But Wait, There's More

SCO Certified for HP MSA Arrays

The SCO Group announced at its SCO Forum last week that the company is now supporting Hewlett-Packard's Modular Smart Array 500 and Modular SAN Array 1000 disk arrays with its OpenServer and UnixWare variants of the Unix operating system for X86 servers.

The MSA 1000s are probably the most commonly used external disk storage for HP's ProLiant line of X86 servers, and include dual RAID 5 storage controllers, Fibre Channel server links, and space for 14 disk drives in a 4U chassis; up to 28 drives can be added in external enclosures for the MSA 1000s, yielding 6 terabytes of total storage. The MSA 500 is a single-chassis version of the same array, with SCSI instead of Fibre Channel links and without expansion enclosures, and spans to 2 terabytes. HP's ProLiant line has historically been the biggest driver of UnixWare sales, and support for the latest arrays is important, given SCO's desire to boost UnixWare sales. UnixWare 7.1.4 and OpenServer 5.0.7 both support the HP arrays.

Transoft Acquires Porting Tool to Attack VMS Base

According to estimates by market researcher Gartner, there are approximately 400,000 legacy VMS and OpenVMS Vaxen and AlphaServer midrange machines in the world, and legacy tool maker Transoft has acquired the legagy software division of a competitor to go chase that, as well as other, business.

Atlanta-based Transoft has been selling source code analyzers and legacy extension software for proprietary mainframes and midrange servers for years, and the addition of the legacy software line from Denver-based Accelr8 Technology will, according to Paul Holland, Transoft's CEO, give it the tools to chase the VMS migration market, which he pegs at around $8 billion (including servers, software, services, and so forth) over the next five to 10 years. Accelr8 is getting into the biotech business and is exiting the legacy software business, and sold the Accelr8 tools and installed base to Transoft for $700,000. Transoft's surveys of the U.S. VMS base indicate that about 30 percent of customers expect to migrate to different platforms in the coming years, as opposed to adopting the OpenVMS on Itanium that HP wants them to move to.

OpsWare Adds More Solaris, Linux Support

Having just announced the OpsWare 4.5 release last month, server management and provisioning software vendor OpsWare now says that its software will run on Sparc clone servers made by Fujitsu Siemens, as well as on Novell's SuSE Linux. Presumably, OpsWare is supporting both the old SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 and the just-announced SLES 9 from Novell. OpsWare also announced that it has backcast its support for Red Hat Linux variants to include Advanced Server 2.1. The software already supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, IBM's AIX, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, Sun Microsystems' Solaris running on Sparc and X86 iron, and Microsoft's Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 running on X86 servers.

PerformanceIT Management Software Gets AIX Agents

PerformanceIT, which peddles the ProIT line of system management tools that integrate application, systems, and network performance management tools into a single entity, announced last week that it has launched ProIT Version 3.1, which includes management agents for IBM's AIX 5L 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 operating systems running on pSeries and RS/6000 servers. The new version of the software also has a feature called Impact Analyzer, which can measure the effect of actual network changes on overall performance of the IT infrastructure or model the effect of proposed network changes on the way infrastructure performs.

ProIT competed with BMC Software's Patrol, IBM's Tivoli, and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView system management programs. The ProIT software is roughly priced based on the number of servers it controls, and costs under $50,000 for the typical user, which PerformanceIT says is a lot lower than the $150,000 or more that the typical customer using the above mentioned performance management suites tend to pay. The software runs on Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms.

Arkeia Gets $4 Million Funding from European Banks

Privately held network backup solution specialist Arkeia announced at LinuxWorld last week that it had secured $4 million in venture funding from two European banks, Banque Populaire and Credit Lyonnais. This is Arkeia's first round of venture funding, and the company says that it has been profitable since it was founded in Paris, France in 1996. The company, which also has offices in Carlsbad, California, has 4,000 corporate customers worldwide using its Network Backup, Server backup, and Arkeia Light products. Arkeia Server Backup is only supported on Linux distributions, while Network Backup is supported on Unix, Linux, Windows, and NetWare platforms.

IBM Tweaks pSeries, iSeries Migration and Implementation Services

IBM rolled out a tweaked version of its implementation and migration services on July 30 to help customers with vintage AS/400 and relatively modern iSeries machines to migrate from that hardware and prior editions of the OS/400 platform to the new eServer i5 and its i5/OS operating system. On August 31, the company will offer similar implementation and migration services for customers moving from older RS/6000 and pSeries Unix boxes to the just-announced eServer p5 and AIX 5L 5.3. For customers who are not yet ready to move to the latest hardware and operating systems for its Power-based boxes, IBM will also tailor these services to go back a generation or two.

The migration services give customers a migration plan, whether they want to move to new hardware and software or just upgrade the software on their production box. Then, IBM technicians come in and do the operating system and related software upgrades (and upgrade the hardware, if customers acquire it). For customers interested in using the logical partitioning capabilities of the Power platform, IBM is offering a separate partitioning implementation service that helps customers carve up their machine and install operating systems within partitions.

As is usually the case, IBM did not provide list prices for any of these services. There ought to be a law against not supplying list prices for any product sold on this planet.