SHORT TAKES

RED HAT, WINCOR NIXDORF COLLABORATE

Research Triangle Park, N.C. — Red Hat, Inc., the leader in developing, deploying and managing open source Internet infrastructure solutions, has combined with Wincor Nixdorf to bring to market the BEETLE Point-of-Sale systems based on Embedded Linux. The BEETLE comes to market amidst growing competition in the retail sector, which has given rise to a demand for new IT solutions, both in the central office and in stores. Commenting on the project, Dieter Hoffmann, managing director of Red Hat Central Europe said, “We helped Wincor Nixdorf to build a system based on Red Hat embedded Linux. Wincor Nixdorf has recognized that retailers look at Red Hat Linux as a platform for retail solutions as an alternative to proprietary operating systems. The benefits of Red Hat Linux are its upgrade capabilities and the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). This was a very exciting project and Red Hat continues to provide level three support and engineering support while this product is in the field.”

The BEETLE NetPOS is an intelligent, scalable thin-client system developed for the new server-centric network solutions. This product is designed to deliver new server-oriented solution concepts and subsequently to satisfy the new requirements for POS (Point Of Sale) hardware and software. This server-centric computing will optimize the high costs of software distribution, system maintenance and administration in large networks, thus minimizing the TCO. “The BEETLE NetPOS offers an attractive design, a minimum footprint and maximum availability at an optimal price/performance ratio. We see massive demand for this product on Embedded Linux and by using Red Hat’s expertise, experience and support this was made possible,” commented Winfried Nolte from Wincor Nixdorf. “The BEETLE NetPOS will give the user the option to define how thin his system is to be and this also applies of the peripherals: POS printers, customer displays, scanners, cash drawers, payment terminals, can be connected as required.” Red Hat Linux is sold and supported through a number of major distribution and industry partners throughout Europe and from http://www.europe.redhat.com/shop .

INRANGE AND TIVOLI ANNOUNCE ALLIANCE

Mount Laurel, N.J. — INRANGE Technologies announced it has been named as a Tivoli Business Partner working toward Tivoli Ready certification for Tivoli Storage Network Manager – a leading enterprise-wide storage management solution. As a result, the INRANGE IN-VSN family of storage networking products may be joined with Tivoli’s leading enterprise-wide storage management solutions to provide customers comprehensive support in today’s information-intensive e-business environment. As part of this initiative to offer true interoperability for Storage Area Network (SAN) deployments, INRANGE’s IN-VSN FC/9000, the industry’s largest capacity fibre channel director, will be certified for use with Tivoli Storage Network Manager, announced by Tivoli. As SANs become more important to the enterprise infrastructure, centralized management software solutions such as Tivoli Storage Network Manager become key to sharing, protecting, and controlling the volume of vital business data across server networks. Centralized management provides users with an enterprise view of SAN management, while automating important tasks like data backup, restore, archiving, and recovery. As part of Tivoli’s overall SAN management scheme, INRANGE’s IN-VSN Enterprise Manager works to control and monitor multiple, distributed FC/9000 directors supporting up to 64 fibre channel ports each, along with their associated departmental edge switches.

“Interoperable solutions from INRANGE and our partners such as Tivoli will combine to give our joint customers the confidence and means to create highly available, scalable storage infrastructures that enable on-demand access to information and are more easily managed,” stated Charles Foley, INRANGE Executive Vice President of Marketing. “SANs are already bringing benefits to corporate users in terms of performance. As SANs continue to expand across the business enterprise, centralized SAN management becomes more important for leveraging their full potential.” “In our relationships with SAN vendors such as INRANGE, Tivoli works to drive the development of standards-based technologies to attain interoperability between multivendor SAN components,” stated Steve Sorce, Director of Tivoli Storage Management. “As storage networks evolve to enterprise levels, certified solutions will provide our customers with proven management and connectivity platforms that can deliver a seamless view across SANs, and an infrastructure that sustains growth.” To ensure open interoperability for its SAN infrastructure offerings, INRANGE maintains its own testing facility and program, the INRANGE Interoperability Initiative (I3), which has been providing SAN component testing and verification on S390 and open systems platforms for nearly a decade. The I3 facility supports implementation programs for INRANGE’s IN-VSN family of virtual storage networking solutions, which lays the infrastructure for building large-scale storage networks locally that can be extended globally.

