HP Readies HP-UX 11i v3 For Launch
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Just as 2006 was winding down, Hewlett-Packard announced some security enhancements to its HP-UX variant of the Unix operating system, which runs on Itanium Integrity servers as well as on older PA-RISC HP 9000 iron. These enhancements, which HP was previewing as upcoming features in the future HP-UX 11i v3, were announced for the current HP-UX 11i v2. The reason HP did this, apparently, is because it did not want these security enhancements buried in the impending HP-UX 11i v3 announcement. READ MORE >

Arrow Buys Agilysys' IT Distribution Business for $485 Million
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The consolidation in the server and storage distribution business continues apace in 2007 as Arrow Electronics announced last week that it would pay $485 million in cash to buy the KeyLink Systems Group distribution business from rival Agilysys. With this deal, Arrow positions itself to better compete against Avnet, its remaining big rival in the enterprise server, storage, and software distribution business. Both Arrow and Avnet have been doing acquisitions in recent months to build up their IT distributorships. READ MORE >

Sun Adds Opteron Rev F Blade Server, Sets Utility Pricing
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While IBM and Hewlett-Packard have come to dominate the blade server market, there is still room for innovation. Or, at least Sun Microsystems is hoping. This week, Sun is adding a new four-socket blade server to its Sun Blade 8000 platform, which is interesting. But for customers who are looking at investing in blade servers and who are tired of the economics of upgrade cycles, the utility-style pricing that Sun is also debuting on these boxes may be more interesting than the iron. READ MORE >

As I See It: Sweating the Little Stuff
by Victor Rozek

Meteorologist Edward Lorenz was in a hurry. The year was 1961 and he was running weather simulations. Lorenz plugged equations into his computer and waited. And waited. He was working on a Royal (as in typewriter) McBee LGP30, a 740-pound "portable" desk system, and the going was slow. Today, of course, computers crunch numbers with the efficiency of an elephant stomping on a peanut, but in the 1960s, computers crunched numbers with all the vigor of a squirrel gnawing on a coconut. So when he decided to run one last simulation, he took the numeric results from the middle of a prior run, rounded off the values in order to hasten the calculation process, and restarted the simulation assuming there would be a slight but negligible impact on the results. READ MORE >