Network resellers and integrators look like they will have another struggling vendor-turned service provider to compete with, now that it appears Banyan has thrown in the directory towel. Last week, Banyan and Microsoft announced an alliance aimed at migrating users of Banyan's VINES network operating system and its StreetTalk directory to Microsoft's Windows 2000 and Active Directory.
Novell this week announced the release of NetWare 4.2, which will provide NetWare 4 users a stepping-stone upgrade path to the vendor's recently released flagship NetWare 5. NetWare 4.2 will replace both Novell intraNetWare and NetWare 4.11. Novell will discontinue both of these products, officials said. The seemingly unusual step of releasing an OS version that steps back from the most recent release makes sense for many customers, said Sean Sanders, product marketing manager for NetWare 4.2. "This decision has been clear to us. Many customers have good business reasons for continuing with NetWare as they prepare to upgrade to NetWare 5 at their own pace," Sanders said.
Iomega has announced a 250MB version of its Zip disk, increasing by 150 per cent the capacity of current Zip media. The new disk, called the Zip 250, is based on the Zip 100 platform and can read and write to Zip 100MB disks. However, existing 100MB Zip drives cannot read Zip 250 disks.
Compaq executives have reiterated their company's aim to dominate in virtually every realm of an Internet-connected enterprise and world. Speaking via remote video connection at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference held here, Compaq's chief executive officer Eckhard Pfeiffer and its vice president of business intelligence and database technology, John Nicholson, stated their company's plans for the future.
Compaq on standardisation, direct sales
IT professionals will get their first glimpses of eight-way Intel servers at Comdex in Las Vegas in two weeks, when IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Compaq Computer show systems based on Intel's forthcoming Profusion eight-way chip set.
Although Sun Microsystems may have entered the ranks of high-end Unix operating systems makers last week with the release of the 64-bit Solaris 7, the vendor acknowledged that there is still more work to be done in future versions of the OS. As a result, Sun this week outlined an ambitious road map for Solaris 8 and 9. Sun hopes that planned improvements to the OS during the next 12 to 36 months will transform Solaris from an operating system that controls print and other enterprise computing functions, into the backbone and lifeblood of a computing utility envisioned not only by Sun, but also by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and others.
Storage vendors are once again jockeying for position with upcoming releases of the latest hardware technologies. IBM is readying a dual-controller, Fibre Channel disk array which houses as much as one terabyte of storage and supports 4GB, 9GB, and 18GB Ultra-SCSI drives.
Hewlett-Packard articulated the shape of its next-generation enterprise at a California conference last week and will create a new computing colossus with the likes of Cisco Systems, EMC, and Oracle. These four companies and eventually others will cooperate to deliver an "information utility" composed of "apps on tap", leased and fee- for-usage enterprise computing power, and a panoply of computing appliances connected to an Internet-based IT infrastructure.
Vendors are quickly releasing workstations powered by Intel's new 450MHz Pentium II processors and 440BX chip set, with Hewlett-Packard announcing new products based on the technology while IBM is upgrading its existing IntelliStation line of workstations.
Sources confirmed this week that reports of an impending release of an improved PCI specification by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Compaq are true. The three vendors have reportedly developed a specification dubbed "PCIx" that would increase the technology bandwidth and throughput speeds in a computer system.
IBM and Dell this week will announce high-end initiatives and products to bring mainframelike technology to Wintel servers.
New initiatives in thin-client-based computing, from companies such as IBM and Wyse, will be detailed at the first-ever Thinergy conference, in the US this week.
In an overture to what it thinks is an army of independent developers working in their bedrooms and university laboratories, Sun Microsystems is offering for free the binaries of its Solaris operating system for non-commercial and educational use.
Seagate Technology shook up the IT industry last month when its board of directors fired the company's legendary CEO, Alan Shugart.
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