ATIPA JOINS THE LINDA CLUB

Kansas City, MO. — Atipa Corporation, a leading provider of end-to-end Open Source and Linux technology solutions, is pleased to announce that it has joined The Linda Club, a new partnership initiative for Beowulf resellers sponsored by Scientific Computing Associates, Inc. (SCA), a leader in high-performance computing software. The Linda Club allows resellers to offer free to their customers a four-node Linux version of Linda, SCIENTIFIC’s powerful programming language for parallel and distributed computing, when it is bundled with a Beowulf cluster.

Atipa has been designing and delivering cutting-edge Linux clusters since 1995. During that time, Atipa has custom-tailored cluster solutions for a wide variety of business, government, and academic institutions, including many Fortune 500 companies. A recognized leader in Beowulf clustering, Atipa uses its deep Linux expertise to design scalable, powerful Beowulf computational clusters that outperform traditional supercomputers at a fraction of the cost while meeting the customized performance needs of customers. One of those customers, Motorola, turned to Atipa to produce a clustering solution for its ongoing “DigitalDNA” project. Additionally, NASA, Sharp Electronics, Los Alamos Labs, CAIS Internet, and MIT count among the many customers that utilize Atipa’s innovative clustering solutions. “This strategic partnership with Scientific Computing Associates truly brings added value to our customers who rely on us to deliver the highest quality clustering solutions for the enterprise,” said Mike Jacobs, Vice President of Atipa’s Hardware Group. “With Linda, Atipa’s customers can more easily “parallelize” their existing applications, saving both time and money and furthering Atipa’s mission of providing easy-to-use technology solutions.”

“We look forward to a very successful business relationship with Atipa, one of the premier Linux cluster resellers. We believe our Linda product suite of high performance application development tools, coupled with Atipa technology and expertise, will help Atipa continue its rapid expansion into new markets,” said Jerry Lipchus, Director of Sales for Scientific Computing Associates. This strategic alliance between Atipa and SCA offers advantages extending beyond the initial Beowulf Cluster purchase. SCA has enabled Atipa to handle future end-users’ purchases of Linda upgrades or other SCA products, creating a one-stop point of purchase.

Linda, first introduced in the mid-1980s, was the first commercial product to implement virtual shared memory (VSM) for supercomputers and large workstation clusters. Linda is content-addressable, not address-based, making it much easier to build applications and fully utilize hardware capacity. Cost-effectiveness, speed and ease of use are all advantages of using Linda in Linux-based systems. Linda technology is embedded in versions of Gaussian 98, the computational chemistry program based on the methodology for which John Pople won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Other uses by such companies as Lehman Brothers and Amerada Hess have proven the power of Linda’s parallel processing capabilities. A recent article, “Linux Gushes Savings for Oil Giant” (Computerworld, May 3, 1999) describes an application developed by Amerada Hess using Linda for Red Hat Linux that makes it possible for geologists to render detailed 3-D seismic images of sub-sea formations. The application was moved from an IBM SP2 to a 32-node Linux cluster, a move that saved Amerada Hess nearly $2,000,000, according to Vic Forsyth, Amerada Hess’s Houston-based Manager of Geophysical systems.

FIRE GL2 & GL3 INTEGRATED INTO CELSIUS

Munich, GERMANY — FGL graphics announced that Fujitsu Siemens computers, the manufacturer of the popular CELSIUS workstations, will inegrate the new Fire GL2 and Fire GL3 accelerators into all Celsius models. The initiative allows Fujitsu-Siemens computers to bring high-end graphics acceleration architecture to all workstation users – from entry-level to the seasoned professional. “The introduction of the Fire GL2 and 3 is creating a paradigm shift in the industry by eliminating the most common barrier for end-users, which is price,” said Ed Huang, vice president of Business Development for Fire GL Professional Graphics. “Workstation users can now select the product that best suits their needs because our accelerators are very affordable.” The new Fire GL accelerators set a standard of excellence by delivering faster performance than every competitive product on the market, regardless of price. The Fire GL2 and Fire GL3 include the IBM RC 1000 256-bit graphics rasterizer and a 256-bit double data rate (DDR) memory interface that doubles the usable bandwidth to provide fast frame rates at higher resolutions and color depths. The new accelerators also feature the IBM GT 1000 hardware geometry engine with 30+ GFLOPS of performance. The IBM GT 1000 geometry engine provides 100% OpenGL support as well as full geometry transform processing and full lighting calculations for 16 simultaneous sources.

