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But Wait, There's More
Tek-Tools Supports Tru64 Unix with Storage Monitor
Tek-Tools, which has been shipping a storage monitoring and reporting solution for various operating systems since 2001, announced this week that it has added Hewlett-Packard's Tru64 Unix variant to the roster of supported platforms for its Profiler Rx tool. With HP rapidly winding down support for its AlphaServer products and not porting Tru64 to its Integrity line of Itanium machines (as it has does with its HP-UX Unix variant), you might wonder why Tek-Tools bothered with Tru64 support at all. Well, there are hundreds of thousands of DEC Vaxes and AlphaServers out there in the world, and probably around 20 percent of them run Tru64 Unix. That is a big target market of companies that are not likely to jump to Itanium for at least a few years, because AlphaServer gear will be available for quite some time and HP is offering support on the boxes through at least 2011.
The Profiler Rx tool, which originally shipped under the name Storage Profiler, consolidates information about what is stored on direct-attached, network-attached, and storage area network storage devices. The software is already available on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and UnixWare, as well as on NetWare and Windows NT, 2000, 2003, and XP. Profiler Rx 3.5 monitors storage use (by user, application, performance, and file type, among many other metrics) and is also useful for capacity planning. It also has plug-ins for popular database and middleware programs that run on Unix and Windows platforms, and integrates with SAN management and backup software for these platforms, too. Profiler Rx pricing starts at $7,500 and scales with the size and complexity of the storage network customers implement.
BindView Adds Unix, Linux Support for System Management Tools
Companies set their own IT and business standards, and governments set standards, too. Keeping track of all of these standards and then measuring whether you are in compliance with standards is a big pain. BindView, a security and policy compliance software maker based in Houston, has been selling a piece of software called Compliance Center to assist with this task. Until now, BindView only supported Microsoft Windows NT, 2000, and 2003 server platforms and Windows XP desktop platforms. But this week, BindView announced that Compliance Center can now run on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX Unixes, and Red Hat and Novell SuSE Linuxes.
In addition to the general support for Unix and Linux, BindView announced a module for the Solaris version of Compliance Center, called Security Essentials for Solaris Technical Standards Pack, which provides a set of "best practices" guidelines for locking down Solaris, against which Solaris shops can measure their own configurations.
Signiant Makes Mobilize Remote Data Management Suite Available for AIX, SuSE Linux
Signiant, a company that was spun out of Nortel Networks in August 2000 as a specialist in data extraction and loading software, announced this week that its Mobilize middleware software is now available on IBM's AIX Unix variant and Novell's SuSE Linux. Mobilize is remote data management software that profiles data stored on systems that are remote from the data center (such as in satellite offices), sets policies for backing up data not being used, and consolidates data (when appropriate) into central systems, where it can be better managed and archived onto tape. Mobilize was already supported on the Solaris and HP-UX Unix variants, as well as on Red Hat Linux, and Microsoft Windows 2000 and 2003. By adding support for AIX and SuSE, Signiant has covered most of the bases in the data center.
MKS Guarantees Success in Porting Apps to Windows from Linux or Unix
Organizations interested in migrating their Unix or Linux applications to Windows can get a free one-hour consultation with a porting expert if they try out a porting tool. MKS last week announced "Guaranteed Success," which provides those who evaluate MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers with a free hour-long consultation with an MKS porting consultant, along with three more one-hour sessions if they license the software. The MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers (formerly NuTCRACKER) is collection of APIs, utilities, and a runtime environment that allows developers to recompile C, C++, and Fortran code as native Windows executables that look and act like regular Windows applications. MKS is also offering a partial refund on the cost of the MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers, which goes for $5,000 for a single-user license, if the migration doesn't work within 90 days.
Web Services: Programmers Say Spanning Platforms More Vital Than Spanning Languages
According to a new survey on Web services programming conducted by Evans Data, what programmers really want is a Web services programming environment that spans many platforms, and they are not so much concerned with having an environment that spans many languages. The survey of more than 500 programmers indicated that they were just about evenly split into Java and Microsoft .NET camps, but 70 percent of them said that what they really valued was a platform that would work on any operating system platform. Having an environment that spans many languages is not as important.
That would seem to imply that Java, which runs on all modern platforms, has an edge against Microsoft's .NET and Common Language Runtime environment, which is officially only supported on Windows but is being cloned for Linux and Unix through the Mono open source project. CLR is very slick in that it can run C#, Visual Basic, C, C++, RPG, and COBOL, among others. However, according to the Evans Data study, just about all .NET programmers use C#.
Earthquake Highlights Lack of Preparedness Among L.A. Companies
It was an eerily prescient finding. One day before a magnitude 5.2 earthquake rolled through Southern California last week, telecommunications provider AT&T announced results of a survey that found 35 percent of companies in the Los Angeles metropolitan area are completely unprepared for a disaster. While the temblor, which was situated about 60 miles offshore in the Pacific Ocean, didn't cause any damage (save for the evacuation of Sea World and frayed nerves in a few thousand souls), it served to highlight the ongoing tenuousness of business continuity in susceptible regions of this country. The report, "Disaster Planning in the Private Sector: A Post 9/11 Look at the State of Business Continuity in the U.S.," which was based on interviews with business continuity executives at 100 Los Angeles firms, found that 35 percent of business have no disaster recovery plans.
"About a third of Los Angeles companies don't seem to think they're vulnerable," said Ken Allen, executive director for Partnership for Public Warning, which is working with AT&T on disaster planning. "That's a dangerously naïve position to take, especially when you consider history." The report also found that 20 percent of companies surveyed had suffered a disaster serious enough for them to close down for some period of time. The most common culprit for shutting down was found to be earthquakes, with a 35 percent share, followed closely by fires, which caused 10 percent of the shutdowns. "Local companies without business continuity plans should make it a priority to develop them," Allen said. "They need to focus on protecting the networks their businesses rely on and securing critical applications and data to keep their businesses up and running."
Daimler-Chrysler IT Exec: Oracle Acquisition of PeopleSoft Would Hurt
The Department of Justice's case for blocking the acquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle got a boost last week, when a Daimler-Chrysler IT executive testified that it would harm his company to the tune of $50 million to $100 million if it was forced to replace its PeopleSoft application if rival Oracle's bid succeeded and it proceeded to neglect the software. Although Oracle wasn't invited to bid for a contract with Daimler-Chrysler, which considered only PeopleSoft and SAP for a recently installed human resources package, having Oracle in the wings increased Daimler-Chrysler's bargaining power, testified Michael Gorriz, the manufacturer's vice president of information technology. "I think there was a benefit to having three independent competitors in the market," Gorriz was quoted by CNET as saying in court. Although Oracle has since committed to supporting PeopleSoft's Enterprise suite of applications for at least 10 years, including the OS/400-based applications PeopleSoft acquired from J.D. Edwards, it is hard to entirely forget Oracle's preliminary pledge to kill its competitors' products if it ever got its hands on them, which is exactly what it said in the days immediately following its hostile takeover bid about a year ago.
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