Novell Taps New CEO, CFO to Lead the Linux Charge
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Novell made an abrupt announcement last Thursday morning, just before Wall Street opened for business, that Jack Messman, the company's chairman and chief executive officer, had been removed from those positions. Thomas Plaskett, who has been on the board of directors since November 2002, was elected non-executive chairman of the board at the company, which has chosen Ron Hovsepian, who was named president at Novell in November 2005, as its new CEO. READ MORE >

Intel Comes Out Swinging with Woodcrest Xeons
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The two-socket SMP server is arguably what made the X86 architecture the dominant server platform in the world, and with the latest iteration of the Xeon, code-named "Woodcrest" and finally launched by the chip maker yesterday, Intel is finally back in the driver's seat, pushing performance and efficiency, by many measures, above rival Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices. While Intel is enjoying some time in the sun starting this week, as Woodcrest goes into production, AMD is not just sitting around, and the question is whether or not Intel can keep pace. READ MORE >

SGI Launches Entry Woodcrest Xeon, Itanium Linux Supers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Having tried to make a go of it solely as a maker of exotic NUMA-based supercomputer clusters based on Intel's Itanium architecture and the Linux operating system, struggling supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics yesterday launched its first Xeon-based machines, which will use Intel's new "Woodcrest" implementation of the low-power Core architecture. At the same time, SGI, which has been in bankruptcy protection since early May, is talking up the impending dual-core "Montecito" Itaniums, which will plug into the Altix 4700 blades and roughly double their performance and is launching a midrange Itanium box. READ MORE >

Smaller Companies are Preparing for Disaster Too, Study Shows
by Alex Woodie

A recent study of companies' disaster preparedness by SteelEye Technology found that smaller companies are implementing business continuity plans complete with remote hot sites almost at the same rate as larger companies. The software vendor's study also found that terrorism barely registers as a concern among North American companies, which are much more concerned with power outages. European companies, on the other hand, consider terrorism a greater threat. READ MORE >