“We are very pleased to announce this alliance with FGL Graphics,” said Bjorn Fehrm, director of Workstation Product Operations for Fujitsu Siemens Computers. “Integrating the Fire GL2 and Fire GL3 into our product line furthers our commitment to bring high-end architecture to our customers and keep the CELSIUS workstation an optimum system.” For entry-level professional graphics, the Fire GL1 with 32 MB of memory and AGP 2X support provides enhanced 2D and 3D graphics acceleration. The Fire GL2, with 64 MB of memory, is ideally suited for MCAD, visual simulation and 3D game development. The Fire GL3 offers 128 MB of memory and AGP Pro 50 support that sustains two monitors from a single slot. All Fire GL professional graphics accelerators are fully optimized for Intel’s Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) and AMD Athlon processor-based systems with 3DNow! technology. The Fire GL family supports the Microsoft Windows NT, Microsoft Windows 2000 and Linux operating systems. For more information about the line of Fire GL professional graphics accelerators, visit http://www.FireGL.com or http://www.BeTheCreator.com .

TOGETHERSOFT AND SECANT INTEGRATE THEIR PRODUCTS

San Jose, CALIF. — TogetherSoft, the “Infrastructure Enabler” company, and Secant Technologies, a leading infrastructure software company, announced the integration of Together Control Center 4.1 and Secant’s Extreme Enterprise Server. The partnership allows TogetherSoft’s community of developers to visually model their Java or C++ applications and deploy those applications using Secant’s dynamic application server architecture. TogetherSoft’s platform-and-building-blocks architecture delivers deep integration across all aspects of software development: model-pattern-edit-compile-debug-version-doc-metric-audit-provision- assemble-deploy-run, leading to a “gentle euphoria” in which developers find they can work more productively, increasing competitive value of what they build and reducing time to market. The Secant building block capitalizes on these features for users of Together Control Center and Secant Extreme Enterprise Server users.

“Our unique code generation technology allows developers to build and deploy a UML model in its entirety, radically accelerating development and simplifying the modification of applications as business requirements change. This eliminates the constraints of the ‘one Java bean at a time’ development methodology practiced by other leading application server vendors,” said John Pompeii, Chief Technology Officer of Secant. Secant’s Extreme Enterprise Server provides a dynamic application architecture that enables organizations to develop, manage, and evolve the most demanding and complex applications. Its unique support for sophisticated object models, vast scalability, and extensive object-to-relational integration dramatically reduces the time-to-market of large-scale e-business and enterprise applications. “The partnership between TogetherSoft and Secant is a true benefit to our mutual customer base,” said Karl Darr, Vice President of Business Development at TogetherSoft. “Secant provides one of the most comprehensive code generation technologies and is one of the few application server vendors that can deploy both Java and C++ applications.”

LABBOOK FORMS PARTNERSHIP WITH YELLOWBRIX

McLean, VA. — LabBook, Inc. announced that it has formed a strategic partnership with Alexandria, Virginia-based YellowBrix, Inc., to broaden information access for life science researchers. LabBook is an XML-based life science informatics company which provides a “personal discovery space” to accelerate the drug discovery process. LabBook’s mission is to solve the life science industry’s need for rapid access to targeted information and new discoveries. Within the IT and e-health landscape, LabBook smartly integrates e-services and content in one place in order to provide an end-to-end solution for life science researchers. YellowBrix uses contextual analysis to provide the tools and infrastructure Web sites need to attract and serve visitors.

Dr. Shawn J. Green, LabBook’s Chief Executive Officer, commented, “This partnership enhances our service to clients and strengthens LabBook’s position as a smart research enabling technology for the life science researcher. YellowBrix technology uses Artificial Intelligence, neural network technology and natural language processing, to capture, filter, integrate and manage content delivery. We are using this innovative technology with our XML aware life science software to search, integrate and present diverse news and information sources for the life science researcher.” David Hoppmann, YellowBrix Chief Executive Officer commented, “We are very pleased to be working with LabBook to dramatically improve the flow of information for drug research and development. By using our contextual analysis search engine, researchers will have faster, more efficient access to diverse information sources.”

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