Novell Swings to a Tiny Profit on a Tiny Revenue Bump in Q2
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Novell may be very happy about the growth that it is seeing from its SUSE Linux products and has certainly dodged a bullet by embracing Linux as plain vanilla NetWare sales go into what is probably a permanent, if very elongated, decline. But Linux is still, by the numbers, a very small piece of the business at Novell, even if it does give Novell mindshare in today's IT space as the major--some might say only--alternative to Red Hat. READ MORE >

U.S. Drags Down Server Sales in Q1, But Weak Dollar Helps
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Depending on how you want to look at it, the United States both helped and hurt sales in the global server market in the first quarter of 2008, according to statistics compiled by the box counters at IDC. The jittery economy in the United States has caused companies large and small to pull back on server spending, but at the same time the weak dollar compared to currencies in overseas markets that are experiencing decent growth in server sales as their economies build up and are amplifying the revenues as those sales are booked back in the States for the major server players. READ MORE >

Intel and Itanium Partners Gear Up for Quad-Core Tukwilas
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is always a bit slow news-wise around the Memorial Day holiday, and that was as good a reason as any for some of the key members of the Itanium Solutions Alliance to start talking up the future 'Tukwila' quad-core Itanium processors, which are expected to start shipping to server makers at the end of 2008 and to appear in servers in early 2009. Another good reason to talk up the Itanium is that competitive dual-core and quad-core chips, many of them running the data center workloads that Itanium was designed for, are already on the market, eating up mindshare. READ MORE >

Java Compute Appliances Upgraded by Azul Systems
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Azul Systems, the maker of hardware appliances that have been specifically designed to run Java virtual machines that are offloaded from general purpose servers and their applications, has announced the third generation of its Java processors, the Vega-3. With this new chip, Azul is adding more cores to the chip and adding other tweaks to make its Compute Appliances even more appealing to IT shops running Java applications who are sick of paying high prices for servers just to run JVMs. READ MORE >