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Microsoft Settles with Alacritech Regarding Network Acceleration Technology

Microsoft and Alacritech have settled their dispute regarding Microsoft's alleged infringement on Alacritech patents for technology designed to speed Windows' network performance. Alacritech, which was founded in 1997 by Larry Boucher, the creator of SCSI, filed a lawsuit against Microsoft last year after Microsoft demonstrated a new technology planned for Longhorn, codenamed "TCP Chimney," which bore a suspicious similarity to Alacritech's networking technology. The lawsuit was going well for Alacritech, as the judge in the case granted the company's motion for a preliminary injunction that would have stopped Microsoft from shipping software (namely, Longhorn) that infringes on its patents. As part of the settlement, Microsoft has paid Alacritech an undisclosed sum of money, and Alacritech has agreed to pull its lawsuit. Microsoft, meanwhile, says it is now set to incorporate the TCP Chimney technology as an out of band release to be called the Scalable Networking Pack for Windows Server 2003, due sometime next year. Microsoft says TCP Chimney will increase the performance of I/O intensive applications such as backup/restore, networked storage, high performance computing, multi-processor web servers, and Exchange servers. It is unknown whether the technology is still planned for Longhorn.

Microsoft Sues Google, Former Employee, for Breach of Confidentiality, Non-Compete Agreements

As Microsoft cleans out its "old lawsuit" file and settles some long-standing disputes, the software giant is opportunistically taking fresh legal action in new and creative ways, such as it did yesterday when it filed a lawsuit against Google and a former employee who is now working for the search leader. Microsoft says Kai-Fu Lee, its former corporate vice president of the Natural Interactive Services Division, broke his employee confidentiality and non-compete agreement when he accepted a position with Google to lead its China research and development center. As a senior executive, Lee has direct knowledge of Microsoft's trade secrets regarding search technologies. By accepting a position at a direct competitor that is developing the same types of technologies and strategies, Lee is in "egregious violation" of his previous contract, Microsoft asserts. "Creating intellectual property is the essence of what we do at Microsoft, and we have a responsibility to our employees and our shareholders to protect our intellectual property," read a statement from Microsoft. Whether or not Microsoft's legal team is hip to the irony of taking such a strong stance on the protection of intellectual property, while at the same time basically admitting that it may have borrowed a little here and a little there from another company's patents (see "Microsoft Settles with Alacritech Regarding Network Acceleration Technology"), we may never know.

Gartner Says Microsoft, IBM the Leaders in Web Services

Never one to squander a good PR opportunity, Microsoft is making the most of a recent Web services report from industry analyst Gartner that looks favorably upon the software giant's Web services strategy. Last week, the analyst group published a report called the 2005 Magic Quadrant for Web Services Platforms, and in it, Microsoft was included in the "leader quadrant," which is where those vendors with the highest "completeness of vision" and the most "ability to execute" come together. Microsoft director of Web Services Strategy, Ari Bixhorn, says the software giant has a "comprehensive solution for organizations to integrate heterogeneous IT investments more securely and reliably," and that's probably accurate, as far as Gartner's analysis goes. But Microsoft wasn't the only company in the leader quadrant, and has to share that space with rivals IBM, Oracle, SAP (who is more of a partner these days), and Tibco Software. All in all, Gartner rated Microsoft highest in completeness of vision, and rated IBM highest in ability to execute.

SSL Certificate Referral Program Brought Back to Life by thawte

SSL certificate issuer thawte has re-launched its digital certificate referral program, the South African firm announced last week. The company says the re-launch of its t-refer.com program will help to boost the sales of thawte's offerings, including the SGC SuperCert, the SSL Web Server certificate, Code Signing Certificates, and, in particular, the popular SSL123 Certificate. "SSL123 Certificates are ideally suited to the t-refer channel and their inclusion has been keenly anticipated by the current referral partner base," says thawte's director of business strategy, Ilse Baxter. Partners referring clients to thawte can get a 15 percent commission on the sale.

IBM to End Support for OS/2 Warp

IBM has not promoted its OS/2 Warp workstation and server operating system in a long time, and while there used to be a relatively large installed base of OS/2 out there (mostly in financial services companies who went whole hog for OS/2 before Windows NT was launched more than a decade ago), that installed base has dwindled to the point that Big Blue no longer feels compelled to offer tech support for the platform. So last week, IBM announced that on December 31, 2006, IBM will withdraw standard support for OS/2 Warp 4 and OS/2 Warp Server for eBusiness Version 1. If you really, really want to keep using OS/2, IBM will be offering fee-based services for support for these programs. IBM will also stop selling new OS/2 Warp operating systems and features for the operating system on December 23, 2005.

Oracle Delivers Release 2 of 10g Database

As expected, database maker Oracle last week announced it has delivered Oracle 10g Release 2, a kicker to the original 10g database that was launched in February 2004. Oracle 10g is itself an improved version of the Oracle 9i database and the Real Application Clusters (RAC) extensions that Oracle co-developed with Compaq a number of years ago. Oracle 9i RAC implemented the first practical and usable clustering technology for general purpose applications, and Oracle 10g is a so-called grid implementation of this software, and the difference between cluster and grid is largely a marketing one, not a technology one. Oracle has sold over 40,000 licenses of Oracle 10g to over 15,000 customers in the past 17 months. With Oracle 10g Release 2, the company is making performance tweaks to make clustered databases run more smoothly and efficiently, and is boosting the scalability of the database to over 100 server nodes in a single database image. The software also has better load balancing across the cluster, and Oracle has published open up and API in the Clusterware feature of the 10g database (this is the secret sauce that Oracle licensed from Compaq's TruCluster extensions to its Tru64 Unix to create Oracle 9i RAC) that will allow companies to better hook 10g databases into their high availability clustering and management software. The 10g Release 2 database also has beefed up encryption technologies, since everyone is paranoid about losing archive tapes or having data stolen from their networks these days. Oracle 10g Release 2 is shipping initially on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, but will be available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (presumably versions 8 and 9), IBM AIX, Sun Microsystems Solaris, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, and Microsoft Windows over the next 30 to 90 days.

IBM Chills Out Server Racks with Heat Exchanger

IBM this week announced a heat exchanger that uses water-cooling technology that IBM hopes will give it an edge over its rivals in selling the hottest server technologies. The "Cool Blue" eServer Heat Exchanger took three years to develop. It consists of back door for IBM's 42U enterprise server racks that hooks into existing water-based air-conditioning systems--commonly known as computer room air conditioning, or CRAC, and a more appropriate acronym could not be found since data centers are increasingly addicted to air conditioning--to suck heat out of the back of the rack and pump it into the water supply. Tim Dougherty, director of BladeCenter marketing at IBM, says the heat exchanger can remove up to 50,000 BTUs of heat out of a rack, which amounts to 55 percent of the heat generated by a full rack of servers. The other 45 percent of the heat still gets dissipated into the data center and must be dealt with by those CRAC units. However, the heat exchanger will allow customers to cope with hot spots in the data center or to more densely pack servers in a rack without creating a hot spot. While server makers often talk up the density of their machines, in many cases--particularly with machines with lots of peripherals and the fastest processors installed--customers can only half-populate their racks in real world settings. So removing half of the heat through a water-based chiller will allow many customers to get the densities they bought into when they acquired their servers. IBM is particularly interested in peddling the chiller with its eServer 1350 rack-mounted clusters. The Cool Blue chiller costs $4,299, and it only snaps on IBM's racks. It can be used to cool xSeries, pSeries, and iSeries servers. Dougherty says it is designed to be installed by customers, but if customers want help, installation services will cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on the geography and the complexity of the data center.