-mail attachments, and it detects pornography,
widely used image types, such as BMP, GIF, JPEG and TIFF files, as well as data and images housed in
existing databases. The company says its software prevents employees from sexual harassing one another
and protects a company from industrial espionage. GROUP Software, a German company whose U.S.
headquarters are in Boston, Massachusetts, presented at the last COMMON, in Minneapolis, Minnesota; its
software runs on OS/400-based systems that have Domino installed.
IBM's venerable mainframe was the toast of the computing world last week, garnering more attention at
LinuxWorld and Lotusphere than its eServer brethren, including the iSeries, in the wake of IBM's
announcement that, in the fourth quarter of its last fiscal year, mainframe sales actually grew, which is the
first time that's happened in, oh, about 100 years. The zSeries was also a hot topic among software vendors,
which announced more mainframe products last week than in any week in recent memory, including new
z/OS and CICS software from DataMirror, Computer Associates, Stampede Technologies,
and SERENA Software. The
iSeries Nation,
supposedly the final bastion of iSeries propaganda, even became a mainframe booster, with links to
three stories on its Web site about the new dedicated Linux eServers, all of which focus almost
entirely on the zSeries version of the dedicated Linux servers (the iSeries received nary a mention).
IBM
even gave away a Linux-enabled mainframe last week to Clarkson University, in Potsdam, New York,
as part of a contest to see which college students could write the most innovative Linux applications.
It should be a welcome respite for iSeries fanatics that their beloved platform isn't being nudged out
of the spotlight by its Unix twin, the pSeries, or the dastardly xSeries, but by its proprietary soul
mate, the zSeries.
The era of proprietary computer systems is over. That's the message coming down from
IBM's eServer chief, Bill Zeitler, who predicted in a
keynote speech at LinuxWorld last week that Linux and the open-source movement will bring an end to
the days when vendors can use a proprietary platform to retain control over their customers. Moreover,
he said that vendors that don't align themselves with the open-source community will find themselves
"on the wrong side of history." IBM is, of course, the biggest provider of proprietary systems in
history. It has sold hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of computer hardware that exclusively runs
its long line of stable and secure operating systems, including OS/400, OS/390, and others. And what
will take the place of proprietary systems? Zeitler says it will be grid computing, the high-speed
infrastructure that IBM sees driving the next generation of e-business.
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